There will be an emergency response meeting in Downing Street on Monday after more than 150 people were arrested following violent disorder in UK towns and cities over the weekend.

It comes after Sir Keir Starmer condemned an attack on a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham and promised those involved in unrest would face “the full force of the law”.

Police responded to violent scenes in Tamworth, Middlesbrough, Bolton, Hull and Weymouth, among other parts of the UK.

The prime minister vowed to do “whatever it takes to bring these thugs to justice” as he addressed the nation on Sunday.

Cobra meetings, or Cobr meetings as they are often also called, are named after Cabinet Office Briefing Room A on Whitehall.

It is an emergency response committee, a get together of ministers, civil servants, the police, intelligence officers and others appropriate to whatever they are looking into.

Monday’s meeting of the emergency committee will be intended to provide the government with an update on the violence over the weekend and the response in the coming days. It will involve relevant ministers and police representatives.

Sources have suggested this should be seen in the context of meetings that have already taken place, such as one between the prime minister and police chiefs last Thursday, and a meeting of senior ministers on Saturday.

During the prime minister’s televised address on Sunday, he warned those involved that they will “regret” taking part.

“People in this country have a right to be safe, and yet we’ve seen Muslim communities targeted, attacks on mosques,” the prime minister said.

“Other minority communities singled out, Nazi salutes in the street, attacks on the police, wanton violence alongside racist rhetoric, so no, I won’t shy away from calling it what it is: far-right thuggery.”

In a statement, the Home Office offered mosques greater protections as part of a new process, under which it said “rapid security” deployment can be requested in order to allow a return to worship as fast as possible.

The Cobra meeting will come after a sixth day of escalating violence following the fatal stabbing of three young girls in Southport last Monday.

Since Saturday, more than 150 arrests have been made.

In Rotherham, at least ten police officers were injured with one left unconscious after anti-immigration demonstrators threw planks of wood at officers and sprayed them with fire extinguishers, South Yorkshire police said.

Some members of the group smashed windows to gain access to the Holiday Inn Express and a large bin was set alight.

The officer knocked unconscious suffered a head injury, the force said, adding that at least two others had suspected broken bones.

Hotel employees and residents, some of whom are asylum seekers, were “terrified”, but no injuries were reported, police said.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper called the scenes “utterly appalling” and said police have government backing to take “the strongest action”.

At a second hotel in Tamworth, Staffordshire, officers said they had to deal with “violent acts of thuggery” on Sunday evening.

One officer was injured at the site as people threw missiles, smashed windows, and started fires, Staffordshire Police said.

Meanwhile, a group of rioters in Middlesbrough smashed the windows of houses and cars and hurled objects at officers.

In Dorset, 600 people from opposing sides gathered on the seafront in Weymouth. Officers said there had been a “small number of low-level incidents”, with one man arrested for a public order offence.

And in Bolton, anti-immigration protestors were confronted by a group of up to 300 masked people shouting “Allahu Akbar” – or “God is greatest”.

Greater Manchester Police issued a Section 60AA order in the town which requires people to “remove face coverings used to disguise or conceal their appearance”.

The violence followed similar scenes of unrest in Southport, Belfast, Hartlepool, Hull, Liverpool, Stoke-on-Trent, Nottingham, Sunderland and elsewhere earlier in the week.

Sir Keir indicated the response to the violence could mirror elements of how the 2011 riots were handled, at which time he was director of public prosecutions.

“We do have standing arrangements for law enforcement which means that we can get arrests… and convictions done very quickly,” he said.

“I myself was part of that in 2011 when I was director of public prosecutions, and I’m determined we will do whatever it takes to bring these thugs to justice as quickly as possible.”

Ministers have suggested that courts could sit 24 hours to fast-track prosecutions – as they did in 2011 – while police forces have measures in place to draft in extra officers to tackle potential unrest.

Stock markets in Asia slumped on Monday morning, following big falls by major indexes around the world last week.

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 was trading 4.6% lower, while the Topix was down by 5.7%.

It comes after weak jobs data in the US on Friday sparked fears of a recession in the world’s largest economy.

Meanwhile, the yen has been strengthening against the US dollar since the Bank of Japan raised interest rates last week, making stocks in Tokyo more expensive for foreign investors.

“The selloff was instigated by the sharp appreciation of the [yen] as global investors turned cautious on Japanese corporate earnings, especially that of exporters such as automakers,” said Kei Okamura, a Tokyo-based portfolio manager at investment firm Neuberger Berman.

The Japanese currency has strengthened around 9% against the US dollar over the last month.

A stronger yen makes Japanese goods more expensive, and consequently less attractive for potential overseas buyers.

Elsewhere in Asia, Taiwan’s main share index was down by 6.9%, with chip making giant TSMC more than 6% lower.

In South Korea, the Kospi index fell 5.5%, with major chip makers including Samsung down more than 7%, while SK Hynix 6.5% lower.

However, the Hang Seng in Hong Kong was down by just 0.6% in morning trade, while the Shanghai Stock Exchange was 0.2% lower.

Cryptocurrencies were also down. Bitcoin dropped to just over $53,000, its lowest level since February.

On Friday, stocks in New York fell sharply after official jobs data showed that US employers added 114,000 jobs in July, far fewer than expected.

The figures raised concerns that a long-running jobs boom in the US might be coming to an end and drove speculation about when and by how much the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates.

Stock markets were already worried about high borrowing costs and unsettled by signs that a long-running rally in share prices, fuelled in part by optimism over artificial intelligence (AI), might be running out steam.

Friday’s decline in the Nasdaq brought the index down about 10% from its most recent peak – a fall known as a “correction” – that in this case has happened in a matter of weeks.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average also dropped 1.5% on Friday, and the S&P 500 ended 1.8% lower, after markets in Asia and Europe sank.

For the past two years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged to transform India into a high-income, developed country by 2047. India is also on course to become the world’s third largest economy in six years, according to several projections.

High-income economies have a per capita Gross National Income – total amount of money earned by a nation’s people and businesses – of $13,846 (£10,870) or more, according to the World Bank.

With a per capita income of around $2,400 (£1,885), India is among the lower middle-income countries. For some years now, many economists have been warning that India’s economy could be headed for a “middle income trap”.

This happens when a country stops being able to achieve rapid growth easily and compete with advanced economies. Economist Ardo Hannson defines it as a situation when countries “seem to get stuck in a trap where your costs are escalating and you lose competitiveness”.

A new World Bank report holds out similar fears. At the current growth rate, India will need 75 years to reach a quarter of America’s per capita income, World Development Report 2024 says. It also says more than 100 countries – including India, China, Brazil and South Africa – face “serious obstacles” that could hinder their efforts to become high-income countries in the next few decades.

Researchers looked at the numbers from 108 middle-income countries responsible for 40% of the world’s total economic output – and nearly two-thirds of global carbon emissions. They are home to three-quarters of the global population and nearly two-thirds of those in extreme poverty.

They say these countries face greater challenges in escaping the middle-income trap. These include rapidly ageing populations, rising protectionism in advanced economies and the urgent need for an accelerated energy transition.

“The battle for global economic prosperity will be largely won or lost in middle-income countries,” says Indermit Gill, chief economist of the World Bank and one of the study’s authors.

“But too many of these countries rely on outmoded strategies to become advanced economies. They depend just on investment for too long – or they switch prematurely to innovation.”

For example, the researchers say, the pace at which businesses can grow is often slow in middle-income countries.

In India, Mexico, and Peru, firms that operate for 40 years typically double in size, while in the US, they grow seven-fold in the same period. This indicates that firms in middle-income countries struggle to grow significantly, but still survive for decades. Consequently, nearly 90% of firms in India, Peru, and Mexico have fewer than five employees, with only a small fraction having 10 or more, the report says.

Mr Gill and his fellow researchers advocate a new approach: these countries need to focus on more investment, infuse new technologies from around the world and grow innovation.

South Korea exemplifies this strategy, the report says.

In 1960, its per capita income was $1,200 – it rose to $33,000 by 2023.

Initially, South Korea boosted public and private investment. In the 1970s, it shifted to an industrial policy that encouraged domestic firms to adopt foreign technology and advanced production methods.

Companies like Samsung responded. Initially a noodle-maker, Samsung began producing TV sets for domestic and regional markets by licensing technologies from Japanese firms.

This success created a demand for skilled professionals. The government increased budgets and set targets for public universities to develop these skills. Today, Samsung is a global innovator and one of the world’s largest smartphone manufacturers, the report says.

Countries like Poland and Chile followed similar paths, the report says. Poland boosted productivity by adopting Western European technologies. Chile encouraged technology transfer to drive local innovation, famously adapting Norwegian salmon farming techniques to become a top salmon exporter.

History provides enough clues about an impending middle-income trap. Researchers reveal that as countries grow wealthier, they often hit a “trap” at around 10% of US GDP per capita ($8,000 today), placing them in the middle-income range. That’s roughly in the middle of what the bank classifies as “middle-income” countries.

Since 1990, only 34 middle-income countries have transitioned to high-income status, with over a third benefiting from integration into European Union (EU) or newfound oil reserves.

Economists Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba separately estimate that even at a very respectable per capita income growth rate of 4%, India’s per capita income will reach $10,000 only by 2060, which is lower than China’s level today.

“We must do better. Over the next decade, we will see a possible population dividend, that is rise in the share of our population of working age, before we, like other countries, succumb to ageing,” they write in their new book Breaking The Mould: Reimagining India’s Economic Future.

“If we can generate good employment for all our youth, we will accelerate growth and have a shot at becoming comfortably upper middle class before our population starts ageing.”

In other words, the economists wonder, “Can India become rich before it becomes old?”

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan has now been behind bars for a year – although there are times you would barely know it.

Mr Khan is still the dominant force of Pakistan’s opposition politics; his name still in the papers and the courts. His social media supporters have been unrelenting.

With no public appearances, the few people allowed in to see the former cricket star regularly – his lawyers and family – have become his conduit for messages to the outside world. They are keen to push the message that his 365 days behind bars have left him unbowed.

“There is still a swagger about him,” Aleema Khanum, Imran Khan’s sister, says. “He’s got no needs, no wants – only a cause.”

According to those who visit him, Mr Khan spends his days on his exercise bike, reading and reflecting. He has an hour a day to walk around the courtyard. There have been occasional disagreements about how quickly the family can provide him with new books.

“He has said ‘I’m not wasting a minute of my time in jail, it’s an opportunity for me to get more knowledge’,” Ms Khanum tells the BBC.

But the fact is Mr Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi are still trapped in prison, with no sign they will be released any time soon.

According to some, this is not a surprise.

“There was no expectation that Mr Khan was going to do anything that would make it easy for him to get out of jail,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Centre think tank in Washington.

And the military – Pakistan’s powerful behind-the-scenes player – “don’t ease up when they decide there’s a political figure that they want to lock up”, says Mr Kugelman. “That has especially been the case with Khan.”

Indeed, the military has been key to many of the ups and downs of Mr Khan’s life in the last decade. Many analysts believe it was his initial close relationship with the military establishment which helped him win power.

But by 9 May last year, that was in tatters. Mr Khan – who had been ousted from power in a vote of no confidence in 2022 – had been arrested, and his supporters came out to protest.

Some of those protests turned violent, and there were attacks on military buildings – including the official residence of the most senior army official in Lahore which was looted and set alight.

In the aftermath, BBC sources said Pakistan’s media companies had been told to stop showing his picture, saying his name or playing his voice.

Mr Khan was released – but ultimately only for a few months.

He was jailed again on 5 August for failing to correctly declare the sale of state gifts – and that was just the start.

In the run-up to the election, the cases against him mounted; by the start of February – just days before the vote – the 71-year-old had acquired three long prison sentences, the last for 14 years.

By the election, many of the candidates standing for Mr Khan’s PTI party were also in prison or in hiding, the party stripped of its well-recognised symbol of a cricket bat – a vital identifier in a country with a 58% literacy rate.

Despite this, “we were determined and wanted to make a statement”, Salman Akram Raja, Mr Khan’s lawyer and a candidate in the election, says.

“It was very constrained, many couldn’t campaign at all. The loss of the cricket bat symbol was the body blow.”

All candidates stood as independents, but hopes – even within the party – weren’t high.

Yet candidates backed by Imran Khan won more seats than anyone else, forcing his political rivals to form an alliance to block them. The PTI, meanwhile, was left to fight for many of their seats in court, alleging the results were rigged.

Supporters see the election on 8 February as a turning point, proof of Mr Khan’s potent message – even from behind bars.

“There is a change, that was expressed on 8 February,” says Aleema Khanum. “Change is coming, it is in the air.”

Others say that practically, the result hasn’t changed the status quo.

“We are really where we might expect to be given past precedent,” Mr Kugelman says.

“PTI didn’t form a government, its leader is still in jail and the coalition in power is led by parties backed by the military.”

But more recently, things have certainly seemed to be looking up for Mr Khan and his supporters.

All three of the sentences handed down just before the election have fallen away, a United Nations panel declared his detention was arbitrary and Pakistan’s supreme court said PTI was an official party and should receive “reserve seats”; the seats reserved for women and non-Muslims allocated according to the proportion of seats the party has won.

But none have yet had a practical impact: Mr Khan is still in jail with new cases against his name, and the reserve seats have yet to be allocated.

His wife Bushra Bibi, whose prison sentence was dropped when the case that declared their marriage illegal was appealed, is also still in prison on new charges.

Meanwhile, the government has made it clear that it sees Mr Khan and his party as a public threat. It announced earlier this month that it intends to seek to ban PTI, despite warnings from groups like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

The military also shows no indication it has changed its mind. On the 9 May anniversary this year, a statement from its public relations wing said there would be no compromise with the “planners, facilitators and executioners” and nor would they be allowed to “hoodwink the law of the land”.

And it is this relationship with the military that most analysts think Mr Khan really needs to smooth out to finally escape prison.

“I think we can come up with an arrangement that gives everyone a way out and allows the system to function,” says Khan’s lawyer, Mr Raja.

Meanwhile, from jail, Mr Khan has been delivering his own messages. Aleema Khanum recently said that that he had told the military to “stay neutral… to let this country run” and called it “the backbone of Pakistan”.

It has been seen as an olive branch by some commentators, although the use of the term neutral was picked up on; when the army previously declared itself neutral by not taking sides in politics, he ridiculed the expression, saying “only an animal is neutral”.

His recent call for snap elections is a move that some see as one of his conditions to the military.

“I don’t think that’s very realistic,” says Mr Kugelman. “Over time, Khan may relent a bit. It is one of the truisms of Pakistani politics: if you want to be prime minister you need to be in the good graces, or at least not the bad graces, of the military.”

For now at least, the stalemate continues.

Ukraine has received its first American-made F-16 fighter jets, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

“F-16s in Ukraine. We did it,” President Zelensky said at a ceremony at an unnamed airbase, flanked by two of the planes.

Ukraine’s leader thanked allies for what they were once very hesitant to provide – though he added that many more were needed.

The arrival of the jets marks a crucial milestone in boosting the capabilities of Ukraine’s air force, which largely relies on old Soviet-era jets.

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More F-16s are expected and hoped in the months ahead, though Mr Zelensky admitted that Ukraine does not yet have enough trained pilots to fly them all.

He did not specify how many aircraft had arrived in Ukraine – or whether they had all been sent by Denmark, the Netherlands and the US, which he specifically thanked.

Around 65 F-16s have been pledged by Nato countries since US President Joe Biden first authorised willing European allies to send them to Ukraine in August 2023.

The F-16 was introduced in 1978. Many Western militaries are in the process of retiring the ageing fighters, replacing them with the US-made F-35, introduced in 2015.

The UK does not have any F-16s in its air force, though it is supplying long-range Storm Shadow missiles which can be fitted to the jets.

Ukraine’s F-16s will work alongside a limited number of Western-supplied surface-to-air missile systems such as Patriot and Nasams which are already on the ground.

With their capacity to carry rockets, bombs and missiles, F-16s should in theory allow the air force to carry out more strikes deep inside occupied territory, and possibly on targets close to the border inside Russia.

They may also help defend against Russian glide bombs – dumb munitions fitted with pop-out wing kits and guidance modules to deliver precision strike stand-off capabilities, similar to the JDAM munitions from the United States.

Around 3,000 were dropped in March alone, mostly from Su-34 fighter-bombers.

If Ukraine can protect its F-16s on the ground, the hope is that they could play an important part in pushing back Russian aircraft to a point where they can no longer target Ukrainian ground forces with glide bombs.

