It’s something Vladimir Putin does rarely: go to the airport to meet people off a plane. Personally.

But he was there last night: on the tarmac at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport to meet and greet those Russians whose release he’d secured from foreign jails; part of the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War.

Out of the plane and down the steps came 10 people, including spies, sleeper agents and a convicted assassin.

“Congratulations on your return to the Motherland!” he told them.

You could tell that the Kremlin believes it has something to celebrate.

For the returning Russians there was a red carpet reception and a guard of honour. There were bouquets of flowers and – for some – hugs from the president. Mr Putin embraced Vadim Krasikov, the FSB hitman who’d been serving a life sentence in Germany for assassinating a Georgian-born Chechen dissident.

President Putin promised them all state awards.

“I would like to address those of you who have a direct connection to military service,” he continued. “Thank you for your loyalty to your oath and your duty to your Motherland, which has never forgotten you for a moment.”

• Americans freed in Russia prisoner swap reunite with families
• Who are the prisoners in the swap?
• Two years, secret talks, high stakes: How deal was struck
• Biden burnishes his legacy with historic prisoner swap
• Watch: Putin hugs Russian prisoners as they arrive in Moscow

There’s another message the pro-Kremlin press is putting out right now: good riddance to those Russia has freed from its prisons and who’ve been flown abroad.

“Eight Russians who’d been jailed in Nato countries have returned to the Motherland in exchange for individuals who had been acting to the detriment of Russia’s national security,” says the government paper.

Referring to the dissidents released by Moscow, Komsomolskaya Pravda claims “they have ditched their former Motherland and flown to those who hired them.”

Attempts to discredit critics and opponents; lavish praise for loyal supporters who are portrayed as true patriots. All this helps the authorities make the case with the Russian people that the prisoner swap was a success for the Kremlin.

There is little doubt that the Kremlin views the prisoner swap as a victory for Moscow. It got what it wanted… it got its agents back, including the man who was No.1 on its wish list, Krasikov. The German authorities had initially been unwilling to release a convicted assassin, who a German court had concluded had acted on behalf of the Russian authorities.

That reluctance softened as a wider deal took shape.

But why was it so important for the Kremlin to secure Vadim Krasikov’s release and to bring him home?

Today’s Russian newspapers provide a clue.

“We’re returning our guys” is the headline in the government paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta,

“We don’t abandon our own!” declares the pro-Putin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda.

That is precisely the message the Kremlin wants to send to its agents and spies: if we send you on missions abroad, and things go wrong, we’ll find a way of getting you home.

Donald Trump returning to the White House would be “a once-in-a-thousand-year opportunity” for North Korea, according to a man in a unique position to know.

Ri Il Kyu is the highest-ranking defector to escape North Korea since 2016 and has been face to face with Kim Jong Un on seven separate occasions.

The former diplomat, who was working in Cuba when he fled with his family to South Korea last November, admits to “shivering with nerves” the first time he met Kim Jong Un.

But during each meeting, he found the leader to be “smiling and in a good mood”.

“He praised people often and laughed. He seems like an ordinary person,” Mr Ri tells the BBC. But he is in no doubt Mr Kim would do anything to guarantee his survival, even if it meant killing all 25 million of his people: “He could have been a wonderful person and father, but turning him into a god has made him a monstrous being.”

In his first interview with an international broadcaster, Mr Ri provides a rare understanding of what one of the world’s most secretive and repressive states is hoping to achieve.

He says that North Korea still views Mr Trump as someone it can negotiate with over its nuclear weapons programme, despite talks between him and Kim Jong Un breaking down in 2019.

Mr Trump has previously hailed the relationship with Kim as a key achievement of his presidency. He famously said the two “fell in love” exchanging letters. Just last month, he told a rally Mr Kim would like to see him back in office: “I think he misses me, if you want to know the truth.”

North Korea is hoping it can use this close personal relationship to its advantage, says Mr Ri, contradicting an official statement from Pyongyang last month that it “did not care” who became president.

The nuclear state will never get rid of its weapons, Mr Ri says, and would probably seek a deal to freeze its nuclear programme in return for the US lifting sanctions.

But he says Pyongyang would not negotiate in good faith. Agreeing to freeze its nuclear programme “would be a ploy, 100% deception”, he says, adding that this was therefore a “dangerous approach” which would “only lead to the strengthening of North Korea”.

Eight months after his defection, Ri Il Kyu is living with his family in South Korea. Accompanied by a police bodyguard and two intelligence agents, he explains his decision to abandon his government.

After years of being ground down by the corruption, bribery and lack of freedom he faced, Mr Ri says he was finally tipped over the edge when his request to travel to Mexico to get an operation on a slipped disc in his neck was denied. “I lived the life of the top 1% in North Korea, but that is still worse than a middle-class family in the South.”

As a diplomat in Cuba, Mr Ri made just $500 (£294) a month and so would sell Cuban cigars illegally in China to make enough to support his family.

When he first told his wife about his desire to defect, she was so disturbed she ended up in hospital with heart problems. After that, he kept his plans secret, only sharing them with her and his child six hours before their plane was due to depart.

He describes it as a “life-or-death gamble”. Regular North Koreans who are caught defecting would typically be tortured for a few months, then released, he says. “But for elites like us, there are only two outcomes – life in a political prison camp or being executed by a firing squad.”

“The fear and terror were overwhelming. I could accept my own death, but I could not bear the thought of my family being dragged to a gulag,” he says. Although Mr Ri had never believed in God, as he waited nervously at the airport gate in the middle of the night, he began to pray.

The last known high-profile defection to the South was that of Tae Yong-ho in 2016. A former deputy ambassador to the UK, he was recently named the new leader of South Korea’s presidential advisory council on unification.

Turning to North Korea’s recent closer ties with Russia, Mr Ri says the Ukraine war had been a stroke of luck for Pyongyang. The US and South Korea estimate the North has sold Moscow millions of rounds of ammunition to support its invasion, in return for food, fuel and possibly even military technology.

Mr Ri says the main benefit of this deal for Pyongyang was the ability to continue developing its nuclear weapons.

With the deal, Russia created a “loophole” in the stringent international sanctions on North Korea, he says, which has allowed it “to freely develop its nuclear weapons and missiles and strengthen its defence, while bypassing the need to appeal to the US for sanctions relief”.

But Mr Ri says Kim Jong Un understands this relationship is temporary and that after the war, Russia is likely to sever relations. For this reason, Mr Kim has not given up on the US, Mr Ri says.

“North Korea understands that the only path to its survival, the only way to eliminate the threat of invasion and develop its economy, is to normalise relations with the United States.”

While Russia might have given North Korea a temporary respite from its economic pain, Mr Ri says the complete closure of North Korea’s borders during the pandemic “severely devastated the country’s economy and people’s lives”.

When the borders reopened in 2023 and diplomats were preparing to return, Mr Ri says families back home had asked them to “bring anything and everything you have, even your used toothbrushes, because there is nothing left in North Korea”.

The North Korean leader demands total loyalty from his citizens and the mere whiff of dissent can result in imprisonment. But Mr Ri says years of hardship had eroded people’s loyalty, as no-one now expected to receive anything from their “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Un.

“There is no genuine loyalty to the regime or to Kim Jong Un anymore, it is a forced loyalty, where one must be loyal or face death,” he says.

Recent change has largely been driven by an influx of South Korean films, dramas and music, which have been smuggled into the North and are illegal to watch and listen to.

“People don’t watch South Korean content because they have capitalist beliefs, they are simply trying to pass the time in their monotonous and bleak lives,” Mr Ri says, but then they begin to ask, “Why do those in the South live the life of a first-world country while we are impoverished?”

But Mr Ri says that although South Korean content was changing North Korea, it would not bring about its collapse, because of the systems of control in place. “Kim Jong Un is very aware that loyalty is waning, that people are evolving, and that’s why he is intensifying his reign of terror,” he says.

The government has introduced laws to harshly punish those who consume and distribute South Korean content. The BBC spoke to one defector last year who said he had witnessed someone be executed after sharing South Korean music and TV shows.

North Korea’s decision, at the end of last year, to abandon a decades-old policy of eventually reunifying with the South, was a further attempt to isolate people from the South, Mr Ri says.

He describes this as Kim Jong Un’s “most evil act”, because all North Koreans dream of reunification. He says that while North Korea’s past leaders had “stolen people’s freedom, money and human rights, Kim Jong Un has robbed what was left of them: hope”.

Outside North Korea, much attention is paid to Kim Jong Un’s health, with some believing that his premature death could trigger the collapse of the regime. Earlier this week, South Korea’s intelligence agency estimated that Mr Kim weighed 140kg, putting him at risk of cardiovascular disease.

But Mr Ri believes the system of surveillance and control is now too well established for Kim’s death to threaten the dictatorship. “Another evil leader will merely take his place,” he says.

It has been widely speculated that Mr Kim is grooming his young daughter, thought to be called Ju Ae, to be his successor, but Mr Ri dismisses the notion.

Ju Ae, he says, lacks the legitimacy and popularity to become the leader of North Korea, especially as the sacred Paektu bloodline, which the Kims use to justify their rule, is believed to run only through the men of the family.

At first, people were fascinated by Ju Ae, Mr Ri says, but not any more. They question why she was attending missile tests rather than going to school, and wearing luxury, designer clothes instead of her school uniform, like other children.

Rather than waiting for Mr Kim to become ill or die, Mr Ri says the international community has to come together, including North Korea’s allies China and Russia, to “persistently persuade it to change”.

“This is the only thing that will bring about the end of the North Korean dictatorship,” he adds.

Mr Ri is hoping that his defection inspires his peers, not to defect themselves, but to push for small changes from the inside. He does not have lofty ambitions, that North Koreans will be able to vote or travel, merely that they can choose what jobs to work, have enough food to eat and be able to share their opinions freely among friends.

For now, though, his priority is helping his family settle into their new life in South Korea and for his child to assimilate into society.

At the end of our interview, he poses a scenario. “Imagine I offer you a venture and tell you, if we succeed we win big, but if we fail it means death.

“You wouldn’t agree, would you? Well that is the choice I forced upon my family, and they silently agreed and followed me,” he says.

“This is now a debt I must repay for the rest of my life.”

US President Joe Biden has said that the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh “doesn’t help” talks over a potential ceasefire in Gaza.

Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Iran’s capital, Tehran, on Wednesday. Iran and its allies have blamed Israel, although Israel is yet to comment on his death.

Haniyeh was Hamas’s most senior official and was highly involved in ceasefire and hostage release talks from his base in Qatar.

Mr Biden said he was “very concerned” about rising tensions in the Middle East. “We have the basis for a ceasefire. He [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] should move on it and they [Hamas] should move on it now.”

Israel and Hamas recently resumed tentative, indirect talks to try to reach a ceasefire in the war in Gaza, though there have been conflicting accounts of progress.

At the end of May, Mr Biden outlined what he said were the terms of an Israeli ceasefire proposal. This has become the basis for on-off indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel since then, with Qatar, Egypt and the US acting as mediators.

Earlier this week, Israel and Hamas accused each other of obstructing progress. Hamas said Israel had introduced new conditions, while Mr Netanyahu’s office said Hamas had demanded 29 changes to the proposal.

