Three people have been killed and another four seriously injured in a knife attack in the western German city of Solingen, police say.

The attack happened during a festival in the city centre on Friday evening. The attacker is reported to be still at large.

Bild website says a man randomly stabbed passers-by. A huge manhunt is now under way, with police helicopters seen hovering above the city.

The industrial city was celebrating 650 years since it was founded.

The city authorities asked people to leave the Fronhof market area, as police set up security cordons, following the attack at about 22:00 local time (21:00 BST).

Emergency crews at the scene were seen treating the injured, media reports said.

Police later deployed 40 tactical vehicles in the hunt for the stabbing suspect, according to Bild.

The vehicles are being commanded by SEK (Special Task Force) officers.

Roads have been blocked, and residents asked to stay indoors as officers carry out their search.

Philipp Müller, one of the festival organisers, said the emergency crews were fighting for the lives of nine people, the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper reports.

“People are shocked, but left the square peacefully,” Mr Müller said.

Eyewitness Lars Breitzke told the newspaper that he knew something was wrong when he saw a singer on stage with a strange expression on their face.

“And then a person fell over just a metre away from me,” he said.

The attacker is believed to have deliberately stabbed his victims in the neck, German media report.

Police spokesman Alexander Kresta was quoted by Spiegel website as saying “we are currently assuming that it was one person” after talking to numerous eyewitnesses.

In a Facebook statement, Solingen Mayor Tim Kurzbach said: “Tonight all of us in Solingen are in shock, horror and great sadness. We all wanted to celebrate our city anniversary together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured.

“It breaks my heart that an attack has happened in our city. I have tears in my eyes when I think of those we’ve lost. I pray for all those still fighting for their lives. Also my greatest sympathy for all those who had to experience this, these images must have been horrific.”

Speaking to the BBC later on Friday, Solinger Tageblatt’s deputy editor Björn Boch said the celebrations had been “supposed to last for three days, and the city expected 25,000 people every night.

“The city was just packed with people,” he said, estimating that “a few thousand people” were at Friday’s free event.

The celebrations have now been cancelled.

Solingen – a city in North Rhineland-Westphalia famous for its steel industry – has about 160,000 inhabitants. It lies about 15 miles (25 km) east of Düsseldorf and north-east of Cologne.

Independent White House candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has joined the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, on stage at a rally in Arizona after dropping out of the race and endorsing the former US president.

Mr Kennedy, 70, a Democrat for most of his life and the scion of the Kennedy dynasty, said the principles that had led him to leave the party had now compelled him “to throw my support to President Trump”.

He said in a press conference in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday that he would seek to remove his name from the ballot in 10 battleground states.

Trump praised Mr Kennedy as “phenomenal” and “brilliant” as he welcomed him on stage at the rally later in Glendale. Democratic rival Kamala Harris said she would try to “earn” the support of Kennedy voters.

With November’s election looming, Mr Kennedy’s polling has slumped from a high of double figures as funds and national coverage dried up.

The son of US Senator Robert F Kennedy and nephew of President John F Kennedy, he is from the most famed family in Democratic politics.

Before welcoming RFK Jr to the stage on Friday, Trump promised, if elected, to release all remaining documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.

Mr Kennedy’s decision to back a Republican for the White House has outraged his relatives, who previously condemned his invocation of the family name in a Super Bowl ad back in February.

Kerry Kennedy, his sister, said his support for Trump was a “betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

“This decision is agonising for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends,” Mr Kennedy said on Friday.

“But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do. And that certainty gives me internal peace, even in storms.”

He is married to Cheryl Hines, the star of HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. She posted on X, formerly Twitter, that she deeply respected her husband’s decision to suspend his campaign. She did not comment on his endorsement of Trump.

Mr Kennedy told reporters on Friday that Trump’s insistence he could end the war in Ukraine by negotiating with Russia “alone would justify my support for his campaign”.

“There are still many issues and approaches on which we continue to have very serious differences. But we are aligned on other key issues.”

He said he would remove his name from 10 states where his presence would be a “spoiler” to Trump’s effort. He has already withdrawn from the battleground states of Arizona and Pennsylvania.

But it is too late for him to pull out from the swing states of Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, election officials told AP news agency.

Mr Kennedy said he had launched his campaign in April 2023 “as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle… the champions of the Constitution”.

But he left because “it had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big money”.

He blamed his decision to suspend his campaign on “media control” and his former party’s efforts to thwart his run, adding: “In my heart I no longer believe I have a realistic path to victory in the face of relentless and systematic censorship.”

Mr Kennedy hovered around 14% – 16% in polls at his most popular. However, his ratings have slumped to single digits since Ms Harris became the Democratic nominee.

He said in his press conference that he had offered to work with Ms Harris and her bid for the White House.

Democrats sounded unfazed by his announcement.

“Donald Trump isn’t earning an endorsement that’s going to help build support, he’s inheriting the baggage of a failed fringe candidate. Good riddance,” Democratic National Committee senior adviser Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement.

Mr Kennedy’s campaign became synonymous with the anti-vaccine movement as he frequently touted his leadership of the Children’s Health Defense organisation, formerly known as the World Mercury Project.

In recent weeks, Mr Kennedy recounted how he dumped a dead bear cub that had been hit by a car in New York’s Central Park in 2014 as a joke.

Earlier in his campaign, it was revealed that he had suffered from a brain parasite over a decade ago which caused severe memory loss and brain fog.

His announcement capped days of rumour that Mr Kennedy offered to endorse Trump to secure a role in his next administration.

Trump told CNN earlier this week he would “certainly be open” to Mr Kennedy playing a role, while Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, said he would be suited to “blow up” a federal department.

Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar with the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation, told the BBC that Mr Kennedy’s decision highlighted the two-party system in the US and “how difficult it is to get new ideas and fresh people into the process”.

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The family of British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah, who died when their yacht sank off Sicily on Monday, say they are devastated and in shock.

They told of their “unspeakable grief” as the final body from the sunken Bayesian yacht, believed to be that of 18-year-old Hannah, was recovered on Friday.

“Their thoughts are with everyone affected by the tragedy,” a statement on the family’s behalf said. “They would like to sincerely thank the Italian coastguard, emergency services and all those who helped in the rescue.”

Italian officials are investigating the circumstances around Monday’s sinking, which also claimed the lives of five others on the boat.

Family and friends paid tribute to Mr Lynch, who helped pioneer a form of artificial intelligence, and his daughter, who had just won a place at the University of Oxford.

“Mike was the most brilliant mind and caring person I have ever known,” a close friend, Andrew Kanter, said. “His passion for life, knowledge and all those around him was instantly inspiring to everyone he met, and he will be sorely missed.”

Hannah’s sister Esme described her as “endlessly caring, passionately mad, unintentionally hilarious and the most amazing, supportive and joyful sister and best friend to me”.

“She is my little angel, my star,” she added.

Gracie Lea, a classmate of Hannah, recalled her as “easy to love: sincere, dedicated, fiercely intelligent and genuinely kind. I’ll always remember her smiling”.

She had recently finished her A-levels and had been offered a place to study English at Oxford, according to the Times.

“We are all incredibly shocked by the news,” a spokesperson for her school, Latymer Upper, west London, said.

“Our thoughts are with their family and everyone involved,” they added.

Among those who lost their lives in the disaster were Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, a charity trustee.

In a statement the Bloomer family described the couple as “incredible people and an inspiration to many”.

Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo, his wife, jeweller Neda Morvillo, and the boat’s chef Recaldo Thomas also died in the disaster.

Among 15 survivors were a one-year-old child, and Hannah’s mother, Angela Bacares.

The gathering on the Lynch’s yacht came after the end of a long-running legal battle over the sale of Mr Lynch’s company Autonomy.

He was acquitted of multiple fraud charges in the US in June, over which he had been facing two decades in jail.

Italian authorities are still investigating the circumstances around Monday’s incident.

In cases like this one, it is common for officials to embark on a broad investigation – known as a ‘crime hypothesis’ – that considers a series of possible criminal charges.

Approached by BBC News, the Italian police confirmed an investigation was ongoing but no charges have yet been brought.

The yacht’s captain, James Cutfield, his eight surviving crew members and passengers have been questioned by the Coast Guard on behalf of prosecutors.

Rescuers described the search and recovery operation as “complex”, with divers limited to 12-minute underwater shifts.

In a statement, Italian firefighters said it had been “five days of long and delicate operations in the sea, at a depth of about 50 metres (around 164 feet).”

After reports emerged that the final body had been found, a coastguard vessel which had been at the site of the shipwreck for hours could be seen back in the port.

Meanwhile, a helicopter landed nearby as divers took off their orange suits on the quayside.

A decision on whether to raise the sunken yacht from the seabed is “not on the agenda” but will be in the future, a spokesperson from the Italian Coastguard has said.

The ship was “practically intact” on the seabed, according to divers on the search and rescue team.

Prosecutors are expected to hold a news conference on Saturday morning.

Egide Irambona, 40, sits bare-chested on his hospital bed, next to the window, in a treatment room that he shares with two other men.

The rays of the evening sun shining above Burundi’s main city, Bujumbura, filter in. His face, bathed in a soft light, is covered in blisters. His chest too, and his arms.

“I had swollen lymph nodes in my throat. It was so painful I couldn’t sleep. Then the pain subsided there and it moved to my legs,” he tells the BBC.

Mr Irambona has mpox.

He is one of the more than 170 confirmed cases recorded since last month in Burundi. One of the poorest countries in the world, it borders the Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicentre of several recent mpox outbreaks, which have led to at least 450 deaths and 14,000 suspected cases so far this year.

In Burundi, there have been no recorded deaths and it is not yet clear how deadly the current outbreak – of a new strain called Clade 1b – is because there is not enough capacity to carry out testing in the affected areas.

However, it has been declared a global health emergency because of fears it could spread quickly to previously unaffected countries and regions.

This is Mr Irambona’s ninth day of treatment at the King Khaled University Hospital. One way that the virus is spread is through close contact with someone infected and it seems that he passed it on to his wife.

She is also being looked after at the same facility.

“I had a friend who had blisters. I think I got it from him. I did not know it was mpox. Thankfully our seven children have not shown any signs of having it,” Mr Irambona says, his voice trailing off.

This hospital in Bujumbura is home to one of three mpox treatment centres in the city.

Fifty-nine of the 61 available beds are occupied by infected patients – a third are under the age of 15 and, according to the World health Organization, children are the worst-affected age group here.

Odette Nsavyimana is the doctor in charge at the hospital and says the number of patients is increasing.

“We are now setting up tents outside.” There are three so far – one for triage, one to hold suspected cases and one to take confirmed cases before they can be transferred to the wards.

“It is tough, especially when the babies come. They cannot stay alone, so I have to keep their mothers here as well. Even if they have no symptoms… It is such a tough situation,” Dr Nsavyimana says, her voice muffled by her protective face mask.

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Burundi is now seeing a surge in mpox cases.

“I am worried about the numbers. If they keep increasing, there is no capacity for us to handle that.”

A lot of effort is made to isolate those infected from the rest of the hospital’s population. There is red tape everywhere, and visitors, who are required to wear protective equipment, are physically distanced from those infected.

Medical officials are worried about limited resources. There is only one laboratory in the country where blood samples can be tested for the virus, there are insufficient testing kits and no vaccines.

Maintaining hygienic conditions across Bujumbura is also hard as access to basic resources like water is limited in the city. There is a shortage of running water and people can be seen queuing up at public taps.

Dr Liliane Nkengurutse, national director for the Centre for Public Health Emergency Operations, says she is really concerned about the coming days.

“This is a real challenge. The fact that diagnosis is only done in one place delays detecting new cases.

“Health centres are calling the laboratory saying they have suspected cases, but it takes time for teams from the lab to deploy to where the suspected cases are to take samples.

“And it takes much more time to release the test results. We need about $14m (£10.7m) to be able to at least take our response to the next level,” she says.

Despite talk of vaccines reaching DR Congo as early as next week, there are no reports of a similar move for Burundi.

Public awareness about mpox is limited.

Bujumbura is just 20 minutes from the border with DR Congo and is a hub for cross-border travel and trade. But there is no sense of the possible risks of an outbreak.

The city is abuzz with activity. People are still buying and selling goods as usual. Handshakes, hugs and very close contact are the norm. There are long queues at the bus stations, with people scrambling to get onto already crammed public service vehicles.

“Many people do not understand the gravity of this issue. Even where there have been cases, people still just mingle,” Dr Nkengurutse says.

The BBC spoke to several people in Bujumbura and the majority did not know what mpox was. And those that did were not aware that it was spreading in their country.

“I have heard about this disease, but I have never seen someone who suffers from it. I have only seen it on social media,” one person said.

“I know it affects babies and young people. I am scared of it, but that does not mean I will just stay at home. I have to work. My family has to eat,” said another.

Health workers know that persuading people to take more care may be hard among a sceptical population that is facing a host of economic challenges.

But they will continue to treat patients, make sure they get better and try and trace those that they have been in contact with in efforts to contain the spread of the virus.

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Having a pet crocodile in the backyard sounds like a far-fetched Australian fable – like riding kangaroos to school or the existence of drop bears.

But in the Northern Territory (NT), it’s a reality.

And Trevor Sullivan has 11 of the reptiles sharing his tropical home in Batchelor, about an hour south of Darwin.

Among them is Big Jack, who is named after a Jack in the Box toy due to his alarming propensity for lunging. Despite his antics, the giant predator is adored, having joined Mr Sullivan’s household as a hatchling the same day his daughter was born 22 years ago.

“He’s been part of our family ever since… [my daughter] refers to him as brother.”

Also on the 80-acre property is Cricket, still a tiny critter, and Shah, who – at the complete other end of the scale – is more than a century old and has truly lived a life.

“He’s possibly seen two world wars and maybe federation in Australia [in 1901],” Mr Sullivan says of the 4.7m (15.4ft) beast.

He claims Shah once killed a man, has been used for scientific research, was almost poisoned to death at a bird park, and lost half his bottom jaw in a fight at a Queensland crocodile farm, all before joining Mr Sullivan a few years ago.