Kyiv had suggested that it could keep some F-16s at foreign military bases, but that suggestion prompted President Vladimir Putin to warn that any Western bases storing Ukrainian jets would be a legitimate military target for Russia.

Experts also say the fighters could provide much needed air support to Ukrainian ground forces, who have faced relentless attacks in recent months, especially in the eastern Donbas region.

Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov previously vowed that Western-made F-16s flying for Ukraine would be “shot down”.

“But of course, these deliveries will not have any significant impact on the development of events on the front,” he added.

Mali says it has cut diplomatic relations with Ukraine, after a military official suggested Kyiv had played a role in deadly fighting near the Algerian border last month.

Dozens of Malian soldiers and mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner group were killed in days of clashes with Tuareg separatist rebels and fighters linked to al-Qaeda.

Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence, said last week that the rebels had been given the “necessary information” to conduct the attacks.

A top Malian official, Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga, said his government was shocked to hear the claim and accused Ukraine of violating Mali’s sovereignty.

Yusov’s comments “admitted Ukraine’s involvement in a cowardly, treacherous and barbaric attack by armed terrorist groups” that had led to the deaths of Malian soldiers, Col Maiga’s statement said.

Mali has decided to break off relations “with immediate effect”, he said.

Last week, Mali’s army admitted it had suffered “significant” losses during several days of fighting earlier that erupted on 25 July.

The clashes took place in the desert near Tinzaouaten, a north-eastern town on the border with Algeria.

Reports say the Malian and Russian forcers were ambushed by Tuareg rebels and fighters from al-Qaeda affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin while waiting for reinforcements, after retreating from Tinzaouaten.

Neither Mali’s military nor Wagner – which has since morphed into a group called the Africa Corps – have given exact figures, but the estimated death toll for Wagner fighters ranges from 20 to 80.

The Russian mercenary outfit’s losses are thought to be the heaviest it has suffered in Mali since it began helping the military government fight the insurgents two years ago.

Wagner has acknowledged that one of its commanders was killed and a Russian helicopter was downed in “fierce fighting”, saying they had been attacked by around 1,000 fighters.

Tuareg-led separatists claimed on Thursday they had killed 84 Wagner mercenaries and 47 Malian soldiers.

More than a decade ago, Mali’s central government lost control of much of the north following a Tuareg rebellion, which was sparked by a demand for a separate state.

The country’s security was then further complicated by the involvement of Islamist militants in the conflict.

When seizing power in coups in 2020 and 2021, the military cited the government’s inability to tackle this unrest.

The new junta severed Mali’s long-running alliance with former colonial power France in favour of Russia, in a bid to quell the unrest.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has posted a video on social media in which he admits that he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014.

The clip, posted to his X account on Sunday, shows him with controversial US comedian Roseanne Barr as he describes bizarre circumstances that led to an incident that mystified New Yorkers 10 years ago.

Mr Kennedy said a woman had hit and killed the bear with her car when he was driving behind her outside of the city, and he put it in his van with the intention of skinning the animal and harvesting its meat.

It appears he shared the anecdote to get ahead of an upcoming story in The New Yorker magazine.

The Kennedy campaign and the New Yorker did not respond to requests for comment.

Seated with rolled-up sleeves at a table covered with food, Mr Kennedy tells Ms Barr in the video that he was driving to meet a group of people to go falconing near Goshen, New York, 10 years ago when the bear was killed. He says he pulled over to put the bear in his vehicle.

“I was going to skin the bear – and it was in very good condition – and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he says. “And you can do that in New York state: Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”

New York state does allow people to take bears killed on roads, but the law stipulates that a person has to notify law enforcement or the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to acquire such a tag.

Mr Kennedy does not appear to have done that.

Instead, he says he continued to his falconing venture, which went late into the evening. He says he went on to a dinner reservation he had at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City, about 75 miles (121km) south of Goshen.

“At the end of the dinner, it was late and I realised I couldn’t go home,” Mr Kennedy says. “I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad.”

That is when, he says, it occurred to him that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle in his car.

He tells Ms Barr that he had the idea of staging a bike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park, which several drunk people with him heartily endorsed. He emphasises that he had not been drinking.

“So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” he says. “The next day… it was on every television station. It was a front page of every paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying, and I was like, ‘Oh my god. What did I do?'”

He then notes that a factchecker from The New Yorker had called him and asked whether he was involved in dumping the bear’s body, which appears to have prompted him to release this video.

The bear’s corpse was discovered by a woman walking her dog in the famous New York City park, according to a 2014 story written by the New York Times. It had been placed under some bushes and an abandoned bicycle, the story says.

The paper noted, at the time, that the New York Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad was looking into the bear’s death, and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation had concluded that the animal had been killed in a “motor vehicle collision” – not a bike accident.

The New York Police Department and Department of Environmental Conservation did not respond to requests for comment.

The New York Times story notes how puzzling the 2014 incident was to those who followed the case: “But so many questions remain unanswered: How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play involved? Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?”

In a twist, that decade-old newspaper story was coincidentally written by another member of the famous Kennedy family – Tatiana Schlossberg, a former New York Times journalist who is the granddaughter of US President John F Kennedy.

Ms Schlossberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her relative, though many members of the Kennedy family have disavowed Mr Kennedy’s actions and his campaign for president.

Mr Kennedy’s bizarre confession comes as his 2024 campaign for president appears to be struggling.

With Vice-President Kamala Harris entering the race after President Joe Biden announced his decision to step aside, polls indicate that Mr Kennedy’s support has dwindled to the single digits.

A scion of America’s most famous political family, Mr Kennedy has struggled to raise money and slowed his campaigning in recent weeks.

Those issues have coincided with a series of blunders that have fuelled speculation that the US politician might drop out, though he has insisted that he will not exit the race.

Vice-President Kamala Harris has interviewed potential contenders to be her running mate on Sunday, ahead of a battleground tour next week.

Among those who travelled to Washington, DC, to meet Ms Harris were Governor Josh Shapiro, Senator Mark Kelly and Governor Tim Walz.

The choices for the Democratic vice-president had been narrowed to a group of five, according to CBS, the BBC’s US partner.

A decision is required before the Democratic National Convention, which starts on 19 August in Chicago.

It is unclear whether other potential candidates, including Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear or Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, were scheduled to meet with Ms Harris.

Harris officially became the Democratic presidential nominee on Friday in a vote of party delegates.

Once Ms Harris’s running mate is announced, the two are expected to tour the battleground states.

Mr Shapiro has seen high approval ratings since he was elected in 2022 and could help Ms Harris capture Pennsylvania – a must-win state in the race for the White House.

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot and Nasa astronaut, has become a leading voices on gun safety and his strong border stance and occasional criticisms of the Biden administration could help appeal to independent and conservative voters.

Mr Walz, who served 12 years in Congress before becoming governor of Minnesota in 2019, gained national attention for his strategy calling Donald Trump and JD Vance “weird”.

On Friday President Joe Biden said he had spoken to Ms Harris about her search for a running mate. Asked what qualities she should look for in a vice-presidential candidate, he said: “I’ll let her work that out.”

Potential partners to join Ms Harris on the Democratic ticket for November’s election face an exhaustive vetting process, having to answer up to 200 questions before being seriously considered.

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Delegates do not vote on the vice-presidential pick.

The United Automobile Workers, a major US union representing more than 400,000 people, said its preferred vice-presidential pick was Mr Beshear, who “stood with us on the picket line and has been there for workers”.

Speaking to CBS’ Face the Nation, UAW President Shawn Fain added that Mr Walz was also “100% behind labour”, but he criticised Mr Shapiro’s support of private school vouchers in Pennsylvania – a Republican-backed proposal to send $100m to families for private school tuition and school supplies.

While she holds those meetings, a new by CBS News, BBC’s US partner, suggests Ms Harris holds a slight edge over her Republican rival Donald Trump, leading by one point nationally.

Across battleground states, the poll indicates that the pair are neck-and neck. Trump still enjoys a small lead in a few states – Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina – but the race has tightened significantly since Mr Biden bowed out of the race and Ms Harris became the Democratic nominee.

The poll suggests that the vice-president has energised the Democratic base, with young, black and female voters noting their renewed enthusiasm for the presidential election.

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign is still beset by comments he made at a convention for US-based black journalists in which he questioned Ms Harris’ racial identity.

Trump said of Ms Harris: “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. So I don’t know – Is she Indian? Or is she black?”

Ms Harris’ mother was born in India and her father is from Jamaica. She has always identified as both Indian American and black.

Multiple Trump allies appeared on US politics shows on Sunday in an attempt to shift attention from what he said.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a longtime Trump backer, said he would advise the former president to focus on the Biden-Harris administration’s policy decision – not the vice-president’s heritage.

“Every day we’re talking about her heritage and not her terrible, dangerous liberal record throughout her entire political life [is] a good day for her and a bad day for us,” Mr Graham told Fox News Sunday.

Earlier in the day, Senator Laphonza Butler, a Democrat who represents Ms Harris’ home state of California, called the comments about the vice-president’s race “despicable” and “an insult” during an appearance on CNN.

“This is a woman who was born in Oakland, California, who has declared and lived proudly all of her identities her entire life, embracing the totality of who she is,” she said.

“This is the only card he’s (Trump’s) got to play, and so he’s playing it. He’s desperate.”

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The sister of Marc Fogel, an American teacher imprisoned in Russia for illegal possession of cannabis, told the BBC that she wishes her brother was among those freed during the historic US-Russia prisoner swap earlier this week.

Mr Fogel, 63, was arrested at an airport in August 2021 and charged with carrying a small amount of medical marijuana, which had been prescribed in the US.

The native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was a teacher at the Anglo-American School of Moscow.

While serving out his 14-year prison sentence, Mr Fogel has reportedly been teaching English to fellow inmates.

Anne Fogel said she last spoke to her brother on Wednesday, when their family undertook a “massive effort” to get him on the plane with the other freed US prisoners.

Reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US Marine Paul Wheelan and journalist Alsu Kurmasheva were taken to the US after they were released in the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War.

Anne Fogel detailed the family’s effort in an interview with the BBC: “We were frantically calling senators and congressmen and our ambassadors, former Russian ambassadors who served there, and I had no news for him, even though he knew that something was happening.”

Anne said her brother may have been aware a prisoner swap was taking place because “they play news nonstop in the Russian penal colonies”.

“He knew that something was going on, because… Paul Whelan had been moved and Evan (Gershkovich) had been moved.”

After learning her brother was not part of the swap, she said she felt “betrayal”.

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US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Thursday, the day of the prisoner swap, that the US was still “actively working to get his (Mark Fogel’s) release”.

When asked about the American’s case the following day, President Biden said that “we’re not giving up on that”.

Asked whether that gave her hope, Anne said: “I’m playing to whatever hope I can so yes, to a certain degree.

“The administration pulled off a masterful, incredible swap and they should be congratulated… and I’m very happy for the return of Paul and Evan and Alsu.

“I just wished my brother was among them.”

Anne said her message to the White House was: “Please, please do everything you can to get him out. He’s the oldest one there, and he’s the most infirm. Please help us.”

White House National Security Council deputy adviser, Jonathan Finer, said on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday that “we worked to try to get Marc included in the deal that consummated last week”.

“And we are right back at it to try to get Marc back to the United States and unite (him) with his family.”

He said that officials work on Mr Fogel’s case “every single day”.

Mr Finer declined to predict whether the American might be returned by the end of the Biden administration in January.

Dozens of people have reportedly been killed in Israeli air strikes on two schools in Gaza, according to Palestinian rescuers and news outlets.

Some of those killed were displaced people sheltering at the schools, rescuers said.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed the strikes, saying it had targeted Hamas “command and control centres” within two schools in Gaza City.

The strikes were the third time in a week schools in Gaza have been hit by Israeli strikes.

The IDF said: “The schools were used by Hamas’s al-Furqan Battalion as a hiding place for its terrorist operatives and as command centres used to plan and execute attacks against IDF troops and the state of Israel.”

Footage on social media purported to show bodies inside one of the schools as rescuers evacuated casualties, including children.

Palestinian media said at least 30 people were killed in the strikes. Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defence, said most of the dead were women and children.

He added that more people were believed to be buried under the rubble.

The attack on the al-Nasr and Hassan Salama schools came on the day of an attack on a camp for displaced people in a hospital in central Gaza, which reportedly killed at least five people.

On Saturday, officials said an air strike on Hamama School in Gaza City had killed at least 17 people.

Days earlier, a strike on Dalal al-Mughrabi School killed 15, according to officials.

The IDF says it takes care to minimise risk to civilians when conducting strikes but the Palestinian Civil Defence described Sunday’s attacks as “a massacre”.

In a separate development on Sunday morning, two people were killed in a stabbing attack in the Israeli city of Holon. The Palestinian attacker was later shot dead, police said.

The Israel-Gaza war began on 7 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.

As the Paris gymnastics arena roared on American Simone Biles for her third gold medal of the 2024 Olympics, one of those applauding was none other than An Chang-ok, a rival from North Korea.

Saturday’s women’s vault final saw the North share a stage with its foes South Korea and the US.

An, 21, grinned and waved for TV cameras and hugged at least one fellow finalist – rare interactions with foreigners by a young woman required to perform diplomatic gymnastics while being carefully chaperoned on her trip away from home.

Pyongyang’s decision to send athletes to these Games – two of whom even posed for a selfie with rivals from the South – has raised hopes that the secretive state could be partially reopening after a particularly deep period of isolation.

After all, this comes after a heated period that has seen the North sending waste-filled balloons at the South.

• Biles takes vault title in emphatic fashion
• Other big stories from day eight of the Games
• Who’s leading the medals table in Paris?

The North’s participation in these Games signalled a “remarkable” return to the international fold, suggested Jean H Lee, a former Associated Press journalist who opened the US news agency’s first bureau in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

It did not send any athletes to the Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021, after the country shut itself off from the world even more sternly than usual due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

But in Paris, it was “making the effort to rejoin the international community”, Lee said, “regardless of what’s happening with their nuclear programme, which is always the elephant in the room”.

The North’s nuclear ambitions are an enduring cause of tension with the South and the US. But there was no sign of animosity between the three nations’ gymnasts on Saturday.

This new generation of North Korean athletes have claimed two silvers in Paris, and occasionally surprised sport commentators who did not know what to expect from them.

Winning medals was not the country’s only aim, according to Prof Ramon Pacheco Pardo of King’s College London, who has written extensively on the two Koreas.

The age-old North Korean art of “sports diplomacy” involved limited participation in a global forum to prove the country was normal, Prod Pacheco Pardo said. Athletes were some of the “few actors that North Korea has who won’t be viewed suspiciously” by the world, he explained.

The contrasting support for An and Biles could not have been starker. In an earlier competition during the Games in Paris, Biles was memorably cheered on by a host of celebrity supporters in the stands, including Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Tom Cruise and Snoop Dogg. Thousands of punters yelled her name on Saturday, too.

An, meanwhile, received only polite appreciation from the neutrals. She had no compatriots in the room, since ordinary North Koreans are prevented from leaving their country.

It is unlikely that anyone was watching at home, either, as the Games are not being televised live in North Korea, according to Radio Free Asia (RFA). And BBC Monitoring has only been able to find a handful of text reports in the tightly-controlled state media.

Nonetheless, “the chattering class of Pyongyang certainly will, from one source or another” know the Olympic results as they come in, said John Everard, the UK’s ambassador to North Korea from 2006 to 2008.

An is among 16 North Korean who athletes have come to an opulent host city that could hardly be more different to the austere Pyongyang airport in which they were filmed setting off last month.

Top North Korean athletes were likely to have some awareness of the outside world, said Everard, but there was still likely to be a “shock factor”.

One of the viral moments of the Games so far was a rare encounter that seemed to break the boundaries: when a bronze-winning South Korean table-tennis player took a selfie that showed his mixed-doubles partner posing alongside the silver-winning North Korean duo.

Would the leadership in Pyongyang have anticipated – or relished – this brief symbol of unity between two nations who are still technically at war?

Agreeing to the selfie was “a message” from the North, said Prof Pachedo Pardo, who speculated that the move would have had Pyongyang’s consent. “North Korea is indicating that it doesn’t have a problem with South Korean people – that the issue it has is with the South Korean government.”

At any rate, the moment was not totally unexpected, after something similar in 2016. And two years later, North and South fielded a joint women’s ice hockey team at the Winter Games in the South.

The selfie represents one of the North’s few visible interactions with the outside world during the Games, including a perfunctory press conference by the two table-tennis stars.

