Democrats have rejected demands from demonstrators to allow a Palestinian to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Uncommitted delegates – who oppose US support of Israel’s war in Gaza – began a sit-in protest just outside of the arena doors on Wednesday night.

But by 18:00 local time on Thursday – the deadline protesters had set to hear from Kamala Harris’s campaign – activists said they had not received a response to their requests for a Palestinian to be allowed to take the stage.

The sit-in protest on the final night of the convention came as thousands of demonstrators outside the perimeter continued to rally against the war in Gaza and White House policy.

The demonstrations this week have been largely peaceful, except for a smaller, unsanctioned protest outside the Israeli consulate that led to 56 arrests.

“This has been a disastrous decision by the Democratic leadership to deny a bare-minimum ask that we requested weeks ago, prior to the convention,” said Layla Elabed, a co-leader of the uncommitted national movement.

The Harris campaign told the BBC that campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez had met leaders from the uncommitted movement in recent days.

“There have been a number of speakers who have spoken about the war in Gaza and the need to secure a ceasefire and hostage deal. You will continue to hear that message,” a spokesperson said.

Uncommitted delegates were selected in state Democratic primaries earlier this year. President Joe Biden won an overwhelming share of primary voters, but pro-Palestinian activists urged people to vote “uncommitted” and similar options in a number of states.

Enough Democratic voters did so to send 30 delegates to the convention in Chicago, out of a total of more than 2,400 delegates.

Israel’s war in Gaza has divided the Democratic Party, but has largely been avoided as a topic of discussion during the DNC this week.

The uncommitted protesters said they had given the Harris campaign a list of several potential Palestinians who could speak at the conference.

The activists said the Harris campaign sent aides and lawmakers to the sit-in protest outside the arena on Wednesday night to try to resolve the conflict, but they refused to offer a speaking slot.

Uncommitted activists said they were told that the focus of the convention was on the vice-president, as she prepared to give a speech that would be the “biggest of her life”.

The delegates said they had been asking to have a Palestinian speaker address the crowd at the convention for two months.

“We’re going to have to have a lot of difficult conversations with the vice-president and her team after this,” said Abbas Alawieh, an uncommitted delegate from Michigan. “We’re going to have to take stock of what happened.”

Despite the large protests outside the arena doors, the war in Gaza has been mentioned by only a handful of speakers throughout the four-day programme.

Mr Alawieh said the goal of having a Palestinian speaker at the convention was about “forcing” the Democratic Party to “create space for talking about Palestinian human rights”.

Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, an outspoken critic of US support of Israel, told the BBC she was not surprised the topic has not been featured much during the convention.

“Interestingly, foreign policy never really is a huge topic that’s talked about,” she said. “But I’ve always thought of foreign policy as domestic policy.”

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?

Days before the Democratic National Convention, Vice-President Kamala Harris is riding high on a wave of favourable polls and energetic rallies. But beyond the good vibes, where does the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee stand on key issues?

Although she has yet to release a comprehensive platform, her time as a California senator and prosecutor, her 2020 bid for the presidency and role in the White House as vice-president give hints as to where Ms Harris stands on a number of policies.

Over the years, some of her positions have shifted and some have said that she has struggled to define herself.

To get a better understanding of what her policy agenda now might look like, BBC News reviewed Ms Harris’ recent speeches and public statements as a 2024 candidate, her record as vice-president and her political history as a 2020 presidential candidate, California senator and prosecutor.

Ms Harris’s campaign told the BBC that the candidate’s most recent statements best reflect her intentions if elected president.

“Vice President Harris will build on the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic agenda that beat Big Pharma, created nearly 16 million jobs, and delivered on the first bipartisan gun safety legislation in three decades,” Harris campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said in a statement.

Here are Ms Harris’ positions on 10 key issues.

As a senator, Ms Harris championed a number of progressive policies, including paid family leave, affordable housing and free tuition for low-and-middle income families.

As vice-president, she has been Mr Biden’s partner in passing major economic legislation – regularly labelled “Bidenomics” – which included major investments in infrastructure and green energy.

But with inflation and high interest rates continuing to bedevil American wallets, polls have shown that the economy continues to be top of mind for many voters.

On Friday, Ms Harris released her economic plan, including mortgage assistance for first-time homebuyers, a tax credit for parents of newborns and bans on price gouging at the grocery store to help target inflation.

And like her opponent, former US President Donald Trump, she has come out against taxing tips.

“As president, I will be laser focused on creating opportunities for the middle class that advance their economic security, stability and dignity. Together, we will build what I call an opportunity economy,” she said Friday.

Ms Harris’s position on the border has changed from when she first ran for office. In 2020, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, she held fairly progressive positions – such as promising to close down immigration detention centres.

In 2021, Mr Biden asked Ms Harris to oversee the diplomatic effort around immigration issues on the US southern border to reduce numbers arriving there.

Many Republicans have characterised her as a “border tsar”, but she was tasked specifically with working with Central American countries on the “root causes” of why people there were fleeing to the US.

As part of that effort, she announced in 2023 that she had helped raise about $3bn – largely from private companies – to invest in communities in the region, hoping to provide opportunities that would make immigrating to the US less attractive.

Earlier this year, she aided the effort to pass a hardline bipartisan border security deal that would have included hundreds of millions of dollars for border wall construction.

But Trump helped kill the deal, accusing Biden’s border policies of causing “death, destruction, and chaos in every American community”.

Her campaign said that, if she were elected president, she remains committed to “bipartisan solutions to strengthen border security”.

Ms Harris has long supported women’s right to an abortion.

She played a key role in the Biden campaign’s effort to make abortion rights central to the 2024 election, and she has long advocated for legislation that would enshrine reproductive rights nationwide.

That position has not changed.

“When Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States, I will sign it into law,” she said at a rally for her 2024 campaign in Atlanta, Georgia.

She was the first vice-president to visit an abortion clinic, and she toured the country after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022 to speak about the growing number of abortion bans in the US – often framing the issue as one about personal freedom.

Powerful pro-choice advocacy groups, such as Emilys List and Reproductive Freedom for All, have officially endorsed Ms Harris since she started her presidential run.

While much of her early career focused on the state of California, since going to Washington as a senator in 2017, Ms Harris has become more involved on the global stage.

As senator, she traveled to Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan and Israel.

As vice-president, she has met 150 world leaders and visited 21 countries.

She attended the Munich Security Conference in the past year, and she delivered remarks in support of western security alliance Nato that denounced isolationism.

She has also vowed to support Ukraine in its war against Russia “for as long as it takes”. Ms Harris represented the US in June at the “peace conference” convened by Ukraine in Switzerland where she reaffirmed Washington’s support.

Within 48 hours of her candidacy becoming public, 350 leading US foreign policy and national security experts – largely Democrats – released a letter endorsing her as the “best qualified person” to lead the country in international affairs.

Ms Harris has been a longtime advocate for a two-state solution.

As vice-president, she was more open to criticising Israel during the Israel-Gaza war than Mr Biden.

She was one of the first members of the administration to call for an “immediate cease-fire”, raised concerns over the “humanitarian catastrophe for Palestinians” and charged Israel with ending the conflict.

She held what she called “frank and constructive” talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited Washington in July.

As the presumptive Democratic candidate, she said she told Mr Netanyahu that she had “serious concerns” about casualties in Gaza and that the way Israel defended itself mattered.

“It is time for this war to end,” she said after face-to-face talks at the White House.

She has not supported an arms embargo on Israel, however, as some on the US left have called for.

Her national security adviser, Phil Gordon, said on X that she “has been clear: she will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups”.

In 2017, while a senator, Ms Harris supported a number of progressive tax programmes, co-sponsoring a bill with Bernie Sanders to expand social security for the elderly by increasing the tax rate on investments.

As a presidential candidate in 2019, she supported a corporate tax rate of 35%, up from 21%.

This was more aggressive than President Biden’s proposal, which she also supported, of an increase to 28%.

A campaign official told the BBC that the vice-president would continue to back President Biden’s proposal of not raising taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 (£310,000).

As California’s attorney general, Ms Harris and her office often used anti-trust laws to keep insurers, hospitals and drug companies from raising customer costs.

When she became a US senator and later a 2020 candidate for president, she held more progressive views than Mr Biden, supporting expanding Medicare and publicly-funded health-care programmes.

Medicare is US government-funded healthcare that covers those aged 65 and older and those younger with disabilities.

Ms Harris previously had supported Medicare for All, a policy that would allow all Americans access to the system. It was a position that became popular among many progressive Democrats before Mr Biden’s presidency.

During the same period, she also backed eliminating private healthcare insurance but then partially walked that back, releasing a plan during her 2020 presidential campaign that would put the US on track to offer government-funded health insurance over 10 years but wouldn’t fully eliminate private insurance companies.

That’s not the case now. Her campaign told the BBC that, as president, she would not push for a single-payer system.

While she was vice-president, the White House reduced prescription drug costs, capped insulin prices at $35, allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices and capped out-of-pocket expenses for Medicare drug coverage.

Ms Harris started her legal career prosecuting child abusers and sex traffickers before being elected district attorney of San Francisco, then California’s attorney general.

Her offices increased conviction rates, particularly of violent criminals, though that history led to criticism from the progressive left, which at times labelled her “a cop”.

Meanwhile, the right has accused her of being soft on crime, although her record is contradictory. As a prosecutor, she declined to seek the death penalty against someone who killed a cop, but as California’s attorney general, she fought for the state’s right to keep using it.

Ms Harris has also used her past as a prosecutor to serve as a major contrast with her opponent, who was convicted on 34 charges in a hush-money scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election.

Ms Harris has long advocated for tough laws to protect the environment.

As a prosecutor, Ms Harris defended California’s climate laws and sued oil companies for environmental damage. She also called for climate change policies via a “Green New Deal” during her 2020 presidential campaign – some of which has come to fruition under the current administration.

During a CNN presidential debate in 2019, she said that “there is no question I’m in favour of banning fracking”, which is a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock. She has reversed her position since throwing her hat into the 2024 presidential race.

As vice-president, she helped pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which has funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars to renewable energy and electric vehicle tax credit and rebate programs.

Last year, she noted in a speech that it constituted “the largest climate investment in our nation’s history” and emphasised the need to protect against extreme weather.

Ms Harris has a history of backing gun safety regulations throughout her political career, and she successfully defended California’s gun laws when they faced legal challenges as the state’s attorney general.

As vice-president, she has overseen the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and earlier this year announced the creation of resource centres to support the implementation of red-flag laws – aimed at keeping firearms from those who may harm themselves and others.

She also encouraged states to tap into $750m in federal funds that the Biden-Harris administration made available for crisis intervention programs.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• ANALYSIS: Three ways Trump will try to end Harris honeymoon
• EXPLAINER: Where the election could be won and lost
• FACT-CHECK: Trump falsely claims Harris crowd was faked
• VOTERS: What Democrats make of Tim Walz as VP

Vice-President Kamala Harris has had to quickly re-introduce herself to US voters, who are now having to size her up as a potential commander-in-chief, instead of Joe Biden’s deputy.

And during the biggest moment of Ms Harris’s career so far – the Democratic convention in Chicago – they have gotten to know her family as well.

Here are the members of the big and blended family who have helped her get here.

Ms Harris met her now-husband, Los Angeles entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff in 2013, while she was serving as California’s attorney general. They were married the following year. Since then Mr Emhoff, 59, has stuck close to his wife’s side as she has risen in the ranks of US politics.

In 2020, when Ms Harris made history as the first black and South Asian woman to become vice-president, Mr Emhoff made history too as the first husband of an American president or vice-president, as well as the first Jewish spouse of a vice-president.

He left his law firm that year to focus full-time on his role as “second gentleman”, a position that has pulled him out of relative obscurity. He is now known as an enthusiastic champion for Democratic party causes and Ms Harris’s most loyal surrogate on the campaign trail.

And in a prime-time slot on the second night of the convention, a beaming Mr Emhoff one again was his wife’s biggest booster.

“She’s always been there for our children,” Mr Emhoff said. “and I know she’ll always be there for yours too.”

The vice-president’s marriage made her a step-mother to Cole and Ella, the two children Mr Emhoff shares with his first wife, Kerstin Emhoff.

Ms Harris has said often that of all her many titles, being “Momala” – the term coined by Cole and Ella – is the most important. That affection seems to go both ways – Cole and Ella, now 30 and 25, respectively, have been vocal supporters of Ms Harris.

“The world’s greatest step-mother”, was Ella’s introduction during the 2020 Democratic convention. “You’re a rock, not just for our dad, but for three generations of our big, blended family.”

Cole, who graduated from Colorado College in 2017, has followed his father into the entertainment industry, with jobs at talent agency WME and, later, Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B.

Ella, who graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York City, signed with IMG Models in 2021 and walked in shows for high-fashion brands like Balenciaga and Proenza Schouler. She’s also an artist and a prolific knitter, who launched the knitwear brand and club Soft Hands in 2021.

Each night of the DNC Cole and Ella have been been staples in the Harris-Walz family box, cheering on their family and proudly donning campaign merchandise.

Cole and Ella’s mom, Kerstin, has – perhaps unexpectedly – gone out of her way to speak warmly and positively of Ms Harris. Recently, Kerstin came to Ms Harris’s defence when JD Vance’s “childless cat lady” comments resurfaced.

“For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin said in a statement to CNN. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

• The many identities of the first woman vice-president
• Doug Emhoff: The first ‘second dude’ in the White House

Kerstin, the founder and CEO of production company Prettybird, even provided her creative expertise and connections to the 2020 campaign.

“They were like, ‘The ex-wife wants to do what?'” Kerstin said to Marie Claire in 2020.

Kamala Harris is known to be very close to her only sibling and younger sister, Maya Harris. After their parents’ divorce, the two girls were primarily raised by their mother, Shyamala Gopalan, in Berkeley, California.

Like her older sister, Maya pursued a career in law, graduating from Stanford University law school in 1992. She worked as a litigator and taught law classes before joining the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, where she became executive director in 2006.

Maya, 57, eventually shifted to politics, serving as a senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton on her 2016 presidential campaign. She then served as campaign chair to her sister’s failed 2020 bid for Democratic nominee, before becoming a surrogate for the Biden-Harris ticket.

Maya’s only child, Meena, followed the Harris family tradition by graduating from law school. Meena advised her “Aunty” Kamala through the early stages of her political career, as she moved through positions at elite Silicon Valley companies like Uber, Facebook and Slack.

Beginning in 2017, the mother of two launched Phenomenal, a media and merchandising company that focuses on projects led by women and other underrepresented groups.

But Meena’s career is still linked in some ways to her aunt’s.

In June 2020, she published a children’s book about her aunt and mother called “Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea”. And after Mr Biden selected Ms Harris as his running mate, Phenomenal began selling “Vice President Aunty” sweatshirts.

Husband to Maya, step-father to Meena, Tony West is another accomplished member of the Harris clan, and another lawyer.

A graduate of Stanford law (where he met Maya and her then-toddler daughter), Mr West has worked at high levels of the private and public sector. He was associate attorney general under President Barack Obama and worked as general counsel of PepsiCo.

Mr West is now the chief legal officer of Uber, but he’s also emerged as a key adviser to his sister-in-law’s campaign.

Uber said this month he would take a leave of absence to devote himself to Team Harris.

“I have always believed family comes first,” Mr West said in a statement. “So I’ve decided to dedicate myself full-time to supporting my family and my sister-in-law on the campaign trail.”