The 60-year-old lights up as he tells the BBC about his crocodiles: “There’s nothing like them… crocodiles are the Harley Davidson of pets.”

But as the famously quirky region heads to the polls on Saturday, the right to own a pet croc has turned into a somewhat unlikely – and very Territory – election issue.

The cost of living, housing and crime are the prime concerns for many voters, but Mr Sullivan is one of scores left heartbroken after the governing Labor Party moved to ban crocodiles as pets.

It is one of the last places in the country the practice is allowed, but the government says they’re concerned for the wellbeing of both humans and the reptiles. The Country Liberal Party opposition, however, has pledged its support for the practice and has promised a review of the “rushed” decision if elected.

About 250,000 people call the NT home, but relatively few of them own crocodiles. The environment minister’s office said they could not provide a figure because the government is in election caretaker mode, but previous estimates have put the number of permit holders at around 100.

Many of the captive crocs are raised from hatchlings, others rehomed from farms or after causing trouble in the wild.

Regulations have long dictated strict conditions about where, and under what conditions, the animals can be kept. For example, hatchlings can only live in urban areas until they are 60cm long – usually about a year old – at which point they must be handed over to authorities or moved to a property outside the town limits.

Under those rules, however, owners were not required to have any special training or knowledge to keep the beasts.

Tom Hayes says owning – or “saving” – a crocodile is part of the Territory’s appeal, and one of the factors which drew his young family to the Darwin region, from Queensland, earlier this year.

The 40-year-old grew up taking trips to the NT with his dad, fishing in the Mary River alongside giant crocodiles, instilling a love of predators and, eventually, a dream to have his own one day.

“I’m not just some dude that wants a crocodile [for] when I’m having a barbecue with my mates on the weekend,” the tattooist and self-styled conservationist told the BBC.

“I wanted to have somewhere I could bring these poor old buggers and they could just live their lives out – happy, fed… not having to worry about people shooting them.”

He was in process of adopting a mega croc when the NT government announced it would not be issuing any new permits to keep the reptiles as pets.

It has left Mr Hayes reeling and the crocodile he’d hoped to rescue at risk of being put down.

NT Environment Minister Kate Worden said the decision was made “after public consultation” and “taking into account personal safety and animal welfare concerns”.

Existing permits will remain valid, but transfers of permits will not be allowed.

“Let’s remember they are an apex predator and probably not one that’s best kept for captivity,” Ms Worden told reporters, adding that there were instances of crocodiles attacking their owners in the region.

The new rules bring the NT in in line with every other state and territory in Australia – except, oddly, Victoria, which is well outside of the comfortable climate of a saltwater crocodile.

Animal activists, who had been pushing for the change, say it’s a big win.

While some of the people keeping crocodiles “may have good intentions”, no wild animal can have its needs fully met in captivity, argues Olivia Charlton, from World Animal Protection.

“There is no way to replicate the space and freedom these crocodiles would have in the wild, particularly given they live for up to 70 years,” she said in a statement.

Charles Giliam, from the RSPCA NT, said the dangerous nature of crocodiles also made it extremely hard for authorities to regulate the program and ensure the reptiles had an acceptable standard of living and medical care.

“I only know one vet who’s prepared to work with crocodiles,” he said, as an example.

But croc owners say they had no idea the change was coming and are distressed over what may now happen to their pets.

“I don’t think you spend many nights on the couch watching TV, snuggling with your four-and-a-half-meter crocodile… but there’s still that emotional attachment,” Mr Hayes says.

They accuse the government of hiding the change in a broader Crocodile Management Plan to avoid doing true consultation on the issue.

The opposition environment spokeswoman Jo Hersey said “the [Country Liberal Party] supports the rights of Territorians to own crocs as pets under a permit system” and has promised the party will look at the rules if elected.

Both Mr Hayes and Mr Sullivan said there is broad support for greater training and education requirements for permit holders.

But they say the reptiles are surprisingly easy to care for – and reject arguments that keeping them as pets is harmful.

“In the wild, they have a stretch of territory and they then have to fight to keep it. They’re forever hunting for food, forever chasing off their enemies or trying to keep their girlfriend sorted and life’s pretty tough going,” Mr Sullivan says.

“In captivity, if they got a good enclosure, plenty of water, sunlight, a bit of shade, and food on a regular basis, they just love it.

“I have a river running through my property and I actually have wild crocs always trying to get in and join my mob.”

The decision to end the practice is particularly bad timing for Mr Sullivan. He listed his home and his menagerie for sale last year, so he could join his partner in New Zealand.

“It is a bit like a Willy Wonka story – I want some young kids, of the right nature, to take on a property full of wildlife.”

But that’s left him with a quandary that belongs in a maths textbook: If you have 80 acres and 11 crocodiles on the market, but zero permits available to transfer, what’s the answer?

There is “not a chance” he’ll euthanise his crocs, he says. “I’ll have to stay on the property until I die, or until something else changes.”

His hope is resting on the election of a CLP government on Saturday, adding he thinks it is an issue which will galvanise voters.

But Mr Hayes, on the other hand, hopes it isn’t. There are greater issues at play which should decide votes, he explains, and he is optimistic that both parties will come to see sense anyway.

“Whoever’s in needs to really look at it… It’s an attack on the Territory way of life.”

Kamala Harris strode out onto the Democratic convention stage on Thursday night and told Americans they had a “precious, fleeting opportunity” in front of them – to back her candidacy and consign the extraordinary period since Donald Trump entered the political arena nine years ago to history.

Her 40-minute speech was not exactly the soaring oratory that the Obamas delivered earlier in the week, but the euphoria and confidence in the arena was palpable.

With high-power celebrity endorsements and a widespread sense among Democrats that they are embarking on a new chapter, the party faithful have not been this excited since Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008.

The jubilant atmosphere among delegates in Chicago is down to both relief that they don’t have to go into this election with Joe Biden, a candidate whose advanced age was a major liability, and delight at how seamlessly Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have assumed their places at the top of the ticket.

But behind the scenes, party strategists are worried about Democratic voters and activists – who will need to turn out, knock on doors and convince their friends and family to head to a ballot box on 5 November – getting carried away.

Opinion polls have moved in their direction in the weeks since President Biden stepped aside but this is still a very tight race. It will be won, too, in a handful of states – Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina.

In nearly all of those places, it seems either candidate could feasibly win. And if the past six weeks are any guide, the political dynamics could change quickly again in the 70 or so days left.

Jim Messina, a veteran Democratic strategist who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told the BBC’s Americast podcast that any certainty Democrats are on course for victory is misplaced.

“Kamala Harris has, since she got in this race, had the best 30 days in American politics I’ve seen in a very long time,” he said. “But she is still tied [in the polls]. The Democrats have clawed up from five points down to tied. So it’s still a tight race with 75 days left. “

The mood here may have hit fever pitch last night, but a toss-up race shows that Democrats still have a lot of work to do if they are to be sure of winning the White House.

Trump appears to be struggling to work out how to campaign against Harris. He doesn’t seem to know what line of attack to take, and hasn’t even settled on one of his customary nicknames.

One prominent Democratic strategist told me he believes Trump will soon work out how to define Ms Harris in a way that best serves his campaign, as that is his great political skill. And when he does this election will get much harder for Harris.

For all the buoyancy and optimism that’s been radiating from the convention stage, there have been warnings too.

In her speech on Tuesday night, Michelle Obama cautioned the election would be extremely tight. “We need to vote in numbers that erase any doubt,” she told the crowd. “We need to overwhelm any effort to suppress us”.

Her husband Barack Obama followed up with a similar exhortation, in what amounted to a one-two punch designed to motivate the thousands in the arena to hit the streets when they return to their hometowns across the country.

“It’s up to all of us to fight for the America we believe in,” the former president said. “And make no mistake, it will be a fight.”

Candidates standing for election in key swing states that will decide the outcome of this election know all too well how much work there is to do.

“I’ve been telling Democrats everywhere I go this week: ‘Don’t get high on your own supply and think everyone is as energetic as you are’,” Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin, who is in a tight Senate race in Michigan, told Politico.

On the convention floor, delegates clearly buoyed by the events of this week appeared to have taken the Obamas’ message to heart.

Cameron Landin, a 21-year-old from Georgia, a key southern battleground state won by the Democrats in the last election for the first time in 28 years, said he knew victory could not be taken for granted.

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“I really do believe Kamala Harris is going to win,” he said, a few hours before Harris took to the stage. “That doesn’t mean I’m not nervous.”

The regional organiser from the city of Savannah said people like him would focus on one thing: boosting turnout.

“That means people doing 60-plus-hour weeks and seven days a week of organising. It means volunteers getting out there – phone-banking, calling on voters, canvassing.”

“That’s what’s going to win this,” he said, pointing at the crowd of delegates waving posters for Harris and Walz. “People on the ground.”

Nevada Democratic Representative Susie Lee, who represents a district that includes part of Las Vegas – said she was under no illusions the election would be extremely competitive, particularly in her swing state.

“It’s not at all in the bag,” she said. Some precincts in Nevada, she explained, could be decided by as little as 50 to 100 votes. “Clearly, we have to get people engaged and out to the polls.

“But I’ll tell you – I do think people are exhausted with Donald Trump,” the congresswoman said. “There’s a clear choice between Harris and Trump. I think people see it.”

Millions of voters watched the political festival the Democrats put on in Chicago – more than 20m viewers tuned in for each of the first three nights.

The Harris-Walz team will almost certainly get a further bump in the opinion polls after this week. But that’s to be expected following any party convention.

The question will be whether the momentum they have been riding will last, especially as the country learns more about Harris, who has so far avoided tough media interviews and released little in the way of policy detail.

Trump has a grip on nearly half of the country. And they know him well after three successive presidential campaigns.

The Democrats could certainly win this election, but they will have their work cut out.

When a shell exploded near Oleksandr Budko, the 26-year-old found himself buried alive and in “terrible pain” from injuries that would lead to the amputation of both his legs.

The Ukrainian soldier was helping to defend the north-eastern Kharkiv region from invading Russian forces in August 2022, when his unit was attacked.

Three years on, he’s the star of a reality TV show in which multiple women battle for his affection.

One advert for the Ukrainian version of hit US series The Bachelor shows a smartly-dressed Oleksandr staring wistfully at a flower. In another, he answers questions in military fatigues before performing a series of pull-ups in a gym.

Speaking to me in a rose garden in Kyiv, the veteran-turned-celebrity is in good spirits despite being tired after a busy week.

Oleksandr says he’s hoping to find love on the show after breaking up with his girlfriend last January – but thinks it will be difficult to choose a partner with “millions of people watching”.

His motivations aren’t just romantic. He also wants to use his appearance on the show to raise awareness of the challenges facing disabled Ukrainians.

“This show is watched by millions of people, and it presents a huge opportunity to positively influence their outlook,” he says.

He wants to show that injured veterans are not “outsiders, but full members of society who are living a good life.

“In my case, my life is now even better than before the war, better than before I got injured.”

Oleksandr is always on the go, telling me he spent the previous night filming a music video.

His life wasn’t always like this. In the years before Russia’s full-scale invasion, he was working as a barista in a Kyiv restaurant while studying graphic design.

He says his dreams were “down to earth”: travelling, discovering the world, and growing professionally. He wanted to start a family.

But Oleksandr’s life was turned upside down two years ago, when he became one of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men to join the army.

In August 2022, he was stationed near Izyum, an occupied city on the front lines of the Russian advance. It was invaded in the early days of the war and used by Russia as a key military hub to supply its forces from the east.

The city was liberated by Kyiv just a month after Oleksandr was seriously injured while defending the nearby Ukrainian position.

“I felt the earth shift onto me. I felt a terrible pain in my legs and realised that it would mean the amputation of my legs,” he said.

“I screamed from horrific pain and shouted for people to hear me.”

He says he knew his comrades were alive, and they dug him out of the ground and provided first aid. But that’s when he knew his legs were badly hurt.

“I understood that I had lost my legs at the moment of injury, two or three seconds after I felt the pain.”

Oleksandr survived but much of Izyum was left in ruins. At the time, authorities said they had found more than 400 bodies in graves near the city.

Despite a challenging recovery, Oleksandr was able to walk with prosthetic legs within six months.

“When I didn’t have prostheses, I had to move around in a wheelchair. I discovered how inaccessible and unsuited Kyiv was for wheelchair users, even though it’s the capital city,” he says.

“In the historic old town you can’t go anywhere. You can’t cross the road on your own and you can’t go inside any building because there are stairs everywhere.”

War injuries mean Oleksandr’s experience is becoming increasingly common in Ukraine. While there’s no official data recording the number of people injured during the war, tens of thousands are estimated to have lost limbs.

This has resulted in the creation of a separate reality show, called Legs Off – which Oleksandr presented – capturing the difficulties faced by disabled people as they move around Ukrainian cities.

As well as presenting, the veteran has also written a book, won medals at the Invictus Games, and performed with a ballet troupe in the US – all while recovering from his injuries.

He’s so popular in Ukraine that The Bachelor’s application portal crashed shortly after it was announced Oleksandr would take on the main role in the upcoming season.

Producers of The Bachelor are casting the veteran as a symbol of hope.

“Despite his amputations, Oleksandr rides a bike, drives a car, and climbs mountains. He lives life to the fullest,” says Natalia Franchuk, from STB, the network on which the show will air later this year.

“If television is about filming reality, then who better could be the star of The Bachelor now? Who else would be better suited in a country at war?”

A landmark report into problems faced by women in the Malayalam-language film industry has revealed the deep rot in one of India’s most popular film hubs.

The findings of the three-member panel are pretty damning.

The 290-page report – parts of which have been redacted to hide identities of survivors and those accused of wrongdoing – says the industry is dominated by “a mafia of powerful men” and that “sexual harassment of women is rampant”.

Headed by a former judge of the Kerala High Court and set up by the state government in 2017, the Hema committee details the abysmal working conditions on sets – including a lack of toilets and changing rooms for junior artists, no food and water for them, poor pay and no accommodation or transport facilities.