Away from the stadiums, unverified footage has appeared to show An holding a collection of pin-badges, which are reported to be an item popularly traded by international gymnasts.

After so much exposure to the Western world, the athletes will probably undergo a gruelling “debrief” after returning home to ensure they stay on-message, said Lee, who is also the co-host of the BBC World Service’s Lazarus Heist podcast.

Contrary to the myth, any athlete deemed to have “failed” would probably not be punished, the analysts agreed. But they could face gruelling “self-criticism” sessions.

“The big hit for not winning a medal isn’t so much the punishment, it’s that you don’t gain all the benefits that you could have gained,” said Everard. Victorious athletes may be given higher status in society and even prizes such as a new home.

It remains to be seen whether this latest sporting diplomacy will translate into meaningful new talks between the two Koreas. The relative bonhomie in Paris was briefly imperilled at the outset by a furore when organisers mixed up the two nations’ names in the opening ceremony, for which they apologised.

Outside the Bercy Arena after Saturday’s gymnastics, one fan from the Seoul side was not convinced the politics would change much.

But she said the sight of sportspeople sharing a stage was at least a reminder that all Koreans were united by something “human”.

When Frank Sinatra sang about “a city that never sleeps”, he probably wasn’t thinking about the economic boost that busy nightlife can provide to a metropolis.

Yet a growing number of cities around the world are increasingly homing in on ways to strengthen their night-time economy.

Around 100 cities now have some form of “night mayor” or “night tsar” in place, to spur this work.

But most of those cities, including London, Sydney, and Sinatra’s beloved New York, are not up all night. In other words, they don’t allow bars and nightclubs to remain open, and serve alcohol, 24 hours a day.

Nonetheless, later this year, Montreal – Canada’s second-largest city – is planning to take the leap into 24-hour nightlife.

Following in the footsteps of Berlin and Tokyo, venues in a new all-night district in Montreal’s city centre will be licensed to remain open, and serve alcohol, throughout the night.

City officials say the move will bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue. Currently bars and clubs in the city have to close by 3am.

On a warm Friday evening in July, the centre of Montreal is bustling; busy bars and restaurants line the wide, pedestrianised streets.

“This is an opportunity for economic growth,” says Ericka Alneus, the city councilor behind the 24-hour plan.

“But it’s also to present, and reinforce, the cultural scene.”

In 2022, the annual financial value of Montreal’s nightlife was estimated to be worth C$2.25bn ($1.6bn; £1.3bn), according to advocacy group MTL 24/24. It says that from this, C$121m went in tax to the government.

Clearly, Ms Alneus hopes those figures will increase when venues are allowed to stay open all night.

But not everyone is supportive of the change: “We don’t have enough security for it,” says one concerned reveller.

A fellow citizen is worried about the practical implications: “It’s nice for people who like to party, but the Metro closes at 1.30am,” she says. “There has to be some kind of way people can go back home.”

Sergio Da Silva’s live music bar, Turbo Haus Club, is located on Saint Denis Street in Old Montreal. He says the planned changes haven’t been sufficiently considered.

“You can’t just say, ‘here are some 24-hour bars, go nuts!’.

“There’s no infrastructure to uphold it. There’s no 24-hour public transport, there’s no extra security.

“Then, there’s the cost of living. If people can’t afford to go out, no matter what 24-hour policy you put in, it doesn’t change anything,” he adds.

As the sun sets outside a different bar, L’ile Noir, owner Michelle Lavellee disagrees – he has a different take on the closing-time situation.

“In Montreal, we close at 3am. People are drunk at 1am – and they’re super-drunk at 3am.

“One of the problems we have is, at 3am it’s like madness. But if you expand the hours, there’s less problems, less demand for security,” he explains.

Ms Alneus agrees. She says the fact that so many bars and clubs all currently close at 3am presents problems for the police.

She believes by allowing 24-hour drinking, those venues that don’t wish to stay open all night will be able to close at different times across the night.

She maintains staggering closing time will bring “a bit more safety in nightlife areas”.

Back in 2012, the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, became the first city to appoint a night mayor – a role that went to club promoter and festival organiser Mirik Milan.

He says that during his six years in charge, alcohol-related violence and reports of nuisance fell by 20% and 30% respectively. Those statistics, he says, were vital for local politicians to demonstrate to voters that “we really managed the night in a better way”.

Mr Milan has gone on to co-found VibeLab, a nightlife consultancy advising governments around the world.

He says that when a city embraces nightlife as one of its key cultural assets, it can have billions of dollars of positive impact on the local economy.

“It drives tourism. It brings in a lot of creative operators and businesses that want to be located in that city. And that has a huge impact on the city as a whole.”

Lutz Leichsenring, co-founder at VibeLab, has been instrumental in promoting nightlife as part of Berlin’s Clubcommission – the organisation which, since 2000, has represented approximately 280 nightclubs in the German capital.

“One of the strongest arguments for nightlife is that it attracts talented and skilled workers,” he says.

“It’s just a very important factor why people would relocate to a city, or would like to stay in a city and not move away.”

Mr Leichsenring adds that the increased temperatures brought about by climate change will only make the nighttime economy more important during summer months for many cities.

He maintains everything “from construction, to education, and cultural gatherings” will increasingly move to cooler nighttime hours.

“The night needs to be governed better, because the more you shift to that – to the night – the more conflicts you create, because people also want to sleep at night.”

Meanwhile, efforts to transform cities into all-night zones have – in some cases – proved disappointing.

In 2017, London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced his 24-hour city proposal, appointing US comedian Amy Lamé “to champion nightlife”.

Both were criticised earlier this year after suggesting they had succeeded in their vision, with social media-users expressing their frustration with the hashtag ‘LameLondon’ on X.

The work of Sydney’s night mayor has also faced scepticism.

Sticking to a nightlife plan isn’t always easy, particularly when governments change, says Jess Reia, assistant professor of data science at the University of Virginia.

“The challenge is how to keep good policies after administration change – instead of having a pilot project for a few years, and then ending up with nothing,” she says.

Back in Montreal, there is no start date yet for 24-hour opening. Ms Alneus says the intention is to launch some time in the autumn.

“We are trying to be trailblazers, and to push forward something that everybody enjoys.” she says.

“There are venues, artists, initiatives and performances at night-time that should have the light on them – for the economic growth of the city, but also for the cultural identity of Montreal.”

As the Paris gymnastics arena roared on American Simone Biles for her third gold medal of the 2024 Olympics, one of those applauding was none other than An Chang-ok, a rival from North Korea.

Saturday’s women’s vault final saw the North share a stage with its foes South Korea and the US.

An, 21, grinned and waved for TV cameras and hugged at least one fellow finalist – rare interactions with foreigners by a young woman required to perform diplomatic gymnastics while being carefully chaperoned on her trip away from home.

Pyongyang’s decision to send athletes to these Games – two of whom even posed for a selfie with rivals from the South – has raised hopes that the secretive state could be partially reopening after a particularly deep period of isolation.

After all, this comes after a heated period that has seen the North sending waste-filled balloons at the South.

• Biles takes vault title in emphatic fashion
• Other big stories from day eight of the Games
• Who’s leading the medals table in Paris?

The North’s participation in these Games signalled a “remarkable” return to the international fold, suggested Jean H Lee, a former Associated Press journalist who opened the US news agency’s first bureau in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

It did not send any athletes to the Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021, after the country shut itself off from the world even more sternly than usual due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

But in Paris, it was “making the effort to rejoin the international community”, Lee said, “regardless of what’s happening with their nuclear programme, which is always the elephant in the room”.

The North’s nuclear ambitions are an enduring cause of tension with the South and the US. But there was no sign of animosity between the three nations’ gymnasts on Saturday.

This new generation of North Korean athletes have claimed two silvers in Paris, and occasionally surprised sport commentators who did not know what to expect from them.

Winning medals was not the country’s only aim, according to Prof Ramon Pacheco Pardo of King’s College London, who has written extensively on the two Koreas.

The age-old North Korean art of “sports diplomacy” involved limited participation in a global forum to prove the country was normal, Prod Pacheco Pardo said. Athletes were some of the “few actors that North Korea has who won’t be viewed suspiciously” by the world, he explained.

The contrasting support for An and Biles could not have been starker. In an earlier competition during the Games in Paris, Biles was memorably cheered on by a host of celebrity supporters in the stands, including Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Tom Cruise and Snoop Dogg. Thousands of punters yelled her name on Saturday, too.

An, meanwhile, received only polite appreciation from the neutrals. She had no compatriots in the room, since ordinary North Koreans are prevented from leaving their country.

It is unlikely that anyone was watching at home, either, as the Games are not being televised live in North Korea, according to Radio Free Asia (RFA). And BBC Monitoring has only been able to find a handful of text reports in the tightly-controlled state media.

Nonetheless, “the chattering class of Pyongyang certainly will, from one source or another” know the Olympic results as they come in, said John Everard, the UK’s ambassador to North Korea from 2006 to 2008.

An is among 16 North Korean who athletes have come to an opulent host city that could hardly be more different to the austere Pyongyang airport in which they were filmed setting off last month.

Top North Korean athletes were likely to have some awareness of the outside world, said Everard, but there was still likely to be a “shock factor”.

One of the viral moments of the Games so far was a rare encounter that seemed to break the boundaries: when a bronze-winning South Korean table-tennis player took a selfie that showed his mixed-doubles partner posing alongside the silver-winning North Korean duo.

Would the leadership in Pyongyang have anticipated – or relished – this brief symbol of unity between two nations who are still technically at war?

Agreeing to the selfie was “a message” from the North, said Prof Pachedo Pardo, who speculated that the move would have had Pyongyang’s consent. “North Korea is indicating that it doesn’t have a problem with South Korean people – that the issue it has is with the South Korean government.”

At any rate, the moment was not totally unexpected, after something similar in 2016. And two years later, North and South fielded a joint women’s ice hockey team at the Winter Games in the South.

The selfie represents one of the North’s few visible interactions with the outside world during the Games, including a perfunctory press conference by the two table-tennis stars.

Away from the stadiums, unverified footage has appeared to show An holding a collection of pin-badges, which are reported to be an item popularly traded by international gymnasts.

After so much exposure to the Western world, the athletes will probably undergo a gruelling “debrief” after returning home to ensure they stay on-message, said Lee, who is also the co-host of the BBC World Service’s Lazarus Heist podcast.

Contrary to the myth, any athlete deemed to have “failed” would probably not be punished, the analysts agreed. But they could face gruelling “self-criticism” sessions.

“The big hit for not winning a medal isn’t so much the punishment, it’s that you don’t gain all the benefits that you could have gained,” said Everard. Victorious athletes may be given higher status in society and even prizes such as a new home.

It remains to be seen whether this latest sporting diplomacy will translate into meaningful new talks between the two Koreas. The relative bonhomie in Paris was briefly imperilled at the outset by a furore when organisers mixed up the two nations’ names in the opening ceremony, for which they apologised.

Outside the Bercy Arena after Saturday’s gymnastics, one fan from the Seoul side was not convinced the politics would change much.

But she said the sight of sportspeople sharing a stage was at least a reminder that all Koreans were united by something “human”.

Two plain-clothed UK police officers were waiting for Dmitry Gudkov as he arrived at London’s Luton Airport last summer. The Russian opposition politician, who lives in exile in an EU country, was flying to the UK to attend a friend’s birthday.

“They were there to intercept me immediately after I exited the plane,” Dmitry says. “That had never happened to me before.”

But the police weren’t arresting him – instead, they wanted to warn him.

“They told me I’m on a list of people who are in danger. They asked where I’ll be staying and what phone I’ll be using.”

Dmitry Gudkov is the co-founder of the Anti-War Committee, an organisation that co-ordinates efforts to oppose the war in Ukraine. He is wanted in Russia for “spreading fakes” about the Russian army.

The start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a wide-ranging crackdown against opponents inside Russia. Almost all activists and independent journalists fled the country.

Now, a number of Kremlin critics living in Europe have told the BBC that Russia is stepping up its efforts to silence, threaten and persecute opponents abroad. Some were unwilling to share their stories publicly. The Russian embassy in London didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Analyst Mark Galeotti, who studies the Russian security services, agrees that the campaign against Russia’s “enemies” abroad is intensifying. “I think it reflects the growing paranoia of the Kremlin,” he says, “that it is involved in an existential political struggle.”

With all dissent snuffed out at home, Russia is turning its attention to opponents who have sought refuge in the West. Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, described them as “traitors who have gone over to the enemy and want their Fatherland to perish”.

Another anti-Kremlin activist was also contacted by British police. “They said they needed to discuss the safety of me and my family,” Ksenia Maximova tells me.

The founder of the Russian Democratic Society in London says the police advised her not to travel to certain countries where Russian agents operate more freely.

“[The Kremlin is] stepping up the campaign against ‘enemies’, that’s absolutely true,” she says, “They’re tightening the screws.”

She and her fellow campaigners have noticed an uptick in cyber attacks and attempts to infiltrate the group online.

In a statement to the BBC, a spokesperson for UK Counter Terrorism Policing said, “We have been open for some time now about the growing demand within our casework relating to countering state threats… We have been actively increasing resources dedicated to countering the activity of hostile states.”

In December, new UK legislation came into effect, giving police more powers to tackle threats from hostile states such as Russia.

“Parasites can’t sleep in peace…” was one of the messages that investigative journalist Alesya Marokhovskaya received last year.

The threats were accompanied by the name of the street in Prague where she lived. “I moved house to make it harder for them,” says Alesya.

“We thought it may just be some crazy Czech guy who was pro-Putin and had recognised me on the street.”

But then the messages became more sinister – calling her a “scumbag” and promising to find her “wherever she walks her wheezing dog”.

Alesya’s dog really does wheeze when it walks. She informed the Czech police.

Later, Alesya was due to fly to Sweden to attend a conference. The sender then sent even more specific threats: details of her flight, seat number and the hotel she had booked. “It was clear they had high-level access to documents,” Alesya says. “It looks like the behaviour of the Russian state.”

Alesya had been branded a ‘foreign agent’ years before by the Russian government, due to her work at independent Russian news website iStories.

“When I left Russia and came to Prague, I had this illusion of security,” says Alesya. “Now I realise that [Russian intelligence services] can get their hands on people almost anywhere in Europe. I can’t say I’m not afraid, because I am.”

But why is this happening now? Experts suggest the Russian security services are beginning to activate operations abroad after a period of turmoil. Hundreds of Russian diplomats believed to be intelligence agents operating under diplomatic cover were expelled from Western countries following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“There was a period of confusion after 2022,” says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who writes about the intelligence services. “In 2023, the agencies regrouped and found a new sense of purpose. They got resources and began increasing pressure.”

Mark Galeotti says the authorities are increasingly turning to proxies to do their dirty work – criminal gangs: “If you want someone beaten up or even killed, they’re a lot easier to engage,” says Mr Galeotti, who has been writing about the links between the Russian state and organised crime for years.

“They’re going to be some thug – maybe someone whom the Russian-based organised crime groups have at some point dealt with.”

The Polish government believes that’s what happened in the case of Leonid Volkov, a prominent activist and associate of the late Alexei Navalny. He was brutally attacked with a hammer in Lithuania four months ago, but survived.

The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, said a Belarusian man working for Russian intelligence had paid two Polish football hooligans to carry out the assault. All three have been arrested.

“Intimidation is the intent,” suggests Mark Galeotti. “The idea that you’d better keep your head down. It’s a way of deterring the emergence of some kind of coherent political opposition [to the Kremlin].”

The Russian authorities also try to make day-to-day life as difficult as possible for opponents abroad.

Activist Olesya Krivtsova, 21, escaped from Russia after being arrested and threatened with jail for anti-war posts on social media. She now lives in Norway, but recently discovered her Russian passport had been cancelled, meaning she can’t apply for travel documents.

“I think this is a new [method] of repression,” Olesya says. “They’re always thinking, how can we do more, how can we pressure them?”

Several other activists living abroad have also had their passports cancelled without warning. Many have criminal cases open against them in Russia – without a valid passport, they cannot hire lawyers or make payments back home. The only way to resolve the issue is to return to Russia.

For Olesya, returning would mean arrest and prison. She has now applied for a temporary Norwegian ID for refugees.

“In Russia, now I only have one right – the right to go to prison. My passport is cancelled. This shows the essence of their cruelty,” says the young activist.

“They’ve already completely destroyed my life and the life of my family…They’re never going to stop.”

“Mercury retrograde is coming back, my darlings.”