Although Dr Shyamala Gopalan died before she could see her daughter run for president, Kamala and Maya Harris say their scientist mother inspired both of their careers.

“My mother was the first person to tell me that my thoughts and experiences mattered,” Ms Harris wrote on Facebook in 2022. “My mother would often say to me: ‘Kamala, you may be the first to do many things. Make sure you are not the last.'”

Ms Gopalan, who died in 2009, moved to the US from India at age 19 to study science, going on to work as a breast cancer researcher.

Her activism in the civil rights movement led her to her future husband: economist and Jamaican immigrant Donald Harris. Ms Harris has credited her mother with raising both her and Maya and her current relationship with her father is unclear.

Seven people were killed and a dozen injured after a fire broke out at a hotel in the South Korean city of Bucheon.

Two people died after jumping out the windows onto an air mattress provided by the fire department, after the mattress flipped.

Other victims were found in rooms on the eight floor, where the fire is believed to have started because of an electrical fault.

Although the fire did not spread throughout the building, the damage was extensive as the rooms were not equipped with sprinklers.

The nine-storey hotel was built in 2003, before the requirement for sprinklers was written into law, according to the city’s fire department.

The fire was first reported at 19:39 local time (11:39 GMT) and was extinguished by 22:26 on Thursday, the department said.

Police are investigating whether the hotel’s managers were in any way negligent.

The fire department’s use of the air mattress is also being investigated.

Reports said a female victim caught the corner of the mattress as they landed, causing it to flip as a second male victim jumped.

Those injured are being treated in hospital with serious injuries, some caused by inhaling the smoke.

Donald Trump isn’t in Chicago but his presence hangs over everything and he is clearly following events here.

A couple of aides told me, a little implausibly, that the former president is not tuning into the Democratic National Convention because he has no interest in watching a Democratic Party “infomercial”.

But one senior campaign official confirms, anonymously, that Trump is watching and is irritated by the attacks against him.

In the view of one ally who speaks to the former president every week, Trump wins in November if he sticks to talking about the economy, the border and crime.

At the start of this week, that looked possible. Trump scheduled a string of rallies, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Arizona – each was themed to focus on exactly those political and economic topics.

But with night after night of anti-Trump speeches here in Chicago, staying on message has gone out the window. And it’s not what his supporters tell him they want anyway.

The North Carolina event on Wednesday was vintage Trump – and it became a referendum on his own team’s strategy. “They always say, ‘Sir, please stick to policy, don’t get personal’… and yet [the Democrats are] getting personal all night long, these people. Do I still have to stick to policy?” Trump asked.

Then he polled the crowd: more policy or go personal? His fans roared, they wanted the Trump show, not a list of boring economic proposals. “My advisers are fired!” he joked. Then he said he’d stick to policy but couldn’t let the attacks go unanswered.

So the campaign strategy now seems to be at the whim of the candidate and the feedback of his crowds. That makes life difficult for his campaign advisers who repeatedly tell me their single biggest concern in this election campaign is whether they can keep Trump focused on issues and off the controversial personal attacks.

• Michelle Obama belittles Trump in starry convention turn
• ‘Coach Walz’ rallies Democrats with personal pitch to middle America
• ‘That’s my dad’: Tim Walz’s son Gus gives tearful reaction to speech

There have been a couple of those this week already.

Late on Wednesday night, Trump took to social media to criticise the Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who had given a rousing speech earlier in the evening. Trump clearly didn’t like what he heard.

“The highly overrated Jewish Governor of the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, made a really bad and poorly delivered speech,” Trump wrote.

“I have done more for Israel than any President…Shapiro has done nothing for Israel, and never will.”

The fact that he singled out Mr Shapiro as Jewish has not gone unnoticed. It was picked up on the US morning shows as an example of a racial dog whistle.

After the Obamas criticised Trump at the DNC on Tuesday night, he responded during his rally in North Carolina, and, again, there was a similar racial innuendo.

“Did you see Barack Hussein Obama last night,” Trump said. “He was taking shots at your president. And so was Michelle.”

It’s true that they did take pretty personal shots at him, but the use of Mr Obama’s middle name has long been used to stoke racial animosity towards him.

The problem for the Trump team is that their candidate thrives on controversy which then dominates headlines, and this distracts from their attempts to point out weaknesses in his opponent’s policy positions.

“It doesn’t matter what he talks about for 45 minutes,” one adviser told me on the condition of anonymity. “One comment or answer to a question gives the left all they need to change the subject.”

SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote

ANALYSIS: Three ways Trump will try to end Harris honeymoon

EXPLAINER: Where the election could be won and lost

FACT-CHECK: Trump falsely claims Harris crowd was faked

VOTERS: What Democrats make of Tim Walz as VP

More than 700 people in the UK have posted on a pro-suicide website looking for someone to die with, a BBC investigation has found.

The site, which we are not naming, has a members-only section where users can look for a suicide partner.

We have connected several double suicides to the “partners thread”.

Our investigation also found that predators have used the site to target vulnerable women.

In December 2019, Angela Stevens’ 28-year-old son, Brett, travelled from his home in the Midlands to Scotland to meet a woman he had made contact with on the partners thread.

The pair rented an Airbnb and took their lives together.

“I miss everything about Brett, his smile, his infectious laugh,” Angela says.

Since her son’s death, she has spent years researching the pro-suicide site – in particular, the partners thread.

“It’s a very dangerous place,” Angela says.

She compares it to a dark version of a dating app.

“Where else would you go to find a partner to take your own life with?” she says. “It’s just absolutely vile.”

The thread encourages users to end their own lives – and offers instructions on how to do it.

Our analysis found more than 5,000 posts on the thread by people from around the world.

We are not naming the site or giving details about methods of suicide recommended there.

A BBC investigation in March found more than 130 British people may have ended their own lives after using a chemical promoted by the site.

The BBC team set up an anonymous account and analysed the number and content of messages.

Members post their age, sex, location and preferred method of death, in a search for someone to die with them.

Helen Kite’s sister, Linda, advertised for a partner in 2023.

It is a forum which “preys on desperate souls”, says Helen. “The partners section sets them on an inescapable path to death.”

“I am 54F [female], based near London,” Linda wrote. “I can travel and could pay for a hotel, if that suited. Obviously, would be good to chat first.”

Linda contacted a man through the partners thread and met him at a hotel in Romford, East London.

They consumed a toxic chemical and died together on 1 July 2023.

Helen says Linda was found “lying next to the body of a total stranger”.

She believes that, every day, “innocent victims seeking support are snared” by the forum, “unimpeded by the authorities”.

It causes “untold misery and suffering for those left behind,” she says.

But there was worse to come.

In September 2023, Helen’s other sister Sarah – devastated by losing Linda – also went on the forum, ingested the same toxic chemical and died.

A further, even more disturbing, aspect of the partners thread came to light during our investigation.

Predators appear to be using it to target vulnerable and suicidal people, especially women.

In 2022, a court in Glasgow heard how 31-year-old Craig McInally had responded to a series of posts in the partners thread, placed by young women looking for someone to die with.

He persuaded one of them, a vulnerable 25-year-old woman, to come to his flat and “practise” suicide.

McInally repeatedly choked her to the point where she lost consciousness.

McInally was arrested at his home where it was found he had offered similar “advice and assistance” to other suicidal young women.

He had met them all on the partners thread.

One of them was 22-year-old Romanian student Roberta Barbos.

In messages seen by the BBC, McInally told Roberta that he had “a hell of a lot of experience” and promised to be with her “the whole way”.

She met McInally once and then refused to see him again – but took her own life alone in February 2020.

“It’s like something from a horror movie, from another world,” said Roberta’s mother, Maria Barbos. “I couldn’t believe that a website like this would even exist. They’re sick minds.”

An Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR) was imposed on McInally – a sentence reserved in Scotland for the most serious cases of sexual and violent offending, short of murder.

Under its terms he was sentenced to a minimum of two years and three months in prison, and supervision for the rest of his life.

In our investigation we found that in the past two years some forum users had even travelled overseas to meet partners.

We know of two cases where men from the US have travelled to the UK to meet and “assist” vulnerable young women in their plans for suicide.

We are not naming any of those involved at the request of their families.

In one case, a man from Minnesota flew into the UK and stayed in a hotel for more than a week with a 21-year-old woman he had met on the thread.

On the 11th day of sharing a hotel room, the young woman ingested a toxic chemical and died.

The man claimed to have been asleep when she took the substance and called the emergency services when he realised what she had done.

He was arrested and questioned by police but was released without charge and permitted to fly home.

In a second case, a man from Florida is believed to have arranged to meet four people he had contacted on the thread – one of them in the UK.

Our investigation found that in one case he gave a woman in the US a gun.

She was located by police before she could carry out her suicide plan.

This man has also admitted flying to London and meeting a young British woman at a hotel.

It is not known who this woman was or what happened to her.

The man has not been charged with any offence.

The previous Conservative government introduced the Online Safety Act in 2023 which it said would allow the regulator, Ofcom, to act against the website.

The new Labour administration says it is committed to the new law and “determined to take action to stop this harm online”.

A spokesperson told us: “We want to get these new protections in place as soon as possible.”

Ofcom is still consulting on how best to implement the law, and its enforcement powers will not come into effect until the end of this year.

Following our earlier reports it did contact the site’s administrators.

The regulator admits that because the site is small and based in the US, it will be “pretty hard” to take legal action against it.

But during the course of our investigation into the site, we found that one of the principal moderators is a woman based in the west of England.

We are not naming her because of concerns for her mental health.

Ofcom chief executive Melanie Dawes says that threats of enforcement have not yet made a difference.

“We contacted [the site] and actually told them this was illegal, that it was promoting suicide,” she said. “Initially they stopped it being available for UK users, but they’ve gone back on that now.”

Bereaved families say that the partners thread is directly promoting suicide – something that is illegal in the UK whether online or offline.

“I think it’s a predator’s dream to have a partner’s thread like that,” says Angela Stevens.

“Because it’s so open to abuse, that I find it really, really scary.”

Weapons dealers in Yemen are openly using the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to sell Kalashnikovs, pistols, grenades and grenade-launchers.

The traders operate in the capital Sana’a and other areas under control of the Houthis, a rebel group backed by Iran and proscribed as terrorists by the US and Australian governments.

“It is inconceivable that they [the weapons dealers] are not operating on the Houthis’ behalf,” said the former British Ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Fitton-Brown, who now works for the Counter Extremism Project.

“Purely private dealers who tried to profit from supplying, [for example] the government of Yemen, would be quickly shut down.”

An investigation by The Times newspaper found that several of the Yemeni accounts bore the blue tick of verification.

Both The Times and the BBC have approached X for comment, but have not so far received any response.

Most of the platform’s content moderators were laid off after the new owner Elon Musk bought the company in 2022.

The advertisements are mostly in Arabic and aimed primarily at Yemeni customers in a country where the number of guns is often said to outnumber the population by three to one.

The BBC has found several examples online, offering weapons at prices in both Yemeni and Saudi riyals.

The words beside the weapons are designed to lure in the buyers.

“Premium craftsmanship and top-notch warranty,” says one advertisement. “The Yemeni-modified AK is your best choice.”

A demonstration video, filmed at night, shows the seller blasting off a 30-round magazine on full automatic.

Another offers sand-coloured Pakistani-produced Glock pistols for around $900 each.

Yet these advertisements are not hidden in the depths of the Dark Web, where guns and other illegal items are usually traded, they are in plain sight on X, openly accessible to millions of people.

Commenting on this, UK-based NGO Tech Against Terrorism issued what it called an urgent plea to tech platforms to actively remove Houthi-supporting content on the internet and social media platforms.

The Houthis, a mountain-based tribal minority, swept to power in Yemen in 2014, ousting the UN-recognised government.

Since then, a seven-year military campaign led by neighbouring Saudi Arabia failed to remove them, while the country descended into civil war.

In late 2023 the Houthis, who have an extensive arsenal of drones and missiles, many supplied by Iran, have been targeting commercial and naval shipping in the Red Sea.

The Houthis say this is in support of Palestinians in Gaza, but many of the vessels have had no links to Israel.

A US-led maritime force offshore has failed to stop the Houthis’ attacks on shipping, which have had a disastrous effect on trade passing through Egypt’s Suez Canal.

A transgender woman from Australia has won a discrimination case against a women-only social media app, after she was denied access on the basis of being male.

The Federal Court found that although Roxanne Tickle had not been directly discriminated against, she was a victim of indirect discrimination – which refers to when a decision disadvantages a person with a particular attribute – and ordered the app to pay her A$10,000 ($6,700; £5,100) plus costs.

It’s a landmark ruling when it comes to gender identity, and at the very heart of the case was the ever more contentious question: what is a woman?

In 2021, Tickle downloaded “Giggle for Girls”, an app marketed as an online refuge where women could share their experiences in a safe space, and where men were not allowed.

In order to gain access, she had to upload a selfie to prove she was a woman, which was assessed by gender recognition software designed to screen out men.

However, seven months later – after successfully joining the platform – her membership was revoked.

As someone who identifies as a woman, Tickle claimed she was legally entitled to use services meant for women, and that she was discriminated against based on her gender identity.

She sued the social media platform, as well as its CEO Sall Grover, and sought damages amounting to A$200,000, claiming that “persistent misgendering” by Grover had prompted “constant anxiety and occasional suicidal thoughts”.

“Grover’s public statements about me and this case have been distressing, demoralising, embarrassing, draining and hurtful. This has led to individuals posting hateful comments towards me online and indirectly inciting others to do the same,” Tickle said in an affidavit.

Giggle’s legal team argued throughout the case that sex is a biological concept.

They freely concede that Tickle was discriminated against – but on the grounds of sex, rather than gender identity. Refusing to allow Tickle to use the app constituted lawful sex discrimination, they say. The app is designed to exclude men, and because its founder perceives Tickle to be male – she argues that denying her access to the app was lawful.

But Justice Robert Bromwich said in his decision on Friday that case law has consistently found sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary”, ultimately dismissing Giggle’s argument.

Tickle said the ruling “shows that all women are protected from discrimination” and that she hoped the case would be “healing for trans and gender diverse people”.

“Unfortunately, we got the judgement we anticipated. The fight for women’s rights continues,” Grover wrote on X, responding to the decision.

Known as “Tickle vs Giggle”, the case is the first time alleged gender identity discrimination has been heard by the federal court in Australia.

It encapsulates how one of the most acrimonious ideological debates – trans inclusion versus sex-based rights – can play out in court.

Tickle was born male, but changed her gender and has been living as a woman since 2017.

When giving evidence to the court, she said: “Up until this instance, everybody has treated me as a woman.”

“I do from time to time get frowns and stares and questioning looks which is quite disconcerting…but they’ll let me go about my business.”

But Grover believes no human being has or can change sex – which is the pillar of gender-critical ideology.

When Tickle’s lawyer Georgina Costello KC cross examined Grover, she said:

“Even where a person who was assigned male at birth transitions to a woman by having surgery, hormones, gets rid of facial hair, undergoes facial reconstruction, grows their hair long, wears make up, wears female clothes, describes themselves as a woman, introduces themselves as a woman, uses female changing rooms, changes their birth certificate – you don’t accept that is a woman?”

“No”, Grover replied.

She also said she would refuse to address Tickle as “Ms,” and that “Tickle is a biological male.”

Grover is a self-declared ‘TERF’ – an acronym that stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” TERFs’ views on gender identity are widely considered to be hostile to trans people.

