US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has arrived in Israel in his latest effort to push for a ceasefire and hostage-release deal in Gaza.

His ninth trip to the region since the war began in October comes days after the US presented a modified proposal aimed at bridging long-standing gaps between the two sides.

The US has expressed optimism about a deal since talks resumed in Doha last week, but Hamas says suggestions of progress are an “illusion”.

Differences are said to include whether Israeli troops will be required to withdraw fully from the Gaza Strip, as Hamas insists.

Mr Blinken will attempt to maintain pressure on the Israeli leader when they meet on Monday – he will say that now is the moment to drop any more attempts to squeeze out last concessions and take a deal.

On the way here one senior US official was using phrases including a critical moment and an inflection point.

The Americans hope they can get this over the finish line perhaps as soon as this time next week.

But that level of optimism is not shared by the Israeli leadership or Hamas.

Each accuses the other of obstinate cynicism, and blocking a deal.

In a statement on Sunday, Hamas accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of putting “obstacles” in the way of an agreement and “setting new conditions and demands” with the aim of “prolonging the war”.

It added it holds him “fully responsible” for thwarting mediators’ efforts and “obstructing an agreement”.

A Hamas source earlier told Saudi media that the proposals include the IDF maintaining a reduced presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

But Israeli sources have told the Times of Israel that other procedures along the border could compensate for an Israeli withdrawal from the area in the first phase of the deal.

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.

US President Joe Biden said earlier this week “we are closer than we have ever been” to a deal.

But previous optimism expressed during months of on-off talks has proven unfounded.

Mr Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting on Sunday that complex negotiations were taking place to secure the return of hostages, but some principles needed to be upheld for Israel’s security.

“There are things we can be flexible about, and there are things we cannot be flexible about, and we insist on them. We know very well how to differentiate between the two,” he said.

He also accused Hamas of being “obstinate” in negotiations and called for further pressure to be applied on the militant group.

A senior Hamas official told the BBC on Saturday: “What we have received from the mediators is very disappointing. There has been no progress.”

It is possible the public statements of defiance are mainly a negotiating tactic – but there is such significant enmity and distrust here that a week feels very optimistic for a breakthrough.

And the US pressure also has the timing of Washington’s electoral politics in the background. It feels like the countdown clock for a deal is ticking that bit faster for the Americans than it has been for the two sides in this agreement.

The original deal outlined by President Biden, based on Israel’s 27 May proposal, was to run in three phases:

• The first would include a “full and complete ceasefire” lasting six weeks, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza, and the exchange of some of the hostages – including women, the elderly and the sick or wounded – for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
• The second phase would involve the release of all other living hostages and a “permanent end to hostilities”.
• The third would see the start of a major reconstruction plan for Gaza and the return of dead hostages’ remains.

Meanwhile, the Hamas-run health authority in Gaza says Israeli air strikes killed at least 21 people including six children on Sunday.

The IDF said on Sunday it had destroyed rocket launchers used to hit Israel from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, the scene of intense fighting in recent weeks, and killed 20 Palestinians.

Ukraine says it has destroyed a second strategic bridge in a week as it continues its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.

The Ukrainian military on Sunday released aerial footage of the strike on the bridge – reported to be over the Seym River in Zvannoe.

Hours later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said for the first time that the aims of the military incursion into Kursk included the creation of a “buffer zone” to stop Russian attacks.

Ukraine is nearly two weeks into its biggest attack on Russian territory since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Minus one more bridge,” Ukrainian Air Force commander Lt Gen Mykola Oleschuk posted on social media with footage of the strike.

Gen Oleschuk added: “Ukrainian Air Force aviation continues to deprive the enemy of logistical capabilities with precision airstrikes, which significantly affects the course of hostilities.”

The video shows a growing large cloud of smoke over the bridge and one of its sections appears to be destroyed. It is not clear when the strike took place.

Earlier this week, Ukraine destroyed another bridge over the river Seym, near the town of Glushkovo.

That bridge was used by the Kremlin to supply its troops.

Earlier, military analysts had identified three bridges in the area used by Russia to supply its forces, and they said two had either been destroyed or seriously damaged, Reuters news agency reported.

Almost two weeks after Ukrainian troops pushed across the border into Russia, it is becoming clear that they plan to stay.

President Zelensky said on Saturday his troops were strengthening positions in Kursk and expanding further in Russia.

On Sunday in an evening address, he said: “Our operation in the Kursk region is still inflicting losses on the Russian army and the Russian state, their defence industry and their economy.”

He stated that “this is more than just defence for Ukraine” and said that the aim was to “destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive actions”.

This would include “creating a buffer zone on the aggressor’s territory”, he added, in an effort to prevent further Russian attacks into Ukraine.

Mykhaylo Podolyak, an adviser to President Zelensky, insisted Ukraine was not interested in occupying Russia but wanted to persuade Russia to enter negotiations.

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

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.

It comes as the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog warned the nuclear safety situation at the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Russian-occupied Ukraine was deteriorating, following a drone strike near the site’s perimeter.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said he remained “extremely concerned” and called for “maximum restraint from all sides” to protect the plant.

The agency said the impact of the strike was on a road just outside the facility – close to essential water sprinkler ponds and about 100m from the only remaining high-voltage line.

The plant was seized by Russia’s forces early in the war and has come under repeated attacks which both sides have blamed the other for.

Last week, Kyiv and Moscow traded blame after a fire broke out in one of the plant’s cooling towers.

The IAEA did not say who carried out Saturday’s strike, but its team stationed at Zaporizhzhia said the damage seemed to have been caused by a drone carrying an explosive.

“The team has heard frequent explosions, repetitive heavy machine gun and rifle fire and artillery at various distances from the plant,” the agency said in a statement.

The plant has not produced power in more than two years and all six reactors have been in cold shutdown since April.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022 and has been making slow progress recently in seizing more territory in eastern Ukraine.

However, it was shocked when Ukrainian troops penetrated into its Kursk region where they have been consolidating positions for nearly two weeks.

Thousands of Russians have been evacuated from the area.

It is the first time foreign troops have been on Russian soil since World War Two.

Dozens of workers from around the world may have been trafficked into the UK to work for a small family-owned Scottish fishing firm, a BBC investigation has revealed.

Thirty-five men from the Philippines, Ghana, India and Sri Lanka were recognised as victims of modern slavery by the Home Office after being referred to it between 2012 and 2020.

The workers were employed by TN Trawlers and its sister companies, owned by the Nicholson family, based in the small town of Annan on the southern coast of Scotland.

The TN Group denied any allegation of modern slavery or human trafficking and said its workers were well treated and well paid.

The company was the focus of two long-running criminal investigations but no cases of human trafficking or modern slavery have come to trial, although some of the men waited years to give evidence.

While TN Trawlers’ lead director, Thomas Nicholson, was under active investigation, TN Group companies continued recruiting new employees from across the world.

Experienced fisherman Joel Quince was 28 when he landed at Heathrow Airport in 2012, thrilled to have secured a job as a deckhand with TN trawlers.

Joel had a young family back home in the Philippines, thousands of miles away. He had been expecting to earn a good income working in the UK. He was to be paid $1,012 (£660) a month for a 48-hour week.

He caught a bus from London to Carlisle, where, he says, he was picked up by the owner’s son, Tom Nicholson Jr.

“On our way to go to the boat he told us: ‘You have to give me your documents’ – so without hesitation I gave all my documents to them,” he said.

Joel says he was then taken straight to the fishing ground to start working.

But he was surprised to find that his boat was the Philomena rather than the Mattanja, which was the only vessel he was authorised to work on under the terms of his visa. “This was already something fishy for me,” he said

He claims that instead of the 48-hour week he had been told about, he was working 18 hours a day, seven days a week while the Philomena was out fishing.

On his monthly wage of £637, it meant Joel was earning less than the UK minimum wage – although at that time there was no legal requirement to pay it to fishermen like him.

Joel was one of about 30 seafarers who arrived in the UK to join TN Trawlers between 2011 and 2013, mostly from the Philippines. They joined dredgers trawling for scallops along the UK coastline.

These dredgers, built in the 1970s and 80s, work by towing metal nets along the seabed. They scrape up shellfish, as well as stones and bycatch – the other marine life which gets caught in the nets. Deckhands throw back the stones and pack the scallops in ice below deck.

Several of the men the BBC spoke to had little or no fishing experience. All describe working shift patterns as gruelling as Joel’s or worse.

Joel said he struggled to get up to go to work because he was so exhausted – but he didn’t complain because his colleagues were also suffering.

“If I stop working, there’s three people suffering, not getting their rest, because the operation keeps continuing. They won’t stop.”

He said there was not enough drinking water on board the vessels, and the crew were reduced to eating tomatoes from the stores to wet their throats. He also said that on one occasion a skipper threw an empty Coke can at the crew.

All the men the BBC spoke to described shortages of proper clothing, food and water.

Jaype Rubi was a young Filippino when he worked on board the TN dredger Sea Lady in 2012.

“Picking up and throwing out rocks is really tiring,” he said.

“The boat had CCTV, so the skipper could watch us. If we stop, he’d pull down the window and say: ‘Why are you resting’?”

Jaype said it was “super cold” and there was not enough food.

When he spoke to his mum on the phone, he started crying. “I said: ‘I want to go home because it’s a nightmare working on that boat’.”

Jaype said he was subjected to verbal abuse and was treated “like a slave”.

Other men said that, despite arriving in the UK on 48-hour transit visa, they were told to work onshore in the TN yard at Annan, in breach of their visa entitlement.

One man, Jovito Abiero, told the BBC he was sometimes sent to the home of the company owner Tom Nicholson to do gardening.

On 22 August 2012, Joel was aboard the Philomena off the coast of Northern Ireland during rough weather.

He was fixing a broken link in the metal nets when the towing bar swung up. He leapt out of the way – but fell and hit his head on the deck.

His crew mates estimated he was unconscious for up to 15 minutes.

When Joel woke up with a bandage on his head, he asked his skipper – Tom Nicholson Jr – if they were going to hospital.

“He said: ‘No, we’re not going to the hospital. We continue fishing’,” said Joel.

