Americans including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who were freed in a prisoner swap deal with Russia, have arrived back on US soil.

Mr Gershkovich, 32, was one of 16 prisoners swapped for eight Russian prisoners in what has been described as the biggest exchange since the end of the Cold War between Russia and the West.

The exchange at an airfield in Turkey also included the release of former US marine Paul Whelan, and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.

After touching down at Joint Base Andrews, in Maryland, Mr Gershkovich, Ms Kurmasheva and Mr Whelan emerged from the jet to cheers from those on the tarmac.

All three were greeted by US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris – before embracing their families.

Speaking ahead of their return, Mr Biden welcomed their release and declared: ‘Their brutal ordeal is over.”

Israel’s military says it has confirmed that Hamas’s military chief Mohammed Deif was killed in an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip last month.

Deif was targeted in the strike on a compound in the Khan Younis area on 13 July. Hamas is yet to confirm his death.

Israel says Deif was one of the figures responsible for planning the 7 October attacks in southern Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

On Wednesday, Hamas political leader Ismael Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Iran. Israel has not commented on his death directly.

The Israeli military said in a statement that “following an intelligence assessment, it can be confirmed that Mohammed Deif was eliminated” in the 13 July strike.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health authorities said at the time of the air strike that it had killed more than 90 people, but denied that Deif was among the dead.

Deif is widely seen as the second-ranking Hamas official in Gaza, behind Yahya Sinwar, the group’s leader in the territory.

Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, said the death of Deif is “a significant milestone” in the dismantling of Hamas.

“This operation reflects the fact that Hamas is disintegrating, and that Hamas terrorists may either surrender or they will be eliminated,” he added.

Mohammed Deif was appointed head of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of the Hamas movement, in 2002.

For decades he’s been seen as one of Israel’s most wanted men – and has survived a reported seven assassination attempts, including one that reportedly saw him lose an eye.

He was born in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp in 1965, when the territory was occupied by Egypt.

As a young man in the late 1980s, he joined Hamas shortly after its formation and quickly rose to prominence within the group.

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

Deif is also known to have helped engineer the construction of tunnels that have allowed Hamas fighters to enter Israel from Gaza.

During his leadership of the al-Qassam brigades, he was credited with designing Hamas’s signature weapon, the Qassam rocket.

In 2014, Israel attempted to kill Deif with an air strike on a house in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza, which killed Deif’s wife, Widad, and their infant son, Ali. Israel thought it had killed Deif, too, but he was not in the building at the time.

Enemies are known to have dubbed Deif ‘the cat with nine lives’, due to the fact he survived so many attempts on his life.

During the current conflict, Deif is believed to have directed Hamas’ military operations from within underground tunnels inside Gaza.

• Bowen: Israel’s killing of Haniyeh deals hammer blow to ceasefire prospects
• Iran vows revenge after Hamas leader assassinated in Tehran

Israel’s confirmation of Deif’s death comes at the end of a turbulent week in the Israel-Gaza conflict, which has stoked fears of a broader regional war.

On Saturday, 12 Druze children and young people were killed after a rocket fell on a football field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed Lebanon-based Hezbollah, saying they would pay “a heavy price”.

On Tuesday, Israel retorted with air strike on Beirut which killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, as well as four others, including two children.

Hours later, Hamas’s political leader Ismael Haniyeh was killed in a strike on a building he was staying in during a visit to Iran’s capital, Tehran.

Iran has blamed Israel for Haniyeh’s death, threatening “harsh punishment”.

A woman who says she was raped in 2017 has described the criminal justice system as “absolutely broken” after a series of problems and errors allowed the accused man to allegedly start stalking her.

Despite reporting the rape allegation to police the day after it happened, the case is not due to be tried in court until next May – eight years after the alleged assault.

In that time, delays and errors by police, mistakes by prosecutors and court backlogs have contributed to the woman having a mental breakdown.

“It’s shambolic, embarrassing, disgraceful and debilitating,” says the woman, who is legally entitled to anonymity. “I shouldn’t have felt abandoned and hopeless.”

The woman, who we are calling Samantha, says the rape was carried out in March 2017 by a man who was “prevalent in my life before and knew where I lived”.

After she reported it, the man was arrested and questioned before being released under investigation. Samantha says West Mercia Police initially updated her on developments but, after about six months, communication petered out and her efforts to make contact went unanswered.

“Being left like that – forgotten about – is exactly how you’re made to feel.”

Out of the blue, in 2019, two officers came to Samantha’s house. They handed her a letter – from the Crown Prosecution Service – saying it had decided not to proceed with the case because of a lack of evidence.

“It came as a complete surprise – I felt abandoned.”

By that time, Samantha says, the man had started stalking her. She says he would follow her to her children’s school, trail her on errands, or just appear at places she regularly visited – including her workplace.

She reported it to two police forces – West Mercia, where she lived, and Warwickshire, where she worked. Samantha was told to call the non-emergency number, 101, but gave up because of lack of support.

She was told “he hasn’t done anything yet” or “he’s only on the other side of the street”, she says.

Throughout this period, Samantha was receiving support from an Independent Sexual Violence Adviser, a role funded by the Ministry of Justice that supports complainants of sexual abuse.

She greatly credits her adviser with helping her to cope, both with the emotions of the case as well as chasing the police to take her allegations seriously.

However, three months after the CPS said the case would not be prosecuted, the adviser was withdrawn, a standard procedure. Feeling stressed and alone, Samantha had a mental breakdown.

“For many months, I was in and out of the GP surgery asking for help, because I found it very difficult to cope with day-to-day life. I was trying to work and be a mum to my kids, trying to just function.”

Samantha says she could go weeks without seeing the man and then there would be “multiple sightings and appearances just to remind me that he was still around”.

It all came to a head one morning when she could not get out of bed, she says.

“I consider myself a strong character but, on that day, I physically couldn’t do anything. I was processing the fact that it was so definitive – no-one was going to help me.”

Strangely, the pandemic made things easier. Samantha says the man stopped appearing, she was able to focus on her two children and keep her business going.

In 2022, an unexpected email arrived.

“May I take this opportunity to apologise on behalf of the CPS for any distress caused to you by the previous decision made not to prosecute this case,” wrote Nicola Haywood, the Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor.

As part of a national review of rape cases, prosecutors had reconsidered the evidence in Samantha’s case and concluded they had made a mistake.

“Consequently, I have decided that a prosecution should now be brought… for offences of rape, assault by penetration, attempted rape and sexual assault.”

Samantha’s world was turned upside down.

“My mind went to how do I cope with that, having had a breakdown, [then] some element of recovery and not wanting to invite that back into my life.”

Around this time, the man moved his business closer to Samantha. After several months considering her options, she decided she had no choice but to pursue the case.

But the problems kept coming. Delays and an inexplicable back-and-forth between the CPS and West Mercia Police meant it was almost a year before the man was charged and then released on bail.

His first court appearance was scheduled for September 2023, 20 months after Samantha had been told by the CPS it was going to charge him.

West Mercia Police told us it could not comment while court proceedings are active.

• There are a record 2,786 adult rape cases waiting to go to court in England and Wales, part of a record 10,141 number of sexual offences awaiting a trial
• In 2023, 68,022 rapes were recorded by police in England and Wales, fewer than 3% resulted in someone being charged that same year
• In England and Wales in 2023, it took on average 777 days from a rape being reported to police to the case being completed in court. In West Mercia, it took 968 days

Source: Ministry of Justice, ONS, Home Office, UK Government

By the time the man had been charged, says Samantha, the stalking had restarted. On one occasion, officers from Warwickshire attended after he had been observing Samantha from a roadside food van. She says one of them dismissed her concerns: “I can’t arrest him for having his lunch, love.”

“I’ll never, ever forget those words – I just felt like being crushed inside,” she says.

At one point, the police told Samantha they were taking her repeated reports of stalking seriously and that the man’s bail conditions would include a clause stipulating that if he was to go anywhere near her, he would risk arrest.

But an admin error meant West Mercia forgot to put the restrictions in place, and Samantha says the stalking continued.

She says she believes if the bail conditions had been administered correctly, the man would have been arrested.

She is still regularly reporting stalking incidents to the police – “I’m becoming their administrator for all the stalking that’s taking place,” she says, but adding there is “absolutely no action” being taken.

She greatly credits her adviser, who works for the West Mercia Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre, with helping her to cope, both with the emotions of the case as well as chasing the police to take her allegations seriously.

Warwickshire Police said it was investigating and “always aims to put measures in place to protect and support” victims of domestic abuse. “It is always concerning when a victim is not satisfied with the service they have received,” added Detective Inspector Ruth Morris.

Samantha’s case was finally due to go to court in May 2024. But in February, a member of the police’s witness care team rang Samantha to say it would have to be postponed.

She was told one of the contributing factors was the roof collapse at Hereford Crown Court in 2020. Cases that should have been heard there are now being spread around the West Mercia courts system.

Samantha’s area has some of the longest court delays in England and her case isn’t due to be heard until May 2025.

“I don’t care that there’s not enough courtrooms. I care what I’m going through. I care that I’m an example of thousands of people in a system that is absolutely shameful,” she told us.

The Labour government has acknowledged the problem and announced plans to fast-track rape cases, with specialist courts in every Crown Court.

The Crown Prosecution Service told us it recognises the profound effect delays have on victims and says it is working with police to build strong cases and improve timeliness.

It says latest figures indicate the time between the CPS receiving evidence and making charging decisions is “coming down sharply”.

“We are consistently charging around seven in 10 rape cases referred to us by police,” it added. However, in 2023, only 2.1% of rape cases, resulted in the suspect being charged or summoned to court.

Unsurprisingly, there have been moments when Samantha has wished she had never reported the rape: “It doesn’t encourage you to come forward.”

But she has stuck with the case – and will go to court – because, she insists, “it’s the right thing to do”.

In Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiya, the stronghold of Hezbollah, large crowds wearing black joined the funeral for Fuad Shukr, a senior commander of the powerful Lebanese militia and political movement, and the most high-profile member to have been assassinated by Israel during these current hostilities.

They carried placards with Shukr’s face, waved the yellow-and-green Hezbollah flag and chanted some of the group’s slogans, sometimes with their fists in the air.

According to the Israeli military, Shukr was behind a missile strike that killed 12 children and teenagers on a football field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights last Saturday. Hezbollah has denied involvement, although it initially claimed an attack on a nearby military base, which raised the possibility that the missile missed its intended targeted.

Shukr, who was also known as al-Hajj Mohsin, was said to be a close adviser to Hassan Nasrallah, the influential and long-time Hezbollah leader.

As people were gathered, Nasrallah gave a televised speech that was watched closely for any indication of Hezbollah’s possible next moves.

The conflict with Israel had entered a “new phase”, he said, speaking from a secret location, as he always does for security reasons. The enemy must wait for the “inevitable response” because it had crossed “red lines”, he added, saying that the reaction would be proportionate to Israel’s targeting of a civilian building.

His tone seemed to indicate that the group remained uninterested in another major war with Israel. But there are concerns that they could be sliding into one.

“I’m not afraid of war. We’re ready for whatever Sheikh Nasrallah decides to do,” one man in the crowd told me. “Inshallah,” said another, meaning God willing, when asked if he believed that Hezbollah would retaliate for the killing.

Shukr’s killing on Tuesday – an attack that killed six other people, including two young siblings – renewed fears that the relatively contained conflict between Hezbollah and Israel could escalate into an all-out war, with the potential to engulf the entire Middle East.

Hezbollah says its campaign, which started a day after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October, is in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Most of the group’s attacks, and Israel’s counterattacks, have been limited to areas along the Lebanon-Israel border.

Supported by Iran, Hezbollah has long been seen by Israel as a much more formidable foe than Hamas. The group has an increasingly sophisticated arsenal of weapons that includes attack drones and precision guided missiles capable of striking deep inside Israel.

• What is Hezbollah and will it go to war with Israel?

A conflict with Hezbollah would probably involve other Iranian-supported groups in the region, members of what Tehran calls the “Axis of Resistance” – the Houthis in Yemen or militias in Iraq, for example.

Iran, too, has vowed to respond to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political chief who was killed on Wednesday while visiting Tehran for the inauguration of the new Iranian president.

Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel, which has stayed silent. The killing has dealt a blow to the possibility of any success in ongoing talks for a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It is the main hope to defuse tensions with Hezbollah, and diplomatic efforts continue to try to de-escalate the situation.

The Israeli military has said it is ready for any scenario, as the country braces itself for a possible response to the two assassinations.

Nasrallah’s speech contained, as expected, sharp words against Israel but did not appear to suggest that a bigger war was imminent just yet.

When Lolita came to Australia in 2022, she was fleeing an older man she’d been forced to marry as a child in Saudi Arabia.

She told confidants she’d escaped a cycle of violence and sexual servitude so extreme it had repeatedly landed her in hospital.

But less than a year after her arrival, she vanished – last seen by a friend who claims he watched as she was taken from her apartment by a group of Saudi men in a black van.

Records show that Lolita, who is in her early 30s and goes by a single name, was put on a flight from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur in May 2023. From there, her lawyer believes she was returned to Saudi Arabia and detained.

But Lolita’s exact whereabouts and safety – or whether she is even alive – remain unknown.

It’s far from the first time the mysterious plight of a Saudi woman fleeing her homeland has ended up in the headlines.