“I’m being taken to federal court by a man who claims to be a woman because he wants to use a woman-only space I created,” she posted on X.

“There isn’t a woman in the world who’d have to take me to court to use this woman only space. It takes a man for this case to exist.”

She says she created her app “Giggle for Girls” in 2020 after receiving a lot of social media abuse by men while she worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

“I wanted to create a safe, women-only space in the palm of your hand,” she said.

“It is a legal fiction that Tickle is a woman. His birth certificate has been altered from male to female, but he is a biological man, and always will be.”

“We are taking a stand for the safety of all women’s only spaces, but also for basic reality and truth, which the law should reflect.”

Grover has previously said that she would appeal the court’s decision and will fight the case all the way to the High Court of Australia.

The outcome of this case could set a legal precedent for the resolution of conflicts between gender identity rights and sex-based rights in other countries.

Crucial to understanding this is the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This is an international treaty adopted in 1979 by the UN – effectively an international bill of rights for women.

Giggle’s defence argued that Australia’s ratification of CEDAW obliges the State to protect women’s rights, including single-sex spaces.

So today’s ruling in favour of Tickle will be significant for all the 189 countries where CEDAW has been ratified – from Brazil to India to South Africa.

When it comes to interpreting international treaties, national courts often look at how other countries have done it.

Australia’s interpretation of the law in a case that got this level of media attention is likely to have global repercussions.

If over time a growing number of courts rule in favour of gender identity claims – it is more likely that other countries will follow suit.

A seaside hotel and former bank offices on the Isle of Man have been used by scammers conning victims in China out of millions of dollars, a BBC World Service investigation has found.

The dining room and lounge at the Seaview Hotel in Douglas were packed with dozens of Chinese workers, we have been told, on computers hooked up to fast broadband. A specialist wok hob had also been delivered to the hotel’s kitchen.

The deception, which happened between January 2022 and January 2023 according to Chinese court documents, used a method known as “pig butchering”. It is so-called because the process of “fattening the pig” – gaining the victim’s trust – is vital to its success.

The BBC spent nearly a year establishing how the investment scam was carried out from the island, which is a British Crown dependency with an independent government.

We also uncovered other details, such as how bosses had big ambitions to build a state-of-the-art office complex overlooking the Irish Sea.

As well as obtaining court papers, we have accessed leaked documents and spoken to company insiders.

One former member of staff, Jordan [not his real name], told us he had no idea of the murky world he was entering when he arrived on the Isle of Man. He says he was relieved to have found what he thought was a stable administrative job.

He did notice, however, that his new employer seemed quite secretive – for example, he and his colleagues were forbidden from taking photos at company social events. What he says he didn’t realise was that many of his Chinese colleagues were actually scam artists.

In late 2021, nearly 100 people had been transferred to the Isle of Man to work for a company which Chinese court documents refer to as “MIC”. They had come from the Philippines where they had worked for another scamming firm. The BBC has discovered that MIC stands for Manx Internet Commerce.

On the Isle of Man, MIC was part of a group of associated companies – all with the same owner.

An online casino, run by King Gaming Ltd, was the most prominent. In mainland China, gambling is illegal. Setting up halfway around the world meant the group’s founders could target Chinese customers, but also take advantage of the Isle of Man’s low gambling taxes.

A few months after being based at the Seaview Hotel in Douglas, the MIC workers were moved to former bank offices on the east side of town.

And this is where Jordan says he would hear sporadic cheering from his new colleagues – who worked in groups of four. He now believes they were celebrating moments when they had successfully scammed another victim, some 5,000 miles away.

Six people who worked for MIC in Douglas have now been convicted – upon their return home to China – of carrying out investment scams against Chinese citizens.

The cases, heard in late 2023, detail the illicit money stream. Victims were lured by the defendants and their accomplices from bases on the Isle of Man and in the Philippines, according to the Chinese court papers.

They say the defendants would work in teams to pull Chinese investors into chat groups on QQ – a popular Chinese instant messaging service similar to WhatsApp. One scammer would play the role of an investment “teacher”, and others would pretend to be fellow investors.

The BBC has seen evidence – including in the court papers – that many of those who arrived in Douglas from the Philippines were engaged in the scams. All used the same computer equipment, depended on QQ for their work and, with the exception of a few managers, all held the same job title.

The fake investors would build an atmosphere of hype and excitement around the money-making skills of the “teacher”, who would then tell the victim to put money into a particular investment platform, the Chinese court found.

Dazzled by the hype, the victim would comply, only for their funds to be syphoned off by the scammers, who actually controlled these platforms and could manipulate them from behind the scenes.

The Chinese court said it was difficult to verify the victims’ total losses – but it said 38.87m renminbi (£4.17m/$5.3m) had been taken from at least 12 victims.

Relying on evidence including the defendants’ own confessions, as well as travel and financial records and chat logs, the court found the six defendants guilty.

This was not only a profitable but also a sophisticated scam, say the court documents, requiring front line teams to deploy the “pig-butchering” techniques with persuasiveness and skill.

The BBC has discovered the identity of the companies’ sole beneficiary. His name was hidden behind layers of administrative paperwork.

MIC and its affiliate companies were all held by a trust set up by an individual named “Bill Morgan” who, documents show, was also known as Liang Lingfei. Employees called him “Boss Liang”, says Jordan.

The Chinese court papers refer to a man called Liang Lingfei being the co-founder of MIC on the Isle of Man – which it described as “a fairly stable criminal organisation established in order to carry out scam activities”. Mr Liang was not one of those prosecuted or represented at the hearings.

The court stated that Mr Liang was also co-founder of the scamming organisation in the Philippines. The BBC has seen evidence that many MIC employees worked there before being transferred to the Isle of Man.

Our investigation has also found that Mr Liang obtained an Isle of Man investment visa and attended multiple company events on the island. His wife also owns a home in the town of Ballasalla, near the island’s airport.

The group of companies on the Isle of Man was ambitious, having signed a planning agreement late last year for a glitzy “parkland campus” headquarters on the site of a former naval training base. A spokesperson for the developers described it as the “largest single private investment in the Isle of Man”.

Architects’ images show office buildings set on a hill above the seafront in Douglas. Inside would have been penthouse apartments, a spa, multiple bars and a karaoke lounge.

The campus was to be used by MIC staff and those working for MIC’s “affiliate” companies, including those involved in online gambling, planning documents state.

Conservative estimates put the global annual revenues of the “pig-butchering” industry at more than $60bn (£46.5bn).

“This is the first such case we’ve seen of one of these [pig-butchering] scam operations setting up in a Western country,” says Masood Karimipour, a UN expert on organised crime – who normally focuses on South East Asia.

Trying to stop the scams is like a “game of whack-a-mole”, he says, and it is a battle that “organised crime is currently winning” as criminals engage in what he calls “jurisdiction shopping” where they perceive there to be legal loopholes and little oversight.

Any ambitions the group of companies may have had on the Isle of Man – legitimate or otherwise – appear to have come to an end.

In April, police raided the former bank offices. They also targeted an address next to the island’s Courts of Justice building – using a ladder to enter through a first-floor window in the early hours of the morning.

In a statement released shortly afterwards, police said the raids had been in connection with a wider fraud and money laundering investigation in relation to King Gaming Ltd IOM. Seven people had been arrested and released on bail, they added.

Since then, a further three people are known to have been arrested.

Receivers were appointed earlier this month for companies in the group – including MIC and King Gaming Ltd IOM – at the request of the Isle of Man’s attorney general.

The island’s gambling regulator has stripped MIC’s gambling affiliate companies of their licences.

The parkland campus site was cleared of trees and signage went up – but the redevelopment is now on hold indefinitely.

The BBC has made repeated attempts, via several methods of communication, to contact the companies involved – as well as Bill Morgan/Liang Langfei and company directors – but has received no replies.

We have also attempted to contact the Seaview Hotel, but have received no response, though there is no suggestion that anyone there was aware of any illegal activities taking place on the premises.

You can reach the Global China Unit directly and securely through encrypted messaging app Signal on: +447769939386 or by email at wsinvestigations@bbc.co.uk

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting Ukraine on Friday, just weeks after he met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

The visit is significant because Kyiv and some Western capitals had reacted sharply to Mr Modi’s visit to the Russian capital in July.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was particularly critical, saying he was “disappointed to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy hug the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow”.

So, is Mr Modi visiting Kyiv to placate Mr Zelensky and other Western leaders?

Not entirely.

It’s not surprising to see India balance its relations between two competing nations or blocs. The country’s famed non-alignment approach to geopolitics has served it well for decades.

This week’s visit – the first by an Indian prime minister to Ukraine – is more about signalling that while India will continue to have strong relations with Russia, it will still work closely with the West.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Centre think-tank in Washington, says the trip will further reassert India’s strategic autonomy.

“India isn’t in the business of placating Western powers, or anyone for that matter. It’s a trip meant to advance Indian interests, by reasserting friendship with Kyiv and conveying its concerns about the continuing war,” he says.

However, the timing of the visit does reflect that Indian diplomats have taken onboard the sharp reactions from the US to Mr Modi’s Moscow visit.

India has refrained from directly criticising Russia over the war, much to the annoyance of Western powers.

• Modi’s balancing act as he meets Putin in Moscow

Delhi, however, has often spoken about the importance of respecting territorial integrity and sovereignty of nations. It has continuously pushed for diplomacy and dialogue to end the war.

Mr Modi’s Moscow visit in July came hours after Russian bombing killed at least 41 people in Ukraine, including at a children’s hospital in Kyiv, sparking a global outcry.

The Indian PM said the death of children was painful and terrifying but stopped short of blaming Russia.

Mr Modi is not likely to deviate from this stance during his visit to Kyiv. The US and other Western nations have grown to accept Delhi’s stand, given India’s time-tested relationship with Moscow and its reliance on Russian military equipment.

India, the world’s largest importer of arms, has diversified its defence import portfolio and also grown domestic manufacturing in recent years but it still buys more than 50% of its defence equipment from Russia.

India has also increased its oil imports from Russia, taking advantage of cheaper prices offered by Moscow – Russia was the top oil supplier to India last year.

The US and its allies have often implored India to take a clearer stand on the war but they have also refrained from applying harsh sanctions or pressure.

The West also sees India as a counterbalance to China and doesn’t want to upset that dynamic. India, now the fifth largest economy in the world, is also a growing market for business.

Mr Kugelman says the West will welcome the visit and see it as Delhi’s willingness to engage with all sides.

“Mr Modi has a strong incentive to signal that it’s not leaning so close to Moscow that there’s nothing to salvage with Kyiv,” he says.

This is important because India wants to keep growing its relations with the West, particularly with the US, and wouldn’t want to upset the momentum. Eric Garcetti, the US ambassador to India, recently said the relationship should not be “taken for granted”.

India also needs the West as China, its Asian rival, and Russia have forged close ties in recent years.

While Delhi has long viewed Moscow as a power that can put pressure on an assertive China when needed, it can’t be taken for granted.

Meanwhile, many media commentators have spoken about the possibility of Mr Modi positioning himself as a peacemaker, given India’s close relations with both Moscow and the West.

But it’s unlikely that he will turn up with a peace plan.

“Is India really up to it, and are the conditions right? India doesn’t like other countries trying to mediate in its own issues, chief among them Kashmir. And I don’t think Mr Modi would formally offer mediation unless both Russia and Ukraine want it. And at this point, I don’t think they do,” Mr Kugelman adds.

Ukraine, however, will still welcome Mr Modi’s visit and see it as an opportunity to engage with a close ally of Moscow, something it hasn’t done much since the war began.

Mr Zelensky, though, is unlikely to hold back his criticism of Mr Putin in front of the Indian PM. Mr Modi can live with that as he has faced such situations many times in other Western capitals.

Moscow is not likely to react to the visit as it has also been making concessions for Delhi’s multilateral approach to geopolitics.

But beyond reasserting its non-alignment policy, Delhi also has bigger goals from this visit.

India has been ramping up engagement with Europe in the past decade, particularly with the underserved regions in Central and Eastern Europe.

Delhi wants to keep consolidating its relations with the big four – the UK, Italy, Germany and France – but also wants to boost engagement with other countries in Europe.

Mr Modi is also visiting Poland on this trip – the first Indian PM to visit the country in 45 years. He also became the first Indian prime minister to visit Austria in 41 years in July.

Analysts say that this signals India’s growing understanding that Central European nations will play a bigger role in geopolitics in the future and strong relations with them will serve Delhi well.

The Indian government has also revived trade deal negotiations with Europe. It has signed a trade and investment deal with the European Free Trade Association, which is the intergovernmental organisation of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

So, while there will be a lot of focus on the war during his visit, Indian diplomats are likely to stay focused on the bigger goal.

“Central and Eastern Europe now have greater agency in writing their own destiny and reshaping regional geopolitics. Mr Modi’s visit to Warsaw and Kyiv is about recognising that momentous change at the heart of Europe and deepening bilateral political, economic and security ties with the Central European states,” foreign policy analyst C Raja Mohan wrote in the Indian Express newspaper, summing up Mr Modi’s wider goal.

Canada’s federal government has moved swiftly to end an industrial dispute that just brought two of the country’s largest railways to a halt, threatening supply chains across North America.

Labour Minister Steve McKinnon said railways operations should resume “within days” as he sent both sides to final binding arbitration.

Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) locked out nearly 9,300 workers on Thursday, after failing to clinch a deal with the Teamsters union.

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

“Workers, farmers, commuters and businesses rely on Canada’s railways everyday, and will continue to do so,” Mr McKinnon said. “It is the government’s duty and responsibility to ensure industrial peace in this critically vital sector.”

Canada, the world’s second-largest country by area, relies heavily on rail transport.

The government said that while it supports the collective bargaining process, it needed to exercise its powers under Canada’s Labour Code in order to ensure important goods and trade were still being transported.

Under its orders, the Canada Industrial Relations Board will settle the disputes over the collective agreements. In the interim, the Board will also extend the current terms of the collective agreements, so that workers can resume work as soon as possible.

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

After months of talks, the increasingly bitter negotiations ground to a halt late on Wednesday evening, CBC reported, with both sides accusing the other of refusing to negotiate seriously.

CN and CPKC had both been calling for binding arbitration.

CN said on Thursday it was “satisfied” that the labour dispute would be mediated.

“The Company is disappointed that a negotiated deal could not be achieved at the bargaining table despite its best efforts,” it added.

Keith Creel, chief executive of CPKC, said the government had acted “to protect Canada’s national interest”.

“We regret that the government had to intervene because we fundamentally believe in and respect collective bargaining; however, given the stakes for all involved, this situation required action,” his statement added.

Speaking to the BBC on Thursday, before the arbitration was announced, the National President of Teamsters Canada, François Laporte, said the sticking point for his union was safety.

“Across Canada, we have trains who are carrying goods, they are carrying energy, they are carrying chemicals,” he said. “And we want to make sure that those trains are operated by people who get the proper rest, who are safe, who are not fatigued.”

The controversial internet influencer Andrew Tate has been placed under house arrest by a Romanian judge, as prosecutors investigate new and serious allegations, including sex with a minor and trafficking underage persons.

He and his brother Tristan appeared in court on Thursday afternoon. Tristan Tate was placed under special judicial control.

Prosecutors had asked the judge to remand the brothers in custody for 30 days while they continued a new investigation involving a total of 35 alleged victims, including a woman who was 15 at the time.

