“All wars end with negotiations. It’s not the soldiers in the trenches who decide when.”

Arni joined the Ukrainian army in 2022 to fight for his country’s survival. When we bump into him 30 months later, he describes a new motivation. “Peace.”

“No-one likes war, we want to finish it,” he says while leaning against his camouflaged pick-up truck.

For the troops we encounter close to Russia’s border, there’s a desire to end Russia’s invasion on acceptable terms.

That is not to say survival isn’t a core driver – it is – but they seem to be striving for a finish line.

“For Ukraine, our people, we’ll stand until the end,” adds Arni.

Until 6 August, Ukraine’s sole objective was one of liberation. The complete repelling of Russian forces to its borders from before Russia first invaded in 2014.

Albeit at a grinding pace, the reverse has been happening for the past year-and-a-half with Moscow eroding Ukrainian territory.

Then came the “all in” poker play which surprised everyone apart from the battle-hardened Ukrainian soldiers who carried it out: a counter-offensive into Russia’s Kursk region.

“It was undeniably successful and daring,” observes Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Co-operation Centre, a think tank.

Now, Kyiv can’t reference its offensive often enough, with countless pictures of troops giving out aid as they tear down Russian flags.

“It also changes the narrative,” says Alina Frolova, security expert and former deputy defence minister of Ukraine. “A situation where we’re losing territory step by step is not a good one.

“Ukraine’s strategic position has changed.”

Despite parallels with Russia’s initial invasion, Kyiv claims its goal is not to occupy.

So what is the aim? Well, there’s more than one.

“This attack was partly carried out so the city of Sumy was better protected,” explains Serhii Kuzan, who thinks it is often forgotten that the border is still a front line.

Since the start of this summer, President Volodymyr Zelensky says there were more than 2,000 strikes on the Sumy region from the Kursk region alone, including 250 glide bombs.

For months it was feared Russian troops were preparing for a cross-border attack of their own, and by pushing them back, Serhii believes defending Ukraine in general will be easier.

“The [now captured] Russian city of Sudzha is on a commanding height. The Russians are already in a less advantageous position because we control the approach routes.”

While Russia has had to react to Ukraine on the battlefield, it has also had its supply lines targeted. Key roads have been seized and a strategically important bridge destroyed.

Which leads us to:

“The main purpose of this offensive into Kursk is to divert Russia’s attention from its occupied territories in Ukraine,” says Ivan Stupak, who worked for Ukraine’s security service (SBU) between 2004-2015.

The good news for Ukraine is that is what appears to be happening. The bad news is that Russian advances, notably towards the town of Pokrovsk, are not slowing.

“The Russian army has been redeploying some troops from different directions – the Kherson, Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, for example,” Ivan says. He believes around 10,000 personnel are being diverted, mostly from other parts of Russia.

It is how President Zelensky describes Ukraine’s collection of captured Russian soldiers.

Historically, when Ukraine has momentum, it captures more and consequentially negotiates the release of their own more easily.

The Kursk offensive has been no exception. Kyiv says hundreds of Russian troops were taken prisoner. Several could be seen surrendering in drone footage and being taken back to Ukraine with tape blindfolds.

“Moscow is actually offering to start negotiations to exchange prisoners of war,” says Serhii Kuzan.

“It is no longer us, enlisting the support of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to ask Russia to hand over our prisoners of war.”

This is a huge part of it for Kyiv.

On a civilian level, you had the horror and anger felt in the Kursk region in response to the blistering Ukrainian assault on their homes.

There were mass evacuations, pleas for help and criticisms of some authorities for not preventing the attack.

On a political level, you had Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly processing events in Moscow while being briefed by his security chiefs.

And of course there is the military level.

“The influence of this Ukrainian incursion could be quite substantial,” concludes Alina Frolova. “That’s why using highly professional troops was specifically the right decision.”

If Ukraine does not plan to keep hold of its captured Russian territory in the long term, but can hang on long enough, it hopes to leverage it for the release of its own land.

But it’s a big “if”.

When fighting slows, that has always suited Russia with its superior size. Misdirection and surprise has often worked for Ukraine.

“In a symmetric war, we have no chances with Russia,” points out Alina Frovola. “We need to make asymmetrical actions”.

Slowing advances in the Kursk region may leave Kyiv with difficult decisions.

But there are benefits for as long as there is movement, Serhii Kuzan argues.

“An advance rate of 1-3km a day is normal for swapping forward units with reserves,” he says. “In Ukraine’s Donbas region, the average advance rate for the Russians is 400m.

“Our pace in the Kursk region is five times faster than a 100,000-strong army!”

But the problem for Kyiv, is that Russians are still going forward in Ukraine.

However, don’t expect Ukraine to withdraw from its Russian attack anytime soon.

It is committed now.

Russia’s president initially labelled the offensive as a “terrorist attack” and “provocation”, but in the days since he has barely referenced it publicly.

That’s despite it fitting into his narrative that Russia’s invasion is a defensive war to protect his people.

Perhaps he doesn’t want the alarm felt by many in the Kursk region to spread, or for it to appear like his military doesn’t have control of the situation.

Also, as with the Kursk submarine disaster and failed coup of last year, Vladimir Putin doesn’t always act quickly to regain the initiative.

Ukraine will be hoping he’s not this time because he can’t.

When Kamala Harris steps onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week as the party’s presidential nominee, she’ll do so knowing that many in the audience cheering her on once counted her out.

Ms Harris, 59, has faced years of doubt from some within her party about her ability to run for America’s highest political office – including from President Joe Biden, the man whom she continues to serve as vice-president.

Since replacing Mr Biden as Democratic nominee in mid-July, Ms Harris has seen a tidal wave of enthusiasm – reflected in polling, fundraising and the enormous crowds that have come out to see her at rallies across the country.

But the political momentum and energy she has generated in recent weeks among Democrats was never a given.

After failing in a short-lived presidential bid in 2019, she began her vice-presidency on a shaky footing, beset by stumbles in high-profile interviews, staff turnover and low approval ratings. And for the last three-and-a-half years in the White House she has struggled to break through to American voters.

Advisers and allies say that in the years since those early struggles she has sharpened her political skills, created loyal coalitions within her party and built credibility on issues like abortion rights that energise the Democratic base. She has, in other words, been preparing for a moment exactly like this one.

On Thursday, as she formally accepts the Democratic nomination, Ms Harris has an opportunity to reintroduce herself on the national stage with fewer than 80 days until an election that could see her become the nation’s first female president.

At the same time, she’ll have to prove that she is capable of leading a party that never saw her as its natural leader and remains divided over the war in Israel and Gaza.

But above all, she’ll need put to rest any lingering doubt among the Democratic faithful that she can meet the challenge of defeating former president Donald Trump in what remains a tight and unpredictable contest.

Before Kamala Harris became a national figure, the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general had forged a reputation as a rising star in the party, landing the endorsement of President Barack Obama in her 2010 race to become the state’s top lawyer.

But those who followed her career closely saw a mixed record. As a prosecutor, she faced public outcry for refusing to seek the death penalty for a man convicted of killing a young police officer. And then as attorney-general, she upheld the state’s death penalty despite her personal opposition.

Having reached the peaks of California state politics, she was elected to the US Senate the same night that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. In her brief tenure, she made headlines for her searing and direct questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his testy 2018 confirmation hearings.

“Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” she asked the Trump appointee, in an exchange that cascaded across social media and late night television.

Like Mr Obama, she was a young senator of limitless ambition. Halfway through her first term, she launched a presidential campaign.

That campaign, like this one, was met with great fanfare. More than 20,000 people gathered in her hometown of Oakland, California, for its launch. But her effort to become the Democratic nominee sputtered and collapsed before the first presidential primary ballot was even cast.

Ms Harris failed to carve out a clear political identity and distinguish herself in a field of rivals that included Mr Biden and left-wing senator Bernie Sanders. Critics said she endorsed a range of progressive policies but seemed to lack clear conviction.

A breakthrough June 2019 debate moment in which she challenged her then-opponent Mr Biden’s record on the racial desegregation of schools resulted in a brief surge in polling. She attacked Mr Biden for an earlier campaign moment in which he fondly recalled working with two segregationist senators, before accusing him of opposing the bussing of students between schools to help integrate them.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day,” Ms Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”

But campaign infighting and indecision on which issues to emphasise ultimately sank her presidential bid.

The campaign was marked by “a lot of rookie mistakes”, said Kevin Madden, an adviser on Republican Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “The substance that needed to be there to pass the commander-in-chief test and to really fill in some of the blanks for voters, it just wasn’t there and as a result her opponents filled it in for her.”

Eight months later, Mr Biden put aside their primary rivalry and announced Ms Harris as his running mate. She became the first woman of colour to ever be nominated in that position – and in January 2021, the first female vice-president in US history.

It was five months into her job as Mr Biden’s vice-president that Ms Harris endured her first public stumble during a foreign trip to Guatemala and Mexico.

The trip was meant to showcase her role in pursuing economic initiatives to curb the flow of migrants from Central America to the US southern border, a foreign policy assignment given to her by Mr Biden.

But it was quickly overshadowed by an awkward exchange in an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, in which she dismissed repeated questions about why she had not yet visited the US-Mexico border.

Later that day, during a press conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, Ms Harris tried to recapture the narrative, delivering a stark message to migrants thinking of making their way to the US. “Do not come,” she told them. “Do not come.”

While the NBC News interview fuelled Republican attacks that continue to this day, the latter comments drew the ire of progressives and were quickly panned on social media, even though other administration officials had echoed the same rhetoric.

• Trump and Harris battle over election’s biggest issue
• In one US state, women politicians dominate. What pointers can it offer Kamala Harris?
• Why the ‘weird’ label is working for Kamala Harris

The vice-president’s allies blamed the White House for failing to adequately prepare her and assigning an unwinnable issue. They complained that as the first woman, African-American and Asian-American to serve as vice-president, outsized expectations had been imposed on her from the very start of her term, giving her little time to settle.

“There was immense pressure in the beginning to own things,” said one former aide who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about their time in the White House.

In the months that followed, Ms Harris endured more scrutiny as she faced high staff turnover, a slew of negative headlines about her performance and underwhelming media appearances. Hemmed in by Covid restrictions, she was limited in her public engagements, fuelling the perception that she was invisible.

When critics labelled her a prop for standing behind Mr Biden at bill-signing ceremonies – as her white male predecessors in the role regularly did – a decision was made to remove her from those events altogether, according to aides, triggering more criticism that she was absent.

“People had an expectation to experience her as vice-president as if she was Michelle Obama, but she was in a job… built for Al Gore or Mike Pence,” said Jamal Simmons, a longtime Democratic strategist who was brought in as her communications director during the second year.

As her team sought to improve her poor public image, Ms Harris stepped into a bigger foreign policy role. She travelled to Poland in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, held bilateral meetings in Asia amid heightened tensions with China and stood in for Mr Biden at the Munich Security Conference that same year.

But in May 2022, a political earthquake would reshape the trajectory of her vice-presidency. In a rare breach of the Supreme Court, a leaked draft opinion revealed plans to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade abortion ruling – which had protected American women’s federal right to abortion for nearly half a century.

She seized on the opportunity to be the lead messenger on an issue that Mr Biden – a devout Irish Catholic who avoided even saying the term “abortion” – was reluctant to own.

“How dare they? How dare they tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body?” she told the crowd at an event for a pro-choice group on the same day the bombshell leak was published, deciding to attack the nation’s top judges before their decision was officially released.

The issue proved to be a driving force for voters in the midterm elections a few months later, helping Democrats to perform better than expected in congressional races and to hold the Senate.

In seeking to become the administration’s leading voice on abortion, Ms Harris tackled the issue with “clarity of purpose”, said former longtime adviser Rachel Palermo.

She convened state legislators, faith leaders, constitutional law experts, healthcare providers and advocates for roundtable discussions. It was a move panned by some activists as not meeting the seriousness of the moment but it was part of a strategy of coalition-building across local and state politics that also helped lay the groundwork for any future presidential run.

Ms Harris, who spent most of her career navigating California’s tricky mix of liberal and traditional Democratic politics, knew every event mattered.

Every meeting, photo opportunity or dinner – whether it was with black business leaders or Hispanic female CEOs – was tracked by her team in detailed spreadsheets that she could utilise when the time came to call on a deep political network for support.

“She forced the operation to mobilise around how she views politics, which is coalitions,” a senior official said.

Ms Harris always had her eye on a 2028 bid for the White House, as Joe Biden’s natural successor, assuming he won a second term in the 2024 contest.

Yet as rumblings mounted about replacing Mr Biden on the ticket after his stumbling debate performance in late June against Donald Trump, some Democrats openly overlooked her.

• Kamala Harris’s positions on 10 key issues
• The ‘blended’ family behind Kamala Harris

They, and many pundits, suggested popular governors like California’s Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro or Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer as better replacements who could motivate voters and take the fight to Trump.

On 21 July, Mr Biden phoned Ms Harris to tell her of his plans to drop out of the race and endorse her as his successor.

It was a decision that took many of his closest allies by surprise, but she sprung into action. Over the course of 10 hours that Sunday, she called more than 100 party officials, members of Congress, labour leaders and activists. Within days, any potential rivals, including the powerful governors, had fallen into line and it was clear that she would take the Democratic mantle with no serious challenge.

As a candidate, the vice-president has yet to lay out a detailed policy agenda or sit down for a tough media interview. She released an economic blueprint on Friday, calling for tax cuts for families and a wider push on capping drug pricing, her most detailed vision for the country so far.

Even as Republicans accuse her of avoiding scrutiny, the team around her see no rush in cutting off the momentum she’s built over the last month. Political strategists say the campaign is right to capitalise on the “sugar high”.

“What Kamala Harris is experiencing is a massive, pent-up demand for people to vote for anybody not named Biden or Trump,” said Mr Madden, the former Romney aide and Republican communications strategist. “But the test always comes with being exposed to interviews, the press, debates and the harsh glare of a campaign.”

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian who helped organise a meeting of historians at Ms Harris’s official residence last year, said the fact that she has been a blank slate for voters is more of a benefit than a burden.

“She may not have been able to be in full bloom under Biden but she never crossed wires with him,” he said. “So she was able to be positioned for this moment and she can take what’s good about the Biden years and shed the baggage of what she wants to, or slightly disagrees with.”

Though her entrance has jolted an outpouring of support among Democrats, it’s unclear whether she can translate that into broad appeal. While Ms Harris has made some inroads with key demographic groups that had drifted from Mr Biden – black, Latino and young voters in particular – she lags in other constituencies that made up his winning 2020 coalition.

Recent polling has put her ahead or tied with Trump in six of the seven battleground states, according to the Cook Political Report survey released on Wednesday. In May, Trump was ahead or tied in all seven states.

Thursday night’s speech at the Democratic convention is the most consequential moment in Kamala Harris’s political career. While the Republican convention served as a coronation for Trump, who was nominated as his party’s candidate for the third consecutive time, Ms Harris’s sudden rise means her speech will be seen as a pivotal moment to define who she really is.

While she’s stood on the stage before, a senior aide said the speech will have a heavier focus on her personal story than previous nominees.

“This is the why part of the conversation. Why is she running for president? What is her vision for the country?” said Mr Simmons, her former communications director. “That will help tie together all of the strands of her policy and political life that will make sense for people.”

But over the course of four days, Ms Harris will need to sharpen her messaging around crime, inflation, the economy and immigration – issues the Trump campaign will relentlessly target between now and election day.

Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican strategist, said Ms Harris will also at some point have to clarify the left-leaning positions she took in 2019 during her failed presidential bid.

“Her greatest vulnerability is that there is plenty of evidence that she’s a San Francisco liberal with a whole set of far left wing policy positions that are outside the mainstream of American thinking, and she hasn’t had to answer for those yet,” he said.

She will also be confronted with protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza, a polarising issue that has politically cleaved the party. Ms Harris has been more forceful in her calls for a ceasefire and condemnation of civilian deaths than President Biden, but she has not wavered from the administration’s steadfast support for Israel – a stance that risks alienating the party’s progressive wing.

“How she positions [herself on Gaza] is going to be her hardest trick,” said Mr Brinkley, the presidential historian.

Still, allies and advisers who have been preparing her over the last week contend she’s built the foundations for a presidential run over the last four – sometimes bumpy – years, even if few expected she would actually find herself in this position at this moment.

“Opportunity is preparation meeting a little bit of luck and I wouldn’t characterise this as luck, because nobody wanted it to be this way, but certainly she was prepared to meet the moment of opportunity,” a senior political adviser said.

Susie Tompkins Buell, a Democratic donor and co-founder of Esprit and The North Face who has known Ms Harris since the 1990s, said she wasn’t surprised by how Ms Harris had performed in the last few weeks.

In the days after Mr Biden’s halting debate performance, she attended an event with the vice-president and said she could tell change was afoot.

After telling Ms Harris to fasten her seatbelt, Ms Buell said the soon-to-be Democratic nominee quipped, “I was born with a seatbelt.”

“I liked her response,” said Ms Tompkins Buell, who helped Ms Harris raise $12m at a San Francisco fundraiser earlier this month. “It was sudden and it was right on. She’s ready.”

Holes mysteriously found cut in army base fences.

An alleged plot to assassinate Germany’s top weapons manufacturer.

Phone taps on a high-level Luftwaffe call.

These aren’t storylines lifted from a 1960s spy novel but real-life events in Germany, this year.

Not all of these events can definitively be blamed on Moscow, but Germany is on heightened alert for possible acts of Russian sabotage, because of Berlin’s continued military support for Kyiv.

As a hot war rages between Russia and Ukraine, there are fears that Europe has slipped into a new Cold War.

“When we think of the Cold War, we have a tendency to think of the 1970s by which point the rules of the game had become established and accepted,” says Mark Galeotti, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) and director of Mayak Intelligence.

“In some way, we’re in the early Cold War – the Fifties and Sixties, so a much rawer time.”

But what does a rekindled Cold War look like for Europe’s biggest economy and a country that was once itself cut in half by the Iron Curtain?

The biggest bombshell dropped just last month when CNN reported that US officials had told Berlin of an alleged Russian plot to kill the chief executive of Germany’s biggest arms company Rheinmetall.

The Kremlin denied the report but German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who strikes a hawkish figure next to the more hesitant Chancellor Olaf Scholz, hit out at Russia for “waging a hybrid war of aggression”.

I met Rheinmetall’s CEO, Armin Papperger, at a ground-breaking ceremony for a new ammunition factory in February.

The 61-year-old is, to use a crude term, a real “somebody”, particularly in a world where Nato countries are spending billions to re-supply Ukraine and boost their own security.

His prominent position was clear as he stood alongside Chancellor Scholz, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen as they plunged spades into the earth in Lower Saxony.

Had a plot to kill him been successful, it would have sent shockwaves through the West.

A security blunder not long afterwards allowed spies to eavesdrop on a highly sensitive conversation between senior German air force officials, later broadcast on Russian TV.

It was a cause of acute embarrassment for Berlin given that a brigadier general in the Luftwaffe appeared to allow spies into the secure call by dialling in on an insecure line.

The mega-blip, however isolated, fuelled accusations that Germany has long been a “weak link” within the European counter-intelligence due to a fragmented, federalised system that’s underpinned by a strong emphasis on individuals’ privacy.

Weeks later, two German-Russian nationals were arrested on suspicion of planning to sabotage US military facilities in Bavaria. Annalena Baerbock summoned the Russian ambassador to complain and announced: “We will not allow Putin to bring his terror to Germany.”

Only last week, holes were found cut into the fences of water facilities supplying two military bases in North Rhine-Westphalia, with concerns that someone has been seeking to contaminate supplies.

Germany is not the only European country being targeted by apparent acts of sabotage, but it has a lot of US military bases that were established in the wake of World War Two.

Mark Galeotti believes Moscow views Germany as a large but “flabby” power, making it the ideal pressure point.