The war began in October when Hamas carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages. The attack triggered a massive Israeli military response, which has killed at least 39,480 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Mr Biden’s comments were his first on Haniyeh’s assassination since the Hamas chief was killed.

The US president spoke to journalists at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, ahead of welcoming home American citizens as part of a prisoner exchange with Russia.

He said he had spoken to Mr Netanyahu earlier on Thursday and had promised to protect Israel “against all threats from Iran”, which has vowed to retaliate. Iran is Hamas’s most important backer and is an arch-foe of Israel.

• Iran vows revenge after Hamas leader assassinated in Tehran
• What does Haniyeh’s killing mean for Gaza ceasefire?

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the assassination, but Mr Netanyahu said after the killing that Israel had delivered “crushing blows” to Iran’s proxy groups in recent days.

Haniyeh’s assassination came at a time of soaring tensions in the Middle East.

On Saturday, 12 children and young people were killed after a strike on a football field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel blamed Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement and vowed “severe” retaliation, though Hezbollah has denied involvement.

On Tuesday, hours before the killing of Haniyeh, Israel killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, who it said was behind the attack on the Golan Heights, in a targeted air strike in Beirut.

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Iran on Wednesday, has been buried in a muslim ceremony in Qatar.

Funeral prayers were held at Qatar’s Imam Muhammed bin Abdul Wahhab mosque – the largest in the country – before his body was taken in a coffin draped in the Palestinian flag for burial at a cemetery in Lusail, a city north of Doha.

Several foreign officials were present at the funeral, including Turkey’s Vice-President Cevdet Yilmaz and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.

Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Iran’s capital. Iran and its allies have blamed Israel, though Israel has not claimed responsibility for his death.

The funeral, a high-security affair, was attended by prominent figures from both Hamas and their Palestinian rivals Fatah – as well as members of the public.

Hamas officials had earlier stood on the tarmac at Doha Airport as the plane carrying Haniyeh’s coffin landed from the Iranian capital Tehran on Thursday afternoon.

Turkey and Pakistan announced a day of mourning on Friday in honour of Haniyeh, while Hamas has called for “roaring anger marches… from every mosque” to take place after Friday prayers to protest Haniyeh’s killing.

At a separate funeral ceremony for Haniyeh which took place in Tehran on Thursday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led the prayers. He had earlier vowed that Israel would suffer a “harsh punishment” for the killing.

Haniyeh had been based in Doha since about 2019. The Hamas political office moved to the Qatari capital in 2012, following the closure of its previous office in Damascus, Syria.

Haniyeh had played a key role in indirect talks with Israel over a potential ceasefire deal for the war in Gaza.

The heads of the CIA, Mossad and the intelligence services of Egypt and Qatar had attended negotiations in Doha

Haniyeh’s burial caps a week of soaring tensions in the Middle East, which escalated with the killing of 12 children and teenagers in a strike on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Israel accused Hezbollah and vowed “severe” retaliation, though Hezbollah denied it was involved.

Days later, senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr was killed in a targeted Israeli air strike in Beirut. Four others, including two children, were also killed.

Hours after that, Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran, Hamas’s main backer. He was visiting to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the assassination, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said afterward that Israel delivered “crushing blows” to Iran’s proxy groups in recent days.

A senior Hamas official told the BBC the killing took place in the same building where Haniyeh had stayed during previous visits to Iran. Three Hamas leaders and a number of guards were with him in the same building, they said.

The killing of Haniyeh left the leadership of Hamas in “a state of shock”, top Hamas officials told the BBC.

The circumstances around his death remain unclear.

Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, told a news conference that a missile hit Haniyeh “directly”, citing witnesses who were with him.

But a report in the New York Times, which cites seven officials, says Haniyeh was killed by a bomb that had been smuggled two months ago into the building where he was staying.

The BBC has not been able to verify either of these claims.

For all those concerns about high prices and big crowds ahead of the Olympics, now might just be an unexpectedly good time to holiday in Paris.

Hotels and restaurants have told the BBC they have dropped their prices to entice customers – after what some call a “catastrophic” downturn in takings during the Games that have left them asking what the event has done for them.

The French capital might seem to be the centre of the world for those watching the sport on TV – but the city’s relatively quiet streets and empty dining tables tell a different story.

Earlier this week, local media ran reports of a “deserted” Disneyland and of Parisians’ bemusement as they managed to secure seats on metro trains at rush hour.

• How to get to Paris for the Olympics
• Parisians’ Olympic spirit not dampened – but grumbles remain

So, what is happening?

Analysts suggest that many Parisians have left the city in droves for the summer, as is their tradition. But also, some overseas visitors have been put off by concerns around price-gouging and overcrowding on an Olympic scale.

One of the locals who used the word “catastrophic” was a restaurateur called Lies in the usually bustling Latin Quarter, who said July had been his worst month for 25 years. During the height of Covid, at least people continued to order meal deliveries, he told the BBC.

Tourists had been put off coming to the area because of security blockades that were put in the place for the previous week’s opening ceremony, Lies suggested.

Another nearby restaurateur hovering in his doorway, Yarva, said would-be visitors had chosen not to pay hotel prices which multiplied several times ahead of the Games.

The event was “only for the rich”, he said, and used a hand gesture to indicate he thought the price inflation had been crazy.

Ahead of the Games, airlines warned there was a low appetite for journeys to Paris, with both Delta and the company that owns Air France predicting an impact on their business.

“Unless you’re going to the Olympics, people aren’t going to Paris,” the Delta boss told CNBC.

This was reflected in flight prices that were well below the usual asking price for this time of year, according to travel expert Simon Calder, writing this week for The Independent.

Next-day one-way flights from UK cities were as low as £31 ($39) per adult (from Edinburgh) at the time of writing this article. However, tickets for the Eurostar trains, which were last week affected by a sabotage attack on the French railway network, were considerably higher.

June and July saw an “avoidance effect”, said Raphael Batko of hotel marketing firm Doyield, which represents about one in 20 of the city’s hotels. He also used the word “catastrophic” to describe the phenomenon, though he said visitor numbers had picked up and were now satisfactory.

A similar avoidance phenomenon has been noticed in previous Olympics, including in London in 2012, when businesses suggested that the Games had deterred visitors and shrunk their profits.

What remains to be seen is whether the emergency action taken by the hospitality industry will be enough to salvage the Olympic trade for many Parisien businesses.

With restaurants dropping their prices, it was now possible to get a meal for as little as €8 (£6.80, $8.70) in the Latin Quarter, claimed Riad, the proprietor of the Olympie diner, as he tried to entice diners.

Hotels, too have tried a similar trick – largely reversing the earlier rises which appear to have been so off-putting. Tourism authorities confirmed that average prices had returned to €258 (£219; $279) per night during the Games, following a massive hike that had previously seen them peak at €342 last month.

The BBC saw that a number of Airbnbs on offer were advertising price reductions, although the company said prices had remained stable since the start of the year, and more locals had been opening their homes in host cities.

Individual hoteliers in Paris spoke of mixed success.

One reception manager, Dino, said bookings had reached normal levels – but only after rates were slashed by half when things “looked bleak”.

Another, Isabelle, said her own price drop had been ineffective and lamented that “we didn’t gain anything from the Olympics”.

As well as the sport, there were plenty of good reasons to come to the French capital for the summer, said Christophe Decloux, head of the Choose Paris regional tourist board.

He cited the city’s rich cultural offering, plus smooth transportation and a “very joyful” atmosphere during the Games.

“Paris is usually very calm in late July and August because people leave for the holidays,” he said, “and right now it is just as calm as usual in August except in some areas around the venues where people are bonding over the sport.”

Organisers of Paris 2024 have trumpeted the positive effects of the Games on Paris following record ticket sales.

It remains possible to sign up to see events, as tickets are released each day. About 800,000 of them are still up for grabs, organisers told the BBC on Friday.

The sporting spectacle itself has already proven memorable – and with some disgruntled businesses doing everything they can to coax in visitors, last-minute bookers to Paris might find themselves in with a chance of scoring a bargain.

A global sell-off in stock markets gathered pace as weak US jobs growth stoked fears about a slowdown in the world’s largest economy.

Nasdaq, the tech-heavy US index, plunged by more than 3% on Friday, dragged lower by Intel and Amazon, after the companies reported disappointing results.

Official data showed employers added 114,000 jobs in July, far fewer than expected.

The figures suggested the long-running jobs boom in the US might be coming to an end, as speculation grows over when and by how much the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates.

Global stock markets were already on edge after US data showed weaker manufacturing activity on Thursday.

As well as the Nasdaq, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 also fell after markets in Asia and Europe sunk on Friday.

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 index tumbled to close nearly 6% lower.

Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve held interest rates again, but signalled it was likely to cut rates at its next meeting in September.

“Now the question isn’t will they [Federal Reserve] cut in September, but by how much,” said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets.

Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, said the latest jobs figures raised questions about whether the Fed had waited too long.

“Job gains have dropped below the 150,000 threshold that would be considered consistent with a solid economy,” she said.

“A September rate cut is in the bag and the Fed will be hoping that they haven’t, once again, been too slow to act.”

Friday’s report showed the unemployment rate rising to 4.3% – the highest rate since 2021 and up from 3.5% a year ago.

Wage gains have also slowed, with average hourly pay rising 3.6% over the last 12 months.

The stock market turmoil has emerged in the middle of a heated US presidential campaign, which has raised the stakes for the Fed and opened its moves up to intense political debate.

Republicans have suggested that lowering rates would amount to helping Democrats, with the party’s presidential candidate Donald Trump saying a pre-election rate cut is “something that they know they shouldn’t be doing”.

But Fed officials have consistently argued that politics do not bear on their decisions over rates.

In a statement following the jobs figures, President Joe Biden said the economy was still making progress.

The US economy expanded at an annual rate of 2.8% this spring, bouncing back after a slump at the start of the year.

Last month’s uptick in the unemployment rate also appeared driven by a rise in people looking for work, rather than a sudden surge in job losses, analysts said.

Nancy Vanden Houten, lead US economist at Oxford Economics, said she thought the report was “overstating emerging weakness”.

“We aren’t dismissing the entire upward creep in the unemployment rate, but the economy is not in recession,” she said.

Landslides that hit the southern Indian state of Kerala earlier this week have killed 196 people. More than 200 people are still missing and some 9,000 people have been moved to relief camps. BBC Tamil’s Muralitharan Kasiviswanathan reports from the badly hit district of Wayanad.

“Have you seen this girl or her body?”

Clutching a mobile phone close to her heart, a woman goes from village to village, asking people the same question.

She shows two pictures of her niece Anita, who is missing.

In one, Anita is flashing the victory sign as she poses happily with her aunt. The nine-year-old moved to live with her after the death of her mother a few years ago.

The other photo shows a disfigured body on the ground.

The woman, who was too traumatised to disclose her name, said she received the picture on WhatsApp from some friends who thought it was Anita.

Since then, she has been trying to locate her niece, but hasn’t been successful. She is not sure if Anita is dead or alive.

Her story resembles that of many others who are desperately searching for their loved ones.