In a statement, Romania’s agency against organised crime, DIICOT, said six people had been detained in total, both Romanians and foreigners.

Andrew Tate made a furious statement to the press outside denouncing the case against him as a “stitch-up” and lies.

“This is a set-up. It is absolutely disgusting. Thirty of those girls say we have done nothing wrong. Two are the mothers of our children, two have never even been here to Romania” he said.

Asked repeatedly by the BBC about the allegations of sex with a 15-year-old girl and trafficking underage persons, he walked away and refused to reply.

The Tate brothers have previously been charged with human trafficking – and Andrew Tate charged with rape – and are awaiting trial on those charges. They were released from house arrest a year ago and told not to leave Romania.

They have always strongly denied any wrongdoing and deny the formal charges they face.

These are new and separate allegations.

The anti-organised crime agency says the accused were grooming “vulnerable” people, who were then housed in different locations and forced to produce pornographic material for online broadcast.

One of the foreign men is accused of forcing a 17-year-old foreign citizen to “perform sexual acts” in order to make online video content. He is said to have kept all the $1.5m (£1.1m) profit. The statement does not name him.

The same man is accused of repeatedly having sexual relations with a girl who was 15 years old when they met.

After questioning for several hours at the DIICOT offices, Andrew Tate told the BBC on Wednesday night that the latest allegations were “pathetic” and that prosecutors were “desperate”. He said they had “made up a lot”.

He also said he was accused of “lover-boying” the mother of his children – a technique used by criminals to prey on victims’ vulnerabilities and then exploit them.

A notorious misogynist with a giant online following, Andrew Tate has referred on Twitter/X to the case against him as some kind of mainstream “conspiracy” to silence him.

In the new statement, prosecutors accuse the brothers of buying four luxury cars, and registering them in the names of other people in order to hide the proceeds of what they describe as their illicit activity.

In total, it is alleged that the accused made some $2.8m through sexual exploitation.

Those detained are also accused of attempting to intimidate the victims and witnesses.

During a 10-hour search of four properties on Wednesday, investigators seized cash and other items, including luxury watches, laptops, hard drives and documents. They also impounded 16 luxury cars.

The Tate brothers were taken into custody late on Wednesday night after questioning, along with four Romanian citizens.

But to hold them longer than 24 hours, the prosecutors had to bring them before a judge, and the brothers appeared in court hours later.

Thailand has announced its first confirmed case of a new, potentially deadlier strain of Mpox – the first in Asia, and second outside of Africa.

According to Thailand’s Department of Disease Control, the infected 66-year-old European man arrived in Bangkok from an unnamed African country on 14 August.

He began displaying symptoms the next day, and immediately went to hospital. It has since been confirmed he had contracted Mpox, and in particular the strain known as Clade 1b.

At least 450 people have died from Mpox in an outbreak centred in the Democratic Repulic of Congo which started last year.

It has since spread to a number of nearby countries – including Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, all of which were previously unaffected by Mpox.

Now a more worrying strain of Mpox called Clade 1b has been identified in the east of the DRC, which is being spread along the border and into neighbouring countries.

Sweden was the first place outside of the African continent to confirm a case of Clade 1b a week ago. The infected man had also recently travelled to an unnamed African country, Sweden’s public health ministry said at the time.

The infection in Thailand is the first confirmed case of Clade 1b in Asia.

Mpox is transmitted through close contact, such as sex, skin-to-skin contact and talking or breathing close to another person – but it is nowhere near as infectious as other viruses like Covid and measles.

But the spread of the new variant and its high fatality rate in parts of Africa has sparked concern among scientists, and led the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare it a public health emergency of international concern.

Outbreaks can be controlled by spreading awareness of the disease, tracking close contacts and preventing infections with vaccines, though these are usually only available for people at risk or those who have been in close contact with an infected person.

Vaccines in Africa are in short supply, but there are plans for millions of doses to arrive in the DRC in the next week or so.

In Thailand, the Department of Disease Control has tracked down some 43 patients who were sitting in the rows near the unidentified man, and those who met him after he landed.

They will all be monitored for 21 days.

Thailand is also requiring people travelling from 42 “risk countries” to test on arrival.

Mpox causes flu-like symptoms and skin lesions. For most people, it’s a mild illness but it can be fatal.

The new strain spreading in central Africa is thought to be more deadly than previous ones – with four in 100 cases leading to death. Mpox is most common in the tropical rainforests of West and Central Africa and there are thousands of infections every year.

Another strain – Clade 2 – which is far milder, caused a global public health emergency in 2022. There are still cases of that Mpox strain in many countries.

Police have captured an Arizona man who allegedly threatened to kill Donald Trump following a manhunt that unfolded as the former president was visiting the border state.

Police say Ronald Lee Syvrud, 66, of Cochise County, made death threats against Trump in social media posts over the past fortnight.

Trump was in Cochise County on Thursday visiting the US frontier with Mexico.

Last month Trump was grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office says Syrvud is also wanted for failing to register as a sex offender.

He faces several warrants in both Wisconsin and Arizona, including on charges of driving under the influence and a felony hit and run.

Police say he is from Benson, Arizona, which is located about 50 miles (80km) south-east of Tucson.

The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office posted on Thursday afternoon that they had caught the suspect within the county lines.

“This subject has been taken into custody without incident,” the office posted.

Trump spent Thursday in Cochise County, visiting the US-Mexico border.

During his remarks, he sought to blame his rival, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, for allowing illegal immigrants into the US.

Reporters asked him if he was aware of the search for the Cochise County suspect.

“No, I have not heard that, but I am not that surprised and the reason is because I want to do things that are very bad for the bad guys,” Trump said.

This isn’t the first threat against a presidential candidate this election cycle.

Earlier this month, a 66-year-old Virginia man was arrested on suspicion of making death threats against Vice-President Harris, among other public officials.

Venezuela’s highest court has upheld the re-election of Nicolás Maduro as president following accusations of widespread voter fraud in July’s poll.

The decision by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) comes as the United Nations warned that the court lacked independence and impartiality.

The TSJ said it had reviewed material from the country’s election authority, which said Mr Maduro had won just over half of the vote, and agreed he had been victorious.

Mr Maduro hailed Thursday’s court decision as a “historic and forceful ruling”.

Announcing the court ruling, TSJ head Caryslia Rodríguez said: “The electoral material assessed is certified unobjectionably and the results of the presidential election of 28 July released by the National Electoral Council (CNE), where Nicolás Maduro was elected president of the republic, are validated.”

The decision could not be appealed, she said.

Marta Valiñas, chair of the fact-finding mission organised by the UN Human Rights Council, said the government had “exerted undue influence over TSJ decisions” through the use of “direct messages to judges and public statements”.

Francisco Cox Vial, another member of the UN’s fact-finding mission, said Ms Rodríguez was a member of Mr Maduro’s ruling party and had held elected positions within it.

Mr Maduro has led the country since 2013 and his re-election means he can serve another six-year term.

At least 23 protesters have been killed at anti-government demonstrations since last month’s election and approximately 2,400 more have been arrested, the UN says.

Protests erupted after the CNE declared Mr Maduro the winner on election night without publishing detailed voting tallies.

The opposition says the tallies prove that its candidate, Edmundo González, won comfortably and they have published copies collected by their election observers on the internet.

These documents, which have been reviewed by independent experts and media, suggest Mr González won 67% of the vote compared with Mr Maduro’s 30%.

Several Western countries have urged the Venezuelan authorities to publish the voting tallies in full while others, including Russia and China, have congratulated Mr Maduro on his victory.

As well as the deaths and arrests of protesters in the last few weeks, the Maduro government has also started an investigation into opposition leaders for allegedly inciting the country’s military to commit crimes.

They have also started passing a law through the National Assembly which would tighten rules on non-governmental organisations and forced the resignations of state employees who allegedly declared pro-opposition views.

The presidential contest in 2018 was widely dismissed as neither free nor fair after opposition candidates were jailed, barred from running or forced into exile.

BBC OS Conversations – Life in Venezuela

The death of a mother-of-six from a botched abortion at an unlicensed clinic 10 years ago is one Reverend Patricia Sheerattan-Bisnauth will never forget.

It had been almost two decades since Guyana passed ground-breaking abortion reform legislation, yet no public hospitals offered terminations and doctors were not licensed to carry them out.

“Women were still dying of abortions gone wrong,” Patricia tells the BBC.

“They were using home remedies, bush medicine, unlicensed doctors. The law may have been passed but it took many years for it to be implemented. For me, it was an urgent cause.”

Today, Guyana remains one of few countries in the Caribbean to allow terminations upon request.

Most are beholden to colonial-era laws – backed by religious leaders – outlawing them in all but the most extreme circumstances.

Despite this, clandestine abortions are prevalent.

As a minister in the Christian Church, Patricia may seem an unlikely campaigner for legal reform.

“We are all talking about life, and we are for life. There are too many abortions; we want to address the issues that create them. Decriminalising abortion will bring it out of the darkness and lead to a reduction because people are educated and don’t have repeat ones,” she explains.

Patricia is working alongside regional women’s health charity Aspire to change the law in two Caribbean nations.

Aspire is spearheading legal action in Dominica and Antigua and Barbuda to overturn the 19th-Century Offences Against the Person Act, which stipulates a 10-year prison sentence for a woman who ends a pregnancy. The only exception is when her life is at risk.

When Brianna (not her real name) fell pregnant at 19 in Dominica, she was faced with a difficult choice. A college student with limited funds, she knew she was neither financially nor emotionally ready to become a parent.

Seven years on, the memory of the secret termination she underwent remains acutely painful.

Brianna and her partner had been taking precautions.

“We used contraception most of the time and I was on birth control too. We were both really young and bringing up a child wasn’t something we could have done then,” she explains.

Brianna decided ending the pregnancy was her only option.

“It was a frightening situation. I had no idea where to go and I didn’t want to get into trouble by just walking in somewhere and asking,” she recalls.

Eventually she found a private doctor willing to carry out the procedure, but at more than $600 (£465) – about an average month’s salary in Dominica – the cost was steep.

A nurse took pity on her and loaned her the money.

“I was really scared. I wasn’t well versed on how it would work or what would happen to me. I had to lie to get the time off work. And at the doctor’s, they hid me in a room by myself.

“I felt really isolated, like I was doing something wrong,” she says.

Brianna’s story is far from unique.

A study carried out by Aspire indicates that in Antigua, almost three in four women will have a termination by their mid-40s – practically all of them carried out clandestinely.

Aspire’s founder Fred Nunes – who played a key role in changing the law in Guyana in the 1990s – says he is fighting to “eliminate unsafe abortions”.

He argues that current laws are unconstitutional, an affront to women’s bodily autonomy, and disproportionately affect the poor.

“The women who have the power to change the law have no need to, because they can walk into a doctor’s office and have a safe abortion,” he says.

“The women who have a need to change the law are the poor, the young and the vulnerable. That is why we have to intervene, to end the silence and provoke social justice.”

Prosecutions for covert abortions in the Caribbean are rare, but not unheard of. Aspire cites a handful of cases where women, and the healthcare provider helping them, have been charged in the last decade.

In Dominica, a young woman’s death in May 2023 was blamed on a self-administered termination after police found a foetus buried at her home.

Still, campaigners know they will have a battle on their hands.

The Christian Church plays a key role in Caribbean society and religious leaders have spoken out vehemently against the matter, which is due to come before Antigua’s High Court in September.

The Antigua and Barbuda Evangelical Alliance has condemned what it calls a “deliberate erosion of our moral code… under the cloak of advancing human rights”.

Spokesman Pastor Fitzgerald Semper told the BBC: “We’re directly opposed to any changes in the law. As a church, we believe life is sacred and only God should determine when life should end.

“The current law says that if the mother’s life is endangered, then abortion is permitted, and we stand in agreement with that. There should be nothing added or taken away from the legislation.”

With the church wielding such power, abortion is a delicate area to navigate politically and many Caribbean governments have been reluctant to broach the issue. In Antigua, the government has sidestepped the debate by pledging to leave the matter in the hands of the courts.

“Politicians are scared of the church,” Mr Nunes says.

“In the last few decades in the Caribbean, membership has declined in mainline established churches and risen in evangelical, right-wing dogmatic churches – and those are extremely hostile to women’s rights.

They’ve made it almost impossible to approach improving the law.”

Alexandrina Wong, of Antigua-based campaign group Women Against Rape, wants to see the “archaic” legislation removed, while retaining some restrictions such as term limits.

“We’ve seen women who’ve become pregnant after being raped and their mental state has been affected considerably. They must not be denied the right to choose,” she adds.

Brianna thinks better sex education in schools would alleviate the prevalence of abortion.

Aspire’s study also indicates very low rates of contraception in the region; 80% of pregnancies are said to be unplanned.

“A lot of teenage pregnancies are because youth are just not educated about sex,” she says.

Stigma surrounding abortion means Brianna has kept her own termination largely to herself.

“Even though many people know someone who did it, people still get shunned. It’s a very religious community and people think it’s taking a life,” she says.

“But to expect a woman to go ahead with a pregnancy when she’s not capable of taking care of a child physically, financially or emotionally is unfair on her and the child. I feel that’s worse than an abortion.

“Unless someone has been in that situation, they can’t understand the psychological warfare it can cause.”

In 2017, professional rugby player Ed Jackson was told that after breaking his neck, he would probably never walk again. Now the 35-year-old is a mountain climber, despite the effects of that accident leaving him with permanent disabilities.

The purpose Jackson and his wife Lois have found in helping others after his own life-changing injuries is the topic of a new documentary, The Mountain Within Me, which tells the story of his accident and recovery.

Exactly a year after the accident, he scaled Yr Wyddfa, or Snowdon, Wales’s highest peak. The film also shows him tackling the Himalayas in Nepal, and Aiguille Dibona, a 3,100-metre peak in the French Alps.

But Jackson tells BBC News he hopes the film won’t be perceived as what he terms as “a hero’s journey”.

“I was blown away when I was approached about making a film, but I did have fears about opening up our lives and those of people we care about, there had to be some purpose behind doing it,” he explains.

“And I hope the film shows that it’s not just about ‘this happens, he gets through it and then climbs mountains’. It is an ongoing journey, the things that I have to live with on a day-to-day basis, but by being challenged, by going through tough things, by surviving them, I think that’s what adds character to your life.”

The film is directed by filmmaker and life coach Polly Steele, who was also behind the 1997 David Furnish and Sir Elton John documentary Tantrums and Tiaras.

“I’m not a mountain climber and I’m not a rugby fan, and when I was first approached about making it, I thought ‘what am I doing here?’” she explains. “But I was told, ‘no this is a story about mental health, and it needs someone who understands that.’”

In the film, Jackson talks openly about how the accident, which happened when he was diving into a too-shallow pool in 2017, has left him struggling with bowel, bladder and sexual function. He now has Brown-Sequard Syndrome, a neurological condition that results in weakness or paralysis of one side of the body and loss of sensation on the other. He walks with a limp.

“But the things that affect me most on a day-to-day basis are bladder function, bowel function, sexual and fertility issues,” he says.

“If you get a group of people with disabilities together, especially with spinal cord injuries, they will not be talking about the way they move. They’ll all be talking about wee and poo and sex because that’s really what affects them on a day-to-day basis.

He continues: “I have to wear a catheter bag at all times when I’m out and about. I’ve wet myself more times than I can remember, but that’s part of living with a spinal cord injury.

