A British mother on board a yacht which sank off the coast of Sicily has described holding her baby girl above the surface of the sea to save her from drowning.

The mother, named locally as Charlotte, her partner and one-year-old daughter are reported to be among 15 people to have been rescued from the luxury yacht Bayesian early on Monday.

Six people – including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch – are missing with one man found dead outside the wreckage.

The 56m (183ft) vessel, which was carrying 10 crew and 12 passengers, sank half a mile off the coast of Palermo after encountering a heavy storm overnight that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to appear over the sea.

Charlotte told Italian newspaper La Repubblica her family survived because they were on deck when the yacht sank.

She said they were woken by “thunder, lightning and waves that made our boat dance”, and it felt like “the end of the world” before they were thrown into the water.

• British tech tycoon Mike Lynch among missing after yacht sinks – LIVE UPDATES

“For two seconds I lost my daughter in the sea then quickly hugged her amid the fury of the waves,” the paper quoted her as saying.

Charlotte said she held her baby “afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning”.

“It was all dark. In the water I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I screamed for help but all I could hear around me was the screams of others,” she added.

A lifeboat inflated and she said 11 people were able to climb in. All three of the family were unharmed and taken to hospital for check-ups.

Karsten Borner, captain of a nearby boat, said his crew took on board some survivors on a life raft, including three who were seriously injured.

Describing the moment, the storm hit, he told Italian news outlet Rai the superyacht tipped to its side and sank within “a few minutes”

“It all happened in really little time,” he said.

A local fisherman, Giuseppe, told Reuters he was on board a motorboat when he saw “mats and T-shirts floating in the sea”.

Another witness, Fabio Cefalù, captain of a trawler, says he was about to go out on a fishing trip when he saw flashes of lightning so he stayed in the harbour.

“At about 4:15am we saw a flare in the sea,” he said, according to the EVN news agency reports.

“We waited for this waterspout to pass. After 10 minutes we went out to the sea and we saw cushions and all the rest of the boat [that had sunk], and everything which was on the deck, at sea. However, we did not see any people in the sea.”

Another fisherman described seeing the yacht “sinking with my own eyes”.

Speaking to the newspaper Giornale di Sicilia, the witness said he was at home when the tornado hit.

“Then I saw the boat, it had only one mast, it was very big,” he said.

Shortly afterwards he went down to the Santa Nicolicchia bay in Porticello, the fishing village near Palermo where the disaster unfolded, to get a better look at what was happening.

He added: “The boat was still floating, then all of a sudden it disappeared. I saw it sinking with my own eyes.”

Pakistan has for weeks been experiencing painfully slow internet – but who, or what, is to blame is a matter for debate.

Activists say the state is building a China-style internet firewall as it looks to exert further control over the online space.

Officials have disputed these claims and instead blamed the widespread use of secure connections or VPN (virtual private networks) for the crawling speeds.

Shutting down the internet to crush dissent is a familiar move in regulators’ playbooks in Pakistan and other parts of Asia.

Since the riots sparked by former prime minister Imran Khan last year, the government has blocked social media platforms and throttled connection speeds as the battle for public support spilled over from the streets to the digital space.

The micro-blogging platform X has been blocked since the February elections due to “national security” concerns.

Mr Khan’s party supporters are big users of X and he is the most popular Pakistani on the platformn, with nearly 21 million followers.

But Minister of State for Information Technology Shaza Fatima said on Sunday that the government was not behind the recent slowdown.

She said her team has been “working tirelessly” with internet service providers and telcos to resolve the issue.

Ms Fatima said a “large population” had been using VPNs and “this strained the network, causing the internet to go slow”.

She said reports that the state was behind the slow connections were “completely false”.

However Ms Fatima said the government had been upgrading its systems to improve cyber security.

“It is the right of the government to [take such measures] given the cyber security attacks that this country has to go through,” she said.

Activists however accuse the minister of “dodging criticism like a usual politician”.

Shahzad Ahmad, director of local digital watchdog Bytes for All, told the BBC his organisation has “ample tech evident” to prove the existence of a firewall.

“It seems its purpose is to monitor online traffic… and limit dissemination [of information] in online spaces, particularly curbing political expression,” Mr Ahmad said.

“Even if civil liberties don’t matter, this is now about people’s livelihood and the economy as well,” said Farieha Aziz, co-founder of Bolo Bhi, a local non-profit that advocates for free speech online.

Business leaders and associations have warned that the slow connections could endanger Pakistan’s business potential.

“The imposition of the firewall has triggered a perfect storm of challenges, with prolonged internet disconnections and erratic VPN performance threatening a complete meltdown of business operations,” said the Pakistan Software Houses Association.

This could cost the IT sector up to $300 million, the association said, calling it a “direct, tangible and aggressive assault on the industry’s viability”.

“A mass exodus of IT companies is not just a possibility but an imminent reality if immediate and decisive action is not taken,” it said.

Activists have filed a petition before the Islamabad High Court, calling for access to the internet to be declared a fundamental right under Pakistan’s constitution.

Benjamin Netanyahu has described his three-hour meeting with Antony Blinken as “positive” and says it was “conducted in good spirit”, with pressure for a ceasefire growing.

The US Secretary of State is making his ninth trip to the region since Israel’s war on Hamas began in October.

The US expressed optimism about a ceasefire deal after talks resumed in Doha last week.

However, Hamas has said suggestions of progress are an “illusion”, with a number of issues between the two sides still contested – including whether Israeli troops will be required to withdraw fully from Gaza.

Earlier that day Mr Blinken also met with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and said it was “probably the best, maybe the last opportunity” to secure a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza.

“We’re working to make sure that there is no escalation, that there are no provocations, that there are no actions that in any way could move us away from getting this deal over the line, or, for that matter, escalating the conflict to other places, and to greater intensity,” Mr Blinken said during his meeting with Mr Herzog.

He said it was “probably the best, maybe the last opportunity” to get the hostages released and achieve a ceasefire.

A statement from Mr Netanyahu’s office following his talks with Mr Biden said: “The prime minister reiterated Israel’s commitment to the latest American proposal regarding the release of our hostages – taking into account Israel’s security needs, which he insists on firmly.”

The current negotiations are based on a modified proposal presented by the US, aimed at bridging long-standing gaps between Israel and Hamas.

The Americans hope they can get the deal 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.

Earlier this week, US President Joe Biden said “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 conflict.

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.

The Democratic National Convention begins on Monday in Chicago, in what is expected to be a celebration of Kamala Harris’s nomination as presidential candidate following Joe Biden’s exit.

However protests over the war in Gaza, led by Democrats from the party’s left, threaten to disrupt the unity message.

Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters are expected near the convention site to show their opposition to President Biden’s policies towards Israel and Gaza, from which Ms Harris, his vice-president, has not deviated.

There will also be events organised by pro-Israel groups, including a “hostage square” to draw attention to the plight of those who remain in Hamas captivity. Relatives of hostages are also expected to attend the convention.

The four-day Democrat spectacle will culminate on Thursday with Ms Harris giving a primetime speech that will be watched by millions of Americans, fewer than three months before election day.

President Biden, the former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, former president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle and a list of actors and entertainers will give speeches at the United Center in Chicago.

It comes a little over a month after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination in Milwaukee, just days after surviving an assassination attempt and as Democrats were in disarray over 81-year-old Mr Biden’s weakness as a candidate.

Since then the momentum of the race has shifted significantly, with Ms Harris’s entry to the race and her running-mate choice of Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, jolting enthusiasm and pushing them slightly ahead of Trump and his running mate JD Vance in national polls.

What remains unclear is how the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party will tackle policy towards Israel and the conflict in Gaza.

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. Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says more than 40,000 people have since been killed in the campaign in the strip.

Ms Harris has not released a clear policy on Gaza and Israel. 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.

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

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.

While the energy of that campaign has ebbed slightly, the presence of that vote in key swing states such as Michigan would still be felt at the convention.

Only three dozen delegates will represent the “uncommitted” vote and they will be greatly outnumbers by the more than 4,500 backing Ms Harris. However, they speak for hundreds of thousands of unsatisfied voters.

In interviews, they said that they intended to spend the convention pressing the Harris campaign and their party to act more forcefully 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 and “uncommitted” delegate.

Several of the delegates said they hoped to convince fellow Democrats to sign a letter demanding Ms Harris and the party support a ceasefire and arms embargo against Israel.

