The man who walked out into the rain in Dhaka hadn’t seen the sun in more than five years.

Even on a cloudy day, his eyes struggled to adjust after half a decade locked in a dimly lit room, where his days had been spent listening to the whirr of industrial fans and the screams of the tortured.

Standing on the street, he struggled to remember his sister’s telephone number.

More than 200km away, that same sister was reading about the men emerging from a reported detention facility in Bangladesh’s infamous military intelligence headquarters, known as Aynaghor, or “House of Mirrors”.

They were men who had allegedly been “disappeared” under the increasingly autocratic rule of Sheikh Hasina – largely critics of the government who were there one day, and gone the next.

But Sheikh Hasina had now fled the country, unseated by student-led protests, and these men were being released.

In a remote corner of Bangladesh, the young woman staring at her computer wondered if her brother – whose funeral they had held just two years ago, after every avenue to uncover his whereabouts proved fruitless – might be among them?

The day Michael Chakma was forcefully bundled into a car and blindfolded by a group of burly men in April 2019 in Dhaka, he thought it was the end.

He had come to authorities’ attention after years of campaigning for the rights of the people of Bangladesh’s south-eastern Chittagong Hill region – a Buddhist group which makes up just 2% of Bangladesh’s 170m-strong, mostly Muslim population.

He had, according to rights group Amnesty International, been staunchly vocal against abuses committed by the military in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and has campaigned for an end to military rule in the region.

A day after he was abducted, he was thrown into a cell inside the House of Mirrors, a building hidden inside the compound the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) used in the capital Dhaka.

It was here they gathered local and foreign intelligence, but it would become known as somewhere far more sinister.

The small cell he was kept in, he said, had no windows and no sunlight, only two roaring exhaust fans.

After a while “you lose the sense of time and day”, he recalls.

“I used to hear the cries of other prisoners, though I could not see them, their howling was terrifying.”

The cries, as he would come to know himself, came from his fellow inmates – many of whom were also being interrogated.

“They would tie me to a chair and rotate it very fast. Often, they threatened to electrocute me. They asked why I was criticising Ms Hasina,” Mr Chakma says.

Outside the detention facility, for Minti Chakma the shock of her brother’s disappearance was being replaced with panic.

“We went to several police stations to enquire, but they said they had no information on him and he was not in their custody,” she recalls. “Months passed and we started getting panicky. My father was also getting unwell.”

A massive campaign was launched to find Michael, and Minti filed a writ petition in the High Court in 2020.

Nothing brought any answers.

“The whole family went through a lot of trauma and agony. It was terrible not knowing the whereabouts of my brother,” she says.

Then in August 2020, Michael’s father died during Covid. Some 18 months later, the family decided that Michael must have died as well.

“We gave up hope,” Minti says, simply. “So as per our Buddhist tradition we decided to do hold his funeral so that the soul can be freed from his body. With a heavy heart we did that. We all cried a lot.”

Rights groups in Bangladesh say they have documented about 600 cases of alleged enforced disappearances since 2009, the year Sheikh Hasina was elected.

In the years that followed, Sheikh Hasina’s government would be accused of targeting their critics and dissenters in an attempt to stifle any dissent which posed a threat to their rule – an accusation she and the government always denied.

Some of the so-called disappeared were eventually released or produced in court, others were found dead. Human Rights Watch says nearly 100 people remain missing.

Rumours of secret prisons run by various Bangladeshi security agencies circulated among families and friends. Minti watched videos detailing the disappearances, praying her brother was in custody somewhere.

But the existence of such a facility in the capital was only revealed following an investigation by Netra News in May 2022.

The report found it was inside the Dhaka military encampment, right in the heart of the city. It also managed to get hold of first-hand accounts from inside the building – many of which tally with Michael’s description of being held in a cell without sunlight.

The descriptions also echo those of Maroof Zaman, a former Bangladeshi ambassador to Qatar and Vietnam, who was first detained in the House of Mirrors in December 2017.

His interview with the BBC is one of the few times he has spoken of his 15-month ordeal: as part of his release, he agreed with officials not to speak publicly.

Like others who have spoken of what happened behind the complex’s walls, he was fearful of what might happen if he did. The detainee who spoke openly to Netra News in 2022 only did so because he was no longer in Bangladesh.

Maroof Zaman has only felt safe to speak out since Sheikh Hasina fled – and her government collapsed – on 5 August.

He describes how he too was held in a room without sunlight, while two noisy exhaust fans drowned out any sound coming from outside.

The focus of his interrogations were on the articles he had written alleging corruption at the heart of government. Why, the men wanted to know, was he writing articles alleging “unequal agreements” signed with India by Ms Hasina, that favoured Delhi.

“For the first four-and-a-half months, it was like a death zone,” he says. “I was constantly beaten, kicked and threatened at gunpoint. It was unbearable, I thought only death will free me from this torture.”

But unlike Michael, he was moved to a different building.

“For the first time in months I heard the sound of the birds. Oh, it was so good, I cannot describe that feeling,” Maroof recounted.

He was eventually released following a campaign by his daughters and supporters in late March 2019 – a month before Michael found himself thrown into a cell.

Few believe that enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings could have been carried out without the knowledge of the top leadership.

But while people like Mr Chakma were languishing in secret jails for years, Ms Hasina, her ministers and her international affairs advisor Gowher Rizvi were flatly rejecting allegations of abductions.

Ms Hasina’s son, Sajeed Wazed Joy, has continued to reject the allegations, instead turning the blame on “some of our law enforcement leadership [who] acted beyond the law”.

“I absolutely agree that it’s completely illegal. I believe that those orders did not come from the top. I had no knowledge of this. I am shocked to hear it myself,” he told the BBC.

There are those who raise their eyebrows at the denial.

Alongside Michael, far higher profile people emerged from the House of Mirrors – including two senior members of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami, a retired brigadier, Abdullahi Aman Azmi and Barrist Ahmed Bin Quasem. Both had spent about eight years in secret incarceration.

What is clear is that the re-emergence of people like the politicians, and Michael, shows “the urgency for the new authorities in Bangladesh to order and ensure that the security forces to disclose all places of detention and account for those who have been missing”, according to Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the UN Human Rights office in Geneva.

Bangladesh’s interim government agreed: earlier this week, it established a five-member commission to investigate cases of enforced disappearances by security agencies during Ms Hasina’s rule since 2009.

And those who have survived the ordeal want justice.

“We want the perpetrators to be punished. All the victims and their families should be compensated,” Maroof Zaman said.

Back on the street outside the House of Mirrors – just two days after Sheikh Hasina fled to India – Michael was struggling to decide what to do. He had only been told about his release 15 minutes before. It was a lot to take in.

“I forgot the last two digits of my sister’s phone number,” he says. “I struggled a lot to remember that, but I couldn’t. Then I called a relative who informed them.”

But Minti already knew: she had seen the news on Facebook.

“I was ecstatic,” she recalls through tears two weeks later. “Next day, he called me, I saw him on that video phone call after five years. We were all crying. I couldn’t recognise him.”

Last week, she saw him in person for the first time in five years: weaker, traumatised – but alive.

“His voice sounds different,” she says.

Michael, meanwhile, is dealing with the long term health implications of being held in the dark for so long.

“I cannot look at contacts or phone numbers properly, it’s a blurred vision. I am getting treatment, and the doctor is giving me spectacles.”

More than that, there is coming to terms with what he has missed. He was told of his father’s death a few days after his release.

And yet, amid the pain, he is hopeful – even happy.

“It’s more than a new lease of life, a resurrection. It feels like I was dead and have come back to life again. I cannot describe this feeling.”

UN agencies and local health officials in the Gaza Strip are launching an ambitious campaign to vaccinate 640,000 children against polio.

The rollout relies on a series of localised pauses in fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas fighters, with the first window set to begin on Sunday.

To be effective, the World Health Organization (WHO) says at least 90% of children under 10 must be immunised in a short time frame.

It follows the discovery of the first confirmed case of polio in 25 years in Gaza, with a UN expert saying more children are likely to be infected and that there could be a wider regional outbreak if the virus is not dealt with.

A video shot a few months ago shows that baby Abdulrahman Abu Judyan was crawling early. But now as he turns one, his mother Niveen – who lives in a crowded tent camp in central Gaza – worries that he will never be able to walk.

“It was very shocking,” Niveen tells the BBC, recalling her son’s recent diagnosis with polio, which has left him partly paralysed in one leg. “I wasn’t expecting this. Now he may not be able to crawl or walk and the child was left without proper medical care.”

On 7 October – the day of a shocking Hamas-led attack on southern Israel which killed 1,200 people – newborn Abdulrahman was supposed to receive routine vaccinations but never did.

During the war that followed, the Abu Judyan family from the very north of Gaza, have moved five times – first to Gaza City, then to different locations in the centre, to Rafah in the far south and back to Deir al-Balah.

About 90% of all Gazans have been displaced and with health services under huge strain, most children have seen their regular immunisations disrupted leaving them vulnerable to infection, like Abdulrahman.

“I feel a lot of guilt that he didn’t get the vaccination. But I couldn’t give it to him because of our circumstances,” Niveen says as she rocks her baby in a car seat. She desperately hopes that her son can be taken outside Gaza for treatment. “He wants to live and walk like other children,” she says.

The mother struggles to find clean drinking water for her nine children. Close to the makeshift tent where they live, raw sewage flows through the street.

Conditions are ideal for the spread of diseases – especially polio which is highly infectious.

Since discovering the virus in wastewater samples taken in June, UN agencies have been racing to set up an emergency mass vaccination programme.

Around 1.3 million doses of the vaccine were recently brought in through the Kerem Shalom checkpoint by Unicef – the UN’s children’s agency. It has had to keep them in cold storage in its warehouse at the correct temperature to maintain their potency. Another shipment of 400,000 doses is set to be delivered to Gaza soon.

On Thursday, the WHO said that it had reached an agreement with Israel for limited pauses in the fighting to allow the polio vaccination programme to take place, starting in central Gaza but then spreading to the south and north. Each “humanitarian pause” is set to last from 06:00 until 15:00 local time over three days, with the possibility of adding an extra day if needed.

Unicef’s Jonathan Crickx says it is crucial that these temporary truces hold.

• Israel agrees to pauses in fighting for polio vaccine drive
• Baby contracts Gaza’s first case of polio in 25 years
• WHO ‘extremely worried’ about possible Gaza polio outbreak

“You cannot lead and implement a polio vaccination campaign in an active combat zone. It’s simply impossible,” he says.

“Families need to be feeling safe in bringing their children to get the vaccines. But also, the healthcare workers need to be able to safely reach the communities.”

“This is a huge endeavour,” Mr Crickx adds. “Especially in a place like the Gaza Strip where we know that, for example, roads have been damaged, that access is problematic, that security incidents take place on a daily basis.”

More than 2,000 workers – mostly locals – are involved in the immunisation effort. Palestinian health officials say there will be more than 400 fixed vaccination sites – which include healthcare centres, hospitals, clinics, and field hospitals – and about 230 so-called outreach sites, community gathering places, where vaccines will be distributed.

Each child must receive two drops of oral polio vaccine in two rounds, the second to be administered four weeks after the first. It is essential that the programme is carried out quickly to prevent mutation of the virus and break transmission.

The polio variant that triggered this latest outbreak is itself a mutated virus from an oral polio vaccine. This is because the vaccine contains a weakened live virus which in very rare cases is shed by those who receive it and can then evolve into a new form that can start new epidemics.

With doctors in Gaza on high alert for potential polio infections in children, tests are being carried out at a WHO-approved laboratory in Jordan.

“There could be more cases of paralytic polio until this outbreak is stopped and this virus will paralyse more children,” Dr Hamid Jafari, WHO director of polio eradication for the eastern Mediterranean, tells me from Amman.

He says the stakes are high for the whole region. “The risk of course, is not only just for Gaza, given the high force of transmission in Gaza, there is a risk of this spilling over into Israel, into the West Bank and surrounding countries.”

For now, though the focus remains on Gaza – where children make up nearly half of the 2.3 million population.

The past year has deprived many of their loved ones, their homes and health. With no end in sight to the war, the hope is that at least one new source of suffering can be eliminated.

US rapper Fatman Scoop has died aged 53 after collapsing at his concert on Friday in Connecticut, his representative has told the BBC.

He was halfway through his set at the Town Center Park in the city of Hamden when he collapsed on stage.

Mayor Lauren Garrett said in a post to Facebook that the rapper was taken to a local hospital by ambulance.

But his booking agency, MN2S, confirmed his death in a statement to the BBC, saying the New York native’s “legacy will live on through his timeless music”.

“Scoop was a beloved figure in the music world, whose work was loved by countless fans across the globe,” an agency spokesperson.

“His iconic voice, infectious energy, and great personality made an indelible mark on the industry.”

In a tribute on social media, Scoop’s family said he was “a radiant soul, a beacon of light on the stage and in life.”

“FatMan Scoop was not just a world class performer, he was a father, brother, uncle and a friend,” his family said.

“He was the laughter in our lives, a constant source of support, unwavering strength and courage.”

Scoop, whose legal name is Isaac Freeman III, has been credited as an influential figure in New York City’s hip hop scene in the 1990s.

He has featured on popular songs including Grammy award-winning Lose Control by Missy Elliott and It’s Like That by Mariah Carey.

Scoop is also known for his sleeper hit Be Faithful, which was originally released in 1999 but garnered international success in 2003, topping the charts in Ireland and the UK.

In 2004, the rapper was featured in the UK TV series Chancers on Channel 4, which featured musicians mentoring aspiring UK artists looking to achieve success in the US.

Fatman Scoop was also a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother 16: UK vs USA, which was housed in the UK and aired in 2015. He was the third housemate to be evicted.