Sadicka, an astrologer and spiritual life coach, is telling her 5,000 Instagram followers to watch out for technology issues, trouble communicating with people and even car accidents, ahead of the planet Mercury going into retrograde from 4 August.

A few times a year, Instagram and TikTok are flooded with cautionary posts like this one – as well as more tongue-in-cheek content (think: “POV: you blame all of your problems on Mercury being in retrograde instead of actually dealing with them”).

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and Mercury retrograde is an optical illusion which occurs three or four times a year, making the planet appear to move in the opposite direction than it usually does.

It is a similar effect to when one car overtakes another and, to those in the faster car, the slower vehicle appears to be moving backwards. All planets appear this way from Earth at various points, as they orbit the Sun at different speeds.

People have observed Mercury going into retrograde for thousands of years, and many believers in astrology (the influence of stars and planets on interpersonal events) link it to an increase in personal problems.

• Why is astrology so popular now?
• ‘My astrology obsession stopped me leaving the house’

Lina Sahhab, a 42-year-old who works for a non-profit, tells the BBC that she once believed superstitions surrounding Mercury were just that.

“Then I started noticing that the obstacles in my life really happen when there is a Mercury retrograde,” she says.

“My laptop would suddenly stop working, or I would buy something that has to do with technology that would not function properly.”

The lack of evidence for astrology doesn’t harm its popularity, especially on social media.

In an era where we can both predict the weather and find answers to most of our questions on Google, astrology enthusiasts often look to horoscopes for guidance on things most humans still feel they have little control over – like romance, friendship or even technology.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that, according to Google Trends, searches for “birth chart” and “astrology” both hit five-year peaks in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time of immense uncertainty.

While astrology is now considered a pseudoscience, in the ancient civilisations in which it was first conceived, people needed ways to help them predict things like the timing of rainfall, temperature, wind and sunlight – and doing so was a survival skill.

Astrology can be traced back to between 3000BC and 2001BC to a region of West Asia then known as Mesopotamia. From there, it spread to India, and it eventually started to look more like it does now during the Hellenistic period (323BC to 31BC) in Ancient Greece.

According to Dr Nicholas Campion, professor of cosmology and culture at University of Wales Trinity Saint David, the Mercury retrograde phenomenon was discovered during the final century BC – but it wasn’t always interpreted as it is today.

Dr Campion says that in medieval times, if someone was trying to answer a question by plotting an astrological chart, Mercury being in retrograde was taken as a sign the answer was negative, or that something was “unlikely to happen”.

“It is only in the 20th century, in the astrology of the English-speaking world, that it came to mean ‘delays’ in particular,” says the astrology expert, adding that this interpretation took over in the 1980s.

Dr Campion says modern astrologists who subscribe to the influence of Mercury retrograde believe it means plans are going to be put on hold, or it is a bad time to start a new job or begin something new.

“It is very much a feature of a particular strand of western astrology,” he says. “Western astrology now spreads all over the world through social media and apps, so it is becoming global.”

Dr Campion says Mercury retrograde didn’t always have the same prominence that is does today: “It was always a very minor phenomenon in astrology.”

“Whilst astronomy and astrology may have been more closely rooted in the past, the general scientific consensus at present is that astronomical phenomena like retrogrades don’t have any predictable effect on people’s lives,” says Dhara Patel, of the National Space Centre in Leicester.

If science suggests Mercury retrograde may not have any bearing on our lives, why do so many people still turn to the stars for answers?

Some studies have linked belief in horoscopes and zodiac signs to “confirmation bias”, the tendency to believe or remember information that aligns with our pre-existing beliefs, and interpret it selectively to support them.

Zeinab Ajami, a clinical psychologist undertaking humanitarian mental health work in Ukraine, tells the BBC that “people tend to believe things that make them feel relieved or comfortable, and that do not require the brain to constantly analyse and reassess”.

She says astrology may provide a “fast and easy explanation” for difficult events, without the need for people to look at the “multiple layers to their problems”.

But many find star signs a gateway to inspiration, entertainment or some spiritual solace.

Mireille Hammal, a Beirut-based specialist in Reiki (a complementary therapy and form of energy healing), says clients who believe in the influence of the Mercury retrograde “usually avoid purchasing electronics during that period, or postpone signing contracts, moving to a new home or taking the step of getting married or engaged”.

Ms Hammal acknowledges that “a lot of people consider astrology to be just nonsense” but believes that it can be helpful to people as long as they avoid “reaching the point of obsession”.

Dr Campion, who runs an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, believes Mercury retrograde found popularity due to its simplicity – but says this can undermine how professional astrology is perceived.

“[Mercury retrograde] almost does not need any interpretation,” he says. “It’s not complicated or complex, and it applies to everybody.

“This idea that this is either a good or bad time for making plans really undermines the idea that astrology can be complex and nuanced,” he continues. “Because the fact is lots of things happen very well when Mercury is in retrograde.”

For the past two years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged to transform India into a high-income, developed country by 2047. India is also on course to become the world’s third largest economy in six years, according to several projections.

High-income economies have a per capita Gross National Income – total amount of money earned by a nation’s people and businesses – of $13,846 (£10,870) or more, according to the World Bank.

With a per capita income of around $2,400 (£1,885), India is among the lower middle-income countries. For some years now, many economists have been warning that India’s economy could be headed for a “middle income trap”.

This happens when a country stops being able to achieve rapid growth easily and compete with advanced economies. Economist Ardo Hannson defines it as a situation when countries “seem to get stuck in a trap where your costs are escalating and you lose competitiveness”.

A new World Bank report holds out similar fears. At the current growth rate, India will need 75 years to reach a quarter of America’s per capita income, World Development Report 2024 says. It also says more than 100 countries – including India, China, Brazil and South Africa – face “serious obstacles” that could hinder their efforts to become high-income countries in the next few decades.

Researchers looked at the numbers from 108 middle-income countries responsible for 40% of the world’s total economic output – and nearly two-thirds of global carbon emissions. They are home to three-quarters of the global population and nearly two-thirds of those in extreme poverty.

They say these countries face greater challenges in escaping the middle-income trap. These include rapidly ageing populations, rising protectionism in advanced economies and the urgent need for an accelerated energy transition.

“The battle for global economic prosperity will be largely won or lost in middle-income countries,” says Indermit Gill, chief economist of the World Bank and one of the study’s authors.

“But too many of these countries rely on outmoded strategies to become advanced economies. They depend just on investment for too long – or they switch prematurely to innovation.”

For example, the researchers say, the pace at which businesses can grow is often slow in middle-income countries.

In India, Mexico, and Peru, firms that operate for 40 years typically double in size, while in the US, they grow seven-fold in the same period. This indicates that firms in middle-income countries struggle to grow significantly, but still survive for decades. Consequently, nearly 90% of firms in India, Peru, and Mexico have fewer than five employees, with only a small fraction having 10 or more, the report says.

Mr Gill and his fellow researchers advocate a new approach: these countries need to focus on more investment, infuse new technologies from around the world and grow innovation.

South Korea exemplifies this strategy, the report says.

In 1960, its per capita income was $1,200 – it rose to $33,000 by 2023.

Initially, South Korea boosted public and private investment. In the 1970s, it shifted to an industrial policy that encouraged domestic firms to adopt foreign technology and advanced production methods.

Companies like Samsung responded. Initially a noodle-maker, Samsung began producing TV sets for domestic and regional markets by licensing technologies from Japanese firms.

This success created a demand for skilled professionals. The government increased budgets and set targets for public universities to develop these skills. Today, Samsung is a global innovator and one of the world’s largest smartphone manufacturers, the report says.

Countries like Poland and Chile followed similar paths, the report says. Poland boosted productivity by adopting Western European technologies. Chile encouraged technology transfer to drive local innovation, famously adapting Norwegian salmon farming techniques to become a top salmon exporter.

History provides enough clues about an impending middle-income trap. Researchers reveal that as countries grow wealthier, they often hit a “trap” at around 10% of US GDP per capita ($8,000 today), placing them in the middle-income range. That’s roughly in the middle of what the bank classifies as “middle-income” countries.

Since 1990, only 34 middle-income countries have transitioned to high-income status, with over a third benefiting from integration into European Union (EU) or newfound oil reserves.

Economists Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba separately estimate that even at a very respectable per capita income growth rate of 4%, India’s per capita income will reach $10,000 only by 2060, which is lower than China’s level today.

“We must do better. Over the next decade, we will see a possible population dividend, that is rise in the share of our population of working age, before we, like other countries, succumb to ageing,” they write in their new book Breaking The Mould: Reimagining India’s Economic Future.

“If we can generate good employment for all our youth, we will accelerate growth and have a shot at becoming comfortably upper middle class before our population starts ageing.”

In other words, the economists wonder, “Can India become rich before it becomes old?”

Some of Zambia’s top musicians have performed at a concert to mourn 46-year-old gospel singer Matthew Ngosa, a day before his burial in the capital, Lusaka.

The audience joined in to belt out his beloved hits at the Praise Christian Centre.

Such was the popularity of some of his songs that they were not only played in churches but also in nightclubs over a two-decade career.

The venue in Lusaka was packed with fans, friends, family and government officials. His older brother Boyd, also a musician – popularly known as BJ – led mourners.

Matthew started out singing with BJ and his younger brother Hezron when they were still at high school, often singing a cappella.

They knew they wanted to make a career out of their music – not an easy ambition in a country where piracy means most musicians get little money from their music.

Matthew and Hezron formed a duo called The Ezma Brothers within a larger group known as The Tribe Called Christians.

Later, at Lusaka’s Northmead Assemblies of God Church, Matthew joined The Christ Ambassador Choir, where he polished his skills.

In 2004 he released his highly successful debut album Umutima Wandi (My Heart), which dominated music charts.

Gospel hits including Ukulolela (Waiting) and Ndakunkula (Rolling to God in Praise) followed – those two also becoming anthems for clubbers.

Matthew Ngosa never made it rich, but was able to make a decent living from his hits before he was diagnosed with liver cancer in January.

He died two days before he had been due to return to India for a check-up.

Hezron told the BBC he would miss his brother’s sense of humour: “He would go out of his way to make people happy. He was very strong even in sickness. He was a man of faith.”

This generosity of spirit was echoed by gospel musician Kings Mumbi.

“To me, he was a mentor. When I recorded my first song, I took it to him to critique and that’s why I have never gone astray. He was more than a brother,” he told the BBC.

“When a pastor invited Matthew Ngosa to their church to sing but couldn’t pay him, he would not bother that pastor because for Matthew, singing was part of his ministry. He took it as a way of spreading the word of God.”

The development of Zambia’s music industry may suffer from piracy, but most Christians prefer buying original albums directly from the musicians as a way of promoting the growth of gospel music.

Others believe that buying pirated gospel music is a sin that is tantamount to theft.

“Your untimely death has crushed me, and broken the hearts of believers and shocked an entire nation,” televangelist and former Vice-President Nevers Mumba posted on Facebook after Ngosa’s death was announced on Friday.

“My only consolation is that I know you will announce your arrival in heaven from Zambia in style. As you walk through that golden door, I can almost hear you singing with all the power that your vocal cords can manage.”

His words reflect the outpouring of grief for Ngosa in Zambia, a largely Christian country where church attendance is high.

President Hakainde Hichilema conveyed his message of condolences to the family while his predecessor Edgar Lungu visited the funeral house on Saturday.

Ngosa, who had two daughters with Tasila Ngombe, once served as a civic leader in Mr Lungu’s party, the Patriotic Front.

BJ told the BBC that their mother Samaria Maswela was fundamental to all three of the Ngosa brothers’ careers.

“She used to sing in church and her own mother and father used to sing as well. Our mother is the one who introduced us to Sunday school music in the United Church of Zambia [UCZ] when we were still kids.”

She joined BJ on stage towards the end of the three-hour concert on Sunday, with other tearful family members, to sing Matthew’s classic Umutima Wandi – a praise song in the Bemba language, thanking God for life’s blessings.

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Rick Pero was working in southern Mexico when the evacuation alerts started going off on his phone.

A wildfire was threatening his California neighbourhood. Again.

Back home – roughly 2,800 miles (4,500km) away – a man at a popular swimming hole shoved a burning car down into a dry, grassy ravine. Almost instantly, the area ignited and those enjoying the summer day started to panic. The flames, about 15 miles (24km) from Mr Pero’s home, were spreading fast in the tinder dry brush.

“Uh oh, this is not looking good,” Mr Pero thought as he watched the blaze’s growth from his phone.

Within hours, the Park Fire had consumed more than 6,000 acres and residents in the area were forced to evacuate. With them, the suspected arsonist who police say blended into the worried crowd and fled the area.

Mr Pero, glued to his phone, packed his bags. He told his cat sitter to get his two felines and leave before it was too late. He knew the danger after surviving the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history in 2018 – which razed the town of Paradise and took 85 lives. His home was incinerated.

Mr Pero rebuilt his life in Forest Ranch, another small community about nine miles (14km) north of Paradise. He thought he was safe – his new “silver lining” home had stunning views and was much more fire resistant. But once again, a fire tore through his home and everything inside of it – possibly also stealing one of his cats that couldn’t be lured out of the house.

The metal disfigured shells of two vehicles remain where his garage once stood. Charred metal debris lay in piles. The foundations of the home aren’t even apparent anymore but some bricks from what appears to be a fireplace are stacked. The colourful sunset views over the wooded area behind his home now looks out on hundreds of scorched – and still smoking – pine trees.

“The big sadness is we have a very close-knit neighbourhood,” he said. “I’m again, so, so grateful that they were able to save all of my neighbours’ – almost all my neighbours’ – houses.”

• ‘Fire devils’ spotted as California fire doubles in size
• California suspect in court accused of starting huge wildfire

Wildfires are becoming more intense and more frequent.

The Park Fire, which started 24 July in a park in Chico, grew to more than 71,000 acres in just 24 hours. It’s now the fourth largest wildfire in California history after tearing through more than 400,000 acres, and – as with the Camp Fire – it spread at a shockingly fast and hot pace.

About 12 hours after the blaze started, the person authorities say is responsible was arrested. Police say Ronnie Dean Stout II was spotted starting the fire and blending into the crowd as people rushed to flee. Witnesses said he acted erratically and may have been intoxicated.

Authorities found him at a nearby mobile home park and charged him with arson. He has not entered a plea but reportedly told authorities his burning car rolled down the 60-foot embankment and it was an accident. He fled the area afterwards because he was afraid, Butte County District Attorney Michael Ramsey said.

The blaze has consumed land in four counties, scorching an area larger than the size of greater Los Angeles or London. Although most of the land is uninhabited by humans, hundreds of homes have been lost in the blaze and experts worry it could take months before it’s fully extinguished.

The area is a frequent target of destructive wildfires. The region in northern California “has had four of the largest 10 fires” in the state’s history, Cal Fire Incident Commander Billy See said at a news conference

Eight of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have happened in the last five years. Scientists say the impacts from wildfires and other extreme weather events have worsened due to climate change. And undoubtedly, this new fire will reinvigorate debates about where and how we live and rebuild in an increasingly hot and dry Western United States.

Last time he evacuated, in 2018, Mr Pero was home with his wife in Paradise. They had just 20 minutes to flee – but it was enough time to grab their photo albums, phones, computers, cars and cats.

That fire ripped through Paradise at a truly unprecedented speed and heat – catching everyone off guard with its ferocity. Of the 85 people who perished, many died in their cars, trying to escape on the rural town’s windy, mountain roads.

Paradise Police Sgt Rob Nichols was one of the many quick-thinking heroes that day. As fire engulfed the town, propane tanks exploded and power lines and burned-out cars blocked the road. His wife and young children got out safely, but Sgt Nichols stayed to help.

Along with firefighters and volunteers, they smashed the windows of an empty building that had a large parking lot – a barrier that could prevent the building from burning – and hustled about 200 people inside as they watched in horror as their beloved mountain town burned. Sgt Nichols lost everything he owned.

He still works in Paradise but he resettled with his family in Chico, about a mile from where the Park Fire ignited. Chico was where many of the Paradise evacuees headed in 2018 – many sleeping in tents around a Walmart or in camper vans until they could resettle elsewhere.

Sgt Nichols was on vacation – 135 miles (217km) away in Lake Siskiyou – when he started hearing news that a wildfire was threatening his home. Again.

“On our last evening up there, we couldn’t rest not knowing what was going on and how close it was to the home,” he said. “So we came home.”