Joel was given paracetamol by the skipper and his head was bandaged. The Philomena didn’t turn around and head for the port of Troon in Ayrshire until 11 hours after the accident.

Joel got off the Philomena, never to return. He found support at the Fisherman’s Mission, a harbourside charity that supports seafarers.

At that time the mission was run by two sisters, Paula Daly and Karen Burston, who helped Joel get medical help. They had been hearing rumours about TN boats for some time.

“In 2012, it became really quite abundantly clear that we were getting the same message from quite a few different crew,” said Paula.

“There were so many things that were so wrong,” added Karen.

Police forces on several UK coasts had long been aware of allegations about TN Trawlers.

The company had been prosecuted in 2007 for illegal catches worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Tom Nicholson and TN Trawlers were ordered to pay £473,000 under proceeds of crime laws.

They were also ordered to pay almost £150,000 in fines and costs after the Maritime and Coastguard Agency found a string of defects and safety breaches on vessels between 2009 and 2011.

A 2012 police briefing, seen by the BBC, also noted six Filipino fishermen swam ashore from TN boats and complained of mistreatment.

That year, police in Dumfries and Galloway launched Operation Alto, an investigation into human trafficking and labour abuse at TN Trawlers.

Eighteen former TN Trawlers employees – including Joel – passed into the Home Office’s National Referral Mechanism, a system which identifies and supports victims of human trafficking.

Modern slavery is a term that can encompass human trafficking and slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour.

The Home Office defines the essence of human trafficking as a situation where a person is “coerced or deceived into a situation where they are exploited”.

Under this guidance, the men were all given recognition by the Home Office that they had been trafficked.

They were taken to a safe house somewhere in Scotland, then police asked them to stay in the UK to help with further enquiries and act as witnesses when the case came to court.

TN Trawlers continued to recruit, switching its main recruitment operation from East Asia to West Africa.

In June 2013, Gideon Mensah from Ghana signed up to work on the TN scalop dredger Noordzee. He said he soon found himself in the same situation as the Filipinos – overworked and undernourished.

Gideon told the BBC his wages were diverted to his recruitment agent back home, leaving him with £50 cash in hand each month – just £1.66 per day.

He was later recognised as a victim of modern slavery by the Home Office and spent several years on file as a witness for forthcoming prosecutions.

In 2017, five years after Joel Quince stepped off the Philomena at Troon harbour, 25-year old Vishal Sharma left India and arrived in London on a transit visa.

He’d signed a contract with a different company to work in the engine room of a Belgian tanker for 15 months.

But his agent in India then told him to travel to a different meeting point in the south of England, and he was taken to the Noordzee.

“I asked: ‘Why am I working there? It’s not my ship… I am not a fisherman’.”

Vishal claims he was threatened with deportation if he didn’t comply.

He spent three weeks on the trawler and says he was never paid.

He claims he worked 22-hour days, had little food, and that his boots began to fall apart in the seawater.

Men continued to arrive from Ghana, including Augustus Mensah and Gershon Norvivor. They both described being put to work in the Nicholsons’ compound before being shipped out, and both ended up working on a vessel called on the Sea Lady.

The BBC has seen payment schedules given to both men upon employment. Both were to earn £850 per month, with an additional cash payment of £50.

Based on a 48-hour working week, they would receive £4.68 an hour.

The conditions they alleged were similar to those described to the BBC by the workers from 2012.

“We were short of food and short of water,” says Gershon.

He claimed deckhands would drink washing water from the ship’s rusty tank. When the tank was empty, they’d melt the ice used to pack the scallops.

“We went to the fish room with a bucket or a sack and you put an ice block in… you put it on the stove… and the guys would make coffee with it.”

On 6 December 2017, a dredge net full of scallops swung and crashed into Augustus’ head and knocked him out. Gershon did what he could to help his friend, rinsing away the blood.

The crew managed to get word to the police onshore in Portsmouth.

“When we were rescued by the police we were very happy,” said Augustus.

Augustus, Gershon and Vishal, along with six other crew members from Ghana, India and Sri Lanka, were taken into the National Referral Mechanism system and recognised by the Home Office as victims of modern slavery. They were asked to stay in the UK as potential witnesses in the ongoing investigation into Thomas Nicholson Snr and TN Trawlers.

After a five-year wait, the case was dropped after some of the men failed to identify suspects during an identity parade.

In a letter from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) this year, Vishal was told that, while prosecutors said there was evidence a crime had been committed, there was not enough evidence to prove the identity of the perpetrator.

Disclosure: Slavery at Sea

A three-year investigation uncovers allegations of modern slavery aboard UK fishing vessels.

Watch on BBC iPlayer or on BBC Scotland at 21:00 on Monday.

The Filipinos’ case finally reached Hamilton Sheriff Court in October 2022, some 10 years after the men were removed from the boats.

Thomas Nicholson Snr and TN Trawlers pleaded guilty to failing to get adequate care for Joel Quince. The Crown accepted his not guilty plea to withholding some of the Filipino crewmen’s passports without reasonable excuse.

Despite the Home Office’s conclusion that the men were trafficking victims, the case did not involve charges of trafficking or modern slavery.

Thomas Nicholson Snr was fined £13,500 and ordered to pay Joel £3,000 in compensation.

Text message exchanges between Nicholson Snr and the vessel’s skipper Tom Nicholson Jr on the day of the accident were read out in court, in which the father instructed his son not to take Joel ashore for medical treatment.

After hearing the messages, Joel told the BBC: “He was a devil with a human image. He doesn’t see me as a person… he doesn’t see us.”

Thomas Nicholson Snr was the director of TN Trawlers, TN Enterprises, Sea Lady Trawlers, and Olivia Jean. The companies owned at least six scallop dredgers.

A spokesman for TN Group said it disputed suggestions that workers were mistreated.

It said it always provided food and accommodation to workers and that they were “always free to come and go when ashore”.

He said: “The overwhelming experience of our workers was that they were well treated and well remunerated. We dispute many of the accounts put to us, in some cases over a decade on.

“We absolutely refute any allegation of modern slavery or human trafficking and our many testimonials and long-term employees are testament to that.”

He said the company regretted the delay in bringing Joel Quince ashore for medical treatment.

“We fell short on that occasion. We have accepted responsibility, compensated and we apologise to that individual,” said the spokesman.

“Working conditions on the high seas, sometimes in dangerous waters and in a confined environment, are extremely difficult.”

The Crown Office said it was fully committed to tackling human trafficking.

“We recognise that the time taken in dealing with these complex and challenging matters has been difficult for those affected,” said a spokesperson.

“COPFS deal with every case on its own individual facts and circumstances and takes action where it assesses there is sufficient admissible evidence that a crime has been committed and it is in the public interest to do so.”

Life after TN Trawlers has seen mixed fortunes for its former crewmen.

Many of those involved in Operation Alto have had their permission to remain in the UK extended, some indefinitely. This enables them to work in the UK and support their families – something they had always wanted.

The men from Ghana interviewed by the BBC have seen their leave to remain expire, meaning they face the possibility of leaving the UK.

However, all the men spoke of their bitterness at working for the company – and their experience of the justice system in the UK.

Joel Quince said his eyes had been opened.

“I see now how it works,” he said.

“This is how your UK law is done… You favour the wealthy people, and you don’t care about the poor.”

File on 4: Invisible Souls

Fishermen from the Philippines, Ghana and Sri Lanka speak out for the first time about how badly they say they were treated by a Scottish fishing company.

Listen on BBC Radio 4 at 20:00 on Tuesday 20 August or on BBC Sounds.

Police in Spain are searching for a man suspected of killing an 11-year-old boy with a sharp object on a football pitch, local media report.

The victim was reportedly playing with other children when he was attacked by a person wearing a hood.

The attack happened in Mocejón, near the city of Toledo, in central Spain on Sunday morning.

The suspect, reported to be a young man around 18, then fled the scene. A large manhunt is under way.

Broadcaster RTVE said government sources confirmed the attack happened around 10:00 local time (08:00 GMT). It said a dozen patrols were looking for the suspect and a helicopter has joined the search.

Crowds gathered outside the town hall for a minute’s silence in tribute to the boy on Sunday afternoon.

Mocejón mayor Concepción Cedillo told reporters: “It is a sad day, with a town broken by pain, and if every murder is painful, how much more so the murder of an innocent child who was playing football with his friends this morning.”

The town, with a population of about 5,000, is set to declare three days of official mourning, according to Spanish media.

Milagros Tolon, the Spanish government’s representative in the Castilla-La Mancha region, posted on X: “It is with great sadness that I receive the news of the murder of a minor in #Mocejón (Toledo) after being attacked with a sharp object.

“The Civil Guard has deployed a wide-ranging operation to arrest the perpetrator.

“All my love to the family and friends of the deceased, as well as to the people of Mocejón.”

Emiliano Garcia-Page, President of the Castilla-La Mancha region, said he was shocked by the events in Mocejón and hoped the perpetrator was found soon.

“These situations are unacceptable and must result in a just punishment.”

Nibha Kumari, a resident of Bihar, India’s poorest state, recalls how a bicycle transformed her life when she turned 15.

For two years, six days a week, she cycled two hours daily from home to school and coaching classes and back, using a bicycle provided by the state government.

“If I didn’t have a cycle, I don’t think I could have finished high school. It changed my life,” says Nibha, now 27.

The daughter of a farmer from Begusarai district, Nibha was sent to live with her aunt 10km (six miles) away to attend a nearby primary school. Mobility was challenging for girls and public transport was unreliable.

When Nibha returned home for high school, she hopped on a bicycle, navigating the rough village roads to pursue her education.

“Girls have gained a lot of confidence after they began using bicycles to go to schools and coaching classes. More and more of them are going to school now. Most of them have free bicycles,” says Bhuvaneshwari Kumari, a health worker in Begusarai.

She’s right. A new peer-reviewed study published in the journal ScienceDirect reveals remarkable insights about school-going children and cycling in rural India.

The study by Srishti Agrawal, Adit Seth and Rahul Goel found that the most notable rise in cycling in India had occurred among rural girls – increasing more than two times from 4.5% in 2007 to 11% in 2017 – reducing the gender gap in the activity.