His tour manager, DJ Pure Cold, wrote in a post on Instagram that he was “lost for words” at the news of his friend’s death.

“You took me all over the world and had me performing alongside you on some of the biggest and greatest stages on this planet,” he wrote.

“The things you taught me have truly made me the man I am today.”

Fatman Scoop was due to perform at the UK’s Reminisce Festival on 7 September. In a post on Instagram, the festival called the news of his death “devastating”.

“He was not just one of our most popular performers, he was a cherished member of the Reminisce family,” the festival said.

“His energy, talent and infectious spirit will be missed more than words can express.”

The Oasis comeback tour has sold out for all the dates the band announced it would play across the UK and Ireland next summer.

The band wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that tickets for all 17 gigs had been scooped up as of 19:00 BST – but many fans criticised the sales process and prices.

Throughout the day, hundreds of thousands of fans sat in online queues in the hope of being able to buy a first-hand view of a tour that comes 15 years after the group disbanded in an acrimonious split.

“Dynamic pricing” on Ticketmaster, where prices rise in line with demand, set some remaining tickets at more than £350 – up from £135 when the sale began.

Earlier this week, standing price tickets for Cardiff, London and Edinburgh were advertised as £135 plus fees. But angry fans online said they noted “in demand” pricing on Ticketmaster had increased prices to £355 plus fees.

Ticketmaster say they do not set ticket prices.

A link on the ticketing website stated: “Promoters and artists set ticket prices. Prices can be either fixed or market-based. Market-based tickets are labelled as ‘Platinum’ or ‘In Demand’.”

Ticketmaster confirmed that fans did not get anything else for the price increase.

Oasis and the band’s promoter were not commenting on the issue on Saturday evening.

Dynamic pricing is not new and is allowed under consumer protection laws.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) told the BBC it could not pass comment on Ticketmaster’s pricing in this instance.

“We encourage anyone with concerns to get in touch with us and we’d carefully assess whether there were any grounds for action,” an ASA spokesperson said.

But they added: “Our rules (the Advertising Codes) are clear – quoted prices must not mislead.”

Within minutes of Saturday’s morning sale, some people looking for tickets for gigs at London’s Wembley Stadium next July and August found more than one million people ahead of them in the queue.

Others were put into a “queue for the queue” with all three ticket sellers redirecting people to a page saying their sites were experiencing high demand.

Tickets were on sale from 09:00 BST and an hour earlier for Ireland, where issues accessing the Ticketmaster website were also reported.

Some hopefuls also said they had been “suspended” by Ticketmaster after it accused them of being bots – automatic computer programmes that can snap up tickets quicker than humans.

Jamie Moore, 50, from East Kilbride, was hoping to get tickets to see Oasis and “re-live the good times” but was kicked out when he reached the front of the online queue after being mistaken for a bot.

Mr Moore says he has “never been so let down by a website” in his life.

Many others have expressed frustration and anger at how the website handled demand.

Ticketmaster’s website called for patience from fans, saying that “as expected Oasis is incredibly popular” and encouraged people to keep their places, “clear cookies”, and avoid using VPN software on their device.

Noel and Liam Gallagher announced on Tuesday that they had put their differences behind them, confirming the band’s long-awaited reunion.

The group disbanded 15 years ago following a backstage brawl between the brothers at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris.

On Friday, shortly after a three-hour pre-sale for a limited number of fans began, tickets for the UK gigs were being listed on resale websites like StubHub and Viagogo for more than £6,000 – around 40 times the face value of a standing ticket.

They included:

• £6,000 for Oasis’s show at Wembley Stadium in London on 26 July
• Between £916 and £4,519 for the first concert of the tour at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on 4 July
• Over £4,000 for standing tickets at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium on 12 August
• More than £2,500 for the band’s homecoming concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park on 12 July

Standing tickets for the shows were expected to cost about £150, while standard seated tickets range from £73 to about £205. Prices for official premium packages go up to £506.

About 1.4 million tickets are expected to be available for the 17 outdoor concerts.

Oasis urged people not to resell tickets at higher prices on websites not linked to their promoter, and said those tickets would be “cancelled”.

It added that they could only be resold at face value on the websites Ticketmaster and Twickets.

“Tickets sold in breach of the terms and conditions will be cancelled by the promoters,” the band said.

Meanwhile, Viagogo issued a statement in which it said “resale is legal in the UK”.

Cris Miller, Viagogo global managing director, said “demand will be at its peak when tickets hit the on-sale but it’s not a normal reflection of what tickets can and will go for.”

A consultation into ticket resale prices and “rip off” touts will be launched in the Autumn, the government has said.

There was joy for some fans who managed to get tickets.

Nayat Karakose, 41, from Istanbul got two tickets to see the band in Wembley in the pre-sale on Friday.

She told the BBC that when she found out she got the tickets, she said she felt “supersonic”.

“My heart was beating, I was super, super excited, I couldn’t believe it for the moment. I thought I’d have to pay a couple of thousands pounds,” she said.

Ms Karakose has been a fan since she was 13 and this will be her third time seeing the band live.

Six years ago she met Liam Gallagher in Istanbul and got a photograph with him as he was about to leave a hotel, but added “it would be a dream to meet Noel Gallagher”.

Rachael Board, 51, from Devon, got two tickets to see Oasis at Wembley – but paid more than £900 after failing to get cheaper tickets.

A longstanding fan, she told the BBC that “we got caught up in the vibe,” adding that she “would never think I was that person who would spend so much on a concert ticket”.

Oasis were formed in Manchester in 1991 – their original line-up comprised of Liam and Noel Gallagher, guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, bassist Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan and drummer Tony McCarroll.

As hype for the gigs builds, sales and streams of the band’s back catalogue have surged, putting three albums into the top five of the UK charts on Friday.

Greatest hits collection Time Flies is at number three, 1995’s What’s The Story Morning Glory is at four, and debut Definitely Maybe – released on 29 August 1994 – is in fifth place, at the time of writing.

A 30th anniversary edition of Definitely Maybe was released on Friday.

In early August, Pablo González was taken from a prison in Poland and flown to Moscow on a plane carrying Russian deep-cover agents, hackers and a hitman for the FSB intelligence service.

The group was met at the airport by a military guard, red carpet and Vladimir Putin – thanking them for their loyal service to the country.

Video footage from that night in Moscow shows Mr González smiling as he shakes hands with President Putin at the foot of the plane steps. Black-bearded, with a shaven and shiny head, he’s wearing a Star Wars T-shirt that declares “Your Empire Needs You”.

Known by his Russian friends as “Pablo, the Basque journalist”, the 42-year-old was part of a major prisoner swap for Westerners held in Russian jails and Russian dissidents.

In the group freed by Vladimir Putin were two opposition activists Mr González was accused of spying on.

He’d been arrested in Poland in 2022 for alleged espionage.

“I got my first suspicions in 2019. It just dawned on me,” Zhanna Nemtsova tells me, in the first interview she’s given about the man who spied on her.

The two met in 2016 at an event about the investigation into her father’s murder. Boris Nemtsov, a staunch opponent of Vladimir Putin, had been assassinated a year earlier, right beside the Kremlin.

His daughter – herself a vocal Putin critic – eventually moved to Europe for safety.

That day in Strasbourg, Pablo González asked Ms Nemtsova for an interview for a newspaper in the Basque region. She refused, at first. But the journalist – Spanish, with Russian roots – gradually became something of a fixture in her circle: attending events, taping interviews, mingling.

Looking back, Ms Nemtsova remembers becoming wary.

“I shared my suspicions with a couple of people and they were like, ‘No, this is nonsense!’ People regard you as crazy if you bring up some things. They can think you paranoid.

“But I was absolutely right.”

That’s why she’s decided to speak out openly now.

“I want other people to be very careful,” Zhanna Nemtsova explains. “The threat is not something you can just read in books or watch at the movies. It’s very close.”

Mr González was only formally charged with espionage a week after he left Poland, flown to Moscow as part of the August prisoner swap. By then, he’d spent well over two years locked up, awaiting trial.

All along, Polish prosecutors have deflected questions about the case and the process. Intelligence sources remain tight-lipped. The Polish lawyer who first represented Mr González says he can’t comment.

By the time of his arrest, Mr González had been living in Warsaw for at least three years, much of that time with his Polish girlfriend. He was a freelance journalist, working mostly for Spanish-language press.

He reported from the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and travelled to Ukraine. At some point, he joined a media trip to Syria run by the Russian defence ministry, always very selective about who it takes.

It was in 2022 that he was detained, briefly, in Ukraine, though the SBU security service there won’t divulge any details. Then, on 28 February, Mr González was arrested in Przemysl, eastern Poland, where he was part of the media pack covering the start of Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine.

The trigger for the arrest has not been made public.

Last year, Zhanna Nemtsova was shown evidence of Mr González’s activity as part of the criminal investigation.

“I have no doubt he was a spy. I am sure, 100%,” she told me this week.

Ms Nemtsova is banned by a non-disclosure agreement from sharing details of the evidence. As a result, she’s had to watch people continue to profess that Mr González is innocent.

“It’s scary. We shouldn’t downplay this. These people have no moral scruples. They regard you as their enemies,” she warns, referring to Russian intelligence agents.

Although Ms Nemtsova says she never trusted Mr González as a true friend, he did manage to insert himself into her circle. He was informing on the group from the start, she says.

“He can be very charming, he knows how to communicate with people, make them feel at ease.”

Her ex-husband, Pavel Elizarov, agrees. He and Mr González were “quite close for some period of time”. He would visit him in Spain, talk politics and do tourism. He introduced others to his friend.

Ilya Yashin, another prominent activist, went to football matches with Mr González in Spain and even coat shopping. When Mr González was released in the prisoner swap, Mr Yashin was one of the trades: he’d been imprisoned in Russia for condemning the war on Ukraine.

Vadim Prokhorov, the Nemtsov family lawyer, recalls another detail.

“He drank like a Russian,” Mr Prokhorov told me. “He could hold his drink without falling over. We should have suspected him back then!”

We did ask to interview Mr González via his wife, who lives in Spain and has been his most avid supporter. So far, he hasn’t replied.

Instead, he appeared on Kremlin-controlled television, filmed wandering through a Moscow suburb, reminiscing in perfect Russian about sledging on cardboard as a child.

He was born, he explains, Pavel Rubtsov – still the name in his Russian passport.

He became Pablo González when he moved to Spain with his mother in 1991. His grandfather had been evacuated to the USSR during the Spanish Civil War, so Pavel and his mother were entitled to Spanish citizenship.

It all made him ideal recruitment material for Russian intelligence, but the state TV report declared that Poland had no evidence of that.

“They threatened and pressured me,” Mr González says, in his extremely deep voice. “I asked, ‘What did I do?’ and they said, ‘You know.’ But I didn’t.”

No-one I’ve interviewed has characterised Mr González as a Putin fan, although Zhanna Nemtsova says she and he were on “different sides of the political spectrum”.

“I didn’t get any pro-Russian vibe off him,” a Polish contact said.

But on Russian TV, Mr González is quite clearly excited as he describes meeting “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” at Vnukovo airport in Moscow.

Coming down the plane steps, he says, he was “practising” all the way how to greet his president. “I wanted to be sure it was a strong, manly handshake,” Mr González explains, with a big grin.

The BBC has not had direct access to any of the material in this case. But we have interviewed reliable sources whose accounts, taken together, reveal that Pablo González was informing on a number of people in Europe.

When he was detained, Polish investigators discovered reports detailing the movements, contacts and profiles of people ranging over several years.

Russian opposition activists were one target, including those close to Zhanna Nemtsova. There’s a report on at least one Polish citizen, as well as students of a journalism summer school run by Ms Nemtsova. Investigators also found emails that Mr González had copied from a laptop he had been lent.

We don’t know who these reports were sent to, but they list expenses incurred in gathering information, including transport costs. “There were a lot of details, including what they ate for lunch,” the BBC was told.

In some cases, that source says, questions have been added, apparently by a superior seeking clarification or more detail.

One of the reports concerns the Russian defence ministry press trip to Syria that Mr González went on, though its main focus is to criticise the ministry for poor organisation of the tour.

The official charge sheet accuses Mr González of espionage – namely, providing intelligence, spreading disinformation and “conducting operational reconnaissance” for Russian military intelligence, the GRU.

We don’t know what other evidence there might be, but the value of what he gathered on the Russian opposition is unclear.

I was told that some reports are “sloppy” and include information taken from the internet. “Some were really wordy, with 10 pages instead of one. Probably to get more funding,” the source thought.

The first part matches the comments of a close friend of Mr González who told me he was “a bit lazy”.

The BBC also understands that the accuracy of the reports deteriorates notably after 2018, with fewer notes or corrections by a senior officer, or handler. It may be coincidental, but that’s when large numbers of Russian intelligence assets were expelled from Europe, after double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in the British city of Salisbury.

And although Russian activists who socialised with “Pablo, the Basque journalist” were shocked to learn he’d betrayed them, they doubt he had access to sensitive information.

“We are not in the habit of sharing this information with anyone, as we’ve always known we could face such problems,” Zhanna Nemtsova confirms.

“Everything we said to him, we’d say to anyone else in public,” opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza told me after his release as part of the same prisoner swap.

One source sought to downplay the case against Mr González, describing the contents of the reports as “not serious”. But Ms Nemtsova – whose father was murdered in Moscow for his politics – strongly disagrees.

“His words were important for the GRU [Russian military intelligence]. They might have led to serious consequences. This does not suggest that Pablo himself would do some damage. But they have other people who do this.

“That’s why this is serious.”

When Mr González was detained, there was a flurry of protest over accusing a journalist of espionage. The EU had significant concerns about the rule of law under the previous Polish government, while groups such as Reporters Without Borders called for Mr González to be brought to trial, allowed to defend himself against any evidence, or be set free.

