Michelle and Barack Obama gave resounding endorsements of Kamala Harris on Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention, exhorting party supporters across the US to turn out and vote to defeat Donald Trump in November.

“Hope is making a comeback,” Mrs Obama told the crowd at the DNC in Chicago, echoing her husband’s campaign promise of “hope and change”.

In their back-to-back speeches, the Democratic Party’s most popular figures praised Ms Harris, while excoriating Trump – whose presidency was characterised by “bluster and chaos”, in the words of Mr Obama.

But the couple also warned their party not to lose sight of what remains an extremely tight race amid the enthusiasm for Ms Harris’s campaign. They stressed the election would be decided in a handful of key swing states.

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“Make no mistake, it will be a fight,” said the 63-year-old former president Mr Obama.

Michelle Obama, 60, stressed the point further. “We need to vote in numbers that erase any doubt,” she said. “We need to overwhelm any effort to suppress us.”

Mr Obama emphasised America’s preparedness for a “new chapter”, adding: “We are ready for a President Kamala Harris. And Kamala Harris is ready for the job.”

The Obamas’ appeal to Democrats to turn out in November exposed a deeper party anxiety about the narrow race between Ms Harris and Trump, who retains a tight hold on his loyal base of supporters across the country.

Ms Harris has a slender lead in national polling averages but pollsters caution that the race remains a virtual tie in the handful of battleground states that will ultimately decide who wins under America’s electoral college system.

Though Ms Harris is technically the incumbent candidate, she has described herself and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, as the underdogs in the race.

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The Obamas also acknowledged the renewed sense of excitement within the party since Ms Harris replaced President Joe Biden following his exit from the race – making a tacit reference to the enthusiasm and message of hope that powered Mr Obama to victory in his 2008 presidential run against Republican John McCain.

Mr Obama also went on to serve a second term, before Trump won the White House in 2016.

Mrs Obama, whose most memorable line from her last convention speech in 2016 was, “when they go low, we go high”, did little to lower the temperature of the heated political rhetoric that has divided the country over the last decade.

She attacked Trump for assailing her family and continuing to push “ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better”.

In a broadside that generated some of the loudest cheers of the night, she mocked Trump for his use of the term “black jobs” on the campaign trail.

“Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs?” she said, referring to her husband’s presidency.

Mrs Obama also used her platform to remember her late mother, Chicago-raised Marian Robinson, who died earlier this year aged 86.

“I wasn’t even sure if I could be steady enough to stand before you tonight, but my heart compelled me to,” she told the audience.

Trump and running mate JD Vance have been holding rallies and events in swing states while the Democrats gather in Chicago.

On Tuesday afternoon, Mr Vance used a news conference in neighbouring Wisconsin to attack Ms Harris over the “failures” of her vice-presidency.

He zeroed in on crime and public safety, and the economy – two areas where the Republicans see a vulnerability.

Referring to protests in the city of Kenosha after the police shooting of black man Jacob Blake in 2020, he said: “Wisconsin has suffered when you don’t have good, smart, pro-public safety and leadership, and that’s what Donald Trump and I want to bring back to the White House.”

Having travelled to Wisconsin, Ms Harris was not present at day two of the convention in Chicago. But the event did feature a jubilant and star-studded roll call, with delegates from each state – as well as US territories – symbolically casting a vote for Ms Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in the arena.

Though the vice-president formally clinched her party’s nomination earlier this month, the symbolic gesture quickly turned into a dance party.

Lil Jon performed Turn Down For What before Georgia’s announced its vote. Actor Sean Astin spoke during Indiana’s turn, a nod to his role in the cult classic American football film Rudy, which is set in the state.

An on-stage DJ spun songs for each state as delegates, on their feet and wearing bracelets that flashed red and white, delivered short speeches about why they were supporting Ms Harris and Mr Walz.

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The vice-president then virtually addressed the crowd from her rally in Milwaukee – 90 miles away – at the same venue where Trump accepted his party’s nomination four weeks ago.

“We are so honoured to be your nominees,” she said of herself and Mr Walz. “I’ll see you in two days, Chicago.”

Before the Obamas gave their speeches, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Ms Harris’s husband, made his own appearance to share personal stories about the vice-president – including how they were set up on a blind date by one of his clients in 2013.

He spoke about their “big, beautiful, blended family”, referring to his son, Cole, and daughter, Ella, from his first marriage. He described Ms Harris as a “joyful warrior” and a supportive parent who put their family first despite the demands of her job.

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Ms Harris, who was flying back from her rally during her husband’s speech, kept Air Force Two in the air so she could watch his speech live, the White House said.

Mr Emhoff said the two would celebrate their 10th anniversary on Thursday night, when Ms Harris formally accepts the party’s nomination in a primetime speech.

“Kamala was exactly the right person for me at an important moment in my life,” he said. “And at this moment in our nation’s history, she is exactly the right president.”

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A Bangladeshi cricket star and ousted lawmaker has taken to the field for the first time since mass anti-government protests toppled his party.

Shakib Al Hasan, 37, was cleared by Bangladesh’s new interim government last week to face Pakistan in a two-match Test series starting on Wednesday.

The former MP played despite earlier calls by protesters to oust cricket players they accused of being loyal to former leader Sheikh Hasina.

Earlier this month, Ms Hasina was forced to resign as prime minister and flee the country.

Shakib is considered one of his country’s greatest sportsmen, with 4,505 runs in 67 Test matches. As a spin bowler, he holds the record for most Test wickets in Bangladesh’s history with 237.

In January, he had won an uncontested election to become a member of parliament for the then-ruling Awami League party.

So far, he has remained silent on the political crisis that has unfolded in his country, which saw hundreds of people killed in clashes with security forces.

Some Bangladeshis in Dhaka had earlier this month protested against cricket board members they accused of being loyal to Sheikh Hasina.

Shakib in particular was criticised by former Bangladesh Cricket Board member Rafiqul Islam.

“When students were being killed, he never protested. Many of these students considered him an icon. He should have come home first and gave an explanation why he was silent,” he told news agency AFP.

However, the country’s new de facto sports minister – 26-year-old student leader Asif Mahmud – said the team should be “formed on merit”.

Ahead of the series, Bangladesh captain Najmul Hossain Shanto said the political crisis would not affect Shakib’s performance.

“He has played this game for so long so he knows his role and how to prepare himself. I am not thinking about his political career – we all treat him as a cricketer,” he told a news conference.

“I hope he will do something special in this series,” he added.

Shakib joined the squad in Pakistan last week, after featuring in the Global T20 League in Canada, where Bangladeshis also chanted slogans against him.

Eight months ago, he won a seat for the ruling party in his home town of Magura in an election that was boycotted by opposition party.

But his brief political career was curtailed earlier this month by mass demonstrations against a controversial job quota law.

The deadly protests then escalated into country-wide dissatisfaction against then prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her 15 years of authoritarian rule. Within weeks, the ruling Awami League party was dissolved and its MPs ousted from parliaments.

The unrest in Dhaka has prevented the Bangladeshi cricket team from training and Pakistan’s Cricket Board has invited them to arrive four days early to make up for their lack of preparation.

The two countries will play two Test matches in August and September.

With just three months to go before the 2024 election, thousands of people have gathered in Chicago this week to support Vice-President Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention.

After the first two days of the party’s celebration, Democrats are gathering at the United Center Arena on Wednesday to hear from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the party’s nominee for vice-president.

The evening will feature a full slate of prominent Democrats, including rising stars Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The convention started off on Monday with prime-time remarks from President Joe Biden – an emotional speech that was frequently interrupted by thunderous applause and chants of “Thank you Joe”.

Tuesday brought the ceremonial roll call vote in which state delegations declared their support for the Harris-Walz ticket, and the evening closed with rousing speeches from Barack and Michelle Obama.

The party has already officially nominated Vice-President Harris as its candidate after President Biden dropped out of the race. The in-person roll call on Tuesday was a formality, with performances from celebrities including rapper Lil Jon.

US political conventions, which happens every four years before a presidential election, date back to the 1830s, when a group of Democratic delegates supporting President Andrew Jackson gathered in Baltimore to nominate him for a second term.

Here’s what to know.

Wednesday’s line-up features former President Bill Clinton, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

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

Before Mr Walz speaks, delegates will hear from prominent US senators, including Cory Booker of New Jersey, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

Two Democratic governors – Josh Shaprio of Pennsylvania and Wes Moore of Maryland – who represent the next generation of party leadership will also have prominent roles.

But the night will not only feature Democrats.

Olivia Troye, a Trump administration official, and Geoff Duncan, a Republican who served as Georgia’s lieutenant governor until 2023, will give remarks as well.

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”.

After the convention experienced a number of delays on Monday, DNC organisers said that the programme would begin earlier Tuesday, though speakers still ran late in the evening.

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During back-to-back speeches on Tuesday, Barack and Michelle Obama mixed gags with serious exhortations to Democrats to get out and vote in November – pointing out that Ms Harris was in a close race with Republican Donald Trump.

“Hope is making a comeback,” said Mrs Obama. This was a contrast with the “bluster and chaos” of Trump’s time in the White House, Mr Obama added.

Another of the speakers was Trump’s former spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham, who said she had switched to voting for Ms Harris, explaining: “I couldn’t be part of the insanity any longer.”

And America’s Second Gentleman, Doug Emhoff, was introduced to the stage by his son Cole, who called him a “goofy dad”. Mr Emhoff went on to laud his wife, Ms Harris, as the “right person” for him and the presidency alike.

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On Monday, the convention heard from Mr Biden. During an emotional defence of his presidency, he said: “America, I gave my best to you.”

Hillary Clinton, who was presidential candidate in 2016, offered her own tribute to Mr Biden the same evening, and voiced her hope that Ms Harris could finally break the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” in the US by becoming the first female president.

Others who spoke that night included progressive lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Americans affected by abortion bans in Republican-controlled states.

Because Ms Harris and Mr Walz were already nominated ahead of the event, this year’s convention is focused on speeches from prominent Democrats and the adoption of the party’s platform.

Delegates are working 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.

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 can 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.

Around 50,000 people are expected at 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 confirmed.

Demonstrations have been taking place outside the DNC venue centre, focusing on opposition to US support of Israel’s war in Gaza.

A protest on Tuesday near Chicago’s Israeli consulate culminated in scuffles between demonstrators and police and led to several arrests.

Earlier, thousands of marchers took to the streets for a mostly peaceful protest on Monday, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to US support for Israel. Several were arrested when dozens of them broke through a security fence.

The turnout appeared to be well below the tens of thousands that organisers had hoped for and short of the 15,000 they claimed were there.

In that night’s address, Mr Biden acknowledged that the activists “have a point”, going on to say that “a lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides”.

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The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in India’s Kolkata city earlier this month has sparked massive outrage in the country, with tens of thousands of people protesting on the streets, demanding justice. BBC Hindi spoke to the doctor’s parents who remember their daughter as a clever, young woman who wanted to lead a good life and take care of her family.

“Please make sure dad takes his medicines on time. Don’t worry about me.”

This was the last thing the 31-year-old doctor said to her mother, hours before she was brutally assaulted in a hospital where she worked.

“The next day, we tried reaching her but the phone kept ringing,” the mother told the BBC at their family home in a narrow alley, a few kilometres from Kolkata.

The same morning, the doctor’s partially-clothed body was discovered in the seminar hall, bearing extensive injuries. A hospital volunteer worker has been arrested in connection with the crime.

The incident has sparked massive outrage across the country, with protests in several major cities. At the weekend, doctors across hospitals in India observed a nation-wide strike called by the Indian Medical Association (IMA), with only emergency services available at major hospitals.

The family say they feel hollowed out by their loss.

“At the age of 62, all my dreams have been shattered,” her father told the BBC.

Since their daughter’s horrific murder, their house, located in a respectable neighbourhood, has become the focus of intense media scrutiny.

Behind a police barricade stand dozens of journalists and camera crew, hoping to capture the parents in case they step out.

A group of 10 to 15 police officers perpetually stand guard to ensure the cameras do not take photos of the victim’s house.

The crime took place on the night of 9 August, when the woman, who was a junior doctor at the city’s RG Kar Medical College, had gone to a seminar room to rest after a gruelling 36-hour shift.

Her parents remembered how the young doctor, their only child, was a passionate student who worked extremely hard to become a doctor.

“We come from a lower middle-class background and built everything on our own. When she was little, we struggled financially,” said the father, who is a tailor.

The living room where he sat was cluttered with tools from his profession – a sewing machine, spools of thread and a heavy iron. There were scraps of fabrics scattered on the floor.

There were times when the family did not have money to even buy pomegranates, their daughter’s favourite fruit, he continued.

“But she could never bring herself to ask for anything for herself.”

“People would say, ‘You can’t make your daughter a doctor’. But my daughter proved everyone wrong and got admission in a government-run medical college,” he added, breaking down. A relative tried to console him.

The mother recalled how her daughter would write in her diary every night before going to bed.

“She wrote that she wanted to win a gold medal for her medical degree. She wanted to lead a good life and take care of us too,” she said softly.

And she did.

The father, who is a high blood-pressure patient, said their daughter always made sure he took his medicines on time.

“Once I ran out of medicine and thought I’d just buy it the next day. But she found out, and even though it was around 10 or 11pm at night, she said no-one will eat until the medicine is here,” he said.

“That’s how she was – she never let me worry about anything.”

Her mother listened intently, her hands repeatedly touching a gold bangle on her wrist – a bangle she had bought with her daughter.

The parents said their daughter’s marriage had almost been finalised. “But she would tell us not to worry and say she would continue to take care of all our expenses even after marriage,” the father said.

As he spoke those words, the mother began to weep, her soft sobs echoing in the background.

Occasionally, her eyes would wander to the staircase, leading up to their daughter’s room.

The door has remained shut since 10 August and the parents have not set foot there since the news of her death.

They say they still can’t believe that something “so barbaric” could happen to their daughter at her workplace.

“The hospital should be a safe place,” the father said.

Violence against women is a major issue in India – an average of 90 rapes a day were reported in 2022, according to government data.

The parents said their daughter’s death had brought back memories of a 2012 case when a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern was gang-raped on a moving bus in capital Delhi. Her injuries were fatal.

Following the assault – which made global headlines and led to weeks of protests – India tightened laws against sexual violence.

But reported cases of sexual assault have gone up and access to justice still remains a challenge for women.

Last week, thousands participated in a Reclaim the Night march held in Kolkata to demand safety for women across the country.

The doctor’s case has also put a spotlight on challenges faced by healthcare workers, who have demanded a thorough and impartial investigation into the murder and a federal law to protect them – especially women – at work.

Federal Health Minister JP Nadda has assured doctors that he will bring in strict measures to ensure better safety in their professional environments.

But for the parents of the doctor, it’s too little too late.

“We want the harshest punishment for the culprit,” the father said.

“Our state, our country and the whole world is asking for justice for our daughter.”

A cult member who beat her two-year-old daughter to death over her failure to properly complete chores in Australia has been sentenced to nine years in jail.

Tillie Craig disappeared from the Ministry of God farm in 1987, sparking a decades-long search by her father, who was told she’d been adopted.

In reality, Tillie had been killed with a plastic pipe. Her remains were then allegedly burned by the sect’s leader and scattered at the commune in regional New South Wales (NSW).

Ellen Rachel Craig, 62, was charged with her daughter’s murder in 2022 after a tip-off to police. She later pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.

When sentencing Craig on Wednesday, Justice Natalie Adams accepted that Craig had not intended to cause serious harm to Tillie, but said calling her death a tragedy would be “a gross understatement”.

“She died at the hands of someone whose role it was to protect her,” she told the NSW Supreme Court.

According to the agreed facts read in court, children at the commune were required to do chores, regardless of their age, and were often disciplined with a piece of black pipe.

On 7 July, 1987, Tillie had been sweeping when her mother – “unhappy” with the quality of the work – beat her to death.

Craig, who was 25 at the time, later brought her daughter inside and said, “She’s stopped breathing” and “Oh no, no she’s gone”.

The court heard she laid Tillie in a bathtub and waited for the cult leader – known as Alexander Wilon or “Papa” – to return, at which point he prayed for the resurrection of the girl.

Wilon is then accused of cremating Tillie before scattering her ashes and forbidding the cult members from speaking of what happened.

He was charged with being an accessory to murder – and later over separate sexual assault allegations – but the terminally ill man has since been declared unfit to stand trial.

Craig was expelled from the cult by November 1987 and travelled to her home country of New Zealand, where she lived under several aliases until her arrest and extradition in 2021.

In a segment of a letter that was read to the court Craig apologised for her crime, claiming “something happened” to her as a mother at the farm.

“My actions were horrible, terrible, horrific.”

“I will never forgive myself for what I have done,” she wrote, adding that she wanted “justice” for her daughter and was “at peace” with her imprisonment.

Tillie’s father, Gerard Stanhope – who visited the cult several times during his desperate search for his daughter – did not know she had died until his ex-partner was arrested.

“I spent years… waking up every day with the hope in my heart that I would find her, and going to bed devastated that I was unable to do so,” Stanhope said in a victim impact statement read to the court, as reported by SMH.

“I didn’t find out until more than 30 years later that my daughter was already gone.”

Craig will be eligible for parole after six years in custody, in November 2027.

Authorities in Pakistan have arrested a man on suspicion of cyber terrorism, in relation to disinformation thought to have fuelled UK unrest.

Police told the BBC that Farhan Asif was linked to a website which gave a false name for the suspected Southport attacker and suggested incorrectly that he was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a small boat.

The article, published on the website Channel3Now in the hours after the attack, was widely quoted in viral posts on social media.

Unrest broke out in England and Northern Ireland after the fatal stabbing attack, in which three young girls died.

On raiding Mr Asif’s property, the police recovered 2 laptops and a mobile phone used by Mr Asif.

After analysing the devices, the police say that the account on X (formerly Twitter) for Channel3Now was found active.