By anyone’s measure, the greatest act of known sabotage to affect Germany in recent years was when the Nord Stream gas pipelines, running under the Baltic Sea from Russia, were blown up in 2022.

Speculation over who ordered the attack has been rife ever since, but in a dramatic development Germany has now issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that the “shoestring” operation had been privately funded but overseen from Ukraine.

Kyiv rejected the report as nonsense, and while there was always scepticism that President Putin would order the destruction of his own pipeline, it does show that the murky world of espionage can be full of twists and turns.

Each incident of apparent sabotage cannot, by any means, be immediately and certainly attributed to Russia.

In France it was far-left activists, not Russian agents, who were accused of targeting the country’s high-speed rail network on the eve of the Olympics.

And Germany has had its own, extensive, history of far-left militant attacks.

The fact that Ukrainian figures are now under the spotlight for the Nord Stream blasts has fuelled fresh criticism from familiar political wings, within Germany, about the government’s support for Kyiv.

Co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, Alice Weidel, has called for “aid payments” to Kyiv to be halted and the damage to Nord Stream “billed” to Ukraine.

The AfD enjoys much of its support in the former communist east, where beyond Berlin you’re more likely to find lingering affection for Russia and dissatisfaction with the main parties that have, since reunification, dominated national politics.

So as Cold War comparisons hover over European security, the politics of that period has also renewed itself in Germany in a stark and unexpected way.

In a bid to bolster security, the German government is working on a new law aimed at boosting resilience of critical infrastructure.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser says there must be “maximum protective measures in all areas”.

Operators in critical sectors such as energy, transport and water will have to follow minimum security standards, under the Kritis Umbrella Act.

It’s the first federal law of its kind in Germany but yet to gain final approval despite heightened tensions surrounding the war.

German-made armoured Marder vehicles are reportedly being used in Ukraine’s surprise operation inside Russian territory.

That would mark yet another German foreign policy taboo being broken since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Add to that contentious plans for the US to station long-range missiles in Germany from 2026.

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Chancellor Sholz promised a “Zeitenwende”, or turning point in national defence and security policy.

But supporters and critics of the government alike acknowledge that reversing years of underinvestment in defence will take time – as will adjusting a mentality so influenced by Germany’s dark past.

Given recent developments, there’s a question mark over how long Berlin has.

Mark Galeotti says it is not just rebuilding defence but upgrading cyber-security and improving counter-intelligence.

“Security planning doesn’t happen over weeks or months but years.”

Opposition supporters have gathered across Venezuela to protest against Nicolas Maduro’s disputed victory in last month’s presidential election.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado joined thousands of protesters in the capital, Caracas, and urged them not to be afraid.

Ms Machado, who had been in hiding after being accused of insurrection, said there was nothing above the voice of the people, and that the people had spoken.

Police and the army were deployed in force as supporters of Mr Maduro also held a demonstration.

“We won’t leave the streets,” Ms Machado told protesters, with many of them waving copies of election records from their voting stations as proof of victory.

She had called for nationwide protests to intensify pressure on Mr Maduro to concede.

Mr Maduro insisted he had won a third six-year term, but the opposition released tallies it said showed its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, winning by a wide margin.

Speaking from an unidentified location, Mr Gonzalez said it was time for an “orderly transition”.

The electoral commission, controlled by allies of Mr Maduro, has refused to release detailed results, but declared he won with 52% of the vote. Independent observers said it lacked transparency.

Since the election, anti-government protests have flared up and hundreds of people have been arrested by the security forces, which remain loyal to President Maduro.

According to the Venezuelan government, more than 2,400 people have been detained since 29 July, the day the disputed election result was announced.

The UN denounced the fact that street protests and criticism on social media have been met with “fierce repression” by the state.

Similar demonstrations have been held in cities around the world, from Australia to Spain and also in the United Kingdom, Canada, Colombia, Mexico and Argentina.

The European Union, the United States and a number of Latin American nations have refused to recognise the result.

When breaker Rachael Gunn – aka Raygun – bombed out of the Paris Olympics, the shockwaves hit a tiny hip-hop scene on the other side of the world.

In a Sydney warehouse-turned-community centre, breakers warm up with ab exercises that would make a Pilates teacher cry, before taking to the floor with acrobatic moves so intricate you can barely make them out.

It is one of the most important events of the year – a qualifier for the Red Bull BC One World Finals – and the past week weighs heavy.

A few people nervously glance at the handful of cameras lining the dance circle, their minds no doubt flashing to images of Gunn which have set the internet alight.

“I feel like it’s just pushed our scene in Australia into the Dark Ages,” Australian hip-hop pioneer Spice told the BBC.

Gunn, a 36-year-old university lecturer, lost all three of her Olympic battles in viral fashion, her green and gold tracksuit and unorthodox routine – which included the sprinkler and kangaroo-inspired hopping – generating waves of memes and abuse.

The fallout has divided and disappointed the Australian breaking community.

“It made a mockery of the Australian scene and I think that’s why a lot of us are hurting,” Spice says.

Many have rushed to defend Raygun against the onslaught.

Others are ready to admit there are questions to be answered over her qualification and performance, but say the global bullying has undermined any attempt to fairly analyse what went down in Paris.

Gunn has always been a dancer – albeit in jazz, tap and ballroom first – but it was her husband and coach Samuel Free that introduced her to the world of breaking when she was 20.

She says it took years to find her place in the male-dominated scene.

“There were times that I would go into the bathroom crying because I was so embarrassed at how terrible I was at this,” she told The Guardian Australia ahead of the Olympics.

Eventually though, Gunn became the face of breaking in Australia – a top-ranked B-girl and an academic with a PhD in the cultural politics of the sport.

And at an Olympics qualifying event in Sydney last October, where 15 women from across Oceania competed, Raygun emerged triumphant and officially booked her ticket to Paris.

Like Gunn, breaking was perhaps a surprising candidate for the Olympics. Born in the cultural melting pot that was the Bronx in the 1970s, the street dance quickly became a global phenomenon.

And in recent years – alongside urban sports like skateboarding and BMX freestyle – it caught the eye of Olympics chiefs desperate to attract new and younger audiences.

Some argued it didn’t deserve Olympic attention, while others insisted a competition like that could not capture breaking’s essence and would only further divorce the artform from the street culture it came from.

All eyes were on the event in Paris to see if the Olympic Committee’s gamble would pay off.

From the moment the final B-girl battle at the Olympics wrapped up, it was clear that breaking had indeed captured global attention – or, more specifically, Raygun had.

Rumours and criticism of her performance spread like wildlife, particularly online. Gunn received a torrent of violent messages.

An anonymous petition demanding Gunn apologise was signed by 50,000 people.

She was accused – without evidence – of manipulating her way onto the world’s biggest stage at the expense of other up-and-coming talent in the Australian hip-hop scene.

Some people shared a conspiracy that she had created the governing body which ran the Oceania qualifiers, and a lie that her husband – who is also a prominent member of the breaking community and a qualified judge – was on the panel that selected her.

Australian factchecking organisations and AUSBreaking, the national organisation for breaking, quickly tried to correct the record, but that didn’t stop the flood.

Then there were those arguing that she had mocked and appropriated hip-hop culture.

“It just looked like somebody who was toying with the culture and didn’t know how culturally significant it was,” Malik Dixon told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

In a series of statements, AUSBreaking stressed that judges were “trained to uphold the highest standards of impartiality” and that not a single person on the nine-person panel for the Oceania qualifiers was Australian.

And while AUSBreaking has had many “interactions” with Raygun since its conception in 2019, at no point had she ever held a leadership position or been involved in “any decision making over events, funding, strategy, judge selection or athlete selection”.

Taking to Instagram to rubbish all the “crackpot theories”, Te Hiiritanga Wepiha – a Kiwi judge on the Oceania qualifying panel – said Raygun won fair and square.

“All us judges talked about how she was going to get smashed, absolutely smashed [at the Olympics]… She knew it was going to be rough, so it’s actually courageous of her,” Wepiha – also known as Rush – said in a livestream

Some of the country’s most decorated athletes and highest Olympic officials also loudly defended Gunn.

“The petition has stirred up public hatred without any factual basis. It’s appalling,” the Australian Olympic Committee’s Matt Carroll said in a statement.

Gunn herself had previously said she was “never” going to be able to beat her powerful competitors, so had “wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative”.

In a video posted to social media in the eye of the public storm, Gunn added that she had taken the competition “very seriously”.

“I worked my butt off preparing for the Olympics and I gave my all. Truly.”

She had only been trying to “bring some joy”, she said. “I didn’t realize that that would also open the door to so much hate, which has frankly been pretty devastating.”

Some within the Australian hip-hop community admit the response to Raygun’s routine initially elicited “a chuckle” – but it quickly got out of hand.

Everyone was unequivocal in condemning the sheer volume of abuse, ridicule and misinformation that has targeted Raygun and the broader Australian B-girl community.

But beyond that, feeling is somewhat split.

Many B-girls say Raygun’s performance does not reflect the standard in Australia.

“When I first saw it, I was so embarrassed,” Spice – who retired from breaking years ago – says.

On any other stage, Raygun would have been encouraged and supported for “having a go”, Spice says, but people representing the country need to be at a certain level.

“It’s the Olympics for God’s sake!”

“In hip-hop we have this thing, you step up or you step off… You need to know your place.”

She stresses, though, that the “bullying is just disgusting” – and many like herself have been really reluctant to speak up out of fear of adding to Gunn’s anguish.

But the impact of the controversy on local Australian B-girls has also been “devastating”, Tinylocks says.

Like some others the BBC spoke to, she did not want her full name published because the scale of abuse circulating.

B-girl’s videos are being trolled, their DMs inundated with insults and violent threats. Young dancers are being harassed at school, and many now feel unsafe practising in public.

“Telling us to be positive and supportive while we are being harmed is unacceptable… [we’re] allowed to be angry,” she told the BBC.

Tinylocks – who herself has battled Raygun – thinks Gunn simply had a terrible day, but says there are questions about her preparation and routine that need answering.

“We know you’re capable of more… Were you set up for success?”

According to Wepiha, the Oceania panel judge also known as Rush, Gunn’s victory in qualifying reflects the size of the “tiny” breaking scene in Australia, and the even tinier public and government support for it.

“I mean, we had to actually get people out of retirement to make up the numbers,” Rush said.

“That’s how small the scene is.”

Others says there were rules which may have made a small talent pool even shallower – like the requirement that potential qualifiers be a member of AUSBreaking and that they have a valid passport, in line with rules put forward by the World Dance Sport Federation.

AUSBreaking did not respond to the BBC’s queries about Raygun’s selection, the financial support it receives or how it seeks out the country’s best breaking talent.

But Steve Gow, the group’s secretary and long-time b-boy Stevie G, tells the BBC the size and isolation of Australia inhibits the growth and development of the scene.

Being so distant from other, bigger hip-hop communities abroad can make it hard – both in terms of the time and money required – to learn from them.

“It can be very insular,” he says.

As if proving the point, he regularly pauses to greet almost everyone who walks into the Red Bull competition, which he is judging.

He insists there is still a high quality of breaking in Australia.

Ultimately, the community is bitterly hurt by the world’s response.

They feel breaking isn’t truly understood, and that people have piled on without knowledge or context.

“It’s a big disappointment because they’re not talking about the winners… they’re all talking about Raygun’s memes, and they’re not even seeing her full set,” Samson Smith – a member of hip-hop group Justice Crew and a breaker for over two decades – told Network 10.

But many hope a silver lining may yet emerge.

“She might actually bring enough attention to get resources,” Rush said.

“At the end of the day, Australia has the most famous Olympian of 2024 and she might actually save the scene here.”

The videos are shocking: buildings burning, horrifying violence and women weeping as they plead for help.

They are – the people sharing them say – proof of a “Hindu genocide” happening in Bangladesh in the wake of the sudden fall of the country’s long-time leader, Sheikh Hasina.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who uses the name Tommy Robinson – a British far-right activist who has been criticised for making inflammatory posts during the UK riots – has got involved, sharing videos along with dark warnings.

But we found that many of the videos and claims shared online are false.

Bangladesh has been in the headlines for weeks: student-led protests which left more than 400 dead culminated with the government falling and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing to India on 5 August.

Celebrations escalated into violent unrest, with rioters targeting members of her ruling Awami League party which is made up of both Hindu and Muslim members.

And while reports on the ground have found violence and looting impacted Hindu people and properties, far-right influencers in neighbouring India shared false videos and information that gave a misleading view of the events.

They claimed to show communal violence against Hindus purportedly carried out by “Islamist radicals” with a violent agenda.

One viral post claimed to show a temple set on fire by “Islamists in Bangladesh”.

However, BBC Verify has determined that this building, identified as the Navagraha Temple in Chittagong, was undamaged by the incident which actually occurred at a nearby Awami League party office.

Pictures obtained by the BBC after the fire show debris of posters with Awami League members’ faces.

“On 5 August, there was an attack on the Awami League office premises behind the temple in the afternoon,” Swapan Das, a staff member at the temple, told BBC Verify. “They took the furniture outside and set fire to it.”

Mr Das added that although the temple was not attacked on the day, the situation remains tense and the temple has been shut with people guarding it round-the-clock.

This is far from the only story shared, most under the same hashtag, which has had nearly a million mentions since 4 August, according to social media monitoring tool Brandwatch. Accounts that were mostly geolocated to India drove the trend.

Other viral posts which have since been debunked include a claim that a Bangladeshi Hindu cricketer’s home had been burned down. BBC Verify has established the house in fact belongs to a Muslim MP from the Awami League.

Then there was the school that burned down, which the BBC visited. Again, the reasons behind the attack appear to be political rather than religious.

All of these posts have been shared by multiple accounts, many of which support Hindu-nationalist values.

Inter-religious strains have been present in Bangladesh for many decades, says Professor Sayeed Al-Zaman, an expert in hate speech and disinformation in Bangladesh.

Following the hasty departure of Sheikh Hasina, matters have come to a head once again, “as Hindus felt insecure in the absence of the government and effective law and order”, says Prof Al-Zaman.

The false narratives have made the situation worse. “Fear-mongering by these influencers is inflaming the tension.”

Some of these posts falsely claiming that Hindus have been targeted by Muslims have been shared by accounts far removed from either Bangladesh or India.

Tommy Robinson who has been criticised for posting inflammatory messages about the violent riots targeting Muslims and immigrants across the UK, has been sharing unverified videos from Bangladesh, where he says there is “a genocide on Hindus”.

We have investigated one video shared by him. It shows a woman pleading for her husband’s life as her home is attacked. The post falsely claims the property is being targeted by “Islamists”. The original video was shared on 6 August, onde day after the property had been attacked.

However, when the BBC investigated the story behind the video, a different narrative emerged.

We were told by a group of local students who had assisted the woman in defending her property that the dispute was about an entirely different matter. They shared photos and videos of the clean-up with the BBC which show the property as seen in the original video. The Hindu temple inside the property is unharmed.

“The conflict is about ownership of land. A case was filed long ago,” a student told us. A case has been in local courts about the ownership of the land for nearly six months.

We’ve spoken to other people in the local area who’ve told us that the attack was not religiously motivated and that the perpetrators were a mix of Hindu and Muslim people. They also reported that other Hindu families and temples in the area weren’t affected.

Tommy Robinson did not respond to our request for comment.

Working out exactly what has happened in Bangladesh over the last few weeks has proved difficult.

Many real incidents and attacks have taken place across the country, but the motivations are difficult to assess: religion or politics.

The two are closely entwined: one Hindu resident explained how the minority are largely viewed as supporters of Sheikh Hasina’s secular Awami League party.

AFP fact-checker for Bangladesh, Qadaruddin Shishir, told the BBC that there have been attacks on Hindu-owned properties.

But, he said, “right-wing Indian accounts are spreading these politically motivated attacks as religious ones.”

Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, a non-profit established to protect minority human rights, reported five Hindu people killed. Two have been confirmed as Awami League members.

The AFP has put the count of Muslim Awami League leaders’ who have been killed at more than 50.

When false claims about attacks on Hindus went viral online, some Muslim protesters decided to guard Hindu temples.

“It’s our responsibility to protect them,” said Moinul, who stood watch last week in front of a temple in Hatharazi, outside of Chittagong.

Viral social media posts were trying to “incite conflict between Hindus and Muslims,” said Moinul. “But we are not falling for it.”

Choton Banik, a local Hindu in the area who attended the temple, asked that they continue their effort “through this critical time.”

“I hope that we will continue to live together in this independent Bangladesh in the future,” he said.

Doctors in India have held a national strike, escalating the protest against the rape and murder of a female colleague in the West Bengal city of Kolkata.

More than a million were expected to join the strikes, as hospitals and clinics across the country turned away non-emergency patients.

The IMA described last week’s killing as a “crime of barbaric scale due to the lack of safe spaces for women” and asked for the country’s support in its “struggle for justice”.

Protests against the attack and calling for the better protection of women have intensified in recent days after a mob vandalised the hospital where it happened.

In a statement, the IMA said emergency and casualty services would continue to run. The strike ended at 06:00 local time on Sunday (00:30 GMT).

The association’s president, R. V. Asokan, told the BBC doctors have been suffering and protesting against violence for years, but that this incident was “qualitatively different”.

If such a crime can happen in a medical college in a major city, it shows “everywhere doctors are unsafe”, he said.

Doctors at some government hospitals announced earlier this week that they were indefinitely halting elective procedures.

The IMA also issued a list of demands including the strengthening of the law to better protect medical staff against violence, increasing the level of security at hospitals and the creation of safe spaces for rest.

It called for a “meticulous and professional investigation” into the killing and the prosecution of those involved in vandalising, as well as compensation for the woman’s family.

The rape of the 31-year-old female trainee doctor has shocked the country.

Her half-naked body bearing extensive injuries was discovered in a seminar hall at R G Kar Medical College last week after she was reported to have gone there to rest during her shift.

A volunteer who worked at the hospital has been arrested in connection with the crime.

The case has been transferred from local police to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) following criticism at the lack of progress.

More incidents of rape have made headlines in India since the woman’s death and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that “monstrous behaviour against women should be severely and quickly punished”.

The woman’s rape and killing has sparked a political blame game in West Bengal, with the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accusing the governing Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) of orchestrating the attack.

The TMC has refuted the allegation and has blamed “political outsiders” for stoking the violence.

Tens of thousands of women across West Bengal participated in the Reclaim the Night march on Wednesday night to demand “independence to live in freedom and without fear”.

Though the protests were largely peaceful, clashes erupted between the police and a small group of unidentified men who barged into the RG Kar Hospital – the site of the crime – and ransacked its emergency ward.

At least 25 people have been arrested in connection with the incident so far.

Protests have also been held in many other Indian cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.

“It feels like hope is being reignited,” one demonstrator, Sumita Datta, told the AFP news agency as thousands of people marched through the streets of Kolkata on Friday.

Indonesia has celebrated Independence Day in its future new capital city Nusantara for the first time – with scaled-back festivities as construction continues.

The country had hoped to officially inaugurate the city on the 79th anniversary of its declaration of independence in 1945 after centuries of Dutch rule and then Japanese occupation during World War Two.

But the project, on the island of Borneo, has been hit with construction delays and funding problems.

It is set to be the biggest legacy of outgoing President Joko Widodo, who attended events alongside his successor Prabowo Subianto.

Millions of screaming fans. A global phenomenon. A multi-billion pound business. No, it’s not Taylor Swift (this time). We’re talking K-pop.

And with four of 2023’s top 10 best-selling acts coming out of South Korea, the Brits want a piece of the action.

Step forward newly created boy band, Dear Alice, who applied to take part in the latest BBC One talent show, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience.

Meet Blaise, Dexter, James, Olly and Reese. You might be hearing a bit more about them from now on.

None of them knew each other before they individually auditioned and were put together as a band by the showrunners.