“What makes this case particularly compelling, compared to some other cases of Saudi women who have disappeared… or turned up dead, is that we have a witness,” says solicitor Alison Battisson.

The Saudi Arabian embassy in Canberra declined to comment. However, in a statement to the BBC, the Australian Federal Police said it became “aware” of the alleged kidnapping in June and had “started making immediate inquiries” both within the country and “offshore”.

Advocates fear Lolita’s case is part of a growing trend in Australia, in which agents of other countries are monitoring, harassing or assaulting their expats with impunity.

The government has declared foreign interference – of all forms – its “most significant” national security threat and promised a crackdown.

But Ms Battisson and other rights campaigners are questioning how a woman – who had told immigration authorities she was fleeing violence – could allegedly be snatched from her home in broad daylight.

Lolita first came to Melbourne in May 2022, according to flight records.

Although she mostly kept to herself, she soon struck up a friendship with a Sudanese refugee who had also lived in Saudi Arabia, as an undocumented migrant.

It was Ali – not his real name – who put Lolita in touch with Ms Battisson, as she had helped him with his own asylum claim.

The human rights lawyer spoke frequently with Lolita from that point onwards, describing her as a “soft spoken” woman with a clear resolve to take back her life: “She was determined this was her time.”

But their correspondence ended abruptly in May of last year, after Ms Battisson received a “strange” text message from Lolita.

“It was in much more formal language than she had ever used, and it said, ‘What is my visa status’,” she tells the BBC.

Lolita’s claim for a protection visa – for people at risk of persecution in their home country – had previously been rejected, but Ms Battisson was helping her appeal against the decision. She says that is something her client was acutely aware of, as the two discussed it frequently.

“I now believe that message was actually from the people who had taken Lolita,” Ms Battisson says. She thinks they were trying to work out whether Lolita had a permanent visa, which would have given her the right to Australian consular assistance back in Saudi Arabia.

Then came the radio silence. As the weeks turned to months, Ms Battisson knew in her gut that “something was seriously wrong”.

She couldn’t reach Ali either, which was highly unusual as the two kept in regular contact.

When Ali eventually did return Ms Battisson’s calls, her worst fears were confirmed.

He said that he had witnessed Lolita being taken, but that the incident had left him so paralysed with fear for his own family, that he’d gone to ground.

He detailed his last conversation with Lolita – a frantic phone call in which she pleaded for protection from a group of men planning to take her to Saudi Arabia.

She even sent him pictures of the bags she claimed they had forced her to pack.

Ali told Ms Battisson he rushed to her flat, but on arrival an Arabic-speaking man threatened him, using personal details that Ali believes could only have come from the Saudi embassy in Canberra.

Changing tack, he contacted a friend and asked him to go to the airport, so the two of them could “create a fuss” and get the attention of security.

But they never saw Lolita in the terminal.

“It took me a year in total to confirm she had been taken,” Ms Battisson says, the dismay in her voice palpable.

The pro-bono lawyer has since been building a paper trail to try to piece together what happened.

“We have phone records and message records of her talking about being frightened. And we also have a pattern of her moving house because of that fear,” she says.

And then there’s the recent testimony of a relative. “As far as they know, Lolita is now in a Saudi prison or detention centre,” Ms Battisson says.

Glaring gaps in the story remain, but one thing Ms Battisson is unequivocal about is that “there are simply no safe options” for Lolita in her home country.

Since becoming the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia in 2017, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has, in some ways, sought to modernise the kingdom by loosening its long-standing restrictions on women.

Crucially though, all females still require a male guardian to sign them out of prison, and in Lolita’s case, that obligation would fall to the husband she allegedly fled halfway across the world to escape.

That fact alone, Ms Battisson says, should be enough to convince Australian authorities that there is “simply no way she would have willingly gone back to Saudi Arabia”.

Around the same time Lolita came to Australia, the country was grappling with the mysterious deaths of two other Saudi women.

In June of 2022, the badly decomposed bodies of sisters Asra and Amaal Alsehli were discovered in their Western Sydney apartment.

Little is known about how they died, but police have described the case as both “suspicious” and “unusual”, and it will soon be the subject of a coronial inquest.

But according to those who witnessed their behaviour, Asra and Amaal – who travelled to Australia from Saudi Arabia in 2017 to seek asylum – were living in fear.

Reports of Saudi women turning up dead while living abroad or being dragged back to the kingdom while trying to seek asylum are not new.

High profile examples include the case of Tala Farea and Rotana Farea, two sisters who were found duct-taped together in the Hudson River in 2018 after applying for asylum in the US. Or Dina Ali Lasloom, who claims she was intercepted by her uncles during a transit in Manila Airport, while trying to flee to Australia in 2017.

In recent years, scores of Australians with Chinese, Iranian, Indian, Cambodian and Rwandan heritage have also come forward to report incidents of monitoring, harassment, or assault, by agents they believed were employed by their respective governments.

And Australia’s intelligence chief has said that more people are now “being targeted for espionage and foreign interference” inside the country “than ever before”.

“Australians need to know that the threat is real. The threat is now. And the threat is deeper and broader than you might think,” Mike Burgess said in February.

Earlier this year, a parliamentary review of national foreign interference legislation found “significant flaws in its design and implementation” and that it had “failed to achieve its intended purpose”.

In response, the government announced reforms – which it calls “world-leading” – including the establishment of a support network to help diaspora communities identify and report suspicious behaviour, and a permanent foreign interference task force.

“These are complex problems, and we’re constantly working with our agencies to… protect vulnerable people,” Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said in a statement about the measures.

But it is too early to assess how effective the changes will prove.

It is not, however, too late for the government to help Lolita, Ms Battisson argues. They could issue her a visa and help her return to Australia, a decision that would fall to the Immigration Minister, Tony Burke.

“As a country now, we have the opportunity to ensure that a victim of gendered violence is finally safe,” she says.

“All women deserve a safe environment in which to flourish, which is what Lolita was doing before she was taken.”

The US secretary of state has said there was “overwhelming evidence” Venezuela’s opposition won the recent presidential election.

In a statement Antony Blinken said it was clear Edmundo González, had won the most votes – despite incumbent president Nicolás Maduro declaring a disputed victory.

“Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s 28 July presidential election,” Mr Blinken said.

His intervention comes as the presidents of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia all called on Venezuela to release the full details of last Sunday’s election.

• Key moments which led to Venezuela protests
• Maduro manoeuvring to stay in power in Venezuela

Last Sunday, the electoral council, which is government-controlled, announced President Maduro had won the election for a third term.

But this was immediately disputed by the opposition who said, with access to the majority of receipts from electronic voting machines around the country, it was false.

The opposition has said its own vote tally shows it won the election by a wide margin. Opinion polls ahead of the election had suggested a clear victory for the challenger.

President Maduro has previously accused foreign governments of interfering in the election.

He has strongly denied electoral fraud and has said the opposition has instigated a coup by disputing the result.

The announcement of President Maduro’s victory set off deadly protests in Caracas.

It has also attracted global criticism, with many governments around the world demanding the Venezuelan government release proof of the result.

The result has been recognised by Venezuelan allies China, Russia and Iran.

But, the US, European Union and other G7 countries have called on President Maduro’s government to release detailed voting data.

Posting on social media, Mr Blinken said: “Electoral data overwhelmingly demonstrate the will of the Venezuelan people: democratic opposition candidate Edmundo González won the most votes in Sunday’s election.

“Venezuelans have voted, and their votes must count.”

The intervention by Mr Blinken is significant. After the last election in 2018 was widely dismissed as neither free nor fair, countries including the US decided to recognise the then-opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president and imposed sanctions on Venezuela.

Mr Blinken said it was “time for the Venezuelan parties to begin discussions on a respectful, peaceful transition in accordance with Venezuelan electoral law and the wishes of the Venezuelan people”.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado, who says she is in hiding, has called for mass demonstrations on Saturday.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Ms Machado said Mr Maduro did not win the election.

She claimed her party’s candidate, Mr Gonzalez, won by a landslide and Ms Machado said she could prove this because she had receipts from more than 80% of polling stations.

Ms Machado appealed for help, saying it was now up to the international community to decide whether to tolerate what she called an illegitimate government.

Heavy rains and floods have affected several parts of India in recent weeks, killing scores of people and displacing thousands of others.

Floods are not uncommon in the country – or South Asia – at this time of the year, when the region receives most of its rainfall.

But climate change has made monsoon rains more erratic, with massive rainfall in a short span of time followed by prolonged periods of dryness.

Now scientists say that a type of storm, known as an atmospheric river, is making things worse with a significant increase in moisture because of global warming.

Also known as “flying rivers”, these storms are huge, invisible ribbons of water vapour that are born in warm oceans as seawater evaporates.

The water vapour forms a band or a column in the lower part of the atmosphere which moves from the tropics to the cooler latitudes and comes down as rain or snow, devastating enough to cause floods or deadly avalanches.

These “rivers in the sky” carry some 90% of the total water vapour that moves across the Earth’s mid-latitudes and, on an average, have about twice the regular flow of the Amazon, the world’s largest river by the discharge volume of water.

As the earth warms up faster, scientists say these atmospheric rivers have become longer, wider and more intense, putting hundreds of millions of people worldwide at risk from flooding.

In India, meteorologists say the warming of the Indian Ocean has created “flying rivers” that are influencing monsoon rains between June and September.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature in 2023 showed a total of 574 atmospheric rivers occurred in the monsoon season in India between 1951 and 2020, with the frequency of such extreme weather events increasing over time.

“In the last two decades, nearly 80% of the most severe atmospheric rivers caused floods in India,” it said.

A team of scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the University of California, who were involved in the study, also found that seven of India’s 10 most severe floods in the monsoon seasons between 1985 and 2020 were associated with atmospheric rivers.

The study said evaporation from the Indian Ocean had significantly increased in recent decades and the frequency of atmospheric rivers and floods caused by them has increased recently as the climate has warmed.

“There is an increase in the variability [more fluctuations] in the moisture transported towards the Indian subcontinent during the monsoon season,” Dr Roxy Matthew Koll, an atmospheric scientist with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, told the BBC.

“As a result, there are short spells when all that moisture from the warm seas is dumped by the atmospheric rivers in a few hours to a few days. This has led to increased landslides and flash floods across the country.”

An average atmospheric river is about 2,000km (1,242 miles) long, 500km wide and nearly 3km deep – although they are now getting wider and longer, with some more than 5,000km long.

And yet, they are invisible to the human eye.

“They can be seen with infrared and microwave frequencies,” says Brian Kahn, an atmospheric researcher with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“That is why satellite observations can be so useful for observing water vapour and atmospheric rivers around the world,” Mr Kahn added.

There are other weather systems like westerly disturbances, monsoon and cyclones that can cause floods as well.

But global studies have shown that atmospheric water vapour has increased by up to 20% since the 1960s.

Scientists have associated atmospheric rivers with up to 56% of extreme precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) in South Asia, although there are limited studies on the region.

In neighbouring Southeast Asia, there have been more detailed studies on the links between atmospheric rivers and monsoon-related heavy rains.

A 2021 study, published by the American Geophysical Union, found that up to 80% of heavy rainfall events in eastern China, Korea and western Japan during early monsoon season (March and April) are associated with atmospheric rivers.

“In East Asia there has been a significant increase in frequency of atmospheric rivers since 1940,” says Sara M Vallejo-Bernal, a researcher with the University of Potsdam in Germany, who led a separate study.

“We found that they have become more intense over Madagascar, Australia and Japan ever since.”

Meteorologists in other regions have been able to link a few recent major floods to atmospheric rivers.

In April 2023, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Jordan were all hit by catastrophic flooding after intense thunder, hailstorms and exceptional rainfall. Meteorologists later found that the skies across the region were carrying a record amount of moisture, surpassing a similar event in 2005.

Two months later, Chile was hit by 500mm of rain in just three days – the sky dumped so much water that it also melted snow on some parts of the Andes mountain, unleashing massive floods that destroyed roads, bridges, and water supplies.

A year earlier parts of Australia had been hit by what politicians called a “rain-bomb”, with more than 20 people killed and thousands evacuated.

Given the risks of catastrophic floods and landslides they can trigger, atmospheric rivers have been categorised into five types based on their size and strength – just like hurricanes.

Not all of them are damaging though, especially if they are of low intensity.

Some can be beneficial if they land in places that have suffered from prolonged droughts.

But the phenomenon is an important reminder of a rapidly warming atmosphere that holds much more moisture than in the past.

At the moment, the storm is relatively under-studied in South Asia, compared to other weather events like western disturbances or Indian cyclones that are the other major causes of floods and landslides.

“Effective collaborative efforts among meteorologists, hydrologists and climate scientists is currently challenging as the concept is new in this region and difficult to introduce,” said Rosa V Lyngwa, a research scholar at IIT Indore.

But as heavy rains continue to pummel parts of India, it’s become more important to study this storm and its potential devastating impact, she adds.

The number of unlawful crossings by migrants at the US southern border has dropped for the fifth consecutive month, according to official data.

US Border Patrol agents apprehended around 57,000 migrants along the border in July – the lowest recorded since September 2020.

The numbers are down significantly from December, when around 250,000 migrants were caught crossing the border.

President Joe Biden’s administration has credited the decrease to recent actions by him to tackle illegal immigration into the US, an election-year political vulnerability for the Democrats.