They said they were not trying to spoil the convention or the election, but were rather pushing the party to adopt a policy 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.

It remains to be seen how many people will protest in Chicago against the Gaza war. Organisers had suggested there could be 100,000, but have since said “many, many thousands” on Monday and “tens of thousands” in total by the end of the week.

Monday’s protests will take place before President Biden delivers the night’s main speech.

Ms Harris had earned some goodwill from Gaza protesters as she was one of the first members of the Biden administration to call for a ceasefire, and express a sharper opinion of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister.

But many protesters said the the vice-president’s honeymoon period is over and they expected to see a policy position that was actionable.

“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 a protest on Sunday of a few hundred people near Chicago’s Trump Tower.

The DNC will also coincide with a consequential week for the US-mediated ceasefire talks, which the White House has described as being in their “final” stages.

This diplomatic reality could put Ms Harris in a tenuous position.

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

Some close to her have said that, either way, there would be no significant policy shift.

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.

US talk show host Phil Donahue has died at the age of 88, his family has confirmed to the US media.

The presenter died at his home on Sunday after a long illness and surrounded by family, according to a statement issued to NBC’s Today show.

Donahue, who created and hosted The Phil Donahue Show, was considered the “king of daytime talk” in the US.

Over his career, Donahue interviewed well-known figures including Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Sammy Davis Jr, Sir Elton John, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Dolly Parton and Michael J Fox.

Donahue is considered a trailblazer in the daytime television landscape.

His TV show was the first to include many elements familiar to viewers today, including participation from the studio audience.

He hosted more than 6,000 editions of his talk show between 1967 and 1996.

Born in Cleveland in 1935, Donahue began his media career in the late 1950s in talk radio and television, launching his eponymous talk show in 1967.

In 1974, the show relocated from Ohio to Chicago and changed its name to simply Donahue.

The show got into its groove soon after, once Donahue began involving the studio audience in discussions and the programme more widely.

Donahue married his second wife, actress Marlo Thomas, in 1980 after the two first met three years earlier when she was a guest on his talk show.

For its last decade on air, the show was hosted from New York City. The final episode was broadcast in September 1996.

Donahue was credited with changing the face of daytime television and challenging assumptions about what female audiences in particular wanted from talk shows.

“If there had been no Phil Donahue show, there would be no Oprah Winfrey Show,” Winfrey wrote in the September 2002 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine.

“He was the first to acknowledge that women are interested in more than mascara tips and cake recipes – that we’re intelligent, we’re concerned about the world around us and we want the best possible lives for ourselves.”

Donahue himself once said: “I honestly believe we have spoken more thoughtfully, more honestly, more often to more issues about which women care than any other show.”

He won 20 Emmy Awards across his career, 10 of which were for outstanding host and 10 for the talk show itself.

Earlier this year, he was awarded the medal of freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US, by President Joe Biden.

Donahue is survived by Thomas and four children from his first marriage.

The boss of Foxtel – a majority News Corp-owned cable television company in Australia – has “unreservedly” apologised after an image surfaced of him performing a Nazi salute.

Patrick Delaney said he believed he was showing “the similarity” between the gesture and one used by some fans of a Western Sydney soccer club when the photo was taken a decade ago.

“Regardless of the context, the fact I demonstrated this offensive salute was wrong,” he said in an email to staff seen by the BBC.

The Jewish Council of Australia condemned Mr Delaney’s actions as “deeply concerning”.

“Equally [concerning] is that he operates in a media industry where he felt this was somehow okay,” Sarah Schwartz, the council’s executive officer, said in a statement on Monday. “It shouldn’t need to be said that the salute is an offensive and violent act not only for Jews, but also for other racialised groups.”

In his internal memo, Mr Delaney said that he had been “searching [his] mind” for a circumstance where “a photo capturing me in this pose could ever be possible”.

He then explained that he believed he was impersonating a threatening gesture made by a group of Western Sydney Wanderers fans during the 2014-15 season, while visiting the set of a Fox Sports television program during his tenure as the channel’s CEO.

Mr Delaney said the photograph – first published by Crikey – was “completely inconsistent” with his “values, beliefs, and family connections”.

He also condemned “racism in all its forms”, pointing to his commitment to the ‘Say No to Antisemitism letter’ which he signed along with other prominent Australian leaders in the wake of the unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October.

About 1,200 people were killed in that attack, and 251 others were taken hostage.

Mr Delaney added that he would continue to meet with Jewish leaders to “express” his “deep remorse”.

But Ms Schwartz said the idea that Mr Delaney could sign a letter condemning antisemitism, while also feeling comfortable doing a Nazi salute, was proof the nation needed “more than superficial pledges”.

The scandal comes at a time when Australia is grappling with a sharp uptick in both antisemitism and Islamophobia, amid rising community tension over the Israel-Gaza war.

In July, the federal government installed a special envoy to combat antisemitism, while promising to appoint an Islamophobia equivalent in the coming months.

During a visit to Sydney in November, Lachlan Murdoch called on News Corp’s staff in Australia to “address and tackle” all forms of antisemitism and said there was “no room for equivocation” or fence-sitting on the issue.

Once a mainstay across the nation’s homes, Foxtel’s business model has been in sharp decline in recent years, after being displaced by the rise of cheaper international streaming services.

Earlier this month, News Corp said it was considering selling the ailing pay TV company.

In January 2015, Abdullah, the 90-year-old king of Saudi Arabia, was dying in hospital. His half-brother, Salman, was about to become king – and Salman’s favourite son, Mohammed bin Salman, was preparing for power.

The prince, known simply by his initials MBS and then just 29 years old, had big plans for his kingdom, the biggest plans in its history; but he feared that plotters within his own Saudi royal family could eventually move against him. So at midnight one evening that month, he summoned a senior security official to the palace, determined to win his loyalty.

The official, Saad al-Jabri, was told to leave his mobile phone on a table outside. MBS did the same. The two men were now alone. The young prince was so fearful of palace spies that he pulled the socket out of the wall, disconnecting the only landline telephone.

According to Jabri, MBS then talked about how he would wake his kingdom up from its deep slumber, allowing it to take its rightful place on the global stage. By selling a stake in the state oil producer Aramco, the world’s most profitable company, he would begin to wean his economy off its dependency on oil. He would invest billions in Silicon Valley tech startups including the taxi firm, Uber. Then, by giving Saudi women the freedom to join the workforce, he would create six million new jobs.

Astonished, Jabri asked the prince about the extent of his ambition. “Have you heard of Alexander the Great?” came the simple reply.

MBS ended the conversation there. A midnight meeting that was scheduled to last half-an-hour had gone on for three. Jabri left the room to find several missed calls on his mobile from government colleagues worried about his long disappearance.

The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince

The story of the extraordinary rise to power of the man who runs Saudi Arabia and whose control of oil affects everyone, starting with how he outwitted hundreds of rivals to become crown prince.

Watch on BBC iPlayer

For the past year, our documentary team has been talking to both Saudi friends and opponents of MBS, as well as senior Western spies and diplomats. The Saudi government was given the opportunity to respond to the claims made in the BBC’s films and in this article. They chose not to do so.

Saad al-Jabri was so high up in the Saudi security apparatus that he was friends with the heads of the CIA and MI6. While the Saudi government has called Jabri a discredited former official, he’s also the most well-informed Saudi dissident to have dared speak about how the crown prince rules Saudi Arabia – and the rare interview he has given us is astonishing in its detail.

By gaining access to many who know the prince personally, we shed new light on the events that have made MBS notorious – including the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the launch of a devastating war in Yemen.

With his father increasingly frail, the 38-year-old MBS is now de facto in charge of the birthplace of Islam and the world’s biggest exporter of oil. He’s begun to carry out many of the groundbreaking plans he described to Saad al-Jabri – while also being accused of human rights violations including the suppression of free speech, widespread use of the death penalty and jailing of women’s rights activists.

The first king of Saudi Arabia fathered at least 42 sons, including MBS’s father, Salman. The crown has traditionally been passed down between these sons. It was when two of them suddenly died in 2011 and 2012 that Salman was elevated into the line of succession.

Western spy agencies make it their business to study the Saudi equivalent of Kremlinology – working out who will be the next king. At this stage, MBS was so young and unknown that he wasn’t even on their radar.