“There are no toilets, so women have to go in the bushes or behind thick trees. During their periods, not being able to change their sanitary napkins for long hours and holding urine for long causes physical discomfort and makes them sick, in some cases needing hospitalisation,” it says.

The report, which was submitted to the government in December 2019, was made public only this week after nearly five years of delay and multiple legal challenges by members of the film industry.

The panel was set up in the aftermath of the horrific sexual assault on a leading actress in the film industry. Bhavana Menon, who has worked in more than 80 films in southern Indian languages and won a number of prestigious awards, was assaulted by a group of men while travelling from Thrissur to Kochi in February 2017.

Her assault made headlines, especially after Dileep, one of the Malayalam-language film industry’s biggest actors and Menon’s co-star in half a dozen films, was named as an accused and charged with criminal conspiracy. He denied the charges, but was arrested and held in custody for three months before being released on bail. The case continues to be heard in court.

Indian law bars identification of survivors of sexual assault, but it was known from the start that it was Ms Menon who had been assaulted. In 2022, she waived her anonymity in a post on Instagram and in an interview to the BBC.

A few months after the attack on Ms Menon, Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) – a group formed by some of her colleagues in a film industry known for its variety of successful mainstream and critically acclaimed films – petitioned the government, seeking swift action in the case and also to address the problems faced by women in cinema.

In the report, retired Justice K Hema says the WCC told her that “women are being silenced as the prestige of the film industry needs to be upheld”.

The panel interviewed several dozen men and women, including artists, producers, directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, hairstylists, makeup artists and costume designers, and “gathered evidence including video and audio clips and WhatsApp messages”.

Describing sexual harassment as the “worst evil” women in cinema face, the report said the panellists saw evidence that “sexual harassment remains shockingly rampant” and that “it goes on unchecked and uncontrolled”.

The industry “is controlled by a group of male actors, producers, distributors, exhibitors and directors who have gained enormous fame and wealth” and they were among the perpetrators, it added.

“Men in industry make open demands for sex without any qualms as if it’s their birthright. Women are left with very little options but to oblige – or reject at the cost of their long awaited dream of pursuing cinema as their profession.

“The experiences of many women are really shocking and of such gravity that they have not disclosed the details even to their close family members.”

Many of the people the panel approached were initially reluctant to speak because “they were afraid they would lose their jobs”.

“In the beginning, we found their fear strange but as our study progressed we realised it was well-founded. We are concerned about their and their close relatives’ safety.”

The report, the WCC says, has vindicated its stand. “For years, we have been saying that there is a systemic problem in the industry. Sexual harassment is just one of them. This report proves it,” Beena Paul, an award-winning editor and one of the founding members of the WCC, told the BBC.

“We were always told that we were troublemakers [for raising such issues]. This report proves that it [the condition] is far worse than what even we thought,” she said.

Members of the WCC say they have faced difficulty in getting work since they began demanding better working conditions on film sets. “People don’t like the fact that we are asking questions. So, quite a few members have faced difficult situations,” Ms Paul says.

The Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA), a top industry body which counts superstars like Mohanlal and Mamooty among its members, denied the accusations. Its general secretary Siddique disagreed that there was a small, powerful group that controlled the industry.

He also denied that sexual harassment was rampant in the industry and said that most of the complaints they received were about the delay or a lack of payment for workers. He said conditions for women had improved on film sets in the past five years and all facilities were now available to them.

In the week since its release, the report has created ripples in the state, with activists and prominent opposition leaders demanding action against those accused of wrongdoing.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said if any woman who testified before the committee came forward to file a complaint, the government would take action. “No matter how big they are, they will be brought before the law,” he said.

On Thursday, a public interest petition was filed in the Kerala High Court, seeking initiation of criminal proceedings against those accused in the report.

The court ordered the government to submit a copy of the report and the judges said they would decide if criminal action needed to be taken once they had read it.

Allegations of harassment and abuse in films are not new in India – in 2018, the #MeToo movement hit the country’s most popular film industry Bollywood after actress Tanushree Dutta accused veteran actor Nana Patekar of behaving inappropriately towards her on a film set in 2008. Patekar denied the allegations.

Ms Dutta, who has since claimed that she has been denied work, described the Hema committee report as “useless”, adding that earlier reports about making workplaces safer for women had not helped.

Parvathy Thiruvothu, an award-winning actress and a key member of the WCC, however, told Asianet news channel that she considered the release of the report “a victory”.

“It’s opened up a door for big changes within the industry,” she said.

Jeo Baby, director of The Great Indian Kitchen, a critically-acclaimed film that examines the patriarchal structure within the family, told the BBC that while gender issues remain a concern, change is under way in the industry. “This is the right time to correct this. The film industry has to fight this together.”

The report, which has made several recommendations to make the industry a safe place for women, says their inquiry and recommendations are not to find fault with any individual, but “an earnest attempt to ennoble a profession so that it becomes a viable career option for aspiring artists and technicians, both male and female”.

“Hopefully filmmaking will become so safe that parents can send their daughters and sons to the profession with the same confidence and sense of security as they send their children to an engineering firm or a college,” it adds.

Read more:

• India arrests after actress says she was abducted and raped
• Bhavana Menon breaks silence on sexual assault
• #MeToo: Why sexual harassment is a reality in Bollywood
• Sex harassment claims shake top India dance academy

A court in Taipei has jailed eight Taiwanese soldiers for spying on behalf of China in exchange for money.

Retired military officers bribed active duty soldiers with as much as 700,000 Taiwan dollars ($21,900; £16,700) to join a spy network, the court found.

One of the men, who was believed to be key to recruiting soldiers, got a 13-year sentence, the longest in the group.

One of the recruits, a lieutenant-colonel, was handed nine years for planning to defect to China by flying a helicopter, while another shot an instructional video about surrendering to China in the event of war.

China sees self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be under its control, and has not ruled out the use of force to take the island.

The two sides have been spying on each other since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.

Ten people in total were indicted for spying last year, and eight were sentenced on Thursday. The court acquitted one, while another – a retired officer – remains at large.

“They were seduced by money,” the court said.

“Their actions violated their official duties of being loyal to the country, defending the country and the people… to seriously endanger national security and the well-being of the people of Taiwan.”

Taiwan recently flagged Beijing’s growing espionage efforts, with the sentencing on Thursday the latest in a string of cases.

Last month, a sergeant who worked at a navy training centre was indicted for allegedly photographing and leaking confidential defence data to China.

Taipei has also raised concern over the growing frequency of Chinese fighter jet flights around the island.

On Friday, Taiwan’s President William Lai said the island’s people “must unite as one” and “defend national sovereignty and safeguard democracy”.

He was speaking at an event to commemorate the 66th anniversary of China’s assault on Taiwan’s Kinmen islands.

A 10-month-old baby has been partially paralysed after contracting polio in Gaza, United Nations officials have said.

According to the UN, Gaza, now in its 11th month of war, has not registered a polio case for 25 years, although type 2 poliovirus was detected in samples collected from the territory’s wastewater in June.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he is “gravely concerned” and confirmed that efforts are under way to roll out a vaccination programme in the coming weeks.

The 10-month-old, who was unvaccinated, is said to be in a stable condition after developing paralysis in one leg.

Poliovirus, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, is highly infectious.

It can cause disfigurement and paralysis, and is potentially fatal. It mainly affects children under the age of five.

Humanitarian groups have blamed the re-emergence of polio in Gaza on disruption to child vaccination programmes and massive damage to water and sanitation systems caused by the war.

In order to try to contain the spread, the UN has been pressing for a week-long pause in fighting to carry out a polio vaccination campaign for more than 640,000 children under the age of 10.

UN Secretary General António Guterres said “hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza [are] at risk”.

He said that for the campaign to be successful, transport of vaccines and required equipment would need to be facilitated, as well as the entry of polio experts into Gaza.

Adequate fuel, increased flow of cash, reliable communications and the ensured safety of both health workers and people reaching health facilities were also needed, he said.

WHO has approved the release of 1.6 million doses of vaccine, UNICEF is coordinating their delivery along with cold storage units and UNRWA’s medical teams will administer the vaccines once they arrive in Gaza.

UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russel said that the re-emergence of the virus in the strip after 25 years is “another sobering reminder of how chaotic, desperate and dangerous the situation has become”.

On 18 August, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said since the beginning of the war, 282,126 vials of the polio vaccine, sufficient for 2,821,260 doses, have been sent to Gaza.

It said in the coming weeks, an additional 60,000 vaccines will be delivered to vaccinate over one million children.

According to the IDF, entry to the Gaza Strip for vaccines and epidemic prevention is being facilitated by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT),

“This includes the entry of medical teams and vaccines against the polio virus,” the IDF said.

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

More than 40,265 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, which does not give details of civilian and combatant deaths. The UN human rights office says most of those killed were women and children.

At least 14 people have died after a bus carrying passengers from India fell into a river in Nepal, officials have said.

There were around 40 people on the bus, which was travelling to Nepal’s capital Kathmandu from Pokhara, according to reports.

Rescue operations are underway at the accident site on the bank of the Marsyangdi river in Tanahun district.

The cause of the accident and the identities of the victims have not been confirmed yet.

“The bus bearing number plate UP FT 7623 plunged into the river and is lying on the bank of the river,” news agency ANI quoted Deepkumar Raya, a senior police official from Tanahun, as saying. The vehicle is registered in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis of the western state of Maharashtra said that some of the victims were from the state.

“We are in touch with the Uttar Pradesh government to bring the bodies of the deceased to Maharashtra in coordination with the Nepal government,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter).

Videos from the accident site show the mangled remains of the bus lying at the bottom of a hilly slope, next to a gushing river. Rescue personnel can be seen looking for survivors among the wreckage.

A Nepal army helicopter carrying a medical team has been despatched to the accident site.

The bus route from Pokhara to Kathmandu is very popular among Indian tourists and pilgrims.

Accidents are often reported in Nepal, due to factors including poor maintenance of roads and vehicles and narrow paths in mountainous areas.

In July, dozens of people went missing after a landslide swept two passenger buses into the Trishuli river.

Icelandic supermarkets have been left in a pickle, after a viral TikTok trend saw an unprecedented surge in demand for cucumbers – leaving suppliers racing to keep up.

It comes after social media influencers in the small Nordic country began sharing a salad recipe of grated cucumbers, sesame oil, garlic, rice vinegar and chilli oil.

The recipe has been such a hit that farmers in the country have been unable to keep up with spiralling demand, Iceland’s farmers association – the Horticulturists’ Sales Company (SFG) – told BBC News.

While one supermarket chain – Hagkaup – questioned the link between demand and the trend, it conceded that purchases of cucumber had more than doubled.

SFG’s marketing director said that as things stand farmers in Iceland are not managing to keep up with surging consumer demand, but said she hopes supply will be back to normal “in a week or so”.

Kristín Linda Sveinsdóttir said the recipe had proven to be “really popular” and other ingredients in the recipe were selling out as well.

The viral trend has its roots in Canada – where TikToker Logan Moffitt, dubbed “cucumber guy”, has been sharing novel recipes using the variety.

“Sometimes, you just need to eat a whole cucumber,” is the influencer’s go-to phrase at the start of his many recipe videos.

The content creator has more than 5.5 million followers and has been sharing cucumber recipes almost everyday since July.

The one that appears to have gripped users in Iceland uses sesame oil and rice vinegar, but sometimes Logan mixes in cream cheese, avocado, and even smoked salmon.

Despite the influencer’s enduring online popularity, experts in Iceland have been keen to play-down his association with the ongoing shortages.

Hagkaup told the BBC it is common to experience shortages in Icelandic cucumber at this time of year.

While the company’s food product manager, Vignir Þór Birgisson, said sales of ingredients like sesame oil and some spices have “doubled” in his stores, he said the current shortage is not solely due to the TikTok trend.

Ms Sveinsdóttir from the SFG also expressed some scepticism, suggesting other factors were at play. Some cucumber farmers replace their cucumber plants at this time of year, which are not yet producing large amounts, she said.

In addition to this, schools are returning from the summer holidays, which puts additional pressure on supplies.

“Everything is happening at the same time,” Ms Sveinsdóttir observed, but said the social media trend remained one of the main contributing factors.

“This is the first time we have experienced something like this,” Ms Sveinsdóttir said, adding that had the TikTok trend become popular earlier in the summer, “when the [cucumber] production was in full blast” and the shortage would not have been noticeable.

Farmers in Iceland – which has a population of 393,600 – produce about six million cucumbers, Ms Sveinsdóttir told the BBC.

They pride themselves on the volume of fresh goods the country can produce, despite the often extreme weather conditions.

Four prison employees have been killed after several prisoners staged a revolt in a remote Russian penal colony and took hostages, federal authorities say.

Special forces stormed the IK-19 Surovikino facility in the southwestern Volgograd region after knife-wielding prisoners, who identified themselves as Islamic State (IS) militants, claimed to have taken control of the sprawling complex.

Authorities said the special forces operation had freed some hostages and “neutralised” all the attackers, but later confirmed that four prison employees had died.

An unverified image posted on social media appeared to show an inmate holding a knife standing above a bloodied prison guard during the revolt.

Russia’s Rosgvardia National Guard said snipers shot four attackers in the rescue operation.

Heavily armed troops were filmed arriving at the prison in footage posted to the Telegram messaging app by the National Guard.

The attack began during a disciplinary commission meeting, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) said in a statement. The attackers were said to have slashed guards and wounded several prison staff.

The FSIN said eight prison employees and four convicts had been taken hostage. Some reports in Russian media suggested that the prison’s director and deputy director were among those seized.

“The criminals inflicted stab wounds of varying severity on four employees, three of whom died. Another four who resisted were hospitalised, one of whom died in the hospital.”

The FSIN denied that the attackers had taken control of the entire prison, saying: “The criminals took hostages and occupied one single room on the territory of the colony.”

According to a law enforcement source quoted by Russian state news agency TASS, there are “reasons to say that the taking of hostages was prepared in advance and was well-planned”.

Russian media named the attackers as Ramzidin Toshev, 28, Rustamchon Navruzi, 23, Nazirchon Toshov, 28, and Temur Khusinov, 29. All were natives of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

In dramatic mobile phone footage released by the attackers, they identified themselves as IS militants. The men said they were motivated by the desire to avenge the persecution of Muslims.