“This is the product of a number of actions this administration has taken,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in an interview with CBS this week.

Mr Mayorkas said those actions include an executive order signed last month by President Joe Biden that allows US immigration officials to deport migrants without processing their asylum claims.

The measure has been called one of the most restrictive border policies by a Democratic president in recent times, and was criticised by left-wing members of the party.

At the time, the president vowed that his executive order would “help us gain control of our border”. He added that “doing nothing is not an option”.

Government data shows that the number of migrants stopped at the US-Mexico border had dropped even before the order.

Border Patrol recorded 141,000 apprehensions in February, 137,000 in March, 129,000 in April, 118,000 in May and 84,000 in June.

The figures do not include official border crossings, where the Biden administration has been processing around 1,500 migrants each day through a smartphone app that schedules appointments between migrants and US border agents.

On the other side of the border, Mexican officials have also been working to curb illegal migration, including stopping people before they attempt to cross on to US soil.

The southern border has been a political headache for the Biden administration heading into November’s election.

Mr Biden has been repeatedly criticised by Republicans and their party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who said last month that the president had “surrendered our southern border.”

The president hit back, accusing the Trump camp of an “extremely cynical political move” by pressing Republican politicians to block a proposed border plan in Congress earlier this year.

The BBC director general has defended the decision not to sack Huw Edwards, despite knowing that the presenter had been arrested in November over the most serious category of indecent images of children.

In an interview with BBC News on Thursday, Tim Davie said the corporation had taken “difficult decisions in a fair and judicious manner”.

Asked about how much BBC managers were told in November, he said: “We knew it was serious, we knew no specifics, apart from the category of the potential offences.”

Meanwhile, the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy raised a number of concerns with the BBC over its handling of their internal investigation, including the use of licence fee payers’ money, a spokesperson for her department said.

Edwards, formerly the BBC’s most high-profile newsreader, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to three counts of making indecent images of children.

Although the BBC knew of the severity of the alleged offences, Mr Davie said the police had not told the corporation the details.

BBC bosses were not aware of the ages of the children in the images.

When the charges ultimately came to light earlier this week, Mr Davie said: “We were very shocked. No-one knew about the specifics of what we heard over the last few days, which have been deeply disturbing.”

Asked by the BBC’s David Sillito why Edwards could not have been sacked at the time of his arrest, Mr Davie replied: “Because the police came to us and said they need to do their work in total confidence, [and said], ‘please keep this confidential’.”

Edwards had not been charged at that point and it was still possible he would be cleared, Mr Davie noted.

“We thought long and hard about this. This wasn’t a kneejerk decision. When you think about this in terms of precedent, people do get arrested, and then we’ve had situations where [there are] no charges, and there’s nothing there to be followed up on.”

He said the corporation also had to consider its duty of care to Edwards.

“When it comes to the decision we made in November, we were obviously faced with a difficult decision, and we considered it very carefully,” Mr Davie said.

“The police… wanted to be assured of total confidence, and the reason they rung us at that point, it’s a technical process to ensure employees are protected and there’s no risk.”

He added: “Another factor at this point was very significant duty of care considerations. I think it was right for us to say we’d let the police do their business, and then when charges happen, we will act.”

Edwards received a £40,000 pay rise in the last financial year, despite being off air for most of it.

The director general said the pay rise dated from before any allegations.

“There was a [small] inflationary increase, which was standard stuff, but in terms of the big pay rise you saw in the annual report, that related to his work at the BBC, extending the scope of his work at the BBC, and that relates to February [2023], way before any allegations.”

Asked whether Edwards would still receive his pension, Mr Davie said it was “very difficult to claw back, nigh on impossible”, adding: “These are unfortunately the specifics of how it works.

“When it comes to pay, again, [it’s] legally challenging [to recover], but we’ll look at all options.”

Mr Davie was also challenged on the BBC’s own investigation into Edwards, which has not been published.

The director general said the BBC was “not sitting on anything that I think we need to share with the police, or is of a serious nature that would make me feel that we hadn’t followed up properly”.

He continued: “I can categorically say that when it comes to the offences we’ve seen, which are truly horrendous, any evidence that is out there is not in the hands of the BBC. If I saw evidence of that, that is not a complicated decision [to hand it over].”

The Metropolitan Police confirmed that it told the BBC in “strict confidence” about the arrest of Edwards on 8 November.

“Common law police disclosure (CLPD) is the established legal mechanism through which the police can inform an individual’s employer when they are arrested or alleged to have committed an offence,” a Met spokesman said.

“It is often used where the individual holds a position of trust/responsibility with the public.

“The information is provided in strict confidence in order to enable the individual’s employer to consider what risk mitigation measures might be necessary.”

On Thursday, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he was “shocked and appalled” by the charges against Edwards.

Later, a spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media & Sport said Culture Secretary Ms Nandy was shocked by Edwards’ “abhorrent actions”.

The Statement continued: “The Secretary of State has spoken to the BBC to raise concerns on a number of points regarding the handling of their own investigations into Huw Edwards, what safeguards and processes had been followed in this case, and additionally, what further action may be taken, especially with regard to the handling of licence fee payers’ money.”

Ms Nandy is said to be concerned the incident could damage public trust and has asked to be kept updated on its progress.

Edwards admitted having 41 indecent images of children, which had been sent to him by a convicted paedophile, Alex Williams, on WhatsApp.

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

After being arrested last November, Edwards was charged in June. He had been off air since July 2023, when he was suspended after being named as the star at the centre of different allegations involving an explicit photo.

Edwards resigned this April, which the BBC said at the time was on “medical advice”.

In a statement on Wednesday, the BBC said he would have been dismissed had he been charged while still employed.

Asked whether any figures in BBC News knew about the allegations before this week, Mr Davie confirmed CEO Deborah Turness was aware of an arrest at the time.

It was “a very small group of people at the centre” and “we had a very restricted list of names”, he said.

“When it comes to news, there was one name on it, the CEO of news, Deborah Turness. She isn’t involved editorially in the reporting of the story.”

Apart from Ms Turness, BBC News was not aware of the arrest nor charges against Edwards until they were made public on Monday. BBC News is editorially independent when reporting on the BBC.

The civil war in Sudan has pushed a camp housing about 500,000 displaced people near the besieged Darfur city of el-Fasher into famine, an independent group of food security experts says.

The 16-month conflict and restrictions on aid deliveries were to blame, the Famine Review Committee (FRC) concluded after looking at new data.

“The scale of devastation brought by the escalating violence in el-Fasher is profound and harrowing,” it said, explaining how Zamzam camp’s population had ballooned since April.

The war – a power struggle between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – has created the world’s largest humanitarian crisis forcing 10 million people from their homes.

It comes as US-mediated talks, scheduled to begin in two weeks, appear to be in jeopardy.

The RSF has accepted the invitation to Geneva, but it is unclear whether the army will go following Wednesday’s alleged assassination attempt on military leader Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

“The main drivers of famine in Zamzam camp are conflict and lack of humanitarian access, both of which can immediately be rectified with the necessary political will,” the FRC said.

The committee, linked to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) – a global initiative by UN agencies, aid groups and governments which identifies famine conditions – analysed two reports:

• The IPC’s Sudan working group’s latest assessment, which says 25.6 million people, or 54% of the population, are in high levels of acute food insecurity with 14 areas at risk of famine and
• Data published on Thursday from a US agency, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (Fews Net).

Fews Net said it was possible that famine was also ongoing in Abu Shouk and Al Salam camps, also near el-Fasher, but there was not enough evidence to conclusively say so.

The conditions for classifying an area to be in famine are that at least 20% of households must be facing an extreme lack of food, with 30% of children acutely malnourished and two people out of every 10,000 dying daily from starvation or from malnutrition and disease.

• What is famine and when is it declared?
• Sudan war: A simple guide to what is happening

Since April the RSF has been battling to take el-Fasher from the army, the only city still under military control in the western region of Darfur.

According to the FRC, around 320,000 people are believed to have fled the city, with around 150,000 to 200,000 moving to Zamzam camp “in search of security, basic services and food” in just a few weeks in May.

That month the UN expert on genocide prevention said many civilians in el-Fasher were being targeted based on their ethnicity – warning that there was a growing risk of genocide.

The violence in Darfur is similar to the ethnic cleansing unleashed by Arab Janjaweed militias on non-Arab communities two decades ago.

The main market in Zamzam camp was now only open intermittently and by June prices had rocketed – by 63% for cooking oil, 190% for sugar, 67% for millet and 75% for rice, the FRC said, giving a glimpse in its 47-page report into what conditions are like in the crowded camp.

Famine conditions prevailed in June and July and were likely to persist until October – the harvest season.

However, the experts fear that the hunger crisis will not ease much as war has prevented many farmers from planting.

The dire situation revealed by the reports about el-Fasher, particularly in Zamzam camp, was “merely the tip of the iceberg”, Barrett Alexander, from the aid agency Mercy Corps, warned.

“Drawing from our experience with previous famines, we know that widespread deaths have already occurred by the time a famine is officially declared.”

He added that a recent Mercy Corps assessment in Central and South Darfur had revealed that nine out of 10 children were suffering from life-threatening malnutrition.

One of the last aid groups operating in el-Fasher, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said things were likely to get worse if an apparent blockade on humanitarian aid was not lifted urgently.

“Our trucks left N’Djamena in Chad over six weeks ago and they should have reached el-Fasher by now, but we have no idea when they will be released,” said MSF’s Stéphane Doyon, MSF’s head of emergencies in Sudan.

The warring sides have both been accused of blocking and looting aid and both deny the allegations.

The MSF lorries are carrying therapeutic food and medical supplies for children in Zamzam camp as well as surgical supplies for the last remaining hospital in el-Fasher that does surgery.

The Saudi Hospital was hit by shelling on Monday that killed three staff and injured at least 25 people – the 10th attack in under three months, the charity said.

“We do not know if hospitals are being intentionally targeted, but the incident on Monday shows that the belligerents are not taking any precautions to spare them,” Mr Doyon said.

• A photographer’s 11-day trek to flee war-torn Sudan
• The children living between starvation and death in Darfur
• I couldn’t bury my brother because of Sudan bombing
• Fear and prayers in Sudan city under siege

Former CNN star presenter Don Lemon has sued multi-billionaire Elon Musk and his social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, over the cancellation of a content deal.

The lawsuit alleges that Mr Musk and his company unfairly terminated a partnership with Mr Lemon and refused to pay him after using his name to promote the social media platform with advertisers.

BBC News has contacted X for comment about the lawsuit.

Earlier this year, X reached deals with Mr Lemon, former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and sports radio presenter Jim Rome, as it tries to bring advertisers back to the platform after a series of controversies.

The lawsuit, filed in the California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges X had agreed to pay Mr Lemon $1.5m (£881,000), along with a share of advertising revenue generated by his content.

It also claims Mr Musk and X used “false promises and representations” to help persuade Mr Lemon to agree to the partnership only to cancel it after he had spent thousands of dollars on creating the show.

However, the deal which would have seen The Don Lemon Show appearing on X collapsed abruptly in March after the recording of the first episode, which featured an interview with Mr Musk.

In a post on X shortly after the deal fell through, Mr Musk said Mr Lemon’s approach “was basically just ‘CNN, but on social media,’ which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying.”

During the interview, which was recorded at Tesla’s headquarters in Texas, Mr Lemon asked Mr Musk about his use of the drug ketamine, as well as the increase of hate speech on X.

Mr Lemon had been with CNN for 17 years when he was fired in April 2023.

The network made the decision after Mr Lemon made on-air comments about then Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley being past her prime.

A curfew has been imposed in Nigeria’s second-biggest state, Kano, after protests against the high cost of living were “hijacked by thugs” who engaged in widespread looting and the destruction of property, the governor’s office has said.

Kano saw the largest crowds on the first day of nationwide protests that forced many businesses to shut.

Demonstrators in all major cities took to the streets, chanting slogans such as: “We are hungry.”

Police fired live bullets and tear gas – and sprayed hot water – to try and disperse thousands of demonstrators in Kano city. Four people were wounded, and taken to hospital.

Protesters had earlier set alight tyres to make a bonfire in front of the house of state governor Abba Kabir Yusuf.

Looters also broke into a warehouse near his house and people were seen carrying away 25-litre cartons of vegetable cooking oil and mattresses.

The curfew effectively bars protests from continuing, with all residents expected to remain at home.

The last census in Nigeria, in 2006, put Kano state’s population at 9.4 million, with unofficial estimates putting its current population at around 20 million.

The protests – called for 10 days – have been organised via social media and inspired by the recent success of protesters in Kenya who forced the government to scrap plans to increase taxes.

Mr Yusuf’s spokesman said the protests were peaceful in Kano, but the governor was forced to declare a curfew to “restore order and ensure the safety of our communities” because of “rampant looting, destruction of property and violence” unleashed by “thugs”.

On Wednesday night, a court ordered that protesters in the capital, Abuja, keep to the National stadium, which is located on the city’s outskirts.

But after gathering at the stadium’s gate on Thursday morning, the demonstrators – who have also been shouting the refrain “End bad governance” – began heading into the city centre.

This prompted police to fire tear-gas cannisters to try and stop the procession, which affected traffic.

The security forces were deployed at strategic locations within the capital, where even banks are closed, and in surrounding towns.