“I thought maybe they were mistaken about the arrest,” a Polish journalist who knew Mr González remembers his own initial doubts. “I thought maybe it was just to show the government were doing stuff about Russia.”

As Mr González was never convicted, his staunchest supporters still argue that Poland has “got away” with an injustice. But most were silenced by last month’s prisoner swap and the ceremonial welcome in Moscow.

The government in Madrid has been notably quiet on the case, in public, from the start.

“But that prisoner exchange, and González’s reception, are the reply to everything,” one official there told me. As she put it, it would be very odd for Vladimir Putin – crusher of the free media – to “save” a mere journalist.

Weeks after Mr González was returned to Moscow, the spy scandal is still causing headaches for Ms Nemtsova.

In 2018 and 2019, the foundation she set up after her father’s killing invited “Pablo, the Basque journalist” to Prague to give a lecture on war reporting. The summer school for young journalists was hosted by Charles University.

Now Czech media have declared that academia has been “infiltrated”, prompting a PhD student to write a dramatic letter to the university Arts Faculty, warning that the Nemtsov Foundation may pose a security threat “to the entire Czech Republic”.

The student, Aliaksandr Parshankou, suggested suspending a Russian Studies MA, supported by Ms Nemtsova’s group, pending an investigation. He told the BBC the course was “by definition a point of attraction for Putin” and called for it to carry a warning that the safety of students “cannot be guaranteed”.

Ms Nemtsova calls the student’s claims “groundless and manipulative” and he admits he has no actual evidence. But the foundation is part of the legacy of Ms Nemtsova’s father and she fears the aim is to “kick us out of the faculty”.

“I am a victim of espionage,” she protested. “It can happen to people like me, but that doesn’t mean we represent a threat to the Czech Republic.”

Pablo González was flown back to Moscow by Russia, where his passport identifies him as Pavel Rubtsov.

Spain does not deprive people of citizenship, even those suspected of espionage. But Mr González would have to reapply for his Spanish passport.

The chances of him heading there seem slim while there’s a case for espionage open in the EU. It’s unclear how long that case might be left pending.

As for visiting his sons there, an official in Madrid was clear: “They are free to go and see him in Moscow.”

Once an intelligence agent is unmasked, their career options and movements are limited.

Other Russians who’ve followed a similar path have ended up starring on state-controlled TV. Perhaps Pablo will restyle himself as Pavel, and find himself praising Vladimir Putin a lot more.

As for Zhanna Nemtsova, she admits she’s even more cautious about who she deals with.

“Now I always think about security,” she told me. “I did think about my security before, because I left Russia. But I didn’t think about security in Europe. Now of course, I do. And I am careful.”

Russia has made sweeping advances in recent days that threaten to outweigh the gains made by Ukraine in its cross-border attack into the Kursk region.

Russian forces are just a few kilometres from the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a crucial logistics hub used by the Ukrainian military.

Home to a key railway station and major roads, Pokrovsk is an essential supply and reinforcement point for Ukraine’s troops on the eastern front line.

Critics in Kyiv fear that the country’s military has made a serious miscalculation.

By sending troops into Kursk instead of reinforcing the eastern frontline, the military has left Pokrovsk and other important Ukrainian towns exposed, these critics say.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

On a visit to the front line, Ukraine’s armed forces chief Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi said Russia was throwing “everything that can move” into its assault.

“The situation is extremely difficult,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky conceded on Wednesday.

“If we lose Pokrovsk,” military expert Mykhaylo Zhyrokhov warned, “the entire front line will crumble.”

Pokrovsk is next to another town, Myrnohrad. Together, the two settlements had a pre-war population of over 100,000, most of whom have now fled. They are the last major cities in that part of the Donetsk region that remain under Ukrainian control.

The battle for Pokrovsk is really a continuation of the battle for Avdiivka, which Ukraine lost in February after months of bloody fighting.

Avdiivka, which is about 40km (25 miles) south-east of Pokrovsk, was seen as a fortress that protected the settlements and roads to its west – helping to bolster Ukraine’s presence along the entire frontline.

When it finally fell, Avdiivka was left in ruins. It was a serious loss for Ukraine.

It meant that Russia could move its focus to Pokrovsk and the key hilltop town of Chasiv Yar, which overlooks some of the important cities in Donetsk still under Ukrainian control. Intense fighting there on Saturday left five people dead.

For weeks now a mass evacuation of Ukrainian civilians from Pokrovsk has been under way, with thousands said to have left already.

Gen Syrskyi said he was working “to strengthen the defence of our troops in the most difficult areas of the front, to provide the brigades with a sufficient amount of ammunition and other material and technical means”.

Russia has long held Pokrovsk as one of its key objectives. For months its forces have slowly ground towards it.

Experts believe Moscow has deployed around one third of its Central Army Group, or about 30,000 troops, to the offensive – as well as its most battle-ready reserves.

This week, it took the Ukrainian town of Novohrodivka, infuriating some in Ukraine who felt it should have been better defended.

“The trenches in front of Novohrodivka were empty. There was practically no Ukrainian army in the once 20,000-strong city,” Ukrainian MP Mariana Bezuhla wrote on Facebook.

With its forces undermanned and outnumbered, it is believed the Ukrainian military withdrew from Novohrodivka to strengthen its defence of Pokrovsk.

“The Ukrainian command likely deemed the defence of Novohrodivka not worth the potential losses,” said the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Elsewhere, Russian forces have launched assaults on the town of Selidove, just south of Novohrodivka, and other areas of the Donetsk region nearby.

The Russian offensive has been helped by a shift in tactics, which are increasingly mirroring those used earlier in the war by the Wagner mercenary group.

Ukrainian forces report coming up against wave after wave of Russian infantry sent forwards in an attempt to storm their positions.

Some have dubbed these tactics “meat assaults”.

The tactics – though costly – quickly exhaust Ukrainian units forced to fend off constant attacks.

Armoured vehicles are used sparingly – complicating the task of Ukrainian tanks and artillery, which have little to aim at on the battlefield.

Russia has also been using powerful glide bombs, forcing Ukraine to disperse its units when shelling begins and sometimes even withdraw troops from the front line.

Meanwhile, the progress of Ukraine’s landmark cross-border offensive has slowed considerably in the past week.

Sudzha – the largest settlement Ukraine has captured inside Russia – has a population of around 5,000, which is three times less than that of Novohrodivka, the settlement Russia captured earlier this week.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s commander in chief said that Kyiv’s forces had taken 1,294 sq km (500 sq miles) of territory inside Kursk, including 100 settlements – and captured 594 Russian soldiers in the process.

These figures should be treated with caution, but they are no doubt significant. The question is whether they will justify the potential losses on Ukraine’s eastern frontline.

“One of the objectives of the offensive operation in the Kursk direction was to divert significant enemy forces from other directions, primarily from the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove directions,” Gen Syrskyi said on Tuesday.

But that objective appears to have failed. Russian forces have not been redeployed from the Pokrovsk frontline.

On the contrary they’ve been strengthened by additional troops and their advance has quickened.

Vice-President Kamala Harris is criticising former president Donald Trump over a recent controversy involving his campaign at Arlington National Cemetery, saying the military burial site is “not a place for politics”.

Ms Harris took aim at Trump on Saturday in a post on social media, writing that he “disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt”.

The US Army said a Trump staffer “abruptly pushed aside” a cemetery employee who was trying to warn his team about rules against filming in the cemetery.

The Trump campaign has disputed the cemetery’s version of events and said it received permission from the families of the fallen soldiers to film.

The incident happened on Monday, when Trump was at an event honouring 13 US military service members who were killed during the country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.

Saturday’s post marks the first time Ms Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, has commented on the controversy.

She wrote that she has visited Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia several times during her tenure as vice-president, and she would never use the site for political gain.

“If there is one thing on which we as Americans can all agree, it is that our veterans, military families, and service members should be honored, never disparaged, and treated with nothing less than our highest respect and gratitude,” Ms Harris said.

“And it is my belief that someone who cannot meet this simple, sacred duty should never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States of America.”

At a campaign rally in Michigan on Thursday, Trump hit back at those who had criticised him over the incident.

He said he had been asked to pose for a photo at the site after the memorial by family members of the soldiers who had died.

“I go there, they ask me to have a picture and they say I was campaigning,” Trump said. “The one thing I get plenty of is publicity. I don’t need that. I don’t need the publicity.”

Trump’s running mate JD Vance used the controversy to attack the Biden administration over its handling of the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying that Ms Harris “can go to hell”.

“Three years ago, 13 brave, innocent Americans died, and they died because Kamala Harris refused to do her job,” Mr Vance said on Wednesday in response to questions from BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

NPR reported earlier that two members of Trump’s campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the cemetery worker aside when she tried to intervene.

Federal law prevents use of the cemetery for political campaigning and the US Army said participants were warned of the rules in advance.

A US Army spokesperson said on Thursday that “the incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked.”

The Trump campaign has denied that a physical altercation took place at the cemetery, adding “we are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made”.

House Democrats have since asked the US Army for a report into the incident, asking for a “full account” of what happened.

It has been described as the “most invasive species” to ever hit Thailand – one which risks enormous damage to the environment, according to officials.

Attempts to control it have seen crowds wading out into lakes, and genetic modification.

And yet the blackchin tialapia continues to spread through Thailand’s waterways, so far impacting 17 provinces.

An investigation in parliament has aimed to uncover the cause and its proponent, with Bangkok MP Nattacha Boonchaiinsawat declaring: “We will not pass a devastated ecosystem to the next generation.”

So can Thai authorities win the battle – and how exactly did this West African fish end up causing havoc half a world away?

Thailand had experienced outbreaks of blackchin tilapia in the past, but none has been as widespread as this most recent episode.

Mr Nattacha estimates that this particular outbreak is going to cost Thai economy at least 10 billion baht ($293m; £223m).

The core problem is that the blackchin tilapia prey on small fish, shrimp, and snail larvae, which are among Thailand’s important aquaculture products.

So for months now, the government has encouraged people to catch blackchin tilapia, which have found their way in rivers and swamps. The fish thrive in brackish water, but can also survive in fresh and salt water.

The Thai government has also doubled the amount that it will pay people who catch the fish, to 15 baht ($0.42; £0.33) per kilogram. The result? In Bangkok’s suburbs, crowds have waded in knee-deep waters hoping to catch blackchin tilapia with their plastic basins.

Authorities have also released the blackchin tilapia’s predators – Asian seabass and long-whiskered catfish – to hunt them down.

However, they are battling a species which reproduces at speed: females are able to produce 500 fingerlings at a time.

And so authorities have also gone to the extent of developing genetically-modified blackchin tilapia that would produce sterile offspring, planning to release them as early as the end of this year, in the hopes of stopping their population from exploding further.

But Mr Nattacha told BBC Thai the government needed to do even more.

“Who will win?” he wondered. “We need the people to follow the case closely, otherwise this matter will be quiet, and we will pass on this kind of environment to the next generation.”

So how exactly did this fish – easily identifiable thanks to the black spots on their chins and cheeks – come to be in Thailand?

One theory that parliament has looked into is that an experiment by food behemoth Charoen Pokphand Food (CPF) 14 years ago had caused the spread.

The company, which produces animal feed and runs shrimp and livestock farms, imported 2,000 from Ghana in late 2010. It said all the fish died and were buried properly.

Two years later, outbreaks of blackchin tilapia were reported in Thailand, including the area of a CPF laboratory, according to local broadcaster Thai PBS.

But CPF – the agribusiness arm of one of Thailand’s largest conglomerate, Charoen Pokphand Group (CP Group) – has rejected the allegations. It has also threatened to sue those spreading what it calls “misinformation” on the matter.

It is co-operating with state agencies fighting the spread of the alien species.

“Although the company is confident that it is not the cause of the outbreak, it is not indifferent and is ready to cooperate with the government to alleviate the suffering of the people,” said Premsak Wanuchsoontorn, CPF’s aquaculture and research development officer.

However, CPF officials have attended parliament hearings in person only once. They have previously given their explanation to lawmakers in writing.

The director-general of Thailand’s Department of Fisheries, Bancha Sukkaew, notes only one private company had sought permission to import blackchin tilapia.

He told the BBC that there was a possibility that some escaped from the laboratory.

However, he is also not discounting the possibility that the invasive fish species could have been smuggled into Thailand.

In the end, though, how they came to be in Thai waterways is the past – the problem is the future, and getting the outbreak under control. But is it possible?

Experts told BBC Thai that the battle against the blackchin tilapia could be a losing one.

“I don’t see the possibility of eradicating it,” said Dr Suwit Wuthisuthimethavee, an expert in aquatic animal genetics at Walailak University.

“Because we cannot limit its range. When it is in nature, it reproduces continuously, has a fast reproductive cycle,” Dr Suwit added.

Nonn Panitvong, an expert in freshwater ecosystems, agreed.

“The problem with alien species is that once they are established, they are very difficult to eradicate,” he said.

Voters in Germany’s two eastern states are due to cast their ballots in elections in which the far right is expected to perform strongly.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been polling top in Thuringia ahead of Sunday’s vote, while the party has been running neck-and-neck for first place with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Saxony.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and its coalition partners have been struggling in recent polls.

On Saturday, thousands of protesters rallied in Thuringia’s regional capital, Erfurt, denouncing the anti-immigrant AfD as fascists. The AfD says Germany needs to expel illegal migrants.

Polling stations across the two German states are scheduled to open at 08:00 local time (06:00 GMT).

In Thuringia, the AfD is widely expected to emerge as the biggest party.

Meanwhile, the SPD – along with its Green and Liberal coalition partners – have been doing so badly in Thuringia, they may not even get a single seat in the state parliament.