Nearly 200 people are still missing after vast swathes of the area were flattened by thick torrents of mud and water on Tuesday.

The disaster stuck at 2am as most people slept, giving them little chance to escape.

Wayanad is known for its cardamom plantations and tea estates and has several popular tourist spots. Hundreds of plantation workers live here with their families in makeshift houses made of tin and clay.

• Hopes for survivors fade in deadly India landslide

On Thursday, rescue officials said that all the people trapped in tea plantations had been rescued and chances of finding more survivors were slim.

They added that rescuing people and retrieving bodies were proving to be difficult due to heavy rains that were continuing to lash the area.

Their operations were also affected because the bridge that connected the badly affected villages of Chooralmala and Mundakkai was washed off.

Officials have now constructed a temporary metal bridge to ferry equipment to the affected areas.

The BBC also witnessed scenes of chaos as anxious relatives waited outside a school where some of the unidentified bodies have been kept.

Amaravati, who narrowly survived the landslides, is still in shock. She is from the neighbouring Tamil Nadu state, but has been living in Chooralmala for years.

“It had been raining continuously for two days. When the first landslide struck, we went to our daughter’s house, which was a short distance away,” she said.

But when they got there, they saw “mud and debris everywhere”.

The family fled to a nearby coffee plantation and took shelter there for the night.

But her husband’s brother and nephew were not as lucky. Landslides buried their house and Amaravati and her family are now trying to identify their bodies.

Ponnaiyan, who ran a tailoring shop in the area, said he and his family narrowly escaped death on the fateful night.

“But many of my neighbours, relatives and friends, who were sleeping peacefully in the night, have all died,” he added.

When rains became too heavy, Ponnaiyan took his family to his shop thinking they would be safer there. But soon, an electric pole fell on the shop’s shutter and water started flooding in.

“When I opened the door, I saw water and mud washing away everything on the road. I thought we would die there,” he recalled.

After they had walked for about half-a-mile in knee-deep mud, the ground collapsed again. The family then climbed up on to a nearby mound, from where they were rescued by officials.

The next morning, he decided to go back and check on his friends and neighbours.

“But everything and everyone had been washed away,” he said.

Almost everyone in the area had similar stories to tell. Many families have accepted that their missing loved ones are dead but some are still clinging on to hopes of a miracle.

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 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“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.

Millions of residents in northern Nigeria have been placed under 24-hour curfews amid nationwide protests against the high cost of living.

Governments in the states of Kano, Jigawa, Yobe and Katsina have ordered locals not to leave their homes – and therefore not attend protests – on Friday.

The authorities say the curfew is necessary because “hoodlums” have hijacked the protests in order to loot and vandalise properties.

There is a heavy security presence around the country with nine more “days of rage” scheduled by the movement’s organisers.

On the first day, demonstrations in the northern city of Kano drew the largest crowds.

Police fired live bullets and tear gas – and sprayed hot water – to try and disperse thousands of demonstrators. Three people were shot dead and many others were injured.

Looters also broke into a warehouse near the Kano governor’s house and police say 269 people have since been arrested with the recovery of many 25-litre groundnut oil cartons and other items taken.

According to rights group Amnesty International, 13 protesters across Nigeria were killed by security forces on the first day of the protests.

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On Thursday night, Nigeria’s police chief Kayode Egbetokun said four people in the north-eastern state of Borno had been killed by an “explosion” within a crowd of protesters.

Thirty-four others were “severely” injured, he said.

A curfew was announced there after anti-government protesters began marching in the state capital, Maiduguri, although the authorities cited an earlier explosion as the reason why Borno had joined its neighbouring states in imposing a 24-hour lockdown.

The blast on Wednesday night had killed 16 people at a teashop in the rural community of Kawori, according to local reports.

No-one has said they were behind the attack, but locals suspect it was carried out by notorious jihadist group Boko Haram, which has been active in the north-east since 2009.

On Friday, protesters regrouped in major cities across the country. In the capital city, Abuja, police fired tear gas in an effort to stop protesters marching on the city centre and other satellite towns.

In Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, some banks and shops reopened after closing on the first day of the protests – and the internet connection remains glitchy.

Inspector-General Egbetokun said he had placed his officers on “red alert”. The police are prepared to respond swiftly to any threats to public safety and order, he added.

The nationwide demonstrations were organised via social media using the hashtag #EndBadGovernance and inspired by the recent success of protesters in Kenya, who forced the government there to scrap plans to increase taxes.

During Thursday’s protests, which were largely peaceful in the south, demonstrators chanted slogans such as: “We are hungry.”

Many of them are angered by President Bola 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, such as food.

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

A spokesperson for Kano’s governor, Abba Kabir Yusuf, said protests there were largely peaceful but a curfew was necessary because of the “rampant looting, destruction of property and violence” unleashed by “thugs”.

Likewise, Yobe State Government imposed a curfew on the areas of Potiskum, Gashua, and Nguru, where it says “hoodlums are taking advantage of the protest to vandalise and loot government and private properties”.

Katsina’s government said “miscreants” had “hijacked the protests” there.

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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.

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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”.

Argentine Foreign Minister Diana Mondino shared Mr Blinken’s view, writing in a post on X, formerly Twitter: “We can all confirm, without a doubt, that the legitimate winner and President-elect is Edmundo González.”

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.

Feline lovers in Kenya’s capital have been twitching over the threat of what is perceived as a “cat tax” – and any talk of tax in the East African nation raises the hackles.

The proposal comes via the Nairobi City County which wants all cats to be registered by their owners – which some are moaning is a “cat-astrophe”.

It would require cat owners in Nairobi to purchase an annual licence – costing 200 Kenyan shillings ($1.50; £1.20) along with proof that the animal has had a rabies vaccination.

Not only that, but “purrents” – as cat owners are known – would need to take responsibility for their furry friend’s behaviour, and we all know that a cat does not take direction well.

According to the city’s Animal Control and Welfare Bill, they would have to ensure their pets do not “scream or cry in a manner that disturbs the peace” of residents.

They would also be required to confine cats on heat.

The proposed legislation is aimed at improving cat welfare, but some jaundiced city residents need convincing.

Kenyans recently forced the government to withdraw a finance bill introducing a raft of contentious taxes – and this plan by Nairobi county is seen by some as part of the government’s appetite for raising more revenue.

“First taxes on period products, now taxing cat owners. Leave my pussy alone!” Khadijah M Farah said on X, referencing the now-dropped finance bill.

Some Kenyans are also raising questions about how enforceable it is, given the high population of stray or feral cats.

The city’s feline population – lions in the Nairobi National Park excluded – is not known, but they are ubiquitous: prowling on streets, lounging in shops, and foraging at rubbish tips and restaurants.

Yowling from various cats in different registers can often punctuate the hush of night, especially during mating season.

Naomi Mutua, who with more than a dozen cats calls herself Nairobi’s “mother of cats”, told the BBC the county authorities should have checked with cat owners, rescue organisations and veterinary groups before coming up with the draft law.

She runs a Facebook group of about 25,000 cat lovers and says the introduction of mandatory rabies vaccinations is a good thing but queries how it will be achieved in reality.

About 2,000 Kenyans die every year from rabies caused by dog or cat bites, according to the health ministry.

And Ms Mutua says the first premise of any new law should start with improving “standards of care that are lacking”.

She wonders whether confining a cat on heat would be “restricting them from their natural behaviour”.

A public consultation is being organised by the county – to begin this Friday.

City residents will be able to give their views about the bill – which may inform further amendments to be considered by the county assembly.

For the head of the Kenya Society for the Protection and Care of Animals (KSPCA), Emma Ngugi, the draft legislation is a welcome move given that animal welfare in the city is a “huge problem”.

But licences, she feels, are probably not the answer as people may not want to claim ownership of cats.

Some people may end up throwing out their cats if they are forced to pay for them, which would defeat the purpose of the bill.

“If you introduce what is essentially a tax on cats, then it’s going to be even harder for organisations like us working in communities to get people to take responsibility,” she told the BBC.

Ms Ngugi also points out that there is already legislation on dog ownership that is ignored as most people do not bother to get licences for them – even those who can afford to do so.

Under the proposed bill, cat owners who fail to comply with the licensing and welfare standards would be guilty of an offence and liable to penalties including jail terms.

Yet many people are scoffing at the idea of anyone checking up.

“Nairobi cats are restless. You cannot own Nairobi cats,” a panellist said on a youth TV show over the weekend.

But the KSPCA director says “the overpopulation of cats” is a big issue, with rabid ones posing a risk to human health and the environment.

She would prefer low-cost veterinary services to be introduced for those who can pay and mass sterilisation campaigns for stray cats and dogs – as the cost of sterilising a cat, for instance, can be the equivalent of a month’s wages for some Kenyans.

“That’s a proven methodology from all over the world, and it works,” she says.

In the meantime the bill has got many talking excitedly on the subject, even prompting one Nairobi resident to poetry.

In his “ode to cats in Kenya” on X, Innocent Ouko ends his verse with the words: “Seems like we’re in a cat-ch 22 situation.”

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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.”

Two nights of violent protest in English towns this week, following the knife attack in Southport, reveal how today’s far-right is organising in the UK.

A BBC analysis of activity on mainstream social media and in smaller public groups shows a clear pattern of influencers driving a message for people to gather for protests, but there is no single organising force at work.

Not everyone attending these protests or posting about the Southport attacks holds fringe views, supports rioting or has links to far-right groups. The protests also appeared to draw in people concerned about violent crime or misled by the misinformation that the attack was linked to illegal immigration.

So how did the protests – starting in Southport and spreading to London, Hartlepool, Manchester and Aldershot – begin?

Merseyside Police have publicly identified the English Defence League (EDL) as a key factor.

While there are people who describe themselves as EDL supporters, the organisation ceased to exist in any formal sense after its founder, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – who uses the alias Tommy Robinson – focused on spreading his message on social media platforms, where he has a sizeable following.

But its core ideas – in particular an opposition to illegal immigration, mixed with indiscriminate and racist claims about Muslims – are very much alive, and loudly and widely spread among sympathisers online.

Thrown into this mix are tropes from conspiracy theories that “elites” are somehow covering up the truth – including the abuse of British children.

An influencer on X associated with Yaxley-Lennon, who posts under the name of “Lord Simon”, was among the first to publicly call for nationwide protests. His account promoted false claims that the alleged Southport attacker had been an asylum seeker, recently arrived in the UK by boat. His video has been viewed over a million times.

“We have to hit the streets. We have to make a huge impact all around the country. Every city needs to go up everywhere,” he said.

BBC Verify has analysed hundreds of posts on social media and in smaller public Telegram groups to get a sense of the motives of the main actors involved in organising, encouraging and attending these protests, as well as those involved in acts of violence.

It is not possible to pinpoint who started the calls for protests but there was a clear pattern – multiple influencers within different circles amplified false claims about the identity of the attacker.

These claims then travelled across social media platforms, reaching a large audience – including ordinary people without any connection to far-right individuals and groups.

“There’s not been a single driving force,” says Joe Mulhall, head of research at anti-racism research group Hope Not Hate.