“This is a silent revolution. We call it a revolution because cycling levels increased among girls in a country which has high levels of gender inequality in terms of female mobility outside the home, in general, and for cycling, in particular,” says Ms Agrawal.

State-run free bicycle distribution schemes since 2004 have targeted girls, who had higher school dropout rates than boys due to household chores and exhausting long walks. This approach isn’t unique to India – evidence from countries like Colombia, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe also shows that bicycles effectively boost girls’ school enrolment and retention. But the scale here is unmatched.

The three researchers – from Delhi’s Indian Institute of Technology and Mumbai’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies – analysed transport modes for school-going children aged 5-17 years from a nationwide education survey, looked at the effectiveness of state-run schemes that provide free bicycles to students and tested their influence on the cycling rate.

Nationally, the percentage of all students cycling to school rose from 6.6% in 2007 to 11.2% in 2017, they found.

Cycling to school in rural areas doubled over the decade, while in urban areas, it remained steady. Indian city roads are notoriously unsafe, with low urban cycling to school linked to poor traffic safety and more cars on the road.

India’s cycling revolution is most substantial in villages, with states like Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, and Chhattisgarh leading the growth. These states have populations comparable to some of the largest European countries. Cycling was most common for longer distances in rural areas than in urban areas, the study found.

India began reporting cycling behaviour for the first time only in the last Census in 2011. Only 20% of those travelling to work outside home reported cycling as their main mode of transport. But people in villages cycled more (21%) than in the cities (17%).

Also, more working men (21.7%) than their female counterparts (4.7%) cycled to work. “Compared to international settings, this level of gender gap in cycling is among the highest in the world,” says Ms Agrawal.

American suffragist Susan B Anthony famously said that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance”.

Researchers wonder if women cycle less as they age due to shrinking job opportunities and workforce dropout. Nibha stopped cycling after marriage and moving to her in-laws’ home. While she still travels outside the house as she trains to become a teacher, when asked about her commute, she simply says, “I don’t need the cycle anymore.”

French film legend Alain Delon has died at the age of 88.

The actor was a star of the golden era of French cinema, known for his tough-guy persona on screen in hits including The Samurai and Borsalino.

Delon has been in poor health in recent years and become a virtual recluse. More recently, the breakdown of his family had been making headlines in France.

Brigitte Bardot led tributes in France saying Delon’s death left a “huge void that nothing and no-one will be able to fill”.

Once described as the most beautiful man in the movies, Delon starred in hits from the 1960s including The Leopard and Rocco and his Brothers.

He stole the hearts of fans whatever role he was playing, from a murderer to a charismatic conman.

From the 1990s, his film appearances grew rare, but he remained a fixture in the celebrity columns.

In total, made almost 90 films during the course of his career.

French President Emmanuel Macron was among those paying tribute to Delon on Sunday, saying the actor “played legendary roles and made the world dream”.

In a statement on X, formerly Twitter, he added: “Melancholy, popular, secretive, he was more than a star: he was a French monument.”

A statement from his family said: “Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as (his dog) Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father.

“He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family.”

Le Parisian newspaper called Delon “a legend of the cinema”, while Liberation described him as “a leading figure of cinema, symbol of shadowy masculinity, the actor with crazy charisma”.

In a statement to the AFP, Brigitte Bardot said Delon “represented the best of France’s ‘prestige cinema'”.

“An ambassador of elegance, talent, beauty. I lose a friend, an alter ego, a partner.”

Delon’s last major public appearance was to receive an honorary Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival in May 2019.

At the event, he made an emotional speech in which he appeared to bid farewell to cinema.

“It’s a bit of a posthumous tribute, but from my lifetime,” he had said. “I am going to leave, but I won’t leave without thanking you.”

Former president of the Cannes festival, Gilles Jacob, described Delon as “a lion… an actor with a steely gaze”, while Alberto Barbera, director of the Venice film festival, said he was an “icon” who had climbed “to the Olympus of the immortals”.

One of his fans from Paris reacting to news of his death, meanwhile, told Reuters News Agency: “I thought he could never die.”

For decades, the French public have followed the ins and outs of Delon’s prolific career and equally prolific love life, via Paris-Match and other magazines.

His colourful personal life regularly made the front pages as he charmed and seduced his way around Europe at the height of his fame.

But he also faced criticism. Some disapproved of his support for Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, who championed the death penalty and opposed same-sex marriage.

His relationship with women also caused controversy and led to claims of misogyny.

More recently, the breakdown of his family had been making headlines in France.

The actor had three children – two sons and a daughter – by two different women, and a third son unacknowledged and now dead.

In recent years, his surviving children have been laying bare their mutual grievances before the media in a series of insults, accusations, lawsuits and secret recordings.

It included disagreements over his medical treatment, following his stroke in 2019.

Another row involved Hiromi Rollin, Delon’s former housekeeper.

Delon’s children ejected her last year, but she subsequently filed a suit against them for endangering Delon’s life by refusing him medicines.

In April this year, a judge placed Delon under “reinforced curatorship”, meaning he no longer had full freedom to manage his assets.

Delon also made headlines in February of this year when French police seized 72 firearms and 3,000 rounds of ammunition from his home. Prosecutors said he did not have a gun licence.

A shooting range was also found at his Douchy-Montcorbon mansion.

BBC News has contacted Delon’s representatives.

The Democratic National Convention is set to kick off on Monday as Gaza protests threaten to overshadow what is expected to be a show of unity for Vice-President Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee for president.

The Harris campaign is hoping the Chicago convention will serve as a jubilant celebration following President Joe Biden’s abrupt exit from the race in July.

But some worry that an internal party debate over the war in Gaza could undercut Democrats’ harmony during the convention and ahead of the November election – which is fewer than 80 days away.

The convention will culminate on Thursday with Ms Harris giving a primetime speech after she formally accepts the party’s nomination.

President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, other party royals, and a star-studded cast of actors and entertainers will take the stage at the United Center in Chicago this week to praise the vice-president and sharpen their attacks on former President Donald Trump – her Republican challenger.

But what remains unclear is how the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party will tackle the sensitive nature of policy towards Israel and the conflict in Gaza.

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza intending to destroy Hamas after the group attacked southern Israel on 7 October. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage in the unprecedented assault.

Israel has faced international criticism for the scale of civilian casualties in its offensive. Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says more than 40,000 people have been killed since October.

Ms Harris, who set off on a bus tour of Western Pennsylvania before flying to Chicago on Sunday, has not released a clear policy on Gaza and Israel. Her nascent campaign has only put forward a series of economic proposals so far and is under pressure to release more detail on her policy agenda.

She has, however, called for a ceasefire and for the respectful treatment of protesters at her rallies. She also recently said “far too many” civilians had been killed but did not back a weapons embargo on Israel as some progressives have called for.

Opposition to the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict caused more than 750,000 people to vote “uncommitted” – rather than for any specific candidate – during the Democratic presidential primary earlier this year, raising concerns that these voters might stay home or cast their ballot for a third party.

While the energy of that “uncommitted” campaign has ebbed slightly in the party excitement over Ms Harris’s candidacy in recent weeks, the presence of that vote in key swing states like Michigan will still be felt at the convention.

Only three dozen delegates at the Democratic convention will represent the “uncommitted” vote, but they speak for hundreds of thousands of unsatisfied voters.

These delegates – many of whom are longtime Democratic organisers – will be greatly outnumbered by the more than 4,500 who are committed to backing Ms Harris.

Still, they said they intended to spend the convention week pressuring the Harris campaign and their party to act on Gaza.

“We know that this is not a small endeavour. We are challenging a status quo US policy of the past 40 years, and it won’t shift overnight,” said Samuel Doten, a Democratic organiser who is an “uncommitted” delegate.

Several “uncommitted” delegates said they hoped to convince others at the convention to sign on to their letter demanding Ms Harris and the Democratic Party support a ceasefire and arms embargo against Israel.

They stressed that they were not working to spoil the convention or the election, but pushing the party to adopt a policy they believed was popular among Democratic voters.

“There are thousands of voters across the US who voted ‘uncommitted,’ so it feels like a huge responsibility for us to present their wishes and to make sure that their voices are being heard and amplified in this party,” said Adrita Rahman, who will attend the DNC for the first time as an “uncommitted” delegate.

As for the protests, it remains to be seen how they will be organised and how many people they will draw.

The largest protest of the week is expected to come on Monday, with organisers saying at a press conference on Sunday to expect “many thousands of people”.

They earlier suggested that there could be 100,000 protesters in the streets, but they have since reduced that number to “many, many thousands” participating in a Gaza demonstration on Monday and “tens of thousands” in total by week’s end.

Ms Harris had earned some goodwill from Gaza protesters as she was one of the first members of the administration to call for a ceasefire and express a sharper opinion of Israel and Mr Netanyahu.

But many have said that the vice-president’s honeymoon period is over. While they said they appreciated her rhetoric of holding Israel accountable for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, delegates and protest organisers said they expected to see a policy position from Ms Harris that was actionable.

“I think the people inside the DNC need to know that they have some very unpopular policies. We’re here to tell them,” said protester Irene Alikakos at the week’s first protest on Sunday, which consisted of a few hundred people near Chicago’s Trump Tower.

This protest will come just before President Biden delivers the night’s primetime address. He is expected to tout his accomplishments and emphasise the importance of the election.

The DNC will also coincide with a consequential week for the US-mediated ceasefire talks – a key initiative in the Biden administration’s final months.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel on Sunday, and he will continue on to Cairo where it is expected that the talks will result in a decision on the effort.

The Biden White House has described the ceasefire talks as in their “final” stages, and this diplomatic reality could put Ms Harris and her campaign in a tenuous position.

As a current member of the US administration, it is difficult for her to stray from President Biden’s position on Gaza under normal circumstances. It is even more difficult with negotations potentially coming to a close.

Some close to her have said that, either way, a significant policy shift will not be forthcoming.

Halie Soifer, who was Ms Harris’s national security adviser in the Senate, said there was “no daylight between” Ms Harris’s views and Mr Biden’s.