The AfD is officially classed as right-wing extremist in Thuringia, while its highly controversial regional leader Björn Höcke was recently fined for using a Nazi slogan – though he denies doing so knowingly.

In Saxony, the AfD is vying for the first place with the CDU.

Last week’s knife attack in western Germany, in which a Syrian asylum seeker and suspected Islamist is accused of killing three people, has fuelled fierce criticism of how successive governments have handled migration.

Even if the AfD emerges as the biggest party in both states, it does not mean it will take power, as other political parties have publicly ruled out any collaboration with it to form a majority.

Still, the poll results will be seen as a litmus test ahead of Germany’s federal elections in 2025.

China and the Philippines have accused each other of ramming coast guard vessels in a disputed area of the South China Sea.

The Philippines has claimed a Chinese ship “directly and intentionally rammed” into its vessel, while Beijing has accused the Philippines of “deliberately” crashing into a Chinese ship.

Saturday’s collision near the Sabina Shoal is the latest in a long-running – and escalating – row between the two countries over various islands and zones in the South China Sea.

Within the past two weeks, there have been at least three other incidents in the same area involving ships belonging to the two countries.

The Sabina Shoal, claimed by China as Xianbin Jiao and as Escoda Shoal by the Philippines, is located some 75 nautical miles from the Philippines’ west coast and 630 nautical miles from China.

The South China Sea is a major shipping route through which $3 trillion worth of trade passes through a year. Beijing claims almost all of the South China Sea, including parts claimed by the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Following the latest clash, China’s coast guard called on the Philippines to withdraw from the Sabina Shoal while pledging to “resolutely thwart all acts of provocation, nuisance and infringement”.

The Philippines coast guard said it would not move its vessel – the Teresa Magbanua – “despite the harassment, the bullying activities and escalatory action of the Chinese coast guard”.

There were no casualties following the crash but Philippines Coast Guard Commodore Jay Tarriela said that the 97-meter (318-feet) Teresa Magbanua had sustained some damage after being hit “several times” by the Chinese ship.

The US ambassador to the Phillipines, MaryKay L Carlson, criticised what she called China’s dangerous actions in the region.

“The US condemns the multiple dangerous violations of international law by the [People’s Republic of China], including today’s intentional ramming of the BRP Teresa Magbanua while it was conducting lawful operations within the[Philippines] EEZ.” she wrote in a post to X.

“We stand with the Philippines in upholding international law.”

China has repeatedly blamed the Philippines and its ally the US for the escalating tensions. Last week, a defence ministry spokesperson said Washington was “emboldening” Manila to make “reckless provocations”.

Observers worry the dispute could eventually spark a larger confrontation in the South China Sea.

A previous attempt by the Philippines to get the United Nations to arbitrate ended with the decision that China had no lawful claims within its so-called nine dash line, the boundary it uses to claim a large swathe of the South China Sea. Beijing has refused to recognise the ruling.

But in recent weeks both countries have made an attempt to de-escalate the immediate conflicts out at sea.

Last month they agreed to allow the Philippines to restock the outpost in the Second Thomas Shoal with food, supplies and personnel. Since then this has taken place with no reported clashes.

Princess Märtha Louise of Norway has married American self-styled shaman Durek Verrett in a wedding that has divided the country.

The couple tied the knot at a private ceremony at a hotel in Geiranger, Western Norway on Saturday following two days of celebrations.

Unlike other royal weddings where the public throngs the streets, there were only a handful of people present to watch – views of the happy couple prior to or during the wedding were obscured by a tent or white sheets after they sold the exclusive rights to Hello! Magazine.

A documentary crew from Netflix was also in tow. The presence of the two major media companies caused some controversy, with local outlets largely excluded.

The princess’s parents, King Harald and Queen Sonja, attended the nuptials along with other members of Norway’s royal family, as well as princes and princesses from Sweden and the Netherlands.

Princess Märtha Louise’s three daughters from her first marriage, to the late Norwegian writer Ari Behn, were also at the ceremony.

Around 350 guests attended Saturday’s gathering, though there was no evidence that Mr Verrett’s purported A-list American chums were among them.

The 49-year old Californian counts actress and wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow as a friend – Mr Verrett calls her his “soul sister”.

But it was reported that Cynthia Bailey, reality TV star of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, was in attendance.

Princess Märtha Louise, 52, and Mr Verrett, who will not become a prince following the wedding, announced their engagement in 2022. While their relationship has divided Norway, King Harald has previously told Norwegian reporters that Mr Verrett was “a great guy” and that the two of them “laughed a lot, even in this difficult time”.

In 2022, the Norwegian palace announced Märtha Louise would “relinquish her patronage role” as she and Mr Verrett sought to “distinguish more clearly between their activities and the Royal House of Norway” and to “prevent misunderstandings regarding the Royal House”.

Since then, the pair have been criticised by the palace and members of Norway’s parliament for linking commercial activities to the princess’s royal status.

Kristi Marie Skrede, royal correspondent for Norway’s NRK TV, said their relationship it has caused a conflict within the royal family, as well as public controversy.

“Many Norwegians are disturbed that she uses her royal connections to earn money,” said Ms Skrede, adding that some believe it is a sign of “disrespect” to King Harald.

Last year, Märtha Louise told the BBC’s Katty Kay that there had been so much “turmoil” concerning her decision to take a different path than that of a “traditional royal”.

“There’s been a lot of criticism over the years, especially with me being spiritual – and in Norway, that’s taboo,” she said.

But others admire the couple for their honesty, said Ms Skrede. In particular, both been open about their spiritual beliefs.

Princess Märtha Louise has claimed in the past she is clairvoyant, and until 2018, ran a school which she said taught students to “create miracles” and talk to angels. Mr Verrett has said he is the latest in six generations of shamans and once said he died for four minutes and 25 seconds.

“I got all the information from the other side. I came back,” he told the New York Times.

A military alliance between Somalia and Egypt is ruffling feathers in the fragile Horn of Africa, upsetting Ethiopia in particular – and there are worries the fallout could become more than a war of words.

The tensions ratcheted up this week with the arrival of two Egyptian C-130 military aeroplanes in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, signalling the beginning of the deal signed earlier in August during a state visit by the Somali president to Cairo.

The plan is for up to 5,000 Egyptian soldiers to join a new-look African Union force at the end of the year, with another 5,000 reportedly to be deployed separately.

Ethiopia, which has been a key ally of Somalia in its fight against al-Qaeda-linked militants and is at loggerheads with Egypt over a mega dam it built on the River Nile, said it could not “stand idle while other actors take measures to destabilise the region”.

Somalia’s defence minister hit back, saying Ethiopia should stop “wailing” as everyone “will reap what they sowed” – a reference to their diplomatic relations that have been on a downward spiral for months.

It all comes down to the ambitions of Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who wants his landlocked country to have a port. Ethiopia lost its access to the sea when Eritrea seceded in the early 1990s.

On New Year’s Day, Mr Abiy signed a controversial deal with the self-declared republic of Somaliland to lease a 20km (12-mile) section of its coastline for 50 years to set up a naval base.

It could also potentially lead to Ethiopia officially recognising the breakaway republic – something Somaliland is pushing hard for.

Somaliland broke away from Somalia more than 30 years ago, but Mogadishu regards it very much as part of its territory – and described the deal as an act of “aggression”.

Somalia fears such a move might set a precedent and encourage other countries to recognise Somaliland’s independence, geopolitical analyst Jonathan Fenton-Harvey told the BBC.

He added that neighbouring Djibouti was also worried it could harm its own port-dependent economy, as Ethiopia has traditionally relied on Djibouti for imports.

In fact in an attempt to deescalate tensions, Djibouti’s foreign minister has told the BBC his country is ready to offer Ethiopia “100%” access to one of its ports.

“It will be in the port of Tadjoura – 100km [62 miles] from the Ethiopia border,” Mahmoud Ali Youssouf told BBC Focus on Africa TV.

This is definitely a change of tune for as recently as last year, a senior presidential adviser said Djibouti was reluctant to offer its neighbour unfettered access to the Red Sea.

Attempts so far to calm tensions – by Turkey – have failed, with Somalia insisting it will not budge until Ethiopia recognises its sovereignty over Somaliland.

Somalia has not only brought its Nile enemy Egypt into the mix, but also announced that Ethiopian troops would not be part of the AU force from next January.

This is when the AU’s third peace support operation begins – the first one was deployed in 2007 months after Ethiopian troops crossed over the border to help fight al-Shabab Islamist militants, who then controlled the Somali capital.

There are at least 3,000 Ethiopian troops under the current AU mission, according to the Reuters news agency.

Last week, the Somali prime minister also said Ethiopia would have to withdraw its other 5-7,000 soldiers stationed in several regions under separate bilateral agreements – unless it withdrew from the port deal with Somaliland.

Ethiopia sees this as a slap in the face for, as its foreign minister put it, “the sacrifices Ethiopian soldiers have paid” for Somalia.

The withdrawal of troops would also leave Ethiopia vulnerable to jihadist attacks, Christopher Hockey, a senior researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, told the BBC.

The planned deployment of Egyptian troops along its eastern border would also make Ethiopia particularly apprehensive, he added.

Egypt sees Ethiopia’s Nile dam – in the west of the country – as an existential threat – and has warned in the past that it will take “measures” should its security be threatened.

Egypt accuses Ethiopia of threatening its supply of water with the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd).

This began in 2011 on the Blue Nile tributary in Ethiopia’s northern-western highlands, from where 85% of the Nile’s water flow.

Egypt said Ethiopia pushed forward with the project in complete “disregard” of the interests and rights of downstream countries and their water security.

It also argued that a 2% reduction in water from the Nile could result in the loss of around 200,000 acres (81,000 hectares) of irrigated land.

For Ethiopia the dam is seen as a way of revolutionising the country by producing electricity for 60% of the population and providing a constant flow of electricity for businesses.

The latest diplomatic efforts to work out how the dam should operate – and determine how much water will flow downstream to Sudan and Egypt – fell apart last December.

Egypt sees its military deal with Somalia as “historic” – in the words of Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi – and a possible chance to settle scores over the mega dam.

Indeed the Nile dispute may well play out in Somalia, warns Dr Hassan Khannenje, the director of the Horn International Institute for Strategic Studies.

It could potentially lead to a “low-scale inter-state conflict” between Ethiopia and Egypt if their troops meet at the Somalia border.

Somaliland has also warned that the establishment of Egyptian military bases within Somalia could destabilise the region.

Both Ethiopia and Somalia are already coping with their own internal strife – Ethiopia with low-level rebellions in several regions and Somalia, recovering from a destructive 30-year civil war, still has al-Shabab to contend with.

Experts say neither can afford further warfare – and more unrest would inevitably lead to further migration.

Dr Khannenje told the BBC that if a conflict broke out, it could further complicate the geopolitics of the Red Sea by drawing in other players and further affect global trade.

At least 17,000 ships go through the Suez Canal each year, meaning that 12% of annual global trade passes through the Red Sea, amounting to $1tn (£842bn) worth of goods, according to shipping monitor Lloyd’s List.

For this reason, countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey have been keen to forge partnerships with African nations like Somalia that border the Red Sea.

According to Mr Harvey, Turkey and the UAE stand a better chance at mediating and finding a middle ground.

The UAE has heavily invested in Somaliland’s Berbera port and holds significant influence over Ethiopia because of its investments there.

All eyes will be on the next diplomatic push by Turkey, which has ties with both Ethiopia and Somalia. Talks are due to start in mid-September.

• Why is Egypt worried about Ethiopia’s dam on the Nile?
• Can the Horn of Africa rift be healed?
• Ethiopia PM eyes Red Sea port, inflaming tensions

Trains and flights have been cancelled in Japan as one of the strongest typhoons to hit the country in decades drenches cities in its path.

At least six people have been killed and more than 100 injured after Typhoon Shanshan made landfall in the south-western Japan on Thursday.

Now downgraded to a tropical storm, Shanshan is still packing winds of 90km/h (56mph).

Thousands of people remain without power.

The highest level-five order was issued to millions of residents in the southern island of Kyushu as the storm approached on Thursday, with winds of up to 252 km/h.

After making landfall, the typhoon weakened to a severe tropical storm, but it is still pummelling its way north-east. Up to 300mm (12in) of rainfall is expected in places in the next 24 hours.

Residents of the affected areas have been warned of landslides, flooding and large-scale damage.

A trail of destruction is visible across Shanshan’s path, with many buildings damaged by flying debris, trees uprooted and cars overturned or buried under floods.

Heavy rain was falling in Gifu and Mie prefectures on Saturday, as the Japan Meteorological Agency urged people “to remain vigilant for landslides, flooding and overflowing rivers”.

“This is the first time I saw a typhoon sweeping across all of Japan,” a resident in the capital, Tokyo, told Reuters news agency.

“Typhoons are supposed to go north from Okinawa. So, I didn’t expect it to be like this. I’m very surprised.”

All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines have cancelled dozens of domestic flights.

Bullet train services between Tokyo and Osaka are among those affected throughout Saturday and Sunday.

Shinkansen bullet trains in the central city of Nagoya were also suspended – and there are warnings that more could be halted.

Special typhoon warnings, like the one issued for Shanshan, are declared in Japan in cases of extraordinarily powerful storms. The same warning was issued in September 2022 as Typhoon Nanmadol approached Kyushu – the first such warning declared for a region other than Okinawa.

Typhoons in the region have been forming closer to coastlines, intensifying more rapidly and lasting longer over land due to climate change, according to a study released last month.

A new show in the Indian capital Delhi showcases a rich collection of early photographs of monuments in the country.

The photographs from the 1850s and 1860s capture a period of experimentation when new technology met uncharted territory.