The video also showed prison officials lying in pools of blood, while in separate clips the attackers roamed the prison courtyard.

Volgograd regional governor Andrei Bocharov said earlier that the hostage-taking posed “no threat to the civilian population”.

President Vladimir Putin was filmed taking part in a virtual meeting with security chiefs, during which the Kremlin said he had been updated on the situation.

The Volgograd hostage-taking is the second such incident this summer, after six prisoners who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group captured two guards at a facility in the neighbouring Rostov region.

Five of the prisoners were killed and a sixth sentenced to 20 years in prison following the attack.

Prosecutors said they had opened a case relating to a hostage-taking.

IK-19 Surovikino is a high-security penal colony. It is believed to hold about 1,200 inmates.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Ukraine to hold talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky. The trip comes 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.

Mr 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.

Friday’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.

It will be a long time before we get answers as to exactly how the UK-flagged Bayesian yacht sank off the coast of Sicily.

The luxury superyacht was carrying 22 people when a heavy storm that created waterspouts struck early on Monday 19 August.

Seven bodies have been recovered from the wreck of the boat.

As Italian authorities continue to investigate the circumstances around the incident, speculation has swirled about what went wrong, with fingers being pointed at the captain, the crew, and faults with the yacht itself.

But experts have told the BBC that this was likely a “black swan” occurrence of freak weather – and that no-one is necessarily at fault.

Here are the key questions that investigators will be asking as they look into the tragedy.

The role of the boat’s keel will be closely examined by investigators.

A keel is a large, fin-like part of the boat that protrudes from its base.

The bottom of the keel – which is the lowest part of the boat – contains a huge weight, the bulb, which keeps the boat stable. When the wind pushes the boat onto its side, the keel rises through the water until – like a see-saw – the weight of it pushes the boat back level.

On a boat the size of the Bayesian, keels are often designed to be retracted so that the vessel can dock in areas that aren’t as deep, like a harbour.

When the keel is raised, it makes the boat much less stable.

In this case, the wreck of the Bayesian was found at a depth of 50m (164ft), which suggests there was no reason that the keel needed to be retracted.

But that doesn’t mean the captain or crew were at fault.

“Even without the keel completely out, the ship is stable and only a massive entry of water could have caused the sinking,” a spokesperson for Italian Sea Group, which owns the company that built the Bayesian, said, according to the Telegraph.

Investigators will want to know whether the keel was “up, down or somewhere halfway,” says Jean-Baptiste Souppez, fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sailing Technology.

The Captain of the Bayesian, James Cutfield, reportedly told Italian media that he couldn’t have foreseen the storm which battered the Bayesian.

But we do know that bad weather had been forecast beforehand.

Luca Mercalli, the president of the Italian Meteorological Society, said on Tuesday that the crew should have made sure that all the guests were awake and assigned them lifejackets, given the poor forecast.

One survivor reportedly told medical staff that the ship started sinking just two minutes after she fell asleep.

Bad weather is one thing, but a waterspout is something else entirely. And not something that the crew could have predicted.

One expert at the scene in Sicily told Reuters news agency an early focus of the investigation would be on whether the yacht’s crew had failed to close access hatches before the bad weather struck.

But on a boat of this size, open hatches alone would likely not have been enough to make the Bayesian sink, experts say.

There are also other entry points for water around the boat known as “down-flooding points”, which are there to allow the engine room to be ventilated, among other things.

“There will obviously be questions about the crew and what happened and whether they were prepared,” says Mr Souppez.

“But think it’s important to remember that the vessel sank in a matter of minutes, and so actually in the middle of the night for the crew to be able to keep so many people on board alive, deploy the flare, and act in the heat of the moment is a tough task,” he says.

“It is very difficult to say precisely what happened here,” said Dr Paul Stott, fellow of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects.

“But it is unlikely that the crew could have reacted in any way to save the yacht in the face of such a sudden and catastrophic weather event.”

Approached by BBC News, the Italian police confirmed an investigation was ongoing but no charges have yet been brought.

The yacht’s captain, James Cutfield, his eight surviving crew members and passengers have been questioned by the Coast Guard on behalf of prosecutors.

In cases like this one, it is common for officials to embark on a broad investigation – known as a ‘crime hypothesis’ – that considers a series of possible criminal charges.

A doctor treating survivors said the ship “capsized within a few minutes”.

A key question is how exactly that happened – and how it happened so fast.

“For the vessel to sink, especially at that speed, you are looking at water making its way inside the vessel throughout its entire length”, says Mr Souppez.

“Vessels like this are not actually designed to stand any period of time at 90 degrees,” says Mr Souppez.

“So if the vessel found itself at 90 degrees, then you would expect water to get inside regardless of whether hatches were open or not. Though it would obviously speed up the process.”

Some have speculated that a waterspout flying over the Bayesian could have been “popped” by the mast, dumping a huge amount of water onto the boat – and sinking it rapidly.

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

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

According to BBC Weather, waterspouts are just that too, but are over water rather than land. With sea temperatures rising due to climate change, there is a concern that they could become more common.

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

But the chance of one striking a ship directly – as has been speculated could have happened here – is still very low.

“I think that the bottom line will be that even if there have been issues with keel or hatches being open, you are probably still looking at a freak weather accident,” says Mr Souppez.

“This is likely to be a very safe modern design that has met with a freak weather condition for which nothing is designed for,” says Mr Stott.

During each day of the Notting Hill Carnival since 2017, the loud music coming from the sound systems is briefly turned off.

People are encouraged to respect a short 72-second silence – one for each of the lives lost in the Grenfell Tower fire over seven years ago.

At many points along the west London parade route, Grenfell Tower is clearly visible.

The Grenfell tragedy on 14 June 2017 has had a great impact on the local community involved with the carnival ever since. Many of them have strong connections.

In just a few weeks the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s final report into what led to the fire – and who was accountable for what was described in the public inquiry as an “avoidable tragedy” – will be published.

For families who lost their loved ones and have been fighting for justice for them ever since it happened, the report’s publication will be a significant milestone.

Raymond Bernard, whose nickname was Moses, lived on the top floor of Grenfell Tower for more than 30 years. He came to London in 1968 from the Caribbean island of Trinidad.

After leaving school in Ladbroke Grove he trained as an electrical engineer and for many years worked in the Houses of Parliament.

His younger sister Bernadette Bernard, who calls him Ray, says music was always his first love.

“He always had music playing from the moment he woke, mostly reggae,” she says.

As a young man Raymond was a DJ and was involved in the Gemini Sound System.

They would play at parties and clubs in London, particularly the Embassy Club in Shepherd’s Bush.

According to family friend Jackie Leger, the annual Notting Hill Carnival over the August Bank Holiday was a highlight.

“He would always go to carnival. It allowed him to reconnect with his roots, reconnect with being born in Trinidad listening to Soca music and then coming to the UK and understanding more of the reggae music,” she explains.

Jackie says she regarded Ray as a brother and calls him a “well-loved” member of the local community in Grenfell Tower.

“He was such a kind person. He would share his last with anybody and he didn’t have very much himself,” she says.

“He was very kind, gracious, he was just lovely and a lovely human being to other human beings.”

In his later years, Raymond sometimes walked with a stick and had severe arthritis.

He was inseparable from his beloved dog Marley, a small spaniel named after Reggae icon Bob Marley.

In evidence given to the inquiry Ray was praised as a hero – a modern day Moses.

On the night of the fire he sheltered a number of people in his one-bedroom flat on the 23rd floor.

Some had dialled 999 and were told to stay in the tower and wait to be rescued.

The transcripts of those desperate calls were submitted to the inquiry and make horrific reading.

Many were found to have collapsed from the toxic fumes or suffocated with the excessive smoke.

Forensic experts concluded many of Ray’s neighbours died huddled on his bed. Ray was found on the floor. He was 63 years old.

“He was very well known in Grenfell Tower, everybody knew who Moses was,” says Jackie.

“He was a counsellor, a good friend and he was a great neighbour and that was the testament to him on the night of the fire. People who were in his apartment at the time of their demise – he looked after them. He was a great person,” she adds.

His sister Bernadette has installed a memorial bench as a tribute to Ray on Powis Square, close to The Tabarnacle in Notting Hill.

It’s a key location for the carnival celebrations and somewhere Ray in his younger years would often go.

On it, the words are inscribed: “In loving memory of Raymond AKA Moses Bernard. A leader, a protector, who protected like no other. Moses is his name.”

“If Moses were still with us, he would be round by the sound systems listening to the music chatting to his friends, he would be enjoying it the same way everyone else enjoys carnival,” says Jackie.

Speaking about the silences observed to remember Grenfell victims during carnival that happen at 15:00 BST each day, Bernadette says: “It’s important for us.

“It not only shows respect for the victims and their families, it’s a way of remembering what actually happened at Grenfell and the impact it’s had on the bereaved survivors and the community as a whole.”

Jackie agrees with her, saying it reminds carnival-goers not to “forget about what happened seven years ago.

“Always keep those victims in your thoughts, in your minds and in your hearts.”

After years of waiting, the final report from the inquiry will be made public in a few weeks. It’s hoped it will be a significant step in the fight for justice.

Like many other families, survivors and local residents in North Kensington, the two women are anxiously waiting for its findings.

“No one would have thought seven years on, we’d just be finishing phase two of the report,” says Jackie.

“No one thought it would take this long, we know it will take even longer,” she adds.

The Bernard family have given testimony at the inquiry and attended many of the hearings.

They also sat through the cross examination of some of those who worked for companies and organisations who are part of what was described in the inquiry as being part of the “web of blame”.

“None of the defendants are taking responsibility for their actions,” says Bernadette.

“They are all trying to pass the buck so that no one says yes I made this decision knowing that should a fire occur it would be one of complete devastation.”

All the organisations and companies have submitted evidence to the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry, with the final report due to be published on 4 September.

A landmark report into problems faced by women in the Malayalam-language film industry has revealed the deep rot in one of India’s most popular film hubs.

The findings of the three-member panel are pretty damning.

The 290-page report – parts of which have been redacted to hide identities of survivors and those accused of wrongdoing – says the industry is dominated by “a mafia of powerful men” and that “sexual harassment of women is rampant”.

Headed by a former judge of the Kerala High Court and set up by the state government in 2017, the Hema committee details the abysmal working conditions on sets – including a lack of toilets and changing rooms for junior artists, no food and water for them, poor pay and no accommodation or transport facilities.

“There are no toilets, so women have to go in the bushes or behind thick trees. During their periods, not being able to change their sanitary napkins for long hours and holding urine for long causes physical discomfort and makes them sick, in some cases needing hospitalisation,” it says.

The report, which was submitted to the government in December 2019, was made public only this week after nearly five years of delay and multiple legal challenges by members of the film industry.

The panel was set up in the aftermath of the horrific sexual assault on a leading actress in the film industry. Bhavana Menon, who has worked in more than 80 films in southern Indian languages and won a number of prestigious awards, was assaulted by a group of men while travelling from Thrissur to Kochi in February 2017.

Her assault made headlines, especially after Dileep, one of the Malayalam-language film industry’s biggest actors and Menon’s co-star in half a dozen films, was named as an accused and charged with criminal conspiracy. He denied the charges, but was arrested and held in custody for three months before being released on bail. The case continues to be heard in court.

Indian law bars identification of survivors of sexual assault, but it was known from the start that it was Ms Menon who had been assaulted. In 2022, she waived her anonymity in a post on Instagram and in an interview to the BBC.

A few months after the attack on Ms Menon, Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) – a group formed by some of her colleagues in a film industry known for its variety of successful mainstream and critically acclaimed films – petitioned the government, seeking swift action in the case and also to address the problems faced by women in cinema.

In the report, retired Justice K Hema says the WCC told her that “women are being silenced as the prestige of the film industry needs to be upheld”.

The panel interviewed several dozen men and women, including artists, producers, directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, hairstylists, makeup artists and costume designers, and “gathered evidence including video and audio clips and WhatsApp messages”.

Describing sexual harassment as the “worst evil” women in cinema face, the report said the panellists saw evidence that “sexual harassment remains shockingly rampant” and that “it goes on unchecked and uncontrolled”.

The industry “is controlled by a group of male actors, producers, distributors, exhibitors and directors who have gained enormous fame and wealth” and they were among the perpetrators, it added.

“Men in industry make open demands for sex without any qualms as if it’s their birthright. Women are left with very little options but to oblige – or reject at the cost of their long awaited dream of pursuing cinema as their profession.

“The experiences of many women are really shocking and of such gravity that they have not disclosed the details even to their close family members.”

Many of the people the panel approached were initially reluctant to speak because “they were afraid they would lose their jobs”.

“In the beginning, we found their fear strange but as our study progressed we realised it was well-founded. We are concerned about their and their close relatives’ safety.”

The report, the WCC says, has vindicated its stand. “For years, we have been saying that there is a systemic problem in the industry. Sexual harassment is just one of them. This report proves it,” Beena Paul, an award-winning editor and one of the founding members of the WCC, told the BBC.

“We were always told that we were troublemakers [for raising such issues]. This report proves that it [the condition] is far worse than what even we thought,” she said.

Members of the WCC say they have faced difficulty in getting work since they began demanding better working conditions on film sets. “People don’t like the fact that we are asking questions. So, quite a few members have faced difficult situations,” Ms Paul says.

The Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA), a top industry body which counts superstars like Mohanlal and Mamooty among its members, denied the accusations. Its general secretary Siddique disagreed that there was a small, powerful group that controlled the industry.

He also denied that sexual harassment was rampant in the industry and said that most of the complaints they received were about the delay or a lack of payment for workers. He said conditions for women had improved on film sets in the past five years and all facilities were now available to them.

In the week since its release, the report has created ripples in the state, with activists and prominent opposition leaders demanding action against those accused of wrongdoing.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said if any woman who testified before the committee came forward to file a complaint, the government would take action. “No matter how big they are, they will be brought before the law,” he said.

On Thursday, a public interest petition was filed in the Kerala High Court, seeking initiation of criminal proceedings against those accused in the report.