“I do appreciate how fortunate I am in the recovery I have made, albeit still very much living as an incomplete quadriplegic with a disability. But to talk about it was really important for me in the film, because a lot of these topics aren’t spoken about enough. I just want to normalise it more.”

Jackson adds that one of his other big motivations is reframing the conversation around masculinity, as well as the mindsets of young people suffering from anxiety

“I’ve had my worries and anxieties and my vulnerabilities all my life, but externally it would have seemed like, ‘well, Ed’s a tough rugby player, he never worries about anything.’ But no, Ed was a tough rugby player who just didn’t talk about any of the things he was worrying about,” he recalls.

“Now I do talk about the things I’m worrying about and it’s the braver thing to do. It’s not less masculine to say I’m struggling or suffering, I think it’s the opposite. It would be less masculine not to talk about them.

“That’s the reframe I want to make for young people and young men who are struggling. Everyone struggles, everyone has fears, everyone has anxieties and that shouldn’t be tied into how masculine you are.”

Photos, TV and phone footage show Ed Jackson in his rugby playing days before his accident with his then girlfriend Lois, and then in hospital immediately afterwards.

After being told a week after his accident that he would probably never walk again because of his injuries, 36 hours after that, he flicked his toe.

“I was as surprised as anyone else,” he says. “Even though I’d been trying to do it.”

At the time of his medical diagnosis, he says he was still in spinal shock.

“The toe flick showed there was a connection past my level of injury, and I’m very lucky because if I’d had a complete spinal cord injury, no matter how hard I tried I wouldn’t have made any further recovery,” he explains.

“And people with worse disabilities than I have live amazing lives of purpose, so it wouldn’t have meant life was over. At the time, I was trying to move because I just felt I didn’t want to live the rest of my life thinking ‘what if I’d just tried?’”

This mindset he discovered during his recovery process is something he’s gone on to use in the charity foundation he set up with his wife, offering outdoor adventures to those who’ve suffered physical injuries and trauma.

Director Steele recounts that she found the couple “inspiring and crazily positive” to be around.

“You can’t knock it. You meet them and you think, there must be some darkness here. And it’s not that they don’t acknowledge that there is a dark side, they just don’t linger in it. And if I learned anything, it was that you make a choice where to put your thoughts.”

His condition may now leave him with a shorter lifespan, which Jackson acknowledges but says: “I really don’t think about it that much.

“I know that my life expectancy might be shorter or getting older is going to be tougher for me. You degrade a lot quicker,” he continues.

“I know that’s coming and I know the quality of life’s changing and I’m quite conscious to live my life whilst I can, whilst I have got a good quality of life. But at the same time, I know as well as anyone how quick medicine changes and advancements change. I don’t want to second guess that. I just try to take each day as it comes.”

Jackson’s next prject will be as one of the presenting team for Channel 4’s extensive coverage of the Paralympic Games from Paris.

After that, he’s hoping to scale Mount Kenya in 2025, saying there’s a connection for him between physically climbing mountains and his own mental mindset.

“A lot of the time when you are on the side of a mountain and it’s minus 20 degrees and everything hurts and you are really tired, you’re thinking ‘What am I doing? Why am I doing this again? Why do I keep doing it to myself?’” he says.

“But always after you finish, you’ve been to this place you can only go to if you put the effort in, and it has changed me emotionally. But without ruining the film too much, it’s great the trip didn’t always go to plan.

He concludes: “It’s not about standing on the top and saying ‘wow, look at us’. We were celebrating more than that – the power of being outdoors, mother nature, respect, surviving something and how instrumental and powerful that can be in your life.”

Quang Doan Hong is a busy person. The accountant, who lives with his family in Hưng Yên, Vietnam, also owns a farm with about 600 pigs.

He’s had to learn quickly about pig health, from which vaccines are effective to when to use antibiotics.

“When the weather changes, I give the pigs antibiotics,” Mr Hong says. In his experience, rapid changes between sunny and rainy weather make it necessary to administer antibiotics for respiratory and diarrhoeal diseases.

Mr Hong has also had to learn which sources of information are reliable. He’s joined farming groups and done online research, although he’s realised that some information on Facebook, for instance, isn’t reliable. “I need to filter it,” he explains.

As his operation has grown, Mr Hong has become reluctant to have veterinarians visit.

He worries about the risk of disease transmission from people who come into contact with animals at many different sites. Some large farms require animal health workers to quarantine for several days before visiting.

One thing that would be useful to Mr Hong is a hybrid source of information: something that combines the expertise of veterinarians with the convenience of digital access.

These kinds of remote veterinary technologies are under development.

The team behind Farm2Vet, a veterinary app for farmers, recently won the top prize from the Trinity Challenge, a charity tackling global health threats.

The competition that Farm2Vet won focused on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – the urgent global threat of our limited slate of antibiotic medicines becoming less effective as pathogens adapt.

Farms where antibiotics are overused can become breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These bacteria then enter the food system and the environment, for instance due to animal waste. Some drug-resistant bacteria, like certain strains of E. coli, can spread between animals and humans.

“Antibiotic misuse and overuse largely relates to a lack of understanding, a lack of support,” says Marc Mendelson, the director of the Trinity Challenge, who also heads the infectious diseases division at the University of Cape Town’s hospital.

Veterinary antibiotics can be extremely cheap, Prof Mendelson says. “Some farmers probably don’t even know that they’re giving antibiotics, because it’s just in the feed.”

Vietnamese regulations now require prescriptions for livestock antibiotics. But this requirement is relatively recent and difficult to monitor. In practice, antibiotics are dispensed without prescriptions, Pawin Padungtod acknowledges.

Dr Padungtod, based in Hanoi, is the senior technical coordinator for the Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD), a unit of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Helen Nguyen grew up in Vietnam and now lives in US, where she is an environmental engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Both countries have issues with the way antibiotics are given to farm animals, she says.

In the US, medically important antibiotics are used for livestock far more often than they’re used for human beings. And in Vietnam, Prof Nguyen says, only larger farmers can afford or access veterinarians.

Prof Nguyen and the rest of the Farm2Vet team are seeking to address these issues in Vietnam by working with farmers, veterinarians, and agricultural suppliers to develop a smartphone app that provides reliable information on animal care.

There would be an AI-powered chatbot to answer relatively simple questions, and connections to veterinarians in more complex cases.

“The technology that we are trying to produce doesn’t replace vets,” according to Prof Nguyen. The aim is to allow veterinarians to expand their reach.

She says that the challenge is not developing the technology, but accumulating the knowledge base.

While there are Vietnamese-language veterinary publications, the amount of data required to feed the AI is likely to exceed what’s available in Vietnamese. Because so much of the published veterinary science is in English, it’s important to carefully translate and localise the information, even to the provincial level.

It will be years before the app is ready. Prof Nguyen says that while the app will be free for farmers to use, eventually, for financial sustainability, the aim is to allow advertising and a paid farming certification programme.

Also in Vietnam, the International Livestock Research Institute is designing a similarly named app, FarmVetCare. The idea is that using the app, farmers will report health abnormalities in livestock to a veterinarian. This is intended to help prevent and control animal diseases and diseases which can transfer between animals and humans.

A different app is being piloted to extend the reach of the digital system for logging animal disease outbreaks through Vietnam’s Department of Animal Health. While the system now allows daily online reporting at the provincial level, the aim is to localise the reporting further, to be as close to the farm as possible.

“The mobile application will then be very helpful because now they can start the reporting closer to the site of where the outbreak is,” Dr Padungtod says.

Farmers may be reluctant to report veterinary diseases “because they don’t want to go bankrupt”, Prof Nguyen says. The Farm2Vet app would allow farmers to report veterinary illnesses anonymously, and the team would not provide identifiable data to anyone, according to Prof Nguyen.

Prof Mendelson reckons such tools that can simplify the process of reporting, especially for subsistence farmers, are helpful.

They may also help to prevent infection in the first place, which would cut down on the need for precious antibiotics. “The biggest bang for buck is in preventing infection – and not only in humans, but in in livestock,” Prof Mendelson says.

He comments that governments could encourage prevention by making vaccination more accessible. And farmers could reduce the chances of infection by giving farm animals more space. Prof Mendelson says, “Intensive livestock farming increases stress on animals. It increases illness and risks.”

While the tech world is full of well-meaning apps that end up being little used, Mr Hong, the pig farmer, has expressed interest. He appreciates the practicality and user-friendliness of apps. “If available, I would like to use them,” he says.

Andy Yearley and Barton Williams grew up at opposite ends of the world – but when they met, they discovered a shared past.

Both were “rescued” from Saigon orphanages after the US withdrew its troops from Vietnam in the early 1970s.

Thousands of children were rehomed in the United States but Barton grew up in south Australia and Andy ended up on the Scottish island of Lewis.

The pair met by chance in 2021 while Barton was starring in a surfing film set on the island.

They had both grown up as Asian children in a predominantly white neighbourhoods, with no memory or knowledge of Vietnam.

“It’s not every day you meet another Vietnam orphan,” Andy says.

“It’s like meeting a twin brother – a blood brother.

“We just clicked straight away.”

The bond between the two men has been brought to life on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe in Precious Cargo – a theatre performance telling the stories of the Vietnamese orphans.

The show explores the individual experience of each person but also their shared feelings of displacement.

“Andy has lived almost a repeat life to mine but in Scotland,” Barton says in his broad Australian accent.

“He has grown up in a very predominant white middle-class environment.

“He looks full Viet, but he doesn’t sound like a Viet – just like me.”

Andy was adopted by Eileen and Iain Yearley after he had been found in the Saigon orphanage by a friend of the family.

According to Andy, the only flight he could be put on was to Orly airport in France.

“My adopted mum had to travel there – apparently there was no-one with me,” Andy says.

“I was left alone as a baby in the airport.”

He was brought up in the village of Keose, about 12 miles from Stornoway, the main town on Lewis.

He says he wore thick NHS glasses and had long black hair to protect his ears after they were damaged in Vietnam.

“I was one of the only Asian people in the Western Isles, certainly the only Vietnamese,” he says.

His parents never mentioned Vietnam, he says.

“They were my parents and I was their child,” Andy says.

By early 1975, it was becoming clear that the war would end as South Vietnam strongholds fell to the communist forces of the Viet Cong.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled by air and sea, including westerners and Vietnamese people who had supported the Americans.

The US military had left the country two years prior but a feeling of concern and panic was building among the western public for the orphaned children left behind.

Their cries were heard by President Gerald Ford, who ordered Operation Babylift, taking 2,000 South Vietnamese children from orphanages to the United States.

The final flight filled with children and orphanage staff took to the skies as artillery fire came barrelling towards the runway.

“The Vietnam War and Operation Babylift is not something that many people – including myself – know an awful lot about,” Andy says.

“Part of bringing the play to the Fringe is to raise awareness of the historical event”, Barton says.

“People always say sorry when they find out you are adopted, and I always replied ‘Why? Don’t be sorry’.”

The show was originally performed in London as a full-length play of Barton’s personal experience but in bringing the show to the Fringe the creative team decided to give it a more Scottish focus.

Despite a life working with music, the play was Andy’s first experience in the theatre industry. He wrote original compositions for the play, while Barton is the lead and sole actor.

Andy and Barton were introduced to each other by a friend who was working on Barton’s surf film, Laura Cameron-Lewis, who became the play’s director.

Her husband Andrew Eaton-Lewis, then joined the Precious Cargo project as a producer to develop the script and find other orphans.

“I didn’t want it to be narcissistic,” Barton says.

“Now that it’s moulded with other orphans, it isn’t just my story, it’s more than that.”

There are unanswered questions for many children taken from Vietnam.

Andy and Barton travelled back at different points in their life to experience the culture of their birth country.

Andy travelled to Ho Chi Minh City, the official name for Saigon, for a BBC2 documentary in 2004 to explore Vietnam for the first time.

Andy, who works as a music teacher, played accordion for children at the orphanage where he had been found.

He says his only link to his past was locating the street he was found on.

Barton was unaware of any living blood relatives until he recently discovered a second cousin through an ancestry website.

His search was aided by another Viet war orphan, Toni Angelique Harrison, who is still searching for her own mother.

Toni, who was raised in Bedfordshire in England, has her voice and story feature in the show and hopes the publicity could reunite her with her mother.

She travelled to the US to meet her father in 2018, an American soldier who fell for her Vietnamese mother.

For all the children of Operation Babylift, time is not on their side, the play’s producer says.

With the 50th anniversary fast approaching, the tragic reality is that their parents might not be here for much longer.

“Operation Babylift was seen as controversial at the time,” Mr Eaton-Lewis says.

“Was it the right thing to do?

He says: “The Americans exercising their guilt over Vietnam, it all seemed quiet colonialist – all these white families, adopting Vietnamese babies.

“But talking to the various adoptees, they are all very positive about their experience.

“They are aware it is a strange thing to grow up in these very white environments, and some of them did experience racism and it was very difficult.

“But we have very much based this show on what these people have told us – and they were very grateful.”

Despite the successful flights, Operation Babylift began in tragedy as an operational failure caused the first plane to crash, killing 138 people, including 78 children.

In total, a huge humanitarian effort saw 3,300 Viet children – not all of them orphans – make it safely to western allies such as the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and West Germany.

Many of the children were orphaned by war, but some had just been separated from their parents in the chaos.

But because of their coincidental meeting and work on the Fringe show, both men say it has brought their personal situation fresh in their mind.

Almost 50 years on, many are still searching for their biological families.

Friends and colleagues of Mike Lynch have paid tribute to “the UK’s greatest tech entrepreneur” after he was confirmed to have died when a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily.

The British businessman, 59, was among those killed when the Bayesian vessel foundered in stormy weather early on Monday near Porticello.

The bodies of five others have been recovered, and a seventh person – believed to be Mr Lynch’s daughter Hannah, 18, is still missing.

Mr Lynch was a prominent figure in the UK tech industry, where his backing of successful companies led to him being dubbed the British equivalent of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

However, he later became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute which resulted in him being controversially extradited to the US, before being acquitted earlier this summer.

Andrew Kanter, a close friend and colleague of Mr Lynch, said he was “the most brilliant mind and caring person I have ever known.”

“Over nearly a quarter century I had the privilege of working beside someone unrivalled in their understanding of technology and business,” he said.

Former Sun newspaper editor David Yelland said Mr Lynch was “an irreplaceable loss not only to those that loved him but also to the country”.

“He is the UK’s greatest tech entrepreneur of recent decades, a family man, a long-time client of my business and a friend,” he said.

“To think Mike Lynch lost his life just as he began to rebuild it is devastating for all those that know him.”

Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo, his wife Neda Morvillo and Recaldo Thomas, the yacht’s chef, also died when the vessel sank.

In a statement confirming their parents’ deaths, the Bloomer family described the couple as “incredible people and an inspiration to many”.

Mr Lynch is survived by his wife Angela Bacares, who was rescued, along with 14 others, after the yacht sank, as well as their elder daughter Esme.

Mike Lynch and Angela Barcares lived at the Loudham Hall estate in Suffolk.

Brent Hoberman, co-founder of Lastminute.com, described the events as “tragic”, saying Mr Lynch had much more to give to the UK tech scene.

“He was still on his journey, and he’d been sidetracked for a decade with this court case,” he told the BBC.

“I think there was a lot of unfulfilled potential.”

IT analyst Richard Holway said in a post on LinkedIn that Mr Lynch – a friend of more than 25 years – was “a unique British tech talent”.

“Goodness knows what he could have achieved next,” he added.