British India was the first country outside Europe to establish professional photographic studios, and many of these early photographers were celebrated internationally. (Photography was launched in 1839.)

They blended and transformed pictorial conventions, introduced new artistic traditions, and shaped the visual tastes of diverse audiences, ranging from scholars to tourists.

While the works of leading British photographers often reflect a colonial perspective, those by their Indian contemporaries reveal overlooked interactions with this narrative.

• What secrets do the Taj Mahal’s locked rooms hold?
• A makeover for 200-year-old India heritage building

The pictures at the show called Histories in the Making have been gathered from the archives of DAG, a leading art firm. They highlight photography’s crucial role in shaping an understanding of India’s history.

They also contributed to the development of field sciences, fostered networks of knowledge, and connected the histories of politics, fieldwork, and academic disciplines like archaeology.

“These images capture a moment in history when the British Empire was consolidating its power in India, and the documentation of the subcontinent’s monuments served both as a means of asserting control and as a way to showcase the empire’s achievements to audiences back in Europe,” says Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG.

This is a a picture of Caves of Elephanta taken by William Johnson and William Henderson.

The Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage site, are a group of temples primarily dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva in the state of Maharashtra.

William Johnson began his photographic career in Bombay (now Mumbai) around 1852, initially working as a daguerreotypist – the daguerreotype was an early photographic process that produced a single image on a metal plate.

In the mid-1850s, Johnson partnered with William Henderson, a commercial studio owner in Bombay, to establish the firm Johnson & Henderson.

Together, they produced The Indian Amateur’s Photographic Album, a monthly series published from 1856 to 1858.

Linnaeus Tripe arrived in India in 1839 at the age of 17, joining the Madras regiment of the East India Company.

He began practicing photography and in December 1854, captured images in the towns of Halebidu, Belur, and Shravanabelagola.

Sixty-eight of these photographs, primarily of temples, were exhibited in 1855 at an exhibition in Madras (now a major city called Chennai), earning him a first-class medal for the “best series of photographic views on paper”.

In 1857, Tripe became the photographer for the Madras Presidency – a former province of British India – and photographed sites at Srirangam, Tiruchirapalli, Madurai, Pudukkottai, and Thanjavur.

Over 50 of these photographs were displayed at the Photographic Society of Madras exhibition the following year, where they were widely praised as the best exhibits.

John Murray, a surgeon in the Bengal Indian Medical Service, began photographing in India in the late 1840s.

Appointed civil surgeon in the city of Agra in 1848, he spent the next 20 years producing a series of studies on Mughal architecture in Agra and the neighbouring cities of Sikandra, and Delhi.

In 1864, he created a comprehensive set of pictures documenting the iconic Taj Mahal.

Throughout his career, Murray used paper negatives and the calotype process – a technique of creating “positive” prints from one negative – to produce his images.

Thomas Biggs arrived in India in 1842 and joined the Bombay Artillery as a captain in the British East India Company.

He soon took up photography and became a founding member of the Photographic Society of Bombay in 1854.

After exhibiting his work at the Society’s first exhibition in January 1855, he was appointed as the government photographer for the Bombay Presidency, tasked with documenting architectural and archaeological sites.

He photographed Bijapur, Badami, Aihole, Pattadakal, Dharwad, and Mysore before being recalled to military service in December 1855.

Biggs experimented with the calotype process, producing “positive” prints from one negative.

Felice Beato, one of the most renowned war and travel photographers of the 19th Century, arrived in India in 1858 to document the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny.

Indian soldiers, known as sepoys, had set off a rebellion against the British rule, often referred to as the first war of independence.

Although the mutiny was nearly over when Beato arrived, he photographed its aftermath with a focus on capturing the immediacy of events.

He extensively documented cities deeply affected by the uprising, including Lucknow, Delhi, and Kanpur, with notable images of Sikandar Bagh, Kashmiri Gate, and the barracks of Kanpur. His chilling photograph of the hanging of sepoys, stands out for its stark depiction.

As a commercial photographer, Beato aimed to sell his work widely, spending over two years in India photographing iconic sites. In 1860, Beato left India for China to photograph the Second Opium War.

Andrew Neill, a Scottish doctor in the Indian Medical Service in Madras, was also a photographer who documented ancient monuments for the Bombay Presidency.

His calotypes were featured in the 1855 exhibition of the Photographic Society of Madras and in March 1857, and 20 of his architectural views of Mysore and Bellary were shown by the Photographic Society of Bengal.

Neill also documented Lucknow after the 1857 revolt.

Edmund Lyon, who served in the British Army from 1845 to 1854 and briefly as governor of Dublin District Military Prison, arrived in India in 1865 and established a photographic studio in the southern city of Ooty.

Working as a commercial photographer until 1869, Lyon gained significant recognition, particularly for his photographs of the Nilgiris mountain range, which were showcased at the 1867 Paris Exposition.

Accompanied by his wife, Anne Grace, Lyon also captured southern India’s archaeological sites and architectural antiquities.

His work resulted in a remarkable collection of 300 photographs documenting sites in Trichinopoly, Madurai, Tanjore, Halebid, Bellary, and Vijayanagara

Samuel Bourne’s stunning images of India, especially from his Himalayan expeditions between 1863 and 1866, stand among the finest examples of 19th-Century travel photography. A former bank clerk, Bourne left his job in 1857 to pursue photography full-time.

Arriving in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1863, he soon moved to Shimla, where he partnered with William Howard to establish the Howard & Bourne studio.

Later that year, Charles Shepherd joined them, forming ‘Howard, Bourne & Shepherd’. When Howard left, the studio became ‘Bourne & Shepherd,’ a name that would become iconic.

Bourne embarked on three major Himalayan expeditions, covering vast regions including Kashmir and the challenging terrain of Spiti. His 1866 photographs of the Manirung Pass, at over 18,600ft (5,669m), gained international acclaim.

In 1870, Bourne returned to England, selling his shares, though Bourne & Shepherd continued to operate in Calcutta and Simla. The studio, which later documented the spectacular Delhi Durbar – the ‘Court of India’ of 1911, an event that saw 20,000 soldiers marching or riding past the silk-robed Emperor and Empress – had a remarkable 176-year legacy before closing in 2016.

“My heart is filled with so much pain. Even today, I cry when I think about how that one encounter destroyed my life.”

The year was 1992. Sushma* said she was 18 when a man she knew took her to an abandoned warehouse under the pretext of watching video tapes. There, six to seven men tied her up, raped her and took photographs of the act.

The men belonged to rich, influential families in Ajmer, a city in the western Indian state of Rajasthan.

“After they raped me, one of them gave me 200 rupees [$2; £1] to buy lipstick. I didn’t take the money,” she said.

Last week, 32 years later, Sushma saw a court convict her rapists and sentence them to life imprisonment.

“I am 50 years old today and I finally feel like I got justice,” she said. “But it cannot bring back all that I have lost.”

She said she had endured years of slander and taunts from society because of what happened to her, and both her marriages ended in divorce when her husbands discovered her past.

Sushma is one of 16 survivors – all schoolchildren or students – who were raped and blackmailed by a group of powerful men in different places in Ajmer city over several months in 1992. The case became a massive scandal and sparked huge protests.

Last week, the court handed out life sentences to six of the 18 accused: Nafis Chishty, Iqbal Bhat, Saleem Chishty, Sayed Jamir Hussain, Naseem – also known as Tarzan – and Suhail Ghani.

They have not confessed to the crime and their lawyers said they will appeal the verdict in a higher court.

So what happened to the remaining 12 accused?

Eight were sentenced to life in 1998, but four were acquitted by a higher court, and the others had their sentences reduced to 10 years.

Of the remaining four, one died by suicide. Another was sentenced to life in 2007 but was acquitted six years later. One was convicted in a related minor case but later acquitted, and one of the accused is still absconding.

“Can you even call this [the 20 August verdict] justice? A judgement is not justice,” said Santosh Gupta, a journalist who had written about the case and has appeared as a witness for the prosecution.

It is a thought echoed by Supreme Court lawyer Rebecca John, who called it yet another case of “justice delayed is justice denied”.

“This points to a problem that extends far beyond the legal system. Our patriarchal society is broken. What we need is a mindset change, but how long is that going to take?”

The accused men used their power and influence to deceive, threaten and lure their victims, said prosecution lawyer Virendra Singh Rathore.

They took compromising photographs and videos of their victims and used them to blackmail them into silence or bring in more victims, he added.

“In one instance, the accused invited a man they knew to a party and got him drunk. They took compromising photos of him and threatened to make them public if he didn’t bring his female friends to meet them,” he said. “That’s how they kept getting victims.”

The accused also had strong political and social connections. Some of them were associated with a famous dargah (Muslim religious shrine) in the city.

“They roamed around on bikes and cars in what was a small-town city at the time,” Mr Gupta said. “Some people were afraid of these men, some wanted to get closer to them and some wanted to be like them.”

He said that it was their power and connections that had helped keep the case under wraps for months. But there were people – like those working at the studio where the photos were developed and even some police officers – who were aware of what was going on.

One day, some of the photographs taken by the accused reached Mr Gupta. They had a chilling effect on him.

“Here were some of the city’s most powerful men committing heinous acts with innocent, young girls – and there was proof of it. But there was no major reaction from the police or the public,” he said.

He wrote a few reports about it but none managed to blow the case wide open.

Then one day, his paper “made a daring decision”, he said.

It published a photo that showed a young girl, naked to the waist, pressed between two men who were fondling her breasts. One of the men was smiling at the camera. Only the girl’s face was blurred.

The report sent shock waves through the city. The public was outraged and shut the city down in protest for days. Anger spread through Rajasthan like raging fire.

“Finally, there was some concrete action from the government. Police registered a case of rape and blackmail against the accused and it was handed over to the the state’s Criminal Investigation Department [CID],” Mr Rathore said.

Mr Rathore explained that the trial had dragged on for 32 years because of several factors, including the staggered arrests of the accused, alleged delaying tactics by the defence, an underfunded prosecution and systemic issues within the justice system.

When police filed the initial charges in 1992, six of the accused – who were only convicted last week – were left out because they were absconding.

Mr Rathore believes this was a mistake, as when the police finally filed charges against the six in 2002, they were still on the run. Two of them were arrested in 2003, another in 2005 and two more in 2012, while the last one was apprehended in 2018.

Every time one of the accused was arrested, the trial would begin afresh with the defence recalling survivors and witnesses brought by the prosecution to give their testimonies.

“Under the law, the accused has the right to be present in court when witnesses are testifying and the defence has the right to cross-examine them,” explained Mr Rathore.

This put the survivors in the horrifying position of having to relive their trauma over and over again.

Mr Rathore recalled how often the survivors, who were now in their 40s and 50s, would scream at the judge, asking why there were being dragged to court, years after they had been raped.

As time passed, the police also found it challenging to track down witnesses.

“Many didn’t want to be associated with the case as their lives had moved on,” Mr Rathore said.

“Even now, one of the accused is absconding. If he is arrested, or if the other accused appeal against the verdict in a higher court, the survivors and witnesses will be called to testify again.”

Sushma – who was one of three survivors whose testimony played a key role in convicting the six accused – said that she had been talking to the media about her ordeal because she was telling the truth.

“I never changed my story. I was young and innocent when these people did this to me. It robbed me of everything. I have nothing to lose now,” she said.

A series of “humanitarian pauses” to fighting in Gaza are due to begin on Sunday, to allow hundreds of thousands of children to be vaccinated against polio.

The agreement comes after UN officials said a 10-month-old has been partially paralysed after contracting Gaza’s first recorded case of polio in 25 years.

Polio is a serious and highly infectious disease that largely affects children under five.

It is caused by a virus that spreads very easily through contact with the faeces (poo) of an infected person or, less commonly, through contaminated water or food.

Most people with the infection have no symptoms but some will have:

• a high temperature
• sore throat
• headache
• neck stiffness
• aching muscles
• stomach pain
• nausea

One in 200 infections lead to more serious problems, when the virus invades the brain and nervous system.

This can causes irreversible paralysis, usually of the legs.

It can happen within a matter of hours and some 5 to 10% of the people who are paralysed die because their breathing muscles become immobilised.

Humanitarian groups say the virus has re-emerged because the war between Israel and Hamas has disrupted regular child vaccination programmes. It has also caused massive damage to water and sanitation systems.

The WHO says immunisation rates in Gaza and the occupied West Bank were optimal before the conflict.

In 2022, polio vaccine coverage was estimated at 99% for two doses of vaccine. However, this has dropped to less than 90%, according to the latest data.

The aim is to vaccinate some 640,000 children under the age of 10, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

The roll-out will start in central Gaza on Sunday, with three consecutive daily pauses in fighting between 6am and 3pm local time.

It will then move to southern Gaza, where there will be another three-day pause, followed by northern Gaza.

According to UN officials, children who get the vaccine will need a second dose in late September.

Healthcare workers aim to achieve 95% vaccine coverage across the strip, the level needed to stop transmission of the virus within Gaza.

If this is not achieved there is an agreement for an additional humanitarian pause to allow a fourth day of vaccination.

About 1.3m doses of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) are already in Gaza, with 400,000 extra doses set to arrive soon.

Vaccinations will be carried out by UN staff and other local health workers. More than 2,000 health and community outreach workers have been trained to give the vaccine.

Vaccines will be available in hospitals, field hospitals and primary health centres.

According to the WHO, safe transport and refrigeration of the vaccines are crucial to the plan.

Poliovirus cases have fallen dramatically since 1988, when a global polio eradication initiative was launched. Many countries have not had cases of polio in many years.

But in two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, polio is still endemic, which means it has a constant presence.

There have also been outbreaks of poliovirus variants – strains related to the oral vaccine – in more than 30 countries around the world, particularly in areas where immunisation rates are low.