“He grew up in relative obscurity,” says Sir John Sawers, chief of MI6 until 2014. “He wasn’t earmarked to rise to power.”

The crown prince also grew up in a palace in which bad behaviour had few, if any, consequences; and that may help explain his notorious habit of not thinking through the impact of his decisions until he had already made them.

MBS first achieved notoriety in Riyadh in his late teens, when he was nicknamed “Abu Rasasa” or “Father of the Bullet”, after allegedly sending a bullet in the post to a judge who had overruled him in a property dispute.

“He has had a certain ruthlessness,” observes Sir John Sawers. “He doesn’t like to be crossed. But that also means he’s been able to drive through changes that no other Saudi leader has been able to do.”

Among the most welcome changes, the former MI6 chief says, has been cutting off Saudi funding to overseas mosques and religious schools that became breeding grounds for Islamist jihadism – at huge benefit to the safety of the West.

MBS’s mother, Fahda, is a Bedouin tribeswoman and seen as the favourite of his father’s four wives. Western diplomats believe the king has suffered for many years from a slow-onset form of vascular dementia; and MBS was the son he turned to for help.

Several diplomats recalled for us their meetings with MBS and his father. The prince would write notes on an iPad, then send them to his father’s iPad, as a way of prompting what he would say next.

“Inevitably I wondered whether MBS was typing out his lines for him,” recalls Lord Kim Darroch, National Security Adviser to David Cameron when he was British prime minister.

The prince was apparently so impatient for his father to become king that in 2014, he reportedly suggested killing the then-monarch – Abdullah, his uncle – with a poisoned ring, obtained from Russia.

“I don’t know for sure if he was just bragging, but we took it seriously,” says Jabri. The former senior security official says he has seen a secretly recorded surveillance video of MBS talking about the idea. “He was banned from court, from shaking hands with the king, for a considerable amount of time.”

In the event, the king died of natural causes, allowing his brother, Salman, to assume the throne in 2015. MBS was appointed Defence Minister and lost no time in going to war.

Two months later, the prince led a Gulf coalition into war against the Houthi movement, which had seized control of much of western Yemen and which he saw as a proxy of Saudi Arabia’s regional rival Iran. It triggered a humanitarian disaster, with millions on the brink of famine.

“It wasn’t a clever decision,” says Sir John Jenkins, who was British ambassador just before the war began. “One senior American military commander told me they had been given 12 hours’ notice of the campaign, which is unheard of.”

The military campaign helped turn a little-known prince into a Saudi national hero. However, it was also the first of what even his friends believe have been several major mistakes.

A recurring pattern of behaviour was emerging: MBS’s tendency to jettison the traditionally slow and collegiate system of Saudi decision-making, preferring to act unpredictably or upon impulse; and refusing to kowtow to the US, or be treated as head of a backward client state.

Jabri goes much further, accusing MBS of forging his father the king’s signature on a royal decree committing ground troops.

Jabri says he discussed the Yemen war in the White House before it started; and that Susan Rice, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, warned him that the US would only support an air campaign.

However, Jabri claims MBS was so determined to press ahead in Yemen that he ignored the Americans.

“We were surprised that there was a royal decree to allow the ground interventions,” Jabri says. “He forged the signature of his dad for that royal decree. The king’s mental capacity was deteriorating.”

Jabri says his source for this allegation was “credible, reliable” and linked to the Ministry of Interior where he was chief of staff.

Jabri recalls the CIA station chief in Riyadh telling him how angry he was that MBS had ignored the Americans, adding that the invasion of Yemen should never have happened.

The former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers says that while he doesn’t know if MBS forged the documents, “it is clear that this was MBS’s decision to intervene militarily in Yemen. It wasn’t his father’s decision, although his father was carried along with it.”

We’ve discovered that MBS saw himself as an outsider from the very beginning – a young man with much to prove and a refusal to obey anybody’s rules other than his own.

Kirsten Fontenrose, who served on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, says that when she read the CIA’s in-house psychological profile of the prince, she felt it missed the point.

“There were no prototypes to base him on,” she says. “He has had unlimited resources. He has never been told ‘no’. He is the first young leader to reflect a generation that, frankly, most of us in government are too old to understand.”

MBS’s purchase of a famous painting in 2017 tells us much about how he thinks, and his willingness to be a risk-taker, unafraid to be out of step with the religiously conservative society that he governs. And above all, determined to outplay the West in conspicuous displays of power.

In 2017, a Saudi prince reportedly acting for MBS spent $450m (£350m) on the Salvator Mundi, which remains the world’s most expensive work of art ever sold. The portrait, reputed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, depicts Jesus Christ as master of heaven and Earth, the saviour of the world. For almost seven years, ever since the auction, it has completely disappeared.

Bernard Haykel, a friend of the crown prince and Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, says that despite rumours that it hangs in the prince’s yacht or palace, the painting is actually in storage in Geneva and that MBS intends to hang it in a museum in the Saudi capital that has not yet been built.

“I want to build a very large museum in Riyadh,” Haykel quotes MBS as saying. “And I want an anchor object that will attract people, just like the Mona Lisa does.”

Similarly, his plans for sport reflect someone who is both hugely ambitious and unafraid to disrupt the status quo.

Saudi Arabia’s incredible spending spree on world-class sport – it is the sole bidder to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034, and has made multimillion-dollar investments in staging tournaments for tennis and golf – has been called “sportswashing”. But what we found is a leader who cares less about what the West thinks of him than he does about demonstrating the opposite: that he will do whatever he wants in the name of making himself and Saudi Arabia great.

“MBS is interested in building his own power as a leader,” says Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of MI6, who has met him. “And the only way he can do that is by building his country’s power. That’s what’s driving him.”

Jabri’s 40-year career as a Saudi official did not survive MBS’s consolidation of power. Chief of staff for the former Crown Prince Muhammed bin Nayef, he fled the kingdom as MBS was taking over, after being tipped off by a foreign intelligence service that he could be in danger. But Jabri says MBS texted him out of the blue, offering him his old job back.

“It was bait – and I didn’t bite,” Jabri says, convinced he would have been tortured, imprisoned or killed if he returned. As it was, his teenage children, Omar and Sarah, were detained and later jailed for money laundering and for trying to escape – charges that they deny. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has called for their release.

“He planned for my assassination,” Jabri says. “He will not rest until he sees me dead, I have no doubt about that.”

Saudi officials have issued Interpol notices for Jabri’s extradition from Canada, without success. They claim he is wanted for corruption involving billions of dollars during his time at the interior ministry. However, he was given the rank of major-general and credited by the CIA and MI6 with helping to prevent al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

The killing of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 implicates MBS in ways that are very hard to refute. The 15-strong hit squad was travelling on diplomatic passports and included several of MBS’s own bodyguards. Khashoggi’s body has never been found and is believed to have been hacked into pieces with a bone saw.

Professor Haykel exchanged WhatsApp messages with MBS not long after the murder. “I was asking, ‘how could this happen?’,” Haykel recalls. “I think he was in deep shock. He didn’t realise the reaction to this was going to be as deep.”

Dennis Ross met MBS shortly afterwards. “He said he didn’t do it and that it was a colossal blunder,” says Ross. “I certainly wanted to believe him, because I couldn’t believe that he could authorise something [like] that.”

MBS has always denied knowledge of the plot, although in 2019 he said he took “responsibility” because the crime happened on his watch. A declassified US intelligence report released in February 2021 asserted that he was complicit in the killing of Khashoggi.

I asked those who know MBS personally whether he had learned from his mistakes; or whether having survived the Khashoggi affair, it had in fact emboldened him.

“He’s learned lessons the hard way,” says Professor Haykel, who says MBS resents the case being used as cudgel against him and his country, but that a killing like Khashoggi’s would not happen again.

Sir John Sawers cautiously agrees that the murder was a turning point. “I think he has learned some lessons. The personality, though, remains the same.”

His father, King Salman, is now aged 88. When he dies, MBS could rule Saudi Arabia for the next 50 years.

However, he has recently admitted he fears being assassinated, possibly as a consequence of his attempts to normalise Saudi-Israeli ties.

“I think there are lots of people who want to kill him,” says Professor Haykel, “and he knows it.”

Eternal vigilance is what keeps a man like MBS safe. It was what Saad al-Jabri observed at the beginning of the prince’s rise to power, when he pulled the telephone socket out of the wall before speaking to him in his palace.