The fresh-faced quintet were then flown out to South Korea’s capital, Seoul, for 100 days of rigorous K-pop training with stardom in their sights.

Most K-pop training takes years rather than months. Not for the faint-hearted, the boys’ experience involved long hours of vocal coaching and learning intricate choreography with a bit of Korean sight-seeing thrown in for good measure (and good TV – the South Korean tourist board will be thrilled).

• Where did K-pop come from?

The six-part series is a collaboration between the BBC, K-pop powerhouse agency SM Entertainment and Moon&Back Media, run by TV veterans Dawn Airey, Nigel Hall and Russ Lindsay, whose back catalogue includes shows such as The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and Saturday Night Takeaway.

K-pop expert Hee Jun Yoon, the creative force behind some of the biggest K-pop bands of the last 20 years, critiques the band’s performance at the end of each week and it’s safe to say she pulls no punches. Even the head of BBC unscripted content, Kate Phillips, says Hee Jun “makes Simon Cowell look like Mary Poppins”.

Former X Factor head judge Cowell is, of course, launching his own search for a boy band in an upcoming Netflix series which is still in production.

Without giving too much away from Made in Korea’s first episode, Hee Jun gives the band a huge wake-up call in week one with some unflinching criticism. “The level of choreo is so basic, it’s nursery level.” Ouch. Her facial expressions alone could go viral.

The boys won’t be drawn on whether any of them wanted to quit the show at any point. “You’ll have to wait and see,” says Olly Quinn, 20, from Sunderland, a recent graduate in dance and musical theatre. (Clearly, the media training has also been exacting).

They also won’t reveal whether they’ve signed a record deal yet, only saying they’re still “rehearsing hard” and commenting that all the effort and brutal feedback was worth it.

Londoner Dexter Greenwood, 22, who also trained in musical theatre, says: “It was hard work, really challenging but the end justifies the means. Everyone at SM was so supportive but I think we were different to what they expected!”

Reese Carter, 20, from Wiltshire and a former cruise ship performer, adds: “At first it hit hard but we had a great welfare team in place… and it was all done with love.

“They’re honest because they want to push us to be that much better. I enjoy the feedback. They’re on our side. We had welfare, a life coach, we had people living with us constantly, you could walk downstairs and speak to someone,” he adds.

Olly concurs: “It’s the brutal honestly. We needed it.”

There’s certainly a vast difference between the band’s performances in episode one and a later video clip journalists were shown at a preview.

Coco Yeonsoo Do is a K-pop dancer and choreographer, and was a former member of KAACHI, considered the UK’s first K-pop girl group.

“It’s really hard to make a K-pop group reach BTS or Blackpink level,” she tells the BBC, but training is what sets successful groups apart.

“It’s very intense and competitive,” says Coco.

One key difference between UK and US pop groups and K-pop ones is how produced the latter are, she adds.

“It’s obvious, but K-pop groups work more like a group, and emphasise the group identity, rather than individuality,” she adds.

Following allegations over very strict and punishing training regimes by wannabe K-pop stars over the past few years, Korean press reported the introduction of regulations to ban some unfair practices in contracts between K-pop trainees and entertainment companies.

Clearly welfare has been a priority for the series producers of The K-pop Experience.

Helen Wood is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Aston University, and is working on a research project on duty of care in TV.

In 2019, there was a Parliamentary inquiry and Ofcom consultation on the broadcasting code, following a handful of reality stars’ deaths by suicide.

In 2020, the media watchdog announced new rules to protect those taking part in TV shows.

“Now there’s more pressure on production to make sure that they’re taking due care of the welfare, dignity and wellbeing of participants that go through production,” she says.

“That’s not to say that things weren’t in place before 2021, but there’s now much more regulation.”

Another key difference brought in through the new Ofcom code is a requirement to show audiences that a duty of care to participants is being enacted, she adds.

This means drawing back the curtain to show audiences some of the backstage production processes to ensure they understand and feel confident that contestants are adequately cared for.

A spokesperson for Made in Korea told the BBC: “The welfare of the band members has been at the centre of their training process,” adding that there was a “strong support team in place” and that the band’s welfare “remains the highest priority”.

Reese says they also relied on each other for support.

“We’ve [the band] grown closer and closer over the last couple of months. Much as it was great to have welfare there, there was a lot of times when we didn’t need to go to them because we’re strong enough as a group.”

Blaise Noon, 19, from London, is the baby of the band but appears to be taking it all in his stride. He is a Brit School graduate and comes across as the most confident.

He says they are really “lucky” to have had the advantage as a British band to be immersed in the Korean training regime: “There’s a lot of really good things we can take away to create this hybrid fusion.”

Interestingly, most of them have never had any desire to be in a boy band until now.

James Sharp, 23, from Huddersfield, is one half of the Sharp twins, whose TikTok account has amassed 5.5 million followers.

He says he thought boy bands were “cringey”, Blaise laughs as he recalls feeling “too cool” for them although Dexter was always a fan. And Olly has had a K-pop education from his auntie who runs K-pop fan pages.

All agree, though, that this was too big an opportunity to pass up.

But how did they come up with the band name?

After Olly’s suggestion of British Bulldogs was quickly scotched (can’t think why), they stumbled upon a restaurant in Seoul called Dear Alice.

They all liked it and it stuck.

“The ‘dear’ is like a letter to the fans” and Alice stands for ‘a love I can’t explain,” says Blaine.

More to the point, the restaurant “sold the best beef wellington in the world” according to the lads.

Not exactly your classic Korean dish but Dear Alice will be hoping a similar culture fusion will be the secret to their success.

Hamas has described suggestions of progress on an Israel-Gaza ceasefire deal as an illusion, after US President Joe Biden said he was feeling “optimistic”.

Following two days of US-backed talks in Qatar, President Biden said on Friday “we are closer than we have ever been”.

And on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Israeli negotiators had expressed “cautious optimism” about moving towards agreement on a deal.

However, a senior Hamas official told the BBC earlier there had been no progress and mediators were “selling illusions”.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October, during which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

A ceasefire deal agreed in November saw Hamas release 105 of the hostages in return for a week-long ceasefire and the freeing of some 240 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel says 111 hostages are still being held, 39 of whom are presumed dead.

In a recent joint statement, the US, Qatar and Egypt stated that they had presented a proposal for a ceasefire and hostage release deal that “narrows the gaps” between Israel and Hamas.

Israel has said any ceasefire deal would require the release of the remaining hostages. Some have already been released, while others are thought to have died in Gaza.

Relatives of hostages still in Gaza are calling the current negotiations as the “last chance” to get some of them out alive.

After 10 months of war and thousands of casualties, there is overwhelming pressure for a breakthrough.

A wider regional conflict, in the event of talks between Israel and Hamas collapsing completely, is a distinct possibility and is something all of those involved are fearful of.

The mediators said that the past two days of ceasefire discussions had been “serious, constructive and conducted in a positive atmosphere”.

Technical teams are expected to continue working over the coming days on the details of how to implement the proposed terms before senior government officials meet again in Cairo, hoping to reach an agreement on the terms set out in Doha.

While the mediators’ statement is clearly a positive development, there is still a long way to go before a ceasefire is agreed.

This is not the first time the Mr Biden has said he thought a deal was close – and not everyone shares his cautious optimism.

Neither Hamas nor the Israeli government have been quite so upbeat in their responses.

Israel says its position and core principles have remained unchanged and were “well-known”. It accused Hamas of refusing to agree to a deal for the release of the hostages.

Above all else, Israelis want to see the remaining hostages released but many are sceptical that is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s primary goal. He has insisted that a “total victory” over Hamas is his government’s priority.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s new leader, Yaya Sinwar, continues to show few signs of compromise.

Asked about President Biden’s statement, the senior Hamas official told the BBC “what we have received from the mediators is very disappointing. There has been no progress”.

Hamas is understood to have dropped its demand for a permanent ceasefire in favour of Mr Biden’s proposal for a six-week pause in which an end to the war could be brokered.

Mr Biden’s ceasefire proposal also included the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza, the staggered release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and the return of dead hostages’ remains.

The “bridging proposal” put forward by US, Egyptian and Qatari negotiators will be the subject of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s negotiations in the region and should form the basis for the next talks in Cairo at which all parties, including Hamas, are expected to attend.

That proposal reportedly “closes the remaining gaps” between the two sides’ positions which could allow for “a rapid implementation of the agreement”.

It might sound straightforward, but there are big obstacles to overcome and there is still absolutely no trust between senior Israeli or Hamas figures.

They’re being dragged to the table – perhaps against their wishes – by others fearful of what could happen in the event of failure.

Hamas and its allies are convinced the US administration is trying to buy more time.

If Iran attacks Israel, it will appear as if it is Hamas which undermined the negotiations.

Hamas does not hide its desire for Iran and Hezbollah to attack Israel and for the escalation to turn into a regional war.

They believe a strong blow to Israel will weaken Mr Netanyahu and push him to accept a deal.

For his part, Mr Biden warned “no-one in the region should take actions to undermine this process”.

Meanwhile, Israel’s military operation in Gaza continues, with an air strike in the early hours of Saturday morning killing 15 people in the al-Zawaida neighbourhood of central Gaza, according to the Palestinian civil defence authority, a rescue service.

Spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP news agency nine children and three women were among the dead.

Israel has not commented directly. The Israel Defense Forces said on Saturday morning it had “eliminated a number of terrorists” in central Gaza, including one that had fired at Israeli forces operating in the area.

The Israeli military has issued new evacuation orders for several blocks in northern Khan Younis and Deir Balah – further shrinking the humanitarian zone in which thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge from the fighting.

Israel said the blocks had become dangerous for civilians “due to significant acts of terrorism” and the firing of rockets and mortars towards Israel.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) said: “Once again, fear spreads as families have nowhere to go.”

Pressing the need for a ceasefire deal is the circulation of the polio virus – which can spread through faecal matter – is now circulating inside the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in Gaza.

“Let’s be clear: The ultimate vaccine for polio is peace and an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said.

A fire at Somerset House in central London has been contained after around 125 firefighters were called to tackle the blaze.

In a joint press conference with the arts venue, the London Fire Brigade (LFB) said firefighters are now working to “extinguish the final pockets of fire” located in the roof space.

The fire broke out in the west wing just before midday on Saturday, and the historic landmark will remain closed “until further notice”. There were no artworks in that part of the building, a spokesman said.

There are no reported injuries and the cause of the fire is currently under investigation.

Thick grey smoke could be seen billowing into the air from the landmark building, over the River Thames and nearby Waterloo Bridge.

Speaking to reporters, the LFB’s assistant commissioner Keeley Foster said firefighters carried out a “complex and technical response”.

They will remain at the scene into tomorrow, she added.

She was joined by Somerset House’s director Jonathan Reekie, who said: “It’s too early to comment on the building’s condition.”

He added the venue will remain closed until further notice, but the Courtauld Gallery will reopen to the public tomorrow.

In an earlier social media post, Somerset House said the venue was closed due to the fire, and all events on Saturday would not take place.

Following evacuation from the venue, staff and visitors were seen standing outside.

“Everybody is safe, there are no valuable artefacts or artworks in that part of the building,” Mr Reekie told the BBC earlier.

“For now we just want to let the London Fire Brigade get on and do their brilliant work.”

Due to heavy smoke, the London Ambulance Service asked people to avoid the area and told local businesses to keep windows and doors shut.

Arts minister Sir Chris Bryant said he hopes the venue can reopen as soon as possible, and that his department is in touch with them.

“I am sorry to hear about the fire at Somerset House, this historic building is home to some of London’s great galleries and creative spaces.”

Somerset House is on the Strand in central London and is currently used as an arts venue. The Georgian era buildings and square were built on the site of a palace dating back to the Tudors.

The venue is also home to the Courtauld Gallery, an art museum which houses the collection of the Samuel Courtauld Trust, including masterpieces ranging from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

Vincent Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear is part of the Courtauld collection, which also includes works by Impressionists Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne.

Somerset House regularly hosts exhibitions, experiences and ice skating within its famous courtyard.

LFB said its crews were tackling flames which are “located in part of the buildings roof”.

Twenty fire engines including crews from Soho, Islington and surrounding fire stations are at the scene, the Brigade added.

Four aerial ladders were employed by the LFB, including one 64m long, to help tackle the blaze, the Brigade’s assistant commissioner said.

The Met Police said officers were called at 12:25 and attended along with LFB firefighters.

Road closures were in place, the force said adding nobody is thought to be inside Somerset House.

Ukrainian troops are “strengthening” positions in captured territory in Russia and expanding further, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

Ukrainian soldiers are two weeks into their incursion in Russia’s Kursk region – their deepest since Moscow launched its full scale invasion more than two years ago.

Troops are continuing to advance further into Kursk, the force said in its daily report.

Moscow has called the incursion a major provocation and vowed to retaliate with a “worthy response”.

In a statement on messaging app Telegram, President Zelensky said: “Thank you to all the soldiers and commanders who are taking Russian military prisoners and bringing the release of our soldiers and civilians held by Russia closer.

“General Syrskyi also reported on strengthening our forces’ positions in the Kursk region and expanding the stabilised territory.”

Russia said its forces had repelled the Ukrainians near three settlements in the Kursk region and were searching for “mobile enemy groups” trying to pierce deeper into the country.

Kyiv claims to have taken control of more than 80 settlements in the incursion.

His latest statement comes after Ukraine destroyed a strategically important bridge over the river Seym this week.

The bridge had been used by the Kremlin to supply its troops and its destruction could hamper those efforts.

The Russian foreign ministry said the bridge was “completely destroyed” and volunteers assisting the evacuated civilian population were killed.

However, as Ukraine moves further into western Russian territory, Russian forces are equally making gains in Ukraine’s east and have claimed a string of villages in recent weeks.

Russia attacked at least four Ukrainian regions on Saturday, according to Ukrainian officials, including the north-eastern region of Kharkiv.

Mr Zelensky said on Saturday there had been “dozens of Russian assaults” on Ukrainian positions near the cities of Toretsk and Pokrovsk.

Pokrovsk is a vital logistics hub that sits on a main road for supplies to Ukrainian troops along the eastern front.

“Our soldiers and units are doing everything to destroy the occupier and repel the attacks,” the Ukrainian president said, stressing the situation was “under control”.

Tourists enjoying the picture postcard views of Lakes Lucerne, Thun or Lake Neuchatel might be surprised to learn what lies beneath those pristine alpine waters.

For years the Swiss military used the lakes as dumping grounds for old munition, believing it could be disposed of safely there.

In Lake Lucerne alone there are an estimated 3,300 tonnes of munition, and 4,500 tonnes in the waters of Neuchatel, which the Swiss air force used for bombing practice until 2021.

Some munitions are at depths of 150 to 220 metres, but others in Lake Neuchatel are just six or seven metres below the surface.

Now, the Swiss defence department is offering 50,000 francs (£45,000) in prize money for the best idea to get it out.

The best three ideas for a safe and environmental solution to retrieve the munition will share the prize pot – but the salvage operation is expected to cost billions.

The fact that so many rounds were dumped in Swiss lakes – Brienz being another of them – has been known about for decades, though people have asked questions about safety more recently.

Retired Swiss geologist Marcos Buser, who advised the government on this topic, wrote a research paper ten years ago warning of the dangers of the dumps.

The munition poses two risks, he said. First, despite the fact it is underwater, there is still a risk of explosion, because in many cases “the army did not remove the fuses before dumping the munition”.

Then there’s water and soil contamination – there is a real chance that highly toxic TNT could pollute the lake water and the sediment.

The Swiss government acknowledges that factors including poor visibility, magnetic iron and individual ammunition weights “represent major challenges for environmentally friendly ammunition recovery”.

An assessment of possible recovery techniques in 2005 showed that all proposed solutions for ammunition recovery posed severe risks for the sensitive ecosystems of the lakes.

It’s not the first time Switzerland’s military has appeared somewhat negligent with its munitions.

The alpine village of Mitholz suffered a massive blast in 1947, when 3,000 tonnes of ammunition the army had stored in the mountain overlooking the village exploded.

Nine people were killed, and the village was destroyed. The blast was even heard 160 kilometres (100 miles) away in Zurich.

Three years ago, the military revealed that 3,500 tonnes of unexploded ammunition which still remained buried in the mountain was not safe after all, and said it would be removed.

For Mitholz’s residents that meant leaving home for up to a decade while the clean-up operation took place.

There have also been scandals about neutral Switzerland’s Cold War defence strategy of mining its bridges and tunnels against an invasion. Some bridges had to be quickly demined because modern heavy goods vehicles risked triggering an explosion.

In 2001, 11 people died in the Gotthard Tunnel, one of Europe’s key north to south transport routes, when a fire broke out following a collision between two lorries.

Large quantities of explosives – not involved in the explosion – were still stored in a depot close to the tunnel mouth and after fire officers successfully put the fire out, the army arrived, bomb disposal equipment to hand.

And this week, the army revealed that reports from civilians finding unexploded ordinance out in the Swiss countryside increased by 12% last year (on 2022).

Even on the glaciers, now receding amid the impacts of climate change, the melting ice is revealing spent and live ammunition left over from high mountain training which took place decades ago.

It’s a legacy of Switzerland’s ‘armed neutrality’ defence strategy – maintaining a large militia army (all Swiss men are required to do military service) which trains its troops almost entirely inside what is a densely populated country.

The task to remove munition from Switzerland’s lakes is expected be long and complicated. But first, someone needs to come up with a workable plan of how exactly to get them out.

While some complain that the army should have thought of that while dumping, for decades the advice from geologists to the military was that the practice was safe.

The hunt is on for solutions. Following the Swiss defence department’s appeal, the public can submit their ideas until February next year when they will be anonymously judged by a panel of experts.

The three winners will be announced next April.

The government said: “It is not planned to implement the submitted entries immediately, but they could serve as the basis for further clarifications or for launching research projects.”

Mr Buser suggests turning to the UK, Norway, or Denmark for advice given their experience in dealing with wartime wrecks containing unexploded weapons.

So will he offer any ideas? “No, I’m too old now…but if they need any advice I will be pleased to give it.”

As Martina Canchi Nate walks through the Bolivian jungle, red butterflies fluttering around her, we have to ask her to pause – our team can’t keep up.

Her ID card shows she’s 84, but within 10 minutes, she digs up three yucca trees to extract the tubers from the roots, and with just two strokes of her knife, cuts down a plantain tree.

She slings a huge bunch of the fruit on her back and begins the walk home from her chaco – the patch of land where she grows cassava, corn, plantains and rice.

Martina is one of 16,000 Tsimanes (pronounced “chee-may-nay”) – a semi-nomadic indigenous community living deep in the Amazon rainforest, 600km (375 miles) north of Bolivia’s largest city, La Paz.

Her vigour is not unusual for Tsimanes of her age. Scientists have concluded the group has the healthiest arteries ever studied, and that their brains age more slowly than those of people in North America, Europe and elsewhere.

The Tsimanes are a rarity. They are one of the last peoples on the planet to live a fully subsistence lifestyle of hunting, foraging and farming. The group is also large enough to provide a sizeable scientific sample, and researchers, led by anthropologist Hillard Kaplan of the University of New Mexico, have studied it for two decades.

Tsimanes are constantly active – hunting animals, planting food and weaving roofs.

Less than 10% of their daylight hours are spent in sedentary activities, compared with 54% in industrial populations. An average hunt, for example, lasts more than eight hours and covers 18km.

They live on the Maniqui River, approximately 100km by boat from the nearest town, and have had little access to processed foods, alcohol and cigarettes.

The researchers found that only 14% of the calories they eat are from fat, compared with 34% in the US. Their foods are high in fibre and 72% of their calories come from carbohydrates, compared with 52% in the US.

Proteins come from animals they hunt, such as birds, monkeys and fish. When it comes to cooking, traditionally, there is no frying.