On Tuesday, police in Lahore said they had questioned Mr Asif about the article.

Mr Asif said he had written it based on information copied from a UK-based social media account without verifying it, a police officer told the BBC.

The officer told the BBC that Mr Asif said that he ran the website alone.

The police report states that Mr Asif told them that he runs the X account with the purpose of sharing national and international news, and that he picked up the alleged tweet from another twitter user – without checking the authenticity of the information before sharing.

The police say that he used his account “with the intent to glorify the incident about the arrest of a Muslim asylum seeker by police… and created a sense of fear, panic, insecurity in the Government and the public” and it is on this basis that they have filed a case against him.

The police report also states that “Farhan Asif admitted to providing misleading information to the BBC regarding his accomplices in an attempt to divert blame to others.”

Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency has since taken up the case and will investigate whether anyone further is involved.

BBC Verify previously tracked down several people linked to Channel3Now and questioned a person who claimed to be “management” at the site.

That person told the BBC that the publication of the false name “shouldn’t have happened, but it was an error, not intentional”.

False information about the attacker spread online after three young girls were killed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on 29 July.

Violent disorder then broke out in Southport before spreading to towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland, fuelled by misinformation, the far-right and anti-immigration sentiment.

According to the latest Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) figure on Tuesday, 494 people have been charged in relation to the recent rioting and unrest.

More than 130 people have already been sentenced with most sent to jail.

An ex-mayor accused of spying for China and having ties with criminal syndicates has fled the Philippines, stirring fury.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr said Wednesday that “heads will roll” after officials admitted Alice Guo had left the country undetected one month ago and travelled to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Mr Marcos said her departure “laid bare the corruption that undermines our justice system and erodes the people’s trust”.

Ms Guo has been out of public view since July when a Senate panel investigating her alleged links to scam centres and online casinos ordered her arrest for refusing to testify in its enquiry.

She is accused of allowing human trafficking syndicates and scam centres to operate in her town by masquerading as online casinos.

Senators have also accused her of being an operative or spy for China, citing her “opaque” answers to questions about her Chinese parentage.

Police have filed criminal complaints against her, while the Philippines’ anti-graft body recently dismissed her from office citing “grave misconduct”.

She has denied all the allegations.

Ms Guo left the Philippines “illegally” and skipped border checks, according to the country’s Bureau of Immigration, which said it found out about her travels abroad through intelligence sources.

Mr Marcos said he would “expose the culprits who have betrayed the people’s trust and aided in her flight.”

He also ordered the cancellation of Ms Guo’s Philippine passport.

Senator Risa Hontiveros, who has been leading the investigation on the Philippines’ scam centres since May, said it is unacceptable for Ms Guo to slip past immigration checks.

“The nerve of this fake Filipino, using a Philippine passport to escape,” she said.

Ms Guo came under scrutiny in March after authorities uncovered a huge scam centre and human trafficking operation in her sleepy town of Bamban, north of Manila.

The illegal operations were hidden in Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, or “Pogo” firms, that stood on land owned by Ms Guo’s family.

Prior to that, Ms Guo was relatively unknown and had not held public office before being elected mayor in 2022. She claims she grew up sheltered in the family’s pig farm in Bamban.

While Pogos are not illegal, they are increasingly being exposed as cover for other crimes. The firms, which mostly cater to mainland Chinese clients, flourished under former president Rodrigo Duterte, who sought close economic and political ties with Beijing.

But Mr Duterte’s successor, Mr Marcos, reversed the country’s foreign policy direction and has cracked down on Pogo-linked crimes since assuming office in 2022.

Nationalist sentiment is also growing in the Philippines, as its dispute with China over reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea continue to fester.

Earlier this week, Manila and Beijing traded fresh allegations of ship ramming in the resource-rich waters.

The daughter of one of the six Israeli hostages whose bodies were brought back from Gaza by Israel’s military on Tuesday has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of putting “political priorities” ahead of a ceasefire and hostage release deal.

Inbal Albini Peri told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that her 80-year-old father Chaim and his friends would have been among the first people freed under any agreement with Hamas and that they “should have come back alive”.

Mr Netanyahu has insisted he is making every effort to bring back all of the remaining hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s 7 October attack.

But Ms Albini Peri said: “I don’t believe a word he is saying.”

“I want him to say to my family and all the other families: ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

In her interview, Ms Peri did not explicitly explain what she meant by “political priorities”.

Mr Netanyahu’s far-right allies have vowed to pull out of his coalition, undermining his chances of staying in power, if he agrees to release large numbers of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in return for hostages.

On Tuesday evening, a senior US administration official criticised the prime minister for making what they called “maximalist statements” that were “not constructive to getting a ceasefire deal across the finish line”.

It followed reported comments by Mr Netanyahu suggesting he had told the US secretary of state that Israeli forces must stay in strategic parts of Gaza, which Hamas rejects.

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 others were taken hostage.

More than 40,170 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

A 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 105 hostages are still being held, 34 of whom are presumed dead.

Chaim Peri lived in Kibbutz Nir Oz, which was one of the 26 communities and towns close to the Gaza perimeter fence targeted by Hamas on 7 October.

The film lecturer and lifelong peace activist was abducted after he voluntarily left the saferoom of his home to protect his wife, Osnat, who was hiding inside. His 34-year-old son, Danny Darlington, was also killed in the attack.

In December, Hamas’s military wing released a video showing Mr Peri along with two other elderly hostages from Nir Oz – Yoram Metzger and Amiram Cooper. Mr Peri could be seen addressing the camera and calling for their release.

“That is more or less the last that we heard from him. Now we know that he probably died around February,” Inbal Peri told the BBC.

In June, the Israeli military informed the family that Mr Peri, Mr Metzger, Mr Cooper and British-Israeli Nadav Popplewell had been killed during an operation in the Khan Younis area, in southern Gaza, citing intelligence it had gathered.

On Tuesday morning, Ms Peri was told that Israeli troops had recovered the bodies of her father and five other hostages – Mr Metzger, Mr Popplewell, Alexander Dancyg, Avraham Munder and Yagev Buchshtab – from underground tunnels in Khan Younis.

“For my family it’s maybe a small closure. It’s not the right word to say ‘happy’, but for us it is the end of the way and we are burying our father in the place that he loved so much,” she said.

“But there are other hostages that are still alive, and the chances that will come back alive are getting smaller.”

Ms Peri said she believed that her father and his friends from Nir Oz also should have come home alive as part of a new hostage release deal, which the US, Qatar and Egypt were trying to broker before her father was thought to have died and are continuing to do now.

“It only depended on our government and the mental standing of our prime minister, who had different priorities. He had political priorities. And that makes us very, very angry and frustrated.

“I’m not saying that we could really stop the war, but we had to do the negotiations instead of keeping on fighting. We have seen for over 10 months that it’s not working.”

When asked if she had put this directly to Mr Netanyahu or other members of his government, she replied: “Many people from the government did talk to us and try to help. But when the head is wrong, it doesn’t matter.”

She added: “We want our government and our prime minister to go ahead and have a deal, to have something to talk about, instead of risking over and over again our soldiers to bring back bodies. We don’t want any more soldiers to be killed.”

“Bring back all the hostages because they are still alive. And their time is really running out.”

On Tuesday night, Mr Netanyahu’s office said he had told hostages’ families in Jerusalem that “the first thing is to eliminate Hama and achieve victory”.

“The second thing is that we are, at the same time, making an effort to return the hostages, on terms that will allow for the maximum number of hostages being released in the first stage of the deal. I say this clearly: This is an objective that I have set,” he added.

“However, the other thing is to preserve our strategic security assets in the face of major domestic and foreign pressure, and we are doing so.”

Romanian police have searched the houses of controversial influencer Andrew Tate as part of an investigation into new allegations against him.

The internet personality was already awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking, but could potentially now face additional charges of sex with, and trafficking in, underage persons, as well as money-laundering and attempting to influence witnesses, prosecutors say.

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who have a massive following on social media, have denied all previous charges against them.

They were first detained in Romania in December 2022, then released from house arrest in August 2023.

According to a statement from DIICOT, the special prosecution service of the Romanian Organised Crime Directorate, four houses were searched on Wednesday morning in the capital, Bucharest, and in Ilfov county.

The BBC understands that this investigation relates to Andrew Tate and that these investigations have been going on for some time.

In an apparent response to the raid, the influencer posted on X (formerly Twitter): “The Matrix is real. And they have a tried and true playbook.

“Slander is their number one tool and the process is the punishment. But unfortunately for them, Good always wins in the end.”

Andrew Tate is a self-described misogynist and was previously banned from social media platforms for expressing misogynistic views.

He has repeatedly claimed Romanian prosecutors have no evidence against him and there is a conspiracy to silence him.

The Tate brothers, former kickboxers who are dual UK-US nationals, are accused of exploiting women via an adult content business, which prosecutors allege operated as a criminal group.

Two female Romanian associates were also named alongside the brothers in an indictment published in June last year, and seven alleged victims were identified.

The internet personalities are also wanted in the UK in connection with separate and unrelated sexual offences allegedly committed there.

A labour dispute between Canada’s two main national rail carriers and workers could lead to a possible lockout as soon as Thursday morning, threatening crucial supply chains across North America.

Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) plan to lock out nearly 9,300 workers as of 00:01 EST (04:01 GMT) failing an eleventh-hour deal.

Canada sends around 75% of all the goods it exports to the US, mostly over rail, and a prolonged dispute could disrupt shipments of a wide range of goods, from grains and beans to potash, coal and timber.

Negotiations have stalled over shift scheduling, fatigue provisions and wages.

Dozens of industry and trade organisations warned last week in an open letter that the disruption would have “an immediate impact” from coast-to-coast and damage Canada’s reputation as a trading partner.

“Factoring in the millions of Canadian jobs that would be impacted, the magnitude of the disruption is daunting,” it said.

On Tuesday, a joint statement from the US and Canadian chambers of commerce warned of the potential “devastating” impact of the stoppage.

It “will be devastating to Canadian businesses and families and impose significant impacts on the US economy”, they said.

A group of agriculture trade associations has urged Ottawa to step in, but the government has declined so far.

Federal Labour Minister Steve MacKinnon is meeting both sides this week but has resisted calls for binding arbitration.

Labour agreements for both railways expired at the end of last year.

Both CPKC and CN have told the union they will begin locking out members on Thursday. Teamsters Canada Rail Conference separately issued a 72-hour strike notice to CPKC on Sunday.

Rail networks in the US and Mexico will continue to operate but a stoppage north of the border could be felt across North America.

On Monday, US Transport Secretary Peter said on X/Twitter that he is monitoring rail negotiations and the potential impact on the cross-border flow of goods.

Some C$380bn (£214bn) in goods is moved by rail each year and railways move half of the country’s goods for export, according to the Railway Association of Canada.

This week, both CPKC and CN have already begun pausing some shipments in preparation for a stoppage. Embargoes are now in place on chemicals such as ammonia, used as a fertiliser, and chlorine, used in water treatment, to avoid them being stranded on the rails if work stops.

Shipping firm Maersk on Monday stopped accepting shipments destined for Canada meant to move by rail and that could not be transported on heavy trucks instead.

The Canadian Pork Council warned that since the industry relies on rail to get feed to its animals, their welfare is at risk.

“Canada’s red meat processors need stable, reliable supply chains to run their businesses,” said Chris White, CEO, Canadian Meat Council in a statement.

“Interruption in service will result in millions of dollars in losses, irreversible reputational damage, environmental disposal challenges, and enormous waste.”

The shutdown could also snarl commuter transit in major Canadian cities like Toronto or Montreal as some dispatchers will be on a work stoppage.

Hollywood stars Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are divorcing after two years of marriage.

Lopez filed for divorce on Tuesday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, according to court documents seen by the BBC.

The pair – dubbed Bennifer by tabloids – formally tied the knot in Las Vegas in July 2022 and held a larger wedding ceremony in Georgia the following month.

Their romance began after they met while working on the set of the 2003 crime caper Gigli. They had originally planned to marry that year, but called off their relationship early in 2004.

Almost two decades later they rekindled their relationship.

“Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient,” Lopez said in 2022 after announcing the Las Vegas wedding.

The BBC has contacted their representatives for comment.

A court filing in the case says Lopez or her attorney has to notify Affleck with a copy of her petition to dissolve their marriage.

Media reports indicate Lopez, who had legally changed her last name to Affleck, did not list any details of a prenuptial agreement in her petition for divorce.

A document filed in LA’s Superior Court in the case says both Lopez, 55, and Affleck, 52, must share financial information, including their current income, expenses, properties and debts.

The document says both are mandated to divulge any changes to their finances “until there is a final agreement about all financial issues in your case”.

The court gave Lopez 60 days to file a financial disclosure and Affleck will have another 60 days after she submits her information to do likewise.

The filing says if either fails to report or update financial information, it could result in a court-imposed sanction.

There has been months of speculation over their relationship. They reportedly put their Beverly Hills mansion up for sale at $65m (£50m) and were pictured out separately not wearing their wedding rings.

Affleck, a two-time Oscar winner, was previously married to the actress Jennifer Garner, who he met on the set of 2001 romance Pearl Harbor. They split in 2015 after a decade of marriage and have three children together.

Lopez has been married four times, first to Cuban-born waiter Ojani Noa from 1997-98; then her former back-up dancer Cris Judd from 2001-03; and to singer Marc Anthony, with whom she had twins, from 2004-14.

The singer and actress, known as J.Lo, was also once engaged to New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez.

Kamala Harris’s White House run received a boost from the Obama double-act at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening, when attendees also saw party members break into dance and heard speeches from Republican defectors.

Rapper Lil Jon added some extra celebrity firepower to the roll call as Democratic delegates went through the formal process of giving Ms Harris their backing.

Monday night included an emotional send-off from President Joe Biden, who reflected on the decades he had spent at the top of US politics before he stepped aside for Kamala Harris to take on the Democratic presidential candidacy.

But the next evening, the Obamas were eager to imbue the convention with positive messaging about the future – and to land a few gags at Donald Trump’s expense.

Here is a look back at some of the night’s memorable moments.

During back-to-back speeches, Barack and Michelle Obama mixed gags with serious exhortations to Democrats to get out and vote in November – pointing out that Ms Harris was in a close race with Donald Trump.

Mr Obama characterised the Republican presidential candidate as being selfish and dangerous, quipping that he was obsessed with crowd sizes.

• Barack and Michelle Obama electrify Democrats but warn of tight race

And Mrs Obama mocked Trump for his use of the term “black jobs” on the campaign trail. She suggested that Trump might himself be seeking one of those jobs – in a reference to her husband’s previous tenure of the White House.

By contrast, Ms Harris represented “hope”, Ms Obama said, echoing her husband’s campaign messaging from 2008.

One of the night’s speakers was none other than Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who resigned in the wake of the attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021.

Ms Grisham said she would vote for Ms Harris in November, and explained her defection by saying: “I couldn’t be part of the insanity any longer.”

She launched her own broadside at Trump, accusing him of having “no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth”.

Other Republicans who had crossed the political aisle made speeches, too – including Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona. Whether their interventions will sway Republicans is far from certain, given the tight grip that Trump and his wing have on their party.

The ex-president’s allies made sure to launch fresh barbs of their own. Trump’s presidential running mate JD Vance used a news conference to attack Harris over the “failures” of her vice-presidency, focusing on crime and public safety.

America’s Second Gentleman had his own moment in the spotlight.

Ms Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff was introduced to the stage by his son Cole, who said their “blended family” had adjusted to their high-profile life in Washington.

“It felt like Doug was a bit out of place on Capitol Hill,” said Cole, the stepson of Ms Harris. “I thought, ‘What is my goofy dad doing here?’ But he embraced it.”

• Doug Emhoff could be first US First Gentleman

Mr Emhoff went on to laud his wife as the “right person” for him and for the US alike.

Meanwhile, a plane carrying Ms Harris herself – who had left a rally in Wisconsin – is reported to have circled for about 10 minutes in the air so that she could finish watch her husband’s speech before landing.

Adding some extra stardust to the political event were filmmaker Spike Lee and actress Eva Longoria, among other famous faces.

Lil Jon showed up, too, performing a ceremonial duty for his home state during a rap that got Democrats dancing in the stands.

When asked which person Georgia was giving its 123 votes, he endorsed Ms Harris and sang bars of his hit Turn Down For What.

Convention attendees also saw the moves of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who boogied his way to the stage to giggles in the room.

Bernie Sanders gave his own speech on Tuesday night – but the energy in the arena was minimal. A murmur of people talking could be heard at the same time.

That is in contrast to the hero’s welcome that the veteran senator received in 2016, the year he challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then, his supporters streamed into the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.

Eight years later, Mr Sanders could still be witnessed railing against oligarchs and corporate interests, but the atmosphere was very different.

One explanation was that the building was filled with delegates who originally supported Joe Biden – rather than the Sanders faithful. But it could also signal that the senator has no clear successor to lead the Democratic progressive left.

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Former President Barack Obama will return to the Democratic National Convention stage in his hometown of Chicago to deliver the keynote address on Tuesday, 20 years after his convention debut thrust him into the national spotlight.

It’s a tricky moment for one of the party’s most popular figures.

He will use his speech to touch on the historic nature of Kamala Harris’s candidacy – the first female of colour to lead the ticket – as a continuation of his legacy. But he must also pay tribute to his own vice-president and the man responsible for her rise – President Joe Biden.

Mr Obama, 63, and Ms Harris, 59, have moved in overlapping political orbits as early as his days as an Illinois state senator running for the US Senate. The two, both on the rise in their nascent political careers, met at a California fundraiser in 2004.

As an early supporter, Ms Harris would later volunteer for his presidential campaign and help power his first victory in 2008. Buoyed by party enthusiasm for Ms Harris’s campaign, Mr Obama – and his popular wife Michelle Obama – will try to return the favour and help propel her to the Oval Office.