“Her policy, which is the policy of this White House, is not changing,” said Ms Soifer, who now leads the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

Extreme misogyny will be treated as a form of extremism under new government plans, the Home Office has said.

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has ordered a review of the UK’s counter-extremism strategy to determine how best to tackle threats posed by harmful ideologies.

The analysis will look at hatred of women as one of the ideological trends that the government says is gaining traction.

Ms Cooper said there has been a rise in extremism “both online and on our streets” that “frays the very fabric of our communities and our democracy”.

The review will look at the rise of Islamist and far-right extremism in the UK, as well as wider ideological trends, including extreme misogyny or beliefs which fit into broader categories, such as violence.

It will also look at the causes and conduct of the radicalisation of young people.

Ms Cooper said the strategy will “map and monitor extremist trends” to work out how to disrupt and divert people away from them.

It will also “identify any gaps in existing policy which need to be addressed to crack down on those pushing harmful and hateful beliefs and violence”, she said.

Ms Cooper said that action against extremism has been “badly hollowed out” in recent years.

The work will inform a new counter-extremism strategy, which was promised in Labour’s manifesto and which the Home Office says will “respond to growing and changing patterns” of extremism across the UK.

The review is expected to be completed by October. It is one of a number of policy reviews Labour has announced since coming to power in July, including the Strategic Defence Review, spending review and a review of the National Curriculum.

Critics might argue that some reviews are a proxy for actual action, but Labour has pointed out that there has been no new Counter Extremism Strategy since 2015, and that an assessment of new and emerging threats is overdue.

This is also not the first time the government has considered misogyny as a form of extremism.

For some years there has been concern around “Incel culture”, an online movement of mainly young men who describe themselves as “involuntarily celibate” and blame women and “alpha males” for their problems.

A mass shooting in Plymouth in 2021 by 22-year-old Jake Davison, who killed five people before fatally shooting himself, was linked to Incel ideology.

At the time no further policy action was taken, but incidents like that one, and also the rise of social media influencers such as Andrew Tate – a self-proclaimed misogynist – may have pushed the new government to think again.

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.”

A British Foreign Office official who worked on counter terrorism has resigned in protest at arms sales to Israel, saying the UK government “may be complicit in war crimes”.

Mark Smith wrote to colleagues on Friday, saying he had raised concerns “at every level” in the Foreign Office, including through an official whistle blowing mechanism.

Mr Smith, who was based at the British Embassy in Dublin, added he had received nothing more than basic acknowledgments.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) declined to comment on an individual case but said the government was committed to upholding international law.

The resignation email, which has been seen by the BBC, was sent to a wide set of distribution lists including hundreds of government officials, embassy staff and special advisers to Foreign Office ministers.

Mr Smith said he had previously worked in Middle East arms export licensing assessment for the government and “each day” colleagues were witnessing “clear and unquestionable examples” of war crimes and breaches of international humanitarian law by Israel in Gaza.

“Senior members of the Israeli government and military have expressed open genocidal intent, Israeli soldiers take videos deliberately burning, destroying and looting civilian property,” he wrote.

“Whole streets and universities have been demolished, humanitarian aid is being blocked and civilians are regularly left with no safe quarter to flee to. Red Crescent ambulances have been attacked, schools and hospitals are regularly targeted. These are War Crimes.”

He said there was “no justification for the UK’s continued arms sales to Israel”.

The FCDO said Foreign Secretary David Lammy had initiated a review “on day one in office” to assess whether Israel was complying with international humanitarian law.

While hundreds of officials in the UK, Europe and the US have registered unprecedented levels of dissent at their governments’ policies towards Israel over the war in Gaza, there have been far fewer known cases of so-called principled resignations, meaning Mr Smith’s case is extremely rare for the British government.

Details of Mr Smith’s resignation first emerged when the journalist Hind Hassan posted a copy of its contents on the social media platform X on Friday.

According to the email, his role was “Second Secretary Counter Terrorism” – understood to be a relatively junior rank, but one in which he described himself as “a subject matter expert in the domain of arms sales policy” after “a long career in the diplomatic service”.

His email continued: “Ministers claim that the UK has one of the most ‘robust and transparent’ arms export licensing regimes in the world, however this is the opposite of the truth.”

“As a fully cleared officer raising serious concerns of illegality in this Department, to be disregarded in this way is deeply troubling. It is my duty as a public servant to raise this.”

A source close to Mr Smith said his email was limited to internal government addressees and he did not resign publicly.

Since the story has emerged in public, Mr Smith has issued a statement calling on the government to “listen to the concerns” of civil servants, adding that he was previously the lead author of the central assessment governing the legality of UK arms sales in the Middle East and North Africa Directorate.

He said: “It was my job to gather all relevant information regarding civilian casualties, international law compliance as well as assess the commitment and capabilities of the countries in question.”

“To export arms to any nation, the UK must be satisfied that the recipient nation has in place robust procedures to avoid civilian casualties and to minimize harm to civilian life. It is impossible to argue that Israel is doing that.”

“I have written to the Foreign Secretary informing him of my resignation and urging him to urgently review the UK approach to the situation in Gaza. I sincerely hope that he will listen to the concerns of Civil Servants on this issue and make the necessary changes.”

• Why are Israel and Hamas fighting in Gaza?
• Gaza ceasefire progress is an illusion, says Hamas

Since 2008, the UK has granted licences for weapons exports to Israel worth £574m ($727m) in total, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT).

The UK government has recently played down the scale of the supply, calling it “relatively small” at £42m ($53m) in 2022.

Israel has repeatedly denied breaching international humanitarian law in Gaza.

Responding to previous cases of dissent by Western officials over policy and arms supply, Israel’s government has said it is acting to defeat Hamas as “a genocidal terrorist organisation which commits war crimes as well as crimes against humanity”.

In May, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) applied for arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister, as well as for leaders of Hamas, for war crimes, but these have yet to be issued.

An FCDO spokesperson said: “This government is committed to upholding international law. We have made clear that we will not export items if they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law.”

The spokesperson added: “There is an ongoing review process to assess whether Israel is complying with International Humanitarian Law, which the Foreign Secretary initiated on day one in office.

We will provide an update as soon as that review process has been completed.”

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 for her candidacy – 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.

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 sprang 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 puts her ahead or tied with Trump in six of the seven battleground states, according to a Cook Political Report survey released on Wednesday. In May, when Mr Biden was still the Democratic candidate, 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.”

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 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 was always 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 booked her ticket to Paris.

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

And in recent years 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 wildfire, particularly online.

Gunn received a torrent of violent messages, and an anonymous petition demanding she 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 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 breaker 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 has 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.

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 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 told the BBC.

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 said in a statement.

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, 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,” he 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 time and money – 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 – told Network 10.

But many hope a silver lining may yet emerge.

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

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.”

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.

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’

“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.

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

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

The Indian Medical Association (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.

Over the centuries, the story of the burial of English Civil War leader Oliver Cromwell’s headless body at Newburgh Priory in North Yorkshire has been myth, rumour and legend.

The Wombwell family, who have lived at the Priory for nearly 500 years, believe it was brought back to the Tudor house from London by his grieving daughter in 1660.

Cromwell died of natural causes after ruling the country as Lord Protector, but when the monarchy was restored, his corpse was exhumed and beheaded.

Stephen Wombwell, the current custodian of the estate near Coxwold, said the story could not be “proved” because it would be disrespectful to open the burial vault.

Oliver Cromwell was an MP who became a soldier during the Civil War and helped to overthrow the king.

He was interred at Westminster Abbey after his death in 1658, but two years later King Charles II vowed retribution for his father’s execution and displayed Cromwell’s severed head in public.

At the time, Cromwell’s daughter Mary was living at Newburgh Priory as the wife of the first Earl Fauconberg.

Mr Wombwell said: “Mary is meant to have gone down to London, managed to bribe someone to get the body but couldn’t get the head, and brought the body back up here and buried him in the roof.”

The tomb is now a brick wall with wood over it.

“It’s not exactly a grand entrance way to the tomb of such a great statesman as Oliver Cromwell,” said Mr Wombwell.

“He’s tucked away in the roof which is exactly the reason really. Mary wasn’t meant to have the body so obviously squirrelled him away up in the attic.”

The tomb became an enclosed vault after an 18th Century earl raised the roof.

Stories abound of attempts to solve the mystery, including the future King Edward VII trying to break into the vault and royal requests for it to be opened.

Mr Wombwell added: “I would not allow it to be opened, partly because it’s macabre digging people up from final resting places, and also he is related to us.”

Cromwell expert Stuart Orme, who works at a museum dedicated to the leader’s life, said there were “many stories” about his final resting place.

The head’s burial location has been verified as Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, where Cromwell studied.

Mr Orme said: “Cromwell was the most significant figure in the parliamentary war effort and was involved in the trial and execution of Charles I.

“The most likely explanation is that Cromwell’s body was thrown into a communal burial pit in London, but we’ll never know for sure where it is.”

A confident Mr Wombwell added: “There’s no reason why it’s not true. No-one else is claiming him. There’s as much reason for him to be here as anywhere else.”

A selection of striking news photographs taken around the world this week.

The Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House has reopened to the public after a fire in the building, but the rest of the landmark remains closed “until further notice”.

About 125 firefighters were called to tackle the blaze as smoke billowed across central London on Saturday.

Visitors queued outside the gallery before it opened at 10:00 BST on Sunday, with one person telling the BBC he was “sad” to see the fire but “relieved” the art was safe.

The fire was in an area of the building that was not housing any valuable art and no injuries were reported. The cause of the blaze is still under investigation.

Paul Clark, his wife Jiorgia and their four children travelled to London from Washington state, in the US, on holiday.

The family saw firefighters battling the blaze while they were on the London Eye on Saturday.

“It was sad to see,” Mr Clark told the BBC.

He said they were all worried the artwork had been damaged but were “very relieved” to hear it was safe.

Mr Clark said he is a huge fan of Vincent Van Gogh. The gallery houses the painter’s famed Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.

A fire broke out in the west wing of the building, which is mostly used for offices and storage, at about midday on Saturday.

The director of Somerset House Trust, Jonathan Reekie, said there were “no valuable artefacts or artworks” in that part of the building.