The court ordered the government to submit a copy of the report and the judges said they would decide if criminal action needed to be taken once they had read it.

Allegations of harassment and abuse in films are not new in India – in 2018, the #MeToo movement hit the country’s most popular film industry Bollywood after actress Tanushree Dutta accused veteran actor Nana Patekar of behaving inappropriately towards her on a film set in 2008. Patekar denied the allegations.

Ms Dutta, who has since claimed that she has been denied work, described the Hema committee report as “useless”, adding that earlier reports about making workplaces safer for women had not helped.

Parvathy Thiruvothu, an award-winning actress and a key member of the WCC, however, told Asianet news channel that she considered the release of the report “a victory”.

“It’s opened up a door for big changes within the industry,” she said.

Jeo Baby, director of The Great Indian Kitchen, a critically-acclaimed film that examines the patriarchal structure within the family, told the BBC that while gender issues remain a concern, change is under way in the industry. “This is the right time to correct this. The film industry has to fight this together.”

The report, which has made several recommendations to make the industry a safe place for women, says their inquiry and recommendations are not to find fault with any individual, but “an earnest attempt to ennoble a profession so that it becomes a viable career option for aspiring artists and technicians, both male and female”.

“Hopefully filmmaking will become so safe that parents can send their daughters and sons to the profession with the same confidence and sense of security as they send their children to an engineering firm or a college,” it adds.

Read more:

• India arrests after actress says she was abducted and raped
• Bhavana Menon breaks silence on sexual assault
• #MeToo: Why sexual harassment is a reality in Bollywood
• Sex harassment claims shake top India dance academy

The independent campaign of Robert F Kennedy Jr is over, but the questionthat has followed him on the campaign trail remains – does his support come mostly from those who would otherwise vote Republican or Democrat?

His base was small and shrinking. An average of opinion polls by the website RealClearPolitics puts him on 5%, down from the high teens just a few months ago.

But in a closely fought election, Kennedy voters could swing victory either way for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in November’s election.

Much of the slump in Mr Kennedy’s numbers, experts say, is down to excitement among Democrats over their new candidate, Vice-President Harris.

• Robert F Kennedy Jr suspends campaign and backs Trump
• Democrats are worried. But will RFK Jr take more votes away from Trump?
• RFK Jr: How anti-vaccine misinformation has shaped his ‘truth-teller’ candidacy

“When it was Biden versus Trump people were looking for a third option,” said Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar with the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation who has studied the history of third-party campaigns.

“But with Kamala Harris coming into the picture and gaining the Democratic nomination, that has changed.”

Opinion polls that reflect independent and third-party candidates – including the Green Party’s Jill Stein and left-wing activist Cornel West – have been inconclusive about where Mr Kennedy’s support is coming from.

In some cases they show his presence in the race benefiting Republicans; in others Democrats; and in nearly every such poll, the margins are slim.

But observers believe that a significant chunk of Mr Kennedy’s liberal-leaning support may have already been drawn back to the Democratic party by Ms Harris’s rise.

Mr Matthews said the suspension of RFK Jr’s campaign means Trump will get a “little bit of a bounce”.

“But I’m not sure it will be very much, as Kennedy was dropping pretty significantly in the polls,” he said.

Still, a few votes in battleground states might be enough to swing an election that appears very close at the moment. Mr Kennedy is keenly aware of this, announcing on Friday that he would only be deleting his name from the ballot in swing states where he believes his presence would hurt Trump’s campaign.

Although he’s a member of the country’s most famous Democratic family, Mr Kennedy spent most of his drop-out speech criticising the party. He also spent much of his campaign butting heads with the Democratic establishment.

At a fundraiser this spring in suburban Detroit – a key battleground in the crucial swing state of Michigan – protesters from the local Democratic party stood outside holding signs calling him a spoiler.

His decision to throw his support behind Trump will vindicate those allegations in the minds of Kennedy critics.

“I think some of his voters will vote for Trump, and there are others who won’t be satisfied with either candidate and who just won’t vote,” said Melissa Smith, author of Third Parties, Outsiders, and Renegades: Modern Challenges to the Two-Party System in Presidential Elections.

But Mr Kennedy’s campaign, struggling for cash, might have had more impact on the race if he had stayed in, or dropped out at the last minute.

With more than two months to go until election day, Ms Smith predicted that his run would be a “blip in history”, which could quickly become old news in an election contest that has already thrown up lots of surprises.

For now, however, Trump appears better placed to capture more of what’s left of Mr Kennedy’s support.

The Trump campaign released a memo from its pollster Tony Fabrizio, stating that Republicans stand to gain.

“This is good news for President Trump and his campaign – plain and simple,” he wrote.

But his endorsement also poses some risk for Trump, as Democrats seek to define the Republican ticket as “weird” – by which they mean outside the mainstream of American politics.

Mr Kennedy, with his fringe anti-vaccination views, could end up providing more material for such attacks.

Outside this week’s Democratic National Convention, a tongue-in-cheek newspaper stating that it was funded by his campaign boasted the headline “Kennedy is weird”.

Chock-full of anti-vaccine messages and references to conspiracy theories, its underlying message was that “weird” is good.

The Harris campaign, meanwhile, did not directly refer to RFK Jr in a statement responding to the news on Friday.

“For any American out there who is tired of Donald Trump looking for a new way forward, ours is a campaign for you,” said Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon.

A TikTok star from a small city in Tennessee has made it his mission to show the world British food is not all that bad.

Food reviewer Kalani Smith, who goes by Kalani Ghost Hunter (KGH) online, racks up millions of views posting his reviews on social media – from Welsh cakes to Greggs.

After initially building up a following investigating the paranormal, a pivot to reviewing British culinary staples has seen Mr Smith’s follower count balloon to more than three million on TikTok alone.

Having recently toured south Wales, Mr Smith boldly declared that Cardiff Market’s food beats London’s Camden Market’s “10 times out of 10”.

“The most interesting thing about this journey… is that the perception around the world, especially in the US, is that the food in the UK is bland, it’s bad,” said Mr Smith.

“I think my whole objective up until this point has been is to document that this is not the case.

“There’s obviously things that are not good in every country, but there’s also some things that are absolutely incredible.”

“A lot of people come to the UK and they visit London, and that’s their extent of visiting the UK,” said Mr Smith, who hails from Mount Juliet in Tennessee.

“Whereas I’ve been to so many cities in the UK that I’ve got a pretty good perception and understanding of the majority of food… I’ve had so many of the regional dishes.”

Mr Smith’s social media career as a ghost hunter took an unexpected turn when, on a trip to the UK earlier this year, he decided to review arguably the most British meal of them all – a roast dinner.

“Things really took a change for me after that point,” said Mr Smith, who has been a food reviewer ever since.

Throughout his travels in the UK, the almost-exclusive setting for his reviews, he found one cuisine particularly stood out.

“The UK’s curry scene is untouchable,” he said.

“You can go to so many different parts of the UK and get a really good curry.”

However, Mr Smith does not have such kind words for all of the UK’s traditional dishes, saying pie, mash and liquor was the worst thing he had.

“That’s a London thing… but that liquor sauce is just not something that I would ever want to eat again.”

On a recent whistle-stop tour of south Wales, Mr Smith visited Newport, Cardiff, Port Talbot and Swansea.

“One of the highlights of the trip definitely had to be the Welsh cake… absolutely incredible,” said Mr Smith, after visiting Cardiff Bakestones in the city’s market.

“My first trip here, I had a horrible Welsh cake from Morrisons out of a package, and everyone told me, you have to get a fresh one.

“We went to the Cardiff market and had some incredible food, Welsh cake being one of those.”

Another highlight of Welsh cuisine was our famed traditional Welsh… tacos?

“Some of the best tacos I’ve had in the UK can be found in Cardiff Market,” he said of the market’s The Bearded Taco.

In Swansea, he said he had a “really good experience” with cockles and laverbread and Welsh rarebit.

“I had to get laverbread from Wales. I had this cockles and laverbread concoction that actually was really good.

“Laverbread by itself, without cooking. It was not a good idea.”

He did, however, tempt the wrath of Swansea natives with a less than perfect, but still positive, review of Joe’s Ice Cream.

“Joe’s Ice Cream in Swansea is one that I’ve had commented hundreds and hundreds of times, and everyone from Swansea talks about Joe’s Ice Cream.

“Joe’s Ice Cream is good, but it doesn’t rank in the top 10 for best ice cream I’ve ever had.

“It’s not something that I would drive or stand in line for.”

Mr Smith said balancing the skill of balancing locals’ passion for their signature dishes with giving an honest review was an important part of the job.

“The key is – you have to be respectful, right? – If you watch any video that I do, even if it is negative, most of the time, I try my best to be respectful.

“Each city in each region has a dish that they kind of cling to and and they’re proud of this dish.

“If I don’t think something tastes good, I’m not going to say [it does] to, you know, save someone’s feelings.

“Just because it’s not my taste and it’s not something I enjoy doesn’t mean that someone else out there doesn’t… I will always be honest with people.”

Malaysian authorities are trying to rescue a woman who fell into an eight-metre deep sinkhole that opened on a busy road in Kuala Lumpur.

The 48-year-old Indian national was sitting on a roadside bench in Jalan India Masjid when the ground beneath her suddenly caved in, according to local police.

Videos on social media show crowds of people watching rescue workers trying to make their way into the sinkhole. Some have ladders, while others are using hammers and diggers to try and clear the way.

There does not appear to be any sign of the woman.

The Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department said it received a distress call at 08:22 local time (00:22 GMT) and dispatched 15 firemen to the scene.

Operation commander Mohd Riduan Akhbar told local media that a search and rescue operation was being conducted.

“The Special Tactical Operation and Rescue Team of Malaysia (STORM) and the K9 unit are at the location,” he said.

Ninety personnel from various other agencies have also joined in the operation, according to local police chief Assistant Commissioner Sulizmie Affendy Sulaiman.

“We will look at CCTV footage and take statements from witnesses to get a clearer picture of what occurred,” he said.

The BBC has reached out to the Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department for comment.

Sinkholes generally form when underground water dissolves the rock on the surface, causing a hole to form.

Although there is no precise data globally, geologists say they are reasonably common. Human injuries, however, are very rare.

One of the worst recent sinkholes disasters in terms of casualties occurred in Canada in 2010, when a family of four died after their entire house was swallowed by a gaping sinkhole near Montreal.

The world’s largest sinkhole is Xiaoxhai Tiankeng in south-western China. With a depth measuring 660 metres, researchers believe it was formed more than 128,000 years ago.

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, South East Asia representative at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

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

Reviewers for US pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s hotly-anticipated new album have described it as “smart pop underneath the froth” at one end of the scale, to having “no ideas, no integrity and no identity” at the other.

Short n’ Sweet is Carpenter’s sixth album at the age of 25, but this summer has seen her catapulted to superstardom by the success of her single Espresso.

In a four-star review, the Times music critic Victoria Segal wrote: “The album can’t quite match Espresso’s language-mangling head-rush, but it seems Carpenter prefers her songs to be like her coffee: short and a little bitter.

“Most just graze three minutes, enough time to let her bounce between her keynote moods of intense lust, spacey sadness and vengeful fury.”

Beyond her “killer singles” Espresso and Please Please Please, Carpenter is at her best as “a kind of Gen Z Dolly Parton” on the songs Coincidence and Slim Pickins, Segal wrote.

“She’s left it late to claim the summer but, beneath the fun, frothy trappings, Short n’ Sweet suggests Carpenter is here for the long haul.”

The Independent’s Helen Brown said the success of the two lead singles mean the album has a lot riding on it.

“I’m happy to report that those punchy little song-shots aren’t the only cool moments on an album that confidently hair-flips its way between TikTok pop, yacht rock, country and R&B without breaking stride or losing identity,” she wrote.

Brown’s four-star review picked out forthcoming single Taste (“a terrifically glossy slice of FM rock”) and Coincidence (“imagine a 21st-century version of Crosby Stills Nash and Young with Joni Mitchell singing along around a beach fire”).

“The whole thing is delightfully caffeinated: Short n’ Sweet is full of hiss and steam, grinding gears and deep kicks beneath the shining chrome surfaces,” she concluded.

The Standard’s El Hunt gave three stars, calling Short n’ Sweet “bright n’ breezy, but lacking in boldness”.

“If you were expecting Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet to serve up a whole tray of freshly brewed Espressos, then think again: that song ends up feeling like a total outlier on an album that instead pulls from twanging country, Swiftian acoustic ballads, the sort of floaty R&B favored by Ariana Grande, and 80s synth-pop,” she wrote.

“Though these are all perfectly serviceable pop songs, many of them end up feeling lightweight and derivative in comparison to its biggest hit.”

Clash’s Ims Taylor agreed that the album as a whole doesn’t match her lead singles – those “sultry, retro-tinged pop bops that assert Carpenter’s place as pop star, irresistible icon, reigning supreme over charts and admirers with infinite confidence”.

“But no – Short n’ Sweet veers towards the softer, more sincere side.”

Marking it seven out of 10, Taylor added: “Carpenter is writing straight from the heart: no pretentiousness, no lofty aspirations, just precisely the silly, emotional, passionate thoughts that run through the head of a 25-year-old woman in a situationship.”

She concluded: “Short n’ Sweet as a whole is a little less addictive than its lead single, and a little less sensitive than its predecessor, but it’s a solid entry into the Sabrina canon, with plenty of potential to sneak up on you with a gut-punch should you ever find yourself relating to it.”

The i newspaper’s Emily Bootle was less forgiving, awarding two stars to an album she said was mostly “entirely forgettable”.

“What Carpenter possesses in juicy aesthetic she lacks in musical integrity,” she wrote.

“There’s only so far being a sexy baby can get you, and while Short and Sweet gives a good dose of her effortless soprano runs and a heady rush of saccharinity… it seems to have almost no organic essence or interesting musical ideas.”

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, which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”. Typically used as a derogatory term for those considered hostile to transgender people, it has also been claimed by some to describe their own gender-critical beliefs.

“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 against 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 court in Taipei has jailed eight Taiwanese soldiers for spying on behalf of China in exchange for money.