Sgt Nichols didn’t anticipate how scary it would be for his children, ages 12 and 13, as they arrived home and saw flames taking over an area on the ridge above their neighbourhood.

“That was kind of a big trigger for them,” he said.

Fortunately, their house was spared. The wind sent the blaze in the opposite direction.

But it was close. He sometimes thinks about moving to a less fire prone area.

“My wife has a lot of family here,” he said, noting the ties that have kept them in the area. “And, you know, we lost seven homes. Her family lost seven homes in the Camp Fire. And so we don’t want to go too far.”

Paradise is likely safer now than most places, he argues, because there just isn’t much left to burn. He’d like to rebuild there, but building costs have skyrocketed and insurance is prohibitively expensive due to wildfires.

Now Sgt Nichols is patrolling around Chico – on loan from Paradise police – to help deter looters or opportunists who attempt to raid communities after an evacuation order.

Mr Pero saw his Forest Ranch house as a paradise away from Paradise because of its natural beauty and how close it kept him and his wife to the community they’d grown to love.

He became serious, maybe obsessed, about fire safety and was in charge of his neighbourhood’s fire mitigation. He says it’s “ironic” his home burned. He had about 50 yards of cleared space behind his house, a barrier he hoped would stop any potential blaze from continuing toward his oasis.

“It had 60,000-gallon water tanks. It also had fire hydrants on the street,” he said. “And the big part, it was also about a one-minute route to get evacuated out on Highway 32 versus nine hours in Paradise.”

Every year, they brought in hundreds of goats to clear brush, which can be like kindling for any fire, throughout the community. He urged his neighbours to make their homes fire safe by trimming trees and clearing brush.

He has hoped his lost cat – a striped grey and black feline named CatMandu – would have made it out alive. Mr Pero has been leaving out food and searching for him around the wreckage.

But the charred remains of his home are still too toxic to walk around – he needs a special mask and suit to search for any sign of the cat or any belongings that survived the blaze.

“I tried to look from the edges,” he said. “Didn’t see anything.”

Mr Pero and volunteers were finally able to safely sift through the wreckage of his home on Saturday. They found what the family most feared – the remains of CatMandu. He said it was “heartbreaking”.

Three other homes on his street also burned to the ground. They were owned by Paradise fire survivors, Mr Pero said.

He and his wife loved their time in Forest Ranch. But he doubts they will rebuild there. He says he doesn’t know if they can start over again in such a fire-prone area. They’re thinking maybe somewhere coastal – near water. Somewhere less dry. Somewhere safer.

He knows people who have relocated to the rain-prone state of Oregon and the often-rainy Ireland.

“We’re kind of wide open now.”

When Graeme Carroll started taking pictures of birds during the coronavirus pandemic, he found a natural affinity with both the art and his avian subjects. He shared some of the secrets of his success with the BBC (but don’t expect him to reveal his best locations).

Graeme suddenly stops talking mid-sentence and grabs the camera that permanently hangs on a strap from around his neck.

He crouches and points his long, camouflage-clad lens at a sudden frenzy of movement in the ferns beside the footpath.

“I’m sure it’s a wren,” he whispers.

Suddenly, the foliage stops flittering and the chirping that had accompanied it ceases. The bird has clearly gone, evading Graeme’s Sony A1 camera.

Wrens “are very flighty,” he says with a laugh.

On another day he might set up a stool and sit there for a while to see if it returns, but we’ve got other sites to scout.

Over the past four years, Graeme has become something of an expert in birds and spends many hours trying to find the best spots to see them in his native Durham dales.

“You have got to put the time in,” he says, as we push through waist-high ferns beside the Bollihope Burn, the beck that weaves through a small valley of old mine workings sandwiched between Weardale and Teesdale.

“It’s always luck when you get a good picture of a bird, but there are things you can to do to increase the chances of that good luck.”

This is one of his favourite bird-watching spots and one he is happy to share, chiefly because it is already well-known to many “twitchers and toggers”, bird watchers and photographers.

He is very protective of his sites and guards their locations fiercely, fearful that they could be spoiled and his beloved birds disturbed if the wrong people find out where they are.

For Graeme, part of the fun and satisfaction is getting a shot of a truly wild creature going about its business.

There is one spot he likes near Muggleswick where he can lie on his back among the heather and watch the red kites soar above him.

Above us swallows dart through the air, Graeme takes a picture of a damsel fly and the brook to our side continues to babble.

He really wants to find the stonechat which he knows frequent the valley, but they prove elusive – for now.

He has already got a good shot of a dipper, achieved by crawling on his belly to the side of the beck to snap away on his silent camera as the little bird skipped over the pebbles.

We reach an enclosure, where Graeme once took a bucket-list picture of a cuckoo mid-song as it perched on a dead tree.

He had scouted the spot for three years waiting to see the bird, so was delighted when it finally paid off, research being a key part of his process to get the best shots.

Cutting our losses with the stonechats, we head back to his car and on to the road over the moors to Teesdale.

Up to 80% of his time is spent in the car; some of his best shots are from his red Mazda.

He spends hours crawling along country lanes, his front windows down so as to not obscure any potential photo opportunity and his camera, fitted with a 200-600m lens, within easy reach on the passenger seat.

Graeme is, he says, a very “irritating” driver, but mindful of that, he always pulls over to let other motorists pass.

He constantly scans the skies for circling silhouettes and fence posts and branches for those that may be perched.

The first U-turn of the day came on our way to Bollihope from his home in Wolsingham, an abrupt about-face after he saw a kestrel sitting atop one of the large red and white poles used to mark the edge of the road in the winter snows.

The second arrives about 10 miles (16km) later as we crest a hill and start our descent into Middleton-in-Teesdale.

As we pass the gateway to a farm, Graeme lets out a cry.

“A curlew,” he says, and I just glimpse its long curved beak as we pass.

He swings the car round, exclaiming: “You don’t normally see them here at this time of the year. They and the lapwings are usually gone by now.”

Thankfully, it is still sitting on the gate post when Graeme pulls up and he takes a flurry of shots.

Birds are more bothered by people than cars, Graeme says, adding he can drive pretty close without disturbing them.

Keeping the disturbance of the birds to a minimum is key for Graeme, who describes himself as an “ethical photographer” who follows the birdwatcher’s code.

He won’t use baits or bird calls to try and lure his subjects (the latter being illegal for a number of species), and once he has got a picture he will leave so as to not deter a bird from hunting if it has found a place it likes.

The fun is in scouting out and researching an area to try and find the birds in their natural habitat.

It all started for Graeme during the coronavirus pandemic when his hobby of playing music for several bands, including a Deep Purple tribute act, was curtailed by the cancellation of gigs.

Graeme, who works as a website administrator for Durham County Council, needed something new to occupy him so started taking pictures of the birds visiting the feeder in his garden.

That migrated to going out for walks to take pictures of other birds and he quickly became obsessed.

“I don’t do things by halves,” he says with another laugh, recounting how he spent hours watching online tutorials to learn how to identify birds and get the best out of his new camera, which he normally has set to 30 frames a second with manual controls.

“I cannot emphasise it enough, you have got to learn how to use the gear,” he says.

Fractions of a second count and he can change apertures and focuses with a flick of his finger without taking his eyes from his quarry.

For every two or three pictures he shares on his social media or looks to sell as a print, he has probably taken up to 800, he says.

With the curlew added to his collection, we move on to Graeme’s “secret road”, one of his most-prized locations for spotting all manner of feathered friends.

We don’t see the owls he has encountered along here before, and our excitement at thinking we have spotted a meadow pipit perched on a post is rapidly doused when we realise it is just a splinter out of the wood.

But then suddenly, Graeme’s efforts pay off as we sight a stonechat, the feathered fiend who had evaded us earlier, sitting happily atop a fence post.

The adult male poses obligingly as Graeme snaps away, then moments later we see a juvenile with a caterpillar hanging from its mouth that delights Graeme even more.

As we head back into Weardale, Graeme turns off on to a side road where, he says with a mischievous laugh, we are guaranteed to find an “incredibly large bird”.

The reason for his mirth becomes apparent when we round a bend and see three peacocks swaggering around next to an old stone farmhouse.

“They are always here and are practically feral,” he says as we drive by.

We pass through the market town of Stanhope and up the steep Crawleyside Bank to the moors beyond and, after spotting red kites circling near Edmundbyers, our final stop lies near three old oak trees close to Muggleswick.

We wait in the hopes of seeing a little owl that Graeme has photographed before.

His longest stake out was a nine-hour watch for a black-crowned night heron near Wakefield, which he finally saw for three or four seconds.

“Of course it was worth it,” he says with full sincerity.

His favourite birds are the grey herons found on and around the River Wear, and the short-eared owls he has seen at several spots, including his secret road.

He also adores green woodpeckers having become infatuated with one of his grandfather’s table mats which featured an illustration of one.

There is a small population in the woods of Auckland Castle in Bishop Auckland but he is yet to photograph them, he says, although they are very much on his list.

As we watch the oaks, there is a moment of excitement when a flock of crows suddenly take flight, suggesting there is a predator, such as an owl, about.

But we fail to see what excited them and decide to call it quits, the midday sun now too bright to take a good picture in even if the birds are still around, which is not so likely at this time of the day.

“Welcome to my world,” he says with another laugh as we head back to Wolsingham where he will edit some of today’s shots.

“I just love it,” he says. “I like the peace.

“I spend my day at a computer, getting out into the beautiful County Durham countryside is fantastic for my mental health.

“I am addicted and I do have some missed opportunities that still haunt me, but I can laugh it off.

“Every time you go out you can see something different, and you can always take a better picture.”

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At the age of 23, Nigerian musician Udoh Ebaide Joy survived a traumatic car accident.

It damaged her spinal cord and for months she could not get around without a wheelchair.

But alongside the pain, Ms Joy felt an overwhelming sense of clarity.

“It made me decide that I will live my life to the fullest,” she told the BBC’s Africa Daily podcast.

In the time since she recovered, Ms Joy has put her energy – and all her savings – into travelling, even converting a 1980s Nissan van into a home on wheels.

But Ms Joy’s greatest adventure took place this year when, at the age of 32, she became the first documented black African woman to travel solo from East to West Africa on a motorcycle.

The Afrobeats singer did a 9,000km (5,600 miles) trip from the Kenyan city of Mombasa to Lagos in Nigeria, and she spent more than three months travelling.

Along the way she experienced gorgeous scenery, visa problems, an underground community of African bikers, lone rides through “scary” forests and an epic, tear-jerking homecoming celebration.

“Being alone and travelling on those roads, not understanding the language, I was always travelling with fear, which was good because my fears keep me alive,” she says.

The journey began earlier this year when Ms Joy flew to Kenya and bought a 250cc motorbike, which she named Rory.

Having never even ridden a standard bicycle, let alone a motorbike, she took a one-week training course in the capital, Nairobi, to prepare for her adventure.

Then, on 8 March, Ms Joy embarked on her odyssey through Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Angola, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Nigeria.

She opted to avoid the Democratic Republic of Congo because of conflict in the east and other safety issues, as well as the poor condition of the roads.

Kenya was the perfect starting point – “the people, the friendliness” were second to none, she says.

The “crazy” roads of Kampala, Uganda’s capital, naturally threw her a few challenges.

However after this experience, she rode to her next destination – Rwanda, and was very impressed by its “seamless” border crossing.

When entering numerous other countries Ms Joy faced extra costs, bureaucracy and hours-long delays.

But Rwanda is one of the few nations on the continent with visa-free travel for all Africans.

It was also “a motorcyclist’s dream” – its mountainous terrain was perfect for practising how to lean from side to side while riding. This was something Ms Joy truly embraced and enjoyed.

Tanzania provided the most memorable meal of Ms Joy’s trip.

After riding for several hours without seeing a single person, she encountered a village in the middle of a forest. Local women at an eatery served a hungry Ms Joy some soup, a huge platter of roasted chicken, and a bowl of fluffy white rice.

“They were fascinated by a girl on a motorcycle and interested in my bad Swahili,” she laughs. “The conversation was so sweet, it just felt good to eat and to see people.”

Along with curious locals, Ms Joy encountered many sites of cultural significance and natural beauty on her trip. She was enthralled by the Victoria Falls on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border.

“It felt great! I’d heard about Victoria Falls forever – for heaven’s sake, it’s one of the seven [natural] wonders in our own universe,” she says.

She met bikers from various countries on her trip, and they joined her for short legs of her journey, recommending where to stay or eat.

An app for bikers also proved invaluable, allowing her to get tips and other advice.

When she started out Ms Joy had intended to camp at night by the roadsides, but soon gave up on the idea as unsafe – and half-way through her journey sent her tent and other camping equipment back home to reduce her baggage.

From Kampala onwards she stayed in cheap hotels – sometimes staying a few days in one place to explore.

“On days I rode, I did at least 300km,” she said, explaining she would often ride overnight.

In Angola, bikers threw her a party – to celebrate the journey she had taken so far.

“It’s a small community,” she says. “No matter where you are, if you get the right connection, you can meet any biker anywhere.”

Those without the ability – or inclination – to jump on a bike and ride alongside Ms Joy, were able to travel with her virtually.

She posted dozens of slick mini-vlogs on social media, captivating viewers across the world with her humour and honesty.

When she had an internet connection, she would send her recordings to someone back home, who would edit the footage and post videos for her.

By the end of the trip, she had reached more than 100,000 followers on Instagram.

Many of these supporters were women, who were proud to see Ms Joy overcoming gender-based stereotypes.

She showed the world she was a woman on a bike, fulfilling her own adventure, doing something for herself.

“Thank you for showing the WORLD how amazing women can be!” one commented.

Ms Joy did not face any discrimination whilst meeting people on her journey.

“People ask about the negativities, but I have not experienced the negatives,” she says.

“Yes, people are fascinated about a girl on a bike, but I’ve not had any bad experiences.”

The positivity she encountered throughout the journey peaked when she reached her final destination – Lagos, the main city in Nigeria.

Fellow bikers and other members of the public crowded the street to give her a hero’s welcome in an event organised by Nigeria’s arts and culture ministry.

“When I arrived, I couldn’t hold back my tears. People were dancing and cheering. I couldn’t contain my excitement,” Ms Joy remembers.

After sleeping “non-stop for three days”, she concludes that the trek changed her outlook on life.

“The trip taught me that I am resilient and tenacious enough to overcome any challenge that life throws at me,” she says.

“I had the best time of my life.”

She has no plans to hang up her leathers though. In just over a month, she will set off on a journey from Nigeria to Morocco.

Biking is a “lifetime lesson”, she explains – it has taken her to the most sublime places and introduced her to the most wonderful people.

• LISTEN: Udoh Ebaide Joy talks to Africa Daily
• Trekking 10,000km across Africa for a football match
• ‘Born to be wild’: Kenya’s female biker gang

The BBC has begun to remove Huw Edwards from some of its archive footage after the former broadcaster pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children.

It is starting with family and entertainment content on iPlayer, according to the Observer which first reported on the move.

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

“As you would expect we are actively considering the availability of our archive,” a BBC spokesperson said.

“While we don’t routinely delete content from the BBC archive as it is a matter of historical record, we do consider the continued use and re-use of material on a case-by-case basis.”

Edwards resigned from the BBC in April citing medical advice. On Wednesday, he admitted having 41 indecent images of children, which had been sent to him by another man on WhatsApp.

The Observer claimed that the removal of certain content was aimed at “protecting audiences from repeats of Edwards’ most visible work in news and on state occasions”, including the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.

A Doctor Who episode featuring Edwards’ voice has already been removed from iPlayer.

The episode from 2006 features David Tennant and Billie Piper as the Doctor and his companion Rose Tyler. The pair travel to the future to the London 2012 Olympics where Edwards’ voice is heard as part of a televised BBC news report.

A mural of the former newsreader in the presenter’s home village of Llangennech, Carmarthenshire has also been removed.

Artist Steve Jenkins, 50, painted over the portrait on Tuesday after it was announced Edwards had been charged.

Cardiff council has also removed a plaque honouring Edwards at Cardiff Castle.

In a separate development, The Sunday Times has revealed that a woman who complained to the BBC about Edwards twice is having therapy paid for by the corporation.

The newspaper says the woman, a member of the public called Rachel, struck up a friendship with Huw Edwards in 2018 over social media.

In 2021, Rachel complained about Edwards, alleging the relationship was becoming “toxic”. She complained about him again the following year.

She retracted both her complaints. Nevertheless, the newspaper reports that the BBC warned Edwards about his behaviour and told him to stop contacting her, but he did not.