The initial work of Prof Kaplan and his colleague, Michael Gurven of the University of California, Santa Barbara, was anthropological. But they noticed the elderly Tsimanes did not show signs of diseases typical of old age such as hypertension, diabetes or heart problems.

Then a study published in 2013 caught their attention. A team led by US cardiologist Randall C Thompson used CT scanning to examine 137 mummies from ancient Egyptian, Inca and Unangan civilisations.

As humans age, a build-up of fats, cholesterol and other substances can make arteries thicken or harden, causing atherosclerosis. They found signs of this in 47 of the mummies, challenging assumptions that it is caused by modern lifestyles.

The two research teams joined forces and carried out CT scans on 705 Tsimanes over the age of 40, looking for coronary artery calcium (CAC) – a sign of clogged-up blood vessels and risk of a heart attack.

Their study, first published in The Lancet in 2017, showed 65% of the Tsimanes over 75 had no CAC. In comparison, most Americans of that age (80%) do have signs of it.

As Kaplan puts it: “A 75-year-old Tsimane’s arteries are more like a 50-year-old American’s arteries.”

A second phase, published in 2023 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, found elderly Tsimanes showed up to 70% less brain atrophy than people of the same age in industrialised countries such as the UK, Japan and the US.

“We found zero cases of Alzheimer’s among the entire adult population – it is remarkable,” Bolivian doctor Daniel Eid Rodríguez, a medical co-ordinator for the researchers, tells us.

Working out the ages of the Tsimanes is not an exact science, however. Some have difficulty counting, as they have not been taught numbers well. They told us they are guided by records of Christian missions in the area or by how long they have known each other. The scientists do calculations based on the ages of a person’s children.

According to their records, Hilda is 81, but she says recently her family killed a pig to celebrate her “100th birthday or something like that”.

Juan, who says he is 78, takes us out hunting. His hair is dark, his eyes lively and his hands muscular and firm. We watch as he stalks a small taitetú – a hairy, wild pig – which manages to sneak away through the foliage and escape.

He admits he does feel his age: “Now the most difficult thing is my body. I don’t walk far any more… it will be two days at most.”

Martina agrees. Tsimane women are known for weaving roofs from jatata, a plant that grows deep in the jungle. To find it, Martina must walk for three hours there and three hours back, carrying the branches on her back.

“I do it once or twice a month, although now it’s harder for me,” she says.

Many Tsimanes never reach old age, though. When the study began, their average life expectancy was barely 45 years – now it’s risen to 50.

At the clinic where the scans take place, Dr Eid asks the elderly woman about their families as they prepare to be examined.

Counting on her fingers, one woman says sadly that she had six children, of which five died. Another says she had 12, of which four died – one more says she has nine children still alive, but another three died.

“These people who reach the age of 80 were the ones who managed to survive a childhood full of diseases and infections,” says Dr Eid.

The researchers believe all the Tsimanes have experienced some sort of infection by parasites or worms during their lifetimes. They also found high levels of pathogens and inflammation, suggesting the Tsimanes’ bodies were constantly fighting infections.

This has led them to wonder whether these early infections could be another factor – in addition to diet and exercise – behind the health of the elderly Tsimanes.

The community’s lifestyle is, however, changing.

Juan says he has not been able to hunt a large enough animal in months. A series of forest fires at the end of 2023 destroyed nearly two million hectares of jungle and forest.

“The fire made the animals leave,” he says.

He has now begun raising livestock and shows us four beef steers he hopes will provide protein for the family later this year.

Dr Eid says the use of boats with an outboard motor – known as peque-peque – is also bringing change. It makes markets easier to reach, giving the Tsimane access to foods such as sugar, flour and oil.

And he points out that it means they are rowing less than before – “one of the most demanding physical activities”.

Twenty years ago, there were barely any cases of diabetes. Now they are beginning to appear, while cholesterol levels have also begun to increase among the younger population, the researchers have found.

“Any small change in their habits ends up affecting these health indices,” says Dr Eid.

And the researchers themselves have had an impact over their 20 years of involvement – arranging better access to healthcare for the Tsimanes, from cataract operations to treatment for broken bones and snake bites.

But for Hilda, old age is not something to be taken too seriously. “I’m not afraid of dying,” she tells us with a laugh, “because they’re going to bury me and I’m going to stay there… very still.”

The peaceful rural village of Repton in Derbyshire is thought to have witnessed a pivotal blood-soaked moment in British history – and an expert says it deserves national recognition.

A chilling truth – which sounds like a cross between a horror movie and an apocalyptic thriller – hides behind a picture of quintessential English calm.

In the quiet shade of trees, children were buried, perhaps to honour hundreds of dead piled nearby.

Beneath a church spire, a royal shrine was torn apart. Under carefully tended turf, the mutilated members of a family.

And while the churchyard of St Wystan’s Church, in Repton, has witnessed centuries of history, these events may have taken place during a few, terrible, months in 873 AD at the hands of the Vikings under their infamous leader Ivar the Boneless and their most terrible iteration, the Great Heathen Army.

“Repton is of quite extraordinary significance as a place where not only are we in touching distance of a sequence of almost mythological individuals and events,” said Steve Baker, Derbyshire County Archaeologist.

“Early saints, Mercian kings, figures from Viking sagas, the ‘Great Army’ itself – all in one location representing critical moments in the making of England as we know it, but we also know these events, figures and stories to be embodied in well-preserved and stratified archaeological evidence.

“Recognition of this importance through some form of national designation is long overdue.”

Repton’s story has been revealed in two main phases of archaeological work – in the 1970s and 1980s under Professor Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, and then from 2016 to 2023 under Dr Cat Jarman.

Dr Tom Horne, who worked on the site during the most recent excavations, said: “Maybe you don’t get England as we know it without Repton.

“We know from a book called the Anglo Saxon Chronicle that the Great Heathen Army effectively wipes out the kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia.

“It also tells us in the winter of 873, this army camped in Repton – but gives little more detail.

“So here we have this snapshot of an extraordinary group of people, changing the map of Britain and it turns out the site at Repton is really remarkably well preserved.”

And the story it preserves seems to live up the gruesome reputation of the Vikings.

A low mound near the churchyard was rumoured by folklore to have contained a giant skeleton, perhaps even Ivar himself.

The Biddle’s excavations of the mound found the remains of 264 adults, dating back to the late 9th Century, piled in the shattered remains of an Anglo Saxon monastery.

Nearby were four skeletons of children. Was this evidence of a massacre?

Dr Emma Brownlee from the University of Cambridge is an expert on funerary archaeology and also worked on the Repton site.

She said: “The large deposit of remains were not complete skeletons but a collection of disarticulated bones, suggesting they had been buried elsewhere then moved.

“This could well be that people who died on campaign were brought back to Repton for reburial, which indicates the area had special significance.

“It caused some surprise that, when the bones were analysed, one in five proved to be women. The army might well have more resembled a town on the move.

“There has been speculation the four adolescent skeletons nearby were sacrifices in honour of the mass grave but the true relationship remains unclear.

“But it is clearly a significant thing to do to gather up your dead and bring them here. Even if the army did not stay for long, this must have been a place of lasting importance.”

The importance of St Wystan’s to the Anglo-Saxons is shown by its crypt, a unique survival from the 8th Century. It is once thought to have held the tombs of Mercian kings but was likely ransacked, along with the neighbouring monastery, when the Vikings seized the town.

Its importance to the Vikings is shown by two graves found by the Biddles just outside the eastern end of the church, next to the crypt.

Dr Brownlee said: “One was an older man, the other younger. Both died violently, with the older suffering injuries to his head and leg. From the angle of the cut to his femur, it is likely this blow severed his genitals as well.

“He was buried with a sword, a Thor’s hammer pendant and a boar’s tusk, which as it sat between his legs, may have been a posthumous replacement for his genitalia. The grave goods and the position of the burial indicate these were high status individuals.

“Both graves were covered with stones, some of which belonged to a smashed Saxon cross, which may itself have been a statement of conquest.”

Later DNA analysis by Dr Jarman showed the two men were closely related and it was theorised they could be Viking father and son Olaf and Eysteinn, mentioned in documents as being killed in 874 and 875, but this cannot be confirmed.

The more recent digs shed more light on the terrible events which the location has witnessed, perhaps uncovering ground walked on by the Great Army.

Dr Horne said: “Finds from a pebble path included the sort of thing one might expect to discover at a looted Anglo-Saxon Christian centre.

“There were spectacular copper alloy brooches with gilded surfaces, sherds of rare blue window glass and coins.

“You can interpret this as monks fleeing the oncoming storm or warriors spilling their loot, not bothering to pick up the small stuff as they had so much.

“The broken glass certainly suggests the shattered windows of an abbey so perhaps we are looking at traces of a landscape of destruction”.

The Biddles also found a large D-shaped ditch, incorporating the church, which would have defended a landing place for longships which had come up the old course of the River Trent.

So, everything pointed to a violent occupation of a Mercian royal and religious site by the Viking army. But one problem remained – a question of size.

Mr Baker said: “The Repton site, even taking in activity outside the ditch, is about one hectare.

“The previous winter the army stayed at Torksey in Lincolnshire and there the camp measured about 26 hectares.

“But following clues from metal detectorists, Cat Jarman looked at fields at a place called Foremark, a little over two miles away.

“Although the excavations were limited, enough was found to suggest there was a major Viking presence there.

“Suddenly you had space for the sort of army which destroyed kingdoms.”

But the countryside near Repton has another revelation about the Vikings, with a unique cemetery at a place called Heath Wood.

Dr Brownlees explains: “There are dozens of barrows or mounds here which are the site of cremation burials, the only example in the British Isles. The contrast to the inhumation – full skeleton – burials at Repton is striking and may indicate cultural differences within the Viking army.

“After this winter, the army split up, with part going to occupy the already conquered kingdoms, part going to face Alfred in Wessex and it has been suggested this was down to differences between the leaders.

“But Heath Wood, which was originally on a bare hill above the Trent valley, served a similar role to Repton, as a statement of domination.”

Steve Baker said: “The story has moved from just being in Repton, to a series of sites spread out across the Trent floodplain.

“These sites have hardly been investigated, so who knows what lies waiting to be discovered.

“We have tantalising glimpses of the people involved, people who destroyed most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

“But by dividing after Repton, only one part of the army went south and failed to conquer Alfred and Wessex. These events helped set much of Britain on a different path.”

Having lived for exactly half his life under a bridge in Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, Liya’u Sa’adu sees himself as the “guardian” for the many other homeless people who have joined him there.

More than 60 men now live in the tightly knit outdoor community – with the busy and noisy Obalende Bridge over them – as renting even a shack has proved unaffordable for them.

Mr Sa’adu advises the newcomers – often young people from far-away towns and villages – on how to be streetwise in fast-paced Lagos, where it is easy to fall into crime and drugs.

“I am 60 and there are young people who came here a few months ago or a few years ago. I see it as my responsibility to guide them,” he tells the BBC.

“It is so easy to lose track here in Lagos, especially for young people because there is no family to watch their steps.”

Like most of those who live under the bridge, he speaks Hausa, the most widely spoken language in the north of Nigeria.

He arrived here from the small town of Zurmi in north-western Zamfara state in 1994 – but all those he made friends with then have either died or have moved back to their hometowns or villages.

Tukur Garba, who began living under the bridge five years ago, says Mr Sa’adu’s advice has been invaluable and he commands huge respect from those who arrive to try their luck in Nigeria’s economic hub.

The 31-year-old hails down from the far northern state of Katsina, about 1,000km (621 miles) away.

“He is like our elder brother because he has been here for so long. We do need words of wisdom from him because it is easy to get in trouble in Lagos,” he says.

The area has now been dubbed “Karkashin Gada”, which in the Hausa language means “Under the Bridge”.

“The people who come here know someone who is already staying here or have a contact who told them about Karkashin Gada,” Mr Sa’adu says.

“When I came here, there were less than 10 people.”

Adamu Sahara, who has lived in an apartment close to Karkashin Gada for more than 30 years, says that homelessness is increasing in Lagos.

“Insecurity [including an insurgency by jihadist groups] and the failing economy has made a lot of people to flee northern Nigeria,” Mr Sahara says.

“Nigerian leaders have to be aware of what is happening so they can fix the problem because no human being is supposed to sleep under a bridge.”

Karkashin Gada’s longest resident has no plans to return to Zamfara as economic opportunities there remain bleak with kidnapping and banditry on the rise.

This has forced many people to abandon their businesses and farms as they risk being taken hostage by gangs demanding ransom payments.

To make life as comfortable as possible, Mr Sa’adu has acquired a mattress, some bedding, a wooden cabinet and a mosquito net.

He has put the mattress on top of the cabinet, and that is where he sleeps.

Mr Sa’adu is among the better-off as some of the other men who live there have no furniture, and share sleeping mats which they roll out on the floor.

Thankfully the risk of theft is minimal as some “residents” of Karkashin Gada are usually around, either working or enjoying their time off.

They all use a nearby public bath and toilet at a cost of 100 naira ($0.06; £0.05) a visit.

Cooking – or lighting fires, even in winter – rarely happens in Karkashin Gada as most of its inhabitants buy food from vendors who sell dishes popular with northerners.

“This is one of the places in Lagos where you see a large number of people from northern Nigeria so I sell fura [millet flour mixed with fermented milk] here and I am happy to say a lot of people do buy,” food vendor Aisha Hadi tells the BBC.

During his three decades in Lagos, Mr Sa’adu has progressed from being a shoe-shiner to being a scrap-metal seller – picking up metal from the streets and workshops for a business that sells it on for recycling.

It earns him an average of 5,000 naira ($3; £2) a day, above the extreme poverty threshold of $1.90 a day but barely enough for him to survive.

“Don’t forget I have to also send money to my family back in Zamfara every week, so it is a continuous struggle,” Mr Sa’adu says.

It is unclear how many people sleep on Lagos’ streets, but non-governmental organisations say they are up to half-a-million.

In the last few months, the Karkashin Gada community has come under heavy pressure from the Lagos state environmental task force.

Its officers carry out occasional raids as they say people are living there illegally.

Those arrested risk fines of up to 20,000 naira ($12; £9), a week’s income for many of the people living under the bridge.

“They come at around 1am or 2am, to arrest people sleeping here. Where do they want us to go?” Mr Garba says, adding that by morning most “residents” will have returned.

He urges the government to show compassion, and “to look into the issue of housing so that poor people like us can get good places to live”.

But in Nigeria, the government does not provide shelter for homeless people. Nor is there any plan to do so.

Instead, the current focus in Lagos is on helping people on low salaries – such as cleaners, drivers and messengers in offices – to buy homes.

For people like Mr Sa’adu, any type of housing in Lagos is unaffordable – renting a shack in an informal settlement costs around 100,000 naira ($48; £62) a year, while in a working-class area, a small apartment costs around 350,000 naira ($220; £170) annually.

Worse still, many landlords demand a year’s rent at the time of occupation, with no plans by the government to regulate the market despite the fact that the cost-of-living crisis is making housing unaffordable for even some young professionals.

Against this backdrop, the likes of Mr Sa’adu have resigned themselves to continue living under Obalende Bridge.

“Considering what I do, it’s difficult to save enough to get a decent place to stay,” he says as he lies on his mattress with the noise of vehicles driving just above his head.

“I am already used to the sound of cars. It doesn’t affect my sleep at all especially after a tired day,” he adds.

• Landlords in Nigeria can demand $20,000 rent upfront
• Why single Nigerian women battle to rent homes
• The Nigerian professor who makes more money welding
• Is Nigeria on the right track after a year of Tinubu?
• Should I stay or should I go? The dilemma for young Nigerians

After almost a year off the platform, Donald Trump returned to X this week and asked his 89 million followers: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?”

It was a clear echo of the famous quote from Ronald Reagan during his victorious 1980 presidential campaign, when he asked: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

This messaging isn’t surprising. It seems like an obvious strategy for Trump to focus on the economy.

That’s because polls consistently suggest it’s the issue American voters care about the most. One such poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov in recent days listed “inflation/prices” and “jobs and the economy” among voters’ top concerns.

Perhaps more importantly, polls also indicate voters are deeply unhappy with the current state of affairs.

That seems like a perfect situation for any presidential challenger.

But in an election that’s been transformed by Kamala Harris taking over from Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, Trump seems to be struggling to land his simple message on the economy.

It is less than a month since he was on stage at the Republican National Convention looking unbeatable, having survived an assassination attempt and riding high in the opinion polls.

Now, he has lost that lead and seems to have lost his way. Meanwhile, in the opposition corner, Ms Harris is riding a wave of excitement and enthusiasm that he is finding difficult to counter.

The easiest way to burst her bubble would be to remind voters how unhappy they are about high prices and blame her for the inflation that has pushed up the cost of living during the time she has been beside President Biden in the White House.

One of the reasons Trump is failing to land that message is the Harris campaign’s strategy of putting proposals to try to lower the cost of living at the heart of her pitch.

In a speech in North Carolina on Friday, Ms Harris promised to expand child tax credits, help people to purchase their first homes, and to encourage the building of more affordable housing.

She also said she hoped to tackle the persistently high price of food and groceries by banning “price gouging” or excessive corporate profiteering.

“By any measure, our economy is the strongest in the world,” she said. “Many Americans don’t yet feel that progress in their daily lives.”

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ought to be able to boast about some very good economic indicators. There is strong growth, record levels of job creation, and this week the inflation rate fell below 3% for the first time during Mr Biden’s presidency.

But because prices are still high, voters don’t feel any better off. Voters don’t care about the rate of inflation – they care about the level of prices.

“A central banker wants inflation to get back to target. A shopper wants his or her old price back,” Jared Bernstein, the chair of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a July speech.

When it comes to the economy, “the vibes are off”.

“Vibes matter,” Mr Bernstein said.

So will the bad economic vibes hurt the Harris campaign?

That is what I asked voters over lunch at a crab shack on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.

Jeff Tester, who works in a nearby marina, said high prices are really hurting him.

“I get paid by the hour. I get up to go to work every day. I think you have to do that to get the American dream,” he said. “But I just know it’s getting harder.”

And he is very clear about who he sees as responsible. “I blame the Democrats. I believe their policies are hurting the working man,” he said.

Every diner I met complained about inflation, but not everyone held Mr Biden or Ms Harris responsible.

Dan Nardo, a retired boat broker, said he believed the pandemic, oil prices, foreign wars and supply chain issues have more to do with price rises than the US president.

His friend Randy Turk, a retired lawyer, told me that he felt a new administration is likely to follow a similar path to try to reduce inflation, regardless of who wins.

“It’s not like a different president can really make that much of a difference,” he said.

Ms Harris struggled for prominence and media coverage during most of her time as vice-president. Previously that was seen as a weakness. But if it means she can emerge untainted by “Bidenomics”, it could be one of her greatest strengths.

Ruth Igielnik, polling editor at the New York Times, says the latest data she has collected suggests “voters very much tied their negative feelings about the economy to Joe Biden”.

Talking to me on the BBC’s Americast podcast, she explained that in her polling Trump is still favoured on the economy, but where he once had an 18-point lead over Mr Biden he now leads Ms Harris by only about 8 points.

“That makes me think voters aren’t necessarily attaching their feelings about the economy to her,” she said.

A separate poll this week conducted for the Financial Times and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business indicated Ms Harris holds a narrow lead over Trump on who Americans trust to handle the economy.

No wonder Republicans are publicly begging Trump to focus on the issues, the economy in particular, and stop launching personal attacks against Ms Harris.

In a speech this week, Trump told supporters he was going to talk about the economy but struggled to stay on topic.

“They say it’s the most important subject,” he said, “they” referring to his advisers and strategists who believe this is his strongest line of attack.

“I’m not sure it is. But they say it’s the most important,” he added, before going on to list immigration, crime and the way Ms Harris laughs as top issues. You could practically hear his campaign managers pulling their hair out.