“That reflects the nature of the contemporary far-right. There are large numbers of people engaging in activity online but there’s no membership structure or badge – there are not even formalised leaders, but they are directed by social media influencers. It’s like a school of fish rather than traditional organisation

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• ‘We’re watching you,’ far-right protesters warned

One of the earliest signs that protests were brewing came in a Southport-themed group, which was set up on Telegram about six hours after the attack.

Telegram – a messaging app which also has channels for publicly broadcasting posts – has historically been used by far-right activists who, until recently, struggled to avoid being banned on the Twitter/X platform.

It became flooded with misinformation about the identity of the alleged attacker and posts by other far-right groups such as the National Front. Users also called for a protest on St Luke’s Street in Southport, where the local mosque is, on Tuesday evening.

Several online graphics promoting the protest were shared on the Telegram channel. Although neither the channel nor its associated chat have many followers, those posters later migrated to TikTok, X and Facebook, where they were shared widely.

“No face, no case, protect your identity,” read one. Another poster called for “mass deportations”.

On TikTok, a now-deleted account urged demonstrators to head to Southport, advising them to hide their identities from the police.

The account used material that echoed anti-immigrant protests last year in nearby Kirkby, suggesting a local organiser.

How did the idea of protest go on to spread nationwide?

What seems to have happened is that far-right activists beyond Merseyside spotted an opportunity from the Southport tragedy to amplify their own messages on major social media platforms.

Matthew Hankinson was released from prison last year after serving six years for membership of National Action, a neo-Nazi group that was banned as a terrorist organisation in 2016.

He said on X he was “documenting live” from the Southport demonstration with videos – and the time stamps match up to when clashes were taking place. He described the scenes as “police oppression of peaceful protesters concerned about the murder of white children” – and one of his videos has been viewed more than 8,000 times.

Hankinson also uses his account to justify extreme violence, post racist material, and quote the neo-Nazi who murdered the Labour MP Jo Cox.

“I went to Southport with the intention of attending the vigil to show solidarity with the people and pay my condolences in a private capacity,” he told the BBC, adding that he began filming when he saw the clashes between police and protestors.

Far more significant has been Yaxley-Lennon. He left the UK on Sunday night ahead of a major court hearing that could have seen him taken into custody.

He has been rebuilding his profile since his X account was restored last year – and now has 800,000 followers.

His posts on the tragedy in Southport, and the related disorder, have regularly been shared or liked thousands of times.

He has accused the police of spreading lies and has claimed: “The government and ‘authorities’ created this.”

BBC Verify identified two of his prominent supporters in video footage of Southport protests: Rikki Doolan and Jesse Clarke, who last week had appeared on stage at a demonstration for Yaxley-Lennon.

Mr Doolan, a self-styled preacher, recorded a video of himself at the protest in Southport saying: “I’m British and proud, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

On Wednesday, Mr Clarke posted videos of the protests in central London outside the prime minister’s home, saying: “We’re outside Downing Street now.”

Followers of smaller groups, including Patriotic Alternative, which organised anti-immigrant demonstrations, have also been promoting the Southport attack protests. They may not have the reach, but their slogan “Enough is Enough” has been widely shared with almost 60,000 mentions on X alone since Monday 29 July, according to the Brandwatch social media analysis tool.

“The language is coming from far-right individuals but the organisation is much more organic,” says Mr Mulhall from Hope Not Hate.

“There are local Facebook groups emerging. They take the lead from the influencers and pass the information about locally. The weather is made on Twitter, but the organising happens elsewhere.”

What happens next is difficult to predict.

The BBC has identified at least 30 additional demonstrations being planned by far-right activists around the UK, including a new protest in Southport – but it is unclear how much traction any will have.

Some of the social media posts relating to the plans are directly referencing the Southport attack and “Enough is Enough”. Others are more general in nature – focusing on fears of illegal migration or the need to protect children.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there’ll be multiple civilian casualties.

“Do you take the shot?” 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.

“I haven’t been able to see him. Or give him food. Or hand him his clothes. I don’t know if he has been beaten. I don’t know if he has bathed. Or eaten.”

‘Isabella’, who did not want to be named, is desperately worried for her son.

Through tears, she explains that he, 28, and his girlfriend, 17, were arrested and beaten after the family joined a march in Caracas protesting against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the day after Sunday’s presidential election.

Mr Maduro claimed victory, which was instantly disputed by the opposition who say they have evidence from electronic voting machines that they, not the government, won.

They and many governments around the world have demanded proof from President Maduro that he won the election.

He has said he will publish the vote tallies, but not when.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado has called for protests “in every city” in Venezuela on Saturday against President Maduro and the disputed election result.

She said on social media “we must remain firm, organised and mobilised with the pride of having achieved a historic victory on 28 July”.

The government has said Ms Machado should be arrested.

It comes after Ms Machado wrote in the Wall Street Journal she is in “hiding” and fearing for her “life” and “freedom.”

So far, the Venezuelan government says more than 1,000 people have been arrested in protests set off by the disputed election.

Isabella has very little information about her son. She has been waiting anxiously outside the police station where she believes he is, hoping for answers.

She says on Monday the National Guard “unjustly grabbed” her son and others at the march:

“They were not harming anyone. They did not have stones. They did not have weapons. They only protested.

“They beat him. They accused them of being terrorists for defending their country, for wanting change,” she says.

“We went out to march because we want a change, because we can no longer stand this government. There is so much misery, so much hunger, so much crime, so much injustice towards innocent people, many people dying in hospitals.”

She shows us a photograph of her granddaughter who she says died in December last year because there was no oxygen for treatment in the hospital where she was.

“There were 12 children who died because there was no oxygen,” she says.

“I want Venezuela to be the same as before, where we work with dignity. Where we earned a decent salary. Where our children and grandchildren could study. My daughter and son left university because there are no teachers.

“The government does not want kids to study, it wants us to continue in misery, to be ignorant, to not speak out. How is it possible that you go to a hospital and you have to buy everything? There is no oxygen. There is nothing.”

She said her son was accused of “terrorism” which can carry a sentence of years in prison, but she says the government has no evidence.

Alberto Romero, a lawyer with the human rights group Foro Penal, said there were about 200 people detained just in the police station where Isabella has been waiting, including children.

“There are 11 minors here,” he said.

“It’s totally illegal. This is not actually a prison, it’s just a police station. It’s not possible for lawyers to get in. No one has had the opportunity to see these people that are being detained, we don’t know the conditions.”

The judiciary in Venezuela is controlled by the government.

“The people detained are not allowed private defenders. Public defenders are part of the state. So the one who accused you, is the one who defends you,” he added.

He said that many of the families who he is representing had relatives detained for just “walking in the street” on the day of protests, adding the purpose was “intimidation” of the Venezuelan people.

Foro Penal have verified and identified 711 people who have been detained and 11 people who have died since 29 August when protests began.

Venezuela’s attorney general has said there have been more than 1,000 detentions.

An opposition politician, Freddy Superlano, who has been a fierce critic of President Maduro has also been detained. A video shared on social media showed six men putting him in a van and taking him away.

His family have demanded proof that he is still alive and do not know his whereabouts.

On Wednesday, President Maduro asked the Supreme Court to act against protesters – paving the way for further arrests.

His government has also accused the opposition leader, Ms Machado, and its presidential candidate, Edmundo González, of inciting violence by disputing the election result and has said they should be arrested.

President Maduro called the opposition leaders a “perverse and macabre duo who have to take responsibility” for protesters he described as “criminals.”

He has strongly denied electoral fraud and has accused the opposition of instigating a “coup”.

But, in an intervention, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington rejected Mr Maduro’s “unsubstantiated allegations” against opposition leaders.

In a statement Mr Blinken said threats to arrest Ms Machado and Mr González “are an undemocratic attempt to repress political participation and retain power”.

“All Venezuelans arrested while peacefully exercising their right to participate in the electoral process or demand transparency in the tabulation and announcement of results should be released immediately,” Mr Blinken added.

“Law enforcement and security forces should not become an instrument of political violence used against citizens exercising their democratic rights.”

Despite the spectre of detentions growing, many Venezuelans are determined to continue protesting – although some are deterred by fear.

Isabella, in spite of what happened to her son, described the protests as “incredible”.

“Everyone now has internet, WiFi, Instagram, TikTok. Everyone passed a statement through the neighbourhoods saying ‘Let’s March. Let’s join for a better Venezuela’.”

She explained how the slum neighbourhood of Petare, which used to be a stronghold for the president “began to descend” from the mountains to the city.

“They started to go down, shouting, with pots, pans, and flags. Barefoot children, mothers carrying children to the march.

“The colectivo [armed paramilitaries who support Mr Maduro] yelled at us, cursed us, threw stones at us, told us ‘Viva Maduro!’ The authorities started throwing tear gas at us.

“We don’t know how this is going to end. We don’t want dead people.”

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.

Ten thousand pairs of underwear which were used in Charli XCX and Billie Eilish’s latest music video have been donated to charity.

Guess, a remix of the Brat original, dropped on Thursday night and showed Billie smashing into a party on a bulldozer surrounded by thousands of bras and knickers.

During the video’s credits, a message appears saying all the unworn garments would be donated to I Support The Girls.

The US-based charity works internationally to distribute underwear and period products to women experiencing domestic violence, homelessness and hardship.

As the pair sing: more and more pairs surround them, strewn across the street and falling from the sky.

The charity says it has received 10,000 pairs which have “overtaken” its warehouse.

“We’re so lucky to be getting the formidable panty mountain,” the charity posted on X, referencing the huge pile of underwear Charli and Billie climb towards the end of the music video.

Its founder, Dana Marlowe, tells BBC Newsbeat the donations “feel very in line with Brat summer”.

“Charli XCX and Billie are both top of their game and they’re showing women empowering women,” she says.

“They’re on top of bra mountain and they’re on top of their industry and they’re not forgetting that there are charities that can do something with the excess props in a music video.

“It really becomes an incredible cyclical effect of women supporting women supporting women which is absolutely part of Brat summer.”

Importantly, she says, a lot of the underwear in the video that’s been donated is “sexy” too.

“At first glance, you might think, why would a nonprofit organisation want to receive that?,” Dana says.

But for I Support The Girls, an important part of their ethos is finding dignity and power in choice, she says.

“There’s people for every style. Just because somebody is experiencing homelessness doesn’t mean that they don’t prefer to wear a thong.”

Guess is Charli’s second collab remix on her critically acclaimed album Brat after releasing a version of Girl, So Confusing with Lorde last month.

But it’s a rare collaboration for Billie, who told Zane Lowe earlier this year that it was her first time working with another artist in about six years.

On Instagram, the Bad Guy artist thanked Charli for letting her work it out on the remix to which Charli responded: “tysm for being on this track I’m beyond honoured.

“Love and respect forever.”

Charli teased new music last week but speculation surrounded a potential collaboration with Chappell Roan after she posted a selfie on Instagram holding a Brat CD.

Brat has been nominated for this year’s Mercury Prize and Brat summer has taken off online, with even US presidential nominee Kamala Harris getting in on the trend.

It’s Charli’s sixth studio album and debuted in the top 10 on both the UK and US.