Mr Lynch co-founded tech firm Autonomy in 1996, which expanded rapidly and was sold to Hewlett Packard for $11bn (£8.6bn) in 2011, from which he is believed to have netted £500m.

But questions over the sale of Autonomy led to a long-running legal battle.

In 2022, Mr Lynch lost a civil fraud case against HP at the High Court in London.

A day later, he was extradited to the US as part of criminal proceedings, and was facing a possible two decades in jail.

He was acquitted in June this year after a jury found him not guilty of the crimes.

He told BBC Radio 4 that though he was convinced of his innocence, he was only able to prove it in a US court because he was rich enough to pay the enormous legal fees involved.

Mr Lynch is reported to have gone on the yacht trip with his family to celebrate securing his freedom.

Its name, Bayesian, is understood to derive from the theory that his PhD thesis – and the software that underpinned Autonomy – was based on.

Witnesses say its aluminium mast broke in half in a storm, causing the ship to lose its balance and sink.

Dick Smith, a neighbour of Mr Lynch, told the BBC he was “reeling from the shock of the news”.

“He was so approachable and a very easy person to talk to with a nice sense of humour,” he said.

“You might think with all that money he would be difficult to talk to, but in fact he was a very easy person to talk to.”

Born on 16 June 1965, Mr Lynch was the son of a nurse and a fireman, and was raised near Chelmsford in Essex.

His first computer was a BBC Micro, and he wrote fondly of how it shaped his passion for programming in a 2011 BBC article celebrating 30 years of the device.

While at school his “first foray into commercialisation of technology” came when designing a digital sampler that could sample music, then selling the designs, according to a 2017 interview.

He continued the hobby while studying Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge – where he said he annoyed his college by getting “solder in the carpets” of his room.

While at Cambridge he earned a PhD in mathematical computing, and later undertook a research fellowship.

In 1991, Mr Lynch helped establish Cambridge Neurodynamics – a firm which specialised in using computer-based detection and recognition of fingerprints.

His tech firm Autonomy was created five years later, using a statistical method known as “Bayesian inference” at the core of its software.

The company’s fast-paced growth and success throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s saw Mr Lynch earn a number of awards and accolades.

In 2006 he was awarded an OBE in recognition of his service to UK enterprise.

He served on the board of the BBC as a non-executive director, and in 2011 was appointed to the government’s council for science and technology – advising then-Prime Minister David Cameron on the risks and possibilities of AI development.

Following the sale of Autonomy, Mr Lynch established tech firm Invoke Capital, which helped create prominent UK cybersecurity firm Darktrace in 2013. Lynch had a seat on its board until earlier this year.

Reacting to the news on Thursday, a spokesperson for Darktrace said that they were shocked by the tragedy, describing Mr Lynch as an “active champion” of the UK’s technology sector.

“His loss will be felt by many,” they added.

A selection of the week’s best photos from across the African continent and beyond:

• ‘I’ve been sleeping under a bridge in Lagos for 30 years’
• World’s second-largest diamond found in Botswana
• Who benefits from Lesotho’s ‘white gold’?
• No foreign holidays for Gabon government officials
• The poet who caught the eye of Mozambique’s freedom fighters

The trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis has been withdrawn by Lionsgate because the clip included fabricated quotes from real film critics about the filmmaker’s previous works.

The studio, responsible for distribution of the film in the US, apologised to the critics and to Mr Coppola “for this inexcusable error in our vetting process”.

“We screwed up,” Lionsgate said in a statement on Wednesday.

Megalopolis, self-funded by Mr Coppola, received mixed reviews at this year’s Cannes film festival.

The now-dropped trailer may have been a play off that lukewarm reception, attempting to show that critics aren’t always the best judges by going back in time to show negative reviews for past Coppola films. “Genius is often misunderstood,” says Megalopolis co-star Laurence Fishburne in a voice-over.

But those negative reviews were manufactured.

• Francis Ford Coppola on how The Godfather was a warning
• Why Megalopolis could be Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m mistake
• Megalopolis review: A ‘pretentious, portentous curio’

The spot included a quote from critic Pauline Kael as writing The Godfather was “diminished by its artsiness”, when her actual review was decidedly positive.

Similarly, critic Rex Reed’s apparent dig at Apocalypse Now – “an epic piece of trash” – was made up.

And the late critic Roger Ebert’s alleged insult of the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula – “A triumph of style over substance” – appears to be taken from his review of a different film by a different director, Tim Burton’s Batman.

It is unclear how the quotes were created.

The trailer was viewed more than 1.3 million times the day it was posted online.

The epic fantasy, with stars including Adam Driver, Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza and Nathalie Emmanuel, cost Mr Coppola a reported $120m (£91.6m).

In his review, the BBC’s Nicholas Barber called it a “pretentious, portentous curio”, akin to someone recalling a “crazy dream”.

The film is due to hit US theatres on 27 September.

The production was hit by another controversy in May after Variety obtained footage of Mr Coppola during a nightclub scene on the Megalopolis set last year, apparently trying to kiss female extras. Sources told the Guardian that the famed director had behaved inappropriately toward women in the movie.

Mr Coppola denied the allegations, telling the New York Times in June: “I’m not touchy-feely. I’m too shy.”

Sphen the gentoo penguin – one half of a world-famous same-sex “power couple” – has died in Australia, aged 11.

He and his partner Magic shot to global stardom in 2018 when they fell in love at the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium, later adopting and raising two chicks.

Their romance has inspired a Mardi Gras float, been referenced in Australia’s education syllabus, and even featured in the Netflix series Atypical.

The Sea Life Sydney Aquarium said Sphen had an “immeasurable” impact around the world as a symbol of equality and a conduit for the conservation cause.

The penguin’s health had deteriorated in the days leading up to his death, and the aquarium’s veterinary team made the difficult decision earlier this month to euthanise Sphen to end his pain and discomfort.

An investigation into the cause of his decline is underway.

“The loss of Sphen is heartbreaking to the penguin colony, the team, and everyone who has been inspired or positively impacted by Sphen and Magic’s story,” the aquarium’s general manager Richard Dilly said in a statement.

“We want to take this opportunity to reflect and celebrate Sphen’s life, remembering what an icon he was.”

A sub-Antarctic species, gentoo penguins on average live between 12 and 13 years and are famously romantic monogamists.

Magic, 8, has been taken to see Sphen’s body to help the penguin understand his partner will not return.

He immediately started singing, the aquarium said, which was reciprocated by the broader penguin colony.

“The team’s focus is now on Magic, who will soon prepare for his first breeding season without Sphen,” Mr Dilly said.

Sphen is also survived by Sphengic – known as Lara – and Clancy, the couple’s two fostered chicks.

Magic and Sphen had been together for six years. Staff first noticed an attraction between them when they saw them bowing to each other – a gentoo way of flirting.

Members of the public have paid tribute to Sphen in a condolence message board on the aquarium’s website.

“Sphen and Magic were equality icons. My heart breaks for the keepers and the whole Sea Life Sydney team,” wrote long-time fan Mark.

“You taught the world so much. We will never forget you, Habibi,” another user named Rach added, using an Arabic term of affection.

United States border agents have intercepted a truck carrying more than $5m-worth of methamphetamine at the US-Mexico border hidden inside a shipment of watermelons.

The drugs were wrapped in plastic painted in two shades of green to resemble the fruit and placed among real watermelons.

More than two tonnes of methamphetamine – in a total of 1,220 packages – was seized by officers.

Stashing drugs among produce is a common way to smuggle the illicit substances across borders – banana shipments are the most popular but officers have recently found narcotics in Gouda cheese and avocados.

US Customs and Border Protection officials said their officers had stopped a truck hauling a trailer at the border with Mexico in Otay Mesa.

The paperwork suggested the driver was transporting a shipment for watermelons, but a inspection revealed the parcels containing methamphetamine.

Also known simply as meth, it is a powerful and highly addictive stimulant.

The driver was handed over to Homeland Security officials.

The seizure came a week after officials at the same border crossing discovered almost 300kg of meth in a shipment of celery.

Both hauls came to a total value of $6m, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Mexican drug cartels are the leading producers and suppliers of methamphetamine to the United States.

In February, Mexican security forces seized more than 40 tonnes of the drug at the biggest lab to be discovered in recent years.

Mexican officials said the lab boasted more than 200 centrifuges, boilers and condensing chambers – key equipment used to make the chemical.

A prestigious US university has recorded a sharp fall in admissions from minorities following a Supreme Court decision to end affirmative action.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology said 16% of its new intake identify as from a minority – down 10 percentage points in one year. Black enrolment fell from 15% to 5%.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that university admissions schemes promoting diversity violated the US Constitution’s equal protection clause.

Stu Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions, said he expected a fall and “that is what happened”. He said he had “no doubt that we left out many well-qualified, well-matched applicants… who would have excelled”.

MIT is the first major university to publish data on intake since the court ruling.

Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT, said in an announcement that the new student intake was “as always, outstanding”.

“What it does not bring, as a consequence of last year’s Supreme Court decision,” she added, “is the same degree of broad racial and ethnic diversity that the MIT community has worked together to achieve over the past several decades.”

In recent years, around 25% of MIT’s enrolling undergraduate students have identified as Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander, Mr Schmill added.

Its figures show that this year, the percentage of black students enrolled dropped to 5% from 15%, and the percentage of Hispanic and Latino students dropped to 11% from 16%.

White students make up 37% of the new class, compared with 38% last year, while the percentage of Asian American students rose to 47% from 40%.

The figures do not total 100% as some students identify as more than one race or ethnicity.

More than 40% of the US population identifies as a race other than white, according to 2023 census data.

Mr Schmill said the intake in the year before the court decision had the largest proportion of under-represented minority students in the university’s history.

He added that MIT did not solicit race or ethnicity information from applicants this year, only from those who were enrolled.

The university said the court decision had prompted it to expand recruitment and financial aid initiatives that prioritise low-income students from all backgrounds.

Mr Schmill added that the university now looks for diversity through “prospective fields of study and areas of research, extracurricular activities and accomplishments, as well as economic, geographic, and educational background”.

Edward Blum, whose Students for Fair Admissions group brought the Supreme Court case, told The New York Times that “every student admitted… will know that they were accepted only based upon their outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements, not the colour of their skin”.

A six-year-old boy who was missing for five days has been found deep in a forest in Vietnam.

Dang Tien Lam, who lives in the northwestern Yen Bai province, was playing in a stream with his nine siblings on 17 August when he wandered into the hills and got lost, local reports said.

He was found on Wednesday by local farmers who heard a child’s cry while they were clearing a cinnamon field close to the forest.

Lam, who was found sitting in cassava bushes about 6km (3.7mi) from where he went missing, had become so weak he was unable to stand.

“I’m so tired, I can’t stand up, please carry me up,” Lam said, according to 52-year-old farmer Ly Van Nang.

Lam survived on leaves, wild fruits and streamwater, reports said.

Pictures online show locals tending to him and offering him cake after he was carried out of the forest.

He was found wearing a red T-shirt and shorts that were completely soiled.

“[The child told me] that when he got lost, he could not find his way home,” said Mr Nang, according to local news site Dan Tri.

“And the more he walked, the more he could not find a way out.”

The police said it was a “miracle” that Lam was found alive.

“Congratulations on returning safely to your family,” officers wrote on a Facebook post.

The news sparked relief on social media, with many congratulating Lam’s family and thanking the search team for their efforts.

Local authorities had mobilised more than 150 people – including police officers, soldiers and local volunteers – in search of the young boy.

The second-largest diamond ever found – a rough 2,492-carat stone – has been unearthed in Botswana at a mine owned by Canadian firm Lucara Diamond.

It is the biggest find since the 3,106-carat Cullinan diamond, found in South Africa in 1905 and cut into nine separate stones, many of which are in the British Crown Jewels.

The diamond was found at Karowe mine, about 500km (300 miles) north of Botswana’s capital, Gaborone.

Botswana’s government said it was the largest diamond ever discovered in the southern African state.

The previous biggest discovery in Botswana was a 1,758-carat stone found at the same mine in 2019.

Botswana is one of the world’s biggest producer of diamonds, accounting for about 20% of global production.

In a statement, Lucara said the stone was “one of the largest rough diamonds ever unearthed”.

“We are ecstatic about the recovery of this extraordinary 2,492 carat diamond,” said Lucara head William Lamb.

The diamond was detected with the use of Lucara’s Mega Diamond Recovery X-ray technology, said Mr Lamb.

It has been used since 2017 to identify and preserve high-value diamonds so that they do not break during ore-crushing processes.

The firm did not give details of the stone’s gem quality or its value.

However, the UK-based Financial Times newspaper reported that people close to Lucara, whom it did not name, estimated that the stone could be worth upwards of $40m (£30.6m).

The 1,758-carat stone found in 2019 was bought by French fashion brand Louis Vuitton for an undisclosed sum.

A 1,109 carat diamond, unearthed at the same mine in 2016, was bought for $53m by London jeweller Laurence Graff, chairman of Graff Diamonds, in 2017.

Lucara has 100% ownership of the mine in Karowe.

Botswana’s government has proposed a law that will ask companies, once granted a license to mine, to sell a 24% stake to local firms if the government does not exercise its option of becoming a shareholder, Reuters news agency reported last month.

• The oil project being called a sin
• From sleepy backwater to global diamond hub
• Digging for diversity in diamond-rich Botswana

Donald Trump isn’t in Chicago but his presence hangs over everything and he is clearly following events here.

A couple of aides told me, a little implausibly, that the former president is not tuning into the Democratic National Convention because he has no interest in watching a Democratic Party “infomercial”.

But one senior campaign official confirms, anonymously, that Trump is watching and is irritated by the attacks against him.

In the view of one ally who speaks to the former president every week, Trump wins in November if he sticks to talking about the economy, the border and crime.

At the start of this week, that looked possible. Trump scheduled a string of rallies, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Arizona – each was themed to focus on exactly those political and economic topics.

But with night after night of anti-Trump speeches here in Chicago, staying on message has gone out the window. And it’s not what his supporters tell him they want anyway.

The North Carolina event on Wednesday was vintage Trump – and it became a referendum on his own team’s strategy. “They always say, ‘Sir, please stick to policy, don’t get personal’… and yet [the Democrats are] getting personal all night long, these people. Do I still have to stick to policy?” Trump asked.

Then he polled the crowd: more policy or go personal? His fans roared, they wanted the Trump show, not a list of boring economic proposals. “My advisers are fired!” he joked. Then he said he’d stick to policy but couldn’t let the attacks go unanswered.

So the campaign strategy now seems to be at the whim of the candidate and the feedback of his crowds. That makes life difficult for his campaign advisers who repeatedly tell me their single biggest concern in this election campaign is whether they can keep Trump focused on issues and off the controversial personal attacks.

• Michelle Obama belittles Trump in starry convention turn
• ‘Coach Walz’ rallies Democrats with personal pitch to middle America
• ‘That’s my dad’: Tim Walz’s son Gus gives tearful reaction to speech

There have been a couple of those this week already.

Late on Wednesday night, Trump took to social media to criticise the Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who had given a rousing speech earlier in the evening. Trump clearly didn’t like what he heard.

“The highly overrated Jewish Governor of the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, made a really bad and poorly delivered speech,” Trump wrote.

“I have done more for Israel than any President…Shapiro has done nothing for Israel, and never will.”

The fact that he singled out Mr Shapiro as Jewish has not gone unnoticed. It was picked up on the US morning shows as an example of a racial dog whistle.