• The frustration of Nigerians vowing ‘days of rage’
• Why Nigeria’s economy is in such a mess
• People turn to ‘throw-away’ rice for food

In Lagos, Nigeria’s economic hub, protesters shouted “ole”, meaning “thief” in the Yoruba language – in reference to President Bola Tinubu and his government.

Many are angered by President Tinubu’s removal of a subsidy on fuel – announced with immediate effect during his inauguration speech in May 2023.

It was aimed at cutting government expenditure, but sent pump prices soaring with a ripple effect on other goods.

“Top on our demand is the subsidy removal. The government should reverse that decision,” Abuja protester Abiodun Sanusi told the BBC.

They also want the government to carry out wide-ranging reforms to the country’s electoral system and the judiciary.

Before this so-called “day of rage”, the government appealed to Nigerians not to take to the streets and give the president time for policies to bear fruit.

But Lagos protester Kingsley Uadiale dismissed this saying, “Hunger is the reason why we’re all here. You can’t beat a baby and ask the baby not to cry.”

If the Tinubu administration wanted patience then, he said, they should lead by example.

“You can’t tell us to be patient and you’re acquiring a private jet,” he said, citing plans to buy new planes worth millions of dollars for Mr Tinubu and his deputy Kashim Shettima.

Dabiraoluwa Adeyinka, an activist also protesting in Lagos, said the aim of the demonstration was to get the price hikes on essential commodities reversed.

“If they don’t yield, we will continue to protest,” she told the BBC

• Is Nigeria on the right track after a year of Tinubu?
• The Nigerian professor who makes more money welding
• Kenyan president’s humbling shows power of African youth

Heavy rains and floods have affected several parts of India in recent weeks, killing scores of people and displacing thousands of others.

Floods are not uncommon in the country – or South Asia – at this time of the year, when the region receives most of its rainfall.

But climate change has made monsoon rains more erratic, with massive rainfall in a short span of time followed by prolonged periods of dryness.

Now scientists say that a type of storm, known as an atmospheric river, is making things worse with a significant increase in moisture because of global warming.

Also known as “flying rivers”, these storms are huge, invisible ribbons of water vapour that are born in warm oceans as seawater evaporates.

The water vapour forms a band or a column in the lower part of the atmosphere which moves from the tropics to the cooler latitudes and comes down as rain or snow, devastating enough to cause floods or deadly avalanches.

These “rivers in the sky” carry some 90% of the total water vapour that moves across the Earth’s mid-latitudes and, on an average, have about twice the regular flow of the Amazon, the world’s largest river by the discharge volume of water.

As the earth warms up faster, scientists say these atmospheric rivers have become longer, wider and more intense, putting hundreds of millions of people worldwide at risk from flooding.

In India, meteorologists say the warming of the Indian Ocean has created “flying rivers” that are influencing monsoon rains between June and September.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature in 2023 showed a total of 574 atmospheric rivers occurred in the monsoon season in India between 1951 and 2020, with the frequency of such extreme weather events increasing over time.

“In the last two decades, nearly 80% of the most severe atmospheric rivers caused floods in India,” it said.

A team of scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the University of California, who were involved in the study, also found that seven of India’s 10 most severe floods in the monsoon seasons between 1985 and 2020 were associated with atmospheric rivers.

The study said evaporation from the Indian Ocean had significantly increased in recent decades and the frequency of atmospheric rivers and floods caused by them has increased recently as the climate has warmed.

“There is an increase in the variability [more fluctuations] in the moisture transported towards the Indian subcontinent during the monsoon season,” Dr Roxy Matthew Koll, an atmospheric scientist with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, told the BBC.

“As a result, there are short spells when all that moisture from the warm seas is dumped by the atmospheric rivers in a few hours to a few days. This has led to increased landslides and flash floods across the country.”

An average atmospheric river is about 2,000km (1,242 miles) long, 500km wide and nearly 3km deep – although they are now getting wider and longer, with some more than 5,000km long.

And yet, they are invisible to the human eye.

“They can be seen with infrared and microwave frequencies,” says Brian Kahn, an atmospheric researcher with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“That is why satellite observations can be so useful for observing water vapour and atmospheric rivers around the world,” Mr Kahn added.

There are other weather systems like westerly disturbances, monsoon and cyclones that can cause floods as well.

But global studies have shown that atmospheric water vapour has increased by up to 20% since the 1960s.

Scientists have associated atmospheric rivers with up to 56% of extreme precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) in South Asia, although there are limited studies on the region.

In neighbouring Southeast Asia, there have been more detailed studies on the links between atmospheric rivers and monsoon-related heavy rains.

A 2021 study, published by the American Geophysical Union, found that up to 80% of heavy rainfall events in eastern China, Korea and western Japan during early monsoon season (March and April) are associated with atmospheric rivers.

“In East Asia there has been a significant increase in frequency of atmospheric rivers since 1940,” says Sara M Vallejo-Bernal, a researcher with the University of Potsdam in Germany, who led a separate study.

“We found that they have become more intense over Madagascar, Australia and Japan ever since.”

Meteorologists in other regions have been able to link a few recent major floods to atmospheric rivers.

In April 2023, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Jordan were all hit by catastrophic flooding after intense thunder, hailstorms and exceptional rainfall. Meteorologists later found that the skies across the region were carrying a record amount of moisture, surpassing a similar event in 2005.

Two months later, Chile was hit by 500mm of rain in just three days – the sky dumped so much water that it also melted snow on some parts of the Andes mountain, unleashing massive floods that destroyed roads, bridges, and water supplies.

A year earlier parts of Australia had been hit by what politicians called a “rain-bomb”, with more than 20 people killed and thousands evacuated.

Given the risks of catastrophic floods and landslides they can trigger, atmospheric rivers have been categorised into five types based on their size and strength – just like hurricanes.

Not all of them are damaging though, especially if they are of low intensity.

Some can be beneficial if they land in places that have suffered from prolonged droughts.

But the phenomenon is an important reminder of a rapidly warming atmosphere that holds much more moisture than in the past.

At the moment, the storm is relatively under-studied in South Asia, compared to other weather events like western disturbances or Indian cyclones that are the other major causes of floods and landslides.

“Effective collaborative efforts among meteorologists, hydrologists and climate scientists is currently challenging as the concept is new in this region and difficult to introduce,” said Rosa V Lyngwa, a research scholar at IIT Indore.

But as heavy rains continue to pummel parts of India, it’s become more important to study this storm and its potential devastating impact, she adds.

A salon owner says she has been left exhausted by a long-running legal battle with global cosmetics giant L’Oréal.

The French firm is opposing Rebecca Dowdeswell’s attempt to renew the trademark on the name of her business – nkd – in Leicester city centre.

L’Oréal has its own trademark on a series of beauty products called NAKED and has told the 48-year-old her use of the name nkd would cause “consumer confusion”.

Ms Dowdeswell said she had spent more than £30,000 contesting L’Oréal’s opposition to her trademark application.

The mother of two, from Radcliffe-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire, said the pressure caused by the dispute had been a factor in her downsizing her business and closing a salon she previously ran in Nottingham.

L’Oréal told the BBC it had made Ms Dowdeswell an offer “that supports her business aspirations”.

However she disputed that, claiming the firm had continued to oppose her trademark application to register nkd as a trademark for toiletries.

Mrs Dowdeswell registered nkd as a trademark when she launched her business in 2009, but said her problems began when that expired 10 years later.

She said she had a six-month window to renew it but forgot to.

“I should have renewed it straight away. I didn’t. That was a big mistake,” she said.

“That six-month window ran into the start of Covid and chaos ensued for all businesses – including beauty salons -and I missed the expiry.

“When I came to re-register the trademark, I was essentially starting from scratch, not renewing an existing one.

“L’Oréal objected on the basis they owned the Urban Decay make-up brand which has a range of eye shadow palettes called Naked.

“I was very surprised because we have never been Naked. We’re spelled NKD, we are pronounced N, K, D.”

Ms Dowdeswell added: “There has never been any evidence of consumer confusion. In 15 years of trading, no-one has ever said ‘are you the same brand as Naked by Urban Decay?’

“I’ve spent two years negotiating with them trying to come to a co-existence agreement where they can carry on trading as Naked with their make-up and we can carry on as nkd in our very tight sphere of waxing and hair removal.

“This is David vs Goliath and frankly it has been horrible, exhausting and really stressful.

“I’ve now racked up over £30,000 plus VAT in legal costs defending myself. I don’t know whether it was the right thing to do.

“What I do know is that I could not just have walked away from my brand when L’Oréal disputed it. I’d spent 13 years of my life pouring everything building up this brand.”

A spokesperson for L’Oréal said: “We are wholly committed to resolving any misunderstanding there might have been with Rebecca Dowdeswell.

“From the beginning of our exchanges with her lawyers in 2022, we have communicated an offer that supports her business aspirations whilst respecting our longstanding trademark rights.

“We look forward to resolving this matter in a mutually agreeable way.”

If the matter is not resolved, Ms Dowdeswell said it would be decided by a judgement from the government’s Intellectual Property Office.

Ms Dowdeswell said she believed that would happen in 2025.

There is turmoil in Venezuela following the announcement by a government-controlled electoral authority of a disputed election result that handed a third consecutive term in power to President Nicolás Maduro.

The opposition says the result is fraudulent and that its candidate, Edmundo González, won the election by a wide margin.

The National Electoral Council (CNE), which announced the contested result, has so far failed to provide the voting tallies from individual polling stations that the opposition says demonstrate Mr González is the winner.

With pressure on the CNE growing to release the tallies, Mr Maduro has turned to Venezuela’s top court. The move has caused concern. Here we explain why.

Venezuela has an electronic voting system. Voters punch in a button assigned to their preferred candidate on a voting machine.

Once the button is pressed, the machine also prints out a paper receipt. Voters place that receipt in a ballot box.

Once polling stations close, the counting begins.

Each voting machine prints out a summary of all the votes cast by voters who used that particular machine.

Additionally, a count of the paper receipts is also conducted at each individual polling station to confirm the machine’s printout is correct.

By law, this process is public and anyone can witness it. There are also a number of accredited witnesses representing the different parties.

Once the chair of the count and the accredited witnesses are satisfied that the numbers match, they sign the tally and it is sent electronically to the CNE.

Accredited witnesses are handed a copy and paper printouts of the tallies are also transported to the CNE by the military.

Out of the five members who make up Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE), three are staunch government allies. Its president, Elvis Amoroso, used to work as Mr Maduro’s legal counsel.

Fearing the CNE could tamper with the election results, the opposition got thousands of people to act as its official witnesses and – in addition – urged Venezuelan citizens to go to their polling stations to monitor the vote count.

Just after midnight on election night, the CNE announced its first partial results.

It said that with 80% of the votes counted, President Maduro had 5.15m votes compared to 4.44m votes for Mr González.

CNE President Elvis Amoroso said that those figures meant that Mr Maduro had “a convincing and irreversible lead” with 51.2%, and that the opposition trailed with 44.2%.

The opposition quickly contested those results.

Its witnesses had provided it with copies of the voting tallies from polling stations across the country.

Just hours after the election, opposition leader María Corina Machado announced that having seen 40% of the voting tallies, they could confirm that it was their candidate, not Mr Maduro who was in the lead.

In the days following the election, the share of voting tallies the opposition has received has risen to 84%.

The opposition says that those tallies show that Mr González won with 67% of the vote.

Opposition campaigners have shared them with international organisations and independent researchers and uploaded them onto a website which Venezuelans can access by entering their ID number.

They have also urged the CNE to make all the tallies public, arguing that they will show that the Maduro win which the electoral authority announced on election night was fraudulent.

Latin American leaders, including left-wing leaders from Colombia and Brazil, have joined the US, the European Union and independent election observers in increasingly forceful demands for the CNE to finally release these tallies.

On Wednesday, three days after the election, President Maduro said his coalition was “ready to present 100% of the voting tallies that are in our hands”.

He made the announcement at the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ), Venezuela’s highest court.

He had earlier blamed the CNE’s delay in publishing the tallies on “an unprecedented cyber attack”, which he alleged had disrupted the transmission of the tallies from the polling stations.

But instead of making the tallies public, he took the unusual step of filing a “writ of ” – a legal move normally used by citizens who think their constitutional rights have been violated.

He asked the top court to audit the voting tallies with a view to confirming the results provided by the CNE which handed him another six-year term in power.

Mr Maduro’s statement may look like he is bowing to pressure for the tallies to be made public.

But by resorting to the top court, he has found a way to both deflect attention away from the CNE and to delay the publication of the tallies in one swoop.

The ball is now in the court of the Supreme Tribunal (TSJ), whose justices are overwhelmingly government loyalists.

The proceedings there are likely to be conducted behind closed doors, in which case even if Mr Maduro provides the tallies, only the justices will be able to access them.

In the short term, this deflects the pressure from the CNE and also allows Mr Maduro to argue that he has complied with international requests to hand over the tallies.

And in the medium term, should the court rule in his favour, he will hope this endorsement bolsters his claim that he is the winner of the election.

However, this move has already been dismissed by independent bodies, including the Carter Center, which was invited by the Maduro government to observe the election.

Jennie K. Lincoln, who led the Carter Center delegation, told AP news agency that the TSJ is “another government institution, appointed by the government, to verify the government numbers for the election results, which are in question”.

“This is not an independent assessment.”