MBS is still a man on a mission to modernise his country, in ways his predecessors would never have dared. But he’s also not the first autocrat who runs the risk of being so ruthless that nobody around him dares prevent him from making more mistakes.

The brutal rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl has sparked outrage in Ethiopia, with many saying the sentence given to her attacker is too lenient.

Heaven Awot was sexually assaulted, mutilated and killed by her mother’s landlord Getnet Baye last August in the north-western city of Bahir Dar in Amhara region.

Getnet was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The case attracted widespread attention after he recently launched an appeal, and the case is now adjourned until October.

The mother of the girl, Abekyelesh Adeba, tells the BBC that losing her child has left her feeling “lifeless”.

More than 200,000 people have so far signed an online petition demanding a review of the sentencing “to reflect the gravity of the crime” and to offer support for the grieving mother.

One of the largest women’s rights advocacy groups in the country, the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA), released a statement saying they believe the sentencing was “very light”, adding “the murder by itself should have been enough to sentence him to life imprisonment or to death… It’s specially sickening and outrageous when such a horrendous crime is committed against children.”

Senior government officials have joined the chorus of criticism, with Minister for Women and Social Affairs Ergogie Tesfaye writing on her Facebook page that the crimes committed against Heaven were “inhumane” and saying her office would pursue the case with stakeholders.

The brutal attack has triggered heated discussions about the safety of vulnerable women and young girls in Ethiopia.

According to a report released in May by Human Rights Watch, conflict-related sexual violence “has reached alarming levels in Ethiopia”.

The lack of accountability for perpetrators is seen by some as one contributing factor for its prevalence.

Thousands of women and young girls are reported to have been raped during a devastating two-year war in Tigray, the country’s northernmost region.

Before being raped and killed, Heaven saw the breaking up of her family because of that war.

Her father, an ethnic Tigrayan, was imprisoned for months at the height of the conflict. He was never charged.

When he was released, he left Amhara – where he felt there was still hostility and suspicions towards him – for Tigray.

Heaven’s mother, Ms Abekyelesh, a nurse, was left to raise her and her younger sister alone.

Being on friendly terms with their landlord who lived with his family within the same compound, Ms Abekyelesh told the BBC that she never felt any threat to her children.

She was related to the landlord’s wife which made her feel even more at ease.

When Heaven was attacked, Ms Abekyelesh was at work and the girl’s aunt was babysitting her.

Her aunt says Heaven told her she was going to the bathroom, and did not return. Wondering why she was taking so long, the aunt says she went to look for the girl but did not find her. She believes Getnet had snatched her away.

Later that day, Heaven’s mutilated body was found in front of her home with clear marks of being strangled. Her mother tells the BBC that she believes the attacker dropped the body there.

“If our children can’t be safe in our homes, where else can we go?,” she says. “Should we stop work and spend all our time with them? How can we feed them?”

In the following months, Ms Abekyelesh faced added ordeals as she grieved her murdered daughter.

She had to go into hiding, fearing for her own and her other daughter’s safety, after the attacker – Getnet – escaped from custody.

He fled from the police station in Bahir Dar where he was being detained last August, after local Amhara militias battling the army broke into that facility to free their fellow fighters who were held there.

Now on the loose, Getnet came looking for Heaven’s mother with a gun. He was not rearrested for close to a month.

She says she felt that security forces were reluctant to detain him, and had to beg them to re-arrest him. All the while Getnet was threatening her.

It left Ms Abekyelesh feeling unsafe, and as a result she has moved homes and jobs repeatedly in the year since.

Ms Abekyelesh feels that the justice system failed her. She does not believe the 25 year sentence for Getnet was enough.

But she is more concerned about him winning his appeal and getting an early release.

“I have lost my Heaven… I am lifeless,” she tells the BBC.

Yet as a health worker, she says she knows of countless more women and young girls who have been sexually assaulted.

“I know there are so many Heavens.”

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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 £660, 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 Filipino 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 Fishermen’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.

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.

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.”

With just three months to go before the 2024 election, thousands are set to gather in Chicago this week for the Democratic National Convention.

It’s a tradition dating back to the 1830s, when a group of Democratic delegates supporting President Andrew Jackson gathered in Baltimore to nominate him for a second term.

This year will look slightly different from others, as the Democratic Party has already officially nominated Vice-President Kamala Harris in a virtual roll call after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

But many of the other DNC traditions – including appearances from celebrities and memorable speeches from party leaders – will remain the same. Here’s what to know.

This year’s convention is taking place at the United Center Arena in Chicago from Monday 19 August to Thursday 22 August.

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Because Ms Harris and Mr Walz have already been nominated, this year’s convention will focus on speeches from prominent Democrats and the adoption of the party’s platform.

Delegates work during the day to finalise the platform, a draft of which has already been released.

It focuses on a broad range of issues, including plans to lower inflation, mitigate climate change and tackle gun violence. In the draft, Democrats contrast each of the party positions with Project 2025, an ultra-conservative blueprint for what a second Trump administration could look like, authored by the Heritage Foundation. Trump has sought to distance himself from the project, though several of his allies were involved in writing it.

Dozens of prominent Democrats and celebrities will be taking the stage in Chicago.

President Biden will headline the convention on Monday night, and his record will be honoured throughout the evening.

The crowd will also hear from First Lady Jill Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Maryland Rep Jamie Raskin, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and other Democratic leaders. Americans affected by abortion bans in Republican-controlled states and voices from the labour movement – including United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain – will be heard as well.

The first evening of the DNC will “showcase Kamala Harris’s commitment to fighting for everyday Americans” with a particular focus on “freedom”, DNC officials told reporters.

On Tuesday, former President Barack Obama is expected to deliver remarks, as is former First Lady Michelle Obama. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Ms Harris’s husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, will also address the convention on Tuesday.

Wednesday’s line-up reportedly features former President Bill Clinton and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, among others.

Ms Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will give the prime-time speech that night after his nomination.

The most important night of the convention is Thursday, when Vice-President Harris will take the stage. She will formally accept the presidential nomination and give her speech on the final night of the convention dedicated “For the Future.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will also take the stage at some point during the week.

Famous politicians aren’t the only ones who will make an appearance. The convention will also hear from several everyday Americans, including Trump voters.

Around 50,000 people are expected to attend this year’s convention in Chicago. This includes thousands of delegates chosen by state Democratic parties as well as super delegates, who are major elected officials, notable members of the Democratic Party and some members of the Democratic National Committee.

Thousands of members of the media will also be in attendance.

It will be a star-studded convention with appearances from several celebrities. In 2020, actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Eva Longoria attended the convention, while Elizabeth Banks and America Ferrera appeared in 2016.

Rumours have swirled about whether mega-stars Beyoncé and Taylor Swift will attend this year, but neither has actually confirmed they will be there.

Demonstrations are planned for outside the DNC venue, many of which are centred around opposition to US support of Israel’s war in Gaza. Organisers have said as many as 10,000 people could take part in marches. Protesters have been haggling with the city of Chicago about where they can demonstrate.

Members of the public can only attend the convention in person by becoming volunteers. But as with the Republican convention, there will be plenty of national media coverage, and the convention itself will offer live-streams on social media platforms.

You’ll be able to follow BBC News coverage – featuring on-site reporting and analysis – across the website and app, and on our live-stream.

The BBC News Channel will carry special coverage from 20:00 ET (01:00 BST) each night. You can find special episodes of The Global Story and Americast podcasts on BBC Sounds and other podcast platforms.

Sign up to North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s election newsletter US Election Unspun for his take on the week’s events direct to your inbox.

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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 Journal of Transport Geography 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.”

“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.

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, one 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.

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.

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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, the 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 of the scale of abuse that is 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.”

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.”

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Imran Khan, Pakistan’s jailed former prime minister, appears to be eyeing up a new role from behind bars – that of Oxford University chancellor.

Mr Khan, who has been in prison for more than a year on charges he says are politically motivated, submitted his application ahead of the deadline on Sunday night, his adviser confirmed on X.

The one-time cricket star is already an honorary fellow of Oxford’s Keble College, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) in 1972.

The University of Oxford gave no comment about the specific application and will not confirm the candidates for the position until early October with voting to be held online on 28 October.

Previously candidates were required to be nominated by 50 members of the University’s Convocation.