Retired military officers bribed active duty soldiers with as much as 700,000 Taiwan dollars ($21,900; £16,700) to join a spy network, the court found.

One of the men, who was believed to be key to recruiting soldiers, got a 13-year sentence, the longest in the group.

One of the recruits, a lieutenant-colonel, was handed nine years for planning to defect to China by flying a helicopter, while another shot an instructional video about surrendering to China in the event of war.

China sees self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be under its control, and has not ruled out the use of force to take the island.

The two sides have been spying on each other since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.

Ten people in total were indicted for spying last year, and eight were sentenced on Thursday. The court acquitted one, while another – a retired officer – remains at large.

“They were seduced by money,” the court said.

“Their actions violated their official duties of being loyal to the country, defending the country and the people… to seriously endanger national security and the well-being of the people of Taiwan.”

Taiwan recently flagged Beijing’s growing espionage efforts, with the sentencing on Thursday the latest in a string of cases.

Last month, a sergeant who worked at a navy training centre was indicted for allegedly photographing and leaking confidential defence data to China.

Taipei has also raised concern over the growing frequency of Chinese fighter jet flights around the island.

On Friday, Taiwan’s President William Lai said the island’s people “must unite as one” and “defend national sovereignty and safeguard democracy”.

He was speaking at an event to commemorate the 66th anniversary of China’s assault on Taiwan’s Kinmen islands.

Three people have been killed and another four seriously injured in a knife attack in the western German city of Solingen, police say.

The attack happened during a festival in the city centre on Friday evening. The attacker is reported to be still at large.

Bild website says a man randomly stabbed passers-by. A huge manhunt is now under way, with police helicopters seen hovering above the city.

The industrial city was celebrating 650 years since it was founded.

The city authorities asked people to leave the Fronhof market area, as police set up security cordons, following the attack at about 22:00 local time (21:00 BST).

Emergency crews at the scene were seen treating the injured, media reports said.

Police later deployed 40 tactical vehicles in the hunt for the stabbing suspect, according to Bild.

The vehicles are being commanded by SEK (Special Task Force) officers.

Roads have been blocked, and residents asked to stay indoors as officers carry out their search.

Philipp Müller, one of the festival organisers, said the emergency crews were fighting for the lives of nine people, the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper reports.

“People are shocked, but left the square peacefully,” Mr Müller said.

Eyewitness Lars Breitzke told the newspaper that he knew something was wrong when he saw a singer on stage with a strange expression on their face.

“And then a person fell over just a metre away from me,” he said.

The attacker is believed to have deliberately stabbed his victims in the neck, German media report.

Police spokesman Alexander Kresta was quoted by Spiegel website as saying “we are currently assuming that it was one person” after talking to numerous eyewitnesses.

In a Facebook statement, Solingen Mayor Tim Kurzbach said: “Tonight all of us in Solingen are in shock, horror and great sadness. We all wanted to celebrate our city anniversary together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured.

“It breaks my heart that an attack has happened in our city. I have tears in my eyes when I think of those we’ve lost. I pray for all those still fighting for their lives. Also my greatest sympathy for all those who had to experience this, these images must have been horrific.”

Speaking to the BBC later on Friday, Solinger Tageblatt’s deputy editor Björn Boch said the celebrations had been “supposed to last for three days, and the city expected 25,000 people every night.

“The city was just packed with people,” he said, estimating that “a few thousand people” were at Friday’s free event.

The celebrations have now been cancelled.

Solingen – a city in North Rhineland-Westphalia famous for its steel industry – has about 160,000 inhabitants. It lies about 15 miles (25 km) east of Düsseldorf and north-east of Cologne.

When a shell exploded near Oleksandr Budko, the 26-year-old found himself buried alive and in “terrible pain” from injuries that would lead to the amputation of both his legs.

The Ukrainian soldier was helping to defend the north-eastern Kharkiv region from invading Russian forces in August 2022, when his unit was attacked.

Three years on, he’s the star of a reality TV show in which multiple women battle for his affection.

One advert for the Ukrainian version of hit US series The Bachelor shows a smartly-dressed Oleksandr staring wistfully at a flower. In another, he answers questions in military fatigues before performing a series of pull-ups in a gym.

Speaking to me in a rose garden in Kyiv, the veteran-turned-celebrity is in good spirits despite being tired after a busy week.

Oleksandr says he’s hoping to find love on the show after breaking up with his girlfriend last January – but thinks it will be difficult to choose a partner with “millions of people watching”.

His motivations aren’t just romantic. He also wants to use his appearance on the show to raise awareness of the challenges facing disabled Ukrainians.

“This show is watched by millions of people, and it presents a huge opportunity to positively influence their outlook,” he says.

He wants to show that injured veterans are not “outsiders, but full members of society who are living a good life.

“In my case, my life is now even better than before the war, better than before I got injured.”

Oleksandr is always on the go, telling me he spent the previous night filming a music video.

His life wasn’t always like this. In the years before Russia’s full-scale invasion, he was working as a barista in a Kyiv restaurant while studying graphic design.

He says his dreams were “down to earth”: travelling, discovering the world, and growing professionally. He wanted to start a family.

But Oleksandr’s life was turned upside down two years ago, when he became one of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men to join the army.

In August 2022, he was stationed near Izyum, an occupied city on the front lines of the Russian advance. It was invaded in the early days of the war and used by Russia as a key military hub to supply its forces from the east.

The city was liberated by Kyiv just a month after Oleksandr was seriously injured while defending the nearby Ukrainian position.

“I felt the earth shift onto me. I felt a terrible pain in my legs and realised that it would mean the amputation of my legs,” he said.

“I screamed from horrific pain and shouted for people to hear me.”

He says he knew his comrades were alive, and they dug him out of the ground and provided first aid. But that’s when he knew his legs were badly hurt.

“I understood that I had lost my legs at the moment of injury, two or three seconds after I felt the pain.”

Oleksandr survived but much of Izyum was left in ruins. At the time, authorities said they had found more than 400 bodies in graves near the city.

Despite a challenging recovery, Oleksandr was able to walk with prosthetic legs within six months.

“When I didn’t have prostheses, I had to move around in a wheelchair. I discovered how inaccessible and unsuited Kyiv was for wheelchair users, even though it’s the capital city,” he says.

“In the historic old town you can’t go anywhere. You can’t cross the road on your own and you can’t go inside any building because there are stairs everywhere.”

War injuries mean Oleksandr’s experience is becoming increasingly common in Ukraine. While there’s no official data recording the number of people injured during the war, tens of thousands are estimated to have lost limbs.

This has resulted in the creation of a separate reality show, called Legs Off – which Oleksandr presented – capturing the difficulties faced by disabled people as they move around Ukrainian cities.

As well as presenting, the veteran has also written a book, won medals at the Invictus Games, and performed with a ballet troupe in the US – all while recovering from his injuries.

He’s so popular in Ukraine that The Bachelor’s application portal crashed shortly after it was announced Oleksandr would take on the main role in the upcoming season.

Producers of The Bachelor are casting the veteran as a symbol of hope.

“Despite his amputations, Oleksandr rides a bike, drives a car, and climbs mountains. He lives life to the fullest,” says Natalia Franchuk, from STB, the network on which the show will air later this year.

“If television is about filming reality, then who better could be the star of The Bachelor now? Who else would be better suited in a country at war?”

Independent White House candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has joined the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, on stage at a rally in Arizona after dropping out of the race and endorsing the former US president.

Mr Kennedy, 70, a Democrat for most of his life and the scion of the Kennedy dynasty, said the principles that had led him to leave the party had now compelled him “to throw my support to President Trump”.

He said in a press conference in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday that he would seek to remove his name from the ballot in 10 battleground states.

Trump praised Mr Kennedy as “phenomenal” and “brilliant” as he welcomed him on stage at the rally later in Glendale. Democratic rival Kamala Harris said she would try to “earn” the support of Kennedy voters.

With November’s election looming, Mr Kennedy’s polling has slumped from a high of double figures as funds and national coverage dried up.

The son of US Senator Robert F Kennedy and nephew of President John F Kennedy, he is from the most famed family in Democratic politics.

Before welcoming RFK Jr to the stage on Friday, Trump promised, if elected, to release all remaining documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.

Mr Kennedy’s decision to back a Republican for the White House has outraged his relatives, who previously condemned his invocation of the family name in a Super Bowl ad back in February.

Kerry Kennedy, his sister, said his support for Trump was a “betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

“This decision is agonising for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends,” Mr Kennedy said on Friday.

“But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do. And that certainty gives me internal peace, even in storms.”

He is married to Cheryl Hines, the star of HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. She posted on X, formerly Twitter, that she deeply respected her husband’s decision to suspend his campaign. She did not comment on his endorsement of Trump.

Mr Kennedy told reporters on Friday that Trump’s insistence he could end the war in Ukraine by negotiating with Russia “alone would justify my support for his campaign”.

“There are still many issues and approaches on which we continue to have very serious differences. But we are aligned on other key issues.”

He said he would remove his name from 10 states where his presence would be a “spoiler” to Trump’s effort. He has already withdrawn from the battleground states of Arizona and Pennsylvania.

But it is too late for him to pull out from the swing states of Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, election officials told AP news agency.

Mr Kennedy said he had launched his campaign in April 2023 “as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle… the champions of the Constitution”.

But he left because “it had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big money”.

He blamed his decision to suspend his campaign on “media control” and his former party’s efforts to thwart his run, adding: “In my heart I no longer believe I have a realistic path to victory in the face of relentless and systematic censorship.”

Mr Kennedy hovered around 14% – 16% in polls at his most popular. However, his ratings have slumped to single digits since Ms Harris became the Democratic nominee.

He said in his press conference that he had offered to work with Ms Harris and her bid for the White House.

Democrats sounded unfazed by his announcement.

“Donald Trump isn’t earning an endorsement that’s going to help build support, he’s inheriting the baggage of a failed fringe candidate. Good riddance,” Democratic National Committee senior adviser Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement.

Mr Kennedy’s campaign became synonymous with the anti-vaccine movement as he frequently touted his leadership of the Children’s Health Defense organisation, formerly known as the World Mercury Project.

In recent weeks, Mr Kennedy recounted how he dumped a dead bear cub that had been hit by a car in New York’s Central Park in 2014 as a joke.

Earlier in his campaign, it was revealed that he had suffered from a brain parasite over a decade ago which caused severe memory loss and brain fog.

His announcement capped days of rumour that Mr Kennedy offered to endorse Trump to secure a role in his next administration.

Trump told CNN earlier this week he would “certainly be open” to Mr Kennedy playing a role, while Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, said he would be suited to “blow up” a federal department.

Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar with the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation, told the BBC that Mr Kennedy’s decision highlighted the two-party system in the US and “how difficult it is to get new ideas and fresh people into the process”.

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: Kamala Harris convention speech

Jermaine Jenas has told the Sun newspaper he is “ashamed” and has “let everybody down” after being sacked as a BBC presenter.

He told the paper he sent “inappropriate messages” to two colleagues on the One Show, but insisted he “did nothing illegal” and said they were sent to “two consenting adults”.

The former Match of the Day and One Show host had his contract terminated this week for allegedly sending inappropriate messages to a female colleague.

The BBC has not disclosed further details about the allegations against him.

He told the Sun the texts were a “huge error of judgement” for which he was “deeply sorry”, adding that he was “not a sex pest”.

Jenas, who is married with four children, told the paper he is receiving therapy and accepted he “fell below [the] standards” of the BBC.

The 41-year-old continued: “I feel so ashamed. I’ve let everybody down – my colleagues, my friends and, most importantly, I’ve let my family down.”

The issue was brought to the BBC’s attention a few weeks ago. The corporation announced his departure on Thursday.

A BBC spokesperson said: “We can confirm Jermaine Jenas is no longer part of our presenting line-up.”

The BBC has not commented since Jenas spoke to the Sun.

Jenas said he was sacked during a video call on Monday while on a family holiday, five days after being told of the allegations against him by the BBC.

In a lengthy and at times tearful interview on camera with the Sun, Jenas said “nothing physical ever happened” but said he considered what he did “cheating”.

He continued: “I was given an incredible opportunity and I know it’s on me that right now I feel I have lost everything.

“I feel like people are judging me and that I am the number one target right now in the country.”

Jenas said he owed “everyone an apology, especially the women” he was messaging, and added: “I am sorry for what I have put them through.”

He denied sending any explicit pictures or video, the Sun reported.

Jenas was presenting on talkSport Drive when the news of his BBC dismissal broke on Thursday.

Asked about the allegations on air, he repeatedly refused to be drawn on why he had been sacked and said he was “speaking to lawyers”.

On the same day, his profile was removed from his agent’s website.

Jenas earned between £190,000 and £194,999 at the BBC in the last financial year for his work on coverage of football including the FA Cup, Match of the Day and the World Cup.

His salary for his work on The One Show has not been made public because it is paid by BBC Studios, the BBC’s commercial production company, which doesn’t reveal how much it pays presenters.

Jenas made his footballing debut at 17, and played for his boyhood team Nottingham Forest, followed by Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur.

He made 21 appearances for England and retired in 2016 before beginning a career in the media.

The ex-Premier League footballer also works for TNT Sports as a pundit and co-commentator, and fronts their Formula E racing coverage.

A Formula E spokesperson said Jenas was part of the Formula E presenting team for season 10, which ended in July, and the presenting line-up for the next season will be announced “in due course”.

They continued: “This decision will be carefully considered, taking into account the high standards we expect to be upheld at Formula E.”

TNT has not commented about his future with the broadcaster.

Jenas’s agency, MC Saatchi, no longer represents him and his profile on the site now displays a “page not found” notice.

Kamala Harris strode out onto the Democratic convention stage on Thursday night and told Americans they had a “precious, fleeting opportunity” in front of them – to back her candidacy and consign the extraordinary period since Donald Trump entered the political arena nine years ago to history.

Her 40-minute speech was not exactly the soaring oratory that the Obamas delivered earlier in the week, but the euphoria and confidence in the arena was palpable.