“I think he can excite people about her and about the stakes [of the election] and I think that’s what he intends to do today,” David Plouffe, Mr Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and a now Harris campaign adviser, told Axios.

Here’s a look at key moments in their two-decade relationship.

Ms Harris, then a San Francisco district attorney, was in the crowd of more than 15,000 people as then-junior senator announced his longshot bid for the White House on the steps of the Old State Capitol in the Illinois capital city of Springfield in February 2007. She would go on to knock on doors and raise money for Mr Obama ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2008, later serving as his California campaign co-chair.

Mr Obama lent her some of his national star power two years later when she mounted a statewide bid for attorney general against Republican Steve Cooley, a popular Los Angeles district attorney. She had been affectionately referred to as “the female Barack Obama” by longtime PBS News anchor Gwen Ifill, but remained locked in a tight contest.

Mr Obama, who would endure widespread congressional losses in that election year, made time to appear at a Los Angeles rally in October 2010 in which he referred to Ms Harris as “dear, dear friend of mine”.

“I want everybody to do right by her,” he told the crowd. Ms Harris eked out a victory by less than a percentage point, setting her on a path toward higher office.

Mr Obama gave Ms Harris a coveted speaking role at the 2012 Democratic National Convention for his re-election.

She had already made a name for herself in California in barrier-breaking roles as the first person of colour or woman to serve as San Francisco’s district attorney. She was also the first African American and South Asian American elected as the state’s top lawyer.

But as attorney general, she had made headlines for standing firm in negotiations on a financial settlement between state attorneys general and the banks responsible for the foreclosure crisis, securing more than $25 billion on behalf of homeowners.

She spoke of her accomplishment, weaving in her personal story, praising Mr Obama for standing up for Americans during the housing crisis and attacking his Republican challenger Mitt Romney as an ally of Wall Street.

“We need to move forward.” she said in her speech, a phrase she has reprised in her 2024 campaign. “President Obama will fight for working families. He will fight to level the economic playing field and fight to give every American the same fair shot my family had.”

Her high-profile remarks came just before former President Bill Clinton, landing a spot that was guaranteed to catch the attention of national Democrats, powerbrokers and key donors.

Though Mr Obama quietly supported Ms Harris as she rose through California politics, he raised eyebrows in 2013 when he referred to her as “the best looking attorney general in the country”.

“You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” the president said at a San Francisco fundraiser. “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”

He phoned Ms Harris hours later to apologise for the comment.

“They are old friends and good friends and he did not want in any way to diminish” her accomplishments, White House spokesman Jay Carney later told reporters.

At the height of his Democratic power in 2016, finishing his second term as president, Mr Obama waded into the contentious California Senate race to endorse Ms Harris, who launched a bid to replace retiring Senator Barbara Boxer.

In July of that year, he and Vice-President Joe Biden formally announced their support for Ms Harris, who was running against fellow Democrat and US Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. In California’s primary system, the two top vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party.

“Kamala is a lifelong courtroom prosecutor with only one client: the people of the State of California. That’s the approach she’ll take to the United States Senate,” Mr Obama said in a statement released by the Harris campaign.

Mr Biden said he had known her through his son Beau Biden, who forged a friendship with Ms Harris as Delaware’s attorney general during their mortgage settlement negotiations.

Ms Harris handily won the election, and became only the second black female to serve in the US Senate.

Ms Harris’ 2020 presidential primary bid began as a spectacle, launched in her hometown of Oakland, California, before a crowd of 20,000 people in 2019. Like others in the crowded field of candidates vying for the Democratic nomination, she met with Mr Obama to lay out her case for her candidacy.

But Mr Obama, whose own vice-president was mounting an election bid, wanted to stay out of the political fray and wait until the party selected its nominee before offering his coveted endorsement.

Ms Harris’s campaign collapsed in less than a year, and Joe Biden would offer her a political reprieve as his running mate. Mr Obama reportedly supported Mr Biden’s selection of Ms Harris, despite their early debate clash over the former vice-president’s record on school desegregation.

Mr Obama said his former vice-president “nailed this decision” in selecting Ms Harris.

“Choosing a vice-president is the first important decision a president makes. When you’re in the Oval Office, weighing the toughest issues, and the choice you make will affect the lives and livelihoods of the entire country — you need someone with you who’s got the judgement and the character to make the right call,” Mr Obama said in a statement at the time.

Since 2020, Mr Obama has been in regular touch with Ms Harris, providing counsel and serving as a sounding board whenever she’s asked.

The Obamas waited several days to endorse Ms Harris until it was clear that there were no challengers and she was the party’s choice. The couple released a video of them calling her to formally announce their support for her campaign.

“We’ve known each other for 20 years. I’ve watched how you have excelled in every position you’ve been in,” Mr Obama told her in the phone call. “Just to see all that hard work be recognised is something that we couldn’t be more thrilled about. And so the main thing we wanted to do was just let you know and let Doug [Emhoff] know, our soon-to-be first gentleman, that we are gonna do everything we can to help propel you into the presidency.”

Over the last few months, the two have been in close contact as Mr Obama has sought to offer support for her campaign, including policy or strategic advice, fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts.

Ms Harris has also relied on many of Mr Obama’s old hands to help run her campaign. Eric Holder, who served as Mr Obama’s attorney general, led efforts to vet Ms Harris’s shortlist for vice-president, while Mr Plouffe is now serving as one of her most senior advisers.

The Harris campaign has also enlisted other Obama aides including Jennifer O’Malley Dillion, her campaign chairwoman, and senior adviser Stephanie Cutter. Former Obama communications director Jennifer Palmieri is also helping Ms Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff.

A body recovered near the luxury yacht which sank off the coast of Sicily is believed to be that of chef Recaldo Thomas.

The Canadian-Antiguan national was understood to be one of 22 people aboard the Bayesian when it sank during a violent storm on Monday.

His friend Gareth Williams described him as well-loved and kind, with “the deepest, most sultry voice in the world, and a smile that lit up the room”.

Divers are struggling to reach the cabins of the sunken vessel as they search for six missing passengers including the British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and the Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer.

British investigators arrived in Italy on Tuesday to assess what happened during the extreme weather that hit the yacht.

The Bayesian capsized around 700m (2,300ft) from Porticello, just east of Sicily’s capital Palermo, early on Monday morning. It now lies on the seabed at the depth of 50m.

Of the 22 people on board, 15 survived – including a British mother who described holding her baby girl above the surface of the sea to save her from drowning.

Dr Fabio Genco was part of the local emergency medical service that treated the survivors.

He told the BBC’s Newsnight programme that the word all of them “kept repeating was the ‘darkness’ during the shipwreck.”

“They spoke of about five minutes, from three to five minutes, from the moment the boat was lifted, raised by the waves of the sea until it sank.”

Dr Genco added that all the survivors had been discharged from hospital.

• Follow live updates here
• Who are the missing and rescued?
• What might have caused the yacht to sink?
• ‘For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea’ – Sicily yacht survivor
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So far only one body, that of Recaldo Thomas, has been found.

Mr Williams said he had known the chef for 30 years as they had grown up together in Antigua, where Thomas lived during yachting’s off-season.

“He told me just the other day that he needed to work two more seasons to fix up his late parents’ house. He loved yachting, but he was tired,” Mr Williams told the BBC’s Insaf Abbas.

Another friend, Eli Fuller, said he first met the chef 25 years ago and that he was a role model to young people.

“Personality was very important in his job. The world’s richest people want to hang out with someone social. He was sought after,” Mr Fuller said.

“The kids would see all these white people working on yachts. For them to see an Antiguan man travelling all over the world – it was important for our community,” he added.

It is believed the Bayesian was struck by a tornado over the water – otherwise known as a waterspout – which caused the vessel to capsize and sink to the seabed.

There are also reports that the boat’s mast snapped, while other factors include water entering through hatches which may have been open due to hot temperatures.

The Italian coastguard said on Tuesday afternoon that their search was continuing and that divers were working out how to safely enter the wreckage.

Earlier a member of the diving team, Marco Tilotta, said accessing it had been difficult because the hull of the Bayesian is titled at a 90 degree angle on the seafloor.

He told Reuters news agency that there was a “a world of objects” obstructing the narrow stairs leading into the cabins.

“We are not stopping,” he added. “We have resources, manpower and means. Our goal is to find all the people who are missing, so that is our job.”

Divers are only able to spend around 12 minutes under water, meaning that by the time they reach the wreckage, they only have about 10 minutes to search it.

As well as several teams of divers, the coastguard said they had five patrol boats, at least two helicopters and a remotely operated underwater vehicle.

Specialist divers trained to operate in small spaces have been flown in from Rome and Sardinia.

The sailing vessel, which was 56m (183ft) long and flying a British flag, was carrying 10 crew and 12 passengers when it sank.

Among the missing are Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, as well as Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy.

Neda Morvillo, an American jewellery designer, and her husband Chris are also missing. The news was confirmed by his law firm Clifford Chance.

Mr Lynch was acquitted in June of multiple fraud charges relating to the $11bn (£8.6bn) sale of his company Autonomy to the US computing giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

A relative of one of the survivors said lawyers who had represented Mr Lynch in the legal proceedings – where Mr Bloomer had been a defence witness – had been invited on board the Bayesian to celebrate.

Ayla Ronald, a senior associate at Clifford Chance, and her husband were among the people rescued from the yacht when it sank.

Separately, it was confirmed on Tuesday that Mr Lynch’s co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain, 52, died after being hit by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.

His family described him as a “much-loved husband, father, son, brother and friend”.

Specialist divers continue to search for the remaining people who were on board a luxury superyacht which capsized off the coast of Sicily on Monday morning – but questions have been asked about why the vessel sank.

According to vessel tracking app Vesselfinder, the boat left the Sicilian port of Milazzo on 14 August and was last tracked east of Palermo on Sunday evening, with a navigation status of “at anchor”.

It is believed the ship was struck by a tornado over the water – otherwise known as a waterspout – causing Bayesian to capsize.

Witnesses have described seeing a waterspout form during the storm before the sinking of the Bayesian.

Most are familiar with what tornadoes look like – they are rotating columns of destructive winds, protruding from the base of clouds down to the ground.

According to BBC Weather, waterspouts are just that too, but are over water rather than land.

Instead of dust and debris swirling around the core of strong winds, it is water mist whipped up from the surface.

Like tornadoes, most are only short-lived, narrow columns and are not easily picked out on weather radars, so many will go unreported.

However, they are not as rare as you may think.

According to the International Centre for Waterspout Research there were 18 confirmed waterspouts off the coast of Italy on 19 August alone.

In the northern hemisphere, waterspouts are most common in late summer and through the autumn, when sea temperatures are at their highest, fuelling the storm clouds.

However, with sea temperatures rising due to climate change there is a concern that they could become more common.

In the last week, the Mediterranean has registered its highest sea surface temperature on record, which has helped to energise this recent storm outbreak.

• Follow live updates here
• ‘For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea’ – yacht survivor
• How sinking of luxury yacht off Sicily unfolded
• Who are the missing and rescued?
• Divers battle 10-minute dive window and debris in yacht search

The Bayesian was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini in 2008 and was last refitted in 2020.

According to Perini’s website Bayesian has a 75m (246ft) mast which it claims is the tallest aluminium mast in the world.

Karsten Borner, the captain of another yacht anchored nearby at the time of the storm, said there was a “very strong hurricane gust” and he had to battle to keep his vessel steady.

He saw the Bayesian’s mast “bend and then snap”, according to Italy’s Corriere della Sera daily newspaper.

But, providing an update on the rescue mission, Marco Tilotta, from the Palermo fire service divers’ unit, told AFP the ship was lying on its side in one piece.

Matthew Schanck, chair of the Maritime Search and Rescue Council, explained it is difficult to say whether the mast broke.

“I think, and this is pure guess work, but the evidence that we are getting from the divers is the vessel is basically intact, lying on its side reportedly,” he told the BBC.

“If the mast was broken, that would be a significant thing that would be reported.”

Mr Schanck added he believed what happened to Bayesian was “a freak event”.

“Vessels aren’t designed to be out sailing in that weather – 65 to 85mph that’s the top of what a vessel would be out in and that’s with its sails down,” he said.

“They aren’t designed to sail through tornadoes or water spouts.”

Separately, Sam Jefferson who is the editor of Sailing Today magazine, added: “The manner in which the yacht was built – how many watertight bulkheads it had et cetera – is vital to understanding what happened.

“Superyachts are air conditioned so most, if not all, the windows and doors are closed at night to keep the boat cool.”

Since mid-June the sea surrounding Sicily – the western Mediterranean Basin – has been experiencing a severe heatwave.

The European Union’s climate change service, Copernicus, has been reporting sea surface temperatures in the region have repeatedly breached 30°C (86F) – four degrees higher than the 20-year average for this time of the year.

Spanish researchers at the Institut de Ciencies del Mar in Barcelona confirmed last Thursday the maximum sea surface temperature record had been broken in the Mediterranean Sea.

In both 2023 and 2024, the record was broken for the highest average temperature recorded around the world on one day.

Scientists put the rapidly rising temperatures down to climate change – oceans have taken the brunt of rising temperatures absorbing around 90% of the excess heat.

Following last year’s record ocean temperatures, Prof Mike Meredith from the British Antarctic Survey told the BBC: “The fact that all this heat is going into the ocean, and in fact, it’s warming in some respects even more rapidly than we thought it would, is a cause for great concern.”

A rescue mission is under way off the coast of Sicily after the British-flagged luxury yacht Bayesian sank during freak weather early on Monday morning.

The vessel’s cook – understood to be Recaldo Thomas – has died and his body has been recovered, according to Sicily’s civil protection agency.

Some 15 people have been rescued from the boat, while six remain missing.

Specialist divers from the Italian fire brigade resumed their search early on Tuesday morning.

The body of a man recovered near the Bayesian yacht is believed to be that of Recaldo Thomas, a Canadian-Antiguan chef who was working on the boat.

His friends have been paying tribute to him. Gareth Williams, who lives in Antigua, knew Thomas for 30 years.

“I can talk for everyone that knew him when I say he was a well-loved, kind human being with a calm spirit,” he told the BBC.

The two grew up together in Antigua, where Thomas spent his time during off-season.

“He would come over to mine over the weekend and he would sing. He had the deepest, most sultry voice in the world, and a smile that lit up the room.

“He told me just the other day that he needed to work two more seasons to fix up his late parents’ house. He loved yachting, but he was tired.”

• Follow live updates here
• ‘For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea’ – yacht survivor
• How sinking of luxury yacht off Sicily unfolded
• What might have caused yacht to sink
• Divers battle 10-minute dive window and debris in yacht search

The six people who are unaccounted for have all been named.

Among them are British businessman Mike Lynch, who was recently acquitted of fraud in the US.

Several people on the boat, including some who are missing, were involved in his recent trial and there have been reports that the yacht trip was a celebration of Mr Lynch’s acquittal.

Mr Lynch is a tech entrepreneur who was once regarded by some as “Britain’s Bill Gates”.

Raised in Essex, he went on to study at the University of Cambridge, before co-founding software company Autonomy in 1996.

The 59-year-old made his riches by selling the company to US tech giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11bn (£8.6bn).

Mr Lynch became embroiled in a decade-long legal battle following the acquisition. He was acquitted in the US in June on multiple fraud charges, over which he had been facing two decades in jail.

He told BBC Radio 4 in August that he believed he had only been able to prove his innocence in US court because he was rich enough to pay the enormous legal fees involved.

“You shouldn’t need to have funds to protect yourself as a British citizen,” he said.

Mr Lynch was travelling with his daughter Hannah, who is also missing.

The 18-year-old is reportedly the younger of Mr Lynch’s two daughters.

She had just completed her A-levels and secured a place to read English at Oxford University, according to the Times.

Chris Morvillo is a lawyer who represented Mr Lynch in his US trial. Since 2011, he has been a partner at the Clifford Chance law firm in New York.

His biography on the firm’s website says that he served as assistant attorney for the southern district of New York from 1999 to 2005.

During his tenure, he worked on the criminal investigation surrounding the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

American jewellery designer Neda Morvillo, wife of Mr Morvillo, is also unaccounted for.

Mr Morvillo’s employer, Clifford Chance, confirmed the news.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the law firm said: “We are in shock and deeply saddened by this tragic incident.”

Ms Morvillo designs jewellery under the name Neda Nassiri. Her website says she “has been designing and hand-crafting fine jewelry in New York City for over 20 years”.

Jonathan Bloomer is the chairman of the Morgan Stanley International bank and insurance company Hiscox.

The 70-year-old Briton was educated at Imperial College London and has previously served on a number of company boards.

Mr Bloomer appeared at trial as a defence witness for Mr Lynch, according to the the Financial Times. Media reports suggest the pair are close friends.

Mr Bloomer’s twin brother, Jeremy, told the BBC he felt numb and his family were “coping the best we can” as rescue workers continued to search for his sibling.

“He was my elder by half an hour, so, it means a lot when you lose a twin brother. We’ll still wait and see, so it’s fingers crossed,” he said.

He added: “It’s a slow process, and it will take time. There might be air pockets but we don’t know.”

Aki Hussain, group chief executive of Hiscox, which Mr Bloomer has chaired since 2023, said: “We are deeply shocked and saddened by this tragic event.

“Our thoughts are with all those affected, in particular our chair, Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife Judy, who are among the missing.”

Judy, the wife of Jonathan Bloomer, is also among the six people missing.

Ms Bloomer is listed as a former director of property developer Change Real Estate along with her husband.

She has been called a “brilliant champion for women’s health” by a charity she has worked closely with.

Ms Bloomer has been a trustee and supporter of gynaecological cancer research charity the Eve Appeal for more than 20 years.

The charity’s chief executive, Athena Lamnisos, said she was “deeply shocked to hear the news that our very dear friend and her husband Jonathan, are among those missing”.