This is not the first time that a Maduro electoral victory has been denounced as fraudulent.

The 2018 election was widely dismissed as neither free nor fair after opposition candidates were jailed, barred from running or forced into exile.

And it is not just the CNE’s result of the 2024 election which has been questioned.

The Carter Center, which has monitored more than 100 elections around the globe, cited a long list of problems with the electoral process, including:

• Venezuelans abroad facing excessive legal requirement to register to vote
• Harassment and intimidation of people who provided services and goods to the main opposition campaign
• Potential pressure on voters exerted by ruling party checkpoints near polling stations

It concluded that the 2024 presidential election “cannot be considered democratic”.

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 likens 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 possible running mates 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.

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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?” she was asked.

“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.

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.

Since the war began in Gaza following Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on 7 October, its leaders have been targeted, allegedly by Israel. Some have been killed, others remain defiant.

Here is a rundown of what has happened to Hamas’s most prominent figures.

Ismail Haniyeh was widely considered Hamas’s overall leader.

He was assassinated, reportedly in an aerial strike, on a building he was staying in during a visit to Tehran on 31 July, 2024. Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the strike.

A prominent member of Hamas in the late 1980s, Israel imprisoned Haniyeh for three years in 1989 as it cracked down on the first Palestinian uprising.

He was then exiled in 1992 to a no-man’s-land between Israel and Lebanon, along with a number of Hamas leaders.

After a year he returned to Gaza. In 1997 he was appointed head of the office of Hamas’s spiritual leader, strengthening his position.

Haniyeh was appointed Palestinian prime minister in 2006 by President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas won the most seats in national elections. But he was dismissed a year later amid deadly violence in Gaza, with Hamas ultimately ousting Mr Abbas’ Fatah party from the Gaza Strip.

Haniyeh rejected his sacking as “unconstitutional”, and Hamas continued to rule in Gaza.

He was elected head of Hamas’s all-powerful political bureau in 2017, making him in effect overall leader.

In 2018, the US Department of State designated Haniyeh a terrorist. He had lived in Qatar for the last several years.

Yahya Sinwar is the leader of the Hamas movement within the Gaza Strip. Israel believes he masterminded the unprecedented attack on 7 October 2023.

Sinwar was born in Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza in 1962.

A year after Hamas was founded in 1987, he formed its internal security service, which amongst other things targeted alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel.

Sinwar was arrested by Israel three times. He was sentenced to four life terms in 1988 for planning the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers and the murder of four Palestinians.

However, in 2011 he was among 1,027 Palestinian and Israeli Arab prisoners released by Israel in exchange for an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas for over five years.

Sinwar returned to his position as a prominent leader in Hamas and was appointed head of the group’s political bureau in the Gaza Strip in 2017, making him Hamas’s leader in the territory.

In 2015, the US included Sinwar on its blacklist of “international terrorists”.

Sinwar has not been seen since the start of the war with Israel in October. He is believed to still be in Gaza, hiding “10 storeys underground”, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.

Mohammed Deif was the head of Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of the Hamas movement. He was Israel’s most wanted man for decades, and was killed in an Israeli air strike last month, Israel says. Hamas has not confirmed this.

Deif, a shadowy figure, became known to Palestinians as The Mastermind, and to Israelis as The Cat with Nine Lives.

Israeli authorities imprisoned him in 1989 during the first Palestinian intifada (uprising), and released him after a year and half. Soon afterwards he formed the al-Qassam Brigades, with the aim of capturing Israeli soldiers.

He also helped engineer the construction of tunnels that enabled Hamas fighters to get inside Israel from Gaza.

Deif was accused by Israel of planning and supervising bus bombings which killed tens of Israelis in 1996, and of involvement in the capture and killing of three Israeli soldiers in the mid-1990s. He was arrested by the Palestinian Authority in 2000, but escaped seven months later at the beginning of the second intifada.

He became Israel’s most wanted man, but since then left behind little trace.

The most serious assassination attempts on his life were in 2002: Deif survived but lost one of his eyes. Israel says he also lost a foot and a hand, and was left with difficulty speaking.

Israel tried and failed again to assassinate Deif during a 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip, but killed his wife and two of his children.

Deif was one of the figures accused of planning the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, 2023. Israel said it killed him in an air strike on a compound in the Khan Younis area of Gaza on 13 July.

Hamas has not confirmed that Marwan Issa, deputy commander-in-chief of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was killed in an Israeli air strike in March 2024, as reported by the White House.

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said he had been killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), following reports in Israeli media that he had died in a strike on a tunnel complex under the Nuseirat refugee camp.

The senior commander is also known as the Shadow Man and has been viewed as Mohammed Deif’s right-hand man.

Prior to reports of his death, he was on Israel’s most wanted list, and was injured when Israel attempted to assassinate him in 2006.

Israeli forces detained him during the first intifada for five years because of his activity with Hamas.

The Palestinian Authority arrested him in 1997, but he was freed after the second intifada in 2000.

Israeli warplanes also destroyed his house twice during invasions of Gaza in 2014 and 2021, killing his brother.

It was not known what he looked like until 2011, when he appeared in a group photo taken during a reception for exchanged prisoners.

He is thought to have played a significant role in planning incursions into Israel, including the most recent.

Khaled Meshaal, who was born in the West Bank in 1956, is considered one of the founders of Hamas.

Under direct instructions from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Mossad spy agency attempted to assassinate Meshaal in 1997 while he was living in Jordan.

Mossad agents entered Jordan with forged Canadian passports and Meshaal was injected with a toxic substance while walking along a street.

Jordanian authorities discovered the assassination attempt and arrested two Mossad members.

The late King Hussein of Jordan asked Israel’s prime minister for the antidote for the substance Meshaal was injected with. Facing pressure from then-US President Bill Clinton, Mr Netanyahu provided it, after initially rejecting the request.

Meshaal, who lives in Qatar, visited the Gaza Strip for the first time in 2012. He was received by Palestinian officials and crowds of Palestinians came out to welcome him.

Hamas elected Ismail Haniyeh to succeed Meshaal as head of its political bureau in 2017, and Meshaal became head of the group’s political bureau abroad.

Mahmoud Zahar was born in Gaza in 1945 to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother. He is considered one of Hamas’ most prominent leaders, and a member of the movement’s political leadership.

He went to school in Gaza and university in Cairo, then worked as a doctor in Gaza and Khan Younis until Israeli authorities dismissed him over his political position.

Mahmoud Zahar was held in Israeli prisons in 1988, months after the founding of Hamas. He was among those deported by Israel to no-man’s land in 1992, where he spent a year.

With the Hamas movement winning Palestinian general elections in 2006, Zahar joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh’s newly formed government before its eventual dismissal.

Israel attempted to assassinate Zahar in 2003, when a plane dropped a bomb on his house in Gaza City. The attack left him with minor injuries, but killed his eldest son, Khaled.

His second son, Hossam, who was a member of the al-Qassam Brigades, was killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza in 2008.

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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.

If you’re taking a flight on Korean Air, you might soon notice something missing from your menu – a cup of instant noodles.

From 15 August onwards, the carrier will stop serving the noodles to economy class passengers. It said the increased risk of turbulence, narrow aisles and passengers sitting closely together could mean “burn incidents occur frequently”.

Business and first class fliers, however, will continue to enjoy the treat.

The snack has long been a passenger favourite and something the carrier is widely known for. Many praise the fact that it is available for free on request.

In a statement, the carrier said that since 2019 the number of times turbulence had occurred on its flights had doubled.

It added that in economy class, several cups of noodles are all served at once, saying that the “risk of burns is greater with passengers crowded together”.

But in business and first class the snacks are brought individually to these passengers, reducing the likelihood of spillage in the event of turbulence, the carrier said.

Up until now, the Korean carrier had been providing the noodles for free to passengers on longer routes.

But this will now be replaced with sandwiches, corn dogs, pizza and “Hot Pockets” – crusty turnovers filled with cheese, meat and vegetables.

The move sparked discussion on social media. Some users expressed relief, while others pointed out that the carrier was still serving other items that could cause burns.

“Aren’t coffee and tea hot?” said one comment.

However, another called it a “very good decision”, saying they had always been “nervous” that they would be scalded.

One user said they had hoped the instant noodles would be removed “because of the smell”.

Korean Air said it will “continue to seek service methods that are safe while increasing customer convenience and satisfaction”.

Earlier this year, Singapore Airlines said it would stop serving hot drinks and meals during turbulence as part of a “more cautious approach”.

A 73-year-old British passenger died and dozens more were injured when flight SQ 321 encountered turbulence over Myanmar and was diverted to Thailand in May.

Turbulence is one of the most unpredictable of all weather phenomena, with severe turbulence becoming more likely with climate change, recent research shows.

For Nashville native Jacki Thrapp flying to Europe this summer to see her idol Taylor Swift perform live was a “no brainer”.

With the cheapest tickets for the remaining US dates of Swift’s continuing Eras Tour now costing $2,500 (£2,000) on the resale market, up from their face value of $49, some American fans realised that it would be cheaper for them to fly across the Atlantic to catch one of the European shows instead.

So back in May, Jacki went to see Swift perform twice in Sweden, with each ticket costing her less than $200.

“Americans are paying so much money, and a lot of Taylor Swift fans are people in their 20s and 30s,” says the 32-year-old. “We’re paying so much money to see her in the US when a lot of us still can’t even afford a house.”

Although Jacki bought two Swedish tickets on the secondary market, the mark-up of the most expensive was only around double its face value. This is said to be because buying resold tickets is not an established thing to do in Sweden, unlike in the US and UK.

In other European countries, such as Germany, tickets cannot be resold at more than 25% above their face value. Meanwhile, some nations go even further. Italy, Portugal and the Republic of Ireland all have laws in place that prevent concert tickets being sold above their original price.

In the UK and the US the price of re-sold tickets can currently be as high as people are willing to pay. In April, 250 musical artists, including Billie Eilish and Cyndi Lauper, signed an open letter that attacked “predatory resellers”, and called the current ticking system “broken”.

The situation may change for the better in the UK in the next few years, as the Labour Party, which forms the new government, said in March that it planned to cap the resale price of tickets.

Yet laws preventing excessive pricing on the secondary market do not stop two key issues – touts getting their hands on excessive amounts of tickets in the first instance, and the risk of people buying counterfeit tickets or being scammed.

The latter is said to have affected hundreds of Taylor Swift fans who tried to buy tickets for her concerts in the UK this summer.

Asher Weiss, chief executive of ticketing start-up Tixologi, believes that technology is the solution, particularly AI.

“People [touts] will buy a ticket and list it on multiple marketplaces for secondary sale,” he says. “And then even if it sells on one, they won’t take it down off the other one.

“So multiple people end up with the same ticket, trying to get in,” explains Mr Weiss, whose firm is based in Los Angeles.

To prevent people buying excessive numbers of tickets, he says that Tixologi’s AI “will be able to flag people making multiple purchases from the same IP address as unusual purchasing behaviour”.

“That would prevent those bad actors, and protect the true fans and customers,” adds Mr Weiss.

His firm is also able to ensure that only one copy of a ticket can ever exist. It does this by using blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies. This prevents duplication.

Tixologi’s electronic tickets also have a rotating QR code that is said to be extremely difficult to copy, so that fake ones are instantly spotted when scanned. And a venue or artist can select a function called “disable transfers”, which prevents a user from emailing the ticket to someone else. This makes them much harder to re-sell.

UK ticketing company Seat Unique is working with London’s Wembley Stadium to sell hospitality tickets for Taylor Swift’s tour. She returns to the stadium for five shows in August, following three there in June.

“It is probably the most popular event I’ve seen in 15 years,” says Robin Sherry, Seat Unique’s founder and chief executive.

The company specializes in allowing venues and artists to sell their tickets via dynamic pricing. What this means is that the price is allowed to go up, and down, according to demand.

The idea is that the venue and artists sell the tickets directly, and therefore get the additional income if prices rise, instead of that money going to sellers on the secondary market.

To set the dynamic price Seat Unique is now using AI to constantly monitor demand and automatically respond to it.

“It’s ultimately about keeping tickets in the hands of fans not scalpers,” says Mr Sherry, who also works with sports clubs and organisations.

He adds that AI also has the ability to transform the marketing of concerts and other events, with adverts specifically targeted at individuals based on learning what they are interested in.

“I always jokingly say, AI will know what events you want to go to before I do,” he adds, saying that this will be “revolutionary in an industry that has been slow to modernise”.

While AI is starting to change how we are able buy tickets to concerts and other events, it is also beginning to appear on the stage.

In November a new AI-powered hologram of Elvis Presley will be performing live in London.

The creator of the Elvis Evolution production, Andrew McGuiness, says the hologram is so lifelike that it will be “less like Abba Voyage and more like time travel”.

But whether AI will be the answer for fans like Jacki Thrapp remains to be seen. “This was the first time I’ve ever left America to see one of my favourite artists, but there has to be a better way to do this,” she says.

Both Seat Unique and Tixologi hope that better way will be delivered by advances in AI.

A leopard attacked two men at a South African air force base that borders the world-famous Kruger National Park.

One of the men, a uniformed air force member, was attacked while out for a run. The other, a civilian working at the base, encountered the leopard while on a walk, an air force spokesman said.

The two individuals were admitted to hospital with scratches but no major injuries, Brig Gen Donavan Chetty told the BBC.