With high-power celebrity endorsements and a widespread sense among Democrats that they are embarking on a new chapter, the party faithful have not been this excited since Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008.

The jubilant atmosphere among delegates in Chicago is down to both relief that they don’t have to go into this election with Joe Biden, a candidate whose advanced age was a major liability, and delight at how seamlessly Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have assumed their places at the top of the ticket.

But behind the scenes, party strategists are worried about Democratic voters and activists – who will need to turn out, knock on doors and convince their friends and family to head to a ballot box on 5 November – getting carried away.

Opinion polls have moved in their direction in the weeks since President Biden stepped aside but this is still a very tight race. It will be won, too, in a handful of states – Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina.

In nearly all of those places, it seems either candidate could feasibly win. And if the past six weeks are any guide, the political dynamics could change quickly again in the 70 or so days left.

Jim Messina, a veteran Democratic strategist who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told the BBC’s Americast podcast that any certainty Democrats are on course for victory is misplaced.

“Kamala Harris has, since she got in this race, had the best 30 days in American politics I’ve seen in a very long time,” he said. “But she is still tied [in the polls]. The Democrats have clawed up from five points down to tied. So it’s still a tight race with 75 days left. “

The mood here may have hit fever pitch last night, but a toss-up race shows that Democrats still have a lot of work to do if they are to be sure of winning the White House.

Trump appears to be struggling to work out how to campaign against Harris. He doesn’t seem to know what line of attack to take, and hasn’t even settled on one of his customary nicknames.

One prominent Democratic strategist told me he believes Trump will soon work out how to define Ms Harris in a way that best serves his campaign, as that is his great political skill. And when he does this election will get much harder for Harris.

For all the buoyancy and optimism that’s been radiating from the convention stage, there have been warnings too.

In her speech on Tuesday night, Michelle Obama cautioned the election would be extremely tight. “We need to vote in numbers that erase any doubt,” she told the crowd. “We need to overwhelm any effort to suppress us”.

Her husband Barack Obama followed up with a similar exhortation, in what amounted to a one-two punch designed to motivate the thousands in the arena to hit the streets when they return to their hometowns across the country.

“It’s up to all of us to fight for the America we believe in,” the former president said. “And make no mistake, it will be a fight.”

Candidates standing for election in key swing states that will decide the outcome of this election know all too well how much work there is to do.

“I’ve been telling Democrats everywhere I go this week: ‘Don’t get high on your own supply and think everyone is as energetic as you are’,” Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin, who is in a tight Senate race in Michigan, told Politico.

On the convention floor, delegates clearly buoyed by the events of this week appeared to have taken the Obamas’ message to heart.

Cameron Landin, a 21-year-old from Georgia, a key southern battleground state won by the Democrats in the last election for the first time in 28 years, said he knew victory could not be taken for granted.

• 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
• VOTERS: What Democrats make of Tim Walz as VP

“I really do believe Kamala Harris is going to win,” he said, a few hours before Harris took to the stage. “That doesn’t mean I’m not nervous.”

The regional organiser from the city of Savannah said people like him would focus on one thing: boosting turnout.

“That means people doing 60-plus-hour weeks and seven days a week of organising. It means volunteers getting out there – phone-banking, calling on voters, canvassing.”

“That’s what’s going to win this,” he said, pointing at the crowd of delegates waving posters for Harris and Walz. “People on the ground.”

Nevada Democratic Representative Susie Lee, who represents a district that includes part of Las Vegas – said she was under no illusions the election would be extremely competitive, particularly in her swing state.

“It’s not at all in the bag,” she said. Some precincts in Nevada, she explained, could be decided by as little as 50 to 100 votes. “Clearly, we have to get people engaged and out to the polls.

“But I’ll tell you – I do think people are exhausted with Donald Trump,” the congresswoman said. “There’s a clear choice between Harris and Trump. I think people see it.”

Millions of voters watched the political festival the Democrats put on in Chicago – more than 20m viewers tuned in for each of the first three nights.

The Harris-Walz team will almost certainly get a further bump in the opinion polls after this week. But that’s to be expected following any party convention.

The question will be whether the momentum they have been riding will last, especially as the country learns more about Harris, who has so far avoided tough media interviews and released little in the way of policy detail.

Trump has a grip on nearly half of the country. And they know him well after three successive presidential campaigns.

The Democrats could certainly win this election, but they will have their work cut out.

The family of British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah, who died when their yacht sank off Sicily on Monday, say they are devastated and in shock.

They told of their “unspeakable grief” as the final body from the sunken Bayesian yacht, believed to be that of 18-year-old Hannah, was recovered on Friday.

“Their thoughts are with everyone affected by the tragedy,” a statement on the family’s behalf said. “They would like to sincerely thank the Italian coastguard, emergency services and all those who helped in the rescue.”

Italian officials are investigating the circumstances around Monday’s sinking, which also claimed the lives of five others on the boat.

Family and friends paid tribute to Mr Lynch, who helped pioneer a form of artificial intelligence, and his daughter, who had just won a place at the University of Oxford.

“Mike was the most brilliant mind and caring person I have ever known,” a close friend, Andrew Kanter, said. “His passion for life, knowledge and all those around him was instantly inspiring to everyone he met, and he will be sorely missed.”

Hannah’s sister Esme described her as “endlessly caring, passionately mad, unintentionally hilarious and the most amazing, supportive and joyful sister and best friend to me”.

“She is my little angel, my star,” she added.

Gracie Lea, a classmate of Hannah, recalled her as “easy to love: sincere, dedicated, fiercely intelligent and genuinely kind. I’ll always remember her smiling”.

She had recently finished her A-levels and had been offered a place to study English at Oxford, according to the Times.

“We are all incredibly shocked by the news,” a spokesperson for her school, Latymer Upper, west London, said.

“Our thoughts are with their family and everyone involved,” they added.

Among those who lost their lives in the disaster were Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, a charity trustee.

In a statement the Bloomer family described the couple as “incredible people and an inspiration to many”.

Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo, his wife, jeweller Neda Morvillo, and the boat’s chef Recaldo Thomas also died in the disaster.

Among 15 survivors were a one-year-old child, and Hannah’s mother, Angela Bacares.

The gathering on the Lynch’s yacht came after the end of a long-running legal battle over the sale of Mr Lynch’s company Autonomy.

He was acquitted of multiple fraud charges in the US in June, over which he had been facing two decades in jail.

Italian authorities are still investigating the circumstances around Monday’s incident.

In cases like this one, it is common for officials to embark on a broad investigation – known as a ‘crime hypothesis’ – that considers a series of possible criminal charges.

Approached by BBC News, the Italian police confirmed an investigation was ongoing but no charges have yet been brought.

The yacht’s captain, James Cutfield, his eight surviving crew members and passengers have been questioned by the Coast Guard on behalf of prosecutors.

Rescuers described the search and recovery operation as “complex”, with divers limited to 12-minute underwater shifts.

In a statement, Italian firefighters said it had been “five days of long and delicate operations in the sea, at a depth of about 50 metres (around 164 feet).”

After reports emerged that the final body had been found, a coastguard vessel which had been at the site of the shipwreck for hours could be seen back in the port.

Meanwhile, a helicopter landed nearby as divers took off their orange suits on the quayside.

A decision on whether to raise the sunken yacht from the seabed is “not on the agenda” but will be in the future, a spokesperson from the Italian Coastguard has said.

The ship was “practically intact” on the seabed, according to divers on the search and rescue team.

Prosecutors are expected to hold a news conference on Saturday morning.

Icelandic supermarkets have been left in a pickle, after a viral TikTok trend saw an unprecedented surge in demand for cucumbers – leaving suppliers racing to keep up.

It comes after social media influencers in the small Nordic country began sharing a salad recipe of grated cucumbers, sesame oil, garlic, rice vinegar and chilli oil.

The recipe has been such a hit that farmers in the country have been unable to keep up with spiralling demand, Iceland’s farmers association – the Horticulturists’ Sales Company (SFG) – told BBC News.

While one supermarket chain – Hagkaup – questioned the link between demand and the trend, it conceded that purchases of cucumber had more than doubled.

SFG’s marketing director said that as things stand farmers in Iceland are not managing to keep up with surging consumer demand, but said she hopes supply will be back to normal “in a week or so”.

Kristín Linda Sveinsdóttir said the recipe had proven to be “really popular” and other ingredients in the recipe were selling out as well.

The viral trend has its roots in Canada – where TikToker Logan Moffitt, dubbed “cucumber guy”, has been sharing novel recipes using the variety.

“Sometimes, you just need to eat a whole cucumber,” is the influencer’s go-to phrase at the start of his many recipe videos.

The content creator has more than 5.5 million followers and has been sharing cucumber recipes almost everyday since July.

The one that appears to have gripped users in Iceland uses sesame oil and rice vinegar, but sometimes Logan mixes in cream cheese, avocado, and even smoked salmon.

Despite the influencer’s enduring online popularity, experts in Iceland have been keen to play-down his association with the ongoing shortages.

Hagkaup told the BBC it is common to experience shortages in Icelandic cucumber at this time of year.

While the company’s food product manager, Vignir Þór Birgisson, said sales of ingredients like sesame oil and some spices have “doubled” in his stores, he said the current shortage is not solely due to the TikTok trend.

Ms Sveinsdóttir from the SFG also expressed some scepticism, suggesting other factors were at play. Some cucumber farmers replace their cucumber plants at this time of year, which are not yet producing large amounts, she said.

In addition to this, schools are returning from the summer holidays, which puts additional pressure on supplies.

“Everything is happening at the same time,” Ms Sveinsdóttir observed, but said the social media trend remained one of the main contributing factors.

“This is the first time we have experienced something like this,” Ms Sveinsdóttir said, adding that had the TikTok trend become popular earlier in the summer, “when the [cucumber] production was in full blast” and the shortage would not have been noticeable.

Farmers in Iceland – which has a population of 393,600 – produce about six million cucumbers, Ms Sveinsdóttir told the BBC.

They pride themselves on the volume of fresh goods the country can produce, despite the often extreme weather conditions.

A landmark report into problems faced by women in the Malayalam-language film industry has revealed the deep rot in one of India’s most popular film hubs.

The findings of the three-member panel are pretty damning.

The 290-page report – parts of which have been redacted to hide identities of survivors and those accused of wrongdoing – says the industry is dominated by “a mafia of powerful men” and that “sexual harassment of women is rampant”.

Headed by a former judge of the Kerala High Court and set up by the state government in 2017, the Hema committee details the abysmal working conditions on sets – including a lack of toilets and changing rooms for junior artists, no food and water for them, poor pay and no accommodation or transport facilities.

“There are no toilets, so women have to go in the bushes or behind thick trees. During their periods, not being able to change their sanitary napkins for long hours and holding urine for long causes physical discomfort and makes them sick, in some cases needing hospitalisation,” it says.

The report, which was submitted to the government in December 2019, was made public only this week after nearly five years of delay and multiple legal challenges by members of the film industry.

The panel was set up in the aftermath of the horrific sexual assault on a leading actress in the film industry. Bhavana Menon, who has worked in more than 80 films in southern Indian languages and won a number of prestigious awards, was assaulted by a group of men while travelling from Thrissur to Kochi in February 2017.

Her assault made headlines, especially after Dileep, one of the Malayalam-language film industry’s biggest actors and Menon’s co-star in half a dozen films, was named as an accused and charged with criminal conspiracy. He denied the charges, but was arrested and held in custody for three months before being released on bail. The case continues to be heard in court.

Indian law bars identification of survivors of sexual assault, but it was known from the start that it was Ms Menon who had been assaulted. In 2022, she waived her anonymity in a post on Instagram and in an interview to the BBC.

A few months after the attack on Ms Menon, Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) – a group formed by some of her colleagues in a film industry known for its variety of successful mainstream and critically acclaimed films – petitioned the government, seeking swift action in the case and also to address the problems faced by women in cinema.

In the report, retired Justice K Hema says the WCC told her that “women are being silenced as the prestige of the film industry needs to be upheld”.

The panel interviewed several dozen men and women, including artists, producers, directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, hairstylists, makeup artists and costume designers, and “gathered evidence including video and audio clips and WhatsApp messages”.

Describing sexual harassment as the “worst evil” women in cinema face, the report said the panellists saw evidence that “sexual harassment remains shockingly rampant” and that “it goes on unchecked and uncontrolled”.

The industry “is controlled by a group of male actors, producers, distributors, exhibitors and directors who have gained enormous fame and wealth” and they were among the perpetrators, it added.

“Men in industry make open demands for sex without any qualms as if it’s their birthright. Women are left with very little options but to oblige – or reject at the cost of their long awaited dream of pursuing cinema as their profession.

“The experiences of many women are really shocking and of such gravity that they have not disclosed the details even to their close family members.”

Many of the people the panel approached were initially reluctant to speak because “they were afraid they would lose their jobs”.

“In the beginning, we found their fear strange but as our study progressed we realised it was well-founded. We are concerned about their and their close relatives’ safety.”

The report, the WCC says, has vindicated its stand. “For years, we have been saying that there is a systemic problem in the industry. Sexual harassment is just one of them. This report proves it,” Beena Paul, an award-winning editor and one of the founding members of the WCC, told the BBC.

“We were always told that we were troublemakers [for raising such issues]. This report proves that it [the condition] is far worse than what even we thought,” she said.

Members of the WCC say they have faced difficulty in getting work since they began demanding better working conditions on film sets. “People don’t like the fact that we are asking questions. So, quite a few members have faced difficult situations,” Ms Paul says.

The Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA), a top industry body which counts superstars like Mohanlal and Mamooty among its members, denied the accusations. Its general secretary Siddique disagreed that there was a small, powerful group that controlled the industry.

He also denied that sexual harassment was rampant in the industry and said that most of the complaints they received were about the delay or a lack of payment for workers. He said conditions for women had improved on film sets in the past five years and all facilities were now available to them.

In the week since its release, the report has created ripples in the state, with activists and prominent opposition leaders demanding action against those accused of wrongdoing.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said if any woman who testified before the committee came forward to file a complaint, the government would take action. “No matter how big they are, they will be brought before the law,” he said.