“Voters don’t care about personalities or who is drawing larger crowd sizes,” said Matt Terrill, former chief of staff for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign.

“Independent, undecided, swing voters in key states care about the economy and inflation so just focus on those core issues,” he said.

“Stay focused on talking about how you are going to make the lives of Americans better over the next four years.”

It was back in 1992 that the Democrat Jim Carville coined the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid” while he was working on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.

It’s advice that every campaign since has clung to. But Trump, this time around, seems to be finding it uncommonly difficult to stick with.

It ought to be a winner for him. After all, according to the Financial Times poll, in answer to his question “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” only 19% of voters say they are.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote

• ANALYSIS: Three ways Trump will try to end Harris honeymoon

• EXPLAINER: Where the election could be won and lost

• FACT-CHECK: Trump falsely claims Harris crowd was faked

• VOTERS: What Democrats make of Tim Walz as VP

The videos are shocking: buildings burning, horrifying violence and women weeping as they plead for help.

They are – the people sharing them say – proof of a “Hindu genocide” happening in Bangladesh in the wake of the sudden fall of the country’s long-time leader, Sheikh Hasina.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who uses the name Tommy Robinson – a British far-right activist who has been criticised for making inflammatory posts during the UK riots – has got involved, sharing videos along with dark warnings.

But we found that many of the videos and claims shared online are false.

Bangladesh has been in the headlines for weeks: student-led protests which left more than 400 dead culminated with the government falling and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing to India on 5 August.

Celebrations escalated into violent unrest, with rioters targeting members of her ruling Awami League party which is made up of both Hindu and Muslim members.

And while reports on the ground have found violence and looting impacted Hindu people and properties, far-right influencers in neighbouring India shared false videos and information that gave a misleading view of the events.

They claimed to show communal violence against Hindus purportedly carried out by “Islamist radicals” with a violent agenda.

One viral post claimed to show a temple set on fire by “Islamists in Bangladesh”.

However, BBC Verify has determined that this building, identified as the Navagraha Temple in Chittagong, was undamaged by the incident which actually occurred at a nearby Awami League party office.

Pictures obtained by the BBC after the fire show debris of posters with Awami League members’ faces.

“On 5 August, there was an attack on the Awami League office premises behind the temple in the afternoon,” Swapan Das, a staff member at the temple, told BBC Verify. “They took the furniture outside and set fire to it.”

Mr Das added that although the temple was not attacked on the day, the situation remains tense and the temple has been shut with people guarding it round-the-clock.

This is far from the only story shared, most under the same hashtag, which has had nearly a million mentions since 4 August, according to social media monitoring tool Brandwatch. Accounts that were mostly geolocated to India drove the trend.

Other viral posts which have since been debunked include a claim that a Bangladeshi Hindu cricketer’s home had been burned down. BBC Verify has established the house in fact belongs to a Muslim MP from the Awami League.

Then there was the school that burned down, which the BBC visited. Again, the reasons behind the attack appear to be political rather than religious.

All of these posts have been shared by multiple accounts, many of which support Hindu-nationalist values.

Inter-religious strains have been present in Bangladesh for many decades, says Professor Sayeed Al-Zaman, an expert in hate speech and disinformation in Bangladesh.

Following the hasty departure of Sheikh Hasina, matters have come to a head once again, “as Hindus felt insecure in the absence of the government and effective law and order”, says Prof Al-Zaman.

The false narratives have made the situation worse. “Fear-mongering by these influencers is inflaming the tension.”

Some of these posts falsely claiming that Hindus have been targeted by Muslims have been shared by accounts far removed from either Bangladesh or India.

Tommy Robinson who has been criticised for posting inflammatory messages about the violent riots targeting Muslims and immigrants across the UK, has been sharing unverified videos from Bangladesh, where he says there is “a genocide on Hindus”.

We have investigated one video shared by him. It shows a woman pleading for her husband’s life as her home is attacked. The post falsely claims the property is being targeted by “Islamists”. The original video was shared on 6 August, onde day after the property had been attacked.

However, when the BBC investigated the story behind the video, a different narrative emerged.

We were told by a group of local students who had assisted the woman in defending her property that the dispute was about an entirely different matter. They shared photos and videos of the clean-up with the BBC which show the property as seen in the original video. The Hindu temple inside the property is unharmed.

“The conflict is about ownership of land. A case was filed long ago,” a student told us. A case has been in local courts about the ownership of the land for nearly six months.

We’ve spoken to other people in the local area who’ve told us that the attack was not religiously motivated and that the perpetrators were a mix of Hindu and Muslim people. They also reported that other Hindu families and temples in the area weren’t affected.

Tommy Robinson did not respond to our request for comment.

Working out exactly what has happened in Bangladesh over the last few weeks has proved difficult.

Many real incidents and attacks have taken place across the country, but the motivations are difficult to assess: religion or politics.

The two are closely entwined: one Hindu resident explained how the minority are largely viewed as supporters of Sheikh Hasina’s secular Awami League party.

AFP fact-checker for Bangladesh, Qadaruddin Shishir, told the BBC that there have been attacks on Hindu-owned properties.

But, he said, “right-wing Indian accounts are spreading these politically motivated attacks as religious ones.”

Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, a non-profit established to protect minority human rights, reported five Hindu people killed. Two have been confirmed as Awami League members.

The AFP has put the count of Muslim Awami League leaders’ who have been killed at more than 50.

When false claims about attacks on Hindus went viral online, some Muslim protesters decided to guard Hindu temples.

“It’s our responsibility to protect them,” said Moinul, who stood watch last week in front of a temple in Hatharazi, outside of Chittagong.

Viral social media posts were trying to “incite conflict between Hindus and Muslims,” said Moinul. “But we are not falling for it.”

Choton Banik, a local Hindu in the area who attended the temple, asked that they continue their effort “through this critical time.”

“I hope that we will continue to live together in this independent Bangladesh in the future,” he said.

Internationally acclaimed author and poet Mia Couto describes himself as an African, but his roots are in Europe.

His Portuguese parents settled in Mozambique in 1953 after fleeing the dictatorial rule of Antonio Salazar.

Couto was born two years later in the port city of Beira.

“My childhood was very happy,’ he tells the BBC.

Be he points out that he was conscious of the fact that he was living in a “colonial society” – something that nobody had to explain to him because “so visible were the borderlines between whites and blacks, between the poor and the rich”.

As a child, Couto was cripplingly shy, unable to speak up for himself in public or even at home.

Instead, like his father who was also a poet and a journalist, he found solace in the written word.

“I invented something, a relationship with paper, and then behind that paper there was always someone I loved, someone that was listening to me, saying: ‘You exist’,” he tells the BBC from his home in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, with a colourful painting and wooden carving on a rich, mustard-yellow wall in the background.

Being of European origin, Couto related most easily to the black elite that existed in Mozambique under Portuguese colonial rule – the “assimilados” – those, in the racist language of the day, considered “civilised” enough to become Portuguese citizens.

The writer counts himself as lucky to have played with the children of assimilados and to have learned some of their languages.

He says this helped him fit in with the black majority.

“I only remember that I’m a white person when I’m outside Mozambique. Inside Mozambique it’s something that really doesn’t come up,” he says.

However, as a child, he was aware his whiteness set him apart.

“Nobody was teaching me about the injustice… the unfair society where I was living. And I thought: ‘I cannot be me. I cannot be a happy person without fighting against this,’” he says.

When Couto was 10, the fight against Portuguese rule in Mozambique began.

The author remembers the night when, as a 17-year-old student writing poetry for an anti-colonial publication, and keen to join the liberation struggle, he was summoned to appear before the leaders of the revolutionary movement, Frelimo.

Arriving at their quarters, he found he was the only white boy in a crowd of 30.

The leaders asked everyone in the room to describe what they had suffered and why they wanted to join Frelimo.

Couto was the last to speak. As he listened to stories of poverty and deprivation, he realised he was the only privileged person in the room.

So, he made up a story about himself – otherwise he knew he had no chance of being selected.

“But when it was my turn, I couldn’t speak and was overwhelmed by emotions,” he says.

What saved him was that Frelimo leaders had already discovered his poetry and had decided he could help their cause.

“The guy that was leading the meetings asked me: ‘Are you the young guy that is writing poetry in the newspaper?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I’m the author’. And he said: ‘Okay, you can come, you can be part of us because we need poetry,” Couto recalls.

After Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, Couto continued working as a journalist in local media until the death of Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, in 1986. He then quit as he had become disillusioned with Frelimo.

“There was a kind of rupture; the discourse of the liberators became something I was not believing in any more,” he says.

After giving up his Frelimo membership, Couto studied biological sciences. Today, he stills works as an ecologist specialising in coastal areas.

He also returned to writing.

“I initially began with poetry, then books, short stories, and novels,” he says.

His first novel, Sleepwalking Land, was published in 1992.

It’s a magical realist fantasy which draws its inspiration from Mozambique’s post-independence civil war, taking the reader through the brutal conflict which raged from 1977 to 1992 when Renamo – then a rebel movement backed by the white-minority regime in South Africa, and Western powers – fought Frelimo.

The book was an immediate success. In 2001 it was described as one of the best 12 African books of the 20th Century by judges at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, and has been translated into more than 33 languages.

Couto went on to win recognition for more novels and short stories that dealt with war and colonialism, the pain and suffering Mozambicans went through, and their resilience during those tough times.

Other themes he focused on included mystical descriptions derived from witchcraft, religion and folklore.

“I want to have a language that can translate the different dimensions inside Africa, the relationship and the conversation between the living and the dead, the visible and non-visible,” he tells the BBC.

Couto is well-known throughout the Portuguese-speaking world – Angola, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome in Africa, as well as Brazil and Portugal.

In 2013, he won the €100,000 ($109,000; £85,500) Camões prize, the biggest prize for a writer in Portuguese.

In 2014 he was awarded the $50,000 (£39,000) Neustadt, regarded as the most prestigious literary award after the Nobel.

When asked if his works reflect the reality of modern-day Africa, Couto replies that this is impossible because the continent is divided and there are so many different Africas.

“We don’t know each other and do not publish our own writers inside our continent because of the borderlines of colonial language such as French, English and Portuguese,” he says.

“We have inherited something that was a colonial construction, now “naturalized”, which is the so-called Anglophone, so-called French-speaking and so-called Lusophone Africa,” he adds.

Couto was due to have attended a literary festival in Kenya last month, but was unfortunately forced to cancel the trip after mass protests broke out over President William Ruto’s move to raise taxes.

He hopes there will be other opportunities to strengthen ties with writers from other parts of Africa.

“We need to get out of these barriers. We need to give more importance to the encounters that we have, as Africans and among Africans,” Couto says.

He laments that African writers are continuously looking to Europe and the United States as points of reference, and are ashamed to celebrate their own diversity and relationship with their gods and ancestors.

“Actually, we even don’t know what is being done in artistic and cultural terms outside Mozambique. Our neighbours – South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania – we don’t know anything about them, and they don’t know anything about Mozambique,” Couto says.

When asked what advice he would give to young writers just starting out, he emphasises the need to hear the voices of others.

“Listening is not just listening to the voice or looking at the iPhone or the gadgets or the tablets. It’s more about being able to become the other. It’s a kind of migration, an invisible migration to become the other person,” Couto says.

“If you are touched by a character of a book, it’s because that character was already living inside you, and you didn’t know.”

• Nuzo Onoh – the Queen of African horror who is terrified of ghosts
• Beauty contest sparks row over who counts as South African
• The Malawi music icon who became a ‘soldier for the poor’

Some music fans now know 15-second sped up snippets of songs better than the real thing.

It’s thanks to an emerging trend on social media, particularly TikTok, of creators changing the tempo of popular songs by 25-30%, to accompany short viral videos of dances or other themes.

These versions are even helping some artists climb the official singles charts. In November 2022, fan-made sped-up versions of RAYE’s single Escapism helped the artist to achieve her first ever number one on the UK Official Singles Chart, nearly three months after its original release.

An initial trend developed based around the lyric: “The man that I loved sat me down last night and he told me it was over, dumb decision.” Users swiftly posted about their own “dumb decision” over sped-up versions.

The phenomenon presents a very modern challenge – how can singers create the next hit tune when the one people actually listen to might sound so different?

Sped-up listening emerged in the early 2000s as “nightcore”, launched by a Norwegian DJ duo of the same name, who sped up a song’s pitch and speed.

This is now commonplace on our social media apps, where the speed of podcasts, voice notes, movies and more can be increased so that we can consume them in less time.

Take Spotify, for example, where in 2023 more than a third of listeners in the US sped up podcasts and nearly two-thirds played songs at a quicker tempo.

The streaming service confirmed to the BBC that it was currently testing a new, more widespread, feature that could potentially allow us to remix the tempo of songs and share them.

Dr Mary Beth Ray, an author focused on digital music culture, says short-form video platforms like TikTok “constrain our ways of listening” into snippets – but those constraints also let you “experience a track in a new way”.

“Short clips provide a quicker line to that dopamine rush social media wants us to feel – so there is an addictive element which we’re pushed towards.”

BBC Radio 1 DJ Maia Beth feels it’s now become hard for established labels and musicians to ignore this trend because “it can sometimes feel like if they don’t release the [sped up] version, then someone else will”.

Beth, who admits she can’t imagine sitting and listening to a sped-up version of a song the whole way through, believes the trend shouldn’t necessarily be a major distraction for musicians though.

“Sped-up versions of tracks can help artists break through or go viral, although that initial success may not last,” the Radio 1 Anthems host said.

Unofficial sped-up or slowed down tunes are different to a professional remix – they are far shorter and can be easily made by anyone, including on TikTok, Instagram Reels and other apps.

But some of our biggest popstars are embracing them.

In 2022, Summer Walker released the first completely sped-up album, a remixed version of her 2018 record Last Day of Summer, which came after a dance trend on TikTok.

Billie Eilish has also released official fast and slow versions of songs, while Sabrina Carpenter’s record-breaking UK number one hits Please Please Please and Espresso received similar treatment.

TikTok says it has noticed an increase in the number of sped-up and slowed down versions of catalogue tracks taken off the platform, then become officially released.

These official changed-tempo releases are now grouped together with the original song in the UK Official Singles Chart, along with remixes, acoustic and live versions, helping artists to climb the ranks.

That said, not everyone is happy with the trend. The popularity of speed altered versions can make it harder to distinguish original from remix while distorting an artist’s intended pacing, mood and tone.

In March, speaking on the A Safe Place Podcast, Lil Yachty said he was so embarrassed when additional versions of his song “A Cold Sunday” were released that he asked for them to be taken down.

In October 2022, following one of Steve Lacy’s shows as part of his Give You The World Tour, the audience appeared to not sing along to much of his hit Bad Habit.

Some people shared videos of this online and suggested that a popular sped-up snippet version of the track was more recognisable to some those in the audience.

While some artists like them and others less so, it seems they are here to stay.

For 23-year-old artist and producer, tonka._.b, from London, adjusting speed and tempo is all part of her creative process.

“I like listening to my song, three times over – sped-up, slowed and normal,” she says, “as each gives a totally different feel, each opening the door to new audiences.”

The hat worn by actor Harrison Ford in the second instalment of the Indiana Jones film franchise has sold for nearly half a million pounds at auction.

The brown felt fedora – specifically made for the Temple of Doom film – fetched $630,000 (£487,000) in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Other items of movie memorabilia were sold at the same time including props from Star Wars, Harry Potter and James Bond productions.

Jones, an adventuring archaeologist, is seen with the hat early on in the movie where he and his companions jump from a crashing plane in an inflatable raft.

During the scene, he is on board a plane with nightclub singer Wilhelmina “Willie” Scott, played by Kate Capshaw, and his 12-year-old friend Short Round, played by Ke Huy Quan, while escaping the clutches of a Chinese crime gang.

After the flight is sabotaged by the pilot, the trio use the raft to fall from the plane, before sliding down a mountainside.

The auction house said the hat was also used during additional photography at producer George Lucas’s visual effects facilities.

The fedora was also worn by Ford’s stunt-double in the 1984 film, Dean Ferrandini, and was sold with previously unpublished photos of the stuntman wearing the now-iconic costume on location.

Ferrandini died last year. The hat came from his personal collection.

The sable-coloured fedora was an update to the original featured in the first Indiana Jones film – Raiders Of The Lost Ark – with a “more tapered” crown then the first, Propstore, the auction house, said.

Created by the Herbert Johnson Hat Company in London, the inside lining features gold monogrammed initials “IJ”.

Also sold at the auction was an imperial scout trooper helmet used in the 1983 Star Wars film Return Of The Jedi – which was bought for $315,000 (£243,000) – as well as a light-up wand used by Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban, which attracted a winning bid of $53,550 (£41,400).

Meanwhile, a suit worn by Daniel Craig in the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall sold for $35,000 (£27,000).

Brandon Alinger, Propstore chief operating officer, said the auction house was “proud to have connected such a wide expanse of fans with the historic pieces they cherish”.

The Indiana Jones hat fetched more than double that of another Temple of Doom fedora auctioned in 2021, which sold for $300,000 (£232,000), according to Hollywood Reporter.

A police sniper potentially saved lives by shooting the rifle of Donald Trump’s would-be assassin and knocking him down, an investigation says.

According to a report by Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins, the sniper’s bullet damaged Thomas Matthew Crooks’s gun and disrupted his aim after he took his first shots in Butler, Pennsylvania. Moments later, a Secret Service sniper killed him.

The report comes as the Secret Service temporarily reassigns some bodyguards from President Joe Biden to Trump, according to US media.

Trump will also be given bulletproof glass protection to allow him to resume outdoor rallies.

The former president did not have the protection during his 13 July rally in Butler when a bullet nearly hit him squarely in the head.

Mr Higgins’ report said a Butler SWAT operator was the first to fire at Trump’s assassin – from 100 yards away.

The congressman said the sniper “ran towards the threat, running to a clear shot position directly into the line of fire”.

Then, in a single shot, he fired at the gunman and hit part of his rifle, the report said.

This knocked the gunman off his position temporarily, but, “after just a few seconds”, he “popped back up” before he was fatally shot by a Secret Service sharpshooter.

Crooks killed one crowd member and critically injured two others in the attack.

Security levels around the former president have increased since then.

New records obtained by ABC News detail internal discussions by local authorities about security planned the day of the assassination attempt, with the Butler County sheriff noting the “circus” and large crowds the rally would bring. The records also include text messages showing frustration by local authorities after the shooting.

Local authorities discussed the Secret Service requesting a sniper and overwatch support, along with counterassault teams and a quick reaction force.

In an email obtained by ABC News to Butler County’s district attorney, Sgt. Edward Lenz of the Adams Township Police Department details that they planned to provide two snipers, a quick reaction force and two mobile counterassault teams.

The counterassault teams “would respond to and address an attack directed at the presidential candidate inside of the venue, whether it be a coordinated attack with multiple assailants, or a single attacker”, he wrote.

He said the quick reaction force would respond to any “high-risk incidents occurring outside of the venue”.

The records came after the transfer of Secret Service agents amid threats against Trump, 78. The move was made possible due to the reduced travel schedule of Mr Biden after he dropped out of the election race, according to a report in The New York Times.

The reassigned officers were responsible for either travelling with Mr Biden, or going in advance of him to set up security measures at an event, a source told the newspaper.

Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, resigned on 23 July following a hearing at the US House of Representatives about the assassination attempt.

Politicians on the House Oversight Committee criticised the lack of information in her answers to their questions regarding security planning and how officers responded to reports of the gunman’s suspicious behaviour prior to the shooting.

Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was shot and killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper team after he fired eight bullets in Mr Trump’s direction from a rooftop just outside the rally’s security perimeter.

The FBI is currently investigating the protection failure and political leaders in the US Congress have also started inquiries.

How the Secret Service failed Donald Trump

Americast gets the inside track on presidential security at the highest levels from Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department for Homeland Security, who served during the Trump presidency.