One has since been discharged and the other is due to leave on Thursday.

On Wednesday, the leopard was captured and relocated to a sanctuary around 100km (62 miles) from the Hoedspruit air force base, following last week’s attacks.

Gen Chetty said that encounters with leopards are common, but not usually dangerous, for those living and working near the park.

The park, a tourist magnet famed for its rich wildlife, is largely fenced off.

However, Gen Chetty said it was impossible to contain leopards, which are known for their agility, with fences.

“[The leopards] are basically in and amongst the human population,” he said, adding that around 150 of them are known to be living in the area.

Leopards are nocturnal animals that hunt a variety of prey, including wildebeest, antelope and fish, the Kruger National Park website says.

In 2017, three lions were killed after escaping from the park.

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When Lolita came to Australia in 2022, she was fleeing an older man she’d been forced to marry as a child in Saudi Arabia.

She told confidants she’d escaped a cycle of violence and sexual servitude so extreme it had repeatedly landed her in hospital.

But less than a year after her arrival, she vanished – last seen by a friend who claims he watched as she was taken from her apartment by a group of Saudi men in a black van.

Records show that Lolita, who is in her early 30s and goes by a single name, was put on a flight from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur in May 2023. From there, her lawyer believes she was returned to Saudi Arabia and detained.

But Lolita’s exact whereabouts and safety – or whether she is even alive – remain unknown.

It’s far from the first time the mysterious plight of a Saudi woman fleeing her homeland has ended up in the headlines.

“What makes this case particularly compelling, compared to some other cases of Saudi women who have disappeared… or turned up dead, is that we have a witness,” says solicitor Alison Battisson.

The Saudi Arabian embassy in Canberra declined to comment. However, in a statement to the BBC, the Australian Federal Police said it became “aware” of the alleged kidnapping in June and had “started making immediate inquiries” both within the country and “offshore”.

Advocates fear Lolita’s case is part of a growing trend in Australia, in which agents of other countries are monitoring, harassing or assaulting their expats with impunity.

The government has declared foreign interference – of all forms – its “most significant” national security threat and promised a crackdown.

But Ms Battisson and other rights campaigners are questioning how a woman – who had told immigration authorities she was fleeing violence – could allegedly be snatched from her home in broad daylight.

Lolita first came to Melbourne in May 2022, according to flight records.

Although she mostly kept to herself, she soon struck up a friendship with a Sudanese refugee who had also lived in Saudi Arabia, as an undocumented migrant.

It was Ali – not his real name – who put Lolita in touch with Ms Battisson, as she had helped him with his own asylum claim.

The human rights lawyer spoke frequently with Lolita from that point onwards, describing her as a “soft spoken” woman with a clear resolve to take back her life: “She was determined this was her time.”

But their correspondence ended abruptly in May of last year, after Ms Battisson received a “strange” text message from Lolita.

“It was in much more formal language than she had ever used, and it said, ‘What is my visa status’,” she tells the BBC.

Lolita’s claim for a protection visa – for people at risk of persecution in their home country – had previously been rejected, but Ms Battisson was helping her appeal against the decision. She says that is something her client was acutely aware of, as the two discussed it frequently.

“I now believe that message was actually from the people who had taken Lolita,” Ms Battisson says. She thinks they were trying to work out whether Lolita had a permanent visa, which would have given her the right to Australian consular assistance back in Saudi Arabia.

Then came the radio silence. As the weeks turned to months, Ms Battisson knew in her gut that “something was seriously wrong”.

She couldn’t reach Ali either, which was highly unusual as the two kept in regular contact.

When Ali eventually did return Ms Battisson’s calls, her worst fears were confirmed.

He said that he had witnessed Lolita being taken, but that the incident had left him so paralysed with fear for his own family, that he’d gone to ground.

He detailed his last conversation with Lolita – a frantic phone call in which she pleaded for protection from a group of men planning to take her to Saudi Arabia.

She even sent him pictures of the bags she claimed they had forced her to pack.

Ali told Ms Battisson he rushed to her flat, but on arrival an Arabic-speaking man threatened him, using personal details that Ali believes could only have come from the Saudi embassy in Canberra.

Changing tack, he contacted a friend and asked him to go to the airport, so the two of them could “create a fuss” and get the attention of security.

But they never saw Lolita in the terminal.

“It took me a year in total to confirm she had been taken,” Ms Battisson says, the dismay in her voice palpable.

The pro-bono lawyer has since been building a paper trail to try to piece together what happened.

“We have phone records and message records of her talking about being frightened. And we also have a pattern of her moving house because of that fear,” she says.

And then there’s the recent testimony of a relative. “As far as they know, Lolita is now in a Saudi prison or detention centre,” Ms Battisson says.

Glaring gaps in the story remain, but one thing Ms Battisson is unequivocal about is that “there are simply no safe options” for Lolita in her home country.

Since becoming the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia in 2017, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has, in some ways, sought to modernise the kingdom by loosening its long-standing restrictions on women.

Crucially though, all females still require a male guardian to sign them out of prison, and in Lolita’s case, that obligation would fall to the husband she allegedly fled halfway across the world to escape.

That fact alone, Ms Battisson says, should be enough to convince Australian authorities that there is “simply no way she would have willingly gone back to Saudi Arabia”.

Around the same time Lolita came to Australia, the country was grappling with the mysterious deaths of two other Saudi women.

In June of 2022, the badly decomposed bodies of sisters Asra and Amaal Alsehli were discovered in their Western Sydney apartment.

Little is known about how they died, but police have described the case as both “suspicious” and “unusual”, and it will soon be the subject of a coronial inquest.

But according to those who witnessed their behaviour, Asra and Amaal – who travelled to Australia from Saudi Arabia in 2017 to seek asylum – were living in fear.

Reports of Saudi women turning up dead while living abroad or being dragged back to the kingdom while trying to seek asylum are not new.

High profile examples include the case of Tala Farea and Rotana Farea, two sisters who were found duct-taped together in the Hudson River in 2018 after applying for asylum in the US. Or Dina Ali Lasloom, who claims she was intercepted by her uncles during a transit in Manila Airport, while trying to flee to Australia in 2017.

In recent years, scores of Australians with Chinese, Iranian, Indian, Cambodian and Rwandan heritage have also come forward to report incidents of monitoring, harassment, or assault, by agents they believed were employed by their respective governments.

And Australia’s intelligence chief has said that more people are now “being targeted for espionage and foreign interference” inside the country “than ever before”.

“Australians need to know that the threat is real. The threat is now. And the threat is deeper and broader than you might think,” Mike Burgess said in February.

Earlier this year, a parliamentary review of national foreign interference legislation found “significant flaws in its design and implementation” and that it had “failed to achieve its intended purpose”.

In response, the government announced reforms – which it calls “world-leading” – including the establishment of a support network to help diaspora communities identify and report suspicious behaviour, and a permanent foreign interference task force.

“These are complex problems, and we’re constantly working with our agencies to… protect vulnerable people,” Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said in a statement about the measures.

But it is too early to assess how effective the changes will prove.

It is not, however, too late for the government to help Lolita, Ms Battisson argues. They could issue her a visa and help her return to Australia, a decision that would fall to the Immigration Minister, Tony Burke.

“As a country now, we have the opportunity to ensure that a victim of gendered violence is finally safe,” she says.

“All women deserve a safe environment in which to flourish, which is what Lolita was doing before she was taken.”

The US secretary of state has said there was “overwhelming evidence” Venezuela’s opposition won the recent presidential election.

In a statement Antony Blinken said it was clear Edmundo González, had won the most votes – despite incumbent president Nicolás Maduro declaring a disputed victory.

“Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s 28 July presidential election,” Mr Blinken said.

His intervention comes as the presidents of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia all called on Venezuela to release the full details of last Sunday’s election.

• Key moments which led to Venezuela protests
• Maduro manoeuvring to stay in power in Venezuela

Last Sunday, the electoral council, which is government-controlled, announced President Maduro had won the election for a third term.

But this was immediately disputed by the opposition who said, with access to the majority of receipts from electronic voting machines around the country, it was false.

The opposition has said its own vote tally shows it won the election by a wide margin. Opinion polls ahead of the election had suggested a clear victory for the challenger.

President Maduro has previously accused foreign governments of interfering in the election.

He has strongly denied electoral fraud and has said the opposition has instigated a coup by disputing the result.

The announcement of President Maduro’s victory set off deadly protests in Caracas.

It has also attracted global criticism, with many governments around the world demanding the Venezuelan government release proof of the result.

The result has been recognised by Venezuelan allies China, Russia and Iran.

But, the US, European Union and other G7 countries have called on President Maduro’s government to release detailed voting data.

Posting on social media, Mr Blinken said: “Electoral data overwhelmingly demonstrate the will of the Venezuelan people: democratic opposition candidate Edmundo González won the most votes in Sunday’s election.

“Venezuelans have voted, and their votes must count.”

The intervention by Mr Blinken is significant. After the last election in 2018 was widely dismissed as neither free nor fair, countries including the US decided to recognise the then-opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president and imposed sanctions on Venezuela.

Mr Blinken said it was “time for the Venezuelan parties to begin discussions on a respectful, peaceful transition in accordance with Venezuelan electoral law and the wishes of the Venezuelan people”.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado, who says she is in hiding, has called for mass demonstrations on Saturday.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Ms Machado said Mr Maduro did not win the election.

She claimed her party’s candidate, Mr Gonzalez, won by a landslide and Ms Machado said she could prove this because she had receipts from more than 80% of polling stations.

Ms Machado appealed for help, saying it was now up to the international community to decide whether to tolerate what she called an illegitimate government.

In Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiya, the stronghold of Hezbollah, large crowds wearing black joined the funeral for Fuad Shukr, a senior commander of the powerful Lebanese militia and political movement, and the most high-profile member to have been assassinated by Israel during these current hostilities.

They carried placards with Shukr’s face, waved the yellow-and-green Hezbollah flag and chanted some of the group’s slogans, sometimes with their fists in the air.

According to the Israeli military, Shukr was behind a missile strike that killed 12 children and teenagers on a football field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights last Saturday. Hezbollah has denied involvement, although it initially claimed an attack on a nearby military base, which raised the possibility that the missile missed its intended targeted.

Shukr, who was also known as al-Hajj Mohsin, was said to be a close adviser to Hassan Nasrallah, the influential and long-time Hezbollah leader.

As people were gathered, Nasrallah gave a televised speech that was watched closely for any indication of Hezbollah’s possible next moves.

The conflict with Israel had entered a “new phase”, he said, speaking from a secret location, as he always does for security reasons. The enemy must wait for the “inevitable response” because it had crossed “red lines”, he added, saying that the reaction would be proportionate to Israel’s targeting of a civilian building.

His tone seemed to indicate that the group remained uninterested in another major war with Israel. But there are concerns that they could be sliding into one.

“I’m not afraid of war. We’re ready for whatever Sheikh Nasrallah decides to do,” one man in the crowd told me. “Inshallah,” said another, meaning God willing, when asked if he believed that Hezbollah would retaliate for the killing.

Shukr’s killing on Tuesday – an attack that killed six other people, including two young siblings – renewed fears that the relatively contained conflict between Hezbollah and Israel could escalate into an all-out war, with the potential to engulf the entire Middle East.

Hezbollah says its campaign, which started a day after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October, is in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Most of the group’s attacks, and Israel’s counterattacks, have been limited to areas along the Lebanon-Israel border.

Supported by Iran, Hezbollah has long been seen by Israel as a much more formidable foe than Hamas. The group has an increasingly sophisticated arsenal of weapons that includes attack drones and precision guided missiles capable of striking deep inside Israel.

• What is Hezbollah and will it go to war with Israel?

A conflict with Hezbollah would probably involve other Iranian-supported groups in the region, members of what Tehran calls the “Axis of Resistance” – the Houthis in Yemen or militias in Iraq, for example.

Iran, too, has vowed to respond to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political chief who was killed on Wednesday while visiting Tehran for the inauguration of the new Iranian president.

Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel, which has stayed silent. The killing has dealt a blow to the possibility of any success in ongoing talks for a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It is the main hope to defuse tensions with Hezbollah, and diplomatic efforts continue to try to de-escalate the situation.

The Israeli military has said it is ready for any scenario, as the country braces itself for a possible response to the two assassinations.

Nasrallah’s speech contained, as expected, sharp words against Israel but did not appear to suggest that a bigger war was imminent just yet.

Former CNN star presenter Don Lemon has sued multi-billionaire Elon Musk and his social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, over the cancellation of a content deal.

The lawsuit alleges that Mr Musk and his company unfairly terminated a partnership with Mr Lemon and refused to pay him after using his name to promote the social media platform with advertisers.

BBC News has contacted X for comment about the lawsuit.

Earlier this year, X reached deals with Mr Lemon, former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and sports radio presenter Jim Rome, as it tries to bring advertisers back to the platform after a series of controversies.

The lawsuit, filed in the California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges X had agreed to pay Mr Lemon $1.5m (£881,000), along with a share of advertising revenue generated by his content.

It also claims Mr Musk and X used “false promises and representations” to help persuade Mr Lemon to agree to the partnership only to cancel it after he had spent thousands of dollars on creating the show.

However, the deal which would have seen The Don Lemon Show appearing on X collapsed abruptly in March after the recording of the first episode, which featured an interview with Mr Musk.