After the Obamas criticised Trump at the DNC on Tuesday night, he responded during his rally in North Carolina, and, again, there was a similar racial innuendo.

“Did you see Barack Hussein Obama last night,” Trump said. “He was taking shots at your president. And so was Michelle.”

It’s true that they did take pretty personal shots at him, but the use of Mr Obama’s middle name has long been used to stoke racial animosity towards him.

The problem for the Trump team is that their candidate thrives on controversy which then dominates headlines, and this distracts from their attempts to point out weaknesses in his opponent’s policy positions.

“It doesn’t matter what he talks about for 45 minutes,” one adviser told me on the condition of anonymity. “One comment or answer to a question gives the left all they need to change the subject.”

SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote

ANALYSIS: Three ways Trump will try to end Harris honeymoon

EXPLAINER: Where the election could be won and lost

FACT-CHECK: Trump falsely claims Harris crowd was faked

VOTERS: What Democrats make of Tim Walz as VP

A transgender woman from Australia has won a discrimination case against a women-only social media app, after she was denied access on the basis of being male.

The Federal Court found that although Roxanne Tickle had not been directly discriminated against, she was a victim of indirect discrimination – which refers to when a decision disadvantages a person with a particular attribute – and ordered the app to pay her A$10,000 ($6,700; £5,100) plus costs.

It’s a landmark ruling when it comes to gender identity, and at the very heart of the case was the ever more contentious question: what is a woman?

In 2021, Tickle downloaded “Giggle for Girls”, an app marketed as an online refuge where women could share their experiences in a safe space, and where men were not allowed.

In order to gain access, she had to upload a selfie to prove she was a woman, which was assessed by gender recognition software designed to screen out men.

However, seven months later – after successfully joining the platform – her membership was revoked.

As someone who identifies as a woman, Tickle claimed she was legally entitled to use services meant for women, and that she was discriminated against based on her gender identity.

She sued the social media platform, as well as its CEO Sall Grover, and sought damages amounting to A$200,000, claiming that “persistent misgendering” by Grover had prompted “constant anxiety and occasional suicidal thoughts”.

“Grover’s public statements about me and this case have been distressing, demoralising, embarrassing, draining and hurtful. This has led to individuals posting hateful comments towards me online and indirectly inciting others to do the same,” Tickle said in an affidavit.

Giggle’s legal team argued throughout the case that sex is a biological concept.

They freely concede that Tickle was discriminated against – but on the grounds of sex, rather than gender identity. Refusing to allow Tickle to use the app constituted lawful sex discrimination, they say. The app is designed to exclude men, and because its founder perceives Tickle to be male – she argues that denying her access to the app was lawful.

But Justice Robert Bromwich said in his decision on Friday that case law has consistently found sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary”, ultimately dismissing Giggle’s argument.

Tickle said the ruling “shows that all women are protected from discrimination” and that she hoped the case would be “healing for trans and gender diverse people”.

“Unfortunately, we got the judgement we anticipated. The fight for women’s rights continues,” Grover wrote on X, responding to the decision.

Known as “Tickle vs Giggle”, the case is the first time alleged gender identity discrimination has been heard by the federal court in Australia.

It encapsulates how one of the most acrimonious ideological debates – trans inclusion versus sex-based rights – can play out in court.

Tickle was born male, but changed her gender and has been living as a woman since 2017.

When giving evidence to the court, she said: “Up until this instance, everybody has treated me as a woman.”

“I do from time to time get frowns and stares and questioning looks which is quite disconcerting…but they’ll let me go about my business.”

But Grover believes no human being has or can change sex – which is the pillar of gender-critical ideology.

When Tickle’s lawyer Georgina Costello KC cross examined Grover, she said:

“Even where a person who was assigned male at birth transitions to a woman by having surgery, hormones, gets rid of facial hair, undergoes facial reconstruction, grows their hair long, wears make up, wears female clothes, describes themselves as a woman, introduces themselves as a woman, uses female changing rooms, changes their birth certificate – you don’t accept that is a woman?”

“No”, Grover replied.

She also said she would refuse to address Tickle as “Ms,” and that “Tickle is a biological male.”

Grover is a self-declared ‘TERF’ – an acronym that stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” TERFs’ views on gender identity are widely considered to be hostile to trans people.

“I’m being taken to federal court by a man who claims to be a woman because he wants to use a woman-only space I created,” she posted on X.

“There isn’t a woman in the world who’d have to take me to court to use this woman only space. It takes a man for this case to exist.”

She says she created her app “Giggle for Girls” in 2020 after receiving a lot of social media abuse by men while she worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

“I wanted to create a safe, women-only space in the palm of your hand,” she said.

“It is a legal fiction that Tickle is a woman. His birth certificate has been altered from male to female, but he is a biological man, and always will be.”

“We are taking a stand for the safety of all women’s only spaces, but also for basic reality and truth, which the law should reflect.”

Grover has previously said that she would appeal the court’s decision and will fight the case all the way to the High Court of Australia.

The outcome of this case could set a legal precedent for the resolution of conflicts between gender identity rights and sex-based rights in other countries.

Crucial to understanding this is the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This is an international treaty adopted in 1979 by the UN – effectively an international bill of rights for women.

Giggle’s defence argued that Australia’s ratification of CEDAW obliges the State to protect women’s rights, including single-sex spaces.

So today’s ruling in favour of Tickle will be significant for all the 189 countries where CEDAW has been ratified – from Brazil to India to South Africa.

When it comes to interpreting international treaties, national courts often look at how other countries have done it.

Australia’s interpretation of the law in a case that got this level of media attention is likely to have global repercussions.

If over time a growing number of courts rule in favour of gender identity claims – it is more likely that other countries will follow suit.

Seven people were killed and a dozen injured after a fire broke out at a hotel in the South Korean city of Bucheon.

Two people died after jumping out the windows onto an air mattress provided by the fire department, after the mattress flipped.

Other victims were found in rooms on the eight floor, where the fire is believed to have started because of an electrical fault.

Although the fire did not spread throughout the building, the damage was extensive as the rooms were not equipped with sprinklers.

The nine-storey hotel was built in 2003, before the requirement for sprinklers was written into law, according to the city’s fire department.

The fire was first reported at 19:39 local time (11:39 GMT) and was extinguished by 22:26 on Thursday, the department said.

Police are investigating whether the hotel’s managers were in any way negligent.

The fire department’s use of the air mattress is also being investigated.

Reports said a female victim caught the corner of the mattress as they landed, causing it to flip as a second male victim jumped.

Those injured are being treated in hospital with serious injuries, some caused by inhaling the smoke.

Jermaine Jenas, who presented The One Show and appeared on Match of the Day for the BBC, has been sacked by the corporation following complaints about workplace conduct.

The former footballer, 41, has been taken off air from both primetime shows.

BBC News understands his contract was terminated this week because of alleged issues relating to workplace behaviour.

Responding to the news, Jenas said there were “two sides to every story” but he would let his “lawyers deal with it”.

The allegations involve digital communications such as texts, which were raised with the corporation a few weeks ago.

In an interview with talkSport radio, he repeatedly said “I can’t really talk about it” when asked about the claims being made.

“I, as you can probably see, I am not happy about it,” he told the station.

Asked if he was surprised that any complaints had been made against him, Jenas said again: “I can’t really talk right now.”

“I’ve just got to leave this to a team of lawyers at the minute who are, yeah, I suppose just managing the situation,” he said.

“This is… Yeah, it’s tough, you know. But I’ve got to listen to my lawyers.”

A BBC spokesperson said: “We can confirm Jermaine Jenas is no longer part of our presenting line-up.”

He was last on air for the corporation earlier in the summer.

Jenas, who is married and has four children, earned £190,000 – £194,999 at the BBC for his work on the FA Cup, Match of the Day and the World Cup.

His work on The One Show was for BBC Studios, the BBC’s commercial production company, so his salary for that is not in the public domain.

He became a permanent member of the flagship show’s presenting team in 2021, appearing on the sofa beside long-time host Alex Jones.

Jenas also does work for talkSport, and was presenting a show on air when the news broke.

The radio station said it had been made aware of the story as the programme started – but a decision was made “with Jermaine that he should continue to present”.

“Given the array of serious allegations being reported as the story continues to evolve, it’s for Jermaine as a private individual to address them in the way he chooses,” it said.

“There are no plans for Jermaine to broadcast as a presenter on talkSport in the immediate future.”

Jenas is also employed by TNT Sports, a group of paid television sports channels. They told the BBC they were not making any comment.

His profile was removed from his agent’s website on Thursday evening.

Jenas made his footballing debut at the age of 17, and played for his boyhood team Nottingham Forest, then Spurs and Newcastle United. He went on to play 341 times, as well as making 21 appearances for England.

He retired in 2016 aged 32, although he had not played since 2014.

Jenas turned his attention to media work as a pundit while recovering from a knee injury and became a regular on Match of the Day, as well as BT Sport.

He started acting as a stand-in host on The One Show in 2020, following the departure of Matt Baker.

It was announced the next April that he and Boyzone star Ronan Keating would be given permanent positions – Jenas presenting with Jones from Mondays to Wednesdays and Keating on Thursdays and Fridays.

The former footballer said at the time that he was “really looking forward to joining as a full-time host”.

Jenas and a friend set up the Aquinas Foundation to help incentivise and raise the aspirations of young people in schools across Nottingham.

In December 2023 he collected an honorary degree from Nottingham Trent University.

More than 700 people in the UK have posted on a pro-suicide website looking for someone to die with, a BBC investigation has found.

The site, which we are not naming, has a members-only section where users can look for a suicide partner.

We have connected several double suicides to the “partners thread”.

Our investigation also found that predators have used the site to target vulnerable women.

In December 2019, Angela Stevens’ 28-year-old son, Brett, travelled from his home in the Midlands to Scotland to meet a woman he had made contact with on the partners thread.

The pair rented an Airbnb and took their lives together.

“I miss everything about Brett, his smile, his infectious laugh,” Angela says.

Since her son’s death, she has spent years researching the pro-suicide site – in particular, the partners thread.

“It’s a very dangerous place,” Angela says.

She compares it to a dark version of a dating app.

“Where else would you go to find a partner to take your own life with?” she says. “It’s just absolutely vile.”

The thread encourages users to end their own lives – and offers instructions on how to do it.

Our analysis found more than 5,000 posts on the thread by people from around the world.

We are not naming the site or giving details about methods of suicide recommended there.

A BBC investigation in March found more than 130 British people may have ended their own lives after using a chemical promoted by the site.

The BBC team set up an anonymous account and analysed the number and content of messages.

Members post their age, sex, location and preferred method of death, in a search for someone to die with them.

Helen Kite’s sister, Linda, advertised for a partner in 2023.

It is a forum which “preys on desperate souls”, says Helen. “The partners section sets them on an inescapable path to death.”

“I am 54F [female], based near London,” Linda wrote. “I can travel and could pay for a hotel, if that suited. Obviously, would be good to chat first.”

Linda contacted a man through the partners thread and met him at a hotel in Romford, East London.

They consumed a toxic chemical and died together on 1 July 2023.

Helen says Linda was found “lying next to the body of a total stranger”.

She believes that, every day, “innocent victims seeking support are snared” by the forum, “unimpeded by the authorities”.

It causes “untold misery and suffering for those left behind,” she says.

But there was worse to come.

In September 2023, Helen’s other sister Sarah – devastated by losing Linda – also went on the forum, ingested the same toxic chemical and died.

A further, even more disturbing, aspect of the partners thread came to light during our investigation.

Predators appear to be using it to target vulnerable and suicidal people, especially women.

In 2022, a court in Glasgow heard how 31-year-old Craig McInally had responded to a series of posts in the partners thread, placed by young women looking for someone to die with.

He persuaded one of them, a vulnerable 25-year-old woman, to come to his flat and “practise” suicide.

McInally repeatedly choked her to the point where she lost consciousness.

McInally was arrested at his home where it was found he had offered similar “advice and assistance” to other suicidal young women.

He had met them all on the partners thread.

One of them was 22-year-old Romanian student Roberta Barbos.

In messages seen by the BBC, McInally told Roberta that he had “a hell of a lot of experience” and promised to be with her “the whole way”.

She met McInally once and then refused to see him again – but took her own life alone in February 2020.

“It’s like something from a horror movie, from another world,” said Roberta’s mother, Maria Barbos. “I couldn’t believe that a website like this would even exist. They’re sick minds.”

An Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR) was imposed on McInally – a sentence reserved in Scotland for the most serious cases of sexual and violent offending, short of murder.

Under its terms he was sentenced to a minimum of two years and three months in prison, and supervision for the rest of his life.

In our investigation we found that in the past two years some forum users had even travelled overseas to meet partners.

We know of two cases where men from the US have travelled to the UK to meet and “assist” vulnerable young women in their plans for suicide.

We are not naming any of those involved at the request of their families.

In one case, a man from Minnesota flew into the UK and stayed in a hotel for more than a week with a 21-year-old woman he had met on the thread.

On the 11th day of sharing a hotel room, the young woman ingested a toxic chemical and died.

The man claimed to have been asleep when she took the substance and called the emergency services when he realised what she had done.

He was arrested and questioned by police but was released without charge and permitted to fly home.

In a second case, a man from Florida is believed to have arranged to meet four people he had contacted on the thread – one of them in the UK.

Our investigation found that in one case he gave a woman in the US a gun.

She was located by police before she could carry out her suicide plan.

This man has also admitted flying to London and meeting a young British woman at a hotel.

It is not known who this woman was or what happened to her.

The man has not been charged with any offence.

The previous Conservative government introduced the Online Safety Act in 2023 which it said would allow the regulator, Ofcom, to act against the website.

The new Labour administration says it is committed to the new law and “determined to take action to stop this harm online”.

A spokesperson told us: “We want to get these new protections in place as soon as possible.”

Ofcom is still consulting on how best to implement the law, and its enforcement powers will not come into effect until the end of this year.

Following our earlier reports it did contact the site’s administrators.

The regulator admits that because the site is small and based in the US, it will be “pretty hard” to take legal action against it.

But during the course of our investigation into the site, we found that one of the principal moderators is a woman based in the west of England.

We are not naming her because of concerns for her mental health.

Ofcom chief executive Melanie Dawes says that threats of enforcement have not yet made a difference.

“We contacted [the site] and actually told them this was illegal, that it was promoting suicide,” she said. “Initially they stopped it being available for UK users, but they’ve gone back on that now.”

Bereaved families say that the partners thread is directly promoting suicide – something that is illegal in the UK whether online or offline.

“I think it’s a predator’s dream to have a partner’s thread like that,” says Angela Stevens.

“Because it’s so open to abuse, that I find it really, really scary.”

A seaside hotel and former bank offices on the Isle of Man have been used by scammers conning victims in China out of millions of dollars, a BBC World Service investigation has found.

The dining room and lounge at the Seaview Hotel in Douglas were packed with dozens of Chinese workers, we have been told, on computers hooked up to fast broadband. A specialist wok hob had also been delivered to the hotel’s kitchen.

The deception, which happened between January 2022 and January 2023 according to Chinese court documents, used a method known as “pig butchering”. It is so-called because the process of “fattening the pig” – gaining the victim’s trust – is vital to its success.

The BBC spent nearly a year establishing how the investment scam was carried out from the island, which is a British Crown dependency with an independent government.

We also uncovered other details, such as how bosses had big ambitions to build a state-of-the-art office complex overlooking the Irish Sea.