The Oxford chancellor’s role is largely ceremonial and is voted for by graduates of the university who have had their degree conferred provided they have registered to vote and members of the university’s congregations including academic staff.

Candidates cannot be current students, employees of the University or candidates to political office.

Christopher Patten is the outgoing chancellor, who has held the position since 2003.

Lord Patten, 80, was the last Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997 and chairman of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1992.

Imran Khan was jailed on 5 August for failing to correctly declare the sale of state gifts.

Cases against the former politician mounted and the 71-year-old was given three long prison sentences, but all of these have now fallen away.

A United Nations panel declared his detention was arbitrary but Mr Khan remains in jail with new cases against his name.

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.

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.

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

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 (CBL) says it has resumed operations following the release of a bank official who had been abducted from his home.

CBL confirmed the release of Musaab Muslamm, head of the bank’s information technology department, who was taken on Sunday by an “unidentified party.”

It said Mr Msallem had been taken from the capital, Tripoli, and that other bank employees had been threatened with kidnapping too.

CBL had halted all work, refusing to reopen until Mr Msallem was freed.

In a brief statement on Monday afternoon, the bank said it was back running as normal as Mr Msallem had returned and was “safe”.

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.

Mr Msallem’s abduction 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.

On Monday, Mr Kabir discussed “the increasing threats to the security and safety of the central bank, its employees and its systems” with British ambassador to Libya Martin Longden, CBL said in a statement on Monday.

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.

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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.”

In January 2015, Abdullah, the 90-year-old king of Saudi Arabia, was dying in hospital. His half-brother, Salman, was about to become king – and Salman’s favourite son, Mohammed bin Salman, was preparing for power.

The prince, known simply by his initials MBS and then just 29 years old, had big plans for his kingdom, the biggest plans in its history; but he feared that plotters within his own Saudi royal family could eventually move against him. So at midnight one evening that month, he summoned a senior security official to the palace, determined to win his loyalty.

The official, Saad al-Jabri, was told to leave his mobile phone on a table outside. MBS did the same. The two men were now alone. The young prince was so fearful of palace spies that he pulled the socket out of the wall, disconnecting the only landline telephone.

According to Jabri, MBS then talked about how he would wake his kingdom up from its deep slumber, allowing it to take its rightful place on the global stage. By selling a stake in the state oil producer Aramco, the world’s most profitable company, he would begin to wean his economy off its dependency on oil. He would invest billions in Silicon Valley tech startups including the taxi firm, Uber. Then, by giving Saudi women the freedom to join the workforce, he would create six million new jobs.

Astonished, Jabri asked the prince about the extent of his ambition. “Have you heard of Alexander the Great?” came the simple reply.

MBS ended the conversation there. A midnight meeting that was scheduled to last half-an-hour had gone on for three. Jabri left the room to find several missed calls on his mobile from government colleagues worried about his long disappearance.

The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince

The story of the extraordinary rise to power of the man who runs Saudi Arabia and whose control of oil affects everyone, starting with how he outwitted hundreds of rivals to become crown prince.

Watch on BBC iPlayer

For the past year, our documentary team has been talking to both Saudi friends and opponents of MBS, as well as senior Western spies and diplomats. The Saudi government was given the opportunity to respond to the claims made in the BBC’s films and in this article. They chose not to do so.

Saad al-Jabri was so high up in the Saudi security apparatus that he was friends with the heads of the CIA and MI6. While the Saudi government has called Jabri a discredited former official, he’s also the most well-informed Saudi dissident to have dared speak about how the crown prince rules Saudi Arabia – and the rare interview he has given us is astonishing in its detail.

By gaining access to many who know the prince personally, we shed new light on the events that have made MBS notorious – including the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the launch of a devastating war in Yemen.

With his father increasingly frail, the 38-year-old MBS is now de facto in charge of the birthplace of Islam and the world’s biggest exporter of oil. He’s begun to carry out many of the groundbreaking plans he described to Saad al-Jabri – while also being accused of human rights violations including the suppression of free speech, widespread use of the death penalty and jailing of women’s rights activists.

The first king of Saudi Arabia fathered at least 42 sons, including MBS’s father, Salman. The crown has traditionally been passed down between these sons. It was when two of them suddenly died in 2011 and 2012 that Salman was elevated into the line of succession.

Western spy agencies make it their business to study the Saudi equivalent of Kremlinology – working out who will be the next king. At this stage, MBS was so young and unknown that he wasn’t even on their radar.

“He grew up in relative obscurity,” says Sir John Sawers, chief of MI6 until 2014. “He wasn’t earmarked to rise to power.”

The crown prince also grew up in a palace in which bad behaviour had few, if any, consequences; and that may help explain his notorious habit of not thinking through the impact of his decisions until he had already made them.

MBS first achieved notoriety in Riyadh in his late teens, when he was nicknamed “Abu Rasasa” or “Father of the Bullet”, after allegedly sending a bullet in the post to a judge who had overruled him in a property dispute.

“He has had a certain ruthlessness,” observes Sir John Sawers. “He doesn’t like to be crossed. But that also means he’s been able to drive through changes that no other Saudi leader has been able to do.”

Among the most welcome changes, the former MI6 chief says, has been cutting off Saudi funding to overseas mosques and religious schools that became breeding grounds for Islamist jihadism – at huge benefit to the safety of the West.

MBS’s mother, Fahda, is a Bedouin tribeswoman and seen as the favourite of his father’s four wives. Western diplomats believe the king has suffered for many years from a slow-onset form of vascular dementia; and MBS was the son he turned to for help.

Several diplomats recalled for us their meetings with MBS and his father. The prince would write notes on an iPad, then send them to his father’s iPad, as a way of prompting what he would say next.

“Inevitably I wondered whether MBS was typing out his lines for him,” recalls Lord Kim Darroch, National Security Adviser to David Cameron when he was British prime minister.

The prince was apparently so impatient for his father to become king that in 2014, he reportedly suggested killing the then-monarch – Abdullah, his uncle – with a poisoned ring, obtained from Russia.

“I don’t know for sure if he was just bragging, but we took it seriously,” says Jabri. The former senior security official says he has seen a secretly recorded surveillance video of MBS talking about the idea. “He was banned from court, from shaking hands with the king, for a considerable amount of time.”

In the event, the king died of natural causes, allowing his brother, Salman, to assume the throne in 2015. MBS was appointed Defence Minister and lost no time in going to war.

Two months later, the prince led a Gulf coalition into war against the Houthi movement, which had seized control of much of western Yemen and which he saw as a proxy of Saudi Arabia’s regional rival Iran. It triggered a humanitarian disaster, with millions on the brink of famine.

“It wasn’t a clever decision,” says Sir John Jenkins, who was British ambassador just before the war began. “One senior American military commander told me they had been given 12 hours’ notice of the campaign, which is unheard of.”

The military campaign helped turn a little-known prince into a Saudi national hero. However, it was also the first of what even his friends believe have been several major mistakes.

A recurring pattern of behaviour was emerging: MBS’s tendency to jettison the traditionally slow and collegiate system of Saudi decision-making, preferring to act unpredictably or upon impulse; and refusing to kowtow to the US, or be treated as head of a backward client state.

Jabri goes much further, accusing MBS of forging his father the king’s signature on a royal decree committing ground troops.

Jabri says he discussed the Yemen war in the White House before it started; and that Susan Rice, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, warned him that the US would only support an air campaign.

However, Jabri claims MBS was so determined to press ahead in Yemen that he ignored the Americans.

“We were surprised that there was a royal decree to allow the ground interventions,” Jabri says. “He forged the signature of his dad for that royal decree. The king’s mental capacity was deteriorating.”

Jabri says his source for this allegation was “credible, reliable” and linked to the Ministry of Interior where he was chief of staff.

Jabri recalls the CIA station chief in Riyadh telling him how angry he was that MBS had ignored the Americans, adding that the invasion of Yemen should never have happened.

The former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers says that while he doesn’t know if MBS forged the documents, “it is clear that this was MBS’s decision to intervene militarily in Yemen. It wasn’t his father’s decision, although his father was carried along with it.”

We’ve discovered that MBS saw himself as an outsider from the very beginning – a young man with much to prove and a refusal to obey anybody’s rules other than his own.

Kirsten Fontenrose, who served on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, says that when she read the CIA’s in-house psychological profile of the prince, she felt it missed the point.