Billie’s also released new music this year with Hit Me Hard And Soft, which came out in May.

BBC Newsbeat has contacted representatives for Charli XCX and Billie Eilish for comment.

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

US chip-maker Intel has said it plans to cut more than 15,000 job cuts as it seeks to revive the business and catch up with competitors.

Shares in the company plunged by up to 20% after it announced the measures, and also reported falling sales.

The news from Intel also hit other shares in other tech giants, and contributed to a sharp fall in Asian stock markets.

Japan’s Nikkei share index closed down 5.8%, the largest percentage fall since March 2020 at the start of the pandemic, with Japanese tech firms among the biggest losers.

The Nikkei ended the day down 2,216.63 points at 35,909.70, the second-biggest points drop in its history, with worries about the strength of the US economy also affecting stocks.

A downbeat survey of US manufacturing firms triggered fears the economy is weakening, and has increased interest in the latest US jobs figures that are due out later on Friday.

The three major share indexes in the US closed lower on Thursday, and shares in big names, including Amazon, continued to fall in after-hours trade.

Amazon shares dropped more than 4%, after the e-commerce giant reported a 10% rise in sales to $148bn.

That marked a slowdown from the prior quarter and it forecast further weakening in the months ahead, putting pressure on margins, even as the firm ramps up investments in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI).

Intel has been struggling as businesses turn to rivals such as Nvidia, known for its powerful AI chips.

The company said sales fell 1% year-on-year in the three months to June and warned that the second half of the year would be worse than expected.

“Our revenues have not grown as expected – and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI,” chief executive Pat Gelsinger wrote in a memo to staff.

He said the situation required “bolder actions” and the firm had to “fundamentally change the way we operate”.

Intel has slashed investment plans and also said it would suspend dividend payments.

“It’s really having to pull back on spending on its data centres and it’s struggling to take market from other providers, so it’s a real shock to the market,” Lucy Coutts, investment director at JM Finn, told the BBC.

There was better news from Apple, which saw sales rebound in spring, overcoming weakness in China and a dip in iPhone sales.

Revenues in the three months to June were $85.8bn (£67.3bn), up 5% year-on-year and marking a return to growth after a slump at the start of 2024.

Apple said it was well positioned to benefit from the increased use of AI, as AI-powered improvements to the company’s software convince customers to upgrade their devices.

The company recently released some of the new features, branded as “Apple Intelligence”, to developers in the US.

The new system makes it easier for iPhone users to record and transcribe phone conversations, generate personalised emojis while messaging and interact more conversationally with the company’s voice assistant, Siri, among other changes.

“We remain incredibly optimistic about the possibilities of AI and we will continue to make significant investments in this technology,” said Apple boss Tim Cook.

Over the April to June period, sales of iPhones slipped 1%, a drop outweighed by increased sales of Macs and iPads.

Apple also reported an all-time record in revenue from its services division, which includes offerings such as Apple Pay and Apple News.

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.

A selection of the week’s best photos from across the African continent and beyond:

• Kenya rolls out poison in bid to cull a million crows
• Frustrated Nigerians vow ‘days of rage’ as hardships mount
• The Kenyan enthralled by the healing power of plants
• My family went to help landslide victims and ended up dead

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 versus 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.

Donald Trump has questioned Kamala Harris’ racial identity during a heated exchange at a convention for black journalists.

Trump falsely claimed the vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee had only emphasised her Asian-American heritage until recently when, he claimed, “she became a black person”.

“I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black,” he said at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago on Wednesday.

“So I don’t know – Is she Indian? Or is she black?”

Ms Harris said Trump’s remarks were “the same old show” of “divisiveness… and disrespect”.

“The American people deserve better,” she told a meeting of the historically black sorority Sigma Gamma Rho in Houston. “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us – they are an essential source of our strength.”

Ms Harris is the first black and Asian-American vice-president, with Indian and Jamaican-born parents. She attended Howard University, a historically black university, and joined the predominantly black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

She became a member of Congressional Black Caucus after entering the Senate in 2017.

Trump’s claims prompted a heated exchange with ABC News’ correspondent Rachel Scott, one of the moderators of the Chicago event.

“I respect either one,” the Republican said in reference to Harris’ racial identity. “But she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a black person.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said no-one “has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify. That is no-one’s right.”

“Since when is Donald Trump, with his long and ugly history of racism, the arbiter of Blackness?” congressman Ritchie Torres of New York posted on X. He described Trump as a “relic of a racist past”.

The Republican nominee and former president has a history of attacking his opponents on the basis of race.

He falsely accused Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, of not being born in the US.

Trump attacked the former UN ambassador and his Republican primary opponent Nikki Haley by falsely claiming she could not be president because her parents were not US citizens when she was born.

Ms Harris has faced a series of attacks since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. Republicans have criticised the decision, saying she was chosen only because of her race.

Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, called her a “DEI vice-president” – a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.

On Wednesday, Scott pushed Trump to clarify whether he believed Ms Harris was a “DEI hire”. He replied: “I really don’t know, could be.”

Ms Harris has described growing up engaged with her Indian heritage and often visited the country. Her mother also immersed her two daughters in the black culture of Oakland, California – where she was raised, she said.

Trump also attacked Ms Harris’ credentials during the discussion, saying she had failed her bar exam early in her legal career. His comments were met with murmurs from the crowd.

“I’m just giving you the facts. She didn’t pass her bar exam and she didn’t think she would pass it and she didn’t think she was going to ever pass it and I don’t know what happened. Maybe she passed it,” he said.

Ms Harris graduated from the University of California Hastings College of Law in 1989. The New York Times reported that she failed her first attempt and passed at the second. The state bar of California says fewer than half of those who sit the test pass on the first attempt.

The Chicago discussion began with a contentious back and forth between Scott and the former president. Trump accused the journalist of giving a “very rude introduction” when she began the conversation asking about his past criticism of black people.

She cited Trump calling black journalists’ questions ”stupid and racist” and that he had ”dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar a Lago resort”.

“I love the black population of this country, I’ve done so much for the black population of this country,” he responded.

The former president criticised the conversation hours later on his social media platform. “The questions were rude and nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” he said.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

It’s something Vladimir Putin does rarely: go to the airport to meet people off a plane. Personally.

But he was there last night: on the tarmac at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport to meet and greet those Russians whose release he’d secured from foreign jails; part of the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War.

Out of the plane and down the steps came 10 people, including spies, sleeper agents and a convicted assassin.

“Congratulations on your return to the Motherland!” he told them.

You could tell that the Kremlin believes it has something to celebrate.

For the returning Russians there was a red carpet reception and a guard of honour. There were bouquets of flowers and – for some – hugs from the president. Mr Putin embraced Vadim Krasikov, the FSB hitman who’d been serving a life sentence in Germany for assassinating a Georgian-born Chechen dissident.

President Putin promised them all state awards.

“I would like to address those of you who have a direct connection to military service,” he continued. “Thank you for your loyalty to your oath and your duty to your Motherland, which has never forgotten you for a moment.”

• Americans freed in Russia prisoner swap reunite with families
• Who are the prisoners in the swap?
• Two years, secret talks, high stakes: How deal was struck
• Biden burnishes his legacy with historic prisoner swap
• Watch: Putin hugs Russian prisoners as they arrive in Moscow

There’s another message the pro-Kremlin press is putting out right now: good riddance to those Russia has freed from its prisons and who’ve been flown abroad.

“Eight Russians who’d been jailed in Nato countries have returned to the Motherland in exchange for individuals who had been acting to the detriment of Russia’s national security,” says the government paper.

Referring to the dissidents released by Moscow, Komsomolskaya Pravda claims “they have ditched their former Motherland and flown to those who hired them.”

Attempts to discredit critics and opponents; lavish praise for loyal supporters who are portrayed as true patriots. All this helps the authorities make the case with the Russian people that the prisoner swap was a success for the Kremlin.

There is little doubt that the Kremlin views the prisoner swap as a victory for Moscow. It got what it wanted… it got its agents back, including the man who was No.1 on its wish list, Krasikov. The German authorities had initially been unwilling to release a convicted assassin, who a German court had concluded had acted on behalf of the Russian authorities.

That reluctance softened as a wider deal took shape.

But why was it so important for the Kremlin to secure Vadim Krasikov’s release and to bring him home?

Today’s Russian newspapers provide a clue.

“We’re returning our guys” is the headline in the government paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta,

“We don’t abandon our own!” declares the pro-Putin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda.

That is precisely the message the Kremlin wants to send to its agents and spies: if we send you on missions abroad, and things go wrong, we’ll find a way of getting you home.

Donald Trump returning to the White House would be “a once-in-a-thousand-year opportunity” for North Korea, according to a man in a unique position to know.

Ri Il Kyu is the highest-ranking defector to escape North Korea since 2016 and has been face to face with Kim Jong Un on seven separate occasions.

The former diplomat, who was working in Cuba when he fled with his family to South Korea last November, admits to “shivering with nerves” the first time he met Kim Jong Un.

But during each meeting, he found the leader to be “smiling and in a good mood”.

“He praised people often and laughed. He seems like an ordinary person,” Mr Ri tells the BBC. But he is in no doubt Mr Kim would do anything to guarantee his survival, even if it meant killing all 25 million of his people: “He could have been a wonderful person and father, but turning him into a god has made him a monstrous being.”

In his first interview with an international broadcaster, Mr Ri provides a rare understanding of what one of the world’s most secretive and repressive states is hoping to achieve.

He says that North Korea still views Mr Trump as someone it can negotiate with over its nuclear weapons programme, despite talks between him and Kim Jong Un breaking down in 2019.

Mr Trump has previously hailed the relationship with Kim as a key achievement of his presidency. He famously said the two “fell in love” exchanging letters. Just last month, he told a rally Mr Kim would like to see him back in office: “I think he misses me, if you want to know the truth.”

North Korea is hoping it can use this close personal relationship to its advantage, says Mr Ri, contradicting an official statement from Pyongyang last month that it “did not care” who became president.

The nuclear state will never get rid of its weapons, Mr Ri says, and would probably seek a deal to freeze its nuclear programme in return for the US lifting sanctions.

But he says Pyongyang would not negotiate in good faith. Agreeing to freeze its nuclear programme “would be a ploy, 100% deception”, he says, adding that this was therefore a “dangerous approach” which would “only lead to the strengthening of North Korea”.

Eight months after his defection, Ri Il Kyu is living with his family in South Korea. Accompanied by a police bodyguard and two intelligence agents, he explains his decision to abandon his government.

After years of being ground down by the corruption, bribery and lack of freedom he faced, Mr Ri says he was finally tipped over the edge when his request to travel to Mexico to get an operation on a slipped disc in his neck was denied. “I lived the life of the top 1% in North Korea, but that is still worse than a middle-class family in the South.”

As a diplomat in Cuba, Mr Ri made just $500 (£294) a month and so would sell Cuban cigars illegally in China to make enough to support his family.

When he first told his wife about his desire to defect, she was so disturbed she ended up in hospital with heart problems. After that, he kept his plans secret, only sharing them with her and his child six hours before their plane was due to depart.