“Our thoughts are with Judy and Jonathan’s family, as well as all those who are still waiting for news after this tragic event,” she added in a statement.

Among the 15 people who were rescued are nine members of the yacht’s crew.

This means every member of the crew is accounted for minus the chef, who local authorities say has died.

Eight of the 15 who were rescued have been taken to hospital.

Dr Fabio Genco, who was part of the local emergency medical service that treated the survivors, said all of them had been discharged from hospital by Tuesday.

A British mother, named locally as Charlotte Golunski, was travelling on the yacht with her partner and baby girl. All three were rescued from the boat.

In an interview, she described holding her infant daughter above the surface of the sea to save her from drowning.

Ms Golunski is a partner at Mr Lynch’s company, Invoke Capital, where she has worked since 2012, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The Times has reported that she has previously worked for Autonomy, the company at the centre of Mr Lynch’s recent court case.

Another lawyer, Ayla Ronald, was also rescued along with her partner.

The New Zealand national works for Clifford Chance, where Mr Morvillo is a partner, and was part of Mr Lynch’s legal team for his June trial.

Her father told the Telegraph that she was “invited to go sailing as a result of the success in the recent United States court case”.

Angela Bacares, Mr Lynch’s wife and Hannah Lynch’s mother, is also among those who have been rescued.

On Monday, Ms Bacares was using a wheelchair after suffering ­abrasions on her feet, according to the newspaper La Repubblica.

Rescue teams searching the luxury yacht off the coast of Italy for six missing people are facing tough conditions, including a short dive window and scattered debris on board, an expert has told the BBC.

Crews have spent the past two days searching the ship, and trying to access the areas where the passengers may be.

The Bayesian yacht was carrying 22 people when it sank in freak weather conditions early on Monday.

One man has been confirmed to have died in the incident, and a search for the six people still missing continues – the Italian coastguard believes they could still be trapped in the sunken yacht.

“You have current, you have wind, you have waves, you have everything,” Guy Thomas, a diving instructor and a member of the special rescue team of the Italian Red Cross, tells the BBC.

He is not involved in this specific rescue attempt, but says he believes “there will be a lot of debris” – making conditions for rescue crews challenging.

• Follow live updates here
• ‘For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea’ – yacht survivor
• How sinking of luxury yacht off Sicily unfolded
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The Italian fire department has said that its divers initially struggled to even get inside the vessel, as furniture was obstructing the passageway.

And the ship’s hull’s location – tilted at a 90-degree angle – has created similar difficulties, the inspector of the diving unit, Marco Tilotta, told the Reuters news agency.

The issue for rescuers is that when a boat goes down in a tornado-like storm, everything that is not attached will either fall or float, Mr Thomas explains.

Rescuers also face challenges trying to access the part of the yacht where they believe the missing passengers may be.

“We know the boat sank quickly,” spokesman Vincenzo Zagarola told the PA news agency, “we suppose that the six people missing may not have had time to get out”.

The timing of its sinking – at night – means those missing were likely to have been in the yacht’s inner cabins if they did not have time to escape.

“Going into all the cabins,” Mr Tilotta said “is a really hard and difficult job.”

Because of the depths at which the wreckage sits – about 50m (164ft) below the surface – divers are limited to how long they can spend under water.

After descending to the wreckage, they only have 10 minutes to search the Bayesian before needing to resurface, according to the head of emergency communications of Italy’s fire and rescue department, Luca Cari.

During deeper dives, Mr Thomas says, “your body starts to accumulate nitrogen, and your body needs to stop and go back up”.

If a diver returns to the surface too quickly, the nitrogen bubbles don’t have time to dissipate – leading to a dangerous condition known as decompression sickness, also known as the bends.

The rescue attempt poses a real risk for the divers themselves, Mr Thomas says, with the possibility that they too could get stuck inside the yacht while carrying a limited amount of air.

“You could get lost in the ship,” he says. “It’s not a huge ship, there’s probably going to be a limited amount of light.”

Finally, there’s the issue of time.

In these situations, Mr Thomas says “you need to get there immediately”.

“When the boat goes down, rescue divers are trying to find people alive in air bubbles.

“But most people will not be in an air bubble.”

And when asked about the likelihood of any of the six people missing being found alive on the vessel, Mr Zagarola – the Italian coastguard spokesman – was not optimistic.

“Never say never, but reasonably the answer should be not.”

In the cloudy skies and on the choppy waters, the emergency operation is continuing here in Porticello, where a luxury yachting holiday turned to horror.

As a coastguard helicopter whirls overhead, divers are being despatched from the port, continuing their search for the six missing passengers of the Bayesian, which capsized before dawn on Monday and whose wreckage now lies some 50m (165ft) underwater on the seabed.

Luca Cari from Italy’s fire and rescue department said that, given the depth, divers were only allowed 10 minutes underwater before resurfacing, limiting their work.

Divers trained to work in small spaces have been flown in from Rome and Sardinia. Strong winds are making the conditions even harder.

The divers found no bodies on the bridge – the room in which the captain controlled the vessel – and have made it into the lounge, from where they are working to gain access to the rest of the yacht.

It’s expected that the six missing passengers will be trapped in the cabins, where they were likely sleeping when it capsized.

• Follow live updates here
• Who are the missing and rescued?
• What might have caused the yacht to sink?
• ‘For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea’ – Sicily yacht survivor
• Who is British tech tycoon Mike Lynch?

Among the missing are the British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch along with his 18-year-old daughter Hannah; his lawyer, Mike Corvillo and his wife Neda; and the president of Morgan Stanley international Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy.

The body of the yacht’s chef has already been found. He is believed to be Recaldo Thomas, a Canadian-Antiguan.

Mr Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, is among the 15 people rescued, when they scrambled into a life raft and set off a flare, that drew the attention of another boat captain.

The tragedy began on Sunday night with violent storms buffeting the boats here.

In the early hours of Monday, that prompted a waterspout – a tornado-like rotating column of cloud and water that engulfed the Bayesian. Witnesses say it snapped the 76m (249ft) tall aluminium mast and quickly engulfed it.

Recent searing heat and heavy winds had reportedly prompted a weather warning prior to the capsizing. The temperature of the Mediterranean was 30C – higher than normal – amplifying the likelihood of an extreme weather event.

Among the survivors are several British nationals, who are staying at a local hotel, to which journalists were denied access.

They include Charlotte Golunski, who clutched her one-year-old daughter above the water to keep her alive, telling how all she could hear were the screams around her.

The British ambassador to Italy, Ed Llewellyn, told me he had visited the survivors and heard their anguish.

“It underlines what a desperately sad and distressing situation they found themselves in,” he said.

“My heart, and I’m sure that of the whole country, goes out to them. We will do whatever we can practically to help in this very difficult and heartbreaking situation.”

He confirmed that marine investigators sent from the UK had arrived in Sicily and were working with their Italian counterparts on a preliminary assessment.

Local prosecutors have also opened an investigation into the circumstances of the tragedy – and if anything could have been done to mitigate it, including closing the ship’s hatches overnight.

The yacht’s captain, James Catfield, from New Zealand, told Italian media of the suddenness of the waterspout that turned a luxury super yacht into a death trap. “We just didn’t see it coming”, he said.

Sitting at an altitude of around 3,800m (12,467ft) is Thame, a small Sherpa village in Nepal’s Everest region.

It is home to many record-holding Sherpa mountaineers, including Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the first person to climb Mount Everest along with explorer Edmund Hillary.

But on 16 August, the village was engulfed by icy flood waters after a glacial lake burst its banks, displacing some 60 people and destroying more than a dozen houses and hotels along with a school and health clinic.

The incident has left many of the village’s residents – around 300 people – wondering whether it is even safe to live there any longer.

No deaths or injuries were reported, but members of the Sherpa community said they were lucky that the flood hit during daytime, when everyone was awake and the alerts arrived quickly.

“If this had happened at night time, between 200 to 300 people would have lost their lives,” Ang Tshering Sherpa, former president of Nepal Mountaineering Association said.

“We are still in shock, and we are still crying when we (villagers) talk to each other,” said Yangji Doma Sherpa, a native of Thame who was born in the village.

“The bigger question is if this place is safe enough to live in now. This flood has shown that we face an even more dangerous situation now, and therefore people don’t feel safe.”

Some of Thame’s residents live nomadic lifestyles and live in different villages depending on the season.

But in this case, even villagers downhill from Thame have been affected.

“Because of the flood some parts of our village was swept away… luckily we managed to run up the hill,” said Pasang Sherpa at Tok Tok village which is almost two days’ trek downhill from Thame.

“The otherwise milky and frothy river turned so dark brown, with boulders and debris being swept down.

The sound and the sight was so scary that I am still shaken. I have taken refuge in a nearby village and am thinking if I should ever go back to Tok Tok.”

Locals say much of the risk could be reduced if there were proper monitoring mechanisms for glacial lakes located upstream from human settlements.

While a few lakes have drawn the attention of scientists and authorities, they added, the rest are simply ignored.

Meanwhile, disaster preparedness is non-existent in many villages.

“A few villages downstream of the Imja glacial lake have been trained on how to run in case of a flood,” Ms Doma Sherpa said.

“But there has been no training in our village whatsoever.”

Of the more than one dozen glacial lake outburst incidents recorded in Nepal in the past 50 years, four have been in the Everest’s Dudhkosi river basin.

One occurred upstream of Thame in 1985, when a large avalanche cascaded into the Dig Tsho glacial lake and created a wave that overtopped the dam. The ensuing flood destroyed a hydroelectricity plant downstream and caused more than three million dollars worth of damage.

The lack of monitoring is not a problem that is unique to just Thame.

There are thousands of glaciers and glacial lakes in the Himalayas – but very few in the Everest region are monitored and have early flood warning systems installed.

Meanwhile, global warming is accelerating the melting of glaciers which can fill up the lakes to bursting point.

A 2021 study led by the University of Leeds found that Himalayan glaciers have lost ice ten times more quickly over the last few decades than the average rate measured since their expansion 400 to 700 years ago.

Another study published in the Nature journal in 2022 found that Mount Everest’s South Col Glacier may have lost half its mass since the 1990s as a result of warming.

Imja Lake below Mount Everest was drained in 2016 after officials found it was in danger of overflowing and flooding downstream settlements, trekking trails and bridges.

But scientists have found that many new lakes have formed in recent years, while others have expanded and joined up to become larger ones.

Further inflaming the risk is the destabilisation of the local landscape caused by fast-retreating glaciers, leading to more landslides and avalanches that can pour into the lakes and cause them to rupture.

Authorities say they have listed around two dozen glacial lakes across the Nepali Himalayas as risky – but the two that burst on 16 August were neither mentioned in that list nor monitored by officials.

“They were the smallest ones and no one cared about them, and yet the damages have been so huge,” said Mr Tshering Sherpa.

“Imagine what could happen if the big ones burst out. There are many of them in the Everest region.”

Officials from Nepal’s Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) conducted a helicopter inspection and found there were a total of five small glacial lakes located near the source of the flooding. One of them had partially burst; another had burst completely.

“Which means the three other lakes at the same location could burst out anytime in the same way,” said Ms Doma Sherpa.

“Now that people know that, they don’t feel safe anymore. We are worried particularly about elderly people because of their mobility issues.”

Since then, the impacts of global warming on Himalayan glaciers and lakes has only become more striking – and locals say some damages from floods are now irreparable.

While the Thame river used to flow through the left part of the Khumbu valley, Friday’s flood has made it change course. Now it flows right through the village, claiming almost half of the land.

“Much of the remaining land now is full of debris and boulders,” Ms Doma Sherpa said.

“This is not like rebuilding the houses destroyed by the quake. When you have no land left, what can you build on?”

The flood has also damaged the reservoir of the only hydropower station that provides electricity to the region.

The station stopped functioning after the disaster led to deposition of mud and debris in the reservoir.

“As a result, power supply has been cut off, and because of that telecommunication systems were also not functioning,” Mingma Sherpa, chair of a youth club at Namche, a major tourist spot near Thame, said.

“The area has remained cut off from the outside world since the disaster struck. This is quite scary.”

“We had been worrying about slow onset impacts of climate change, like dwindling water resources, but this disaster has shown how unsafe and vulnerable we are.”

Government officials are aware of locals’ fears.

Anil Pokhrel, head of NDRRMA, said the authority is now forming a team of experts that will “study the risks posed by the three remaining lakes upstream of Thame village and find out if the downstream settlement areas are safe for people to live in or not”.

“We are also working on disaster risk reduction in the region,” he added.

Members of local Sherpa communities, however, say they’ve seen more talk and less action over the years when it comes to dealing with risks from glacial lake outbursts.

“We hear all big plans, especially during conferences, and soon the plans are forgotten,” Ms Doma Sherpa said.

“But we can’t forget about what this flood has done – and that there are other lakes lurking up there that can unleash disasters on us anytime.”

When the owner of 7-Eleven announced this week that it had received a buyout offer from a Canadian rival it triggered shockwaves in Japan.

A Japanese company of this size has never been bought by a foreign firm.

Historically, companies from Japan were more likely to buy overseas businesses.

7-Eleven is the world’s biggest convenience store chain, with 85,000 outlets across 20 countries and territories.

And it’s been especially successful at selling itself as an option for a quick and cheap yet tasty meal, and in places where there is already an abundance of that, such as Japan and Thailand.

“We have more stores than McDonald’s or Starbucks,” the chief executive of Seven & i Holdings, Ryuichi Isaka, told BBC News before the firm received the buyout offer.

Around a quarter of those 85,000 shops are in Japan, while there are roughly 10,000 in the US.

In comparison, Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard, which operates the Circle K chain, has almost 17,000 stores in 31 countries and territories. More than half of its outlets are in North America.

The approach valued Seven & i at more than $30bn (£23bn) before news of the preliminary offer emerged.

7-Eleven’s shares jumped by over 20% on Monday, before giving up some of those gains the following day.

Analysts point to the Japanese yen’s weakness against the US dollar and other major currencies for helping to make Seven & i affordable.

Along with the weakness of the yen, efforts by the Japanese government to promote mergers and acquisitions appear to be working, said Manoj Jain from Hong Kong-based hedge fund Maso Capital.

However, the proposal is still at the preliminary stage and given the potential size of any deal it could face scrutiny from competition authorities.

7-Eleven has been keen to capitalise on the popularity of the food it sells – a wide range, including rice balls, sandwiches, cooked pasta, fried chicken and dumplings.

While in much of the world convenience stores are where people grab a bar of chocolate or a bag of crisps in an emergency, in Japan, shops like 7-Eleven are popular with visitors searching for culinary delights.

These 7-Eleven dishes have turned the chain into a social media sensation in Asia.

Dropping into a 7-Eleven store has even been touted as one of the top things to do in Thailand, where its ham and cheese toastie has become a TikTok hit.

British singer Ed Sheeran is among the celebrities who have helped raise 7-Eleven’s profile – a video of him trying snacks from a store in Thailand went viral.

Mr Isaka has been aiming to repeat that success in the US and European markets as the company came under pressure from investors to sell some of its businesses and focus on the 7-Eleven brand.

The firm has been updating its strategy so more stores could follow the approach of its Japanese shops.

“What we found is that stores which sell fresh food are attracting many more shoppers,” Mr Isaka said.

“We want to grow with high quality – not just increase the quantity. We want to make sure customers are happy, and increase sales of each store whilst increasing the number of stores,” he added.

Seven & i has also been on a shopping spree. In January, it bought more than 200 stores in the US from petrol station chain Sunoco for around $1bn (£770m).

In April, it bought back more than 750 stores from a franchisee in Australia.

For most of its almost century-long history 7-Eleven was an American brand.

Starting out in 1927 selling blocks of ice that were used to keep fridges cool, it later stocked essential items like eggs, milk and bread.

At the time, the stores were open between 07:00 and 23:00 – hence the name.

As the business grew, 7-Eleven began offering franchises outside the US.

In 1974, Japanese retail firm Ito-Yokado struck a deal to open the country’s first 7-Eleven. In 1991, it bought a 70% stake in the chain’s US parent company.

The founder of Ito-Yokado, Masatoshi Ito, who died in 2023 at the age of 98, is often credited with transforming 7-Eleven into a global empire.

Ito-Yokado was renamed Seven & i Holdings in 2005 with the “i” in its name being a nod to Ito-Yokado and Mr Ito, who was by then the company’s honorary chairman.

Now, as the company decides whether it will remain under Japanese ownership or return to its North American roots, experts are wondering whether more of Japan’s big firms could become takeover targets.

There is now a “greater willingness of Japanese boards and management teams to accept offshore capital and be receptive to foreign approaches,” Mr Jain said.

More foreign investors may now be encouraged to pursue their interest in Japanese companies, he added.

Fayaz and his wife believed they were moments from safety when the bombs began to fall: “We were getting on the boat one after another – that’s when they started bombing us.”

Wails and shouts filled the air around 17:00 local time on 5 August, Fayaz* says, as thousands of scared Rohingyas made their way to the banks of the Naf river in the town of Maungdaw.

Attacks on villages earlier in the area meant this was what hundreds of families, including Fayaz’s, saw as their only option – that to get to safety, they had to escape from western Myanmar to Bangladesh’s safer shores.

Fayaz was carrying bags stuffed with whatever they had managed to grab. His wife was carrying their six-year-old daughter, their eldest was running alongside them. His wife’s sister was walking ahead, with the couple’s eight-month-old son in her arms.

The first bomb killed his sister-in-law instantly. The baby was badly injured – but alive.

“I ran and carried him… But he died while we were waiting for the bombing to stop.”

Nisar* had also made it to the riverbank by about 17:00, having decided to escape with his mother, wife, son, daughter and sister. “We heard drones overhead and then the loud sound of an explosion,” he recalls. “We were all thrown to the ground. They dropped bombs on us using drones.”

Nisar was the only one of his family to survive.