After an investigation into its handling of Rachel’s complaints, the BBC admitted shortcomings in its processes. It is still paying for Rachel’s therapy.

A BBC Spokesperson said: “If a complaint is made, or concern raised, about how the BBC handles such a complaint then we always investigate thoroughly, provide support to those involved and be as transparent as possible in relation to our work, findings and any resolution.”

It has also emerged that the BBC board, which oversees the running of the corporation, has asked executives for two briefing papers covering their response to Edwards’ arrest in November and the internal disciplinary process he faced.

Milla Magee was crowned Miss England in May with some reports calling her the first plus size Miss England.

The 23-year-old said whatever your size “it doesn’t matter” and she wants to use her reign to spread the message.

She lives in Newquay in Cornwall, but grew up in London where she was surrounded by rock ‘n’ roll, with a mum who worked at Creation Records, the label of Oasis and Primal Scream.

Her godmother is Noel Gallagher’s ex-wife Meg Matthews, and Milla was “trying to conform to the lifestyle”.

“I went to an all-girls school and I think that’s where the struggle started,” she said.

“A lot of the other girls were petite and small.

“It’s not in my bone structure to look like that but I tried to conform to that because it’s what society told me I had to look like.”

What followed was body dysmorphia, a condition which causes people to believe they are extremely ugly.

She said: “And then I just it dawned on me, I thought, ‘no, I will make it my style’.”

Looking back to curvy beauties of the past such as Marilyn Monroe was her inspiration.

“We had role models of women back in the day, like the gorgeous Marilyn Monroe, who was curvaceous, or models like Naomi Campbell, who are very tall and athletically built,” she said.

“And they’re so beautiful, and embrace their looks.

“It’s about embracing whatever we’ve been born with and it’s still beautiful.”

Now, winning the Miss England title as the only size 16 in the line-up, she wants to be “that representative that I wish I had”.

What also helped her shun the demands of the body perfect was surfing on trips down from London and in Newquay where she has lived since she was 16.

“Surfing saved my life because at that time living in London I struggled a lot mentally and that was trying to conform to the lifestyle that I was born into,” she said.

“It was a very different lifestyle to the way I live now.

“I was trying to conform to my surroundings because we’ve got this image of what men and women should look like.

“But if you’re passionate and stay true to yourself, if you’re kind and humble that’s all that matters.”

She took this body positive message all the way to the podium when she was crowned Miss England in May.

She accepted there was still a tension between what was perceived by many as a beauty contest and shunning body stereotypes, but urges a different outlook on the contest.

She said rather than being a beauty contest the ethos of Miss England is now “beauty with a purpose”.

“I wanted to be part of the movement to change perspective on these so-called pageants,” she said.

“It’s evolved so much with women from all walks of life coming together.

“We’ve had firefighters, we’ve had lawyers, we’ve had doctors, myself as the first surfer and lifeguard to represent.

“You can’t not be inspired by the women around you. It’s not about the physical on the outside, it’s about beauty from the inside.”

Did she mention lifeguard?

Yes, she trained at Fistral in Newquay and is taking it further with her campaign Go Far with CPR – which calls for the teaching of the resuscitation technique CPR to be compulsory in schools.

“It’s a skill that you can do wherever you are in the world, but it is the difference between life and death,” she said.

“Both of my grandfathers passed away before I was born due to heart attacks.”

Back at Fistral, she is on a mission to spread the word all the way to the Miss World event next year.

“I feel like if I can use my voice and use this opportunity, not only to represent… represent our beautiful country, but also use my voice for positive change and for good, that is what my purpose is,” she said.

“If I can be a representative to all those young girls who look at me and think that they can relate to that, then I’ve done my job,” she said.

X (formerly Twitter)

“Hopefully the fans will be happy because we’re trying to be as loyal to the source material as we can be.”

The season finale of House of the Dragon, a prequel to Game of Thrones, airs on Sunday, with millions of fantasy fanatics expected to tune in.

Based on George RR Martin’s novel, A Song of Ice and Fire, the HBO drama sees fiery beasts, battles and family feuds take centre stage.

Behind the photo-realistic visual effects and intricate plots lies an immense effort in production with the show’s costumes captivating audiences and critics.

Emmy award-winning designer Caroline McCall from Portadown in County Armagh joined the show for its second season and plays a crucial role in bringing the fictional kingdom of Westeros to life.

Fresh from her work on the BBC and HBO’s fantasy drama His Dark Materials, Caroline said she was “really excited to try to get my teeth stuck into another one”.

“I was excited by the scale of it, and slightly apprehensive when I got the job… [House of the Dragon] is a huge show with an amazing scope of design as a costume designer,” she told BBC News NI.

“I was very excited to get the opportunity to pitch for the job.”

Caroline was hired to replace renowned designer Jany Temime – best known for her work on the Harry Potter film series – who she said built a strong foundation for the series.

“I had the benefit that there was already a really great costume team on board,” she said.

“A lot of the team already knew the workings of the show, so that was really helpful.”

Born in County Armagh, Caroline found early inspiration at Belfast’s Grand Opera House where theatre productions sparked her interest in costume design from a young age.

After studying a foundation course at Ulster University, she then embarked on a three-year costume degree at Wimbledon School of Art in London.

She then trained with the BBC, climbing her way up the industry before winning an Emmy in 2011 for her work on period drama Downton Abbey.

This summer, she is celebrating her 25th year in the film industry, during which she has witnessed significant changes back home.

Game of Thrones was primarily filmed on location in Northern Ireland and has sparked a film boom there.

“I’m rather jealous that there’s an industry now,” she said.

“I think it’s fantastic that it’s so well established. I have several team members from Northern Ireland who trained on Thrones.”

House of the Dragon is set 200 years before Game Of Thrones, and follows the fortunes of the Targaryens – a noble family with the power to control dragons.

With hundreds of costumes to oversee, where does a designer begin?

“It’s huge,” Caroline said.

“The fans of the show, and particularly those who have read the books, have got very firm ideas of how things should be.

“The politics and the economics of these places have changed between our show and Game Of Thrones.

“To dress people accordingly, basically in a redefined Westeros, was quite something to get my head around.”

In season two, the houses have separated, “so there’s a natural reason to redesign quite a lot of the principle characters”, Caroline explained.

Her research spanned “thousands of years of history” as she drew inspiration from cultures including the Roman and Byzantine Empires and the Mayans.

“I took all this reference and sort of divvied it up in to what aesthetically worked for each house,” she said.

“For example, the Targaryen look, it’s sort of brutalist in style, in terms of it’s adornment and embroidery, it’s more abstract, whereas the folks at Kings Landing are more naturalistic.”

With a team of up to 300 people, costumes are painstakingly dyed, printed and decorated, often taking months to complete.

The first series of House of the Dragon, much like its predecessor, faced some criticism for its dark cinematography, something that showrunner Ryan Condal has acknowledged and adjusted.

“We went into season two very conscious of that feedback,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

The cinematography is something Caroline was very aware of as she produced her garments.

“We tried before filming to look at colours on camera and in the environments that they would be in, to sort of make sure the greens were reading green or the blues were reading blue,” she said.

“Some of the sets are really dark, and they should be, Dragonstone and Harrenhal don’t have a lot of natural light coming in.”

House of the Dragon was one of the few US productions that continued to shoot during the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes.

For almost three months in 2023, industry writers and actors walked out in a dispute over fair pay and the use of artificial intelligence in the industry.

But the House of the Dragon cast did not take part because the show was mainly filmed in the UK under contracts overseen by British union Equity, rather than its striking US counterpart the Screen Actors Guild.

The show’s writer Ryan Condal previously told the BBC it was a “fraught period”, but a “great privilege” to keep the cast and crew employed.

So what’s next for the designer, and the House of the Dragon?

With details on season three kept tight-lipped, Caroline revealed that she will once again be working on the show, which she said will be her main focus for the next 14 months – albeit with a brief break for award season next year, one would assume.

Could the show repeat previous successes at the Baftas, Golden Globes or Costume Designers Guild Awards? It’s not something the designer has given much thought.

“You just have to do your best work and it all depends on what other productions are out…there’s an awful lot of fantasy and science fiction shows out this year,” she said.

“We’ll see.”

On a crisp September night in 1943, a woman boarded a warplane ready to return to Poland to fight the Nazis, a parachute strapped to her back and a blue dress beneath her flight suit.

Elżbieta Zawacka had arrived in the UK in May following a perilous journey lasting several months across 1,000 miles of occupied territory.

Branded “the captain in a skirt” and “a militant female dictator” as she confronted those in charge in London, her efforts would transform the status of women in the Polish Home Army, helping to save thousands of lives.

On her return to her homeland, and having played a major role in the largest organised insurrection against Germany in World War Two, her “reward” was to be captured, tortured and jailed by her own government.

So who was the woman who went by the name of Zo, and what inspired her to acts of such defiance and bravery?

Elżbieta Zawacka was born in 1909 in the city of Toruń, a part of Poland which had been under the control of Prussia, then later Germany, for nearly a century.

At the end of World War One, the area was reclaimed by Poland. When both Germany and the Soviet Union invaded the country in September 1939, Zawacka joined the underground resistance, taking the code name Zo and building an intelligence network made up nearly entirely of women that covered the size of Wales.

Her blonde hair and perfect German made her an ideal candidate to act as its main courier, smuggling microfilms packed with military information hidden in objects such as toothpaste tins, keys and cigarette lighters – often into Berlin where the illicit cargo would be handed to another agent to be passed on to the West.

“It’s really ironic,” says Clare Mulley, historian and author of a new book, . “She has to bring information from Nazi-occupied Poland right into the heart of the Third Reich as that’s the fastest way they can get it to London.”

In May 1942 her network was infiltrated by the Nazis and soon Gestapo officers were in hot pursuit. At one point, Mulley says, Zo leapt from the door of a moving train to evade an officer who had joined her in the carriage.

With her intelligence network compromised and her name and face known, she was handed a new mission.

Assigned by the commander of Poland’s Home Army, Gen Stefan Rowecki, as his personal representative, Zo was instructed to cross occupied Europe to pass orders to the country’s government-in-exile, which was based in London.

Departing in February 1943, the journey first took her back to Berlin and then on to Paris, where she soon feared the worst when her fake identity papers were confiscated by a hotel clerk.

“She knows they think there’s something up, but when they return them to her the next morning, they say, ‘What wonderful papers, we kept them to compare against a possible forgery,'” says Mulley.

Needing to reach Gibraltar to catch a troopship to Britain, Zo next hid herself inside a secretly adapted tender (water-tank carriage) on a train used by French politician and Nazi collaborator Pierre Laval.

This took her to the Pyrenees, almost drowning her in the process, from where she trekked across the mountain range into Spain.

Again Zo was nearly captured. At one point, Mulley says, she was thrown out of a hotel window by her guideto shake off two German officers who had picked up her resistance companions. She was later shot at as she crossed the frozen mountain passes.

Zo finally boarded a ship to Liverpool where she was immediately picked up by MI6 and taken to its south London base, amid fears she was an enemy agent.

Papers held by the National Archives show this questioning was seemingly done in the most British way possible.

“One of the very first memos is from her interrogating officer and he just says rather pathetically: ‘She was rather reluctant to pass information on to me.’

“I love that. It’s very polite,” laughs Mulley.

Zo soon moved into a hotel in Piccadilly and joined up with the Polish authorities, who were bemused by the arrival of someone who had gained legendary status – but was also a woman.

“They don’t know whether to salute her or to bow and kiss her hand,” Mulley says.

For Polish war hero Kazimierz Bilski, there was one thing for it. He declared that “out of a bachelor’s long-standing habit, I tried my best to draw her into some semblance of flirtation”.

“He takes her across St James’s Park and it’s spring and there’s bluebells and birdsong and American GIs making out with the English girls, and he pulls from his pocket these silk stockings like an amorous magician and flirts with her,” explains Mulley.

“Zo’s absolutely appalled because the only women wearing silk stockings in Poland are the wives of Gestapo officers. She could be killed if she was caught with them.

“It just shows to her how little he understands what the situation is like behind enemy lines.”

As a courier she had witnessed first hand the risks members of the resistance took when smuggling intelligence across Europe and, in her usual forthright fashion, Zo set out to inform the Polish leaders of their ignorance.

“I started to point out their mistakes… I’m quite direct in these matters,” she later recorded.

“The London end isn’t really working very well so she sorts that out,” Mulley explains.

The matter of greatest importance to Zo was a mission given to her by Gen Rowecki, to secure from Poland’s government-in-exile the same legal military rights for women in the Home Army as male soldiers had.

“He’s not a feminist or equal opportunities employer or anything like that. He’s doing it because he knows it’s of real importance to the Home Army’s effort,” Mulley says.

Poland’s Home Army was the largest resistance force in occupied Europe but with many men stuck overseas, there was a need to recruit as many women as possible and for them to have military ranks.

“The women can’t discipline soldiers and they can’t give orders; they can only ask politely, and that’s not the way an army runs,” says Mulley.

The government-in-exile “just can’t believe that women should be given military legal status”, Mulley explains, and Zo was branded “an insane feminist”.

Yet she drafted a legal decree on women’s military status that became law and which would prove lifesaving the following year.

Zo was determined to return to the fight in her homeland, and joining up with Poland’s elite paratrooper unit in Britain – known as the Cichociemni or Silent Unseen – made this possible.

During the war, several of the UK’s stately homes were requisitioned as training camps and Zo was sent to Audley End House, in Essex, to brief the troops about how to remain unnoticed in occupied Poland.

It was also where she began her own training, and on 9 September 1943 she became one of only 316 Cichociemni out of some 2,500 recruits to be flown home.

“I quite like the line she’s the only person to parachute back from Britain to Nazi-occupied Poland in a dress because she’s the only woman to do it,” Mulley says.

Back on home soil, Zo’s underground work continued but it would be her influence during the Warsaw Uprising – a rebellion launched against the Nazis on 1 August 1944 – that proved most significant.

With the Polish fighters finally surrendering after 63 days of brutal combat, which left some 200,000 people dead, Zo’s work to gain military status for female soldiers spared countless women the fate of being executed or sent to concentration camps.

“Previously when the Nazi Germans captured women who are involved in resistance… they considered them to be basically bandits or commandos and Hitler has got this Commando Order – after a raid on the Channel Islands, he said that anyone who is found fighting not in uniform will be shot without trial,” says Mulley.

Recent estimates by Poland’s Warsaw Uprising Museum suggest up to 12,000 women took part.

“They have protections under the Geneva Convention, which means it’s the only time in the war that Nazi Germany sets up prisoner-of-war camps for women,” Mulley says.

Zo, though, managed to sneak away from her captors to continue her resistance work.

Yet along with many other resistance fighters who were considered a threat by the Soviet-backed communist authorities who took power in Poland as World War Two ended, Zo was arrested. She was tortured and sentenced to 10 years in jail.

Released after six years, she would remain closely watched, her wartime heroics kept hidden by those in charge.

In secret, Zo managed to collect the resistance stories of women who had served in the war. These were eventually used to create a museum in her hometown of Toruń.

Zo, who died aged 99 in January 2009, became only the second woman to attain the status of brigadier general in the Polish Army, a rank conferred upon her in the years after communist government fell.

So what drove this woman who was so determined to see her causes to the end?

“One of the things I like about her is that when she talks after the war, she speaks about recruiting many of her friends and she sometimes says, ‘They were so grateful to me, they were so delighted that I enabled them the chance to serve their nation,'” Mulley says.

“And then you look at some of the paperwork of her friends and they said: ‘Zo came and she terrified me. I couldn’t do anything else. I had to do it.’

“They’ve got a very different perspective on it but she sort of blithely assumes that everyone shares her very binary world vision – they’re bad, we’ve got to free Poland.

“That’s it. That’s what’s driving her.”

There will be an emergency response meeting in Downing Street on Monday after more than 150 people were arrested following violent disorder in UK towns and cities over the weekend.

It comes after Sir Keir Starmer condemned an attack on a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham and promised those involved in unrest would face “the full force of the law”.

Police responded to violent scenes in Tamworth, Middlesbrough, Bolton, Hull and Weymouth, among other parts of the UK.

The prime minister vowed to do “whatever it takes to bring these thugs to justice” as he addressed the nation on Sunday.

Cobra meetings, or Cobr meetings as they are often also called, are named after Cabinet Office Briefing Room A on Whitehall.

It is an emergency response committee, a get together of ministers, civil servants, the police, intelligence officers and others appropriate to whatever they are looking into.