He describes it as a “life-or-death gamble”. Regular North Koreans who are caught defecting would typically be tortured for a few months, then released, he says. “But for elites like us, there are only two outcomes – life in a political prison camp or being executed by a firing squad.”

“The fear and terror were overwhelming. I could accept my own death, but I could not bear the thought of my family being dragged to a gulag,” he says. Although Mr Ri had never believed in God, as he waited nervously at the airport gate in the middle of the night, he began to pray.

The last known high-profile defection to the South was that of Tae Yong-ho in 2016. A former deputy ambassador to the UK, he was recently named the new leader of South Korea’s presidential advisory council on unification.

Turning to North Korea’s recent closer ties with Russia, Mr Ri says the Ukraine war had been a stroke of luck for Pyongyang. The US and South Korea estimate the North has sold Moscow millions of rounds of ammunition to support its invasion, in return for food, fuel and possibly even military technology.

Mr Ri says the main benefit of this deal for Pyongyang was the ability to continue developing its nuclear weapons.

With the deal, Russia created a “loophole” in the stringent international sanctions on North Korea, he says, which has allowed it “to freely develop its nuclear weapons and missiles and strengthen its defence, while bypassing the need to appeal to the US for sanctions relief”.

But Mr Ri says Kim Jong Un understands this relationship is temporary and that after the war, Russia is likely to sever relations. For this reason, Mr Kim has not given up on the US, Mr Ri says.

“North Korea understands that the only path to its survival, the only way to eliminate the threat of invasion and develop its economy, is to normalise relations with the United States.”

While Russia might have given North Korea a temporary respite from its economic pain, Mr Ri says the complete closure of North Korea’s borders during the pandemic “severely devastated the country’s economy and people’s lives”.

When the borders reopened in 2023 and diplomats were preparing to return, Mr Ri says families back home had asked them to “bring anything and everything you have, even your used toothbrushes, because there is nothing left in North Korea”.

The North Korean leader demands total loyalty from his citizens and the mere whiff of dissent can result in imprisonment. But Mr Ri says years of hardship had eroded people’s loyalty, as no-one now expected to receive anything from their “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Un.

“There is no genuine loyalty to the regime or to Kim Jong Un anymore, it is a forced loyalty, where one must be loyal or face death,” he says.

Recent change has largely been driven by an influx of South Korean films, dramas and music, which have been smuggled into the North and are illegal to watch and listen to.

“People don’t watch South Korean content because they have capitalist beliefs, they are simply trying to pass the time in their monotonous and bleak lives,” Mr Ri says, but then they begin to ask, “Why do those in the South live the life of a first-world country while we are impoverished?”

But Mr Ri says that although South Korean content was changing North Korea, it would not bring about its collapse, because of the systems of control in place. “Kim Jong Un is very aware that loyalty is waning, that people are evolving, and that’s why he is intensifying his reign of terror,” he says.

The government has introduced laws to harshly punish those who consume and distribute South Korean content. The BBC spoke to one defector last year who said he had witnessed someone be executed after sharing South Korean music and TV shows.

North Korea’s decision, at the end of last year, to abandon a decades-old policy of eventually reunifying with the South, was a further attempt to isolate people from the South, Mr Ri says.

He describes this as Kim Jong Un’s “most evil act”, because all North Koreans dream of reunification. He says that while North Korea’s past leaders had “stolen people’s freedom, money and human rights, Kim Jong Un has robbed what was left of them: hope”.

Outside North Korea, much attention is paid to Kim Jong Un’s health, with some believing that his premature death could trigger the collapse of the regime. Earlier this week, South Korea’s intelligence agency estimated that Mr Kim weighed 140kg, putting him at risk of cardiovascular disease.

But Mr Ri believes the system of surveillance and control is now too well established for Kim’s death to threaten the dictatorship. “Another evil leader will merely take his place,” he says.

It has been widely speculated that Mr Kim is grooming his young daughter, thought to be called Ju Ae, to be his successor, but Mr Ri dismisses the notion.

Ju Ae, he says, lacks the legitimacy and popularity to become the leader of North Korea, especially as the sacred Paektu bloodline, which the Kims use to justify their rule, is believed to run only through the men of the family.

At first, people were fascinated by Ju Ae, Mr Ri says, but not any more. They question why she was attending missile tests rather than going to school, and wearing luxury, designer clothes instead of her school uniform, like other children.

Rather than waiting for Mr Kim to become ill or die, Mr Ri says the international community has to come together, including North Korea’s allies China and Russia, to “persistently persuade it to change”.

“This is the only thing that will bring about the end of the North Korean dictatorship,” he adds.

Mr Ri is hoping that his defection inspires his peers, not to defect themselves, but to push for small changes from the inside. He does not have lofty ambitions, that North Koreans will be able to vote or travel, merely that they can choose what jobs to work, have enough food to eat and be able to share their opinions freely among friends.

For now, though, his priority is helping his family settle into their new life in South Korea and for his child to assimilate into society.

At the end of our interview, he poses a scenario. “Imagine I offer you a venture and tell you, if we succeed we win big, but if we fail it means death.

“You wouldn’t agree, would you? Well that is the choice I forced upon my family, and they silently agreed and followed me,” he says.

“This is now a debt I must repay for the rest of my life.”

US President Joe Biden has said that the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh “doesn’t help” talks over a potential ceasefire in Gaza.

Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Iran’s capital, Tehran, on Wednesday. Iran and its allies have blamed Israel, although Israel is yet to comment on his death.

Haniyeh was Hamas’s most senior official and was highly involved in ceasefire and hostage release talks from his base in Qatar.

Mr Biden said he was “very concerned” about rising tensions in the Middle East. “We have the basis for a ceasefire. He [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] should move on it and they [Hamas] should move on it now.”

Israel and Hamas recently resumed tentative, indirect talks to try to reach a ceasefire in the war in Gaza, though there have been conflicting accounts of progress.

At the end of May, Mr Biden outlined what he said were the terms of an Israeli ceasefire proposal. This has become the basis for on-off indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel since then, with Qatar, Egypt and the US acting as mediators.

Earlier this week, Israel and Hamas accused each other of obstructing progress. Hamas said Israel had introduced new conditions, while Mr Netanyahu’s office said Hamas had demanded 29 changes to the proposal.

The war began in October when Hamas carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages. The attack triggered a massive Israeli military response, which has killed at least 39,480 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Mr Biden’s comments were his first on Haniyeh’s assassination since the Hamas chief was killed.

The US president spoke to journalists at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, ahead of welcoming home American citizens as part of a prisoner exchange with Russia.

He said he had spoken to Mr Netanyahu earlier on Thursday and had promised to protect Israel “against all threats from Iran”, which has vowed to retaliate. Iran is Hamas’s most important backer and is an arch-foe of Israel.

• Iran vows revenge after Hamas leader assassinated in Tehran
• What does Haniyeh’s killing mean for Gaza ceasefire?

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the assassination, but Mr Netanyahu said after the killing that Israel had delivered “crushing blows” to Iran’s proxy groups in recent days.

Haniyeh’s assassination came at a time of soaring tensions in the Middle East.

On Saturday, 12 children and young people were killed after a strike on a football field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel blamed Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement and vowed “severe” retaliation, though Hezbollah has denied involvement.

On Tuesday, hours before the killing of Haniyeh, Israel killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, who it said was behind the attack on the Golan Heights, in a targeted air strike in Beirut.

For all those concerns about high prices and big crowds ahead of the Olympics, now might just be an unexpectedly good time to holiday in Paris.

Hotels and restaurants have told the BBC they have dropped their prices to entice customers – after what some call a “catastrophic” downturn in takings during the Games that have left them asking what the event has done for them.

The French capital might seem to be the centre of the world for those watching the sport on TV – but the city’s relatively quiet streets and empty dining tables tell a different story.

Earlier this week, local media ran reports of a “deserted” Disneyland and of Parisians’ bemusement as they managed to secure seats on metro trains at rush hour.

• How to get to Paris for the Olympics
• Parisians’ Olympic spirit not dampened – but grumbles remain

So, what is happening?

Analysts suggest that many Parisians have left the city in droves for the summer, as is their tradition. But also, some overseas visitors have been put off by concerns around price-gouging and overcrowding on an Olympic scale.

One of the locals who used the word “catastrophic” was a restaurateur called Lies in the usually bustling Latin Quarter, who said July had been his worst month for 25 years. During the height of Covid, at least people continued to order meal deliveries, he told the BBC.

Tourists had been put off coming to the area because of security blockades that were put in the place for the previous week’s opening ceremony, Lies suggested.

Another nearby restaurateur hovering in his doorway, Yarva, said would-be visitors had chosen not to pay hotel prices which multiplied several times ahead of the Games.

The event was “only for the rich”, he said, and used a hand gesture to indicate he thought the price inflation had been crazy.

Ahead of the Games, airlines warned there was a low appetite for journeys to Paris, with both Delta and the company that owns Air France predicting an impact on their business.

“Unless you’re going to the Olympics, people aren’t going to Paris,” the Delta boss told CNBC.

This was reflected in flight prices that were well below the usual asking price for this time of year, according to travel expert Simon Calder, writing this week for The Independent.

Next-day one-way flights from UK cities were as low as £31 ($39) per adult (from Edinburgh) at the time of writing this article. However, tickets for the Eurostar trains, which were last week affected by a sabotage attack on the French railway network, were considerably higher.

June and July saw an “avoidance effect”, said Raphael Batko of hotel marketing firm Doyield, which represents about one in 20 of the city’s hotels. He also used the word “catastrophic” to describe the phenomenon, though he said visitor numbers had picked up and were now satisfactory.

A similar avoidance phenomenon has been noticed in previous Olympics, including in London in 2012, when businesses suggested that the Games had deterred visitors and shrunk their profits.

What remains to be seen is whether the emergency action taken by the hospitality industry will be enough to salvage the Olympic trade for many Parisien businesses.

With restaurants dropping their prices, it was now possible to get a meal for as little as €8 (£6.80, $8.70) in the Latin Quarter, claimed Riad, the proprietor of the Olympie diner, as he tried to entice diners.

Hotels, too have tried a similar trick – largely reversing the earlier rises which appear to have been so off-putting. Tourism authorities confirmed that average prices had returned to €258 (£219; $279) per night during the Games, following a massive hike that had previously seen them peak at €342 last month.

The BBC saw that a number of Airbnbs on offer were advertising price reductions, although the company said prices had remained stable since the start of the year, and more locals had been opening their homes in host cities.

Individual hoteliers in Paris spoke of mixed success.

One reception manager, Dino, said bookings had reached normal levels – but only after rates were slashed by half when things “looked bleak”.

Another, Isabelle, said her own price drop had been ineffective and lamented that “we didn’t gain anything from the Olympics”.

As well as the sport, there were plenty of good reasons to come to the French capital for the summer, said Christophe Decloux, head of the Choose Paris regional tourist board.

He cited the city’s rich cultural offering, plus smooth transportation and a “very joyful” atmosphere during the Games.

“Paris is usually very calm in late July and August because people leave for the holidays,” he said, “and right now it is just as calm as usual in August except in some areas around the venues where people are bonding over the sport.”

Organisers of Paris 2024 have trumpeted the positive effects of the Games on Paris following record ticket sales.