The day after the blaze, multiple fire engines were still parked outside.

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 home to the Courtauld Gallery, an art museum that houses the collection of the Samuel Courtauld Trust, including masterpieces from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century.

The gallery also features works by impressionists Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne.

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

Jim Smith has played the bagpipes for more than 60 years but when he was told he would have to have all his teeth removed he thought his lifelong obsession was over.

“Bagpipes are what I live for,” says Jim, who started learning when he was 12.

The pipe major had been diagnosed with mouth cancer and the surgeon said the only way to operate on his tongue was to remove all 32 teeth.

“I was flabbergasted,” says Jim.

“I said, ‘please don’t’, but he said ‘we have to get access to operate’.”

The 78-year-old said teeth were really important to pipers because without a firm grip on the mouthpiece they can’t get the power of their breath into the bag.

So Jim, who lives with his wife Moira in Bellside, near Wishaw, pleaded for a compromise.

He asked doctors to just remove his lower set of teeth.

His surgeon said he would see during the operation if he needed to take out the upper teeth.

“So I went into the operation knowing that all my bottom teeth were going to disappear and that my upper ones might or might not be interfered with,” Jim says.

When he woke up after the operation he still had his upper teeth.

Jim had the operation at Monklands Hospital in Lanarkshire in 2015, two weeks after receiving his diagnosis.

During surgery he had the lower half of his tongue and the floor of his mouth removed and replaced with skin from his arm.

“The biggest problem after the operation was the tongue,” he says.

“It looked like a sausage roll. It was swollen and my mouth was filled with it.”

Jim says he couldn’t talk and had to be fed through a tube into his stomach for five months.

“There was also so much trauma going on in my body that I couldn’t contemplate eating but it did feel weird not eating for all that time,” he says.

It took two years for his mouth to heal enough for two implant stems to be fitted to hold a bottom denture securely in place.

He tried to begin his return to the pipes by using a practice chanter, which is played like a flute and requires less blowing as it does not have the pipes or drones attached.

But he soon had another setback.

Jim was diagnosed with Stage 2 severe dysplasia on the floor of his mouth and had laser treatment to eliminate it.

“Because I had this dysplasia I have been under constant examination having to go to have my mouth checked out,” he says.

Five years on from that and Jim has finally been given the cancer all-clear by doctors.

He said it had been a long journey to be able to play the bagpipes again.

Once he had mastered blowing into a practice chanter – which took months – he started tackling the bagpipes.

He says he went to the gym five times a week to get the strength of breath to power the pipes.

“To have the power to blow, the stamina you need, it’s not just the mouth, it’s the whole chest and lungs, which had not properly been powered in the years since I had my operation,” he says.

The father-of-six still can’t chew tough foods such as steak but he is back playing the bagpipes three times a week.

“It’s hard to say what it means to me being able to play the pipes again,” he says.

“It’s the sound of the pipes and enjoying that and the ability to express music, I just love the sound of it. It brings back so many memories.

“I’ve had a full lifetime since I was 12 years old of the bagpipes. It’s part of me.”

Jim’s cancer was detected when his dentist spotted two small white spots on the floor of his mouth, under his tongue.

“I had no pain, nothing to speak of, and then ‘bam, I had a mouth cancer diagnosis’,” he says.

“I didn’t realise just how devastating the surgery for mouth cancer could be.”

Lorrie Cameron, centre head for Maggie’s cancer charity in Lanarkshire, said: “Our cancer support specialists note that people with head and neck cancers commonly need their teeth removed in order to have effective surgery that removes as much of the cancer as possible.

“Sometimes people receiving chemo will also have teeth removed to reduce infection risk.”

Jim says he felt self conscious when telling people he has had mouth cancer.

“A diagnosis of mouth cancer can be embarrassing,” he says.

“Because some people immediately think ‘well, was he a drinker or a smoker?’

“But although I smoked and drank in my youth, I gave up both habits more than 30 years ago.”

Ms Cameron says: “We see every day how men with cancer feel guilt or shame for developing cancer – sometimes because of a sense of responsibility for their families; sometimes because others can make incorrect assumptions about why cancer has developed.

“And we see the real difference it makes to be able to talk through these difficult emotions with professionals and others going through cancer treatment, here at Maggie’s.”

Libya’s central bank has announced the suspension of all its operations after a senior employee was kidnapped in the capital Tripoli.

The bank denounced the abduction of its information technology director Musab Msallem in a statement on Sunday.

They said Mr Msallem was taken from his home by an “unidentified party” on Sunday morning and that other employees have been threatened with kidnapping.

The central bank says operations will not resume until Mr Msallem is released.

The central bank, which is independent but owned by the Libyan state, is the only internationally recognised depository for Libyan oil revenues – a vital economic income for a country torn for years between two rival governments in Tripoli and Benghazi.

It comes a week after the central bank suffered a siege by armed men, according to AFP news agency.

According to local media, cited by AFP, the armed men did so to force the resignation of the bank’s governor Seddik al-Kabir.

In office since 2012, Mr Kabir has faced criticism over the management of oil resources and the state budget.

Since the ousting and killing of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the country has suffered from chronic insecurity.

The country has been divided by power struggles and currently has two governments – a UN-recognised one based in Tripoli, and another in the country’s east backed by warlord Gen Khalifa Haftar.

• How Ghana’s central bank lost $5bn in one year
• Why Nigeria is a global leader in Bitcoin trade
• Can digital banking transform the fortunes of Africa’s youth?

Ukraine says it has destroyed a second strategic bridge in a week as it continues its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.

The Ukrainian military on Sunday released aerial footage of the strike on the bridge – reported to be over the Seym River in Zvannoe.

Hours later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said for the first time that the aims of the military incursion into Kursk included the creation of a “buffer zone” to stop Russian attacks.

Ukraine is nearly two weeks into its biggest attack on Russian territory since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Minus one more bridge,” Ukrainian Air Force commander Lt Gen Mykola Oleschuk posted on social media with footage of the strike.

Gen Oleschuk added: “Ukrainian Air Force aviation continues to deprive the enemy of logistical capabilities with precision airstrikes, which significantly affects the course of hostilities.”

The video shows a growing large cloud of smoke over the bridge and one of its sections appears to be destroyed. It is not clear when the strike took place.

Earlier this week, Ukraine destroyed another bridge over the river Seym, near the town of Glushkovo.

That bridge was used by the Kremlin to supply its troops.

Earlier, military analysts had identified three bridges in the area used by Russia to supply its forces, and they said two had either been destroyed or seriously damaged, Reuters news agency reported.

Almost two weeks after Ukrainian troops pushed across the border into Russia, it is becoming clear that they plan to stay.

President Zelensky said on Saturday his troops were strengthening positions in Kursk and expanding further in Russia.

On Sunday in an evening address, he said: “Our operation in the Kursk region is still inflicting losses on the Russian army and the Russian state, their defence industry and their economy.”

He stated that “this is more than just defence for Ukraine” and said that the aim was to “destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive actions”.

This would include “creating a buffer zone on the aggressor’s territory”, he added, in an effort to prevent further Russian attacks into Ukraine.

Mykhaylo Podolyak, an adviser to President Zelensky, insisted Ukraine was not interested in occupying Russia but wanted to persuade Russia to enter negotiations.

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

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.

It comes as the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog warned the nuclear safety situation at the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Russian-occupied Ukraine was deteriorating, following a drone strike near the site’s perimeter.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said he remained “extremely concerned” and called for “maximum restraint from all sides” to protect the plant.

The agency said the impact of the strike was on a road just outside the facility – close to essential water sprinkler ponds and about 100m from the only remaining high-voltage line.

The plant was seized by Russia’s forces early in the war and has come under repeated attacks which both sides have blamed the other for.

Last week, Kyiv and Moscow traded blame after a fire broke out in one of the plant’s cooling towers.

The IAEA did not say who carried out Saturday’s strike, but its team stationed at Zaporizhzhia said the damage seemed to have been caused by a drone carrying an explosive.

“The team has heard frequent explosions, repetitive heavy machine gun and rifle fire and artillery at various distances from the plant,” the agency said in a statement.

The plant has not produced power in more than two years and all six reactors have been in cold shutdown since April.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022 and has been making slow progress recently in seizing more territory in eastern Ukraine.

However, it was shocked when Ukrainian troops penetrated into its Kursk region where they have been consolidating positions for nearly two weeks.

Thousands of Russians have been evacuated from the area.

It is the first time foreign troops have been on Russian soil since World War Two.

Nibha Kumari, a resident of Bihar, India’s poorest state, recalls how a bicycle transformed her life when she turned 15.

For two years, six days a week, she cycled two hours daily from home to school and coaching classes and back, using a bicycle provided by the state government.

“If I didn’t have a cycle, I don’t think I could have finished high school. It changed my life,” says Nibha, now 27.

The daughter of a farmer from Begusarai district, Nibha was sent to live with her aunt 10km (six miles) away to attend a nearby primary school. Mobility was challenging for girls and public transport was unreliable.

When Nibha returned home for high school, she hopped on a bicycle, navigating the rough village roads to pursue her education.

“Girls have gained a lot of confidence after they began using bicycles to go to schools and coaching classes. More and more of them are going to school now. Most of them have free bicycles,” says Bhuvaneshwari Kumari, a health worker in Begusarai.

She’s right. A new peer-reviewed study published in the journal ScienceDirect reveals remarkable insights about school-going children and cycling in rural India.

The study by Srishti Agrawal, Adit Seth and Rahul Goel found that the most notable rise in cycling in India had occurred among rural girls – increasing more than two times from 4.5% in 2007 to 11% in 2017 – reducing the gender gap in the activity.

“This is a silent revolution. We call it a revolution because cycling levels increased among girls in a country which has high levels of gender inequality in terms of female mobility outside the home, in general, and for cycling, in particular,” says Ms Agrawal.

State-run free bicycle distribution schemes since 2004 have targeted girls, who had higher school dropout rates than boys due to household chores and exhausting long walks. This approach isn’t unique to India – evidence from countries like Colombia, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe also shows that bicycles effectively boost girls’ school enrolment and retention. But the scale here is unmatched.