In a post on X shortly after the deal fell through, Mr Musk said Mr Lemon’s approach “was basically just ‘CNN, but on social media,’ which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying.”

During the interview, which was recorded at Tesla’s headquarters in Texas, Mr Lemon asked Mr Musk about his use of the drug ketamine, as well as the increase of hate speech on X.

Mr Lemon had been with CNN for 17 years when he was fired in April 2023.

The network made the decision after Mr Lemon made on-air comments about then Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley being past her prime.

The biggest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the Cold War era took place earlier on Thursday, with 24 people released in total, the US has confirmed.

The White House said 16 prisoners had been freed and were on their way back to Europe and the US. Among them is Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

In return, eight Russian prisoners have been released from prisons in the US, Norway, Germany, Poland and Slovenia, including individuals accused of intelligence activities. The children of two of the prisoners also returned to Russia.

The swap took place on the runway at Ankara airport earlier on Thursday.

President Joe Biden has confirmed US Marine veteran Paul Whelan, Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Russian-British activist Vladimir Kara-Murza – who has a US green card – are also on their way back to the US.

• Biggest Russia-West prisoner swap since Cold War – live updates
• Who are the prisoners in the Russia-West swap?

The deal had been more than 18 months in the making and appears to have hinged on Moscow’s demand for the return of Vadim Krasikov.

He was serving a life sentence in Germany for carrying out an assassination in a Berlin park, and is now back in Russia.

Senior US administration officials described him as a “bad dude” and said he was “certainly the biggest fish the Russians wanted back”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior officials, along with a guard of honour, met the returning Russians at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport.

Earlier prisoner swap discussions had included jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but the offer collapsed when he died in February.

His widow Yulia welcomed the swap, describing it as a “joy”.

“Every released political prisoner is a huge victory and a reason to celebrate,” she said in a post on X.

“No one should be held hostage by Putin, subjected to torture, or left to die in his prisons.”

The view in the White House is that this deal is the most complex exchange in US and Russian history.

Mr Biden called it a “feat of diplomacy”, adding that many countries had “joined difficult, complex negotiations at my request and I personally thank them”.

He added that those released had been convicted in “show trials” and sentenced to “long prison terms with absolutely no legitimate reason whatsoever”.

Mr Biden joined relatives of the three Americans and Kara-Murza on a call from the Oval Office after the exchange was completed.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he welcomed the releases, particularly of Kara-Murza and Whelan, who hold British citizenship.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin said in a statement that 13 prisoners had been pardoned in order to secure the return of Russians held in prisons abroad.

There was no explanation as to why the names of two of the released Germans, Patrick Schobel and Herman Moyzhes, were not included in the list of pardons.

German citizen Rico Krieger, who was sentenced to death in Belarus before being pardoned by the country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko earlier this week, has also been released.

Others included in the deal are Russian political prisoners Ilya Yashin and Oleg Orlov.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted the swap was “the right decision, and if you had any doubts, you will lose them after talking to those who are now free”.

“Many of the prisoners feared for their health and even their lives,” he added after meeting with some prisoners on their arrival at Cologne Bonn Airport.

Earlier, the Turkish presidency said prisoners from both sides of the deal were taken off aircraft at Ankara airport, moved to secure locations under the supervision of Turkish security officials and put on planes for their respective destination countries.

It said 26 individuals were involved in the exchange. That figure included two children, who a US official confirmed returned to Russia with their parents Artyom Dultsev and Anna Dultseva – a Russian couple convicted of spying in Slovenia who are part of the exchange.

The exchange comes after days of speculation about a major swap between various countries, which increased after several dissidents and journalists jailed in Russia were moved from their prison cells to unknown locations.

Although secret prison transfers are common in Russia, the multiple disappearances of well-known prisoners was unusual.

The last high-profile prisoner swap took place in December 2022, when US basketball star Brittney Griner was exchanged on the tarmac at Abu Dhabi airport for notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had been held in an American prison for 12 years.

The last comparable one occurred in Vienna in 2010, when 10 Russian spies held in the US were swapped for four alleged double agents held in Russia.

One of them was Sergei Skripal, a former military intelligence officer, later poisoned by nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018.

Tensions between Moscow and the West have been high in recent years, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Heavy rains and floods have affected several parts of India in recent weeks, killing scores of people and displacing thousands of others.

Floods are not uncommon in the country – or South Asia – at this time of the year, when the region receives most of its rainfall.

But climate change has made monsoon rains more erratic, with massive rainfall in a short span of time followed by prolonged periods of dryness.

Now scientists say that a type of storm, known as an atmospheric river, is making things worse with a significant increase in moisture because of global warming.

Also known as “flying rivers”, these storms are huge, invisible ribbons of water vapour that are born in warm oceans as seawater evaporates.

The water vapour forms a band or a column in the lower part of the atmosphere which moves from the tropics to the cooler latitudes and comes down as rain or snow, devastating enough to cause floods or deadly avalanches.

These “rivers in the sky” carry some 90% of the total water vapour that moves across the Earth’s mid-latitudes and, on an average, have about twice the regular flow of the Amazon, the world’s largest river by the discharge volume of water.

As the earth warms up faster, scientists say these atmospheric rivers have become longer, wider and more intense, putting hundreds of millions of people worldwide at risk from flooding.

In India, meteorologists say the warming of the Indian Ocean has created “flying rivers” that are influencing monsoon rains between June and September.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature in 2023 showed a total of 574 atmospheric rivers occurred in the monsoon season in India between 1951 and 2020, with the frequency of such extreme weather events increasing over time.

“In the last two decades, nearly 80% of the most severe atmospheric rivers caused floods in India,” it said.

A team of scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the University of California, who were involved in the study, also found that seven of India’s 10 most severe floods in the monsoon seasons between 1985 and 2020 were associated with atmospheric rivers.

The study said evaporation from the Indian Ocean had significantly increased in recent decades and the frequency of atmospheric rivers and floods caused by them has increased recently as the climate has warmed.

“There is an increase in the variability [more fluctuations] in the moisture transported towards the Indian subcontinent during the monsoon season,” Dr Roxy Matthew Koll, an atmospheric scientist with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, told the BBC.

“As a result, there are short spells when all that moisture from the warm seas is dumped by the atmospheric rivers in a few hours to a few days. This has led to increased landslides and flash floods across the country.”

An average atmospheric river is about 2,000km (1,242 miles) long, 500km wide and nearly 3km deep – although they are now getting wider and longer, with some more than 5,000km long.

And yet, they are invisible to the human eye.

“They can be seen with infrared and microwave frequencies,” says Brian Kahn, an atmospheric researcher with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“That is why satellite observations can be so useful for observing water vapour and atmospheric rivers around the world,” Mr Kahn added.

There are other weather systems like westerly disturbances, monsoon and cyclones that can cause floods as well.

But global studies have shown that atmospheric water vapour has increased by up to 20% since the 1960s.

Scientists have associated atmospheric rivers with up to 56% of extreme precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) in South Asia, although there are limited studies on the region.

In neighbouring Southeast Asia, there have been more detailed studies on the links between atmospheric rivers and monsoon-related heavy rains.

A 2021 study, published by the American Geophysical Union, found that up to 80% of heavy rainfall events in eastern China, Korea and western Japan during early monsoon season (March and April) are associated with atmospheric rivers.

“In East Asia there has been a significant increase in frequency of atmospheric rivers since 1940,” says Sara M Vallejo-Bernal, a researcher with the University of Potsdam in Germany, who led a separate study.

“We found that they have become more intense over Madagascar, Australia and Japan ever since.”

Meteorologists in other regions have been able to link a few recent major floods to atmospheric rivers.

In April 2023, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Jordan were all hit by catastrophic flooding after intense thunder, hailstorms and exceptional rainfall. Meteorologists later found that the skies across the region were carrying a record amount of moisture, surpassing a similar event in 2005.

Two months later, Chile was hit by 500mm of rain in just three days – the sky dumped so much water that it also melted snow on some parts of the Andes mountain, unleashing massive floods that destroyed roads, bridges, and water supplies.

A year earlier parts of Australia had been hit by what politicians called a “rain-bomb”, with more than 20 people killed and thousands evacuated.

Given the risks of catastrophic floods and landslides they can trigger, atmospheric rivers have been categorised into five types based on their size and strength – just like hurricanes.

Not all of them are damaging though, especially if they are of low intensity.

Some can be beneficial if they land in places that have suffered from prolonged droughts.

But the phenomenon is an important reminder of a rapidly warming atmosphere that holds much more moisture than in the past.

At the moment, the storm is relatively under-studied in South Asia, compared to other weather events like western disturbances or Indian cyclones that are the other major causes of floods and landslides.

“Effective collaborative efforts among meteorologists, hydrologists and climate scientists is currently challenging as the concept is new in this region and difficult to introduce,” said Rosa V Lyngwa, a research scholar at IIT Indore.

But as heavy rains continue to pummel parts of India, it’s become more important to study this storm and its potential devastating impact, she adds.

A woman who says she was raped in 2017 has described the criminal justice system as “absolutely broken” after a series of problems and errors allowed the accused man to allegedly start stalking her.

Despite reporting the rape allegation to police the day after it happened, the case is not due to be tried in court until next May – eight years after the alleged assault.

In that time, delays and errors by police, mistakes by prosecutors and court backlogs have contributed to the woman having a mental breakdown.

“It’s shambolic, embarrassing, disgraceful and debilitating,” says the woman, who is legally entitled to anonymity. “I shouldn’t have felt abandoned and hopeless.”

The woman, who we are calling Samantha, says the rape was carried out in March 2017 by a man who was “prevalent in my life before and knew where I lived”.

After she reported it, the man was arrested and questioned before being released under investigation. Samantha says West Mercia Police initially updated her on developments but, after about six months, communication petered out and her efforts to make contact went unanswered.

“Being left like that – forgotten about – is exactly how you’re made to feel.”

Out of the blue, in 2019, two officers came to Samantha’s house. They handed her a letter – from the Crown Prosecution Service – saying it had decided not to proceed with the case because of a lack of evidence.

“It came as a complete surprise – I felt abandoned.”

By that time, Samantha says, the man had started stalking her. She says he would follow her to her children’s school, trail her on errands, or just appear at places she regularly visited – including her workplace.

She reported it to two police forces – West Mercia, where she lived, and Warwickshire, where she worked. Samantha was told to call the non-emergency number, 101, but gave up because of lack of support.

She was told “he hasn’t done anything yet” or “he’s only on the other side of the street”, she says.

Throughout this period, Samantha was receiving support from an Independent Sexual Violence Adviser, a role funded by the Ministry of Justice that supports complainants of sexual abuse.

She greatly credits her adviser with helping her to cope, both with the emotions of the case as well as chasing the police to take her allegations seriously.

However, three months after the CPS said the case would not be prosecuted, the adviser was withdrawn, a standard procedure. Feeling stressed and alone, Samantha had a mental breakdown.

“For many months, I was in and out of the GP surgery asking for help, because I found it very difficult to cope with day-to-day life. I was trying to work and be a mum to my kids, trying to just function.”

Samantha says she could go weeks without seeing the man and then there would be “multiple sightings and appearances just to remind me that he was still around”.

It all came to a head one morning when she could not get out of bed, she says.

“I consider myself a strong character but, on that day, I physically couldn’t do anything. I was processing the fact that it was so definitive – no-one was going to help me.”

Strangely, the pandemic made things easier. Samantha says the man stopped appearing, she was able to focus on her two children and keep her business going.

In 2022, an unexpected email arrived.

“May I take this opportunity to apologise on behalf of the CPS for any distress caused to you by the previous decision made not to prosecute this case,” wrote Nicola Haywood, the Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor.

As part of a national review of rape cases, prosecutors had reconsidered the evidence in Samantha’s case and concluded they had made a mistake.

“Consequently, I have decided that a prosecution should now be brought… for offences of rape, assault by penetration, attempted rape and sexual assault.”

Samantha’s world was turned upside down.

“My mind went to how do I cope with that, having had a breakdown, [then] some element of recovery and not wanting to invite that back into my life.”

Around this time, the man moved his business closer to Samantha. After several months considering her options, she decided she had no choice but to pursue the case.

But the problems kept coming. Delays and an inexplicable back-and-forth between the CPS and West Mercia Police meant it was almost a year before the man was charged and then released on bail.

His first court appearance was scheduled for September 2023, 20 months after Samantha had been told by the CPS it was going to charge him.

West Mercia Police told us it could not comment while court proceedings are active.

• There are a record 2,786 adult rape cases waiting to go to court in England and Wales, part of a record 10,141 number of sexual offences awaiting a trial
• In 2023, 68,022 rapes were recorded by police in England and Wales, fewer than 3% resulted in someone being charged that same year
• In England and Wales in 2023, it took on average 777 days from a rape being reported to police to the case being completed in court. In West Mercia, it took 968 days

Source: Ministry of Justice, ONS, Home Office, UK Government

By the time the man had been charged, says Samantha, the stalking had restarted. On one occasion, officers from Warwickshire attended after he had been observing Samantha from a roadside food van. She says one of them dismissed her concerns: “I can’t arrest him for having his lunch, love.”

“I’ll never, ever forget those words – I just felt like being crushed inside,” she says.