It remains possible to sign up to see events, as tickets are released each day. About 800,000 of them are still up for grabs, organisers told the BBC on Friday.

The sporting spectacle itself has already proven memorable – and with some disgruntled businesses doing everything they can to coax in visitors, last-minute bookers to Paris might find themselves in with a chance of scoring a bargain.

A global sell-off in stock markets gathered pace as weak US jobs growth stoked fears about a slowdown in the world’s largest economy.

Nasdaq, the tech-heavy US index, plunged by more than 3% on Friday, dragged lower by Intel and Amazon, after the companies reported disappointing results.

Official data showed employers added 114,000 jobs in July, far fewer than expected.

The figures suggested the long-running jobs boom in the US might be coming to an end, as speculation grows over when and by how much the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates.

Global stock markets were already on edge after US data showed weaker manufacturing activity on Thursday.

As well as the Nasdaq, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 also fell after markets in Asia and Europe sunk on Friday.

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 index tumbled to close nearly 6% lower.

Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve held interest rates again, but signalled it was likely to cut rates at its next meeting in September.

“Now the question isn’t will they [Federal Reserve] cut in September, but by how much,” said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets.

Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, said the latest jobs figures raised questions about whether the Fed had waited too long.

“Job gains have dropped below the 150,000 threshold that would be considered consistent with a solid economy,” she said.

“A September rate cut is in the bag and the Fed will be hoping that they haven’t, once again, been too slow to act.”

Friday’s report showed the unemployment rate rising to 4.3% – the highest rate since 2021 and up from 3.5% a year ago.

Wage gains have also slowed, with average hourly pay rising 3.6% over the last 12 months.

The stock market turmoil has emerged in the middle of a heated US presidential campaign, which has raised the stakes for the Fed and opened its moves up to intense political debate.

Republicans have suggested that lowering rates would amount to helping Democrats, with the party’s presidential candidate Donald Trump saying a pre-election rate cut is “something that they know they shouldn’t be doing”.

But Fed officials have consistently argued that politics do not bear on their decisions over rates.

In a statement following the jobs figures, President Joe Biden said the economy was still making progress.

The US economy expanded at an annual rate of 2.8% this spring, bouncing back after a slump at the start of the year.

Last month’s uptick in the unemployment rate also appeared driven by a rise in people looking for work, rather than a sudden surge in job losses, analysts said.

Nancy Vanden Houten, lead US economist at Oxford Economics, said she thought the report was “overstating emerging weakness”.

“We aren’t dismissing the entire upward creep in the unemployment rate, but the economy is not in recession,” she said.

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Iran on Wednesday, has been buried in a muslim ceremony in Qatar.

Funeral prayers were held at Qatar’s Imam Muhammed bin Abdul Wahhab mosque – the largest in the country – before his body was taken in a coffin draped in the Palestinian flag for burial at a cemetery in Lusail, a city north of Doha.

Several foreign officials were present at the funeral, including Turkey’s Vice-President Cevdet Yilmaz and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.

Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Iran’s capital. Iran and its allies have blamed Israel, though Israel has not claimed responsibility for his death.

The funeral, a high-security affair, was attended by prominent figures from both Hamas and their Palestinian rivals Fatah – as well as members of the public.

Hamas officials had earlier stood on the tarmac at Doha Airport as the plane carrying Haniyeh’s coffin landed from the Iranian capital Tehran on Thursday afternoon.

Turkey and Pakistan announced a day of mourning on Friday in honour of Haniyeh, while Hamas has called for “roaring anger marches… from every mosque” to take place after Friday prayers to protest Haniyeh’s killing.

At a separate funeral ceremony for Haniyeh which took place in Tehran on Thursday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led the prayers. He had earlier vowed that Israel would suffer a “harsh punishment” for the killing.

Haniyeh had been based in Doha since about 2019. The Hamas political office moved to the Qatari capital in 2012, following the closure of its previous office in Damascus, Syria.

Haniyeh had played a key role in indirect talks with Israel over a potential ceasefire deal for the war in Gaza.

The heads of the CIA, Mossad and the intelligence services of Egypt and Qatar had attended negotiations in Doha

Haniyeh’s burial caps a week of soaring tensions in the Middle East, which escalated with the killing of 12 children and teenagers in a strike on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Israel accused Hezbollah and vowed “severe” retaliation, though Hezbollah denied it was involved.

Days later, senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr was killed in a targeted Israeli air strike in Beirut. Four others, including two children, were also killed.

Hours after that, Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran, Hamas’s main backer. He was visiting to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the assassination, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said afterward that Israel delivered “crushing blows” to Iran’s proxy groups in recent days.

A senior Hamas official told the BBC the killing took place in the same building where Haniyeh had stayed during previous visits to Iran. Three Hamas leaders and a number of guards were with him in the same building, they said.

The killing of Haniyeh left the leadership of Hamas in “a state of shock”, top Hamas officials told the BBC.

The circumstances around his death remain unclear.

Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, told a news conference that a missile hit Haniyeh “directly”, citing witnesses who were with him.

But a report in the New York Times, which cites seven officials, says Haniyeh was killed by a bomb that had been smuggled two months ago into the building where he was staying.

The BBC has not been able to verify either of these claims.

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 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“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.

Conservative campaigner Kyle Rittenhouse says he will not vote for Donald Trump in November’s US election because he thinks the ex-president is “bad” at protecting gun rights.

Mr Rittenhouse, now 21, shot dead two men during racial unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020. He was cleared of all charges the following year after arguing self-defence.

Instead of Trump, he plans to write in former Libertarian presidential nominee Ron Paul on the ballot.

Trump has repeatedly vowed to protect Americans’ right to own guns and to roll back Biden-era restrictions on firearms.

Mr Rittenhouse – who became a cause célèbre among some US conservatives during his trial – met Trump just a week after being cleared of charges in November 2021, with the president calling him a “fan”.

In an online post early on Friday, Mr Rittenhouse – now outreach director for the group Texas Gun Rights – said that “unfortunately, Donald Trump has bad advisers, making him bad on the Second Amendment”, which protects gun ownership in the US.

“If you cannot be completely un-compromisable on the Second Amendment, I will not vote for you,” he said on X, formerly Twitter. “We need champions for the Second Amendment or our rights would be eaten away and eroded each day.”

“I support my decision and I have no takebacks,” he added.

Soon after his post, Mr Rittenhouse shared another post from the leader of the National Association for Gun Rights outlining the group’s criticism of Trump’s record.

It cites his support while president for raising the minimum age for gun purchases and openness to expanded background checks. Trump quickly backed away from those ideas at the time.

The list also included Trump’s 2018 ban on bump stocks, an accessory that allows semi-automatic rifles to fire hundreds of bullets per minute, similar to a machine gun. The Supreme Court overturned the prohibition two months ago.

Mr Rittenhouse’s video drew the ire of some Trump supporters, some of whom responded with expletive-laden tirades.

“The left hates you and now Maga will shun you,” one user wrote.

But the former president’s political opponents celebrated what some termed a “break-up” between Mr Rittenhouse and Trump.

“When you’ve lost Kyle Rittenhouse… Trump campaign is in trouble,” posted the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group.

Trump, now the Republican nominee for president, has repeatedly vowed to protect gun rights if elected in November’s election.

In February, he told a meeting of the National Rifle Association that “every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated on my very first week back in office”.

In 2021, the most recent year for available data, almost 49,000 people in the US died of firearms-related injuries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The figure includes both murders and suicides.

Last month, President Joe Biden said that he had “no higher priority” than gaining the release of Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan from Russian prison.

On Thursday night, after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, arm-twisting and manoeuvring, Biden and his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, exchanged hugs with the two men as they set foot at last on American soil.

For Mr Biden, it was a valedictory turn in the final months of his presidency. For Ms Harris – the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee – it was a chance to share the limelight of a foreign success.

In one particularly powerful moment, Mr Biden removed the American flag pin he always wears on his suit jacket lapel and put it on Mr Whelan. It was a tangible sign of the task accomplished and a promise fulfilled.

The multilateral exchange of 24 prisoners with Russia – the largest such swap since the Cold War – represents a significant feather in the cap of a man who abandoned his re-election bid less than two weeks ago.

Like many in the waning days of their White House tenures, Mr Biden has found that foreign policy is one area where a president, even when sidelined from electoral politics, can make a splash.

Typically, this focus abroad occurs at the end of a second term, when the incumbent is unburdened by a re-election campaign and domestic attention is on the party’s new nominee.

Mr Biden’s circumstances are unusual. The nearest historical parallel in the modern era is when President Lyndon Baines Johnson stood down his re-election bid because of growing discontent with his handling of the Vietnam War.

That war dominated Mr Johnson’s final months in office – and represented his political undoing.

Mr Biden, on the other hand, has been able to take a victory lap with this prisoner swap, basking in the joy of families of the released Americans at the White House on Thursday, after more than a month of personal and political turmoil.

Mr Biden’s month of turmoil, which began with a catastrophic debate performance in late June, culminated in last week’s Oval Office address to the nation, where he discussed his decision to drop his re-election campaign.

While he conceded that it was time to “pass the torch”, his speech included a reminder that his presidential term wasn’t over and that his work wasn’t done. It came with a heavy serving of foreign policy promises.

He said he would bring home detained Americans – which Thursday’s news significantly advanced.

He also pledged to continue to support Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders – which recent congressional funding has guaranteed well into next year.

And he said he would work to end the war in Gaza “and bring peace and security to the Middle East”.

On that last item, the news has been trending from bad to worse in recent days.

• Americans freed in Russia prisoner swap reunite with families
• Who are the prisoners in the swap?
• Two years, secret talks, high stakes: How deal was struck
• Watch: Putin hugs Russian prisoners as they arrive in Moscow

Tensions in the Middle East have been escalating dramatically. Israel was allegedly behind the assassination of a prominent Hamas political leader in Iran on Wednesday.

The chances of a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah have grown, as the two sides exchanged attacks across the Israel-Lebanon border. An Israeli strike on Tuesday killed a senior Hezbollah leader, as well as an Iranian military advisor.

The US State Department has warned American citizens to avoid travel to Lebanon – reflecting the growing concern of a widening regional conflict.

Mr Biden, who once chaired the Senate Foreign Relations committee and oversaw an international portfolio as Barack Obama’s vice-president, touted his foreign policy chops as he campaigned for president in 2020.

But the Middle East has proven to be a diplomatic graveyard for even the most capable US foreign policy hands. While achieving the kind of lasting “peace and security” Mr Biden envisions would become a remarkable accomplishment, it seems as far off now as any point since the war began nearly 10 months ago.

While foreign policy successes could bolster Mr Biden’s legacy, the president’s place in the history books – and, in particular, how he is viewed by his members of his own party – hinges most directly on the fate of his chosen successor.

Although Ms Harris was not with the president at the White House on Thursday afternoon, she joined the president in greeting the newly released prisoners as they returned to US soil.

The White House also has been quick to credit the vice-president for playing a key role in negotiating details of the complex multilateral prisoner exchange with US allies.