Monday’s meeting of the emergency committee will be intended to provide the government with an update on the violence over the weekend and the response in the coming days. It will involve relevant ministers and police representatives.

Sources have suggested this should be seen in the context of meetings that have already taken place, such as one between the prime minister and police chiefs last Thursday, and a meeting of senior ministers on Saturday.

During the prime minister’s televised address on Sunday, he warned those involved that they will “regret” taking part.

“People in this country have a right to be safe, and yet we’ve seen Muslim communities targeted, attacks on mosques,” the prime minister said.

“Other minority communities singled out, Nazi salutes in the street, attacks on the police, wanton violence alongside racist rhetoric, so no, I won’t shy away from calling it what it is: far-right thuggery.”

In a statement, the Home Office offered mosques greater protections as part of a new process, under which it said “rapid security” deployment can be requested in order to allow a return to worship as fast as possible.

The Cobra meeting will come after a sixth day of escalating violence following the fatal stabbing of three young girls in Southport last Monday.

Since Saturday, more than 150 arrests have been made.

In Rotherham, at least ten police officers were injured with one left unconscious after anti-immigration demonstrators threw planks of wood at officers and sprayed them with fire extinguishers, South Yorkshire police said.

Some members of the group smashed windows to gain access to the Holiday Inn Express and a large bin was set alight.

The officer knocked unconscious suffered a head injury, the force said, adding that at least two others had suspected broken bones.

Hotel employees and residents, some of whom are asylum seekers, were “terrified”, but no injuries were reported, police said.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper called the scenes “utterly appalling” and said police have government backing to take “the strongest action”.

At a second hotel in Tamworth, Staffordshire, officers said they had to deal with “violent acts of thuggery” on Sunday evening.

One officer was injured at the site as people threw missiles, smashed windows, and started fires, Staffordshire Police said.

Meanwhile, a group of rioters in Middlesbrough smashed the windows of houses and cars and hurled objects at officers.

In Dorset, 600 people from opposing sides gathered on the seafront in Weymouth. Officers said there had been a “small number of low-level incidents”, with one man arrested for a public order offence.

And in Bolton, anti-immigration protestors were confronted by a group of up to 300 masked people shouting “Allahu Akbar” – or “God is greatest”.

Greater Manchester Police issued a Section 60AA order in the town which requires people to “remove face coverings used to disguise or conceal their appearance”.

The violence followed similar scenes of unrest in Southport, Belfast, Hartlepool, Hull, Liverpool, Stoke-on-Trent, Nottingham, Sunderland and elsewhere earlier in the week.

Sir Keir indicated the response to the violence could mirror elements of how the 2011 riots were handled, at which time he was director of public prosecutions.

“We do have standing arrangements for law enforcement which means that we can get arrests… and convictions done very quickly,” he said.

“I myself was part of that in 2011 when I was director of public prosecutions, and I’m determined we will do whatever it takes to bring these thugs to justice as quickly as possible.”

Ministers have suggested that courts could sit 24 hours to fast-track prosecutions – as they did in 2011 – while police forces have measures in place to draft in extra officers to tackle potential unrest.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has posted a video on social media in which he admits that he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014.

The clip, posted to his X account on Sunday, shows him with controversial US comedian Roseanne Barr as he describes bizarre circumstances that led to an incident that mystified New Yorkers 10 years ago.

Mr Kennedy said a woman had hit and killed the bear with her car when he was driving behind her outside of the city, and he put it in his van with the intention of skinning the animal and harvesting its meat.

It appears he shared the anecdote to get ahead of an upcoming story in The New Yorker magazine.

The Kennedy campaign and the New Yorker did not respond to requests for comment.

Seated with rolled-up sleeves at a table covered with food, Mr Kennedy tells Ms Barr in the video that he was driving to meet a group of people to go falconing near Goshen, New York, 10 years ago when the bear was killed. He says he pulled over to put the bear in his vehicle.

“I was going to skin the bear – and it was in very good condition – and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he says. “And you can do that in New York state: Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”

New York state does allow people to take bears killed on roads, but the law stipulates that a person has to notify law enforcement or the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to acquire such a tag.

Mr Kennedy does not appear to have done that.

Instead, he says he continued to his falconing venture, which went late into the evening. He says he went on to a dinner reservation he had at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City, about 75 miles (121km) south of Goshen.

“At the end of the dinner, it was late and I realised I couldn’t go home,” Mr Kennedy says. “I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad.”

That is when, he says, it occurred to him that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle in his car.

He tells Ms Barr that he had the idea of staging a bike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park, which several drunk people with him heartily endorsed. He emphasises that he had not been drinking.

“So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” he says. “The next day… it was on every television station. It was a front page of every paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying, and I was like, ‘Oh my god. What did I do?'”

He then notes that a factchecker from The New Yorker had called him and asked whether he was involved in dumping the bear’s body, which appears to have prompted him to release this video.

The bear’s corpse was discovered by a woman walking her dog in the famous New York City park, according to a 2014 story written by the New York Times. It had been placed under some bushes and an abandoned bicycle, the story says.

The paper noted, at the time, that the New York Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad was looking into the bear’s death, and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation had concluded that the animal had been killed in a “motor vehicle collision” – not a bike accident.

The New York Police Department and Department of Environmental Conservation did not respond to requests for comment.

The New York Times story notes how puzzling the 2014 incident was to those who followed the case: “But so many questions remain unanswered: How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play involved? Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?”

In a twist, that decade-old newspaper story was coincidentally written by another member of the famous Kennedy family – Tatiana Schlossberg, a former New York Times journalist who is the granddaughter of US President John F Kennedy.

Ms Schlossberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her relative, though many members of the Kennedy family have disavowed Mr Kennedy’s actions and his campaign for president.

Mr Kennedy’s bizarre confession comes as his 2024 campaign for president appears to be struggling.

With Vice-President Kamala Harris entering the race after President Joe Biden announced his decision to step aside, polls indicate that Mr Kennedy’s support has dwindled to the single digits.

A scion of America’s most famous political family, Mr Kennedy has struggled to raise money and slowed his campaigning in recent weeks.

Those issues have coincided with a series of blunders that have fuelled speculation that the US politician might drop out, though he has insisted that he will not exit the race.

Mali says it has cut diplomatic relations with Ukraine, after a military official suggested Kyiv had played a role in deadly fighting near the Algerian border last month.

Dozens of Malian soldiers and mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner group were killed in days of clashes with Tuareg separatist rebels and fighters linked to al-Qaeda.

Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence, said last week that the rebels had been given the “necessary information” to conduct the attacks.

A top Malian official, Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga, said his government was shocked to hear the claim and accused Ukraine of violating Mali’s sovereignty.

Yusov’s comments “admitted Ukraine’s involvement in a cowardly, treacherous and barbaric attack by armed terrorist groups” that had led to the deaths of Malian soldiers, Col Maiga’s statement said.

Mali has decided to break off relations “with immediate effect”, he said.

Last week, Mali’s army admitted it had suffered “significant” losses during several days of fighting earlier that erupted on 25 July.

The clashes took place in the desert near Tinzaouaten, a north-eastern town on the border with Algeria.

Reports say the Malian and Russian forcers were ambushed by Tuareg rebels and fighters from al-Qaeda affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin while waiting for reinforcements, after retreating from Tinzaouaten.

Neither Mali’s military nor Wagner – which has since morphed into a group called the Africa Corps – have given exact figures, but the estimated death toll for Wagner fighters ranges from 20 to 80.

The Russian mercenary outfit’s losses are thought to be the heaviest it has suffered in Mali since it began helping the military government fight the insurgents two years ago.

Wagner has acknowledged that one of its commanders was killed and a Russian helicopter was downed in “fierce fighting”, saying they had been attacked by around 1,000 fighters.

Tuareg-led separatists claimed on Thursday they had killed 84 Wagner mercenaries and 47 Malian soldiers.

More than a decade ago, Mali’s central government lost control of much of the north following a Tuareg rebellion, which was sparked by a demand for a separate state.

The country’s security was then further complicated by the involvement of Islamist militants in the conflict.

When seizing power in coups in 2020 and 2021, the military cited the government’s inability to tackle this unrest.

The new junta severed Mali’s long-running alliance with former colonial power France in favour of Russia, in a bid to quell the unrest.

Ukraine has received its first American-made F-16 fighter jets, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

“F-16s in Ukraine. We did it,” President Zelensky said at a ceremony at an unnamed airbase, flanked by two of the planes.

Ukraine’s leader thanked allies for what they were once very hesitant to provide – though he added that many more were needed.

The arrival of the jets marks a crucial milestone in boosting the capabilities of Ukraine’s air force, which largely relies on old Soviet-era jets.

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More F-16s are expected and hoped in the months ahead, though Mr Zelensky admitted that Ukraine does not yet have enough trained pilots to fly them all.

He did not specify how many aircraft had arrived in Ukraine – or whether they had all been sent by Denmark, the Netherlands and the US, which he specifically thanked.

Around 65 F-16s have been pledged by Nato countries since US President Joe Biden first authorised willing European allies to send them to Ukraine in August 2023.

The F-16 was introduced in 1978. Many Western militaries are in the process of retiring the ageing fighters, replacing them with the US-made F-35, introduced in 2015.

The UK does not have any F-16s in its air force, though it is supplying long-range Storm Shadow missiles which can be fitted to the jets.

Ukraine’s F-16s will work alongside a limited number of Western-supplied surface-to-air missile systems such as Patriot and Nasams which are already on the ground.

With their capacity to carry rockets, bombs and missiles, F-16s should in theory allow the air force to carry out more strikes deep inside occupied territory, and possibly on targets close to the border inside Russia.

They may also help defend against Russian glide bombs – dumb munitions fitted with pop-out wing kits and guidance modules to deliver precision strike stand-off capabilities, similar to the JDAM munitions from the United States.

Around 3,000 were dropped in March alone, mostly from Su-34 fighter-bombers.

If Ukraine can protect its F-16s on the ground, the hope is that they could play an important part in pushing back Russian aircraft to a point where they can no longer target Ukrainian ground forces with glide bombs.

Kyiv had suggested that it could keep some F-16s at foreign military bases, but that suggestion prompted President Vladimir Putin to warn that any Western bases storing Ukrainian jets would be a legitimate military target for Russia.

Experts also say the fighters could provide much needed air support to Ukrainian ground forces, who have faced relentless attacks in recent months, especially in the eastern Donbas region.

Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov previously vowed that Western-made F-16s flying for Ukraine would be “shot down”.

“But of course, these deliveries will not have any significant impact on the development of events on the front,” he added.

Stock markets in Asia slumped on Monday morning, following big falls by major indexes around the world last week.

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 was trading 4.6% lower, while the Topix was down by 5.7%.

It comes after weak jobs data in the US on Friday sparked fears of a recession in the world’s largest economy.

Meanwhile, the yen has been strengthening against the US dollar since the Bank of Japan raised interest rates last week, making stocks in Tokyo more expensive for foreign investors.

“The selloff was instigated by the sharp appreciation of the [yen] as global investors turned cautious on Japanese corporate earnings, especially that of exporters such as automakers,” said Kei Okamura, a Tokyo-based portfolio manager at investment firm Neuberger Berman.

The Japanese currency has strengthened around 9% against the US dollar over the last month.

A stronger yen makes Japanese goods more expensive, and consequently less attractive for potential overseas buyers.

Elsewhere in Asia, Taiwan’s main share index was down by 6.9%, with chip making giant TSMC more than 6% lower.

In South Korea, the Kospi index fell 5.5%, with major chip makers including Samsung down more than 7%, while SK Hynix 6.5% lower.

However, the Hang Seng in Hong Kong was down by just 0.6% in morning trade, while the Shanghai Stock Exchange was 0.2% lower.

Cryptocurrencies were also down. Bitcoin dropped to just over $53,000, its lowest level since February.

On Friday, stocks in New York fell sharply after official jobs data showed that US employers added 114,000 jobs in July, far fewer than expected.

The figures raised concerns that a long-running jobs boom in the US might be coming to an end and drove speculation about when and by how much the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates.

Stock markets were already worried about high borrowing costs and unsettled by signs that a long-running rally in share prices, fuelled in part by optimism over artificial intelligence (AI), might be running out steam.

Friday’s decline in the Nasdaq brought the index down about 10% from its most recent peak – a fall known as a “correction” – that in this case has happened in a matter of weeks.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average also dropped 1.5% on Friday, and the S&P 500 ended 1.8% lower, after markets in Asia and Europe sank.

Several countries have urged their nationals to leave Lebanon, as fears grow of a wider conflict in the Middle East.

Iran has vowed “severe” retaliation against Israel, which it blames for the death of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday. Israel has not commented.

His assassination came hours after Israel killed Hezbollah senior commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut.

Western officials fear that Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia and political movement based in Lebanon, could play a key role in any such retaliation, which in turn could spark a serious Israeli response.

Diplomatic efforts by the US and other Western countries continue to try to de-escalate tensions across the region.

A growing number of flights have been cancelled or suspended at the country’s only commercial airport in Beirut.

The US, the UK, Australia, Sweden, France, Italy, Canada, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are among the countries to have urged their citizens to leave Lebanon as soon as possible.

Fears of an escalation of hostilities that could engulf Lebanon are at their highest since Hezbollah started its attacks on Israel, a day after the deadly Hamas attacks on southern Israel on 7 October, in support for Palestinians in Gaza.

Most of the violence has been contained to border areas, with both sides indicating not being interested in a wider conflict.

Hezbollah, however, has vowed to respond to Shukr’s assassination, which happened in Dahiyeh, the group’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

On Sunday, Hezbollah launched dozens of rockets at the town of Beit Hillel in northern Israel at around 00:25 local time (21:25 GMT Saturday).

Footage posted on social media showed Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system intercepting the rockets. There have been no reports of casualties.

Israel’s air force responded by striking targets in southern Lebanon.

In a separate development on Sunday morning, two people were killed in a stabbing attack in the Israeli city of Holon. The attacker was later “neutralised”, police said.

Also on Sunday, officials from the Hamas-run ministry of health in Gaza said an Israeli air strike had hit a tent inside a hospital, killing at least five people. The officials said 19 Palestinians had been killed on Sunday.

In a statement on Saturday, the US embassy in Beirut said those who chose to stay in Lebanon should “prepare contingency plans” and be prepared to “shelter in place for an extended period of time”.

The Pentagon has said it is deploying additional warships and fighter jets to the region to help defend Israel from possible attacks by Iran and its proxies, a strategy similar to the one adopted in April, when Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation to an attack on its diplomatic compound in Syria.

It blamed Israel for that strike.

Many fear Iran’s retaliation on this occasion could take a similar form.

The UK says it is sending extra military personnel, consular staff and border force officials to help with any evacuations.

It has urged UK citizens to leave Lebanon while commercial flights are running.

Two British military ships are already in the region and the Royal Air Force has put transport helicopters on standby.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the regional situation “could deteriorate rapidly”.

In a phone call with EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell on Friday, Iran’s Acting Foreign Minister Ali Baqeri Kani said Iran would “undoubtedly use its inherent and legitimate right” to “punish” Israel.

On Friday, an announcer on Iran’s state TV warned “the world would witness extraordinary scenes”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Israelis that “challenging days lie ahead… We have heard threats from all sides. We are prepared for any scenario”.

Tensions between Israel and Iran initially 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, Shukr, who was a close adviser to the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in a targeted Israeli air strike in Beirut. Four others, including two children, were also killed.

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

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said Israel will suffer a “harsh punishment” for the killing.

Haniyeh’s assassination dealt a blow to the negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza, the main hope to defuse tensions along the Lebanon-Israel border.

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.

At least 90 people were killed in Bangladesh on Sunday, amid worsening clashes between police and anti-government protesters.

The unrest comes as student leaders have declared a campaign of civil disobedience to demand that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina step down.

Thirteen police officers were killed when thousands of people attacked a police station in the district of Sirajganj, police said.

The student protest started with a demand to abolish quotas in civil service jobs last month, but has now turned into a wider anti-government movement.

Both police and some supporters of the governing party were seen shooting at anti-government protesters with live ammunition. Police also used tear gas and rubber bullets.

The total death toll since the protest movement began in July now stands at over 280.

A nationwide overnight curfew has been in place since 18:00 (12:00 GMT).

The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, called for an end to the “shocking violence” and urged restraint from Bangladeshi politicians and security forces.

He expressed particular concern over a mass march planned in Dhaka on Monday, warning of a risk of “further loss of life and wider destruction”.