They include Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Niger, Nigeria, South Sudan, Algeria, Angola, Indonesia.

The WHO says as long as a single child remains infected, children in all countries are at risk of getting polio, because the virus can easily be imported into a polio-free country.

There is no cure for polio. It can only be prevented by vaccination, and vaccines must be given multiple times to protect a child for life.

There are two main types of vaccines available.

One is an oral vaccine that is given as drops and is effective and easy to administer.

The oral vaccine contains a live but weakened from of the virus. This replicates in the gut for a short time and activates the immune system so the body is ready to fight off polio if it encounters the virus again.

Rarely, the weakened vaccine-virus can pick up small genetic changes as it replicates. These rare changes can sometimes cause the virus to make people ill with polio – if it has the chance to spread to unvaccinated people.

In Gaza, a novel version of the oral vaccine will be given to help address this.

The other main form of polio vaccine is given by injection and contains inactivated polio virus. It has been used in the US and UK for the last two decades.

In the UK, the National Health Service offers five doses from the ages of eight weeks to 14 years as part of routine childhood jabs.

Because of vaccines, more than 20 million people who would otherwise have been paralysed are able to walk, according to the WHO.

There are many moments where you could begin the story of Grenfell Tower. One is in 1972, when a section of cramped west London terraced streets in Notting Dale had just been torn down.

The vision was to replace them with an entirely new community. The Lancaster West Estate would have three blocks, each leading to a central 24-storey concrete tower – Grenfell.

Early plans included shops, offices, a swimming pool and gardens. But plans for these amenities were quickly abandoned.

Just five years after Grenfell Tower opened in 1974, the early optimism had faded. Residents were already complaining about vandalism, broken lifts and lights, and of the estate feeling impersonal.

More than 30 years later, some residents spoke of slum-like conditions. Then a new refurbishment began. It promised lower heating bills, new boilers, a completely new look for the building.

It was this refurbishment that would cover the tower’s external walls with combustible materials and lead to the catastrophic fire that killed 72 people in 2017.

Next week, the public inquiry into the disaster will produce its final report, setting out what led to the worst residential fire since World War Two – one the inquiry has heard was both foreseeable and preventable.

I’ve been covering that inquiry since 2018, listening to hundreds, possibly thousands of hours of evidence about the layers of opportunities missed and warnings unheeded at every level.

This is a story of corporate deceit, government deregulation drives and a construction industry in a race to the bottom.

Dr Barbara Lane is fire safety specialist who was one of the inquiry’s main expert witnesses, giving days of evidence. She’s upfront and straight-talking, often telling the barristers why their questions were wrong.

In person, though, when she talks about her experiences inside the block in the fire’s aftermath, her manner is completely different.

Quietly, she recalls the darkness, the black smoke-stained walls, a half-burnt bedroom where only a cot remained. What struck her was the humanity of it, she says: “What the humans went through.”

To understand how a refurbishment could have created the possibility of such a disaster, we have to look at what underpinned all that work – the building regulations.

When Grenfell was constructed, those regulations were set by an act of parliament.

Grenfell: Building a Disaster

For the past six years, a public inquiry has heard evidence about the worst residential fire in UK peacetime. Kate Lamble has reported on it from the beginning. She examines what created the conditions for a disaster that was both foreseeable and preventable.

Listen on BBC Sounds

In the 1980s, however, Margaret Thatcher wanted to reduce government intervention. Regulations stopped listing precise rules, simply describing instead what the end result should be.

The external walls of a building, the regulations now stated, should simply offer “adequate resistance” to fire – a standard the public inquiry has already concluded Grenfell Tower did not meet.

How to achieve this was contained in government guidance, not regulations.

Dr Lane says this shift gave the industry a false confidence to not really care as much as they should about safety.

As early as the 1990s, there were signs of weakness in the new guidance. It suggested that cladding panels should meet a certain fire safety standard known as Class 0.

But materials which met that standard were soon involved in fires.

On 11 June 1999, a dropped cigarette started a fire in Garnock Court, a 14-storey block in Irvine, Ayrshire. News reports described it igniting like matchwood. One man was killed.

The corner flats had been surrounded by plastic cladding that should have met the Class 0 standard.

Brian Donohoe, the then-local MP, says he pushed for all combustible cladding to be banned and removed. His Labour colleagues, then in government, did not agree. One secretary of state, he says, told him “it would cost millions”.

A parliamentary select committee recommended that all cladding on high-rise buildings should either be entirely non-combustible, or put through large-scale fire tests to prove it wasn’t a risk.

These tests were introduced, but Class 0 remained in the guidance. England and Wales continued to be a market for combustible cladding.

Garnock Court wasn’t the only warning.

In 2009, flames at Lakanal House, a south London tower block, spread rapidly into combustible panels outside. Six people were killed.

Four years later, a coroner called for a review of the building regulation guidance.

The government agreed to do this by 2016 or 2017. But by the time of the Grenfell fire, this work had not begun, despite repeated demands from MPs in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fire Safety.

This was a period of snap elections and referendums. The minister responsible for building regulations changed three times in as many years. Ministers also say they were not briefed on the importance of the Lakanal House fire.

Statistics also showed fewer people were dying in fires. One minister told the inquiry they took comfort from that that there was no urgent problem.

At the public inquiry, one junior civil servant admitted there were a number of occasions “where I could have potentially prevented this happening”.

Brian Martin advised ministers on the part of the building regulation guidance that covered fire safety. Over the years, he was given a series of warnings about the use of combustible materials on high-rise residential buildings.

After a cladding fire in Dubai in 2015, Mr Martin was approached by industry figures who told him that the combustible products involved in the blaze – the very type of cladding later installed on Grenfell Tower – were being sold in the UK.

Mr Martin has acknowledged he did not escalate that warning to his bosses. “I struggle to come to terms with why I didn’t do that,“ he told the inquiry.

• What happened at Grenfell Tower?
• Nine things we now know about the cladding
• Survivors: ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’

We should remember the 2010s were the era of slashing red tape, of health and safety culture “gone mad”. According to Mr Martin: “Regulation was a dirty word.”

Under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, in 2011 a policy of “one in, one out” was adopted. Ministers could not introduce a regulation unless they abolished one too. By 2016, under the Conservatives, that became “one in, three out”.

Brian Martin and his superiors have said they understood fire safety was not exempt from the government’s deregulation drive – something ministers have strongly denied.

The Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities says it has since taken a number of actions, including banning combustible materials on high-rise buildings.

It was the view that first attracted Marcio Gomes to his 21st-floor flat in Grenfell, he tells me. On New Year’s Eve, he would invite friends to watch the fireworks.

He remembers when talk started of refurbishing the building. Posters showed how it might look with metallic-looking cladding fitted. Residents were asked which colour they’d prefer, which finish? Fire safety was never discussed.

At the public inquiry, there have been questions about how each of the materials installed on Grenfell were tested.

The cladding was made of thin sheets of aluminium with a core of combustible plastic. The inquiry has already found it to be the main cause of the spread of the fire.

It was made in France by a company called Arconic and came with a certificate that said a “standard panel” met the fire safety standards contained in the government guidance.

However, Arconic suggested their materials could be cut in two different ways.

The first option, flat panels, had achieved the European fire standards described. The other option, cassettes, where the material had been bent and folded, had not. In fire tests, these performed “spectacularly” worse.

It was the bent cassettes that were fitted on to Grenfell Tower.

Arconic received their certificate by only providing the results of the successful test on the flat panels, not the failed test on the cassettes.

At the public inquiry, Claude Schmidt, the managing director of the company’s French office, accepted this could be seen as a “misleading half-truth”, but denied information was deliberately withheld.

Arconic told us it acknowledges the part it played in supplying a material involved in the fire. But it says responsibility for fire safety compliance does not rest with it as the supplier, but with those who selected it for use.

Ed Daffarn moved into Grenfell in 2001. In the following decade he describes the building falling into a period of managed decline.

He welcomed the idea of a multi-million pound refurbishment.

The initial design work was given to Studio E, architects who had worked on a nearby school and leisure centre.

Only they had never clad a high-rise building before. A competitive process legally required for large expensive projects was avoided because Studio E deliberately deferred part of their fee – bringing down the upfront costs.

At a meeting with the Tenant Management Organisation that ran the building on behalf of the local council, Ed Daffarn asked if the architects had experience with tower blocks and if not: “Why are we using them?”

He says he never received an answer.

During the refurbishment, Mr Daffarn says he can’t remember “a single meeting where I felt that our views or what we wanted was being listened to”. Many residents joined action groups to raise concerns about a range of fire safety issues including out-of-date equipment.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has acknowledged residents were not listened to as much as they should have been.

The lead architect on the Grenfell refurbishment, Bruce Sounes, told the inquiry he did not familiarise himself with building regulations on fire safety. Nor did Studio E check the suitability of the materials they specified.

At Studio E’s request, a company called Exova wrote three fire safety strategies for Grenfell Tower. All three stated the refurbishment would have no adverse effect on external fire spread. None even acknowledged the building would be clad.

Exova staff have said they thought the architects would ask them to look at the cladding if necessary.

With the initial design completed, the refurbishment was handed to a construction firm, Rydon, which became legally responsible for the design and build.

Rydon’s bid had been lower than their nearest competitor – but still £800,000 over budget.

In cases like this, what commonly happens next is a process known as “value engineering” – finding ways to cut costs without affecting performance.

Two days after Rydon was officially appointed as the contractor, it sent details of proposed savings to the Tenant Management Organisation which ran the building.

Non-combustible metal cladding, which the architects had preferred, would be replaced with a cheaper alternative, saving nearly £400,000.

Based only on looks, the council’s planning department chose cassette panels, the most dangerous form.

This cladding, with its combustible plastic core, was the primary cause of the fire’s spread.

As is common in construction, Rydon hired sub-contractors, who then often hired their own. Almost all have argued they did not hold ultimate responsibility for checking the work for fire safety, pointing instead to another firm they presumed was doing it.

The lead counsel at the public inquiry called this a “merry-go-round of buck-passing”.

In 2016, the local council’s building control department signed off the refurbishment. The council accepts it should not have done so.

The tower was transformed, but residents immediately spotted problems.

“There were massive gaps above, below and beside the windows,” Ed Daffarn says.

In the early hours of the 14 June 2017, those gaps would fill with smoke.

The first fire engine arrived at Grenfell within five minutes. Crews saw wispy smoke and an orange glow. To them, this seemed normal. There were around five fires a week in high-rise flats in London.

But this fire would quickly become something else, as it spread out of the window and climbed up the outside of the building through the combustible cladding and insulation.

Having watched dozens of firefighters give evidence to the inquiry, it’s hard to think of even one who recognised what they were watching was a cladding fire.

Front-line firefighting staff hadn’t been trained about the risks of fire spreading across the outside of a high-rise building. That is even though Andy Roe, who now leads the London Fire Brigade (LFB), accepts his organisation knew of these risks.

”It’s fair to say that we didn’t train people adequately enough,“ he says. He accepts this was a failure of the organisation’s obligation to its staff.

Still, Mr Roe thinks it would have been very hard to foresee the extremity of the Grenfell fire.

For more than an hour and a half, the LFB operated on the principle of “stay put” – advising residents they would be safest to remain in their flats until help arrived.

This policy relies on flames and smoke being contained in a flat for at least 60 minutes, giving firefighters time to reach them. But at Grenfell, flames climbed 19 floors in just 18 minutes.

Mr Roe recognises residents were advised to stay put for too long and that advice would have had an impact on residents’ decision-making that night.

“Stay put” is still used by the LFB but it has now trained its crews to evacuate when necessary.

Ed Daffarn was woken by a neighbour’s smoke alarm around 01:10 on 14 June 2017. When he opened his door, he was met with a wall of smoke.

The spread of this smoke was aided by something that seems small, even insignificant: automatic door-closing mechanisms.

These are meant to keep smoke inside a flat if a resident has to run outside to safety. But at Grenfell, not every door closed behind people as they fled.

Workmen had removed some door-closers during repair work – including on flat on Ed Daffarn’s floor. He’d complained about it himself.

Both the Tenant Management Organisation and Grenfell’s owners, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, were aware of this issue.

The inquiry has been told a plan was put together to regularly check door-closers. But the idea was rejected.

The council told us that it could and should have done more to keep its residents safe before the fire. It told the BBC it was wrong to tell the Tenant Management Organisation there should not be an inspection programme.

On the night of the fire, flames quickly reached Ed’s neighbour’s flat, the one without an automatic door-closer. The resident ran out, leaving the door open, and smoke poured out into the hallway where Ed would find himself.

Ed became lost in the corridor. As he panicked, a firefighter grabbed him and pulled him into the stairwell.

These, then, are the layers of missed opportunities, the dozens of chances over decades for someone to step in, to ask a question, to change history.

At the end of the hearings, the lead counsel to the inquiry said it will “be able to conclude with confidence that each and every one of the deaths that occurred in Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 was avoidable”.

For me, Grenfell also reveals a series of unspoken truths about the British system.

How safety was regarded as, at best, not as a vote-winner; and at worst as an obstruction to the economy. How regulation was viewed as guidance to be bent. An inherent lack of curiosity – a presumption that someone else would check, that something bad couldn’t happen here.

More than 3,000 high- and mid-rise buildings across England are still being monitored because they have unsafe cladding.

The recommendations made next week will attempt to ensure such a disaster can never happen again.

As always the government will have no obligation to carry these out. Nor is there a formal process to monitor what they reject or why.

It is another opportunity for change. One we may yet reflect on after future fires.

The first sign that the sibling warfare between Noel and Liam Gallagher was beginning to calm came during an interview last month.