Fayaz, his wife and daughters escaped and would eventually make it across the river. Despite his pleas, the boatman refused to allow Fayaz to bring the baby’s body with them. “He said there was no point in carrying the dead, so I dug a hole by the river bank and hastily buried him.”

Now they’re all in the relative safety of Bangladesh, but if they are caught by authorities here they could be sent back. Nisar clutches a Quran, unable still to process how his world was shattered in a single day.

“If I’d known what would happen, I would never have tried to leave that day,” Nisar says.

It is notoriously difficult to piece together what is happening in Myanmar’s civil war. But the BBC has managed to construct a picture of what happened on the evening of 5 August through a series of exclusive interviews with more than a dozen Rohingya survivors who escaped to Bangladesh, and the videos they shared.

All of the survivors – unarmed Rohingya civilians – recount hearing many bombs exploding over a period of two hours. While most described the bombs being dropped by drones, a weapon increasingly being used in Myanmar, some said they were hit by mortars and gunfire. The MSF clinic operating in Bangladesh has said it saw a big surge in wounded Rohingya in the days that followed – half of the injured were women and children.

Survivors’ videos analysed by BBC Verify show the river bank covered in bloodied bodies, many of them women and children. There’s no verified count of the number of people killed, but multiple eyewitnesses have told the BBC they saw scores of bodies.

Survivors told us they were attacked by the Arakan Army, one of the strongest insurgent groups in Myanmar which in recent months has driven the military out of nearly all of Rakhine State. They said they were first attacked in their villages, forcing them to flee, and then were attacked again by the river bank as they sought to escape.

The AA declined to be interviewed but its spokesman Khaing Tukha denied the accusation and responded to the BBC’s questions with a statement which said “the incident did not occur in areas controlled by us”. He also accused Rohingya activists of staging the massacre and falsely accusing the AA.

Nisar stands by his account, however.

“The Arakan Army are lying,” he says. “The attacks were done by them. It was only them in our area on that day. And they have been attacking us for weeks. They don’t want to leave any Muslim alive.”

Most of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims live as a minority in Rakhine – a Buddhist-majority state, where the two communities have long had a fraught relationship. In 2017, when the Myanmar military killed thousands of Rohingyas in what the UN described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, local Rakhine men also joined the attacks. Now, amid a spiralling conflict between the junta and the AA, which has strong support in the ethnic Rakhine population, Rohingyas once again find themselves trapped.

Despite the risk of being caught and returned to Myanmar by the Bangladeshi authorities, Rohingya survivors told the BBC they wished to share details of the violence they faced so it would not go undocumented, especially as it unfolded in an area that is no longer accessible to rights groups or journalists.

“My heart is broken. Now, I’ve lost everything. I don’t know why I survived,” Nisar says.

A wealthy Rohingya trader, he sold his land and house as the shelling increased near his home in Rakhine. But the conflict intensified faster than he expected, and on the morning of 5 August, the family decided to leave Myanmar.

He is crying as he points to his daughter’s body in one of the videos: “My daughter died in my arms saying Allah’s name. She looks so peaceful, like she’s sleeping. She loved me so much.”

In the same video, he also points to his wife and sister, both severely injured but alive when the video was filmed. He could not carry them out as bombs were still falling, so he made the agonising choice to leave them behind. He found out later they had died.

“There was nowhere left that was safe, so we ran to the river to cross over to Bangladesh,” Fayaz says. The gunfire and bombs had followed them from village to village, and so Fayaz gave all his money to a boatman to carry them across the river.

Devastated and angry, he holds up a photo of his son’s bloodied body.

“If the Arakan Army didn’t fire at us, then who did?” he asks. “The direction that the bombs came from, I know the Arakan Army was there. Or was it thunder falling from the sky?”

These accusations raise serious questions about the Arakan Army, which describes itself as a revolutionary movement representing all the people of Rakhine.

Since late last year, the AA, part of the larger Three Brotherhood Alliance of armed insurgents in Myanmar, has made huge gains against the military.

But the army’s losses have brought new dangers for Rohingyas, who have previously told the BBC they were being forcibly recruited by the junta to fight the AA.

This, together with the decision by the Rohingya militant group ARSA to ally itself with the junta against the Rakhine insurgents, has soured already poor relations between the two communities and left Rohingya civilians vulnerable to retribution.

One survivor of the 5 August attack told the BBC that ARSA militants who had aligned themselves with the junta had been among the fleeing crowd – and that might have provoked the attack.

“Even if there was any military target, there was a disproportionate use of force. There were children, women, the elderly that were killed that day. It was also indiscriminate,” says John Quinley, a director of the human rights group Fortify Rights, which has been investigating the incident.

“So that would leave us to believe that there are reasonable grounds to believe that a war crime did happen on 5 August. The Arakan Army should be investigated for these crimes and Arakan Army senior commanders should be held accountable.”

This is a precarious moment for the Rohingya community. More than a million of them fled to Bangladesh in 2017, where they continue to be restricted to densely-packed, squalid camps.

More have been arriving in recent months as the war in Rakhine reaches them but, it’s no longer 2017, when Bangladesh opened its borders. This time, the government has said it cannot allow any more Rohingyas into the country.

So survivors who can find the money to pay boatmen and traffickers – the BBC was told it costs 600,000 Burmese kyat ($184; £141) per person – then have to slip past Bangladeshi border guards and chance their luck with locals, or hide in Rohingya camps.

When Fayaz and his family arrived in Bangladesh on the 6 August, the border guards gave them a meal but then put them on a boat and sent them back.

“We spent two days afloat with no food or water,” he says. “I gave my daughters water from the river to drink, and pleaded with some of the others on the boat to give them a few biscuits from the packets they had.”

They got into Bangladesh on their second attempt. But at least two boats have capsized because of overcrowding. One woman, a widow with 10 children, said she had managed to hide her family during the bombing, but five of her children drowned when their boat overturned.

“My children were like pieces of my heart. When I think of them, I want to die,” she says, weeping.

Her grandson, a wide-eyed eight-year-old boy, sits beside her. His parents and younger brother also died.

But what of those who were left behind? Phone and internet networks in Maungdaw have been down for weeks but after repeated attempts, the BBC contacted one man, who wished to remain anonymous for his own safety.

“The Arakan Army has forced us out of our homes and are holding us in schools and mosques,” he said. “I am being kept with six other families in a small house.”

The Arakan Army told the BBC that it rescued 20,000 civilians from the town amid fighting against the military. It said it was providing them with food and medical treatment, and add that “these operations are conducted for the safety and security of these individuals, not as forced relocations”.

The man on the phone rejected their claims. “The Arakan Army has told us they will shoot us if we try to leave. We are running out of food and medicines. I am ill, my mother is ill. A lot of people have diarrhoea and are vomiting.”

He broke down, pleading for help: “Tens of thousands of Rohingya are under threat here. If you can, please save us.”

Across the river in Bangladesh, Nisar looks back at Myanmar. He can see the shore where his family was killed.

“I never want to go back.”

“I want to go home,” Kenyan Eulita Jerop tells the BBC from Lebanon, where she is employed as a domestic worker.

But the terms of her employment make it difficult for her to leave, despite fears of an all-out war in the country.

She has been terrified by the unfamiliar sounds she has heard overhead on the outskirts of the capital, Beirut.

The 35-year-old has been working there for the past 14 months.

“It was so scary. We were told it wasn’t bombs, but it was [planes breaking] the sound barrier,” she says. “But the sounds were hitting so hard.”

Her panic is shared by many others in her WhatsApp group of fellow domestic workers, she adds.

The loud booms in the sky came from fighter planes. There are fears that they could foreshadow a full-on war.

Israel and Lebanon-based group Hezbollah have traded near-daily fire across the border since the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. It prompted the Israeli invasion of Gaza, with the aim of eliminating Hamas.

Hezbollah, a political movement and Iran-backed militia, says it is attacking Israel in support of the Palestinian people.

The shells have mostly fallen in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, but there are concerns that the rest of Lebanon could get caught up as the conflict transforms into a wider regional struggle.

The US, UK, Australia, France and Canada have all issued official advice for their citizens to leave Lebanon as soon as possible.

But getting out is easier for some than others.

Ms Jerop said it was common for employers to take their passports on arrival in Lebanon.

Even with a passport, domestic workers still need an exit visa to leave – paperwork which must be approved by their boss.

This is allowed to happen under the country’s “kafala” (sponsorship) system for foreign workers – which employs an estimated 250,000 people.

“Kafala” gives individuals or companies permits to employ foreign workers. This means that their immigration status is entirely dependent on their employer and they have limited rights.

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Employers can take advantage of their position and many women are overworked, underpaid and physically abused – though this is not the case for Ms Jerop.

Despite calls for significant reforms, the system continues in several Arab states.

Daniela Rovina, communications officer at the International Organization for Migration, told the BBC that under international law a person must be allowed to leave a country if a conflict occurs.

In Ms Jerop’s case, her employers want her to continue working in Lebanon.

“They are saying the situation has been here in Lebanon for many years, and there is nothing to worry about,” she says. “But for us the tension is high. We are not used to these kinds of [bombing] sounds.”

But even with papers, Ms Jerop and her fellow domestic workers face other challenges to leave.

“Few flights are available and they are very expensive,” she says.

Flights to Kenya cost up to $1,000 (£770).

Banchi Yimer, who founded an organisation supporting the rights of Ethiopian domestic workers, says the average monthly salary used to be $150 but since the cost-of-living crisis, which hit Lebanon hard, “many are not getting paid at all”.

“Every day we receive calls from women panicking… they ask us if we have any [evacuation] plan, if we can do anything about it.”

Chiku, another domestic worker from Kenya, whose name we have changed to protect her safety, cannot pay for the flight.

She has been living in Baabda, in the west of Lebanon, for almost a year.

“I personally would like to go back home. But the tickets are so costly,” she says. “And my mum and dad also can’t afford that money.”

She has been living in fear for the past few weeks, but like Ms Jerop, her employer has told her to stay.

“They say I can’t leave because I haven’t finished my contract,” Chiku says. “But is this contract more important than my life?”

The Lebanese labour ministry has not yet responded to a BBC request for comment.

The Kenyan authorities say that if war does break out, they will put an evacuation plan in place.

Roseline Kathure Njogu, in charge of diaspora affairs for the Kenyan government, told the BBC the department can issue emergency travel documents for those without their passports.

She assured that the Kenyan government would be able to provide emergency flights.

“We have around 26,000 Kenyans in Lebanon, and 1,500 have registered with us for evacuation,” she said.

But many want to leave right now.

Ethiopian government spokesperson Nebiyu Tedla told the BBC they are “preparing contingency plans to evacuate diplomats and citizens from Lebanon if necessary”.

However, Ms Banchi makes the point that even before the Israel-Gaza conflict, there were already many Ethiopian women stranded in Lebanon desperate to leave.

A collapse in Lebanon’s economy in 2020 left many Ethiopian domestic workers out of a job.

“Many cannot even afford rent or medical assistance, let alone a flight home,” she says.

While foreign embassies continue to work on evacuation plans, many feel they have been abandoned by their governments to fend for themselves.

Chiku is trying to set aside money to pay for a flight home.

“But what about the others who can’t?” she asks.

If there’s one thing the world’s gaming studios need at the moment, it’s a little bit of hype.

It has been a year with no major new console launches and where the industry has seen strikes and cuts with thousands of workers being laid off.

The opening night of Gamescom is often an opportunity for a big shiny night to get fans all excited for the year ahead.

Setting the stage for the next 12 months, here are the biggest things we found out from Europe’s biggest gaming show in Germany.

In a year when games became films, and films became games, the convention centre in Cologne saw a night all about the big trailers.

This year, Borderlands has taken attention for its movie adaptation starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart.

That film received some of the year’s harshest reviews, but that has not scuppered plans for a new game in the mainline series.

We don’t know lots about the game yet, other than that it is set to launch in 2025.

No specific platforms have been announced yet either, but expect this one to come to PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox’s latest consoles.

We already knew that the upcoming Black Ops 6 will be set during the First Gulf War of the 1990s.

Now we’ve had a look at one of the missions in the single-player campaign including high-speed chases and close-quarter gun fights.

This launch is already being closely watched.

It’s the first one where a Call of Duty title will be released on Microsoft’s subscription service Game Pass on day one.

Anyone signed up to that service will get this game for no extra cost, while PlayStation owners will be looking at around £70 ($90).

Fallout maker Bethesda, now a part of Microsoft’s massive collection of studios, is hoping to keep excitement building for its Indiana Jones game with a release date.

Titled Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, we found out it will be coming before the end of the year… at least if you plan to play it on an Xbox or PC.

Those gamers will get their hands on it from 9 December, just in time for Christmas shopping season.

There had been question marks over whether this game would come to its competitors’ consoles, but it was announced a version for the PlayStation 5 is in development.

That won’t be ready until Spring 2025, though.

One of the more unexpected announcements of the night, a co-op combat game called King of Meat.

Not another cooking game, but instead a new take on a dungeon crawler where you can team up with your friends to survive in a twisted reality show competition.

This one’s published by Amazon Games, and developed by Guildford-based indie studio Glowmade – a studio set up by former employees of Fable makers Lionhead Studios.

Speaking of team-based multiplayer titles, NetEase Games announced a launch date of 6 December for its free-to-play shooter Marvel Rivals.

Lots of the characters you might recognise to tempt new players in, including Captain America, Black Panther and Iron Man.

We also got a new gameplay trailer which confirms this title will have a lot in common with popular hero shooter Overwatch.

The name Peter Molyneux ring a bell?

As one of the main creators of the fantasy epic Fable, we now know he’s got a new project in the works called Masters of Albion.

If you’re a Fable fan, you’ll know Albion is the name of the world in which those games are set.

Curiously though, this one apparently will not be set in the same universe as those Fable games.

The trailer showed off a top-down real-time strategy game with elements of resource management and questing.

We got a short glimpse at a new project from Hangar 13 in the Mafia series to close the show.

It’s going to be called Mafia: The Old Country, and while we didn’t get a release date or launch window, we’ve been promised more details in December.

No surprises if that features heavily at the Game Awards.

Kamala Harris has been holding rallies across the US as she campaigns against Donald Trump, and will appear in Milwaukee on Tuesday ahead of her headline speech at the Democratic National Convention later in the week.

She has made a series of claims contrasting their records on the economy, healthcare, abortion and immigration.

BBC Verify has been examining them.

CLAIM: “Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

VERDICT: This is misleading. In this campaign, Trump has said repeatedly he would not do this, although he has suggested he would in the past.

Social Security provides a source of income when you retire or if you cannot work due to a disability.

Medicare is a US government programme which provides healthcare coverage for millions of Americans who are retired or disabled.

“I will not cut 1 cent from Social Security or Medicare,” Trump said at a rally on 5 August.

And in his 20 point policy platform, one of the pledges is: “Fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts.”

However, during his time as president Trump proposed several budgets which would have cut elements of Medicare, such as eliminating the programme advising recipients how to sign up for benefits. None of these budget proposals was enacted.

He also has made comments about cutting Social Security in the past.

In an interview in March this year, on entitlement programs such as Social Security Trump said: “There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.”

However, he later clarified the comments, saying: “I will never do anything that will hurt or jeopardise Social Security or Medicare.”

CLAIM: “Inflation is down under 3%.”

VERDICT: That figure is correct but some context is needed here.

Inflation, which is the increase in the price of something over time, is down from a peak of 9.1% under the Biden administration and it is higher than when Mr Trump left office.

When President Biden took office in January 2021, inflation was 1.4% but it rose significantly during the first two years of his administration.

This trend is comparable with many Western countries which saw high inflation in 2021 and 2022, as global supply chain issues as a consequence of Covid and the war in Ukraine contributed to rising prices.

While the Biden administration had limited control over these external factors, some economists say that their 2021 American Rescue Plan, worth $1.9tn (£1.5tn), also contributed to rising prices.

CLAIM: “We have created 16 million new jobs.”

VERDICT: That is roughly correct. 15.8 million jobs have been added under the Biden administration, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

However, when the Biden government entered the White House in January 2021, the US was recovering from the Covid pandemic, which crippled the economy and during which more than 20 million jobs were lost.

“Many of the jobs would have come back if Trump had won in 2020 – but the American Rescue Plan played a major role in the speed and aggressiveness of the labour market recovery,” says Professor Mark Strain, an economist at Georgetown University.

Since President Biden came into office, job growth has been strong, surpassing the pre-pandemic levels seen under Trump.

However, weaker than expected job growth in July led to fears of a sudden downturn in the US economy and stock markets were hit as a result, but they have since stabilised.

CLAIM: “He froze in the face of the COVID crisis. He drove our economy into the ground.”

VERDICT: The US economy did take a big hit during the pandemic, like most countries, but it also bounced back under Trump.

You can see from the graph above that there was a dramatic collapse in economic growth in the US during the Covid pandemic.

However following the pandemic, the US economy bounced back under Trump.

He implemented a series of measures to help it recover, including financial assistance for small businesses.

During Trump’s four years in office (Jan 2017- Jan 2021), the average annual growth rate of the US economy was 2.3%.

Under the Biden administration, this figure has been 2.2% – so almost the same.

CLAIM: “We had a chance to pass the toughest bipartisan border security bill in decades but Donald Trump tanked the deal.”

VERDICT: Trump was publicly against the Biden administration’s immigration bill, but voting on it was up to Congress.

The immigration bill aimed to tighten asylum standards, increase spending on Border Patrol, and allow for the automatic closure of the southern border to illegal crossings if a certain daily threshold was reached.

It failed to pass a vote in February with the majority of lawmakers in the US Senate opposing it.

Trump did not have a vote as he was not an elected official at the time, but he did call for his Republican allies to oppose it.

Trump also took credit when the bill failed, saying it was “horrendous” as he thought it was not tough enough on immigration.

At a Fox News event in February 2024, he said he was against the deal as passing it would have “made it much better for the opposing side”.

The bill was blocked in the Senate for a second time in May.