“The government must cease targeting those participating peacefully in the protest movement, immediately release those arbitrarily detained, restore full internet access, and create conditions for meaningful dialogue,” Mr Turk added.

The continuing effort to suppress popular discontent, including through the excessive use of force, and the deliberate spread of misinformation and incitement to violence, must immediately cease,” Mr Türk added.

Amid calls for her resignation, Ms Hasina sounded defiant. Speaking after a meeting with security chiefs, she said the protesters were “not students but terrorists who are out to destabilise the nation”.

On Sunday, Law and Justice Minister Anisul Huq told the BBC’s Newshour programme that authorities were showing “restraint”.

“If we had not shown restraint, there would have been a bloodbath. I guess our patience has limits,” he added.

In the capital, Dhaka, access to internet on mobile devices has been suspended.

Deaths and injuries have been reported across the country, including the northern districts of Bogra, Pabna and Rangpur.

Thousands of people gathered in a main square in Dhaka and there have been violent incidents in other parts of the city.

“The whole city has turned into a battleground,” a policeman, who asked not to be named, told the AFP news agency. He said a crowd of several thousand protesters had set fire to cars and motorcycles outside a hospital.

Asif Mahmud, a leading figure in the nationwide civil disobedience campaign, called on protesters to march on Dhaka on Monday.

“The time has come for the final protest”, he said.

Students Against Discrimination, a group behind the anti-government demonstrations, urged people not to pay taxes or any utility bills.

The students have also called for a shutdown of all factories and public transport.

Around 10,000 people have been reportedly detained in a major crackdown by security forces in the past two weeks. Those arrested included opposition supporters and students.

Some ex-military personnel have expressed support for the student movement, including ex-army chief General Karim Bhuiyan, who told journalists: “We call on the incumbent government to withdraw the armed forces from the street immediately.

He and other ex-military personnel condemned “egregious killings, torture, disappearances and mass arrests”.

The next few days are seen as crucial for both camps.

The protests pose a momentous challenge to Ms Hasina, who was elected for a fourth consecutive term in January elections, boycotted by the main opposition.

Students took to the streets last month over a quota that reserved one third of civil service jobs for relatives of the veterans of Bangladesh’s independence war with Pakistan in 1971.

Most of the quota has now been scaled back by the government following a government ruling, but students have continued to protest, demanding justice for those killed and injured. Now they want Ms Hasina to step down.

Supporters of Ms Hasina have ruled out her resignation.

Earlier, Ms Hasina offered unconditional dialogue with the student leaders, saying she wanted the violence to end.

“I want to sit with the agitating students of the movement and listen to them. I want no conflict,” she said.

But the student protesters have rejected her offer.

Ms Hasina called in the military last month to restore order after several police stations and state buildings were set on fire during the protests.

The Bangladeshi army chief, Gen Waker-Uz-Zaman, held a meeting with junior officers in Dhaka to assess the security situation.

“The Bangladesh army has always stood by the people and will continue to do so for the interest of people and in any need of the state,” Gen Zaman said, according to a release by the Inter Services Public Relation Directorate.

Bangladeshi media say most of those killed in last month’s protests were shot dead by police. Thousands were injured.

The government argues that police opened fire only in self-defence and to protect state properties.

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan has now been behind bars for a year – although there are times you would barely know it.

Mr Khan is still the dominant force of Pakistan’s opposition politics; his name still in the papers and the courts. His social media supporters have been unrelenting.

With no public appearances, the few people allowed in to see the former cricket star regularly – his lawyers and family – have become his conduit for messages to the outside world. They are keen to push the message that his 365 days behind bars have left him unbowed.

“There is still a swagger about him,” Aleema Khanum, Imran Khan’s sister, says. “He’s got no needs, no wants – only a cause.”

According to those who visit him, Mr Khan spends his days on his exercise bike, reading and reflecting. He has an hour a day to walk around the courtyard. There have been occasional disagreements about how quickly the family can provide him with new books.

“He has said ‘I’m not wasting a minute of my time in jail, it’s an opportunity for me to get more knowledge’,” Ms Khanum tells the BBC.

But the fact is Mr Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi are still trapped in prison, with no sign they will be released any time soon.

According to some, this is not a surprise.

“There was no expectation that Mr Khan was going to do anything that would make it easy for him to get out of jail,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Centre think tank in Washington.

And the military – Pakistan’s powerful behind-the-scenes player – “don’t ease up when they decide there’s a political figure that they want to lock up”, says Mr Kugelman. “That has especially been the case with Khan.”

Indeed, the military has been key to many of the ups and downs of Mr Khan’s life in the last decade. Many analysts believe it was his initial close relationship with the military establishment which helped him win power.

But by 9 May last year, that was in tatters. Mr Khan – who had been ousted from power in a vote of no confidence in 2022 – had been arrested, and his supporters came out to protest.

Some of those protests turned violent, and there were attacks on military buildings – including the official residence of the most senior army official in Lahore which was looted and set alight.

In the aftermath, BBC sources said Pakistan’s media companies had been told to stop showing his picture, saying his name or playing his voice.

Mr Khan was released – but ultimately only for a few months.

He was jailed again on 5 August for failing to correctly declare the sale of state gifts – and that was just the start.

In the run-up to the election, the cases against him mounted; by the start of February – just days before the vote – the 71-year-old had acquired three long prison sentences, the last for 14 years.

By the election, many of the candidates standing for Mr Khan’s PTI party were also in prison or in hiding, the party stripped of its well-recognised symbol of a cricket bat – a vital identifier in a country with a 58% literacy rate.

Despite this, “we were determined and wanted to make a statement”, Salman Akram Raja, Mr Khan’s lawyer and a candidate in the election, says.

“It was very constrained, many couldn’t campaign at all. The loss of the cricket bat symbol was the body blow.”

All candidates stood as independents, but hopes – even within the party – weren’t high.

Yet candidates backed by Imran Khan won more seats than anyone else, forcing his political rivals to form an alliance to block them. The PTI, meanwhile, was left to fight for many of their seats in court, alleging the results were rigged.

Supporters see the election on 8 February as a turning point, proof of Mr Khan’s potent message – even from behind bars.

“There is a change, that was expressed on 8 February,” says Aleema Khanum. “Change is coming, it is in the air.”

Others say that practically, the result hasn’t changed the status quo.

“We are really where we might expect to be given past precedent,” Mr Kugelman says.

“PTI didn’t form a government, its leader is still in jail and the coalition in power is led by parties backed by the military.”

But more recently, things have certainly seemed to be looking up for Mr Khan and his supporters.

All three of the sentences handed down just before the election have fallen away, a United Nations panel declared his detention was arbitrary and Pakistan’s supreme court said PTI was an official party and should receive “reserve seats”; the seats reserved for women and non-Muslims allocated according to the proportion of seats the party has won.

But none have yet had a practical impact: Mr Khan is still in jail with new cases against his name, and the reserve seats have yet to be allocated.

His wife Bushra Bibi, whose prison sentence was dropped when the case that declared their marriage illegal was appealed, is also still in prison on new charges.

Meanwhile, the government has made it clear that it sees Mr Khan and his party as a public threat. It announced earlier this month that it intends to seek to ban PTI, despite warnings from groups like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

The military also shows no indication it has changed its mind. On the 9 May anniversary this year, a statement from its public relations wing said there would be no compromise with the “planners, facilitators and executioners” and nor would they be allowed to “hoodwink the law of the land”.

And it is this relationship with the military that most analysts think Mr Khan really needs to smooth out to finally escape prison.

“I think we can come up with an arrangement that gives everyone a way out and allows the system to function,” says Khan’s lawyer, Mr Raja.

Meanwhile, from jail, Mr Khan has been delivering his own messages. Aleema Khanum recently said that that he had told the military to “stay neutral… to let this country run” and called it “the backbone of Pakistan”.

It has been seen as an olive branch by some commentators, although the use of the term neutral was picked up on; when the army previously declared itself neutral by not taking sides in politics, he ridiculed the expression, saying “only an animal is neutral”.

His recent call for snap elections is a move that some see as one of his conditions to the military.

“I don’t think that’s very realistic,” says Mr Kugelman. “Over time, Khan may relent a bit. It is one of the truisms of Pakistani politics: if you want to be prime minister you need to be in the good graces, or at least not the bad graces, of the military.”

For now at least, the stalemate continues.

Vice-President Kamala Harris has interviewed potential contenders to be her running mate on Sunday, ahead of a battleground tour next week.

Among those who travelled to Washington, DC, to meet Ms Harris were Governor Josh Shapiro, Senator Mark Kelly and Governor Tim Walz.

The choices for the Democratic vice-president had been narrowed to a group of five, according to CBS, the BBC’s US partner.

A decision is required before the Democratic National Convention, which starts on 19 August in Chicago.

It is unclear whether other potential candidates, including Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear or Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, were scheduled to meet with Ms Harris.

Harris officially became the Democratic presidential nominee on Friday in a vote of party delegates.

Once Ms Harris’s running mate is announced, the two are expected to tour the battleground states.

Mr Shapiro has seen high approval ratings since he was elected in 2022 and could help Ms Harris capture Pennsylvania – a must-win state in the race for the White House.

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot and Nasa astronaut, has become a leading voices on gun safety and his strong border stance and occasional criticisms of the Biden administration could help appeal to independent and conservative voters.

Mr Walz, who served 12 years in Congress before becoming governor of Minnesota in 2019, gained national attention for his strategy calling Donald Trump and JD Vance “weird”.

On Friday President Joe Biden said he had spoken to Ms Harris about her search for a running mate. Asked what qualities she should look for in a vice-presidential candidate, he said: “I’ll let her work that out.”

Potential partners to join Ms Harris on the Democratic ticket for November’s election face an exhaustive vetting process, having to answer up to 200 questions before being seriously considered.

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Delegates do not vote on the vice-presidential pick.

The United Automobile Workers, a major US union representing more than 400,000 people, said its preferred vice-presidential pick was Mr Beshear, who “stood with us on the picket line and has been there for workers”.

Speaking to CBS’ Face the Nation, UAW President Shawn Fain added that Mr Walz was also “100% behind labour”, but he criticised Mr Shapiro’s support of private school vouchers in Pennsylvania – a Republican-backed proposal to send $100m to families for private school tuition and school supplies.

While she holds those meetings, a new by CBS News, BBC’s US partner, suggests Ms Harris holds a slight edge over her Republican rival Donald Trump, leading by one point nationally.

Across battleground states, the poll indicates that the pair are neck-and neck. Trump still enjoys a small lead in a few states – Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina – but the race has tightened significantly since Mr Biden bowed out of the race and Ms Harris became the Democratic nominee.

The poll suggests that the vice-president has energised the Democratic base, with young, black and female voters noting their renewed enthusiasm for the presidential election.

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign is still beset by comments he made at a convention for US-based black journalists in which he questioned Ms Harris’ racial identity.

Trump said of Ms Harris: “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. So I don’t know – Is she Indian? Or is she black?”

Ms Harris’ mother was born in India and her father is from Jamaica. She has always identified as both Indian American and black.

Multiple Trump allies appeared on US politics shows on Sunday in an attempt to shift attention from what he said.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a longtime Trump backer, said he would advise the former president to focus on the Biden-Harris administration’s policy decision – not the vice-president’s heritage.

“Every day we’re talking about her heritage and not her terrible, dangerous liberal record throughout her entire political life [is] a good day for her and a bad day for us,” Mr Graham told Fox News Sunday.

Earlier in the day, Senator Laphonza Butler, a Democrat who represents Ms Harris’ home state of California, called the comments about the vice-president’s race “despicable” and “an insult” during an appearance on CNN.

“This is a woman who was born in Oakland, California, who has declared and lived proudly all of her identities her entire life, embracing the totality of who she is,” she said.

“This is the only card he’s (Trump’s) got to play, and so he’s playing it. He’s desperate.”

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As the Paris gymnastics arena roared on American Simone Biles for her third gold medal of the 2024 Olympics, one of those applauding was none other than An Chang-ok, a rival from North Korea.

Saturday’s women’s vault final saw the North share a stage with its foes South Korea and the US.

An, 21, grinned and waved for TV cameras and hugged at least one fellow finalist – rare interactions with foreigners by a young woman required to perform diplomatic gymnastics while being carefully chaperoned on her trip away from home.

Pyongyang’s decision to send athletes to these Games – two of whom even posed for a selfie with rivals from the South – has raised hopes that the secretive state could be partially reopening after a particularly deep period of isolation.

After all, this comes after a heated period that has seen the North sending waste-filled balloons at the South.

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The North’s participation in these Games signalled a “remarkable” return to the international fold, suggested Jean H Lee, a former Associated Press journalist who opened the US news agency’s first bureau in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

It did not send any athletes to the Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021, after the country shut itself off from the world even more sternly than usual due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

But in Paris, it was “making the effort to rejoin the international community”, Lee said, “regardless of what’s happening with their nuclear programme, which is always the elephant in the room”.

The North’s nuclear ambitions are an enduring cause of tension with the South and the US. But there was no sign of animosity between the three nations’ gymnasts on Saturday.

This new generation of North Korean athletes have claimed two silvers in Paris, and occasionally surprised sport commentators who did not know what to expect from them.

Winning medals was not the country’s only aim, according to Prof Ramon Pacheco Pardo of King’s College London, who has written extensively on the two Koreas.

The age-old North Korean art of “sports diplomacy” involved limited participation in a global forum to prove the country was normal, Prod Pacheco Pardo said. Athletes were some of the “few actors that North Korea has who won’t be viewed suspiciously” by the world, he explained.

The contrasting support for An and Biles could not have been starker. In an earlier competition during the Games in Paris, Biles was memorably cheered on by a host of celebrity supporters in the stands, including Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Tom Cruise and Snoop Dogg. Thousands of punters yelled her name on Saturday, too.

An, meanwhile, received only polite appreciation from the neutrals. She had no compatriots in the room, since ordinary North Koreans are prevented from leaving their country.

It is unlikely that anyone was watching at home, either, as the Games are not being televised live in North Korea, according to Radio Free Asia (RFA). And BBC Monitoring has only been able to find a handful of text reports in the tightly-controlled state media.

Nonetheless, “the chattering class of Pyongyang certainly will, from one source or another” know the Olympic results as they come in, said John Everard, the UK’s ambassador to North Korea from 2006 to 2008.

An is among 16 North Korean who athletes have come to an opulent host city that could hardly be more different to the austere Pyongyang airport in which they were filmed setting off last month.

Top North Korean athletes were likely to have some awareness of the outside world, said Everard, but there was still likely to be a “shock factor”.

One of the viral moments of the Games so far was a rare encounter that seemed to break the boundaries: when a bronze-winning South Korean table-tennis player took a selfie that showed his mixed-doubles partner posing alongside the silver-winning North Korean duo.

Would the leadership in Pyongyang have anticipated – or relished – this brief symbol of unity between two nations who are still technically at war?

Agreeing to the selfie was “a message” from the North, said Prof Pachedo Pardo, who speculated that the move would have had Pyongyang’s consent. “North Korea is indicating that it doesn’t have a problem with South Korean people – that the issue it has is with the South Korean government.”

At any rate, the moment was not totally unexpected, after something similar in 2016. And two years later, North and South fielded a joint women’s ice hockey team at the Winter Games in the South.

The selfie represents one of the North’s few visible interactions with the outside world during the Games, including a perfunctory press conference by the two table-tennis stars.

Away from the stadiums, unverified footage has appeared to show An holding a collection of pin-badges, which are reported to be an item popularly traded by international gymnasts.

After so much exposure to the Western world, the athletes will probably undergo a gruelling “debrief” after returning home to ensure they stay on-message, said Lee, who is also the co-host of the BBC World Service’s Lazarus Heist podcast.

Contrary to the myth, any athlete deemed to have “failed” would probably not be punished, the analysts agreed. But they could face gruelling “self-criticism” sessions.

“The big hit for not winning a medal isn’t so much the punishment, it’s that you don’t gain all the benefits that you could have gained,” said Everard. Victorious athletes may be given higher status in society and even prizes such as a new home.

It remains to be seen whether this latest sporting diplomacy will translate into meaningful new talks between the two Koreas. The relative bonhomie in Paris was briefly imperilled at the outset by a furore when organisers mixed up the two nations’ names in the opening ceremony, for which they apologised.

Outside the Bercy Arena after Saturday’s gymnastics, one fan from the Seoul side was not convinced the politics would change much.

But she said the sight of sportspeople sharing a stage was at least a reminder that all Koreans were united by something “human”.