“There were no prototypes to base him on,” she says. “He has had unlimited resources. He has never been told ‘no’. He is the first young leader to reflect a generation that, frankly, most of us in government are too old to understand.”

MBS’s purchase of a famous painting in 2017 tells us much about how he thinks, and his willingness to be a risk-taker, unafraid to be out of step with the religiously conservative society that he governs. And above all, determined to outplay the West in conspicuous displays of power.

In 2017, a Saudi prince reportedly acting for MBS spent $450m (£350m) on the Salvator Mundi, which remains the world’s most expensive work of art ever sold. The portrait, reputed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, depicts Jesus Christ as master of heaven and Earth, the saviour of the world. For almost seven years, ever since the auction, it has completely disappeared.

Bernard Haykel, a friend of the crown prince and Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, says that despite rumours that it hangs in the prince’s yacht or palace, the painting is actually in storage in Geneva and that MBS intends to hang it in a museum in the Saudi capital that has not yet been built.

“I want to build a very large museum in Riyadh,” Haykel quotes MBS as saying. “And I want an anchor object that will attract people, just like the Mona Lisa does.”

Similarly, his plans for sport reflect someone who is both hugely ambitious and unafraid to disrupt the status quo.

Saudi Arabia’s incredible spending spree on world-class sport – it is the sole bidder to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034, and has made multimillion-dollar investments in staging tournaments for tennis and golf – has been called “sportswashing”. But what we found is a leader who cares less about what the West thinks of him than he does about demonstrating the opposite: that he will do whatever he wants in the name of making himself and Saudi Arabia great.

“MBS is interested in building his own power as a leader,” says Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of MI6, who has met him. “And the only way he can do that is by building his country’s power. That’s what’s driving him.”

Jabri’s 40-year career as a Saudi official did not survive MBS’s consolidation of power. Chief of staff for the former Crown Prince Muhammed bin Nayef, he fled the kingdom as MBS was taking over, after being tipped off by a foreign intelligence service that he could be in danger. But Jabri says MBS texted him out of the blue, offering him his old job back.

“It was bait – and I didn’t bite,” Jabri says, convinced he would have been tortured, imprisoned or killed if he returned. As it was, his teenage children, Omar and Sarah, were detained and later jailed for money laundering and for trying to escape – charges that they deny. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has called for their release.

“He planned for my assassination,” Jabri says. “He will not rest until he sees me dead, I have no doubt about that.”

Saudi officials have issued Interpol notices for Jabri’s extradition from Canada, without success. They claim he is wanted for corruption involving billions of dollars during his time at the interior ministry. However, he was given the rank of major-general and credited by the CIA and MI6 with helping to prevent al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

The killing of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 implicates MBS in ways that are very hard to refute. The 15-strong hit squad was travelling on diplomatic passports and included several of MBS’s own bodyguards. Khashoggi’s body has never been found and is believed to have been hacked into pieces with a bone saw.

Professor Haykel exchanged WhatsApp messages with MBS not long after the murder. “I was asking, ‘how could this happen?’,” Haykel recalls. “I think he was in deep shock. He didn’t realise the reaction to this was going to be as deep.”

Dennis Ross met MBS shortly afterwards. “He said he didn’t do it and that it was a colossal blunder,” says Ross. “I certainly wanted to believe him, because I couldn’t believe that he could authorise something [like] that.”

MBS has always denied knowledge of the plot, although in 2019 he said he took “responsibility” because the crime happened on his watch. A declassified US intelligence report released in February 2021 asserted that he was complicit in the killing of Khashoggi.

I asked those who know MBS personally whether he had learned from his mistakes; or whether having survived the Khashoggi affair, it had in fact emboldened him.

“He’s learned lessons the hard way,” says Professor Haykel, who says MBS resents the case being used as cudgel against him and his country, but that a killing like Khashoggi’s would not happen again.

Sir John Sawers cautiously agrees that the murder was a turning point. “I think he has learned some lessons. The personality, though, remains the same.”

His father, King Salman, is now aged 88. When he dies, MBS could rule Saudi Arabia for the next 50 years.

However, he has recently admitted he fears being assassinated, possibly as a consequence of his attempts to normalise Saudi-Israeli ties.

“I think there are lots of people who want to kill him,” says Professor Haykel, “and he knows it.”

Eternal vigilance is what keeps a man like MBS safe. It was what Saad al-Jabri observed at the beginning of the prince’s rise to power, when he pulled the telephone socket out of the wall before speaking to him in his palace.

MBS is still a man on a mission to modernise his country, in ways his predecessors would never have dared. But he’s also not the first autocrat who runs the risk of being so ruthless that nobody around him dares prevent him from making more mistakes.

The brutal rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl has sparked outrage in Ethiopia, with many saying the sentence given to her attacker is too lenient.

Heaven Awot was sexually assaulted, mutilated and killed by her mother’s landlord Getnet Baye last August in the north-western city of Bahir Dar in Amhara region.

Getnet was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The case attracted widespread attention after he recently launched an appeal, and the case is now adjourned until October.

The mother of the girl, Abekyelesh Adeba, tells the BBC that losing her child has left her feeling “lifeless”.

More than 200,000 people have so far signed an online petition demanding a review of the sentencing “to reflect the gravity of the crime” and to offer support for the grieving mother.

One of the largest women’s rights advocacy groups in the country, the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA), released a statement saying they believe the sentencing was “very light”, adding “the murder by itself should have been enough to sentence him to life imprisonment or to death… It’s specially sickening and outrageous when such a horrendous crime is committed against children.”

Senior government officials have joined the chorus of criticism, with Minister for Women and Social Affairs Ergogie Tesfaye writing on her Facebook page that the crimes committed against Heaven were “inhumane” and saying her office would pursue the case with stakeholders.

The brutal attack has triggered heated discussions about the safety of vulnerable women and young girls in Ethiopia.

According to a report released in May by Human Rights Watch, conflict-related sexual violence “has reached alarming levels in Ethiopia”.

The lack of accountability for perpetrators is seen by some as one contributing factor for its prevalence.

Thousands of women and young girls are reported to have been raped during a devastating two-year war in Tigray, the country’s northernmost region.

Before being raped and killed, Heaven saw the breaking up of her family because of that war.

Her father, an ethnic Tigrayan, was imprisoned for months at the height of the conflict. He was never charged.

When he was released, he left Amhara – where he felt there was still hostility and suspicions towards him – for Tigray.

Heaven’s mother, Ms Abekyelesh, a nurse, was left to raise her and her younger sister alone.

Being on friendly terms with their landlord who lived with his family within the same compound, Ms Abekyelesh told the BBC that she never felt any threat to her children.

She was related to the landlord’s wife which made her feel even more at ease.

When Heaven was attacked, Ms Abekyelesh was at work and the girl’s aunt was babysitting her.

Her aunt says Heaven told her she was going to the bathroom, and did not return. Wondering why she was taking so long, the aunt says she went to look for the girl but did not find her. She believes Getnet had snatched her away.

Later that day, Heaven’s mutilated body was found in front of her home with clear marks of being strangled. Her mother tells the BBC that she believes the attacker dropped the body there.

“If our children can’t be safe in our homes, where else can we go?,” she says. “Should we stop work and spend all our time with them? How can we feed them?”

In the following months, Ms Abekyelesh faced added ordeals as she grieved her murdered daughter.

She had to go into hiding, fearing for her own and her other daughter’s safety, after the attacker – Getnet – escaped from custody.

He fled from the police station in Bahir Dar where he was being detained last August, after local Amhara militias battling the army broke into that facility to free their fellow fighters who were held there.

Now on the loose, Getnet came looking for Heaven’s mother with a gun. He was not rearrested for close to a month.

She says she felt that security forces were reluctant to detain him, and had to beg them to re-arrest him. All the while Getnet was threatening her.

It left Ms Abekyelesh feeling unsafe, and as a result she has moved homes and jobs repeatedly in the year since.

Ms Abekyelesh feels that the justice system failed her. She does not believe the 25 year sentence for Getnet was enough.

But she is more concerned about him winning his appeal and getting an early release.

“I have lost my Heaven… I am lifeless,” she tells the BBC.

Yet as a health worker, she says she knows of countless more women and young girls who have been sexually assaulted.

“I know there are so many Heavens.”

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US talk show host Phil Donahue has died at the age of 88, his family has confirmed to the US media.

The presenter died at his home on Sunday after a long illness and surrounded by family, according to a statement issued to NBC’s Today show.