Reflecting on the band’s sound, Noel told journalist John Robb: “It’s difficult to explain – when I would sing a song it would sound good, when [Liam] would sing it, it would sound great.”

Hearing Noel compliment his brother publicly after 16 years of insults certainly turned a few heads. But few people expected that just days later, the band – who broke up on the same week in 2009 – would dramatically reform.

A blizzard of headlines and a social media frenzy followed, cutting through the national psyche like the band’s two era-defining nights at Knebworth in 1996.

And now, we have a reunion. Tickets for the Oasis comeback tour went on sale on Friday for the pre-sale, and Saturday for the general sale, with fans racing to beat each other the booking queue.

But why reunite now?

There are several reasons – but the financial incentive is surely on the list.

“A deal would’ve been struck early by promoters, and I’ve heard numbers bandied around of the Gallagher brothers earning £50m each,” says Jonathan Dean of the Sunday Times, who first reported the reunion tour. That £50m estimate was made by Birmingham City University about the initial 14 dates.

“I think that is probably true, ticket prices are higher than they used to be.”

But, he notes, figures are difficult to estimate until the full extent of the live shows is known.

“This is being called a world tour, but currently it’s not going further than England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland,” he notes. “It doesn’t go to the rest of Europe, to America, so I think any earnings are completely up in the air until we know how far this tour is going to spread.”

Birmingham City University estimated that the initial dates could, potentially, bring in roughly £400m in ticket sales and other add-ons.

For comparison, Take That’s Progress Live tour in 2011 brought in an estimated $185m (£140m).

The Spice Girls – minus Victoria Beckham – caused Ticketmaster to crash for their 13-date tour in 2019, which earned an estimated $78m (£60m).

Abba were able to launch a hugely successful comeback without even performing live themselves, with the digital avatars used in Abba: Voyage said to be making $2m (£1.5m) in London per week.

But bands – including Oasis – are also presumably attracted to the idea of building their legacy as well as their bank balances.

When Blur played two nights at Wembley last year, critics’ reviews were breathless in their praise.

To some, the Gallaghers’ sudden claims of a truce after years of ferocious barbs might cynically echo the Sex Pistols’ 1996 reunion. Frontman John Lydon admitted at the time that although the band still hated each other they had “found a common cause, and that’s your money”.

But although “money is king here”, says Robin Murray, music editor of Clash magazine, the timing is also arguably “quite natural”.

He notes both Gallagher brothers have just completed their most recent solo musical commitments. “There’s definitely an element of truth to this simply being two people, with a particular bond, being in the right place at the right time.”

Dean notes the Gallaghers are “very rich men anyway”, so there will have been other motivations.

“I think the family thing is key, I just think they’re older, and their ages has made them come together,” he says.

And their long rivalry, with its familial ties and shared legacy, has equally helped bring the band back together, suggests music psychotherapist Katerina Georgiou.

Both Gallaghers have had solo career success. But it’s Liam’s star that has risen the most in recent years. “The brothers spark off each other marvellously and there’s always been that edge of competition,” says Dr Georgiou.

“Of course seeing Liam sell out Knebworth and carry a Definitely Maybe tour on his own will have risen the stakes for Noel and vice versa, as Noel’s movement away from Liam pushed Liam to prove himself to his brother.”

The pair will no doubt benefit from changes to the wider industry landscape. Streaming wasn’t around during Oasis’s heyday, but it has helped them reach new audiences in the intervening years.

Carl Smith, editor at the Official Charts Company, says “the timelessness of Oasis’s material transcends generations and holds up so well in the streaming era”.

It’s echoed by Dean, from the Sunday Times, who says their music is accessible. “What Oasis do is simple, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s songs of escapism and going off and doing your own thing and being free of the drudgery of daily life and work, but done in a simple, slightly raucous, singalong way.”

Before the reunion had even been announced, Spotify said Oasis streams increased by more than 160% globally just on the strength of the rumours.

Another surge following the announcement led to three of the band’s albums going back into the top five on Friday’s official chart, with their greatest hits album increasing by 332%.

Many new Oasis fans are young women – capturing younger fans is crucial for future-proofing the band financially.

Liam’s popularity, in particular, is helping to carry the band’s music for a new generation. Just last week, aged 51, he headlined Reading Festival, a favourite of GCSE and A-Level students.

For all the heady temptations reunions bring artists, they can easily go wrong.

Jennifer Lopez this summer cancelled her greatest hits tour midway through its run over poor ticket sales. Music journalist Michael Cragg, author of 90s and noughties pop book Reach for the Stars, says she had already “flooded the market” with several Netflix projects, making her music feel like “almost like the last thought”.

And the unexpected return of Oasis’s iconic Mancunian contemporaries The Stone Roses in 2011, after a 20-year absence, highlighted the danger of overpromising and underdelivering. Their initial comeback dates were rapturously received, but new singles fell flat and a new album never materialised.

Oasis’s return has, so far, avoided this pitfall, says the Independent’s music editor Roisin O’Connor.

For now, the band haven’t promised the world – they’re gauging reaction to the tour first, a tour which itself was a surprise.

“There’s no indication that they plan on releasing any new music, meaning there isn’t that risk of fans feeling let down if the material didn’t match those earlier albums,” O’Connor says.

But this doesn’t mean the tour isn’t without risk.

There’s a potential threat to Oasis’s working-class credentials, for example. If this tour becomes financially and logistically inaccessible, it could undermine this image.

Standing tickets for the Oasis tour are priced around £150, but premium packages cost up to £506. Some unofficial re-sale tickets are going for £6,000, though the band has warned these could be cancelled.

During Saturday’s sale, “dynamic pricing” on Ticketmaster, where prices rise in line with demand, set some remaining tickets to around £355 plus fees – up from £135 when the sale began.

Tickets to see the band at Knebworth in 1996 cost about £22 – but that doesn’t account for inflation and the new era of tiered pricing.

The pricing concern and clamour for tickets has also led to discussions around gatekeeping.

Some older fans feel they shouldn’t be in competition for tickets with fans who weren’t even alive the first time around. But many counter that music does not belong to anyone, it’s there for all to enjoy.

The cultural impact of the 2025 shows is likely to be huge, suggesting Oasis “have already stamped their foot over next summer”, Dean says.

The fact the band have ruled out playing Glastonbury next year is likely to boost demand of their own tour: fans have been told the only way to see them live is to buy a ticket.

The appeal of the Oasis live shows is further underlined by the prospect of it being the last chance for fans to see them.

“I think this will be viewed as the latest – possibly final – chapter in the Oasis story,” says the Independent’s O’Connor.

“A moment of catharsis for fans who wanted that closure or a chance to see the band for a final time, and hopefully a mending of fences for Noel and Liam after all these years.

“After that, who knows.”

A building has collapsed in Nigeria’s megacity, Lagos, once every two weeks on average so far this year.

Whereas the commercial cost can be calculated, a figure can never be put on the value of the lives lost underneath the rubble.

The gaps among the buildings, replaced by piles of debris, represent a failure of governance as well as giving rise to allegations of contractors trying to cut corners to save money.

There are regulations, there are maintenance schedules, there are inspectors – but the system does not work.

Those responsible are never held to account, and so nothing ever changes.

Lagos, dubbed by one expert who spoke to the BBC as ” the building-collapse capital of Nigeria”, has seen at least 90 buildings falling down in the last 12 years, leaving more than 350 people dead, according to the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria.

One of the most notorious incidents was in 2021.

Sunday Femi was just metres away, in the upmarket suburb of Ikoyi, when a 21-storey block of luxury flats under construction collapsed, killing 42 people.

• Ikoyi collapse: Anger and frustration grow

After the loud crashing sound, he was engulfed in dust.

“Like many, I rushed inside trying to see if I could help some of the people trapped. Sadly I knew some of those who died and I think about it every day,” he says, reflecting on what happened nearly three years ago.

The drinks seller had been speaking to some of the construction workers moments before they entered the building site.

He still works nearby and the chatter among the locals often turns to those events and the possible cause.

Metal sheeting protects the site from prying eyes but mounds of broken concrete can still be seen through the gaps in the gate.

Knocking on the entrance to the ill-fated compound, two fierce-looking security guards opened up and said they had instructions not to allow anybody into the premises except state government officials.

Just as the place is sealed to the public so is the official investigation into the collapse – it has been sitting with the state governor since he received it in 2022.

A list of recommendations has reportedly been drawn up by a panel of experts following the investigation but that also has not been made public.

The BBC has repeatedly asked the Lagos state authorities to see the recommendations, and the report into the Ikoyi building collapse, but neither has been made available.

The coroner, however, has had her say and in 2022 she did not hold back.

In a damning judgment on the deaths, Chief Magistrate Oyetade Komolafe, attributed the building collapse to the irresponsibility and negligence of the government agencies that were supposed to approve and supervise the plans and construction.

Lagos’s population is booming and is now estimated to stand at more than 20 million.

As the city grows so does the demand for housing and commercial property, and it can sometimes feel like a giant building site with construction going on everywhere.

Before work can begin, plans need to be approved by Lagos state’s Physical Planning Permit Agency. Then inspectors from the Lagos State Building Control Agency (LASBCA) are supposed to look at the site as well as check the progress at every stage of construction.

And the Standards Organisation of Nigeria should make sure that only suitable building material gets to the market.

But on many occasions the procedures are not followed.

Inside the LASBCA’s offices everything appears calm – there is no sense of the urgency of the problems or challenges it faces.

Spokesperson Olusegun Olaoye acknowledges the criticism but dismisses allegations that officials have been bribed to issue fake certificates and rather blames a lack of resources.

“At the moment we have about 300 building inspectors and supervisors but we are looking to add to that,” he says.

Experts agree that more supervisors are needed.

Muhammad Danmarya, architect and construction expert, says they should number in their thousands.

“Three hundred is just not right for a state like Lagos. Each local government area should have at least 100 inspectors and supervisors and Lagos has 57 of those areas,” he argues.

“There’s always construction going on everywhere you look, so it’s important that inspection and supervision is going on all the time.”

In the absence of that regime across the state, some less scrupulous companies are getting away with violating building codes, using sub-standard materials and employing poorly trained workers – three of the reasons cited for the high frequency of collapses.

“They just come here to pick us up any time they have a job for us and pay us after we are done,” says labourer Habu Isah, who has worked on construction sites for years.

“I have never undergone any training, I just learned everything on the job.”

But even if violations are identified in the wake of a collapse, the state’s building agency does not take any legal action.

“To my knowledge there haven’t been any prosecutions in the past as far as building collapses in Lagos are concerned,” LASBCA’s Mr Olaoye admits.

“I know the statistics are worrying but there are ongoing efforts to halt the trend.”

Alleged political influence is a barrier to pursuing prosecutions.

“If you are connected to people in power, even if you are the culprit in a building collapse case nothing will happen to you,” says a Lagos state politician, who talked to the BBC on the condition of anonymity.

“We’ve seen it so many times, some of the high-profile cases have to do with structures of highly placed people and they are still roaming around freely.

“In Nigeria when you are rich and connected you can avoid problems easily.”

With 19 building collapses already recorded so far this year by the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency, the final total is likely to be the highest in the past decade.

But lessons may still go unlearnt.

The head of the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria recently said that the country lacked the capacity to properly investigate what is going on.

“We don’t have the expertise, the equipment, and the resources to do so,” said Prof Sadiq Abubakar.

In the meantime, construction workers and others will carry on paying with their lives.

• ‘I’ve been sleeping under a bridge in Lagos for 30 years’
• The Nigerian professor who makes more money welding
• Frustrated Nigerians vow ‘days of rage’ as hardships mount
• Is Nigeria on the right track after a year of Tinubu?

The notion that artificial intelligence could one day take our jobs is a message many of us will have heard in recent years.

But, for Paul Skye Lehrman, that warning has been particularly personal, chilling and unexpected: he heard his own voice deliver it.

In June 2023, Paul and his partner Linnea Sage were driving near their home in New York City, listening to a podcast about the ongoing strikes in Hollywood and how artificial intelligence (AI) could affect the industry.

The episode was of interest because the couple are voice-over performers and – like many other creatives – fear that human-sounding voice generators could soon be used to replace them.

This particular podcast had a unique hook – they interviewed an AI-powered chat bot, equipped with text-to-speech software, to ask how it thought the use of AI would affect jobs in Hollywood.

But, when it spoke, it sounded just like Mr Lehrman.

“We needed to pull the car over,” he said.

“The irony that AI is coming for the entertainment industry, and here is my voice talking about the potential destruction of the industry, was really quite shocking.”

That night they spent hours online, searching for clues until they came across the site of text-to-speech platform Lovo. Once there, Ms Sage said she found a copy of her voice as well.

“I was stunned,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

“A tech company stole our voices, made AI clones of them, and sold them possibly hundreds of thousands of times.”

They have now filed a lawsuit against Lovo. The firm has not yet responded to that or the BBC’s requests for comment.

But how was Lovo able to recreate their voices? The couple alleges it was done under false pretences.

Lovo co-founder Tom Lee has previously said its voice-cloning software only needs a user to read about 50 sentences to create a faithful clone.

“We can capture the tone, the character, the style, the phonemes, and even if you have an accent, we can capture that as well,” he told the Future Visionaries podcast in 2021.

In their lawsuit, the couple set out how they say Lovo obtained just such a recording from them.

They allege anonymous Lovo employees contacted them to record audio assets on Fiverr, the popular freelance talent website, where they were selling their services to provide audio for television, radio, video games, and other media.

First, in 2019, Ms Sage says a user reached out asking for her to record dozens of generic sounding test radio scripts.

Test recordings are often used in film and television for focus groups, internal meetings, or as placeholders for works in progress. Because they won’t be shared broadly, these recordings cost much less than audio meant for broadcast.