On Thursday, a public interest petition was filed in the Kerala High Court, seeking initiation of criminal proceedings against those accused in the report.

The court ordered the government to submit a copy of the report and the judges said they would decide if criminal action needed to be taken once they had read it.

Allegations of harassment and abuse in films are not new in India – in 2018, the #MeToo movement hit the country’s most popular film industry Bollywood after actress Tanushree Dutta accused veteran actor Nana Patekar of behaving inappropriately towards her on a film set in 2008. Patekar denied the allegations.

Ms Dutta, who has since claimed that she has been denied work, described the Hema committee report as “useless”, adding that earlier reports about making workplaces safer for women had not helped.

Parvathy Thiruvothu, an award-winning actress and a key member of the WCC, however, told Asianet news channel that she considered the release of the report “a victory”.

“It’s opened up a door for big changes within the industry,” she said.

Jeo Baby, director of The Great Indian Kitchen, a critically-acclaimed film that examines the patriarchal structure within the family, told the BBC that while gender issues remain a concern, change is under way in the industry. “This is the right time to correct this. The film industry has to fight this together.”

The report, which has made several recommendations to make the industry a safe place for women, says their inquiry and recommendations are not to find fault with any individual, but “an earnest attempt to ennoble a profession so that it becomes a viable career option for aspiring artists and technicians, both male and female”.

“Hopefully filmmaking will become so safe that parents can send their daughters and sons to the profession with the same confidence and sense of security as they send their children to an engineering firm or a college,” it adds.

Read more:

• India arrests after actress says she was abducted and raped
• Bhavana Menon breaks silence on sexual assault
• #MeToo: Why sexual harassment is a reality in Bollywood
• Sex harassment claims shake top India dance academy

Having a pet crocodile in the backyard sounds like a far-fetched Australian fable – like riding kangaroos to school or the existence of drop bears.

But in the Northern Territory (NT), it’s a reality.

And Trevor Sullivan has 11 of the reptiles sharing his tropical home in Batchelor, about an hour south of Darwin.

Among them is Big Jack, who is named after a Jack in the Box toy due to his alarming propensity for lunging. Despite his antics, the giant predator is adored, having joined Mr Sullivan’s household as a hatchling the same day his daughter was born 22 years ago.

“He’s been part of our family ever since… [my daughter] refers to him as brother.”

Also on the 80-acre property is Cricket, still a tiny critter, and Shah, who – at the complete other end of the scale – is more than a century old and has truly lived a life.

“He’s possibly seen two world wars and maybe federation in Australia [in 1901],” Mr Sullivan says of the 4.7m (15.4ft) beast.

He claims Shah once killed a man, has been used for scientific research, was almost poisoned to death at a bird park, and lost half his bottom jaw in a fight at a Queensland crocodile farm, all before joining Mr Sullivan a few years ago.

The 60-year-old lights up as he tells the BBC about his crocodiles: “There’s nothing like them… crocodiles are the Harley Davidson of pets.”

But as the famously quirky region heads to the polls on Saturday, the right to own a pet croc has turned into a somewhat unlikely – and very Territory – election issue.

The cost of living, housing and crime are the prime concerns for many voters, but Mr Sullivan is one of scores left heartbroken after the governing Labor Party moved to ban crocodiles as pets.

It is one of the last places in the country the practice is allowed, but the government says they’re concerned for the wellbeing of both humans and the reptiles. The Country Liberal Party opposition, however, has pledged its support for the practice and has promised a review of the “rushed” decision if elected.

About 250,000 people call the NT home, but relatively few of them own crocodiles. The environment minister’s office said they could not provide a figure because the government is in election caretaker mode, but previous estimates have put the number of permit holders at around 100.

Many of the captive crocs are raised from hatchlings, others rehomed from farms or after causing trouble in the wild.

Regulations have long dictated strict conditions about where, and under what conditions, the animals can be kept. For example, hatchlings can only live in urban areas until they are 60cm long – usually about a year old – at which point they must be handed over to authorities or moved to a property outside the town limits.

Under those rules, however, owners were not required to have any special training or knowledge to keep the beasts.

Tom Hayes says owning – or “saving” – a crocodile is part of the Territory’s appeal, and one of the factors which drew his young family to the Darwin region, from Queensland, earlier this year.

The 40-year-old grew up taking trips to the NT with his dad, fishing in the Mary River alongside giant crocodiles, instilling a love of predators and, eventually, a dream to have his own one day.

“I’m not just some dude that wants a crocodile [for] when I’m having a barbecue with my mates on the weekend,” the tattooist and self-styled conservationist told the BBC.

“I wanted to have somewhere I could bring these poor old buggers and they could just live their lives out – happy, fed… not having to worry about people shooting them.”

He was in process of adopting a mega croc when the NT government announced it would not be issuing any new permits to keep the reptiles as pets.

It has left Mr Hayes reeling and the crocodile he’d hoped to rescue at risk of being put down.

NT Environment Minister Kate Worden said the decision was made “after public consultation” and “taking into account personal safety and animal welfare concerns”.

Existing permits will remain valid, but transfers of permits will not be allowed.

“Let’s remember they are an apex predator and probably not one that’s best kept for captivity,” Ms Worden told reporters, adding that there were instances of crocodiles attacking their owners in the region.

The new rules bring the NT in in line with every other state and territory in Australia – except, oddly, Victoria, which is well outside of the comfortable climate of a saltwater crocodile.

Animal activists, who had been pushing for the change, say it’s a big win.

While some of the people keeping crocodiles “may have good intentions”, no wild animal can have its needs fully met in captivity, argues Olivia Charlton, from World Animal Protection.

“There is no way to replicate the space and freedom these crocodiles would have in the wild, particularly given they live for up to 70 years,” she said in a statement.

Charles Giliam, from the RSPCA NT, said the dangerous nature of crocodiles also made it extremely hard for authorities to regulate the program and ensure the reptiles had an acceptable standard of living and medical care.

“I only know one vet who’s prepared to work with crocodiles,” he said, as an example.

But croc owners say they had no idea the change was coming and are distressed over what may now happen to their pets.

“I don’t think you spend many nights on the couch watching TV, snuggling with your four-and-a-half-meter crocodile… but there’s still that emotional attachment,” Mr Hayes says.

They accuse the government of hiding the change in a broader Crocodile Management Plan to avoid doing true consultation on the issue.

The opposition environment spokeswoman Jo Hersey said “the [Country Liberal Party] supports the rights of Territorians to own crocs as pets under a permit system” and has promised the party will look at the rules if elected.

Both Mr Hayes and Mr Sullivan said there is broad support for greater training and education requirements for permit holders.

But they say the reptiles are surprisingly easy to care for – and reject arguments that keeping them as pets is harmful.

“In the wild, they have a stretch of territory and they then have to fight to keep it. They’re forever hunting for food, forever chasing off their enemies or trying to keep their girlfriend sorted and life’s pretty tough going,” Mr Sullivan says.

“In captivity, if they got a good enclosure, plenty of water, sunlight, a bit of shade, and food on a regular basis, they just love it.

“I have a river running through my property and I actually have wild crocs always trying to get in and join my mob.”

The decision to end the practice is particularly bad timing for Mr Sullivan. He listed his home and his menagerie for sale last year, so he could join his partner in New Zealand.

“It is a bit like a Willy Wonka story – I want some young kids, of the right nature, to take on a property full of wildlife.”

But that’s left him with a quandary that belongs in a maths textbook: If you have 80 acres and 11 crocodiles on the market, but zero permits available to transfer, what’s the answer?

There is “not a chance” he’ll euthanise his crocs, he says. “I’ll have to stay on the property until I die, or until something else changes.”

His hope is resting on the election of a CLP government on Saturday, adding he thinks it is an issue which will galvanise voters.

But Mr Hayes, on the other hand, hopes it isn’t. There are greater issues at play which should decide votes, he explains, and he is optimistic that both parties will come to see sense anyway.

“Whoever’s in needs to really look at it… It’s an attack on the Territory way of life.”

A US campaign group has accused Boeing of concealing information about electrical problems on a plane that later crashed.

The Foundation for Aviation Safety claimed the aircraft, which went down in Ethiopia in 2019, had suffered a number of issues, including an “uncommanded roll” at low altitude.

The organisation said more than 1,000 planes currently flying could potentially be at risk of electrical failures as a result of production problems.

The foundation’s claims relate to an aircraft which hit the ground minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa in March 2019.

The plane was a 737 Max, at the time a brand-new model. It was the second of its type to be lost, following a previous accident off Indonesia in late 2018.

A Boeing spokesperson said that following the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 accident in 2019, it “fully cooperated and provided relevant information to the investigation”.

“We defer to the investigative agencies for further information,” they added.

Both crashes were primarily attributed to a poorly designed flight control system, which activated at the wrong time due to a sensor failure.

The foundation has published a number of documents on its website, which it says are build records for the aircraft involved in the Ethiopian accident, leaked by Boeing employees.

The documents, which are highly technical, set out problems encountered during the construction process.

The foundation claims they “paint a clear picture of the confusing and chaotic production operations going on at the 737 factory when this airplane was being manufactured.”

According to the foundation, among the apparent issues indicated by the documents are a lack of electrical parts, missing and improperly installed wiring, and employees being placed under extreme pressure to rework defective parts.

The foundation claims this connects to electrical issues it says were suffered by the plane in the weeks and months leading up to the crash.

A further document allegedly describes an incident involving the same aircraft, three weeks after it had been delivered to its owner, Ethiopian Airlines.

A record of communications between Boeing and the airline, it sets out how the plane suffered an “uncommanded roll” at low altitude while preparing to land.

This was later attributed to an intermittent fault with wiring, according to the foundation.

The Foundation for Aviation Safety claims these documents were concealed from “government authorities, law enforcement, airline customers, victim families, and the public”.

It suggests that as a result, systemic production quality problems at Boeing’s factory were allowed to persist, leading to issues such as the blowout that affected an Alaskan Airlines flight at the beginning of this year.

The foundation is led by Ed Pierson, a former manager at Boeing’s 737 factory in Renton, Washington State.

He became a prominent figure in the wake of the two 737 Max accidents, testifying before US lawmakers on a number of occasions.

Mr Pierson has consistently maintained that serious production issues at the factory played a key role in the two crashes – a claim Boeing has repeatedly denied.

The official investigation into the Ethiopian accident, carried out by the country’s Accident Investigation Bureau, appeared to back up this view. It suggested production-related defects were responsible for the sensor failure that ultimately triggered the crash.

However, this version of events was rejected by the US agency the National Transportation Safety Board, which said there was no evidence for it, and attributed the sensor failure to an impact with a foreign object, probably a bird.

Company insiders at Boeing also reject the claim that documents have been concealed, and maintain that multiple investigations have not validated Mr Pierson’s allegations.

Earlier this month, Boeing’s new chief executive Kelly Ortberg said he planned to focus on restoring trust in the business.

He added he would base himself in Seattle, in order to be close to the factories, rather than in the company’s Arlington headquarters.

The company has been ordered to carry out a “corrective action plan” by US regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), to improve safety and quality control.

But during a call with journalists, Mr Pierson said reports from people within the factory alleged that efforts to improve conditions on the production line had so far been “woefully inadequate” – largely because FAA inspections were known about well in advance and could be prepared for.

Jermaine Jenas has told the Sun newspaper he is “ashamed” and has “let everybody down” after being sacked as a BBC presenter.

He told the paper he sent “inappropriate messages” to two colleagues on the One Show, but insisted he “did nothing illegal” and said they were sent to “two consenting adults”.

The former Match of the Day and One Show host had his contract terminated this week for allegedly sending inappropriate messages to a female colleague.

The BBC has not disclosed further details about the allegations against him.

He told the Sun the texts were a “huge error of judgement” for which he was “deeply sorry”, adding that he was “not a sex pest”.

Jenas, who is married with four children, told the paper he is receiving therapy and accepted he “fell below [the] standards” of the BBC.

The 41-year-old continued: “I feel so ashamed. I’ve let everybody down – my colleagues, my friends and, most importantly, I’ve let my family down.”

The issue was brought to the BBC’s attention a few weeks ago. The corporation announced his departure on Thursday.

A BBC spokesperson said: “We can confirm Jermaine Jenas is no longer part of our presenting line-up.”

The BBC has not commented since Jenas spoke to the Sun.

Jenas said he was sacked during a video call on Monday while on a family holiday, five days after being told of the allegations against him by the BBC.

In a lengthy and at times tearful interview on camera with the Sun, Jenas said “nothing physical ever happened” but said he considered what he did “cheating”.

He continued: “I was given an incredible opportunity and I know it’s on me that right now I feel I have lost everything.

“I feel like people are judging me and that I am the number one target right now in the country.”

Jenas said he owed “everyone an apology, especially the women” he was messaging, and added: “I am sorry for what I have put them through.”

He denied sending any explicit pictures or video, the Sun reported.

Jenas was presenting on talkSport Drive when the news of his BBC dismissal broke on Thursday.

Asked about the allegations on air, he repeatedly refused to be drawn on why he had been sacked and said he was “speaking to lawyers”.

On the same day, his profile was removed from his agent’s website.

Jenas earned between £190,000 and £194,999 at the BBC in the last financial year for his work on coverage of football including the FA Cup, Match of the Day and the World Cup.

His salary for his work on The One Show has not been made public because it is paid by BBC Studios, the BBC’s commercial production company, which doesn’t reveal how much it pays presenters.

Jenas made his footballing debut at 17, and played for his boyhood team Nottingham Forest, followed by Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur.

He made 21 appearances for England and retired in 2016 before beginning a career in the media.

The ex-Premier League footballer also works for TNT Sports as a pundit and co-commentator, and fronts their Formula E racing coverage.

A Formula E spokesperson said Jenas was part of the Formula E presenting team for season 10, which ended in July, and the presenting line-up for the next season will be announced “in due course”.

They continued: “This decision will be carefully considered, taking into account the high standards we expect to be upheld at Formula E.”

TNT has not commented about his future with the broadcaster.

Jenas’s agency, MC Saatchi, no longer represents him and his profile on the site now displays a “page not found” notice.