Donahue, who created and hosted The Phil Donahue Show, was considered the “king of daytime talk” in the US.

Over his career, Donahue interviewed well-known figures including Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Sammy Davis Jr, Sir Elton John, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Dolly Parton and Michael J Fox.

Donahue is considered a trailblazer in the daytime television landscape.

His TV show was the first to include many elements familiar to viewers today, including participation from the studio audience.

He hosted more than 6,000 editions of his talk show between 1967 and 1996.

Born in Cleveland in 1935, Donahue began his media career in the late 1950s in talk radio and television, launching his eponymous talk show in 1967.

In 1974, the show relocated from Ohio to Chicago and changed its name to simply Donahue.

The show got into its groove soon after, once Donahue began involving the studio audience in discussions and the programme more widely.

Donahue married his second wife, actress Marlo Thomas, in 1980 after the two first met three years earlier when she was a guest on his talk show.

For its last decade on air, the show was hosted from New York City. The final episode was broadcast in September 1996.

Donahue was credited with changing the face of daytime television and challenging assumptions about what female audiences in particular wanted from talk shows.

“If there had been no Phil Donahue show, there would be no Oprah Winfrey Show,” Winfrey wrote in the September 2002 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine.

“He was the first to acknowledge that women are interested in more than mascara tips and cake recipes – that we’re intelligent, we’re concerned about the world around us and we want the best possible lives for ourselves.”

Donahue himself once said: “I honestly believe we have spoken more thoughtfully, more honestly, more often to more issues about which women care than any other show.”

He won 20 Emmy Awards across his career, 10 of which were for outstanding host and 10 for the talk show itself.

Earlier this year, he was awarded the medal of freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US, by President Joe Biden.

Donahue is survived by Thomas and four children from his first marriage.

British tech tycoon Mike Lynch is among the six people missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning.

The 56m (183ft) vessel was carrying 22 people – 10 crew and 12 passengers – including British, American and Canadian nationals. Emergency services rescued 15 people, including a one-year-old British girl.

Local media reported the yacht, sailing under the name Bayesian, sank after encountering a heavy storm overnight that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to appear over the sea.

Mr Lynch, known by some as “the British Bill Gates”, co-founded software company Autonomy, which was later bought by tech giant Hewlett-Packard for $11bn (£8.6bn).

Witnesses told Italian news agency Ansa that the Bayesian’s anchor was down when the storm struck, causing the mast to break and the ship to lose its balance and sink off the coast of Sicilian capital Palermo.

A waterspout is similar to a tornado and can form over oceans, seas or large lakes.

Divers have identified a wreckage 50m below the water’s surface and are searching for those missing.

The body of one man has been found outside of the wreckage. His nationality has not been confirmed.

BBC Verify has looked at corporate records and found that Bayesian’s ownership is tied to Mr Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares.

Sources close to the matter have confirmed to the BBC Ms Bacares has been rescued.

Fifteen people managed to get to safety after the storm hit.

Ansa news agency reported a 35-year-old mother held her one-year-old daughter in her arms in the sea.

The woman, only named as Charlotte, said: “For two seconds I lost the little girl in the sea, then I immediately hugged her again amidst the fury of the waves.

“I held her tightly, close to me, while the sea was stormy. Many were screaming.

“Luckily the lifeboat inflated and 11 of us managed to get on board.”

The baby is fine and the mother was treated with stitches, the agency said.

She added she had been on the boat with her husband, who is also safe, and colleagues from a London company.

In the initial aftermath, a nearby Dutch-flagged vessel rescued survivors from the waves, tending to them until emergency services arrived.

Captain Karsten Borner said after the storm had passed, the crew noticed that the yacht that had been behind them had disappeared.

“We saw a red flare, so my first mate and I went to the position, and we found this life raft drifting,” he told Reuters.

That life raft was carrying 15 survivors, three of whom were “heavily injured”, he said.

A local fisherman told Reuters news agency he had seen people being rescued by an inflatable boat dispatched from another yacht.

The captain of a local fishing trawler said he saw debris, including cushions from the deck, floating in the sea.

Footage from the wreckage site showed helicopters circling over several coastguard vessels as divers wearing bright orange descended into the water.

Eight of those rescued are receiving treatment in hospital, the Italian coastguard said.

The western half of the Mediterranean has experienced severe storms since the middle of last week.

Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, a clutch of bad weather passed by the north coast of Sicily.

BBC Weather forecaster Matt Taylor said: “A waterspout is a tornado that has occurred over water rather than land.

“They can form during intense storms, on the base of cumulonimbus/thunder clouds.

“Turbulence, and the wind blowing in slightly different directions around the cloud, can cause rotation under the base of the cloud and the spout to form.

“Like tornadoes, they bring powerful winds, but instead of picking up dust and debris they cause a water mist around the column of rotating air.”

The UK Foreign Office said it was aware of the incident and in contact with local authorities. Britain’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch is also sending a team of inspectors to look into the sinking of the UK registered-boat.

The Bayesian’s registered owner is listed as Revtom Ltd. The superyacht can accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites.

The yacht’s name is understood to be based on the Bayesian theory, which Mr Lynch’s PhD thesis and the software that made his fortune was based on.

Mr Lynch’s wife Ms Bacares is named as the sole legal owner of Revtom registered in the Isle of Man.

A spokesperson for Camper and Nicholsons International, the firm that manages the 2008-built boat, told BBC Verify: “Our priority is assisting with the ongoing search and providing all necessary support to the rescued passengers and crew.”

A Canadian convenience store giant has made a bid worth $38bn (£29.2bn) for the Japanese-owned 7-Eleven in what could be the country’s record foreign takeover.

Circle K owner Alimentation Couche-Tard’s (ACT) made the approach for the chain – a staple across Asia and North America – on Monday.

ACT’s footprint in the US and Canada would more than double to more than 20,000 sites if the deal goes ahead.

The news comes after the Japanese stock market was rocked by record swings earlier this month.

The offer of 5.6 trillion Japanese yen valued 7-Eleven at a fifth more than its pre-bid price on the Japanese stock market.

ACT said it had “submitted a friendly, non-binding proposal” to buy the retail chain but that there was no guarantee it would go ahead.

“The company is focused on reaching a mutually agreeable transaction that benefits both companies’ customers, employees, franchisees and shareholders,” ACT said.

Meanwhile, Tokyo-based Seven & i Holdings, which owns 7-Eleven, said it has formed a special committee to consider the offer.

It said it had “received a confidential, non-binding and preliminary proposal by ACT to acquire all [of its] outstanding shares”.

“[The] special committee intends to conduct a prompt, careful and comprehensive review of the proposal,” it added.

If a deal is agreed it could face challenges from competition watchdogs in North America. The 7-Eleven chain runs more than 13,000 stores in the US and Canada, while Couche-Tard has more than 9,000.

In recent years, activist investors have pressed Seven & i to sell some of its assets to focus the company on the 7-Eleven brand.

The takeover offer also comes after the Japanese stock market had a record slump and then a record spike following the central bank’s decision to raise borrowing costs.

7-Eleven was first brought to Japan from the US in 1974 by retail tycoon Masatoshi Ito.

Ito, who died in 2023 aged 98, is credited with turning the convenience store chain into a global business empire.

Today, 7-Eleven has 85,000 shops worldwide in 20 countries and territories and has a large footprint in Asia.

Quebec-based ACT is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and runs around 17,000 shops in more than 30 countries and territories across North America Europe and Asia under the Circle K and Couche-Tard brands.

It has a stock market valuation of about 80bn Canadian dollars ($58.2bn; £45bn).

The Democratic National Convention begins on Monday in Chicago, in what is expected to be a celebration of Kamala Harris’s nomination as presidential candidate following Joe Biden’s exit.

However protests over the war in Gaza, led by Democrats from the party’s left, threaten to disrupt the unity message.

Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters are expected near the convention site to show their opposition to President Biden’s policies towards Israel and Gaza, from which Ms Harris, his vice-president, has not deviated.

There will also be events organised by pro-Israel groups, including a “hostage square” to draw attention to the plight of those who remain in Hamas captivity. Relatives of hostages are also expected to attend the convention.

The four-day Democrat spectacle will culminate on Thursday with Ms Harris giving a primetime speech that will be watched by millions of Americans, fewer than three months before election day.