CLAIM: “In more than 20 states, there is a Trump abortion ban, many with no exceptions, even for rape and incest… be sure if he were to win, he would sign a national abortion ban”

VERDICT: Bans were enacted by states after Trump left office but, as president, he appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who voted to overturn Roe v Wade. Trump has said he would not sign a national abortion ban.

Roe v. Wade protected the federal Constitutional right to abortion for nearly 50 years until it was overturned in June 2022.

As a result, 22 states currently ban abortion or restrict the procedure to earlier in pregnancy than was set by Roe v. Wade. In 14 of those states, abortion is banned in almost all circumstances with 10 not even making an exception for rape or incest.

During his campaign, he has declined to back a national abortion ban and said he believes the issue should be left to individual states.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Discovering a signature sound is the holy grail of pop music.

There’s no Pink Floyd without David Gilmour’s sweeping guitar lines. Remove Dr Dre’s incendiary production, and NWA’s lyrics lose some of their potency. Billie Eilish’s vocal delivery is so distinctive she can jump between genres without losing her essence.

For Clean Bandit, their signature sound is a simple, but effective, mixture of chamber music and dance beats.

It’s a formula they came up with at university. Cellist Grace Chatto was dating architecture student Jack Patterson, who started splicing samples of her string quartet into his instrumentals.

It wasn’t exactly a new idea. In 1976, Walter Murphy turned Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 into a thumping disco track; and in 1995, Madonna’s producer William Orbit made an album, Pieces In A Modern Style, that took Ravel, Vivaldi and Handel to an all-night rave.

But Clean Bandit weren’t interested in remixes. They wrote big pop hits like Solo and Rockabye, using their classical chops to give the songs emotional heft.

“It’s a delicate balance,” says Patterson. “If you added a sax solo, for example, it’d be one element too far. You might as well put on a waistcoat and go home.”

But when it works, it works.

Clean Bandit’s trademark sound earned them four UK number one singles, two Ivor Novello songwriting awards and a Grammy.

Then, with grim inevitability, their record label told them to ditch it.

“There was a push for us to stop having strings in our music,” grimaces Chatto.

“We were told to stop making pop music, as well,” says Patterson.

“We were sent dance music playlists on Spotify and told ‘your music has to sit on here – only Harry Styles can make pop music’.”

Part of the concern was that the band are, in their own words, “shy and unassuming people”.

Their songs are fronted by pop titans from Demi Lovato and Ellie Goulding to Charli XCX and Lizzo – but the trio (completed by Jack’s brother Luke) can still catch the Tube without being bothered.

“We were told ‘you don’t have a face, you need to make club music’,” recalls Patterson.

The demands were so frequent and insistent that the band began to mistrust their instincts. They erased the violins and went for a darker sound, more indebted to house than pop.

It did not go well: Since 2020, none of their records has made the top 10.

“We allowed it to happen because we were like, ‘We’d rather release something than nothing’,” says Chatto.

“But the music didn’t feel like our music. Our fans were feeling it. We were feeling it.

“In the end, we were like, what’s the point in doing anything?’

Eventually, they negotiated an “amicable” exit from Atlantic Records that allowed them to retain the rights to all of their unreleased songs.

“It couldn’t have ended in a better way,” says Chatto.

“We’re still friends with those people… I just think the more success we had, the more pressure they felt. Their jobs were on the line.”

The band jumped over to the Sony Music label B1/Ministry of Sound, whose head honcho is Wolfgang Boss – one of the first people to champion Clean Bandit back in the 2010s.

He encouraged them to release Cry Baby – a collaboration with Anne-Marie and David Guetta that they’d been sitting on for four years after Atlantic rejected it.

From the opening bars, it’s undeniably a Clean Bandit song. Chatto whistles a Spaghetti Western hook over sweeping strings, before Anne-Marie delivers a salty lyric about a cheating boyfriend over a breezy, tropical beat .

“It feels like a comeback,” says Chatto.

It’s not just the music. The band got back into the habit of directing and filming their own videos – something they’d not done for a couple of years.

For Cry Baby, they dreamt up an epic storyline, in which Anne-Marie flees her disloyal partner on a long distance luxury train. But when they brought the storyboards to production companies, they turned it down.

“They said it would cost at least a quarter of a million pounds,” says Chatto, “so I ended up producing it myself, which is a first.”

That meant commissioning and building the sets at their own expense.

Luckily, Chatto’s father is a carpenter, who not only built her first cello, but also happens to work on the London Underground (“It was his idea to put sliding doors on the platform of the Jubilee line,” says Patterson).

And so Ricky Chatto found himself constructing a complete dining car and sleeper carriage inside Clean Bandit’s studio in Finsbury Park.

“He didn’t realise what we were letting him in for,” laughs Chatto. “We tried about a million different varnishes. It was epic.”

Patterson directed and edited the video, which also features a horseback-riding stuntman who dives through a train window; and a near-death experience for David Guetta, after a contraption that was supposed to simulate tears malfunctioned while strapped to his face.

Undeterred, the group are planning an even bigger shoot for their next single, which sees them reunite with Swedish pop star Zara Larsson.

“Zara’s been learning to fly helicopters,” reveals Patterson. “So we’re devising a story where she works for the RAF search and rescue as a helicopter pilot.”

The band seem creatively reinvigorated after a period they politely describe as “pretty challenging”. They have two albums-worth of material ready to go, including unreleased collaborations with Elton John and Raye that may (or may not) see the light of day.

They’ve also been spreading their wings, collaborating with artists from South America, Jamaica and Africa on a number of spontaneous sessions earlier this year.

Unexpectedly, those sessions were inspired by another teeth-grinding setback the band endured in 2019.

It all started when the band signed a deal with a major beer company, who offered to sponsor the band as they travelled to China, Russia, Nepal, India and Vietnam, making new songs with local artists.

“They approached us and said ‘you have total creative freedom’,” says Patterson. “As long as you drink a bit of the beer in the studio, we’ll pay for it all and film it.”

“It felt like it was going to be a really creative thing – but we’d been tricked,” adds Chatto.

The penny didn’t drop until their third recording session, when the band were handed a translation of the lyrics by Vietnamese singers JustaTee and Phương Ly.

“I was like ‘that’s weird, the chorus says “open to more” again’,” recalls Patterson.

It transpired that, although Clean Bandit had been given artistic freedom, the brewery had signed separate contracts with their collaborators, forcing them to use the company’s slogan in their lyrics.

‘We were like, ‘hang on, that’s the Tuborg strapline, why are you writing that in the chorus?’” Patterson recalls.

“And they’re like, ‘oh, we have to. If we don’t do that, we don’t get paid’.”

The whole experience was a “devastating waste of energy”, he says. The songs essentially vanished, unable to be played on radio stations where they’d be considered in breach of advertising guidelines.

But, says Chatto, “it made us realise that if we were doing this on our own terms, it would be a fantastic way to live – just going around the world, making music.”

That’s what they did at the start of 2024, with writing sessions in Miami, Lagos and Jamaica that have produced “two entire records” of material.

Some of those songs have already come out – including the sublime summer jam Mar Azul, written with Colombian pop group Piso 21.

“I hate to keep coming back to it, but our previous label was based in the UK,” says Patterson, “so their priority was always what would work over here.

“If it wasn’t going to be played on Capital [Radio], they weren’t interested.

“Now, if we work with someone in Mumbai, that’s ok. The fact that we don’t have a singer means we can be light on our feet and work anywhere in the world.”

That’s where Clean Bandit see their future: Concentrating on quality, rather than the demands of streaming algorithms, in the hope their fans will follow them.

“That’s the hope,” says Chatto. “Because it’s already been the case that our songs have gone around the world and reached a lot of people.”

In other words: There’s no place they’d rather be.

Many Nigerians have reacted with outrage after a new plane was bought for President Bola Tinubu at a time when the economy is experiencing its worst crisis in a generation.

The purchase comes less than two weeks after thousands took to the streets across the country to protest at rising hunger and the cost of living.

Elected last year to lead Africa’s most populous country, Mr Tinubu has introduced several economic reforms, including the removal of fuel subsidies, which have contributed to high inflation, currently over 30%.

President Tinubu said the reforms were necessary to cut government spending and stimulate long-term growth.

In January, the Nigerian president announced a 60% reduction in the size of official travel delegations, including his own entourage.

However on Monday, the president departed for France using a newly acquired Airbus A330, which has become the latest addition to the presidential fleet of more than five aircraft.

The cost of the plane has not been disclosed, and nor has the reason for his trip.

• ‘I’ve been sleeping under a bridge in Lagos for 30 years’
• Is Nigeria on the right track after a year of Tinubu?
• Should I stay or should I go? The dilemma for young Nigerians

X user @Fdmlearn said it wasn’t right that Nigerians were being told to undergo economic pain while the government was buying a new plane for the president.

“Wait so despite the Tinubu led Government telling Nigerians to bear the economic hardship and wait for a better tomorrow, they were busy paying cash for a new private Jet to add to the presidential fleet that has over 6 aircraft’s already?”.

Another X user @RealOlaudah was even more angry.

“Let’s tell ourselves the truth. Tinubu’s new Airbus presidential aircraft purchase for N150 billion at a time of penury, hunger, and want shows how wicked, selfish, self-indulgent, and insensitive to the plight of the average Nigerian he really is.”

However, @Timi_The_Law says he supports the president’s decision as the plane is not personal but belongs to the office of the president.

“Tinubu’s decision to buy a new plane is the right one. The plane belongs to the office of the president, and future presidents will enjoy it,” he posted.

It is not known if lawmakers approved the purchase, which was not mentioned in this year’s budget.

In a statement on X, President Tinubu’s media aide Bayo Onanuga said the new plane would actually save money.

“The new plane, bought far below the market price, saves Nigeria huge maintenance and fuel costs, running into millions of dollars yearly,” the statement read in part.

The new presidential jet was recently released to the Nigerian government after it was seized by a Chinese firm, Zhangson Investment Co. Limited, which obtained a Paris court order to seize some Nigerian government assets following an investment dispute with Ogun state in south-west Nigeria.

The 15-year-old plane is said to have an elaborate configuration for VIPs and replaces the country’s 19-year-old Boeing BBJ 737-700.

Nigerian officials have previously said that the presidential fleet had a high maintenance cost due to the age of its planes.

In June, lawmakers recommended the purchase of two new aircraft for the president and his deputy, saying the old ones were not safe.

Last month, lawmakers passed a supplementary budget, which sought to raise the 2024 budget from 28.7 trillion naira ($18bn; £14bn) to 35.06 trillion naira.

It is not known if the purchase of the new plane was included in this budget.

The BBC has reached out to the Senate President and the Office of the National Security Adviser but is yet to get a response.

• Africa’s ‘flying presidents’ under fire
• Bola Tinubu halts foreign trips by government officials
• Woman switches to Miss Universe Nigeria after Miss South Africa row

An ex-mayor accused of spying for China and having ties with criminal syndicates has fled the Philippines, stirring fury.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr said Wednesday that “heads will roll” after officials admitted Alice Guo had left the country undetected one month ago and travelled to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Mr Marcos said her departure “laid bare the corruption that undermines our justice system and erodes the people’s trust”.

Ms Guo has been out of public view since July when a Senate panel investigating her alleged links to scam centres and online casinos ordered her arrest for refusing to testify in its enquiry.

She is accused of allowing human trafficking syndicates and scam centres to operate in her town by masquerading as online casinos.

Senators have also accused her of being an operative or spy for China, citing her “opaque” answers to questions about her Chinese parentage.

Police have filed criminal complaints against her, while the Philippines’ anti-graft body recently dismissed her from office citing “grave misconduct”.

She has denied all the allegations.

Ms Guo left the Philippines “illegally” and skipped border checks, according to the country’s Bureau of Immigration, which said it found out about her travels abroad through intelligence sources.

Mr Marcos said he would “expose the culprits who have betrayed the people’s trust and aided in her flight.”

He also ordered the cancellation of Ms Guo’s Philippine passport.

Senator Risa Hontiveros, who has been leading the investigation on the Philippines’ scam centres since May, said it is unacceptable for Ms Guo to slip past immigration checks.

“The nerve of this fake Filipino, using a Philippine passport to escape,” she said.

Ms Guo came under scrutiny in March after authorities uncovered a huge scam centre and human trafficking operation in her sleepy town of Bamban, north of Manila.

The illegal operations were hidden in Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, or “Pogo” firms, that stood on land owned by Ms Guo’s family.

Prior to that, Ms Guo was relatively unknown and had not held public office before being elected mayor in 2022. She claims she grew up sheltered in the family’s pig farm in Bamban.

While Pogos are not illegal, they are increasingly being exposed as cover for other crimes. The firms, which mostly cater to mainland Chinese clients, flourished under former president Rodrigo Duterte, who sought close economic and political ties with Beijing.

But Mr Duterte’s successor, Mr Marcos, reversed the country’s foreign policy direction and has cracked down on Pogo-linked crimes since assuming office in 2022.

Nationalist sentiment is also growing in the Philippines, as its dispute with China over reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea continue to fester.

Earlier this week, Manila and Beijing traded fresh allegations of ship ramming in the resource-rich waters.

A senior US administration official has pushed back at reported comments by Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing the Israeli prime minister of making “maximalist statements” that are “not constructive to getting a ceasefire deal across the finish line”.

It comes in the midst of an intense round of regional diplomacy by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as Washington tries to drive forward progress on a ceasefire and hostage release deal.

On Monday, Mr Blinken had talks lasting three hours with the Israeli leader in Jerusalem.

He later said Mr Netanyahu had accepted Washington’s so-called “bridging proposal” aimed at trying to solve sticking points and bring Israel and Hamas closer to a deal.

According to an Israeli media report, Mr Netanyahu later told a meeting of hostage families that he “convinced” Mr Blinken that the deal must see Israeli troops remaining in areas of Gaza he described as “strategic military and political assets”, including along the southern border with Egypt.

The reported comments appear to have irritated the US administration.

“We saw the prime minister’s comments, specifically on some of these items,” said the senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We’re certainly not going to negotiate in public but what I can say is that the only thing Secretary Blinken and the United States are convinced of is the need for getting a ceasefire proposal across the finish line.”

“We fully expect that… if Hamas were also to also accept this bridging proposal, discussions will continue on some of the more technical… details.

“I would also just add that maximalist statements like this are not constructive to getting a ceasefire deal across the finish line and they certainly risk the ability of implementing level, working level and technical talks to be able to move forward when both parties agree to a bridging proposal.”

The senior official’s remarks followed Tuesday’s round of talks between Mr Blinken and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the coastal city of El-Alamein.

Egyptian officials are said to be strongly opposed to the idea of Israeli troops remaining along Egypt’s border in Gaza.

Following his stop in Egypt, Mr Blinken travelled on to Qatar for further talks in Doha – the last stop on his Middle East tour.

The BBC has been travelling with the secretary of state and asked him about the conversation shortly before he left Doha.

He revealed for the first time that the American bridging proposal included a “detailed plan” about Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

“The agreement is very clear on the schedule and locations of IDF [Israel Defense Forces] withdrawals from Gaza and Israel has agreed to that,” said Mr Blinken.

Asked by the BBC whether Mr Netanyahu’s reported claim that the Israeli leader had “convinced” Mr Blinken to keep troops in Gaza, he said: “I can’t speak to what he’s quoted as saying, I can just speak to what I heard from him directly yesterday [Monday] when we spent three hours together,” he said.

“[That included] Israel’s endorsement of the bridging proposal and thus the detailed plan. And that plan among other things includes a very clear schedule and locations for withdrawals.”

Asked whether the proposal was for a “full withdrawal”, Mr Blinken said he would not comment on the details of the plan.

Hamas said the latest ceasefire proposals constituted “a coup” against what had been agreed upon in earlier negotiations, and reiterated its wish that a ceasefire plan for Gaza be based on where talks were in July rather than any new rounds of negotiations.

A trial has begun in California to decide whether Stanford University can keep the diaries of a top Chinese official, in a case that is being framed as a fight against Chinese government censorship.

The diaries belong to the late Li Rui, a former secretary to Communist China’s founder Mao Zedong.

Following Li’s death in 2019, his widow sued for the documents to be returned to Beijing, claiming they belong to her.

Stanford rejects this. It says Li, who had been a critic of the Chinese government, donated his diaries to the university as he feared they would be destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party.

The diaries, which were written between 1935 and 2018, cover much of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule. In those eight tumultuous decades, China emerged from impoverished isolation to become indispensable to the global economy.

“If [the diaries] return to China they will be banned… China does not have a good record in permitting criticism of party leaders,” Mark Litvack, one of Stanford’s lawyers, told the BBC before the trial began.

The BBC has contacted lawyers representing Zhang Yuzhen, Mr Li’s widow, for comment.

A prominent CCP figure known for his reformist views, Mr Li was both venerated and shunned by the party.

As a young outspoken cadre he caught the eye of Mao who made him one of his personal secretaries in the mid-1950s. But the position was shortlived.

When Li criticised Mao’s views at a political meeting, he was ousted from the party and spent years in prison. He was among hundreds of party officials and public figures, including close allies of Mao, who fell foul of the mercurial leader.

Like some of them, Li returned to prominence after Mao died in 1976. He oversaw the ministry of hydroelectric power and a CCP department that selected officials for key positions. Within the party, he was allied with the more liberal, open-minded faction advocating for reform.

After his retirement, he continued to lobby the party for reform. But his unsparing, sharp-tongued criticism of leaders, including President Xi Jinping – whom he dismissed as “lowly-educated” – needled the government. His writings were censored and his books banned in China.

As a party elder, however, he continued to be treated with respect and enjoyed privileges. When he died he was given a state funeral.

Throughout, as he navigated the echelons of power, he meticulously recorded observations about party politics and key events in his diaries.