Listen now on BBC Sounds

Police have identified two murder suspects thought to have been involved in the death of a miner whose remains were discovered more than 50 years after he went missing.

Alfred Swinscoe’s remains were found in a field on farmland in Nottinghamshire last April, after the father of six was last seen drinking at a pub on 27 January 1967.

Work on Mr Swinscoe’s bones has found he sustained a “significant” stab injury and blunt force trauma, and police say he died with a broken hand.

Now officers have identified two suspects, both of whom are no longer alive.

Nottinghamshire Police launched a murder inquiry following the discovery of the remains, later confirmed as belonging to the 54-year-old.

They were found off Coxmoor Road in Sutton-in-Ashfield, on 26 April, when digging work was being carried out on farmland.

Officers believe Mr Swinscoe – who was last seen at the former Pinxton Miners Arms in Derbyshire – was murdered and then buried in a grave between 4ft (1.2m) and 6ft (1.8m) deep.

Police said since the remains were found, scientists had carried out “extensive” work on Mr Swinscoe’s bones to determine a cause of death.

It is thought Mr Swinscoe could have sustained his broken hand while fighting his attacker or attackers off.

One of the suspects had a history of violence, police added.

Some of the injuries the suspect had inflicted on another man he was convicted of assaulting in April 1966, were similar to those found on Mr Swinscoe.

As some of the bones were missing, experts believe it was “highly likely” Mr Swinscoe was killed at a different location, and then moved to where his remains were found “at a much later date”.

Mr Swinscoe’s grandson, Russell Lowbridge, told the BBC he recognised the former miner’s sock that was found with the remains.

“Finding out he was murdered was a shock. It took some sinking in,” Mr Lowbridge said. “It’s all a bit disturbing and upsetting.

“Anybody that knew anything, they’ve kept it a secret. It would be wonderful if [people] did come forward – it would help put our minds at rest.

“It will always haunt us; we’ll always be left wondering. We have got some closure, but not full closure. There are still questions to be answered.”

Since the age of 14, Mr Swinscoe had worked at Langton Colliery as a “cutter”, known for operating a machine that cut large chunks of coal out of the coal face for others to then break down.

He had the nickname “Sparrow”, and was also known as “Champion Pigeon Man of Pinxton”, due to his love of pigeon racing.

Four of his six children are still alive and he has a number of grandchildren.

It is believed Mr Swinscoe was drinking with his two sons and friends on the night of his disappearance.

He was last seen giving money to son Gary to buy a round, and then left to use the outside toilet.

Mr Lowbridge previously told the BBC that the disappearance had “tormented” Gary, who died in 2012 “never knowing what happened to his dad”.

Detectives believe a vehicle would have been used in the killing, as it was “some distance” between the pub and where Mr Swinscoe was buried.

They added it “would have been rare” to own a car in the village of Pinxton in 1967.

Assistant Chief Constable Rob Griffin said many of the people who were with Mr Swinscoe at the time he went missing were no longer alive, adding “we may never get the full picture” of what happened.

“That certainly hasn’t stifled our determination to investigate this crime and leave no stone unturned to find his killer or killers,” he said.

“We will continue to investigate this crime and continue to look at all new and existing avenues available to us.”

Mr Swincoe’s cause of death will be determined by a pathologist ahead of an inquest.

Police are continuing to appeal for information, with Mr Swinscoe’s final movements recreated as part of a BBC Crimewatch appeal in October.

The family held a small funeral for Mr Swinscoe in Sutton-in-Ashfield in January.

The service – arranged by A Wass Funeral Directors – was officiated by Stephen Blakeley, a celebrity celebrant who was known for playing PC Younger in the television series Heartbeat.

“He did a nice talk about grandad for us and it was lovely,” Mr Lowbridge said.

“It’s good to have him back home buried properly with his family and we feel content that he’s not lost any more.”

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

Kamala Harris has called for millions of new-build homes and first-time buyer help, tax breaks for families and a ban on grocery “price-gouging” in her first speech focused on economic policy.

The Democratic presidential nominee’s plans build on ideas from the Biden administration and aim at addressing voter concerns after a surge in prices since 2021.

Many of the proposals would require action from Congress, where similar ideas have stalled in the past.

Donald Trump said the vice-president had already had more than three years with the administration to deliver her promises, which his campaign called “dangerously liberal”.

“Where has she been and why hasn’t she done it?” he asked.

Ms Harris hit back in a speech on Friday in North Carolina, stating: “I think that if you want to know who someone cares about, look at who they fight for.

“Donald Trump fights for billionaires and large corporations. I will fight to give money back to working and middle class Americans.”

The campaign’s proposals include a “first-ever” tax credit for builders of homes sold to first-time buyers, as well as up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance for “eligible” first time buyers, a move that her campaign estimated could reach four million households over four years.

She has also called for capping the monthly price of diabetes-drug insulin at $35 for everyone, finding ways to cancel medical debt, and giving families a $6,000 tax credit the year they have a new child.

She is supporting a federal law banning firms from charging excessive prices on groceries and urged action on a bill in Congress that would bar property owners from using services that “coordinate” rents.

Democrats and their allies are hoping Ms Harris will prove a more forceful and trusted messenger than President Joe Biden on economic pain.

Robert Weissman, the co-president of the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, characterised Ms Harris’s plans as a “pro-consumer, anti-corporate abuse agenda”.

“The [Biden] administration did talk about it but they did not promote proposed measures anywhere near as aggressive as Harris is doing,” he said.

But pollster Micah Roberts, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, said inflation was likely to remain a challenge for Democrats, noting that voters have a long history of trusting Trump – and Republicans – more on economic issues.

“Trump’s been holding the advantage on this stuff for like a year plus,” said Mr Roberts, the Republican half of a bipartisan team that recently conducted a survey on economic issues for CNBC, which found that Trump still held a big lead over Ms Harris on the topic.

Without a huge change, he said it would be “hard for me to believe” that the margin had suddenly closed.

Though analysts say some of Harris’s proposals, such as the ban on price-gouging, are likely to be popular, they have also sparked criticism from some economists.

Bans on price-gouging already exist in many states, applied during emergencies such as hurricanes.

But economists say the term is difficult to define and widening such rules could end up backfiring, by discouraging firms from making more at times of short supply.

Michael Salinger, a professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, said a similar ban was discussed when he served as the lead economist at the Federal Trade Commission during the administration of George W Bush.

“I thought then that it was a bad idea and I think now that it’s a bad idea,” he said. “To impose controls on competitive markets will lead to shortages – that’s always been our experience.”

He said the Harris campaign’s other plans would also face questions, given their cost.

For example, the proposal to increase the tax credit for children to as much as $3,600, which Congress did temporarily during the pandemic and opted against extending, would cost more than $1tn, according to some estimates.

With populism ascendant in both parties, that cost has not dissuaded Trump’s choice for vice president, JD Vance, from backing an even bigger tax credit expansion.

Prof Salinger said Trump’s other economic plans would be unlikely to tackle inflation concerns.

Economists predict that increased drilling would have limited impact given the global nature of energy markets and have warned that Trump’s pledge to impose a tax of 10% or more on imports would drive up prices.

As it stands, price increases have been subsiding, as the shocks from pandemic-era supply chain issues and the war in Ukraine fade.

Inflation, which tracks the pace of price increases, was 2.9% in July, the smallest annual increase since March 2021, the Labor Department said this week.

That is getting closer to the 2% pace considered normal, though prices are up roughly 20% since January 2021.

“The problem that people object to is that even if inflation is down, the prices are still higher and that’s true but they’re higher because of the natural working of market forces,” Prof Salinger said.

“Trying to stand in the way of the working of market forces is a lot like trying to stop the tides,” he added. “You just can’t do it.”

When breaker Rachael Gunn – aka Raygun – bombed out of the Paris Olympics, the shockwaves hit a tiny hip-hop scene on the other side of the world.

In a Sydney warehouse-turned-community centre, breakers warm up with ab exercises that would make a Pilates teacher cry, before taking to the floor with acrobatic moves so intricate you can barely make them out.

It is one of the most important events of the year – a qualifier for the Red Bull BC One World Finals – and the past week weighs heavy.

A few people nervously glance at the handful of cameras lining the dance circle, their minds no doubt flashing to images of Gunn which have set the internet alight.

“I feel like it’s just pushed our scene in Australia into the Dark Ages,” Australian hip-hop pioneer Spice told the BBC.

Gunn, a 36-year-old university lecturer, lost all three of her Olympic battles in viral fashion, her green and gold tracksuit and unorthodox routine – which included the sprinkler and kangaroo-inspired hopping – generating waves of memes and abuse.

The fallout has divided and disappointed the Australian breaking community.

“It made a mockery of the Australian scene and I think that’s why a lot of us are hurting,” Spice says.

Many have rushed to defend Raygun against the onslaught.

Others are ready to admit there are questions to be answered over her qualification and performance, but say the global bullying has undermined any attempt to fairly analyse what went down in Paris.

Gunn has always been a dancer – albeit in jazz, tap and ballroom first – but it was her husband and coach Samuel Free that introduced her to the world of breaking when she was 20.

She says it took years to find her place in the male-dominated scene.

“There were times that I would go into the bathroom crying because I was so embarrassed at how terrible I was at this,” she told The Guardian Australia ahead of the Olympics.

Eventually though, Gunn became the face of breaking in Australia – a top-ranked B-girl and an academic with a PhD in the cultural politics of the sport.

And at an Olympics qualifying event in Sydney last October, where 15 women from across Oceania competed, Raygun emerged triumphant and officially booked her ticket to Paris.

Like Gunn, breaking was perhaps a surprising candidate for the Olympics. Born in the cultural melting pot that was the Bronx in the 1970s, the street dance quickly became a global phenomenon.

And in recent years – alongside urban sports like skateboarding and BMX freestyle – it caught the eye of Olympics chiefs desperate to attract new and younger audiences.

Some argued it didn’t deserve Olympic attention, while others insisted a competition like that could not capture breaking’s essence and would only further divorce the artform from the street culture it came from.

All eyes were on the event in Paris to see if the Olympic Committee’s gamble would pay off.

From the moment the final B-girl battle at the Olympics wrapped up, it was clear that breaking had indeed captured global attention – or, more specifically, Raygun had.

Rumours and criticism of her performance spread like wildlife, particularly online. Gunn received a torrent of violent messages.

An anonymous petition demanding Gunn apologise was signed by 50,000 people.

She was accused – without evidence – of manipulating her way onto the world’s biggest stage at the expense of other up-and-coming talent in the Australian hip-hop scene.

Some people shared a conspiracy that she had created the governing body which ran the Oceania qualifiers, and a lie that her husband – who is also a prominent member of the breaking community and a qualified judge – was on the panel that selected her.

Australian factchecking organisations and AUSBreaking, the national organisation for breaking, quickly tried to correct the record, but that didn’t stop the flood.

Then there were those arguing that she had mocked and appropriated hip-hop culture.

“It just looked like somebody who was toying with the culture and didn’t know how culturally significant it was,” Malik Dixon told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

In a series of statements, AUSBreaking stressed that judges were “trained to uphold the highest standards of impartiality” and that not a single person on the nine-person panel for the Oceania qualifiers was Australian.

And while AUSBreaking has had many “interactions” with Raygun since its conception in 2019, at no point had she ever held a leadership position or been involved in “any decision making over events, funding, strategy, judge selection or athlete selection”.

Taking to Instagram to rubbish all the “crackpot theories”, Te Hiiritanga Wepiha – a Kiwi judge on the Oceania qualifying panel – said Raygun won fair and square.

“All us judges talked about how she was going to get smashed, absolutely smashed [at the Olympics]… She knew it was going to be rough, so it’s actually courageous of her,” Wepiha – also known as Rush – said in a livestream

Some of the country’s most decorated athletes and highest Olympic officials also loudly defended Gunn.

“The petition has stirred up public hatred without any factual basis. It’s appalling,” the Australian Olympic Committee’s Matt Carroll said in a statement.

Gunn herself had previously said she was “never” going to be able to beat her powerful competitors, so had “wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative”.

In a video posted to social media in the eye of the public storm, Gunn added that she had taken the competition “very seriously”.

“I worked my butt off preparing for the Olympics and I gave my all. Truly.”

She had only been trying to “bring some joy”, she said. “I didn’t realize that that would also open the door to so much hate, which has frankly been pretty devastating.”

Some within the Australian hip-hop community admit the response to Raygun’s routine initially elicited “a chuckle” – but it quickly got out of hand.

Everyone was unequivocal in condemning the sheer volume of abuse, ridicule and misinformation that has targeted Raygun and the broader Australian B-girl community.

But beyond that, feeling is somewhat split.

Many B-girls say Raygun’s performance does not reflect the standard in Australia.

“When I first saw it, I was so embarrassed,” Spice – who retired from breaking years ago – says.

On any other stage, Raygun would have been encouraged and supported for “having a go”, Spice says, but people representing the country need to be at a certain level.

“It’s the Olympics for God’s sake!”

“In hip-hop we have this thing, you step up or you step off… You need to know your place.”

She stresses, though, that the “bullying is just disgusting” – and many like herself have been really reluctant to speak up out of fear of adding to Gunn’s anguish.

But the impact of the controversy on local Australian B-girls has also been “devastating”, Tinylocks says.

Like some others the BBC spoke to, she did not want her full name published because the scale of abuse circulating.

B-girl’s videos are being trolled, their DMs inundated with insults and violent threats. Young dancers are being harassed at school, and many now feel unsafe practising in public.

“Telling us to be positive and supportive while we are being harmed is unacceptable… [we’re] allowed to be angry,” she told the BBC.

Tinylocks – who herself has battled Raygun – thinks Gunn simply had a terrible day, but says there are questions about her preparation and routine that need answering.

“We know you’re capable of more… Were you set up for success?”

According to Wepiha, the Oceania panel judge also known as Rush, Gunn’s victory in qualifying reflects the size of the “tiny” breaking scene in Australia, and the even tinier public and government support for it.

“I mean, we had to actually get people out of retirement to make up the numbers,” Rush said.

“That’s how small the scene is.”

Others says there were rules which may have made a small talent pool even shallower – like the requirement that potential qualifiers be a member of AUSBreaking and that they have a valid passport, in line with rules put forward by the World Dance Sport Federation.

AUSBreaking did not respond to the BBC’s queries about Raygun’s selection, the financial support it receives or how it seeks out the country’s best breaking talent.

But Steve Gow, the group’s secretary and long-time b-boy Stevie G, tells the BBC the size and isolation of Australia inhibits the growth and development of the scene.

Being so distant from other, bigger hip-hop communities abroad can make it hard – both in terms of the time and money required – to learn from them.

“It can be very insular,” he says.

As if proving the point, he regularly pauses to greet almost everyone who walks into the Red Bull competition, which he is judging.

He insists there is still a high quality of breaking in Australia.

Ultimately, the community is bitterly hurt by the world’s response.

They feel breaking isn’t truly understood, and that people have piled on without knowledge or context.

“It’s a big disappointment because they’re not talking about the winners… they’re all talking about Raygun’s memes, and they’re not even seeing her full set,” Samson Smith – a member of hip-hop group Justice Crew and a breaker for over two decades – told Network 10.

But many hope a silver lining may yet emerge.

“She might actually bring enough attention to get resources,” Rush said.

“At the end of the day, Australia has the most famous Olympian of 2024 and she might actually save the scene here.”

“All wars end with negotiations. It’s not the soldiers in the trenches who decide when.”

Arni joined the Ukrainian army in 2022 to fight for his country’s survival. When we bump into him 30 months later, he describes a new motivation. “Peace.”

“No-one likes war, we want to finish it,” he says while leaning against his camouflaged pick-up truck.

For the troops we encounter close to Russia’s border, there’s a desire to end Russia’s invasion on acceptable terms.

That is not to say survival isn’t a core driver – it is – but they seem to be striving for a finish line.

“For Ukraine, our people, we’ll stand until the end,” adds Arni.

Until 6 August, Ukraine’s sole objective was one of liberation. The complete repelling of Russian forces to its borders from before Russia first invaded in 2014.

Albeit at a grinding pace, the reverse has been happening for the past year-and-a-half with Moscow eroding Ukrainian territory.

Then came the “all in” poker play which surprised everyone apart from the battle-hardened Ukrainian soldiers who carried it out: a counter-offensive into Russia’s Kursk region.

“It was undeniably successful and daring,” observes Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Co-operation Centre, a think tank.

Now, Kyiv can’t reference its offensive often enough, with countless pictures of troops giving out aid as they tear down Russian flags.

“It also changes the narrative,” says Alina Frolova, security expert and former deputy defence minister of Ukraine. “A situation where we’re losing territory step by step is not a good one.

“Ukraine’s strategic position has changed.”

Despite parallels with Russia’s initial invasion, Kyiv claims its goal is not to occupy.

So what is the aim? Well, there’s more than one.

“This attack was partly carried out so the city of Sumy was better protected,” explains Serhii Kuzan, who thinks it is often forgotten that the border is still a front line.

Since the start of this summer, President Volodymyr Zelensky says there were more than 2,000 strikes on the Sumy region from the Kursk region alone, including 250 glide bombs.

For months it was feared Russian troops were preparing for a cross-border attack of their own, and by pushing them back, Serhii believes defending Ukraine in general will be easier.

“The [now captured] Russian city of Sudzha is on a commanding height. The Russians are already in a less advantageous position because we control the approach routes.”

While Russia has had to react to Ukraine on the battlefield, it has also had its supply lines targeted. Key roads have been seized and a strategically important bridge destroyed.

Which leads us to:

“The main purpose of this offensive into Kursk is to divert Russia’s attention from its occupied territories in Ukraine,” says Ivan Stupak, who worked for Ukraine’s security service (SBU) between 2004-2015.

The good news for Ukraine is that is what appears to be happening. The bad news is that Russian advances, notably towards the town of Pokrovsk, are not slowing.

“The Russian army has been redeploying some troops from different directions – the Kherson, Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, for example,” Ivan says. He believes around 10,000 personnel are being diverted, mostly from other parts of Russia.

It is how President Zelensky describes Ukraine’s collection of captured Russian soldiers.

Historically, when Ukraine has momentum, it captures more and consequentially negotiates the release of their own more easily.

The Kursk offensive has been no exception. Kyiv says hundreds of Russian troops were taken prisoner. Several could be seen surrendering in drone footage and being taken back to Ukraine with tape blindfolds.

“Moscow is actually offering to start negotiations to exchange prisoners of war,” says Serhii Kuzan.

“It is no longer us, enlisting the support of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to ask Russia to hand over our prisoners of war.”

This is a huge part of it for Kyiv.

On a civilian level, you had the horror and anger felt in the Kursk region in response to the blistering Ukrainian assault on their homes.

There were mass evacuations, pleas for help and criticisms of some authorities for not preventing the attack.

On a political level, you had Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly processing events in Moscow while being briefed by his security chiefs.

And of course there is the military level.

“The influence of this Ukrainian incursion could be quite substantial,” concludes Alina Frolova. “That’s why using highly professional troops was specifically the right decision.”

If Ukraine does not plan to keep hold of its captured Russian territory in the long term, but can hang on long enough, it hopes to leverage it for the release of its own land.

But it’s a big “if”.

When fighting slows, that has always suited Russia with its superior size. Misdirection and surprise has often worked for Ukraine.

“In a symmetric war, we have no chances with Russia,” points out Alina Frovola. “We need to make asymmetrical actions”.

Slowing advances in the Kursk region may leave Kyiv with difficult decisions.

But there are benefits for as long as there is movement, Serhii Kuzan argues.

“An advance rate of 1-3km a day is normal for swapping forward units with reserves,” he says. “In Ukraine’s Donbas region, the average advance rate for the Russians is 400m.

“Our pace in the Kursk region is five times faster than a 100,000-strong army!”

But the problem for Kyiv, is that Russians are still going forward in Ukraine.