As well as obtaining court papers, we have accessed leaked documents and spoken to company insiders.

One former member of staff, Jordan [not his real name], told us he had no idea of the murky world he was entering when he arrived on the Isle of Man. He says he was relieved to have found what he thought was a stable administrative job.

He did notice, however, that his new employer seemed quite secretive – for example, he and his colleagues were forbidden from taking photos at company social events. What he says he didn’t realise was that many of his Chinese colleagues were actually scam artists.

In late 2021, nearly 100 people had been transferred to the Isle of Man to work for a company which Chinese court documents refer to as “MIC”. They had come from the Philippines where they had worked for another scamming firm. The BBC has discovered that MIC stands for Manx Internet Commerce.

On the Isle of Man, MIC was part of a group of associated companies – all with the same owner.

An online casino, run by King Gaming Ltd, was the most prominent. In mainland China, gambling is illegal. Setting up halfway around the world meant the group’s founders could target Chinese customers, but also take advantage of the Isle of Man’s low gambling taxes.

A few months after being based at the Seaview Hotel in Douglas, the MIC workers were moved to former bank offices on the east side of town.

And this is where Jordan says he would hear sporadic cheering from his new colleagues – who worked in groups of four. He now believes they were celebrating moments when they had successfully scammed another victim, some 5,000 miles away.

Six people who worked for MIC in Douglas have now been convicted – upon their return home to China – of carrying out investment scams against Chinese citizens.

The cases, heard in late 2023, detail the illicit money stream. Victims were lured by the defendants and their accomplices from bases on the Isle of Man and in the Philippines, according to the Chinese court papers.

They say the defendants would work in teams to pull Chinese investors into chat groups on QQ – a popular Chinese instant messaging service similar to WhatsApp. One scammer would play the role of an investment “teacher”, and others would pretend to be fellow investors.

The BBC has seen evidence – including in the court papers – that many of those who arrived in Douglas from the Philippines were engaged in the scams. All used the same computer equipment, depended on QQ for their work and, with the exception of a few managers, all held the same job title.

The fake investors would build an atmosphere of hype and excitement around the money-making skills of the “teacher”, who would then tell the victim to put money into a particular investment platform, the Chinese court found.

Dazzled by the hype, the victim would comply, only for their funds to be syphoned off by the scammers, who actually controlled these platforms and could manipulate them from behind the scenes.

The Chinese court said it was difficult to verify the victims’ total losses – but it said 38.87m renminbi (£4.17m/$5.3m) had been taken from at least 12 victims.

Relying on evidence including the defendants’ own confessions, as well as travel and financial records and chat logs, the court found the six defendants guilty.

This was not only a profitable but also a sophisticated scam, say the court documents, requiring front line teams to deploy the “pig-butchering” techniques with persuasiveness and skill.

The BBC has discovered the identity of the companies’ sole beneficiary. His name was hidden behind layers of administrative paperwork.

MIC and its affiliate companies were all held by a trust set up by an individual named “Bill Morgan” who, documents show, was also known as Liang Lingfei. Employees called him “Boss Liang”, says Jordan.

The Chinese court papers refer to a man called Liang Lingfei being the co-founder of MIC on the Isle of Man – which it described as “a fairly stable criminal organisation established in order to carry out scam activities”. Mr Liang was not one of those prosecuted or represented at the hearings.

The court stated that Mr Liang was also co-founder of the scamming organisation in the Philippines. The BBC has seen evidence that many MIC employees worked there before being transferred to the Isle of Man.

Our investigation has also found that Mr Liang obtained an Isle of Man investment visa and attended multiple company events on the island. His wife also owns a home in the town of Ballasalla, near the island’s airport.

The group of companies on the Isle of Man was ambitious, having signed a planning agreement late last year for a glitzy “parkland campus” headquarters on the site of a former naval training base. A spokesperson for the developers described it as the “largest single private investment in the Isle of Man”.

Architects’ images show office buildings set on a hill above the seafront in Douglas. Inside would have been penthouse apartments, a spa, multiple bars and a karaoke lounge.

The campus was to be used by MIC staff and those working for MIC’s “affiliate” companies, including those involved in online gambling, planning documents state.

Conservative estimates put the global annual revenues of the “pig-butchering” industry at more than $60bn (£46.5bn).

“This is the first such case we’ve seen of one of these [pig-butchering] scam operations setting up in a Western country,” says Masood Karimipour, a UN expert on organised crime – who normally focuses on South East Asia.

Trying to stop the scams is like a “game of whack-a-mole”, he says, and it is a battle that “organised crime is currently winning” as criminals engage in what he calls “jurisdiction shopping” where they perceive there to be legal loopholes and little oversight.

Any ambitions the group of companies may have had on the Isle of Man – legitimate or otherwise – appear to have come to an end.

In April, police raided the former bank offices. They also targeted an address next to the island’s Courts of Justice building – using a ladder to enter through a first-floor window in the early hours of the morning.

In a statement released shortly afterwards, police said the raids had been in connection with a wider fraud and money laundering investigation in relation to King Gaming Ltd IOM. Seven people had been arrested and released on bail, they added.

Since then, a further three people are known to have been arrested.

Receivers were appointed earlier this month for companies in the group – including MIC and King Gaming Ltd IOM – at the request of the Isle of Man’s attorney general.

The island’s gambling regulator has stripped MIC’s gambling affiliate companies of their licences.

The parkland campus site was cleared of trees and signage went up – but the redevelopment is now on hold indefinitely.

The BBC has made repeated attempts, via several methods of communication, to contact the companies involved – as well as Bill Morgan/Liang Langfei and company directors – but has received no replies.

We have also attempted to contact the Seaview Hotel, but have received no response, though there is no suggestion that anyone there was aware of any illegal activities taking place on the premises.

You can reach the Global China Unit directly and securely through encrypted messaging app Signal on: +447769939386 or by email at wsinvestigations@bbc.co.uk

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting Ukraine on Friday, just weeks after he met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

The visit is significant because Kyiv and some Western capitals had reacted sharply to Mr Modi’s visit to the Russian capital in July.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was particularly critical, saying he was “disappointed to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy hug the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow”.

So, is Mr Modi visiting Kyiv to placate Mr Zelensky and other Western leaders?

Not entirely.

It’s not surprising to see India balance its relations between two competing nations or blocs. The country’s famed non-alignment approach to geopolitics has served it well for decades.

This week’s visit – the first by an Indian prime minister to Ukraine – is more about signalling that while India will continue to have strong relations with Russia, it will still work closely with the West.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Centre think-tank in Washington, says the trip will further reassert India’s strategic autonomy.

“India isn’t in the business of placating Western powers, or anyone for that matter. It’s a trip meant to advance Indian interests, by reasserting friendship with Kyiv and conveying its concerns about the continuing war,” he says.

However, the timing of the visit does reflect that Indian diplomats have taken onboard the sharp reactions from the US to Mr Modi’s Moscow visit.

India has refrained from directly criticising Russia over the war, much to the annoyance of Western powers.

• Modi’s balancing act as he meets Putin in Moscow

Delhi, however, has often spoken about the importance of respecting territorial integrity and sovereignty of nations. It has continuously pushed for diplomacy and dialogue to end the war.

Mr Modi’s Moscow visit in July came hours after Russian bombing killed at least 41 people in Ukraine, including at a children’s hospital in Kyiv, sparking a global outcry.

The Indian PM said the death of children was painful and terrifying but stopped short of blaming Russia.

Mr Modi is not likely to deviate from this stance during his visit to Kyiv. The US and other Western nations have grown to accept Delhi’s stand, given India’s time-tested relationship with Moscow and its reliance on Russian military equipment.

India, the world’s largest importer of arms, has diversified its defence import portfolio and also grown domestic manufacturing in recent years but it still buys more than 50% of its defence equipment from Russia.

India has also increased its oil imports from Russia, taking advantage of cheaper prices offered by Moscow – Russia was the top oil supplier to India last year.

The US and its allies have often implored India to take a clearer stand on the war but they have also refrained from applying harsh sanctions or pressure.

The West also sees India as a counterbalance to China and doesn’t want to upset that dynamic. India, now the fifth largest economy in the world, is also a growing market for business.

Mr Kugelman says the West will welcome the visit and see it as Delhi’s willingness to engage with all sides.

“Mr Modi has a strong incentive to signal that it’s not leaning so close to Moscow that there’s nothing to salvage with Kyiv,” he says.

This is important because India wants to keep growing its relations with the West, particularly with the US, and wouldn’t want to upset the momentum. Eric Garcetti, the US ambassador to India, recently said the relationship should not be “taken for granted”.

India also needs the West as China, its Asian rival, and Russia have forged close ties in recent years.

While Delhi has long viewed Moscow as a power that can put pressure on an assertive China when needed, it can’t be taken for granted.

Meanwhile, many media commentators have spoken about the possibility of Mr Modi positioning himself as a peacemaker, given India’s close relations with both Moscow and the West.

But it’s unlikely that he will turn up with a peace plan.

“Is India really up to it, and are the conditions right? India doesn’t like other countries trying to mediate in its own issues, chief among them Kashmir. And I don’t think Mr Modi would formally offer mediation unless both Russia and Ukraine want it. And at this point, I don’t think they do,” Mr Kugelman adds.

Ukraine, however, will still welcome Mr Modi’s visit and see it as an opportunity to engage with a close ally of Moscow, something it hasn’t done much since the war began.

Mr Zelensky, though, is unlikely to hold back his criticism of Mr Putin in front of the Indian PM. Mr Modi can live with that as he has faced such situations many times in other Western capitals.

Moscow is not likely to react to the visit as it has also been making concessions for Delhi’s multilateral approach to geopolitics.

But beyond reasserting its non-alignment policy, Delhi also has bigger goals from this visit.

India has been ramping up engagement with Europe in the past decade, particularly with the underserved regions in Central and Eastern Europe.

Delhi wants to keep consolidating its relations with the big four – the UK, Italy, Germany and France – but also wants to boost engagement with other countries in Europe.

Mr Modi is also visiting Poland on this trip – the first Indian PM to visit the country in 45 years. He also became the first Indian prime minister to visit Austria in 41 years in July.

Analysts say that this signals India’s growing understanding that Central European nations will play a bigger role in geopolitics in the future and strong relations with them will serve Delhi well.

The Indian government has also revived trade deal negotiations with Europe. It has signed a trade and investment deal with the European Free Trade Association, which is the intergovernmental organisation of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

So, while there will be a lot of focus on the war during his visit, Indian diplomats are likely to stay focused on the bigger goal.

“Central and Eastern Europe now have greater agency in writing their own destiny and reshaping regional geopolitics. Mr Modi’s visit to Warsaw and Kyiv is about recognising that momentous change at the heart of Europe and deepening bilateral political, economic and security ties with the Central European states,” foreign policy analyst C Raja Mohan wrote in the Indian Express newspaper, summing up Mr Modi’s wider goal.

Democrats have rejected demands from demonstrators to allow a Palestinian to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Uncommitted delegates – who oppose US support of Israel’s war in Gaza – began a sit-in protest just outside of the arena doors on Wednesday night.

But by 18:00 local time on Thursday – the deadline protesters had set to hear from Kamala Harris’s campaign – activists said they had not received a response to their requests for a Palestinian to be allowed to take the stage.

The sit-in protest on the final night of the convention came as thousands of demonstrators outside the perimeter continued to rally against the war in Gaza and White House policy.

The demonstrations this week have been largely peaceful, except for a smaller, unsanctioned protest outside the Israeli consulate that led to 56 arrests.

“This has been a disastrous decision by the Democratic leadership to deny a bare-minimum ask that we requested weeks ago, prior to the convention,” said Layla Elabed, a co-leader of the uncommitted national movement.

The Harris campaign told the BBC that campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez had met leaders from the uncommitted movement in recent days.

“There have been a number of speakers who have spoken about the war in Gaza and the need to secure a ceasefire and hostage deal. You will continue to hear that message,” a spokesperson said.

Uncommitted delegates were selected in state Democratic primaries earlier this year. President Joe Biden won an overwhelming share of primary voters, but pro-Palestinian activists urged people to vote “uncommitted” and similar options in a number of states.

Enough Democratic voters did so to send 30 delegates to the convention in Chicago, out of a total of more than 2,400 delegates.

Israel’s war in Gaza has divided the Democratic Party, but has largely been avoided as a topic of discussion during the DNC this week.

The uncommitted protesters said they had given the Harris campaign a list of several potential Palestinians who could speak at the conference.

The activists said the Harris campaign sent aides and lawmakers to the sit-in protest outside the arena on Wednesday night to try to resolve the conflict, but they refused to offer a speaking slot.

Uncommitted activists said they were told that the focus of the convention was on the vice-president, as she prepared to give a speech that would be the “biggest of her life”.

The delegates said they had been asking to have a Palestinian speaker address the crowd at the convention for two months.

“We’re going to have to have a lot of difficult conversations with the vice-president and her team after this,” said Abbas Alawieh, an uncommitted delegate from Michigan. “We’re going to have to take stock of what happened.”

Despite the large protests outside the arena doors, the war in Gaza has been mentioned by only a handful of speakers throughout the four-day programme.

Mr Alawieh said the goal of having a Palestinian speaker at the convention was about “forcing” the Democratic Party to “create space for talking about Palestinian human rights”.

Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, an outspoken critic of US support of Israel, told the BBC she was not surprised the topic has not been featured much during the convention.

“Interestingly, foreign policy never really is a huge topic that’s talked about,” she said. “But I’ve always thought of foreign policy as domestic policy.”

The second-largest diamond ever found – a rough 2,492-carat stone – has been unearthed in Botswana at a mine owned by Canadian firm Lucara Diamond.

It is the biggest find since the 3,106-carat Cullinan diamond, found in South Africa in 1905 and cut into nine separate stones, many of which are in the British Crown Jewels.

The diamond was found at Karowe mine, about 500km (300 miles) north of Botswana’s capital, Gaborone.

Botswana’s government said it was the largest diamond ever discovered in the southern African state.

The previous biggest discovery in Botswana was a 1,758-carat stone found at the same mine in 2019.

Botswana is one of the world’s biggest producer of diamonds, accounting for about 20% of global production.

In a statement, Lucara said the stone was “one of the largest rough diamonds ever unearthed”.

“We are ecstatic about the recovery of this extraordinary 2,492 carat diamond,” said Lucara head William Lamb.

The diamond was detected with the use of Lucara’s Mega Diamond Recovery X-ray technology, said Mr Lamb.

It has been used since 2017 to identify and preserve high-value diamonds so that they do not break during ore-crushing processes.

The firm did not give details of the stone’s gem quality or its value.

However, the UK-based Financial Times newspaper reported that people close to Lucara, whom it did not name, estimated that the stone could be worth upwards of $40m (£30.6m).

The 1,758-carat stone found in 2019 was bought by French fashion brand Louis Vuitton for an undisclosed sum.

A 1,109 carat diamond, unearthed at the same mine in 2016, was bought for $53m by London jeweller Laurence Graff, chairman of Graff Diamonds, in 2017.

Lucara has 100% ownership of the mine in Karowe.

Botswana’s government has proposed a law that will ask companies, once granted a license to mine, to sell a 24% stake to local firms if the government does not exercise its option of becoming a shareholder, Reuters news agency reported last month.

• The oil project being called a sin
• From sleepy backwater to global diamond hub
• Digging for diversity in diamond-rich Botswana

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?