President Biden, the former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, former president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle and a list of actors and entertainers will give speeches at the United Center in Chicago.

It comes a little over a month after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination in Milwaukee, just days after surviving an assassination attempt and as Democrats were in disarray over 81-year-old Mr Biden’s weakness as a candidate.

Since then the momentum of the race has shifted significantly, with Ms Harris’s entry to the race and her running-mate choice of Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, jolting enthusiasm and pushing them slightly ahead of Trump and his running mate JD Vance in national polls.

What remains unclear is how the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party will tackle policy towards Israel and the conflict in Gaza.

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. Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says more than 40,000 people have since been killed in the campaign in the strip.

Ms Harris has not released a clear policy on Gaza and Israel. 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.

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

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.

While the energy of that campaign has ebbed slightly, the presence of that vote in key swing states such as Michigan would still be felt at the convention.

Only three dozen delegates will represent the “uncommitted” vote and they will be greatly outnumbers by the more than 4,500 backing Ms Harris. However, they speak for hundreds of thousands of unsatisfied voters.

In interviews, they said that they intended to spend the convention pressing the Harris campaign and their party to act more forcefully 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 and “uncommitted” delegate.

Several of the delegates said they hoped to convince fellow Democrats to sign a letter demanding Ms Harris and the party support a ceasefire and arms embargo against Israel.

They said they were not trying to spoil the convention or the election, but were rather pushing the party to adopt a policy 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.

It remains to be seen how many people will protest in Chicago against the Gaza war. Organisers had suggested there could be 100,000, but have since said “many, many thousands” on Monday and “tens of thousands” in total by the end of the week.

Monday’s protests will take place before President Biden delivers the night’s main speech.

Ms Harris had earned some goodwill from Gaza protesters as she was one of the first members of the Biden administration to call for a ceasefire, and express a sharper opinion of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister.

But many protesters said the the vice-president’s honeymoon period is over and they expected to see a policy position that was actionable.

“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 a protest on Sunday of a few hundred people near Chicago’s Trump Tower.

The DNC will also coincide with a consequential week for the US-mediated ceasefire talks, which the White House has described as being in their “final” stages.

This diplomatic reality could put Ms Harris in a tenuous position.

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

Some close to her have said that, either way, there would be no significant policy shift.

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.

Pakistan has for weeks been experiencing painfully slow internet – but who, or what, is to blame is a matter for debate.

Activists say the state is building a China-style internet firewall as it looks to exert further control over the online space.

Officials have disputed these claims and instead blamed the widespread use of secure connections or VPN (virtual private networks) for the crawling speeds.

Shutting down the internet to crush dissent is a familiar move in regulators’ playbooks in Pakistan and other parts of Asia.

Since the riots sparked by former prime minister Imran Khan last year, the government has blocked social media platforms and throttled connection speeds as the battle for public support spilled over from the streets to the digital space.

The micro-blogging platform X has been blocked since the February elections due to “national security” concerns.

Mr Khan’s party supporters are big users of X and he is the most popular Pakistani on the platformn, with nearly 21 million followers.

But Minister of State for Information Technology Shaza Fatima said on Sunday that the government was not behind the recent slowdown.

She said her team has been “working tirelessly” with internet service providers and telcos to resolve the issue.

Ms Fatima said a “large population” had been using VPNs and “this strained the network, causing the internet to go slow”.

She said reports that the state was behind the slow connections were “completely false”.

However Ms Fatima said the government had been upgrading its systems to improve cyber security.

“It is the right of the government to [take such measures] given the cyber security attacks that this country has to go through,” she said.

Activists however accuse the minister of “dodging criticism like a usual politician”.

Shahzad Ahmad, director of local digital watchdog Bytes for All, told the BBC his organisation has “ample tech evident” to prove the existence of a firewall.

“It seems its purpose is to monitor online traffic… and limit dissemination [of information] in online spaces, particularly curbing political expression,” Mr Ahmad said.

“Even if civil liberties don’t matter, this is now about people’s livelihood and the economy as well,” said Farieha Aziz, co-founder of Bolo Bhi, a local non-profit that advocates for free speech online.

Business leaders and associations have warned that the slow connections could endanger Pakistan’s business potential.

“The imposition of the firewall has triggered a perfect storm of challenges, with prolonged internet disconnections and erratic VPN performance threatening a complete meltdown of business operations,” said the Pakistan Software Houses Association.

This could cost the IT sector up to $300 million, the association said, calling it a “direct, tangible and aggressive assault on the industry’s viability”.

“A mass exodus of IT companies is not just a possibility but an imminent reality if immediate and decisive action is not taken,” it said.

Activists have filed a petition before the Islamabad High Court, calling for access to the internet to be declared a fundamental right under Pakistan’s constitution.

The boss of Foxtel – a majority News Corp-owned cable television company in Australia – has “unreservedly” apologised after an image surfaced of him performing a Nazi salute.

Patrick Delaney said he believed he was showing “the similarity” between the gesture and one used by some fans of a Western Sydney soccer club when the photo was taken a decade ago.

“Regardless of the context, the fact I demonstrated this offensive salute was wrong,” he said in an email to staff seen by the BBC.

The Jewish Council of Australia condemned Mr Delaney’s actions as “deeply concerning”.

“Equally [concerning] is that he operates in a media industry where he felt this was somehow okay,” Sarah Schwartz, the council’s executive officer, said in a statement on Monday. “It shouldn’t need to be said that the salute is an offensive and violent act not only for Jews, but also for other racialised groups.”

In his internal memo, Mr Delaney said that he had been “searching [his] mind” for a circumstance where “a photo capturing me in this pose could ever be possible”.

He then explained that he believed he was impersonating a threatening gesture made by a group of Western Sydney Wanderers fans during the 2014-15 season, while visiting the set of a Fox Sports television program during his tenure as the channel’s CEO.

Mr Delaney said the photograph – first published by Crikey – was “completely inconsistent” with his “values, beliefs, and family connections”.

He also condemned “racism in all its forms”, pointing to his commitment to the ‘Say No to Antisemitism letter’ which he signed along with other prominent Australian leaders in the wake of the unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October.

About 1,200 people were killed in that attack, and 251 others were taken hostage.

Mr Delaney added that he would continue to meet with Jewish leaders to “express” his “deep remorse”.

But Ms Schwartz said the idea that Mr Delaney could sign a letter condemning antisemitism, while also feeling comfortable doing a Nazi salute, was proof the nation needed “more than superficial pledges”.

The scandal comes at a time when Australia is grappling with a sharp uptick in both antisemitism and Islamophobia, amid rising community tension over the Israel-Gaza war.

In July, the federal government installed a special envoy to combat antisemitism, while promising to appoint an Islamophobia equivalent in the coming months.

During a visit to Sydney in November, Lachlan Murdoch called on News Corp’s staff in Australia to “address and tackle” all forms of antisemitism and said there was “no room for equivocation” or fence-sitting on the issue.

Once a mainstay across the nation’s homes, Foxtel’s business model has been in sharp decline in recent years, after being displaced by the rise of cheaper international streaming services.

Earlier this month, News Corp said it was considering selling the ailing pay TV company.

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 Journal of Transport Geography 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.”

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s jailed former prime minister, appears to be eyeing up a new role from behind bars – that of Oxford University chancellor.

Mr Khan, who has been in prison for more than a year on charges he says are politically motivated, submitted his application ahead of the deadline on Sunday night, his adviser confirmed on X.

The one-time cricket star is already an honorary fellow of Oxford’s Keble College, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) in 1972.

The University of Oxford gave no comment about the specific application and will not confirm the candidates for the position until early October with voting to be held online on 28 October.

Previously candidates were required to be nominated by 50 members of the University’s Convocation.

The Oxford chancellor’s role is largely ceremonial and is voted for by graduates of the university who have had their degree conferred provided they have registered to vote and members of the university’s congregations including academic staff.

Candidates cannot be current students, employees of the University or candidates to political office.

Christopher Patten is the outgoing chancellor, who has held the position since 2003.

Lord Patten, 80, was the last Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997 and chairman of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1992.

Imran Khan was jailed on 5 August for failing to correctly declare the sale of state gifts.

Cases against the former politician mounted and the 71-year-old was given three long prison sentences, but all of these have now fallen away.

A United Nations panel declared his detention was arbitrary but Mr Khan remains in jail with new cases against his name.