The three researchers – from Delhi’s Indian Institute of Technology and Mumbai’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies – analysed transport modes for school-going children aged 5-17 years from a nationwide education survey, looked at the effectiveness of state-run schemes that provide free bicycles to students and tested their influence on the cycling rate.

Nationally, the percentage of all students cycling to school rose from 6.6% in 2007 to 11.2% in 2017, they found.

Cycling to school in rural areas doubled over the decade, while in urban areas, it remained steady. Indian city roads are notoriously unsafe, with low urban cycling to school linked to poor traffic safety and more cars on the road.

India’s cycling revolution is most substantial in villages, with states like Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, and Chhattisgarh leading the growth. These states have populations comparable to some of the largest European countries. Cycling was most common for longer distances in rural areas than in urban areas, the study found.

India began reporting cycling behaviour for the first time only in the last Census in 2011. Only 20% of those travelling to work outside home reported cycling as their main mode of transport. But people in villages cycled more (21%) than in the cities (17%).

Also, more working men (21.7%) than their female counterparts (4.7%) cycled to work. “Compared to international settings, this level of gender gap in cycling is among the highest in the world,” says Ms Agrawal.

American suffragist Susan B Anthony famously said that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance”.

Researchers wonder if women cycle less as they age due to shrinking job opportunities and workforce dropout. Nibha stopped cycling after marriage and moving to her in-laws’ home. While she still travels outside the house as she trains to become a teacher, when asked about her commute, she simply says, “I don’t need the cycle anymore.”

Dozens of workers from around the world may have been trafficked into the UK to work for a small family-owned Scottish fishing firm, a BBC investigation has revealed.

Thirty-five men from the Philippines, Ghana, India and Sri Lanka were recognised as victims of modern slavery by the Home Office after being referred to it between 2012 and 2020.

The workers were employed by TN Trawlers and its sister companies, owned by the Nicholson family, based in the small town of Annan on the southern coast of Scotland.

The TN Group denied any allegation of modern slavery or human trafficking and said its workers were well treated and well paid.

The company was the focus of two long-running criminal investigations but no cases of human trafficking or modern slavery have come to trial, although some of the men waited years to give evidence.

While TN Trawlers’ lead director, Thomas Nicholson, was under active investigation, TN Group companies continued recruiting new employees from across the world.

Experienced fisherman Joel Quince was 28 when he landed at Heathrow Airport in 2012, thrilled to have secured a job as a deckhand with TN trawlers.

Joel had a young family back home in the Philippines, thousands of miles away. He had been expecting to earn a good income working in the UK. He was to be paid $1,012 (£660) a month for a 48-hour week.

He caught a bus from London to Carlisle, where, he says, he was picked up by the owner’s son, Tom Nicholson Jr.

“On our way to go to the boat he told us: ‘You have to give me your documents’ – so without hesitation I gave all my documents to them,” he said.

Joel says he was then taken straight to the fishing ground to start working.

But he was surprised to find that his boat was the Philomena rather than the Mattanja, which was the only vessel he was authorised to work on under the terms of his visa. “This was already something fishy for me,” he said

He claims that instead of the 48-hour week he had been told about, he was working 18 hours a day, seven days a week while the Philomena was out fishing.

On his monthly wage of £637, it meant Joel was earning less than the UK minimum wage – although at that time there was no legal requirement to pay it to fishermen like him.

Joel was one of about 30 seafarers who arrived in the UK to join TN Trawlers between 2011 and 2013, mostly from the Philippines. They joined dredgers trawling for scallops along the UK coastline.

These dredgers, built in the 1970s and 80s, work by towing metal nets along the seabed. They scrape up shellfish, as well as stones and bycatch – the other marine life which gets caught in the nets. Deckhands throw back the stones and pack the scallops in ice below deck.

Several of the men the BBC spoke to had little or no fishing experience. All describe working shift patterns as gruelling as Joel’s or worse.

Joel said he struggled to get up to go to work because he was so exhausted – but he didn’t complain because his colleagues were also suffering.

“If I stop working, there’s three people suffering, not getting their rest, because the operation keeps continuing. They won’t stop.”

He said there was not enough drinking water on board the vessels, and the crew were reduced to eating tomatoes from the stores to wet their throats. He also said that on one occasion a skipper threw an empty Coke can at the crew.

All the men the BBC spoke to described shortages of proper clothing, food and water.

Jaype Rubi was a young Filippino when he worked on board the TN dredger Sea Lady in 2012.

“Picking up and throwing out rocks is really tiring,” he said.

“The boat had CCTV, so the skipper could watch us. If we stop, he’d pull down the window and say: ‘Why are you resting’?”

Jaype said it was “super cold” and there was not enough food.

When he spoke to his mum on the phone, he started crying. “I said: ‘I want to go home because it’s a nightmare working on that boat’.”

Jaype said he was subjected to verbal abuse and was treated “like a slave”.

Other men said that, despite arriving in the UK on 48-hour transit visa, they were told to work onshore in the TN yard at Annan, in breach of their visa entitlement.

One man, Jovito Abiero, told the BBC he was sometimes sent to the home of the company owner Tom Nicholson to do gardening.

On 22 August 2012, Joel was aboard the Philomena off the coast of Northern Ireland during rough weather.

He was fixing a broken link in the metal nets when the towing bar swung up. He leapt out of the way – but fell and hit his head on the deck.

His crew mates estimated he was unconscious for up to 15 minutes.

When Joel woke up with a bandage on his head, he asked his skipper – Tom Nicholson Jr – if they were going to hospital.

“He said: ‘No, we’re not going to the hospital. We continue fishing’,” said Joel.

Joel was given paracetamol by the skipper and his head was bandaged. The Philomena didn’t turn around and head for the port of Troon in Ayrshire until 11 hours after the accident.

Joel got off the Philomena, never to return. He found support at the Fisherman’s Mission, a harbourside charity that supports seafarers.

At that time the mission was run by two sisters, Paula Daly and Karen Burston, who helped Joel get medical help. They had been hearing rumours about TN boats for some time.

“In 2012, it became really quite abundantly clear that we were getting the same message from quite a few different crew,” said Paula.

“There were so many things that were so wrong,” added Karen.

Police forces on several UK coasts had long been aware of allegations about TN Trawlers.

The company had been prosecuted in 2007 for illegal catches worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Tom Nicholson and TN Trawlers were ordered to pay £473,000 under proceeds of crime laws.

They were also ordered to pay almost £150,000 in fines and costs after the Maritime and Coastguard Agency found a string of defects and safety breaches on vessels between 2009 and 2011.

A 2012 police briefing, seen by the BBC, also noted six Filipino fishermen swam ashore from TN boats and complained of mistreatment.

That year, police in Dumfries and Galloway launched Operation Alto, an investigation into human trafficking and labour abuse at TN Trawlers.

Eighteen former TN Trawlers employees – including Joel – passed into the Home Office’s National Referral Mechanism, a system which identifies and supports victims of human trafficking.

Modern slavery is a term that can encompass human trafficking and slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour.

The Home Office defines the essence of human trafficking as a situation where a person is “coerced or deceived into a situation where they are exploited”.

Under this guidance, the men were all given recognition by the Home Office that they had been trafficked.

They were taken to a safe house somewhere in Scotland, then police asked them to stay in the UK to help with further enquiries and act as witnesses when the case came to court.

TN Trawlers continued to recruit, switching its main recruitment operation from East Asia to West Africa.

In June 2013, Gideon Mensah from Ghana signed up to work on the TN scalop dredger Noordzee. He said he soon found himself in the same situation as the Filipinos – overworked and undernourished.

Gideon told the BBC his wages were diverted to his recruitment agent back home, leaving him with £50 cash in hand each month – just £1.66 per day.

He was later recognised as a victim of modern slavery by the Home Office and spent several years on file as a witness for forthcoming prosecutions.

In 2017, five years after Joel Quince stepped off the Philomena at Troon harbour, 25-year old Vishal Sharma left India and arrived in London on a transit visa.

He’d signed a contract with a different company to work in the engine room of a Belgian tanker for 15 months.

But his agent in India then told him to travel to a different meeting point in the south of England, and he was taken to the Noordzee.

“I asked: ‘Why am I working there? It’s not my ship… I am not a fisherman’.”

Vishal claims he was threatened with deportation if he didn’t comply.

He spent three weeks on the trawler and says he was never paid.

He claims he worked 22-hour days, had little food, and that his boots began to fall apart in the seawater.

Men continued to arrive from Ghana, including Augustus Mensah and Gershon Norvivor. They both described being put to work in the Nicholsons’ compound before being shipped out, and both ended up working on a vessel called on the Sea Lady.

The BBC has seen payment schedules given to both men upon employment. Both were to earn £850 per month, with an additional cash payment of £50.

Based on a 48-hour working week, they would receive £4.68 an hour.

The conditions they alleged were similar to those described to the BBC by the workers from 2012.

“We were short of food and short of water,” says Gershon.

He claimed deckhands would drink washing water from the ship’s rusty tank. When the tank was empty, they’d melt the ice used to pack the scallops.

“We went to the fish room with a bucket or a sack and you put an ice block in… you put it on the stove… and the guys would make coffee with it.”

On 6 December 2017, a dredge net full of scallops swung and crashed into Augustus’ head and knocked him out. Gershon did what he could to help his friend, rinsing away the blood.

The crew managed to get word to the police onshore in Portsmouth.

“When we were rescued by the police we were very happy,” said Augustus.

Augustus, Gershon and Vishal, along with six other crew members from Ghana, India and Sri Lanka, were taken into the National Referral Mechanism system and recognised by the Home Office as victims of modern slavery. They were asked to stay in the UK as potential witnesses in the ongoing investigation into Thomas Nicholson Snr and TN Trawlers.

After a five-year wait, the case was dropped after some of the men failed to identify suspects during an identity parade.

In a letter from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) this year, Vishal was told that, while prosecutors said there was evidence a crime had been committed, there was not enough evidence to prove the identity of the perpetrator.

Disclosure: Slavery at Sea

A three-year investigation uncovers allegations of modern slavery aboard UK fishing vessels.