A senior Biden administration official told the BBC that Ms Harris’ February meetings with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Prime Minister Robert Golob of Slovenia at the Munich Security Conference were particularly crucial.

Meanwhile, the Republican presidential ticket has quickly attempted to minimise any political benefits from the prisoner swap – both by taking credit for it and by questioning its wisdom.

During a rally in Arizona, Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance said that the exchange was really a reflection of what he said was the increasing likelihood that Donald Trump would win in November.

“There’s a real sense that the world leaders are afraid that if Donald Trump comes in, they’re going to have to start behaving again,” he said. “The bad guys worry that Donald Trump will be back and the free ride is over.”

The former president himself posted a lengthy response on his social media website, questioning Mr Biden’s negotiating strategy and speculating about the details of the exchange.

“We never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps,” he wrote. “Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!”

The Russian asking price for the release of Mr Gershkovich and Mr Whelan – along with Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and a group of Russian dissidents – was unquestionably high. It included Russian intelligence agents convicted of an assassination and espionage.

But the president and his senior staff, in their remarks on Thursday, said the deal was worth it.

Mr Biden also took a moment to tout his foreign policy vision in what could be an implied contrast with the former president’s “America first”, go-it-alone international outlook.

“Today is a powerful example of why it’s vital to have friends in this world and friends you can trust, work with and depend upon, especially on matters of great consequence and sensitivity like this,” he said. “Our alliances make our people safer.”

It was a pointed message from a president whose opportunities to pull the national spotlight his way – and to burnish his legacy – are diminishing as the final days of his presidency tick away.

The US has confirmed 24 people were involved in a prisoner exchange between Russia and some Western countries including the US and Germany.

Among the prisoners released are the US citizens Evan Gershkovich – a Wall Street Journal reporter – and former US Marine Paul Whelan.

As part of the deal, Russian security service hitman Vadim Krasikov has been freed by Germany.

There had been speculation for days about a major swap between Russia and Western countries, which was heightened after several prisoners were moved from their prison cells in Russian jails to unknown locations.

US journalist Evan Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony earlier this month after being convicted on espionage charges.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter was first arrested by security services last March while on a reporting trip in the city of Yekaterinburg, about 1,600km (1,000 miles) east of Moscow.

Prosecutors accused him of working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), accusations that Mr Gershkovich, the WSJ and the US government vociferously deny.

It marked the first conviction of a US journalist for espionage in Russia since the Cold War ended more than 30 years ago. After his initial arrest, he was held in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison.

Paul Whelan, 54, was given a 16-year jail sentence in 2020 after being arrested in Moscow on suspicion of spying in 2018.

The ex-US Marine is a citizen of four countries – the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland. His lawyer said he was being held in a prison in the Mordovia region.

After being discharged from the military in 2008 for bad conduct, he became a security consultant and started to travel back and forth to Russia for work.

In December 2018, he was arrested by Russia’s FSB state security agency, which claimed he had been “caught spying” in Moscow. His family has always denied the charges.

On the same day Mr Gershkovich was convicted, Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in a medium-security prison after a secret trial.

She was an editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is funded by the US government, and was convicted of spreading false information about the Russian military.

Her husband, Pavel Butorin, previously said she was arrested over a book published last year, which was a collection of stories about Russians opposed to the war in Ukraine.

Ms Kurmasheva holds US and Russian citizenship and lived in Prague with her husband and two daughters. She was detained in June 2023 while visiting her mother in Russia.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a prominent Russian dissident, one of the most vocal opponents of the Putin regime, and an outspoken critic of the war in Ukraine and the internal crackdown on dissent in Russia.

In 2023, the 42-year-old was sentenced to 25 years in prison for spreading “false” information about the Russian army and being affiliated with an “undesirable organisation”.

Mr Kara-Murza – a former journalist and politician – denied all the charges.

The dual British-Russian citizen had spent his term in a prison colony in Siberia, where his wife said he developed a neurological condition as a result of being poisoned.

One of Russia’s most prominent opposition figures, Ilya Yashin was jailed in 2022 for “spreading fake news” about the country’s military.

He was arrested after he condemned suspected Russian war crimes in Bucha.

Following the death of former opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison, Mr Yashin said he feared for his life.

He previously accused President Vladimir Putin of going “mad with power” in a series of letters from the prison in the western Smolensk region where he was being held.

Oleg Orlov is a Russian human rights activist who was jailed in February for calling Russia a fascist state and criticising the war in Ukraine. He was previously the chair of the Nobel Prize-winning organisation Memorial.

The 71-year-old was handed a two-and-a-half-year term for “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian armed forces.

In an appeal aginst his sentence in July, he compared the Russian justice system to that of Nazi Germany.

His sentencing followed a retrial. In the original trial in October last year, he received a 150,000-rouble fine (£1,290; $1,630) and walked free from the court. His later conviction marked a hardening of repressions against opponents of the war.

Lilia Chanysheva was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison earlier this year after being accused of extremism by authorities.

She had served as a local co-ordinator with the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption network.

She was initially sentenced to seven years in 2023, but prosecutors appealed against the sentence and told officials it was too lenient. She was most recently held at a centre in the Perm region.

Ms Chanysheva was the first of Mr Navalny’s allies sentenced on the charge. Most of his other activists have fled Russia into exile.

Ksenia Fadeyeva was sentenced to nine years in prison by authorities after she was accused of organising an extremist group.

She had been a local organiser with Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where she was subsequently detained.

Her lawyers argued that she had ended her association with the organisation before it was designated an extremist group in 2021.

Most of Mr Navalny’s former staff and allies have been forced to flee Russia into exile in recent years, as the Kremlin has ramped up repression of opposition groups.

Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for replacing supermarket pricing labels with anti-war messages in November as a form of protest.

The replacement labels drew attention to civilian deaths in Mariupol and said Russia had become a “fascist state”.

The artist from St Petersburg had been held in a detention centre in the city since April 2023.

German-Russian citizen Kevin Lik was convicted of treason as a teenager, becoming the youngest person ever to be found guilty of the crime.

He grew up in Germany and moved to Russia when he was 12.

Authorities sentenced him to four years in prison last December for supposedly emailing pictures to “representatives of a foreign state” before and during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The court claimed he had visited and photographed “deployment sites” of Russian troops.

German national Rico Krieger was accused of planting explosives in Belarus and sentenced to death, before being pardoned by the country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko earlier this week.

In a heavily choreographed interview on state-controlled media, he said he was acting on instruction from Ukraine, but no evidence was given.

He is believed to have been the first Western citizen ever to be given the death penalty in Belarus.

Russian opposition activist Andrei Pivovarov headed the Open Russia foundation, which was established by former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison for campaigning against Mr Putin.

He was arrested in 2021 after trying to leave the country from St Petersburg, accused of directing an “undesirable organisation”.

In an interview for the Meduza website, his mother, who lives in the city, said she had been expecting him home in September when his sentence was due to end. She said he had called her from Germany and told her not to worry, adding: “I don’t know what happens next, but for now this is the best option.”

Russian-German citizen Dieter Voronin was sentenced to 13 years in prison on “treason” charges after Moscow alleged he received classified military information from another journalist, Ivan Safronov, who remains behind bars, AFP reported.

The 38-year-old German was detained in St Petersburg earlier this year after reportedly being found with a packet of cannabis gummy bears. He was accused of drug trafficking.

Schoebel explained in court that he bought the bears in Germany last year and took them before long-haul flights to help him sleep. He said he didn’t know they were banned in Russia.

Russian-German immigration lawyer and cycling campaigner Mozhyes is facing treason charges after being arrested in May.

Little is known about his case, but human rights activists suggest the charges may be connected to his work in helping Russian citizens with European documents, or simply to his nationality.

The Insider website describes a dramatic first attempt to arrest him as he was cycling in St Petersburg. Apparently he confused the manoeuvres made by the security forces’ car to stop him with a case of bad driving and simply evaded capture. He was later detained outside his home and has spent the last few months in custody in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison.

Ostanin was the head of Alexei Navalny’s regional branch in Barnaul, sentenced to nine years in jail in 2023.

Like the other Navalny representatives in the swap, he was charged with belonging to an extremist organisation.

In May of that year, while in custody awaiting trial, he said that his health was deteriorating because of his confinement.

One of the most high-profile prisoners to be released back to Russia is Federal Security Service (FSB) agent Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 murder of an exiled Chechen commander in a Berlin park.

During his trial, prosecutors said he was acting on orders from Russia, and that he belonged to a highly secretive Vympel unit of the FSB.

Lawyers defending him insisted he was a construction worker, not a hitman. He denied being known as Krasikov, and identified himself as Vadim Sokolov, the name on the passport he was travelling with.

In a recent interview with US talk show host Tucker Carlson, Mr Putin hinted his country was seeking “patriot” Krasikov’s release in exchange for US journalist Evan Gershkovich.

Roman Seleznev was found guilty of running a hacking scheme in 2017 that caused $169m (£131m) in damages.

US officials said he stole credit card data from restaurants and sold it on the black market. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison for the scheme, which prosecutors say he ran between 2009 and 2013.

According to the Justice Department, Mr Seleznev used software which enabled him to steal millions of credit card numbers from thousands of businesses.

His father is Valery Seleznev, an MP and ally of Mr Putin.

The US charged Vadim Konoshchenok with conspiracy related to procurement and money-laundering on behalf of the Russian government in 2022.

He was also thought to have been an FSB agent.

At the time, a statement from the US Department of Justice said he and others unlawfully purchased and exported highly sensitive electronic components, some of which can be used for military purposes.

Husband and wife Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva were arrested and convicted on espionage charges in Slovenia.

They were each sentenced to 19 months in prison. Their two children also returned to Russia with them.

University lecturer Mikhail Valeryevich Mikushin was charged with gathering intelligence in Norway on behalf of Russia in 2022 while posing as a Brazilian academic.

Norwegian officials said he had a Brazilian passport and had worked as a researcher at the University of Tromso since 2021.

He had reportedly been going by the name José Assis Giammaria.

Mr Mikushin was also believed to have lied about his age, being in fact 44 rather than 37 when charged.

Arrested in Switzerland at the request of the US authorities in 2021, Klyushin was jailed for nine years in 2023 for insider trading after refusing a plea deal.

During the investigation, he was linked to former military intelligence officer Ivan Yermakov, who was allegedly involved in efforts to influence the 2016 US election in Donald Trump’s favour.

In Russia, the cybersecurity company he headed, M-13, was also responsible for the Katyusha programme, employed by the authorities to monitor media outlets and blogging sites.

The Spanish-Russian journalist was arrested in Poland in February 2022, shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, accused of espionage and links to Russian military intelligence.

Born Pavel Rubtsov in Moscow to descendants of Basque emigrees, he moved to Spain as a child and changed his name to Pablo González.

After his arrest, a campaign to free him was launched involving Amnesty International and Reporters without Borders (RSF).

In a statement in February this year, RSF urged his release, noting that he still had not been charged by the Polish authorities.

• Americans freed in Russia prisoner swap reunite with families
• Two years, secret talks, high stakes: How deal was struck
• Biden burnishes his legacy with historic prisoner swap
• Watch: Putin hugs Russian prisoners as they arrive in Moscow