However, don’t expect Ukraine to withdraw from its Russian attack anytime soon.

It is committed now.

Russia’s president initially labelled the offensive as a “terrorist attack” and “provocation”, but in the days since he has barely referenced it publicly.

That’s despite it fitting into his narrative that Russia’s invasion is a defensive war to protect his people.

Perhaps he doesn’t want the alarm felt by many in the Kursk region to spread, or for it to appear like his military doesn’t have control of the situation.

Also, as with the Kursk submarine disaster and failed coup of last year, Vladimir Putin doesn’t always act quickly to regain the initiative.

Ukraine will be hoping he’s not this time because he can’t.

When Kamala Harris steps onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week as the party’s presidential nominee, she’ll do so knowing that many in the audience cheering her on once counted her out.

Ms Harris, 59, has faced years of doubt from some within her party about her ability to run for America’s highest political office – including from President Joe Biden, the man whom she continues to serve as vice-president.

Since replacing Mr Biden as Democratic nominee in mid-July, Ms Harris has seen a tidal wave of enthusiasm – reflected in polling, fundraising and the enormous crowds that have come out to see her at rallies across the country.

But the political momentum and energy she has generated in recent weeks among Democrats was never a given.

After failing in a short-lived presidential bid in 2019, she began her vice-presidency on a shaky footing, beset by stumbles in high-profile interviews, staff turnover and low approval ratings. And for the last three-and-a-half years in the White House she has struggled to break through to American voters.

Advisers and allies say that in the years since those early struggles she has sharpened her political skills, created loyal coalitions within her party and built credibility on issues like abortion rights that energise the Democratic base. She has, in other words, been preparing for a moment exactly like this one.

On Thursday, as she formally accepts the Democratic nomination, Ms Harris has an opportunity to reintroduce herself on the national stage with fewer than 80 days until an election that could see her become the nation’s first female president.

At the same time, she’ll have to prove that she is capable of leading a party that never saw her as its natural leader and remains divided over the war in Israel and Gaza.

But above all, she’ll need put to rest any lingering doubt among the Democratic faithful that she can meet the challenge of defeating former president Donald Trump in what remains a tight and unpredictable contest.

Before Kamala Harris became a national figure, the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general had forged a reputation as a rising star in the party, landing the endorsement of President Barack Obama in her 2010 race to become the state’s top lawyer.

But those who followed her career closely saw a mixed record. As a prosecutor, she faced public outcry for refusing to seek the death penalty for a man convicted of killing a young police officer. And then as attorney-general, she upheld the state’s death penalty despite her personal opposition.

Having reached the peaks of California state politics, she was elected to the US Senate the same night that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. In her brief tenure, she made headlines for her searing and direct questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his testy 2018 confirmation hearings.

“Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” she asked the Trump appointee, in an exchange that cascaded across social media and late night television.

Like Mr Obama, she was a young senator of limitless ambition. Halfway through her first term, she launched a presidential campaign.

That campaign, like this one, was met with great fanfare. More than 20,000 people gathered in her hometown of Oakland, California, for its launch. But her effort to become the Democratic nominee sputtered and collapsed before the first presidential primary ballot was even cast.

Ms Harris failed to carve out a clear political identity and distinguish herself in a field of rivals that included Mr Biden and left-wing senator Bernie Sanders. Critics said she endorsed a range of progressive policies but seemed to lack clear conviction.

A breakthrough June 2019 debate moment in which she challenged her then-opponent Mr Biden’s record on the racial desegregation of schools resulted in a brief surge in polling. She attacked Mr Biden for an earlier campaign moment in which he fondly recalled working with two segregationist senators, before accusing him of opposing the bussing of students between schools to help integrate them.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day,” Ms Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”

But campaign infighting and indecision on which issues to emphasise ultimately sank her presidential bid.

The campaign was marked by “a lot of rookie mistakes”, said Kevin Madden, an adviser on Republican Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “The substance that needed to be there to pass the commander-in-chief test and to really fill in some of the blanks for voters, it just wasn’t there and as a result her opponents filled it in for her.”

Eight months later, Mr Biden put aside their primary rivalry and announced Ms Harris as his running mate. She became the first woman of colour to ever be nominated in that position – and in January 2021, the first female vice-president in US history.

It was five months into her job as Mr Biden’s vice-president that Ms Harris endured her first public stumble during a foreign trip to Guatemala and Mexico.

The trip was meant to showcase her role in pursuing economic initiatives to curb the flow of migrants from Central America to the US southern border, a foreign policy assignment given to her by Mr Biden.

But it was quickly overshadowed by an awkward exchange in an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, in which she dismissed repeated questions about why she had not yet visited the US-Mexico border.

Later that day, during a press conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, Ms Harris tried to recapture the narrative, delivering a stark message to migrants thinking of making their way to the US. “Do not come,” she told them. “Do not come.”

While the NBC News interview fuelled Republican attacks that continue to this day, the latter comments drew the ire of progressives and were quickly panned on social media, even though other administration officials had echoed the same rhetoric.

• Trump and Harris battle over election’s biggest issue
• In one US state, women politicians dominate. What pointers can it offer Kamala Harris?
• Why the ‘weird’ label is working for Kamala Harris

The vice-president’s allies blamed the White House for failing to adequately prepare her and assigning an unwinnable issue. They complained that as the first woman, African-American and Asian-American to serve as vice-president, outsized expectations had been imposed on her from the very start of her term, giving her little time to settle.

“There was immense pressure in the beginning to own things,” said one former aide who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about their time in the White House.

In the months that followed, Ms Harris endured more scrutiny as she faced high staff turnover, a slew of negative headlines about her performance and underwhelming media appearances. Hemmed in by Covid restrictions, she was limited in her public engagements, fuelling the perception that she was invisible.

When critics labelled her a prop for standing behind Mr Biden at bill-signing ceremonies – as her white male predecessors in the role regularly did – a decision was made to remove her from those events altogether, according to aides, triggering more criticism that she was absent.

“People had an expectation to experience her as vice-president as if she was Michelle Obama, but she was in a job… built for Al Gore or Mike Pence,” said Jamal Simmons, a longtime Democratic strategist who was brought in as her communications director during the second year.

As her team sought to improve her poor public image, Ms Harris stepped into a bigger foreign policy role. She travelled to Poland in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, held bilateral meetings in Asia amid heightened tensions with China and stood in for Mr Biden at the Munich Security Conference that same year.

But in May 2022, a political earthquake would reshape the trajectory of her vice-presidency. In a rare breach of the Supreme Court, a leaked draft opinion revealed plans to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade abortion ruling – which had protected American women’s federal right to abortion for nearly half a century.

She seized on the opportunity to be the lead messenger on an issue that Mr Biden – a devout Irish Catholic who avoided even saying the term “abortion” – was reluctant to own.

“How dare they? How dare they tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body?” she told the crowd at an event for a pro-choice group on the same day the bombshell leak was published, deciding to attack the nation’s top judges before their decision was officially released.

The issue proved to be a driving force for voters in the midterm elections a few months later, helping Democrats to perform better than expected in congressional races and to hold the Senate.

In seeking to become the administration’s leading voice on abortion, Ms Harris tackled the issue with “clarity of purpose”, said former longtime adviser Rachel Palermo.

She convened state legislators, faith leaders, constitutional law experts, healthcare providers and advocates for roundtable discussions. It was a move panned by some activists as not meeting the seriousness of the moment but it was part of a strategy of coalition-building across local and state politics that also helped lay the groundwork for any future presidential run.

Ms Harris, who spent most of her career navigating California’s tricky mix of liberal and traditional Democratic politics, knew every event mattered.

Every meeting, photo opportunity or dinner – whether it was with black business leaders or Hispanic female CEOs – was tracked by her team in detailed spreadsheets that she could utilise when the time came to call on a deep political network for support.

“She forced the operation to mobilise around how she views politics, which is coalitions,” a senior official said.

Ms Harris always had her eye on a 2028 bid for the White House, as Joe Biden’s natural successor, assuming he won a second term in the 2024 contest.

Yet as rumblings mounted about replacing Mr Biden on the ticket after his stumbling debate performance in late June against Donald Trump, some Democrats openly overlooked her.

• Kamala Harris’s positions on 10 key issues
• The ‘blended’ family behind Kamala Harris

They, and many pundits, suggested popular governors like California’s Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro or Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer as better replacements who could motivate voters and take the fight to Trump.

On 21 July, Mr Biden phoned Ms Harris to tell her of his plans to drop out of the race and endorse her as his successor.

It was a decision that took many of his closest allies by surprise, but she sprung into action. Over the course of 10 hours that Sunday, she called more than 100 party officials, members of Congress, labour leaders and activists. Within days, any potential rivals, including the powerful governors, had fallen into line and it was clear that she would take the Democratic mantle with no serious challenge.

As a candidate, the vice-president has yet to lay out a detailed policy agenda or sit down for a tough media interview. She released an economic blueprint on Friday, calling for tax cuts for families and a wider push on capping drug pricing, her most detailed vision for the country so far.

Even as Republicans accuse her of avoiding scrutiny, the team around her see no rush in cutting off the momentum she’s built over the last month. Political strategists say the campaign is right to capitalise on the “sugar high”.

“What Kamala Harris is experiencing is a massive, pent-up demand for people to vote for anybody not named Biden or Trump,” said Mr Madden, the former Romney aide and Republican communications strategist. “But the test always comes with being exposed to interviews, the press, debates and the harsh glare of a campaign.”

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian who helped organise a meeting of historians at Ms Harris’s official residence last year, said the fact that she has been a blank slate for voters is more of a benefit than a burden.

“She may not have been able to be in full bloom under Biden but she never crossed wires with him,” he said. “So she was able to be positioned for this moment and she can take what’s good about the Biden years and shed the baggage of what she wants to, or slightly disagrees with.”

Though her entrance has jolted an outpouring of support among Democrats, it’s unclear whether she can translate that into broad appeal. While Ms Harris has made some inroads with key demographic groups that had drifted from Mr Biden – black, Latino and young voters in particular – she lags in other constituencies that made up his winning 2020 coalition.

Recent polling has put her ahead or tied with Trump in six of the seven battleground states, according to the Cook Political Report survey released on Wednesday. In May, Trump was ahead or tied in all seven states.

Thursday night’s speech at the Democratic convention is the most consequential moment in Kamala Harris’s political career. While the Republican convention served as a coronation for Trump, who was nominated as his party’s candidate for the third consecutive time, Ms Harris’s sudden rise means her speech will be seen as a pivotal moment to define who she really is.

While she’s stood on the stage before, a senior aide said the speech will have a heavier focus on her personal story than previous nominees.

“This is the why part of the conversation. Why is she running for president? What is her vision for the country?” said Mr Simmons, her former communications director. “That will help tie together all of the strands of her policy and political life that will make sense for people.”

But over the course of four days, Ms Harris will need to sharpen her messaging around crime, inflation, the economy and immigration – issues the Trump campaign will relentlessly target between now and election day.

Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican strategist, said Ms Harris will also at some point have to clarify the left-leaning positions she took in 2019 during her failed presidential bid.

“Her greatest vulnerability is that there is plenty of evidence that she’s a San Francisco liberal with a whole set of far left wing policy positions that are outside the mainstream of American thinking, and she hasn’t had to answer for those yet,” he said.

She will also be confronted with protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza, a polarising issue that has politically cleaved the party. Ms Harris has been more forceful in her calls for a ceasefire and condemnation of civilian deaths than President Biden, but she has not wavered from the administration’s steadfast support for Israel – a stance that risks alienating the party’s progressive wing.

“How she positions [herself on Gaza] is going to be her hardest trick,” said Mr Brinkley, the presidential historian.

Still, allies and advisers who have been preparing her over the last week contend she’s built the foundations for a presidential run over the last four – sometimes bumpy – years, even if few expected she would actually find herself in this position at this moment.

“Opportunity is preparation meeting a little bit of luck and I wouldn’t characterise this as luck, because nobody wanted it to be this way, but certainly she was prepared to meet the moment of opportunity,” a senior political adviser said.

Susie Tompkins Buell, a Democratic donor and co-founder of Esprit and The North Face who has known Ms Harris since the 1990s, said she wasn’t surprised by how Ms Harris had performed in the last few weeks.

In the days after Mr Biden’s halting debate performance, she attended an event with the vice-president and said she could tell change was afoot.

After telling Ms Harris to fasten her seatbelt, Ms Buell said the soon-to-be Democratic nominee quipped, “I was born with a seatbelt.”

“I liked her response,” said Ms Tompkins Buell, who helped Ms Harris raise $12m at a San Francisco fundraiser earlier this month. “It was sudden and it was right on. She’s ready.”

Holes mysteriously found cut in army base fences.

An alleged plot to assassinate Germany’s top weapons manufacturer.

Phone taps on a high-level Luftwaffe call.

These aren’t storylines lifted from a 1960s spy novel but real-life events in Germany, this year.

Not all of these events can definitively be blamed on Moscow, but Germany is on heightened alert for possible acts of Russian sabotage, because of Berlin’s continued military support for Kyiv.

As a hot war rages between Russia and Ukraine, there are fears that Europe has slipped into a new Cold War.

“When we think of the Cold War, we have a tendency to think of the 1970s by which point the rules of the game had become established and accepted,” says Mark Galeotti, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) and director of Mayak Intelligence.

“In some way, we’re in the early Cold War – the Fifties and Sixties, so a much rawer time.”

But what does a rekindled Cold War look like for Europe’s biggest economy and a country that was once itself cut in half by the Iron Curtain?

The biggest bombshell dropped just last month when CNN reported that US officials had told Berlin of an alleged Russian plot to kill the chief executive of Germany’s biggest arms company Rheinmetall.

The Kremlin denied the report but German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who strikes a hawkish figure next to the more hesitant Chancellor Olaf Scholz, hit out at Russia for “waging a hybrid war of aggression”.

I met Rheinmetall’s CEO, Armin Papperger, at a ground-breaking ceremony for a new ammunition factory in February.

The 61-year-old is, to use a crude term, a real “somebody”, particularly in a world where Nato countries are spending billions to re-supply Ukraine and boost their own security.

His prominent position was clear as he stood alongside Chancellor Scholz, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen as they plunged spades into the earth in Lower Saxony.

Had a plot to kill him been successful, it would have sent shockwaves through the West.

A security blunder not long afterwards allowed spies to eavesdrop on a highly sensitive conversation between senior German air force officials, later broadcast on Russian TV.

It was a cause of acute embarrassment for Berlin given that a brigadier general in the Luftwaffe appeared to allow spies into the secure call by dialling in on an insecure line.

The mega-blip, however isolated, fuelled accusations that Germany has long been a “weak link” within the European counter-intelligence due to a fragmented, federalised system that’s underpinned by a strong emphasis on individuals’ privacy.

Weeks later, two German-Russian nationals were arrested on suspicion of planning to sabotage US military facilities in Bavaria. Annalena Baerbock summoned the Russian ambassador to complain and announced: “We will not allow Putin to bring his terror to Germany.”

Only last week, holes were found cut into the fences of water facilities supplying two military bases in North Rhine-Westphalia, with concerns that someone has been seeking to contaminate supplies.

Germany is not the only European country being targeted by apparent acts of sabotage, but it has a lot of US military bases that were established in the wake of World War Two.

Mark Galeotti believes Moscow views Germany as a large but “flabby” power, making it the ideal pressure point.

By anyone’s measure, the greatest act of known sabotage to affect Germany in recent years was when the Nord Stream gas pipelines, running under the Baltic Sea from Russia, were blown up in 2022.

Speculation over who ordered the attack has been rife ever since, but in a dramatic development Germany has now issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that the “shoestring” operation had been privately funded but overseen from Ukraine.

Kyiv rejected the report as nonsense, and while there was always scepticism that President Putin would order the destruction of his own pipeline, it does show that the murky world of espionage can be full of twists and turns.

Each incident of apparent sabotage cannot, by any means, be immediately and certainly attributed to Russia.

In France it was far-left activists, not Russian agents, who were accused of targeting the country’s high-speed rail network on the eve of the Olympics.

And Germany has had its own, extensive, history of far-left militant attacks.

The fact that Ukrainian figures are now under the spotlight for the Nord Stream blasts has fuelled fresh criticism from familiar political wings, within Germany, about the government’s support for Kyiv.

Co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, Alice Weidel, has called for “aid payments” to Kyiv to be halted and the damage to Nord Stream “billed” to Ukraine.

The AfD enjoys much of its support in the former communist east, where beyond Berlin you’re more likely to find lingering affection for Russia and dissatisfaction with the main parties that have, since reunification, dominated national politics.

So as Cold War comparisons hover over European security, the politics of that period has also renewed itself in Germany in a stark and unexpected way.

In a bid to bolster security, the German government is working on a new law aimed at boosting resilience of critical infrastructure.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser says there must be “maximum protective measures in all areas”.

Operators in critical sectors such as energy, transport and water will have to follow minimum security standards, under the Kritis Umbrella Act.

It’s the first federal law of its kind in Germany but yet to gain final approval despite heightened tensions surrounding the war.

German-made armoured Marder vehicles are reportedly being used in Ukraine’s surprise operation inside Russian territory.

That would mark yet another German foreign policy taboo being broken since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Add to that contentious plans for the US to station long-range missiles in Germany from 2026.

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Chancellor Sholz promised a “Zeitenwende”, or turning point in national defence and security policy.

But supporters and critics of the government alike acknowledge that reversing years of underinvestment in defence will take time – as will adjusting a mentality so influenced by Germany’s dark past.

Given recent developments, there’s a question mark over how long Berlin has.

Mark Galeotti says it is not just rebuilding defence but upgrading cyber-security and improving counter-intelligence.

“Security planning doesn’t happen over weeks or months but years.”

As Martina Canchi Nate walks through the Bolivian jungle, red butterflies fluttering around her, we have to ask her to pause – our team can’t keep up.

Her ID card shows she’s 84, but within 10 minutes, she digs up three yucca trees to extract the tubers from the roots, and with just two strokes of her knife, cuts down a plantain tree.

She slings a huge bunch of the fruit on her back and begins the walk home from her chaco – the patch of land where she grows cassava, corn, plantains and rice.

Martina is one of 16,000 Tsimanes (pronounced “chee-may-nay”) – a semi-nomadic indigenous community living deep in the Amazon rainforest, 600km (375 miles) north of Bolivia’s largest city, La Paz.

Her vigour is not unusual for Tsimanes of her age. Scientists have concluded the group has the healthiest arteries ever studied, and that their brains age more slowly than those of people in North America, Europe and elsewhere.

The Tsimanes are a rarity. They are one of the last peoples on the planet to live a fully subsistence lifestyle of hunting, foraging and farming. The group is also large enough to provide a sizeable scientific sample, and researchers, led by anthropologist Hillard Kaplan of the University of New Mexico, have studied it for two decades.

Tsimanes are constantly active – hunting animals, planting food and weaving roofs.

Less than 10% of their daylight hours are spent in sedentary activities, compared with 54% in industrial populations. An average hunt, for example, lasts more than eight hours and covers 18km.

They live on the Maniqui River, approximately 100km by boat from the nearest town, and have had little access to processed foods, alcohol and cigarettes.

The researchers found that only 14% of the calories they eat are from fat, compared with 34% in the US. Their foods are high in fibre and 72% of their calories come from carbohydrates, compared with 52% in the US.

Proteins come from animals they hunt, such as birds, monkeys and fish. When it comes to cooking, traditionally, there is no frying.

The initial work of Prof Kaplan and his colleague, Michael Gurven of the University of California, Santa Barbara, was anthropological. But they noticed the elderly Tsimanes did not show signs of diseases typical of old age such as hypertension, diabetes or heart problems.

Then a study published in 2013 caught their attention. A team led by US cardiologist Randall C Thompson used CT scanning to examine 137 mummies from ancient Egyptian, Inca and Unangan civilisations.