These include his account of the Tiananmen Massacre, which he witnessed from a balcony overlooking the square and labelled as “Black Weekend” in English in his diary. It is a highly sensitive issue that is rarely discussed in China.

His daughter, Li Nanyang, began donating his documents, including the diaries, to Stanford’s Hoover Institution in 2014, when he was still alive.

In a 2019 interview with BBC Chinese after his death, she said this fulfilled her father’s wishes.

That year Ms Zhang filed a lawsuit against Li Nanyang – her stepdaughter – in China.

Ms Zhang, who was Li Rui’s second wife, argued that he wanted her to decide which of his documents would be made public and they were wrongfully given to Stanford, according to reports.

The widow said the diaries contained “deeply personal and private affairs” of her life with Li. As the diaries can be accessed by the public at Stanford, she said their display caused her “personal embarrassment and emotional distress”.

A Beijing court ruled in Ms Zhang’s favour and ordered the diaries to be handed over to her.

Stanford has rejected this ruling. Its lawyers have argued that “Chinese courts are not impartial in politically-charged cases such as this” and that the university was not given a chance to defend itself.

The trial that began in California on Monday is over a separate lawsuit launched by the university against Ms Zhang in the US.

Stanford is asking the California court to declare the university as the lawful owner of the diaries.

Its lawyers argue that Li Rui wanted to donate his papers to Stanford because “he understood that the regime would seek to suppress his account of modern Chinese history” and he “feared that the materials would be destroyed”.

Stanford has been allowed to retain copies of the diaries, but it is arguing to keep the original documents as well, to comply with Li’s wishes.

“Li Rui wanted his diaries, including his originals, at Hoover,” Mr Litvack said. “That’s why they are at Hoover and we have fought to keep them at Hoover.”

The Moon’s south pole was once covered in an ocean of liquid molten rock, according to scientists.

The findings back up a theory that magma formed the Moon’s surface around 4.5 billion years ago.

Remnants of the ocean were found by India’s historic Chandrayaan-3 mission that landed on the south pole last August.

The mission explored this isolated and mysterious area where no craft had ever landed before.

The findings help back up an idea called the Lunar Magma Ocean theory about how the Moon formed.

Scientists think that when the Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago, it began to cool and a lighter mineral called ferroan anorthosite floated to the surface. This ferroan anorthosite – or molten rock – formed the moon’s surface.

The team behind the new findings found evidence of ferroan anorthosite in the south pole.

“The theory of early evolution of the Moon becomes much more robust in the light of our observations,” said Dr Santosh Vadawale from the Physical Research Laboratory, who is co-author of the paper published in Nature on Wednesday.

Before India’s mission, the main evidence of magma oceans was found in the mid-latitudes of the Moon as part of the Apollo programme.

Prof Vandawale and his team were at mission control during Chandrayaan-3.

“They were really exciting times. Sitting in the control room, moving the rover around on the lunar surface – that was really a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” says Prof Vadawale.

When India’s lander, called Vikram, made its celebrated soft landing on the south pole last August, a rover called Pragyaan drove out of the craft.

Pragyaan rambled around the lunar surface for 10 days, while Prof Vadawale and his colleagues worked around the clock instructing it to collect data at 70 degree south latitude.

The robot was built to withstand swings of temperature between 70C and -10C, and could make its own decisions about how to navigate the uneven and dusty lunar surface.

It took 23 measurements with an instrument called an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer. This basically excites atoms and analyses the energy produced in order to identify the minerals in the Moon’s soil.

The team of scientists also found evidence of a huge meteorite crash in the region four billion years ago.

The crash is thought to have made the South Pole–Aitken basin, which is one of the largest craters in the solar system, measuring 2,500 km across.

It is about 350km from the site India’s Praygam rover explored.

But the scientists detected magnesium, which they believe was from deep inside the Moon, thrown up from the crash and propelled over the surface.

“This would have been caused by a big impact of an asteroid, throwing out material from this big basin. In the process, it also excavated a deeper part of the Moon,” said Professor Anil Bhardwaj, director of India’s Physical Research Laboratory.

The findings are just some of the scientific data collected during the Chandrayaan-3 mission which eventually hopes to discover ice water on the South Pole.

That discovery would be a game-changer for space agencies’ dreams of building a human base on the Moon.

India plans to launch another mission to the Moon in 2025 or 2026 when it hopes to collect and bring back to Earth samples from the lunar surface for analysis.

The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in India’s Kolkata city earlier this month has sparked massive outrage in the country, with tens of thousands of people protesting on the streets, demanding justice. BBC Hindi spoke to the doctor’s parents who remember their daughter as a clever, young woman who wanted to lead a good life and take care of her family.

“Please make sure dad takes his medicines on time. Don’t worry about me.”

This was the last thing the 31-year-old doctor said to her mother, hours before she was brutally assaulted in a hospital where she worked.

“The next day, we tried reaching her but the phone kept ringing,” the mother told the BBC at their family home in a narrow alley, a few kilometres from Kolkata.

The same morning, the doctor’s partially-clothed body was discovered in the seminar hall, bearing extensive injuries. A hospital volunteer worker has been arrested in connection with the crime.

The incident has sparked massive outrage across the country, with protests in several major cities. At the weekend, doctors across hospitals in India observed a nation-wide strike called by the Indian Medical Association (IMA), with only emergency services available at major hospitals.

The family say they feel hollowed out by their loss.

“At the age of 62, all my dreams have been shattered,” her father told the BBC.

Since their daughter’s horrific murder, their house, located in a respectable neighbourhood, has become the focus of intense media scrutiny.

Behind a police barricade stand dozens of journalists and camera crew, hoping to capture the parents in case they step out.

A group of 10 to 15 police officers perpetually stand guard to ensure the cameras do not take photos of the victim’s house.

The crime took place on the night of 9 August, when the woman, who was a junior doctor at the city’s RG Kar Medical College, had gone to a seminar room to rest after a gruelling 36-hour shift.

Her parents remembered how the young doctor, their only child, was a passionate student who worked extremely hard to become a doctor.

“We come from a lower middle-class background and built everything on our own. When she was little, we struggled financially,” said the father, who is a tailor.

The living room where he sat was cluttered with tools from his profession – a sewing machine, spools of thread and a heavy iron. There were scraps of fabrics scattered on the floor.

There were times when the family did not have money to even buy pomegranates, their daughter’s favourite fruit, he continued.

“But she could never bring herself to ask for anything for herself.”

“People would say, ‘You can’t make your daughter a doctor’. But my daughter proved everyone wrong and got admission in a government-run medical college,” he added, breaking down. A relative tried to console him.

The mother recalled how her daughter would write in her diary every night before going to bed.

“She wrote that she wanted to win a gold medal for her medical degree. She wanted to lead a good life and take care of us too,” she said softly.

And she did.

The father, who is a high blood-pressure patient, said their daughter always made sure he took his medicines on time.

“Once I ran out of medicine and thought I’d just buy it the next day. But she found out, and even though it was around 10 or 11pm at night, she said no-one will eat until the medicine is here,” he said.

“That’s how she was – she never let me worry about anything.”

Her mother listened intently, her hands repeatedly touching a gold bangle on her wrist – a bangle she had bought with her daughter.

The parents said their daughter’s marriage had almost been finalised. “But she would tell us not to worry and say she would continue to take care of all our expenses even after marriage,” the father said.

As he spoke those words, the mother began to weep, her soft sobs echoing in the background.

Occasionally, her eyes would wander to the staircase, leading up to their daughter’s room.

The door has remained shut since 10 August and the parents have not set foot there since the news of her death.

They say they still can’t believe that something “so barbaric” could happen to their daughter at her workplace.

“The hospital should be a safe place,” the father said.

Violence against women is a major issue in India – an average of 90 rapes a day were reported in 2022, according to government data.

The parents said their daughter’s death had brought back memories of a 2012 case when a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern was gang-raped on a moving bus in capital Delhi. Her injuries were fatal.

Following the assault – which made global headlines and led to weeks of protests – India tightened laws against sexual violence.

But reported cases of sexual assault have gone up and access to justice still remains a challenge for women.

Last week, thousands participated in a Reclaim the Night march held in Kolkata to demand safety for women across the country.

The doctor’s case has also put a spotlight on challenges faced by healthcare workers, who have demanded a thorough and impartial investigation into the murder and a federal law to protect them – especially women – at work.

Federal Health Minister JP Nadda has assured doctors that he will bring in strict measures to ensure better safety in their professional environments.

But for the parents of the doctor, it’s too little too late.

“We want the harshest punishment for the culprit,” the father said.

“Our state, our country and the whole world is asking for justice for our daughter.”

An ex-mayor accused of spying for China and having ties with criminal syndicates has fled the Philippines, stirring fury.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr said Wednesday that “heads will roll” after officials admitted Alice Guo had left the country undetected one month ago and travelled to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Mr Marcos said her departure “laid bare the corruption that undermines our justice system and erodes the people’s trust”.

Ms Guo has been out of public view since July when a Senate panel investigating her alleged links to scam centres and online casinos ordered her arrest for refusing to testify in its enquiry.

She is accused of allowing human trafficking syndicates and scam centres to operate in her town by masquerading as online casinos.

Senators have also accused her of being an operative or spy for China, citing her “opaque” answers to questions about her Chinese parentage.

Police have filed criminal complaints against her, while the Philippines’ anti-graft body recently dismissed her from office citing “grave misconduct”.

She has denied all the allegations.

Ms Guo left the Philippines “illegally” and skipped border checks, according to the country’s Bureau of Immigration, which said it found out about her travels abroad through intelligence sources.

Mr Marcos said he would “expose the culprits who have betrayed the people’s trust and aided in her flight.”

He also ordered the cancellation of Ms Guo’s Philippine passport.

Senator Risa Hontiveros, who has been leading the investigation on the Philippines’ scam centres since May, said it is unacceptable for Ms Guo to slip past immigration checks.

“The nerve of this fake Filipino, using a Philippine passport to escape,” she said.

Ms Guo came under scrutiny in March after authorities uncovered a huge scam centre and human trafficking operation in her sleepy town of Bamban, north of Manila.

The illegal operations were hidden in Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, or “Pogo” firms, that stood on land owned by Ms Guo’s family.

Prior to that, Ms Guo was relatively unknown and had not held public office before being elected mayor in 2022. She claims she grew up sheltered in the family’s pig farm in Bamban.

While Pogos are not illegal, they are increasingly being exposed as cover for other crimes. The firms, which mostly cater to mainland Chinese clients, flourished under former president Rodrigo Duterte, who sought close economic and political ties with Beijing.

But Mr Duterte’s successor, Mr Marcos, reversed the country’s foreign policy direction and has cracked down on Pogo-linked crimes since assuming office in 2022.

Nationalist sentiment is also growing in the Philippines, as its dispute with China over reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea continue to fester.

Earlier this week, Manila and Beijing traded fresh allegations of ship ramming in the resource-rich waters.

The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in India’s Kolkata city earlier this month has sparked massive outrage in the country, with tens of thousands of people protesting on the streets, demanding justice. BBC Hindi spoke to the doctor’s parents who remember their daughter as a clever, young woman who wanted to lead a good life and take care of her family.

“Please make sure dad takes his medicines on time. Don’t worry about me.”

This was the last thing the 31-year-old doctor said to her mother, hours before she was brutally assaulted in a hospital where she worked.

“The next day, we tried reaching her but the phone kept ringing,” the mother told the BBC at their family home in a narrow alley, a few kilometres from Kolkata.

The same morning, the doctor’s partially-clothed body was discovered in the seminar hall, bearing extensive injuries. A hospital volunteer worker has been arrested in connection with the crime.

The incident has sparked massive outrage across the country, with protests in several major cities. At the weekend, doctors across hospitals in India observed a nation-wide strike called by the Indian Medical Association (IMA), with only emergency services available at major hospitals.

The family say they feel hollowed out by their loss.

“At the age of 62, all my dreams have been shattered,” her father told the BBC.

Since their daughter’s horrific murder, their house, located in a respectable neighbourhood, has become the focus of intense media scrutiny.

Behind a police barricade stand dozens of journalists and camera crew, hoping to capture the parents in case they step out.

A group of 10 to 15 police officers perpetually stand guard to ensure the cameras do not take photos of the victim’s house.

The crime took place on the night of 9 August, when the woman, who was a junior doctor at the city’s RG Kar Medical College, had gone to a seminar room to rest after a gruelling 36-hour shift.

Her parents remembered how the young doctor, their only child, was a passionate student who worked extremely hard to become a doctor.

“We come from a lower middle-class background and built everything on our own. When she was little, we struggled financially,” said the father, who is a tailor.

The living room where he sat was cluttered with tools from his profession – a sewing machine, spools of thread and a heavy iron. There were scraps of fabrics scattered on the floor.

There were times when the family did not have money to even buy pomegranates, their daughter’s favourite fruit, he continued.

“But she could never bring herself to ask for anything for herself.”

“People would say, ‘You can’t make your daughter a doctor’. But my daughter proved everyone wrong and got admission in a government-run medical college,” he added, breaking down. A relative tried to console him.

The mother recalled how her daughter would write in her diary every night before going to bed.

“She wrote that she wanted to win a gold medal for her medical degree. She wanted to lead a good life and take care of us too,” she said softly.

And she did.

The father, who is a high blood-pressure patient, said their daughter always made sure he took his medicines on time.

“Once I ran out of medicine and thought I’d just buy it the next day. But she found out, and even though it was around 10 or 11pm at night, she said no-one will eat until the medicine is here,” he said.

“That’s how she was – she never let me worry about anything.”

Her mother listened intently, her hands repeatedly touching a gold bangle on her wrist – a bangle she had bought with her daughter.

The parents said their daughter’s marriage had almost been finalised. “But she would tell us not to worry and say she would continue to take care of all our expenses even after marriage,” the father said.

As he spoke those words, the mother began to weep, her soft sobs echoing in the background.

Occasionally, her eyes would wander to the staircase, leading up to their daughter’s room.

The door has remained shut since 10 August and the parents have not set foot there since the news of her death.

They say they still can’t believe that something “so barbaric” could happen to their daughter at her workplace.

“The hospital should be a safe place,” the father said.

Violence against women is a major issue in India – an average of 90 rapes a day were reported in 2022, according to government data.

The parents said their daughter’s death had brought back memories of a 2012 case when a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern was gang-raped on a moving bus in capital Delhi. Her injuries were fatal.

Following the assault – which made global headlines and led to weeks of protests – India tightened laws against sexual violence.

But reported cases of sexual assault have gone up and access to justice still remains a challenge for women.

Last week, thousands participated in a Reclaim the Night march held in Kolkata to demand safety for women across the country.

The doctor’s case has also put a spotlight on challenges faced by healthcare workers, who have demanded a thorough and impartial investigation into the murder and a federal law to protect them – especially women – at work.

Federal Health Minister JP Nadda has assured doctors that he will bring in strict measures to ensure better safety in their professional environments.

But for the parents of the doctor, it’s too little too late.

“We want the harshest punishment for the culprit,” the father said.

“Our state, our country and the whole world is asking for justice for our daughter.”

Hollywood stars Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are divorcing after two years of marriage.

Lopez filed for divorce on Tuesday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, according to court documents seen by the BBC.

The pair – dubbed Bennifer by tabloids – formally tied the knot in Las Vegas in July 2022 and held a larger wedding ceremony in Georgia the following month.

Their romance began after they met while working on the set of the 2003 crime caper Gigli. They had originally planned to marry that year, but called off their relationship early in 2004.

Almost two decades later they rekindled their relationship.

“Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient,” Lopez said in 2022 after announcing the Las Vegas wedding.

The BBC has contacted their representatives for comment.

A court filing in the case says Lopez or her attorney has to notify Affleck with a copy of her petition to dissolve their marriage.

Media reports indicate Lopez, who had legally changed her last name to Affleck, did not list any details of a prenuptial agreement in her petition for divorce.

A document filed in LA’s Superior Court in the case says both Lopez, 55, and Affleck, 52, must share financial information, including their current income, expenses, properties and debts.

The document says both are mandated to divulge any changes to their finances “until there is a final agreement about all financial issues in your case”.

The court gave Lopez 60 days to file a financial disclosure and Affleck will have another 60 days after she submits her information to do likewise.

The filing says if either fails to report or update financial information, it could result in a court-imposed sanction.

There has been months of speculation over their relationship. They reportedly put their Beverly Hills mansion up for sale at $65m (£50m) and were pictured out separately not wearing their wedding rings.

Affleck, a two-time Oscar winner, was previously married to the actress Jennifer Garner, who he met on the set of 2001 romance Pearl Harbor. They split in 2015 after a decade of marriage and have three children together.

Lopez has been married four times, first to Cuban-born waiter Ojani Noa from 1997-98; then her former back-up dancer Cris Judd from 2001-03; and to singer Marc Anthony, with whom she had twins, from 2004-14.

The singer and actress, known as J.Lo, was also once engaged to New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez.

Michelle and Barack Obama gave resounding endorsements of Kamala Harris on Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention, exhorting party supporters across the US to turn out and vote to defeat Donald Trump in November.

“Hope is making a comeback,” Mrs Obama told the crowd at the DNC in Chicago, echoing her husband’s campaign promise of “hope and change”.

In their back-to-back speeches, the Democratic Party’s most popular figures praised Ms Harris, while excoriating Trump – whose presidency was characterised by “bluster and chaos”, in the words of Mr Obama.

But the couple also warned their party not to lose sight of what remains an extremely tight race amid the enthusiasm for Ms Harris’s campaign. They stressed the election would be decided in a handful of key swing states.

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“Make no mistake, it will be a fight,” said the 63-year-old former president Mr Obama.

Michelle Obama, 60, stressed the point further. “We need to vote in numbers that erase any doubt,” she said. “We need to overwhelm any effort to suppress us.”

Mr Obama emphasised America’s preparedness for a “new chapter”, adding: “We are ready for a President Kamala Harris. And Kamala Harris is ready for the job.”