At one point, the police told Samantha they were taking her repeated reports of stalking seriously and that the man’s bail conditions would include a clause stipulating that if he was to go anywhere near her, he would risk arrest.

But an admin error meant West Mercia forgot to put the restrictions in place, and Samantha says the stalking continued.

She says she believes if the bail conditions had been administered correctly, the man would have been arrested.

She is still regularly reporting stalking incidents to the police – “I’m becoming their administrator for all the stalking that’s taking place,” she says, but adding there is “absolutely no action” being taken.

She greatly credits her adviser, who works for the West Mercia Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre, with helping her to cope, both with the emotions of the case as well as chasing the police to take her allegations seriously.

Warwickshire Police said it was investigating and “always aims to put measures in place to protect and support” victims of domestic abuse. “It is always concerning when a victim is not satisfied with the service they have received,” added Detective Inspector Ruth Morris.

Samantha’s case was finally due to go to court in May 2024. But in February, a member of the police’s witness care team rang Samantha to say it would have to be postponed.

She was told one of the contributing factors was the roof collapse at Hereford Crown Court in 2020. Cases that should have been heard there are now being spread around the West Mercia courts system.

Samantha’s area has some of the longest court delays in England and her case isn’t due to be heard until May 2025.

“I don’t care that there’s not enough courtrooms. I care what I’m going through. I care that I’m an example of thousands of people in a system that is absolutely shameful,” she told us.

The Labour government has acknowledged the problem and announced plans to fast-track rape cases, with specialist courts in every Crown Court.

The Crown Prosecution Service told us it recognises the profound effect delays have on victims and says it is working with police to build strong cases and improve timeliness.

It says latest figures indicate the time between the CPS receiving evidence and making charging decisions is “coming down sharply”.

“We are consistently charging around seven in 10 rape cases referred to us by police,” it added. However, in 2023, only 2.1% of rape cases, resulted in the suspect being charged or summoned to court.

Unsurprisingly, there have been moments when Samantha has wished she had never reported the rape: “It doesn’t encourage you to come forward.”

But she has stuck with the case – and will go to court – because, she insists, “it’s the right thing to do”.

Israel’s military says it has confirmed that Hamas’s military chief Mohammed Deif was killed in an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip last month.

Deif was targeted in the strike on a compound in the Khan Younis area on 13 July. Hamas is yet to confirm his death.

Israel says Deif was one of the figures responsible for planning the 7 October attacks in southern Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

On Wednesday, Hamas political leader Ismael Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Iran. Israel has not commented on his death directly.

The Israeli military said in a statement that “following an intelligence assessment, it can be confirmed that Mohammed Deif was eliminated” in the 13 July strike.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health authorities said at the time of the air strike that it had killed more than 90 people, but denied that Deif was among the dead.

Deif is widely seen as the second-ranking Hamas official in Gaza, behind Yahya Sinwar, the group’s leader in the territory.

Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, said the death of Deif is “a significant milestone” in the dismantling of Hamas.

“This operation reflects the fact that Hamas is disintegrating, and that Hamas terrorists may either surrender or they will be eliminated,” he added.

Mohammed Deif was appointed head of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of the Hamas movement, in 2002.

For decades he’s been seen as one of Israel’s most wanted men – and has survived a reported seven assassination attempts, including one that reportedly saw him lose an eye.

He was born in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp in 1965, when the territory was occupied by Egypt.

As a young man in the late 1980s, he joined Hamas shortly after its formation and quickly rose to prominence within the group.

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

Deif is also known to have helped engineer the construction of tunnels that have allowed Hamas fighters to enter Israel from Gaza.

During his leadership of the al-Qassam brigades, he was credited with designing Hamas’s signature weapon, the Qassam rocket.

In 2014, Israel attempted to kill Deif with an air strike on a house in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza, which killed Deif’s wife, Widad, and their infant son, Ali. Israel thought it had killed Deif, too, but he was not in the building at the time.

Enemies are known to have dubbed Deif ‘the cat with nine lives’, due to the fact he survived so many attempts on his life.

During the current conflict, Deif is believed to have directed Hamas’ military operations from within underground tunnels inside Gaza.

• Bowen: Israel’s killing of Haniyeh deals hammer blow to ceasefire prospects
• Iran vows revenge after Hamas leader assassinated in Tehran

Israel’s confirmation of Deif’s death comes at the end of a turbulent week in the Israel-Gaza conflict, which has stoked fears of a broader regional war.

On Saturday, 12 Druze children and young people were killed after a rocket fell on a football field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed Lebanon-based Hezbollah, saying they would pay “a heavy price”.

On Tuesday, Israel retorted with air strike on Beirut which killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, as well as four others, including two children.

Hours later, Hamas’s political leader Ismael Haniyeh was killed in a strike on a building he was staying in during a visit to Iran’s capital, Tehran.

Iran has blamed Israel for Haniyeh’s death, threatening “harsh punishment”.

The BBC director general has defended the decision not to sack Huw Edwards, despite knowing that the presenter had been arrested in November over the most serious category of indecent images of children.

In an interview with BBC News on Thursday, Tim Davie said the corporation had taken “difficult decisions in a fair and judicious manner”.

Asked about how much BBC managers were told in November, he said: “We knew it was serious, we knew no specifics, apart from the category of the potential offences.”

Meanwhile, the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy raised a number of concerns with the BBC over its handling of their internal investigation, including the use of licence fee payers’ money, a spokesperson for her department said.

Edwards, formerly the BBC’s most high-profile newsreader, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to three counts of making indecent images of children.

Although the BBC knew of the severity of the alleged offences, Mr Davie said the police had not told the corporation the details.

BBC bosses were not aware of the ages of the children in the images.

When the charges ultimately came to light earlier this week, Mr Davie said: “We were very shocked. No-one knew about the specifics of what we heard over the last few days, which have been deeply disturbing.”

Asked by the BBC’s David Sillito why Edwards could not have been sacked at the time of his arrest, Mr Davie replied: “Because the police came to us and said they need to do their work in total confidence, [and said], ‘please keep this confidential’.”

Edwards had not been charged at that point and it was still possible he would be cleared, Mr Davie noted.

“We thought long and hard about this. This wasn’t a kneejerk decision. When you think about this in terms of precedent, people do get arrested, and then we’ve had situations where [there are] no charges, and there’s nothing there to be followed up on.”

He said the corporation also had to consider its duty of care to Edwards.

“When it comes to the decision we made in November, we were obviously faced with a difficult decision, and we considered it very carefully,” Mr Davie said.

“The police… wanted to be assured of total confidence, and the reason they rung us at that point, it’s a technical process to ensure employees are protected and there’s no risk.”

He added: “Another factor at this point was very significant duty of care considerations. I think it was right for us to say we’d let the police do their business, and then when charges happen, we will act.”

Edwards received a £40,000 pay rise in the last financial year, despite being off air for most of it.

The director general said the pay rise dated from before any allegations.

“There was a [small] inflationary increase, which was standard stuff, but in terms of the big pay rise you saw in the annual report, that related to his work at the BBC, extending the scope of his work at the BBC, and that relates to February [2023], way before any allegations.”

Asked whether Edwards would still receive his pension, Mr Davie said it was “very difficult to claw back, nigh on impossible”, adding: “These are unfortunately the specifics of how it works.

“When it comes to pay, again, [it’s] legally challenging [to recover], but we’ll look at all options.”

Mr Davie was also challenged on the BBC’s own investigation into Edwards, which has not been published.

The director general said the BBC was “not sitting on anything that I think we need to share with the police, or is of a serious nature that would make me feel that we hadn’t followed up properly”.

He continued: “I can categorically say that when it comes to the offences we’ve seen, which are truly horrendous, any evidence that is out there is not in the hands of the BBC. If I saw evidence of that, that is not a complicated decision [to hand it over].”

The Metropolitan Police confirmed that it told the BBC in “strict confidence” about the arrest of Edwards on 8 November.

“Common law police disclosure (CLPD) is the established legal mechanism through which the police can inform an individual’s employer when they are arrested or alleged to have committed an offence,” a Met spokesman said.

“It is often used where the individual holds a position of trust/responsibility with the public.

“The information is provided in strict confidence in order to enable the individual’s employer to consider what risk mitigation measures might be necessary.”

On Thursday, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he was “shocked and appalled” by the charges against Edwards.

Later, a spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media & Sport said Culture Secretary Ms Nandy was shocked by Edwards’ “abhorrent actions”.

The Statement continued: “The Secretary of State has spoken to the BBC to raise concerns on a number of points regarding the handling of their own investigations into Huw Edwards, what safeguards and processes had been followed in this case, and additionally, what further action may be taken, especially with regard to the handling of licence fee payers’ money.”

Ms Nandy is said to be concerned the incident could damage public trust and has asked to be kept updated on its progress.

Edwards admitted having 41 indecent images of children, which had been sent to him by a convicted paedophile, Alex Williams, on WhatsApp.

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

After being arrested last November, Edwards was charged in June. He had been off air since July 2023, when he was suspended after being named as the star at the centre of different allegations involving an explicit photo.

Edwards resigned this April, which the BBC said at the time was on “medical advice”.

In a statement on Wednesday, the BBC said he would have been dismissed had he been charged while still employed.

Asked whether any figures in BBC News knew about the allegations before this week, Mr Davie confirmed CEO Deborah Turness was aware of an arrest at the time.

It was “a very small group of people at the centre” and “we had a very restricted list of names”, he said.

“When it comes to news, there was one name on it, the CEO of news, Deborah Turness. She isn’t involved editorially in the reporting of the story.”

Apart from Ms Turness, BBC News was not aware of the arrest nor charges against Edwards until they were made public on Monday. BBC News is editorially independent when reporting on the BBC.

A 17-year-old charged with murdering three girls who were stabbed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport has been named.

Axel Muganwa Rudakubana is also charged with 10 counts of attempted murder after eight other children and two adults were seriously injured in the attack on Monday.

The suspect, who is from the Lancashire village of Banks, appeared at Liverpool Crown Court, and also faces a charge of possessing a curved kitchen knife.

He was remanded into youth detention accommodation.

The Cardiff-born teenager could not previously be named due to his age but Recorder of Liverpool Judge Andrew Menary KC ruled it could be made public following applications from the media.

The defendant is due to turn 18 next week.

The judge said he was mindful of “misinformation” that had spread regarding the accused’s identity.

Southport saw a night of unrest on Tuesday following a vigil in memory of the victims, with protesters gathering near a mosque in the Merseyside town.

Five men were arrested – with one later charged with possessing a knife – after a police van was set alight and bricks were thrown, with 53 police officers injured.

A further Section 60 order, which gives police enhanced powers to stop and search and is designed to minimise violence, was put in place on Thursday evening.

This follows the original Section 60 order brought in for 24 hours from 17:00 BST on Wednesday evening.

The latest order came into effect at 18:00 BST and will also last for 24 hours, with extra officers in the area, Merseyside Police said.

Judge Menary said: “Continuing to prevent full reporting at this stage has a disadvantage of allowing others up to mischief to continue to spread misinformation in a vacuum.”

He acknowledged his decision was “exceptional” but said “the balance clearly comes down in favour of the public interest in allowing full reporting of these proceedings”.

Arguing against naming the defendant, the prosecution said he had an “autism spectrum disorder diagnosis” and had been “unwilling to leave the house and communicate with family for a period of time”.

He attended an appearance at a youth court at about 09:00 BST, arriving in a prison van with a large police escort.

In front of a packed press gallery, he glanced at reporters before he was asked to sit down before District Judge James Hatton.

Wearing a grey police-issued tracksuit, the defendant pulled his sweatshirt above his nose and lowered his head during the five-minute hearing, in which he did not speak.

None of the families of the victims or the defendant were in court.

The accused will next appear at Liverpool Crown Court on 25 October for a pre-trial preparation hearing.

Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, died after the stabbings on Hart Street in the Merseyside town, just before midday on Monday.

Eight children and two adults were also seriously injured.

Earlier on Thursday, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital confirmed two children who were being treated there had been discharged.

The hospital said it was continuing to treat five other children, and all were now in a stable condition.

A statement read: “We are delighted that two of the children involved in Monday’s awful incident have now been discharged.

“Our heartfelt sympathies remain with all those affected.”

The hospital also thanked Taylor Swift fans for raising more than £340,000.

Set up by two members of the Taylor Swift UK & EU Facebook Group, the fundraiser has had donations from fans around the world.

“Thank you for embodying the spirit of Taylor’s music and for turning empathy into action,” the hospital said.

Following Tuesday’s disturbances in Southport, further disorder broke out in areas across England, with more than 100 people arrested at a protest in central London on Wednesday night.

There were also incidents in Hartlepool, Manchester and Aldershot.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said “action will be taken” following the “violent disorder” at a meeting with police chiefs at Downing Street earlier.

Speaking in a televised speech afterwards, he laid out plans for forces across the country to increase their co-operation to tackle such incidents.

He described the widespread disorder as the “actions of a tiny, mindless minority” and condemned “far-right hatred”.

The prime minister added: “These thugs are mobile, they move from community to community, and we must have a police response that can do the same.”

Following Monday’s attack, the families of Bebe King and Alice Dasilva Aguiar issued tributes and asked for privacy.

Bebe’s family said “no words can describe the devastation that has hit our family as try to deal with the loss”.

The family of Alice said “keep smiling and dancing like you love to do our Princess”.