As humans age, a build-up of fats, cholesterol and other substances can make arteries thicken or harden, causing atherosclerosis. They found signs of this in 47 of the mummies, challenging assumptions that it is caused by modern lifestyles.

The two research teams joined forces and carried out CT scans on 705 Tsimanes over the age of 40, looking for coronary artery calcium (CAC) – a sign of clogged-up blood vessels and risk of a heart attack.

Their study, first published in The Lancet in 2017, showed 65% of the Tsimanes over 75 had no CAC. In comparison, most Americans of that age (80%) do have signs of it.

As Kaplan puts it: “A 75-year-old Tsimane’s arteries are more like a 50-year-old American’s arteries.”

A second phase, published in 2023 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, found elderly Tsimanes showed up to 70% less brain atrophy than people of the same age in industrialised countries such as the UK, Japan and the US.

“We found zero cases of Alzheimer’s among the entire adult population – it is remarkable,” Bolivian doctor Daniel Eid Rodríguez, a medical co-ordinator for the researchers, tells us.

Working out the ages of the Tsimanes is not an exact science, however. Some have difficulty counting, as they have not been taught numbers well. They told us they are guided by records of Christian missions in the area or by how long they have known each other. The scientists do calculations based on the ages of a person’s children.

According to their records, Hilda is 81, but she says recently her family killed a pig to celebrate her “100th birthday or something like that”.

Juan, who says he is 78, takes us out hunting. His hair is dark, his eyes lively and his hands muscular and firm. We watch as he stalks a small taitetú – a hairy, wild pig – which manages to sneak away through the foliage and escape.

He admits he does feel his age: “Now the most difficult thing is my body. I don’t walk far any more… it will be two days at most.”

Martina agrees. Tsimane women are known for weaving roofs from jatata, a plant that grows deep in the jungle. To find it, Martina must walk for three hours there and three hours back, carrying the branches on her back.

“I do it once or twice a month, although now it’s harder for me,” she says.

Many Tsimanes never reach old age, though. When the study began, their average life expectancy was barely 45 years – now it’s risen to 50.

At the clinic where the scans take place, Dr Eid asks the elderly woman about their families as they prepare to be examined.

Counting on her fingers, one woman says sadly that she had six children, of which five died. Another says she had 12, of which four died – one more says she has nine children still alive, but another three died.

“These people who reach the age of 80 were the ones who managed to survive a childhood full of diseases and infections,” says Dr Eid.

The researchers believe all the Tsimanes have experienced some sort of infection by parasites or worms during their lifetimes. They also found high levels of pathogens and inflammation, suggesting the Tsimanes’ bodies were constantly fighting infections.

This has led them to wonder whether these early infections could be another factor – in addition to diet and exercise – behind the health of the elderly Tsimanes.

The community’s lifestyle is, however, changing.

Juan says he has not been able to hunt a large enough animal in months. A series of forest fires at the end of 2023 destroyed nearly two million hectares of jungle and forest.

“The fire made the animals leave,” he says.

He has now begun raising livestock and shows us four beef steers he hopes will provide protein for the family later this year.

Dr Eid says the use of boats with an outboard motor – known as peque-peque – is also bringing change. It makes markets easier to reach, giving the Tsimane access to foods such as sugar, flour and oil.

And he points out that it means they are rowing less than before – “one of the most demanding physical activities”.

Twenty years ago, there were barely any cases of diabetes. Now they are beginning to appear, while cholesterol levels have also begun to increase among the younger population, the researchers have found.

“Any small change in their habits ends up affecting these health indices,” says Dr Eid.

And the researchers themselves have had an impact over their 20 years of involvement – arranging better access to healthcare for the Tsimanes, from cataract operations to treatment for broken bones and snake bites.

But for Hilda, old age is not something to be taken too seriously. “I’m not afraid of dying,” she tells us with a laugh, “because they’re going to bury me and I’m going to stay there… very still.”

The videos are shocking: buildings burning, horrifying violence and women weeping as they plead for help.

They are – the people sharing them say – proof of a “Hindu genocide” happening in Bangladesh in the wake of the sudden fall of the country’s long-time leader, Sheikh Hasina.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who uses the name Tommy Robinson – a British far-right activist who has been criticised for making inflammatory posts during the UK riots – has got involved, sharing videos along with dark warnings.

But we found that many of the videos and claims shared online are false.

Bangladesh has been in the headlines for weeks: student-led protests which left more than 400 dead culminated with the government falling and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing to India on 5 August.

Celebrations escalated into violent unrest, with rioters targeting members of her ruling Awami League party which is made up of both Hindu and Muslim members.

And while reports on the ground have found violence and looting impacted Hindu people and properties, far-right influencers in neighbouring India shared false videos and information that gave a misleading view of the events.

They claimed to show communal violence against Hindus purportedly carried out by “Islamist radicals” with a violent agenda.

One viral post claimed to show a temple set on fire by “Islamists in Bangladesh”.

However, BBC Verify has determined that this building, identified as the Navagraha Temple in Chittagong, was undamaged by the incident which actually occurred at a nearby Awami League party office.

Pictures obtained by the BBC after the fire show debris of posters with Awami League members’ faces.

“On 5 August, there was an attack on the Awami League office premises behind the temple in the afternoon,” Swapan Das, a staff member at the temple, told BBC Verify. “They took the furniture outside and set fire to it.”

Mr Das added that although the temple was not attacked on the day, the situation remains tense and the temple has been shut with people guarding it round-the-clock.

This is far from the only story shared, most under the same hashtag, which has had nearly a million mentions since 4 August, according to social media monitoring tool Brandwatch. Accounts that were mostly geolocated to India drove the trend.

Other viral posts which have since been debunked include a claim that a Bangladeshi Hindu cricketer’s home had been burned down. BBC Verify has established the house in fact belongs to a Muslim MP from the Awami League.

Then there was the school that burned down, which the BBC visited. Again, the reasons behind the attack appear to be political rather than religious.

All of these posts have been shared by multiple accounts, many of which support Hindu-nationalist values.

Inter-religious strains have been present in Bangladesh for many decades, says Professor Sayeed Al-Zaman, an expert in hate speech and disinformation in Bangladesh.

Following the hasty departure of Sheikh Hasina, matters have come to a head once again, “as Hindus felt insecure in the absence of the government and effective law and order”, says Prof Al-Zaman.

The false narratives have made the situation worse. “Fear-mongering by these influencers is inflaming the tension.”

Some of these posts falsely claiming that Hindus have been targeted by Muslims have been shared by accounts far removed from either Bangladesh or India.

Tommy Robinson who has been criticised for posting inflammatory messages about the violent riots targeting Muslims and immigrants across the UK, has been sharing unverified videos from Bangladesh, where he says there is “a genocide on Hindus”.

We have investigated one video shared by him. It shows a woman pleading for her husband’s life as her home is attacked. The post falsely claims the property is being targeted by “Islamists”. The original video was shared on 6 August, onde day after the property had been attacked.

However, when the BBC investigated the story behind the video, a different narrative emerged.

We were told by a group of local students who had assisted the woman in defending her property that the dispute was about an entirely different matter. They shared photos and videos of the clean-up with the BBC which show the property as seen in the original video. The Hindu temple inside the property is unharmed.

“The conflict is about ownership of land. A case was filed long ago,” a student told us. A case has been in local courts about the ownership of the land for nearly six months.

We’ve spoken to other people in the local area who’ve told us that the attack was not religiously motivated and that the perpetrators were a mix of Hindu and Muslim people. They also reported that other Hindu families and temples in the area weren’t affected.

Tommy Robinson did not respond to our request for comment.

Working out exactly what has happened in Bangladesh over the last few weeks has proved difficult.

Many real incidents and attacks have taken place across the country, but the motivations are difficult to assess: religion or politics.

The two are closely entwined: one Hindu resident explained how the minority are largely viewed as supporters of Sheikh Hasina’s secular Awami League party.

AFP fact-checker for Bangladesh, Qadaruddin Shishir, told the BBC that there have been attacks on Hindu-owned properties.

But, he said, “right-wing Indian accounts are spreading these politically motivated attacks as religious ones.”

Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, a non-profit established to protect minority human rights, reported five Hindu people killed. Two have been confirmed as Awami League members.

The AFP has put the count of Muslim Awami League leaders’ who have been killed at more than 50.

When false claims about attacks on Hindus went viral online, some Muslim protesters decided to guard Hindu temples.

“It’s our responsibility to protect them,” said Moinul, who stood watch last week in front of a temple in Hatharazi, outside of Chittagong.

Viral social media posts were trying to “incite conflict between Hindus and Muslims,” said Moinul. “But we are not falling for it.”

Choton Banik, a local Hindu in the area who attended the temple, asked that they continue their effort “through this critical time.”

“I hope that we will continue to live together in this independent Bangladesh in the future,” he said.

Indonesia has celebrated Independence Day in its future new capital city Nusantara for the first time – with scaled-back festivities as construction continues.

The country had hoped to officially inaugurate the city on the 79th anniversary of its declaration of independence in 1945 after centuries of Dutch rule and then Japanese occupation during World War Two.

But the project, on the island of Borneo, has been hit with construction delays and funding problems.

It is set to be the biggest legacy of outgoing President Joko Widodo, who attended events alongside his successor Prabowo Subianto.

Tourists enjoying the picture postcard views of Lakes Lucerne, Thun or Lake Neuchatel might be surprised to learn what lies beneath those pristine alpine waters.

For years the Swiss military used the lakes as dumping grounds for old munition, believing it could be disposed of safely there.

In Lake Lucerne alone there are an estimated 3,300 tonnes of munition, and 4,500 tonnes in the waters of Neuchatel, which the Swiss air force used for bombing practice until 2021.

Some munitions are at depths of 150 to 220 metres, but others in Lake Neuchatel are just six or seven metres below the surface.

Now, the Swiss defence department is offering 50,000 francs (£45,000) in prize money for the best idea to get it out.

The best three ideas for a safe and environmental solution to retrieve the munition will share the prize pot – but the salvage operation is expected to cost billions.

The fact that so many rounds were dumped in Swiss lakes – Brienz being another of them – has been known about for decades, though people have asked questions about safety more recently.

Retired Swiss geologist Marcos Buser, who advised the government on this topic, wrote a research paper ten years ago warning of the dangers of the dumps.

The munition poses two risks, he said. First, despite the fact it is underwater, there is still a risk of explosion, because in many cases “the army did not remove the fuses before dumping the munition”.

Then there’s water and soil contamination – there is a real chance that highly toxic TNT could pollute the lake water and the sediment.

The Swiss government acknowledges that factors including poor visibility, magnetic iron and individual ammunition weights “represent major challenges for environmentally friendly ammunition recovery”.

An assessment of possible recovery techniques in 2005 showed that all proposed solutions for ammunition recovery posed severe risks for the sensitive ecosystems of the lakes.

It’s not the first time Switzerland’s military has appeared somewhat negligent with its munitions.

The alpine village of Mitholz suffered a massive blast in 1947, when 3,000 tonnes of ammunition the army had stored in the mountain overlooking the village exploded.

Nine people were killed, and the village was destroyed. The blast was even heard 160 kilometres (100 miles) away in Zurich.

Three years ago, the military revealed that 3,500 tonnes of unexploded ammunition which still remained buried in the mountain was not safe after all, and said it would be removed.

For Mitholz’s residents that meant leaving home for up to a decade while the clean-up operation took place.

There have also been scandals about neutral Switzerland’s Cold War defence strategy of mining its bridges and tunnels against an invasion. Some bridges had to be quickly demined because modern heavy goods vehicles risked triggering an explosion.

In 2001, 11 people died in the Gotthard Tunnel, one of Europe’s key north to south transport routes, when a fire broke out following a collision between two lorries.

Large quantities of explosives – not involved in the explosion – were still stored in a depot close to the tunnel mouth and after fire officers successfully put the fire out, the army arrived, bomb disposal equipment to hand.

And this week, the army revealed that reports from civilians finding unexploded ordinance out in the Swiss countryside increased by 12% last year (on 2022).

Even on the glaciers, now receding amid the impacts of climate change, the melting ice is revealing spent and live ammunition left over from high mountain training which took place decades ago.

It’s a legacy of Switzerland’s ‘armed neutrality’ defence strategy – maintaining a large militia army (all Swiss men are required to do military service) which trains its troops almost entirely inside what is a densely populated country.

The task to remove munition from Switzerland’s lakes is expected be long and complicated. But first, someone needs to come up with a workable plan of how exactly to get them out.

While some complain that the army should have thought of that while dumping, for decades the advice from geologists to the military was that the practice was safe.

The hunt is on for solutions. Following the Swiss defence department’s appeal, the public can submit their ideas until February next year when they will be anonymously judged by a panel of experts.

The three winners will be announced next April.

The government said: “It is not planned to implement the submitted entries immediately, but they could serve as the basis for further clarifications or for launching research projects.”

Mr Buser suggests turning to the UK, Norway, or Denmark for advice given their experience in dealing with wartime wrecks containing unexploded weapons.

So will he offer any ideas? “No, I’m too old now…but if they need any advice I will be pleased to give it.”

Doctors in India have held a national strike, escalating the protest against the rape and murder of a female colleague in the West Bengal city of Kolkata.

More than a million were expected to join the strikes, as hospitals and clinics across the country turned away non-emergency patients.

The IMA described last week’s killing as a “crime of barbaric scale due to the lack of safe spaces for women” and asked for the country’s support in its “struggle for justice”.

Protests against the attack and calling for the better protection of women have intensified in recent days after a mob vandalised the hospital where it happened.

In a statement, the IMA said emergency and casualty services would continue to run. The strike ended at 06:00 local time on Sunday (00:30 GMT).

The association’s president, R. V. Asokan, told the BBC doctors have been suffering and protesting against violence for years, but that this incident was “qualitatively different”.

If such a crime can happen in a medical college in a major city, it shows “everywhere doctors are unsafe”, he said.

Doctors at some government hospitals announced earlier this week that they were indefinitely halting elective procedures.

The IMA also issued a list of demands including the strengthening of the law to better protect medical staff against violence, increasing the level of security at hospitals and the creation of safe spaces for rest.

It called for a “meticulous and professional investigation” into the killing and the prosecution of those involved in vandalising, as well as compensation for the woman’s family.

The rape of the 31-year-old female trainee doctor has shocked the country.

Her half-naked body bearing extensive injuries was discovered in a seminar hall at R G Kar Medical College last week after she was reported to have gone there to rest during her shift.

A volunteer who worked at the hospital has been arrested in connection with the crime.

The case has been transferred from local police to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) following criticism at the lack of progress.

More incidents of rape have made headlines in India since the woman’s death and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that “monstrous behaviour against women should be severely and quickly punished”.

The woman’s rape and killing has sparked a political blame game in West Bengal, with the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accusing the governing Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) of orchestrating the attack.

The TMC has refuted the allegation and has blamed “political outsiders” for stoking the violence.

Tens of thousands of women across West Bengal participated in the Reclaim the Night march on Wednesday night to demand “independence to live in freedom and without fear”.

Though the protests were largely peaceful, clashes erupted between the police and a small group of unidentified men who barged into the RG Kar Hospital – the site of the crime – and ransacked its emergency ward.

At least 25 people have been arrested in connection with the incident so far.

Protests have also been held in many other Indian cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.

“It feels like hope is being reignited,” one demonstrator, Sumita Datta, told the AFP news agency as thousands of people marched through the streets of Kolkata on Friday.

Hamas has described suggestions of progress on an Israel-Gaza ceasefire deal as an illusion, after US President Joe Biden said he was feeling “optimistic”.

Following two days of US-backed talks in Qatar, President Biden said on Friday “we are closer than we have ever been”.

And on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Israeli negotiators had expressed “cautious optimism” about moving towards agreement on a deal.

However, a senior Hamas official told the BBC earlier there had been no progress and mediators were “selling illusions”.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October, during which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

A ceasefire deal agreed in November saw Hamas release 105 of the hostages in return for a week-long ceasefire and the freeing of some 240 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel says 111 hostages are still being held, 39 of whom are presumed dead.

In a recent joint statement, the US, Qatar and Egypt stated that they had presented a proposal for a ceasefire and hostage release deal that “narrows the gaps” between Israel and Hamas.

Israel has said any ceasefire deal would require the release of the remaining hostages. Some have already been released, while others are thought to have died in Gaza.

Relatives of hostages still in Gaza are calling the current negotiations as the “last chance” to get some of them out alive.

After 10 months of war and thousands of casualties, there is overwhelming pressure for a breakthrough.

A wider regional conflict, in the event of talks between Israel and Hamas collapsing completely, is a distinct possibility and is something all of those involved are fearful of.

The mediators said that the past two days of ceasefire discussions had been “serious, constructive and conducted in a positive atmosphere”.

Technical teams are expected to continue working over the coming days on the details of how to implement the proposed terms before senior government officials meet again in Cairo, hoping to reach an agreement on the terms set out in Doha.

While the mediators’ statement is clearly a positive development, there is still a long way to go before a ceasefire is agreed.

This is not the first time the Mr Biden has said he thought a deal was close – and not everyone shares his cautious optimism.

Neither Hamas nor the Israeli government have been quite so upbeat in their responses.

Israel says its position and core principles have remained unchanged and were “well-known”. It accused Hamas of refusing to agree to a deal for the release of the hostages.

Above all else, Israelis want to see the remaining hostages released but many are sceptical that is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s primary goal. He has insisted that a “total victory” over Hamas is his government’s priority.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s new leader, Yaya Sinwar, continues to show few signs of compromise.

Asked about President Biden’s statement, the senior Hamas official told the BBC “what we have received from the mediators is very disappointing. There has been no progress”.

Hamas is understood to have dropped its demand for a permanent ceasefire in favour of Mr Biden’s proposal for a six-week pause in which an end to the war could be brokered.

Mr Biden’s ceasefire proposal also included the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza, the staggered release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and the return of dead hostages’ remains.

The “bridging proposal” put forward by US, Egyptian and Qatari negotiators will be the subject of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s negotiations in the region and should form the basis for the next talks in Cairo at which all parties, including Hamas, are expected to attend.

That proposal reportedly “closes the remaining gaps” between the two sides’ positions which could allow for “a rapid implementation of the agreement”.

It might sound straightforward, but there are big obstacles to overcome and there is still absolutely no trust between senior Israeli or Hamas figures.

They’re being dragged to the table – perhaps against their wishes – by others fearful of what could happen in the event of failure.

Hamas and its allies are convinced the US administration is trying to buy more time.

If Iran attacks Israel, it will appear as if it is Hamas which undermined the negotiations.

Hamas does not hide its desire for Iran and Hezbollah to attack Israel and for the escalation to turn into a regional war.

They believe a strong blow to Israel will weaken Mr Netanyahu and push him to accept a deal.

For his part, Mr Biden warned “no-one in the region should take actions to undermine this process”.

Meanwhile, Israel’s military operation in Gaza continues, with an air strike in the early hours of Saturday morning killing 15 people in the al-Zawaida neighbourhood of central Gaza, according to the Palestinian civil defence authority, a rescue service.

Spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP news agency nine children and three women were among the dead.

Israel has not commented directly. The Israel Defense Forces said on Saturday morning it had “eliminated a number of terrorists” in central Gaza, including one that had fired at Israeli forces operating in the area.

The Israeli military has issued new evacuation orders for several blocks in northern Khan Younis and Deir Balah – further shrinking the humanitarian zone in which thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge from the fighting.

Israel said the blocks had become dangerous for civilians “due to significant acts of terrorism” and the firing of rockets and mortars towards Israel.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) said: “Once again, fear spreads as families have nowhere to go.”

Pressing the need for a ceasefire deal is the circulation of the polio virus – which can spread through faecal matter – is now circulating inside the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in Gaza.

“Let’s be clear: The ultimate vaccine for polio is peace and an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said.