The Obamas’ appeal to Democrats to turn out in November exposed a deeper party anxiety about the narrow race between Ms Harris and Trump, who retains a tight hold on his loyal base of supporters across the country.

Ms Harris has a slender lead in national polling averages but pollsters caution that the race remains a virtual tie in the handful of battleground states that will ultimately decide who wins under America’s electoral college system.

Though Ms Harris is technically the incumbent candidate, she has described herself and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, as the underdogs in the race.

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The Obamas also acknowledged the renewed sense of excitement within the party since Ms Harris replaced President Joe Biden following his exit from the race – making a tacit reference to the enthusiasm and message of hope that powered Mr Obama to victory in his 2008 presidential run against Republican John McCain.

Mr Obama also went on to serve a second term, before Trump won the White House in 2016.

Mrs Obama, whose most memorable line from her last convention speech in 2016 was, “when they go low, we go high”, did little to lower the temperature of the heated political rhetoric that has divided the country over the last decade.

She attacked Trump for assailing her family and continuing to push “ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better”.

In a broadside that generated some of the loudest cheers of the night, she mocked Trump for his use of the term “black jobs” on the campaign trail.

“Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs?” she said, referring to her husband’s presidency.

Mrs Obama also used her platform to remember her late mother, Chicago-raised Marian Robinson, who died earlier this year aged 86.

“I wasn’t even sure if I could be steady enough to stand before you tonight, but my heart compelled me to,” she told the audience.

Trump and running mate JD Vance have been holding rallies and events in swing states while the Democrats gather in Chicago.

On Tuesday afternoon, Mr Vance used a news conference in neighbouring Wisconsin to attack Ms Harris over the “failures” of her vice-presidency.

He zeroed in on crime and public safety, and the economy – two areas where the Republicans see a vulnerability.

Referring to protests in the city of Kenosha after the police shooting of black man Jacob Blake in 2020, he said: “Wisconsin has suffered when you don’t have good, smart, pro-public safety and leadership, and that’s what Donald Trump and I want to bring back to the White House.”

Having travelled to Wisconsin, Ms Harris was not present at day two of the convention in Chicago. But the event did feature a jubilant and star-studded roll call, with delegates from each state – as well as US territories – symbolically casting a vote for Ms Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in the arena.

Though the vice-president formally clinched her party’s nomination earlier this month, the symbolic gesture quickly turned into a dance party.

Lil Jon performed Turn Down For What before Georgia’s announced its vote. Actor Sean Astin spoke during Indiana’s turn, a nod to his role in the cult classic American football film Rudy, which is set in the state.

An on-stage DJ spun songs for each state as delegates, on their feet and wearing bracelets that flashed red and white, delivered short speeches about why they were supporting Ms Harris and Mr Walz.

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The vice-president then virtually addressed the crowd from her rally in Milwaukee – 90 miles away – at the same venue where Trump accepted his party’s nomination four weeks ago.

“We are so honoured to be your nominees,” she said of herself and Mr Walz. “I’ll see you in two days, Chicago.”

Before the Obamas gave their speeches, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Ms Harris’s husband, made his own appearance to share personal stories about the vice-president – including how they were set up on a blind date by one of his clients in 2013.

He spoke about their “big, beautiful, blended family”, referring to his son, Cole, and daughter, Ella, from his first marriage. He described Ms Harris as a “joyful warrior” and a supportive parent who put their family first despite the demands of her job.

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Ms Harris, who was flying back from her rally during her husband’s speech, kept Air Force Two in the air so she could watch his speech live, the White House said.

Mr Emhoff said the two would celebrate their 10th anniversary on Thursday night, when Ms Harris formally accepts the party’s nomination in a primetime speech.

“Kamala was exactly the right person for me at an important moment in my life,” he said. “And at this moment in our nation’s history, she is exactly the right president.”

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Romanian police have searched the houses of controversial influencer Andrew Tate as part of an investigation into new allegations against him.

The internet personality was already awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking, but could potentially now face additional charges of sex with, and trafficking in, underage persons, as well as money-laundering and attempting to influence witnesses, prosecutors say.

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who have a massive following on social media, have denied all previous charges against them.

They were first detained in Romania in December 2022, then released from house arrest in August 2023.

According to a statement from DIICOT, the special prosecution service of the Romanian Organised Crime Directorate, four houses were searched on Wednesday morning in the capital, Bucharest, and in Ilfov county.

The BBC understands that this investigation relates to Andrew Tate and that these investigations have been going on for some time.

In an apparent response to the raid, the influencer posted on X (formerly Twitter): “The Matrix is real. And they have a tried and true playbook.

“Slander is their number one tool and the process is the punishment. But unfortunately for them, Good always wins in the end.”

Andrew Tate is a self-described misogynist and was previously banned from social media platforms for expressing misogynistic views.

He has repeatedly claimed Romanian prosecutors have no evidence against him and there is a conspiracy to silence him.

The Tate brothers, former kickboxers who are dual UK-US nationals, are accused of exploiting women via an adult content business, which prosecutors allege operated as a criminal group.

Two female Romanian associates were also named alongside the brothers in an indictment published in June last year, and seven alleged victims were identified.

The internet personalities are also wanted in the UK in connection with separate and unrelated sexual offences allegedly committed there.

Authorities in Pakistan have arrested a man on suspicion of cyber terrorism, in relation to disinformation thought to have fuelled UK unrest.

Police told the BBC that Farhan Asif was linked to a website which gave a false name for the suspected Southport attacker and suggested incorrectly that he was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a small boat.

The article, published on the website Channel3Now in the hours after the attack, was widely quoted in viral posts on social media.

Unrest broke out in England and Northern Ireland after the fatal stabbing attack, in which three young girls died.

On raiding Mr Asif’s property, the police recovered 2 laptops and a mobile phone used by Mr Asif.

After analysing the devices, the police say that the account on X (formerly Twitter) for Channel3Now was found active.

On Tuesday, police in Lahore said they had questioned Mr Asif about the article.

Mr Asif said he had written it based on information copied from a UK-based social media account without verifying it, a police officer told the BBC.

The officer told the BBC that Mr Asif said that he ran the website alone.

The police report states that Mr Asif told them that he runs the X account with the purpose of sharing national and international news, and that he picked up the alleged tweet from another twitter user – without checking the authenticity of the information before sharing.

The police say that he used his account “with the intent to glorify the incident about the arrest of a Muslim asylum seeker by police… and created a sense of fear, panic, insecurity in the Government and the public” and it is on this basis that they have filed a case against him.

The police report also states that “Farhan Asif admitted to providing misleading information to the BBC regarding his accomplices in an attempt to divert blame to others.”

Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency has since taken up the case and will investigate whether anyone further is involved.

BBC Verify previously tracked down several people linked to Channel3Now and questioned a person who claimed to be “management” at the site.

That person told the BBC that the publication of the false name “shouldn’t have happened, but it was an error, not intentional”.

False information about the attacker spread online after three young girls were killed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on 29 July.

Violent disorder then broke out in Southport before spreading to towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland, fuelled by misinformation, the far-right and anti-immigration sentiment.

According to the latest Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) figure on Tuesday, 494 people have been charged in relation to the recent rioting and unrest.

More than 130 people have already been sentenced with most sent to jail.

A Bangladeshi cricket star and ousted lawmaker has taken to the field for the first time since mass anti-government protests toppled his party.

Shakib Al Hasan, 37, was cleared by Bangladesh’s new interim government last week to face Pakistan in a two-match Test series starting on Wednesday.

The former MP played despite earlier calls by protesters to oust cricket players they accused of being loyal to former leader Sheikh Hasina.

Earlier this month, Ms Hasina was forced to resign as prime minister and flee the country.

Shakib is considered one of his country’s greatest sportsmen, with 4,505 runs in 67 Test matches. As a spin bowler, he holds the record for most Test wickets in Bangladesh’s history with 237.

In January, he had won an uncontested election to become a member of parliament for the then-ruling Awami League party.

So far, he has remained silent on the political crisis that has unfolded in his country, which saw hundreds of people killed in clashes with security forces.

Some Bangladeshis in Dhaka had earlier this month protested against cricket board members they accused of being loyal to Sheikh Hasina.

Shakib in particular was criticised by former Bangladesh Cricket Board member Rafiqul Islam.

“When students were being killed, he never protested. Many of these students considered him an icon. He should have come home first and gave an explanation why he was silent,” he told news agency AFP.

However, the country’s new de facto sports minister – 26-year-old student leader Asif Mahmud – said the team should be “formed on merit”.

Ahead of the series, Bangladesh captain Najmul Hossain Shanto said the political crisis would not affect Shakib’s performance.

“He has played this game for so long so he knows his role and how to prepare himself. I am not thinking about his political career – we all treat him as a cricketer,” he told a news conference.

“I hope he will do something special in this series,” he added.

Shakib joined the squad in Pakistan last week, after featuring in the Global T20 League in Canada, where Bangladeshis also chanted slogans against him.

Eight months ago, he won a seat for the ruling party in his home town of Magura in an election that was boycotted by opposition party.

But his brief political career was curtailed earlier this month by mass demonstrations against a controversial job quota law.

The deadly protests then escalated into country-wide dissatisfaction against then prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her 15 years of authoritarian rule. Within weeks, the ruling Awami League party was dissolved and its MPs ousted from parliaments.

The unrest in Dhaka has prevented the Bangladeshi cricket team from training and Pakistan’s Cricket Board has invited them to arrive four days early to make up for their lack of preparation.

The two countries will play two Test matches in August and September.

Kamala Harris’s White House run received a boost from the Obama double-act at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening, when attendees also saw party members break into dance and heard speeches from Republican defectors.

Rapper Lil Jon added some extra celebrity firepower to the roll call as Democratic delegates went through the formal process of giving Ms Harris their backing.

Monday night included an emotional send-off from President Joe Biden, who reflected on the decades he had spent at the top of US politics before he stepped aside for Kamala Harris to take on the Democratic presidential candidacy.

But the next evening, the Obamas were eager to imbue the convention with positive messaging about the future – and to land a few gags at Donald Trump’s expense.

Here is a look back at some of the night’s memorable moments.

During back-to-back speeches, Barack and Michelle Obama mixed gags with serious exhortations to Democrats to get out and vote in November – pointing out that Ms Harris was in a close race with Donald Trump.

Mr Obama characterised the Republican presidential candidate as being selfish and dangerous, quipping that he was obsessed with crowd sizes.

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And Mrs Obama mocked Trump for his use of the term “black jobs” on the campaign trail. She suggested that Trump might himself be seeking one of those jobs – in a reference to her husband’s previous tenure of the White House.

By contrast, Ms Harris represented “hope”, Ms Obama said, echoing her husband’s campaign messaging from 2008.

One of the night’s speakers was none other than Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who resigned in the wake of the attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021.

Ms Grisham said she would vote for Ms Harris in November, and explained her defection by saying: “I couldn’t be part of the insanity any longer.”

She launched her own broadside at Trump, accusing him of having “no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth”.

Other Republicans who had crossed the political aisle made speeches, too – including Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona. Whether their interventions will sway Republicans is far from certain, given the tight grip that Trump and his wing have on their party.

The ex-president’s allies made sure to launch fresh barbs of their own. Trump’s presidential running mate JD Vance used a news conference to attack Harris over the “failures” of her vice-presidency, focusing on crime and public safety.

America’s Second Gentleman had his own moment in the spotlight.

Ms Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff was introduced to the stage by his son Cole, who said their “blended family” had adjusted to their high-profile life in Washington.

“It felt like Doug was a bit out of place on Capitol Hill,” said Cole, the stepson of Ms Harris. “I thought, ‘What is my goofy dad doing here?’ But he embraced it.”

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Mr Emhoff went on to laud his wife as the “right person” for him and for the US alike.

Meanwhile, a plane carrying Ms Harris herself – who had left a rally in Wisconsin – is reported to have circled for about 10 minutes in the air so that she could finish watch her husband’s speech before landing.

Adding some extra stardust to the political event were filmmaker Spike Lee and actress Eva Longoria, among other famous faces.

Lil Jon showed up, too, performing a ceremonial duty for his home state during a rap that got Democrats dancing in the stands.

When asked which person Georgia was giving its 123 votes, he endorsed Ms Harris and sang bars of his hit Turn Down For What.

Convention attendees also saw the moves of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who boogied his way to the stage to giggles in the room.

Bernie Sanders gave his own speech on Tuesday night – but the energy in the arena was minimal. A murmur of people talking could be heard at the same time.

That is in contrast to the hero’s welcome that the veteran senator received in 2016, the year he challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then, his supporters streamed into the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.

Eight years later, Mr Sanders could still be witnessed railing against oligarchs and corporate interests, but the atmosphere was very different.

One explanation was that the building was filled with delegates who originally supported Joe Biden – rather than the Sanders faithful. But it could also signal that the senator has no clear successor to lead the Democratic progressive left.

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BBC presenter Lauren Laverne has revealed she has been diagnosed with cancer and is recovering in hospital.

Writing on Instagram on Wednesday morning, Laverne said the cancer was “caught early and unexpectedly during a screening test”.

She also told followers she was “expected to make a full recovery” and thanked the medical staff who had cared for her.

Laverne is the host of BBC Radio 6 Music’s breakfast show, and also presents BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.

In her statement Laverne wrote: “I’m in hospital at the moment and wanted to take this moment to say thank you: Firstly to medical teams who have got me this far with incredible skill and kindness.”

The 46-year-old also thanked her colleagues for “their support and for giving me the time off that I need to get better”.

She added her family and friends “have been absolutely extraordinary every step of the way”.

Laverne urged people who were “avoiding a test or putting off an appointment” to get checked out today.

“Half of us will get cancer at some point and finding out asap is everything,” she added.

She concluded: “It’s usually my job to bring the good vibes on air but any you have to spare are very much welcome here. Sending loads of love to anyone in a similar boat, or who has made it back to shore.”

Laverne began filling in for Kirsty Young as BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs host in 2018 after Young had to step away due to health issues.

She later permanently took over the role and has interviewed the likes of Hollywood stars Cate Blanchett and Stanley Tucci, as well as Young herself, over the years.

In addition to her radio work, Laverne has also presented a variety of TV shows including The One Show on the BBC and Channel 4’s 10 O’Clock Live.

Laverne shot to fame as the lead singer and guitarist of 90s pop punk band Kenickie.

After posting about her diagnosis on Instagram, the radio DJ received comments of support from friends and fans.

Fellow BBC presenters Gabby Logan, Clara Amfo and Anita Rani have sent well wishes, while other celebrities including comedian Sarah Millican and McFly’s Harry Judd have also commented on her post.

Presenter Dermot O’Leary, actor Richard E Grant and former Match Of The Day presenter Ian Wright all posted heart emojis.

A BBC spokesman said: “Everyone at 6 Music, Radio 4 and The One Show sends Lauren our very best wishes and we look forward to welcoming her back to work when she’s ready.”

After the news of Laverne’s diagnosis was announced on her breakfast show, presenter Deb Grant, who was sitting in for her, said: “I just wanted to say on behalf of everyone here at 6 Music we’re thinking of you, we hope you’ll be back with us very soon… we love you Lauren.”

Grant then played the track We Can Work It Out, saying it is one of Laverne’s “favourites”.

Nick Grimshaw will present 6 Music Breakfast Show next week while Laverne is on pre-planned holiday.

The BBC said the following week’s presenter will be announced in due course.

Desert Island Discs is currently off air, and due to return in mid-September.

Ukrainian authorities have ordered the evacuation of a key city in the Donbas region as Russian forces continue to make gains in the east of the country, despite Ukraine’s ongoing offensive into Russia’s Kursk region.

Officials said families with children living in Pokrovsk and surrounding villages would be forced to leave.

The head of the city’s military government, Serhii Dobriak, said residents had at most two weeks to flee the Russian advance.

The strategically important city is one of Ukraine’s main defensive strongholds and a key logistical hub for Kyiv’s troops on the eastern front.

Donetsk region head Vadym Filashkin said over 53,000 people, including almost 4,000 children, remained in the city.

He said authorities had taken the decision to forcibly evacuate children and their parents or guardians.

“When our cities are within range of virtually any enemy weapon, the decision to evacuate is necessary and inevitable.”

Mr Dobriak said the rate of evacuations from the city had risen to about 500 to 600 people a day. He said that while basic services continued to operate, they would likely soon cease to function as the Russian army closes in.

The evacuation order came even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his forces were continuing to make gains during their incursion of Russia’s Kursk region.

On Monday, President Zelensky said Ukraine had gained control of over 1,250 sq km of Kursk’s territory and 92 settlements.

“The Russian border area opposite our Sumy region has been mostly cleared of Russian military presence,” he said on X.

“A few months ago, many people around the world would have said this was impossible and crossed Russia’s strictest ‘red line’,” he added.

One of the aims of the incursion is reportedly to divert Russia’s troops away from the Donbas region, relieving pressure on beleaguered Ukrainian troops there.

On Monday, Russian military bloggers claimed Ukraine had blown up a third bridge over the River Seym in the Kursk region. Kyiv did not claim responsibility but the destruction of the bridge would likely further hinder Russian military logistics and help Ukraine consolidate its control over the territory it has seized from Moscow.

But BBC Verify has identified new pontoon bridges – temporary, floating crossings, quickly constructed and used in the absence of permanent structures – over the river, apparently constructed by Russian forces.

In these satellite images taken on Saturday, the two recently built crossings, near Glushkovo, can be seen.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank said that while Russia appeared committed to a strategy of “gradual creeping advances” in the east, Ukraine’s surprise advance into Kursk showed that seizing the initiative had allowed Kyiv to make significant gains rather than slowly losing a “war of attrition”.

The ISW said it had assessed Ukraine to be present across 800 sq km of Russian territory, though it added that presence did not necessarily equate to control. By contrast, the think tank estimates that Russia gained about 1,175 sq km between January and July.