Watch on BBC iPlayer or on BBC Scotland at 21:00 on Monday.

The Filipinos’ case finally reached Hamilton Sheriff Court in October 2022, some 10 years after the men were removed from the boats.

Thomas Nicholson Snr and TN Trawlers pleaded guilty to failing to get adequate care for Joel Quince. The Crown accepted his not guilty plea to withholding some of the Filipino crewmen’s passports without reasonable excuse.

Despite the Home Office’s conclusion that the men were trafficking victims, the case did not involve charges of trafficking or modern slavery.

Thomas Nicholson Snr was fined £13,500 and ordered to pay Joel £3,000 in compensation.

Text message exchanges between Nicholson Snr and the vessel’s skipper Tom Nicholson Jr on the day of the accident were read out in court, in which the father instructed his son not to take Joel ashore for medical treatment.

After hearing the messages, Joel told the BBC: “He was a devil with a human image. He doesn’t see me as a person… he doesn’t see us.”

Thomas Nicholson Snr was the director of TN Trawlers, TN Enterprises, Sea Lady Trawlers, and Olivia Jean. The companies owned at least six scallop dredgers.

A spokesman for TN Group said it disputed suggestions that workers were mistreated.

It said it always provided food and accommodation to workers and that they were “always free to come and go when ashore”.

He said: “The overwhelming experience of our workers was that they were well treated and well remunerated. We dispute many of the accounts put to us, in some cases over a decade on.

“We absolutely refute any allegation of modern slavery or human trafficking and our many testimonials and long-term employees are testament to that.”

He said the company regretted the delay in bringing Joel Quince ashore for medical treatment.

“We fell short on that occasion. We have accepted responsibility, compensated and we apologise to that individual,” said the spokesman.

“Working conditions on the high seas, sometimes in dangerous waters and in a confined environment, are extremely difficult.”

The Crown Office said it was fully committed to tackling human trafficking.

“We recognise that the time taken in dealing with these complex and challenging matters has been difficult for those affected,” said a spokesperson.

“COPFS deal with every case on its own individual facts and circumstances and takes action where it assesses there is sufficient admissible evidence that a crime has been committed and it is in the public interest to do so.”

Life after TN Trawlers has seen mixed fortunes for its former crewmen.

Many of those involved in Operation Alto have had their permission to remain in the UK extended, some indefinitely. This enables them to work in the UK and support their families – something they had always wanted.

The men from Ghana interviewed by the BBC have seen their leave to remain expire, meaning they face the possibility of leaving the UK.

However, all the men spoke of their bitterness at working for the company – and their experience of the justice system in the UK.

Joel Quince said his eyes had been opened.

“I see now how it works,” he said.

“This is how your UK law is done… You favour the wealthy people, and you don’t care about the poor.”

File on 4: Invisible Souls

Fishermen from the Philippines, Ghana and Sri Lanka speak out for the first time about how badly they say they were treated by a Scottish fishing company.

Listen on BBC Radio 4 at 20:00 on Tuesday 20 August or on BBC Sounds.

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 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 was always 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 booked her ticket to Paris.

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

And in recent years 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 wildfire, particularly online.

Gunn received a torrent of violent messages, and an anonymous petition demanding she 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 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 breaker 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 has 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.

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 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 told the BBC.

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 said in a statement.

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, 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,” he 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 time and money – 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 – told Network 10.

But many hope a silver lining may yet emerge.

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

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

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has arrived in Israel in his latest effort to push for a ceasefire and hostage-release deal in Gaza.

His ninth trip to the region since the war began in October comes days after the US presented a modified proposal aimed at bridging long-standing gaps between the two sides.

The US has expressed optimism about a deal since talks resumed in Doha last week, but Hamas says suggestions of progress are an “illusion”.

Differences are said to include whether Israeli troops will be required to withdraw fully from the Gaza Strip, as Hamas insists.

Mr Blinken will attempt to maintain pressure on the Israeli leader when they meet on Monday – he will say that now is the moment to drop any more attempts to squeeze out last concessions and take a deal.

On the way here one senior US official was using phrases including a critical moment and an inflection point.

The Americans hope they can get this over the finish line perhaps as soon as this time next week.

But that level of optimism is not shared by the Israeli leadership or Hamas.

Each accuses the other of obstinate cynicism, and blocking a deal.

In a statement on Sunday, Hamas accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of putting “obstacles” in the way of an agreement and “setting new conditions and demands” with the aim of “prolonging the war”.

It added it holds him “fully responsible” for thwarting mediators’ efforts and “obstructing an agreement”.

A Hamas source earlier told Saudi media that the proposals include the IDF maintaining a reduced presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

But Israeli sources have told the Times of Israel that other procedures along the border could compensate for an Israeli withdrawal from the area in the first phase of the deal.

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.

US President Joe Biden said earlier this week “we are closer than we have ever been” to a deal.

But previous optimism expressed during months of on-off talks has proven unfounded.

Mr Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting on Sunday that complex negotiations were taking place to secure the return of hostages, but some principles needed to be upheld for Israel’s security.

“There are things we can be flexible about, and there are things we cannot be flexible about, and we insist on them. We know very well how to differentiate between the two,” he said.

He also accused Hamas of being “obstinate” in negotiations and called for further pressure to be applied on the militant group.

A senior Hamas official told the BBC on Saturday: “What we have received from the mediators is very disappointing. There has been no progress.”

It is possible the public statements of defiance are mainly a negotiating tactic – but there is such significant enmity and distrust here that a week feels very optimistic for a breakthrough.

And the US pressure also has the timing of Washington’s electoral politics in the background. It feels like the countdown clock for a deal is ticking that bit faster for the Americans than it has been for the two sides in this agreement.

The original deal outlined by President Biden, based on Israel’s 27 May proposal, was to run in three phases:

• The first would include a “full and complete ceasefire” lasting six weeks, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza, and the exchange of some of the hostages – including women, the elderly and the sick or wounded – for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
• The second phase would involve the release of all other living hostages and a “permanent end to hostilities”.
• The third would see the start of a major reconstruction plan for Gaza and the return of dead hostages’ remains.

Meanwhile, the Hamas-run health authority in Gaza says Israeli air strikes killed at least 21 people including six children on Sunday.

The IDF said on Sunday it had destroyed rocket launchers used to hit Israel from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, the scene of intense fighting in recent weeks, and killed 20 Palestinians.

Tourists enjoying the picture postcard views of lakes Lucerne, Thun or 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 munitions, 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 munitions 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 munitions pose 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 fire – 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 ordnance 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 munitions 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.”

The Democratic National Convention is set to kick off on Monday as Gaza protests threaten to overshadow what is expected to be a show of unity for Vice-President Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee for president.

The Harris campaign is hoping the Chicago convention will serve as a jubilant celebration following President Joe Biden’s abrupt exit from the race in July.

But some worry that an internal party debate over the war in Gaza could undercut Democrats’ harmony during the convention and ahead of the November election – which is fewer than 80 days away.

The convention will culminate on Thursday with Ms Harris giving a primetime speech after she formally accepts the party’s nomination.

President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, other party royals, and a star-studded cast of actors and entertainers will take the stage at the United Center in Chicago this week to praise the vice-president and sharpen their attacks on former President Donald Trump – her Republican challenger.

But what remains unclear is how the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party will tackle the sensitive nature of policy towards Israel and the conflict in Gaza.

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza intending to destroy Hamas after the group attacked southern Israel on 7 October. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage in the unprecedented assault.

Israel has faced international criticism for the scale of civilian casualties in its offensive. Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says more than 40,000 people have been killed since October.

Ms Harris, who set off on a bus tour of Western Pennsylvania before flying to Chicago on Sunday, has not released a clear policy on Gaza and Israel. Her nascent campaign has only put forward a series of economic proposals so far and is under pressure to release more detail on her policy agenda.

She has, however, called for a ceasefire and for the respectful treatment of protesters at her rallies. She also recently said “far too many” civilians had been killed but did not back a weapons embargo on Israel as some progressives have called for.

Opposition to the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict caused more than 750,000 people to vote “uncommitted” – rather than for any specific candidate – during the Democratic presidential primary earlier this year, raising concerns that these voters might stay home or cast their ballot for a third party.

While the energy of that “uncommitted” campaign has ebbed slightly in the party excitement over Ms Harris’s candidacy in recent weeks, the presence of that vote in key swing states like Michigan will still be felt at the convention.

Only three dozen delegates at the Democratic convention will represent the “uncommitted” vote, but they speak for hundreds of thousands of unsatisfied voters.

These delegates – many of whom are longtime Democratic organisers – will be greatly outnumbered by the more than 4,500 who are committed to backing Ms Harris.

Still, they said they intended to spend the convention week pressuring the Harris campaign and their party to act on Gaza.

“We know that this is not a small endeavour. We are challenging a status quo US policy of the past 40 years, and it won’t shift overnight,” said Samuel Doten, a Democratic organiser who is an “uncommitted” delegate.

Several “uncommitted” delegates said they hoped to convince others at the convention to sign on to their letter demanding Ms Harris and the Democratic Party support a ceasefire and arms embargo against Israel.

They stressed that they were not working to spoil the convention or the election, but pushing the party to adopt a policy they believed was popular among Democratic voters.

“There are thousands of voters across the US who voted ‘uncommitted,’ so it feels like a huge responsibility for us to present their wishes and to make sure that their voices are being heard and amplified in this party,” said Adrita Rahman, who will attend the DNC for the first time as an “uncommitted” delegate.

As for the protests, it remains to be seen how they will be organised and how many people they will draw.

The largest protest of the week is expected to come on Monday, with organisers saying at a press conference on Sunday to expect “many thousands of people”.

They earlier suggested that there could be 100,000 protesters in the streets, but they have since reduced that number to “many, many thousands” participating in a Gaza demonstration on Monday and “tens of thousands” in total by week’s end.

Ms Harris had earned some goodwill from Gaza protesters as she was one of the first members of the administration to call for a ceasefire and express a sharper opinion of Israel and Mr Netanyahu.

But many have said that the vice-president’s honeymoon period is over. While they said they appreciated her rhetoric of holding Israel accountable for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, delegates and protest organisers said they expected to see a policy position from Ms Harris that was actionable.

“I think the people inside the DNC need to know that they have some very unpopular policies. We’re here to tell them,” said protester Irene Alikakos at the week’s first protest on Sunday, which consisted of a few hundred people near Chicago’s Trump Tower.

This protest will come just before President Biden delivers the night’s primetime address. He is expected to tout his accomplishments and emphasise the importance of the election.

The DNC will also coincide with a consequential week for the US-mediated ceasefire talks – a key initiative in the Biden administration’s final months.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel on Sunday, and he will continue on to Cairo where it is expected that the talks will result in a decision on the effort.

The Biden White House has described the ceasefire talks as in their “final” stages, and this diplomatic reality could put Ms Harris and her campaign in a tenuous position.

As a current member of the US administration, it is difficult for her to stray from President Biden’s position on Gaza under normal circumstances. It is even more difficult with negotations potentially coming to a close.

Some close to her have said that, either way, a significant policy shift will not be forthcoming.

Halie Soifer, who was Ms Harris’s national security adviser in the Senate, said there was “no daylight between” Ms Harris’s views and Mr Biden’s.

“Her policy, which is the policy of this White House, is not changing,” said Ms Soifer, who now leads the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

French film legend Alain Delon has died at the age of 88.

The actor was a star of the golden era of French cinema, known for his tough-guy persona on screen in hits including The Samurai and Borsalino.

Delon has been in poor health in recent years and become a virtual recluse. More recently, the breakdown of his family had been making headlines in France.

Brigitte Bardot led tributes in France saying Delon’s death left a “huge void that nothing and no-one will be able to fill”.

Once described as the most beautiful man in the movies, Delon starred in hits from the 1960s including The Leopard and Rocco and his Brothers.

He stole the hearts of fans whatever role he was playing, from a murderer to a charismatic conman.

From the 1990s, his film appearances grew rare, but he remained a fixture in the celebrity columns.

In total, made almost 90 films during the course of his career.

French President Emmanuel Macron was among those paying tribute to Delon on Sunday, saying the actor “played legendary roles and made the world dream”.

In a statement on X, formerly Twitter, he added: “Melancholy, popular, secretive, he was more than a star: he was a French monument.”

A statement from his family said: “Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as (his dog) Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father.

“He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family.”

Le Parisian newspaper called Delon “a legend of the cinema”, while Liberation described him as “a leading figure of cinema, symbol of shadowy masculinity, the actor with crazy charisma”.

In a statement to the AFP, Brigitte Bardot said Delon “represented the best of France’s ‘prestige cinema'”.

“An ambassador of elegance, talent, beauty. I lose a friend, an alter ego, a partner.”

Delon’s last major public appearance was to receive an honorary Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival in May 2019.

At the event, he made an emotional speech in which he appeared to bid farewell to cinema.

“It’s a bit of a posthumous tribute, but from my lifetime,” he had said. “I am going to leave, but I won’t leave without thanking you.”

Former president of the Cannes festival, Gilles Jacob, described Delon as “a lion… an actor with a steely gaze”, while Alberto Barbera, director of the Venice film festival, said he was an “icon” who had climbed “to the Olympus of the immortals”.

One of his fans from Paris reacting to news of his death, meanwhile, told Reuters News Agency: “I thought he could never die.”

For decades, the French public have followed the ins and outs of Delon’s prolific career and equally prolific love life, via Paris-Match and other magazines.

His colourful personal life regularly made the front pages as he charmed and seduced his way around Europe at the height of his fame.

But he also faced criticism. Some disapproved of his support for Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, who championed the death penalty and opposed same-sex marriage.

His relationship with women also caused controversy and led to claims of misogyny.

More recently, the breakdown of his family had been making headlines in France.

The actor had three children – two sons and a daughter – by two different women, and a third son unacknowledged and now dead.

In recent years, his surviving children have been laying bare their mutual grievances before the media in a series of insults, accusations, lawsuits and secret recordings.

It included disagreements over his medical treatment, following his stroke in 2019.

Another row involved Hiromi Rollin, Delon’s former housekeeper.

Delon’s children ejected her last year, but she subsequently filed a suit against them for endangering Delon’s life by refusing him medicines.

In April this year, a judge placed Delon under “reinforced curatorship”, meaning he no longer had full freedom to manage his assets.

Delon also made headlines in February of this year when French police seized 72 firearms and 3,000 rounds of ammunition from his home. Prosecutors said he did not have a gun licence.

A shooting range was also found at his Douchy-Montcorbon mansion.

BBC News has contacted Delon’s representatives.

Police in Spain are searching for a man suspected of killing an 11-year-old boy with a sharp object on a football pitch, local media report.

The victim was reportedly playing with other children when he was attacked by a person wearing a hood.

The attack happened in Mocejón, near the city of Toledo, in central Spain on Sunday morning.

The suspect, reported to be a young man around 18, then fled the scene. A large manhunt is under way.

Broadcaster RTVE said government sources confirmed the attack happened around 10:00 local time (08:00 GMT). It said a dozen patrols were looking for the suspect and a helicopter has joined the search.

Crowds gathered outside the town hall for a minute’s silence in tribute to the boy on Sunday afternoon.

Mocejón mayor Concepción Cedillo told reporters: “It is a sad day, with a town broken by pain, and if every murder is painful, how much more so the murder of an innocent child who was playing football with his friends this morning.”

The town, with a population of about 5,000, is set to declare three days of official mourning, according to Spanish media.

Milagros Tolon, the Spanish government’s representative in the Castilla-La Mancha region, posted on X: “It is with great sadness that I receive the news of the murder of a minor in #Mocejón (Toledo) after being attacked with a sharp object.

“The Civil Guard has deployed a wide-ranging operation to arrest the perpetrator.

“All my love to the family and friends of the deceased, as well as to the people of Mocejón.”

Emiliano Garcia-Page, President of the Castilla-La Mancha region, said he was shocked by the events in Mocejón and hoped the perpetrator was found soon.

“These situations are unacceptable and must result in a just punishment.”

A British Foreign Office official who worked on counter terrorism has resigned in protest at arms sales to Israel, saying the UK government “may be complicit in war crimes”.

Mark Smith wrote to colleagues on Friday, saying he had raised concerns “at every level” in the Foreign Office, including through an official whistle blowing mechanism.

Mr Smith, who was based at the British Embassy in Dublin, added he had received nothing more than basic acknowledgments.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) declined to comment on an individual case but said the government was committed to upholding international law.

The resignation email, which has been seen by the BBC, was sent to a wide set of distribution lists including hundreds of government officials, embassy staff and special advisers to Foreign Office ministers.

Mr Smith said he had previously worked in Middle East arms export licensing assessment for the government and “each day” colleagues were witnessing “clear and unquestionable examples” of war crimes and breaches of international humanitarian law by Israel in Gaza.

“Senior members of the Israeli government and military have expressed open genocidal intent, Israeli soldiers take videos deliberately burning, destroying and looting civilian property,” he wrote.

“Whole streets and universities have been demolished, humanitarian aid is being blocked and civilians are regularly left with no safe quarter to flee to. Red Crescent ambulances have been attacked, schools and hospitals are regularly targeted. These are War Crimes.”

He said there was “no justification for the UK’s continued arms sales to Israel”.

The FCDO said Foreign Secretary David Lammy had initiated a review “on day one in office” to assess whether Israel was complying with international humanitarian law.

While hundreds of officials in the UK, Europe and the US have registered unprecedented levels of dissent at their governments’ policies towards Israel over the war in Gaza, there have been far fewer known cases of so-called principled resignations, meaning Mr Smith’s case is extremely rare for the British government.

Details of Mr Smith’s resignation first emerged when the journalist Hind Hassan posted a copy of its contents on the social media platform X on Friday.

According to the email, his role was “Second Secretary Counter Terrorism” – understood to be a relatively junior rank, but one in which he described himself as “a subject matter expert in the domain of arms sales policy” after “a long career in the diplomatic service”.

His email continued: “Ministers claim that the UK has one of the most ‘robust and transparent’ arms export licensing regimes in the world, however this is the opposite of the truth.”

“As a fully cleared officer raising serious concerns of illegality in this Department, to be disregarded in this way is deeply troubling. It is my duty as a public servant to raise this.”

A source close to Mr Smith said his email was limited to internal government addressees and he did not resign publicly.

Since the story has emerged in public, Mr Smith has issued a statement calling on the government to “listen to the concerns” of civil servants, adding that he was previously the lead author of the central assessment governing the legality of UK arms sales in the Middle East and North Africa Directorate.

He said: “It was my job to gather all relevant information regarding civilian casualties, international law compliance as well as assess the commitment and capabilities of the countries in question.”

“To export arms to any nation, the UK must be satisfied that the recipient nation has in place robust procedures to avoid civilian casualties and to minimize harm to civilian life. It is impossible to argue that Israel is doing that.”

“I have written to the Foreign Secretary informing him of my resignation and urging him to urgently review the UK approach to the situation in Gaza. I sincerely hope that he will listen to the concerns of Civil Servants on this issue and make the necessary changes.”

• Why are Israel and Hamas fighting in Gaza?
• Gaza ceasefire progress is an illusion, says Hamas

Since 2008, the UK has granted licences for weapons exports to Israel worth £574m ($727m) in total, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT).

The UK government has recently played down the scale of the supply, calling it “relatively small” at £42m ($53m) in 2022.

Israel has repeatedly denied breaching international humanitarian law in Gaza.

Responding to previous cases of dissent by Western officials over policy and arms supply, Israel’s government has said it is acting to defeat Hamas as “a genocidal terrorist organisation which commits war crimes as well as crimes against humanity”.

In May, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) applied for arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister, as well as for leaders of Hamas, for war crimes, but these have yet to be issued.

An FCDO spokesperson said: “This government is committed to upholding international law. We have made clear that we will not export items if they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law.”

The spokesperson added: “There is an ongoing review process to assess whether Israel is complying with International Humanitarian Law, which the Foreign Secretary initiated on day one in office.

We will provide an update as soon as that review process has been completed.”