Ms Sage says she completed the job, delivered the files, and was paid $400 (£303).

About six months later, Mr Lehrman says he got a similar request to record dozens of generic sounding radio ads.

In messages the couple have shared with the BBC, the anonymous Fiverr user says the audio will be used for research into “speech synthesis”.

After asking the user to guarantee that the scripts will not be used outside their specific research project, Mr Lehrman asks what the goal of the project is.

“The scripts will not be used for anything else,” the user says, “and I can’t yet tell you the goal, as it’s a confidential work in process sorry haha”.

Mr Lehrman asked if the finished files would be repurposed or used in a different order. The user says the files will be used for research purposes only. Mr Lehrman says he delivered the files and was paid $1200.

The link between the anonymous user and Lovo came, they say, from Lovo itself.

They shared the evidence they had found of their voices being cloned with Lovo – who replied they had done nothing wrong, pointing to the communications between them the anonymous user as evidence they engaged with the couple legally.

“In our careers, we’ve delivered over 100,000 audio assets,” Mr Lehrman said, of their work on Fiverr over the better part of a decade.

“We were able to find this needle in a haystack – they gave us this needle in a haystack.”

In both cases, both Mr Lehrman and Ms Sage say they did not have a written contract, just these conversations. The BBC has not been able to verify the entirety of their conversations. The couple say the user they spoke with also appears to have deleted some messages.

The BBC contacted Lovo on several occasions to request an interview with Mr Lee and to seek a response to the couple’s claims. They did not respond to any of our messages.

The lawsuit the couple filed in May alleges that Lovo used recordings of their voices to create copies that illegally compete with Ms Sage and Mr Lehrman’s real voices.

The couple say the company did so without permission or proper compensation.

It is a class action lawsuit – meaning they are hoping other claimants will join it, though none have so far.

Professor Kristelia Garcia, an expert in intellectual property law at Georgetown University in Washington DC says the case is likely to centre on an area of US law called rights of publicity.

Sometimes referred to as personality rights, violations of one’s publicity often come from misuse or misrepresentation of someone’s image or voice.

She also says there could likely be a breach of contract regarding the licences Ms Sage and Mr Lehrman granted the user who commissioned the recordings.

“Licences are permission for a very specific and narrow use. I might give you a licence to use my swimming pool one afternoon, but that doesn’t mean you can come whenever you want and have a party in my swimming pool,” she told the BBC.

“That would exceed the terms of the licence.”

Whatever the outcome of the case, it is another in a long list of lawsuits brought by artists, authors, illustrators, and musicians who don’t want to lose control of their work and livelihood.

And they are likely to just be the tip of the iceberg. This week the financial firm Klarna said it planned to use AI to halve its workforce.

Some experts predict 40% of all jobs will eventually be impacted by AI

For Mr Lehrman and Ms Sage though that worrying future is playing out now.

“This whole experience has felt so surreal,” Ms Sage said.

“When we thought about artificial intelligence, we were thinking of AI folding our laundry and making us dinner, not pursuing human being’s creative endeavours.”

A man in Singapore who attempted to frame his estranged wife by planting cannabis in her car has been sentenced to almost four years in jail.

Tan Xianglong, 37, planted what he thought was more than half a kilo of cannabis between the rear passenger seats of his wife’s car, assuming it was enough to warrant the death penalty for drug trafficking.

Singapore has some of the world’s toughest anti-drug laws, which the government says are necessary to deter drug-related crimes.

Less than half of the substance Tan planted turned out to be cannabis, though. The rest was filler.

Tan “intended to scare the involved party and to also get her in trouble with the law,” according to court documents.

“He understood that the involved party would be wrongly arrested and charged with a serious crime if his plan succeeded.”

He was sentenced on Thursday to three years and 10 months in prison for cannabis possession. The court also considered a second charge of illegal planting of evidence.

Tan and his wife married in 2021 and separated a year later. They could not file for divorce because Singapore allows it only for couples who have been married for at least three years.

Tan believed he might be granted to exception to that rule if his wife had a criminal record.

In Telegram chats with his girlfriend last year, he said he had hatched the “perfect crime” to frame his wife.

On 16 October, he bought a brick of cannabis from a Telegram chat group, weighing it to make sure it exceeded 500g (1.1lbs), and placed it in her car the next day.

What Tan seemingly didn’t account for was the fact that his wife’s car was equipped with a camera, which sent her a phone notification alerting her to a “parking impact”.

When she checked the live footage, she saw her estranged husband walking around her vehicle and reported him to the police for harassment.

In the course of their investigation, police searched the car, found the drugs and arrested Tan’s wife.

But after finding no incriminating evidence against her, they then turned their investigation towards Tan himself, and arrested him.

Tan’s lawyer tried to argue that he was suffering from depression when he committed the crime, but the court rejected this, citing doctors’ findings that he was not suffering from any mental disorder.

Depending on the substance and the amount seized, drug possession in Singapore is punishable by imprisonment while drug trafficking can be punishable by death.

Although Tan was liable to be sentenced to five years in prison, he got a lower term because he co-operated in the proceedings and pleaded guilty early in the trial, according to court documents.

Last year, Singapore executed two convicted drug traffickers over a five-month period, defying opposition from international human rights groups.

The first families have begun to trickle out of Jenin camp, sealed off for almost four days by an Israeli military operation.

There was fierce fighting inside the camp on Saturday, with battles reportedly taking place in the central Damaj neighbourhood, where armed groups have a strong presence, as well as near the camp entrances.

Out of the gunfire, under the constant buzzing of military drones, the figures of several women and children threaded past Israeli army vehicles. Alone on the deserted road, among the military trucks, they looked small and out of place.

Oruba Shalabi, scared, distressed, and carrying her two-month-old daughter, told us what they had experienced inside the camp.

“They were firing at us and throwing hand-grenades at homes,” she said. “Half our home was blown up. We were hiding in the kitchen and shouting to tell them that we have a baby.”

Oruba says she went to the doorstep to tell them that the children in the house were afraid and struggling to breathe from the smoke.

“They told us we had two minutes to go out,” she said. “They checked our phones and IDs, made us stand in the sun for half an hour, then told us to walk straight ahead.”

Oruba left on foot, just as she was, with her mother, aunt, sister and niece. It’s the first time they have been able to leave their home since Tuesday night.

“There was no electricity or water [in the camp],” she said. “They were shooting at anyone coming close to the windows. All our neighbours were forced out and we were all put in one room. They got the young men to sit on the floor and tied them up.”

The fighting in Jenin intensified on Saturday. The Palestinian Red Crescent has said there are at least two bodies inside the camp they have been unable to retrieve. The Palestinian health ministry has said one of them is an elderly man.

There are also unconfirmed reports of Israeli army casualties. A statement from one of the armed groups – al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade – claimed its fighters had engaged soldiers in an ambush in Damaj.

Israel’s operation this week began with incursions into several cities and refugee camps in the north of the occupied West Bank. Over the past three days, the focus of that operation has narrowed to Jenin, as troops have pulled out of Tulkarem and Tubas.

Early on Friday morning, the Israeli army confronted and killed the man it says headed Hamas in Jenin, Wissam Khazem, along with two other men it said were wanted for shooting attacks.

But this operation is still ongoing, with reports that Israeli forces are moving deep inside the camp to search house-to-house for other wanted men.

Israel says it has killed 20 armed fighters in the operation and recovered weapons including M16 rifles and explosive devices.

The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah says that 20 people have been killed across the West Bank. The head of the UN agency dealing with Palestinian refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, says children are among them.

One of those killed is an 82-year-old man whose body was found with nine bullet wounds on Friday, a paramedic told the BBC.

Israel says this is a counter-terrorism operation to dismantle armed Palestinian groups, which it believes are backed by Iran.

An attempted bomb attack in Tel Aviv earlier this month has also sparked alarm in Israel that the threat of suicide attacks in Israeli cities will resurface.

Overnight, Israel’s army said there were two attempted attacks on settlements in the southern part of the West Bank. Its chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, said the ongoing operation in Jenin was aimed at preventing exactly these kinds of attacks.

Tensions over the Gaza War – and repeated military incursions into the West Bank – are changing attitudes and tactics here on both sides. The risk is that they will push the conflict here into a new and more dangerous phase.

An extensive search for an Indian woman who disappeared into a pavement sinkhole in Kuala Lumpur hit a snag on its eighth day, as authorities now say it is “too risky” to continue deploying divers.

The incident has gripped Malaysia, with some 110 rescuers working around the clock this past week in search of Vijaya Lakshmi Gali, 48.

But apart from a pair of slippers found in an initial 17-hour search, their efforts have been unsuccessful.

Two divers who entered via a sewer network at 04:00 local time on Friday (21:00 GMT Thursday) were confronted with strong water currents and hard debris, the Fire and Rescue Department said.

The pair, comprising a firefighter and a sewer worker, also had to “lie flat” as the space was narrow, according to the department’s director-general Nor Hisham Mohammad.

“It was found to be impossible, extremely difficult, to break the solidified [debris] which are like concrete blocks,” he told reporters on Friday.

“Even [when we tried] pulling at them with ropes using up to eight people, [it] was unsuccessful.”

Divers who earlier descended into the sewer in full scuba gear said they had to fight zero visibility and heavy rain.

“When going down into the hole… it was really scary, but this is indeed the duty of a firefighter; we have to overcome the fear and surrender to God,” firefighter Alimaddia Bukri told local newspaper Simar Harian earlier this week.

“It is pitch black in that pipe,” another diver told The Straits Times on Wednesday.

“You don’t want to know what’s in there. It’s full of human waste and other garbage. We decontaminate immediately after each dive.”

Ms Gali, who was visiting from India’s Andhra Pradesh state, was reportedly heading towards a nearby temple with her family when she was swallowed by the 8m (26ft) deep sinkhole on the street of Jalan Masjid India.

Excavators were deployed shortly after the incident to dig up the area around the sinkhole, while rescuers used sniffer dogs and crawler cameras – robotic cameras used to inspect pipes – to get a better sense of what was happening underground.

They have also tried to break apart hardened debris using high-pressure water jets, iron hooks and rope.

On Tuesday, officials wheeled a ground-penetrating radar device onto the site, to help them pinpoint changes in material density underground.

The next day, a second sinkhole appeared just 50m from the first one. A Malaysian geologist, speaking to local newspaper Malaysiakini, attributed it to the ongoing search and rescue operation.

Search efforts in the last few days have focused on clearing a 15m blockage in the sewer lines below Wisma Yakin, an office building about 44m from the first sinkhole.

Reports said the blockage was made of human waste, tyres, hair and solidified used cooking oil, among other things.

Some parts of Jalan Masjid India have been cordoned off as the search continues.

The area, normally popular with tourists, has become unusually quiet in the last few days. Traders have experienced a 50% to 70% drop in sales, with some considering closures to cut their losses, according to local reports.

The Malaysian government has extended the visas for Ms Gali’s family for a month while they await news of her whereabouts. They were due to return to India last Saturday.

Kuala Lumpur’s City Hall has also cancelled National Day celebrations out of respect for the family.

The incident has sparked fear and anger among Malaysians, many of whom are questioning what might have caused the sinkhole.

Authorities said they would carry out an “integrity audit” to determine the cause. An official from the Minerals and Geosciences Department said initial observations suggested it could have been due to a combination of human activities and climate change.

A drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity could also slow down the process of ageing, researchers believe.

Semaglutide, better known as Ozempic, “has far-reaching benefits beyond what we initially imagined,” Prof Harlan Krumholz, from the Yale School of Medicine, said following the publication of several new studies.

They found that the drug could be used to treat a wide range of illnesses linked to heart failure, arthritis, Alzheimer’s and even cancer.

“It wouldn’t surprise me that improving people’s health this way actually slows down the ageing process,” Prof Krumholz was quoted on Friday as telling the European Society of Cardiology Conference 2024, where the studies were presented.

The new data has been published in a number of medical journals, including the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), which Prof Krumholz edits.

“These ground-breaking medications are poised to revolutionise cardiovascular care and could dramatically enhance cardiovascular health,” he said.

The studies – part of the Select trial – tracked more than 17,600 people, aged 45 or older, as they were given either 2.4 mg of semaglutide or a placebo for more than three years.

Participants were obese or overweight and had cardiovascular disease but not diabetes.

Those who took the drug died at a lower rate from all causes, including cardiovascular issues and Covid-19, researchers found.

People using the weight-loss drug were just as likely to catch Covid but they were less likely to die from it, with 2.6% dying among those on semaglutide compared with 3.1% on the placebo.

And while women experienced fewer major adverse cardiovascular events, the drug “consistently reduced the risk” of adverse cardiovascular outcomes regardless of sex.

It also improved heart failure symptoms and cut levels of inflammation in the body regardless of whether or not people lost weight.

Dr Benjamin Scirica, lead author of one of the studies and a professor of cardiovascular medicine at Harvard Medical School, said the findings “reinforce that overweight and obesity increases the risk of death due to many etiologies”.

But, he told the PA news agency, this “can be modified with potent incretin-based therapies like semaglutide”.

The medication is a prescription drug offered by the NHS, which supresses appetite and is sold under the brand names Wegovy – used to treat obesity – and Ozempic, for diabetes.

It comes in the form of an injection and mimics the hormone GLP-1, making people feel fuller and less hungry.

Experts have warned in the past that the drug is not a quick fix or a replacement for eating well and exercising, and should only be offered under medical supervision.

Like any medication, there can be side effects and risks – the most common being nausea, an upset stomach, bloating and gas.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked the commander of Ukraine’s air force amid debate over the destruction of one of the country’s valuable new F-16 fighter jets.

Mr Zelensky did not specify the reason for dismissing Lt Gen Mykola Oleshchuk, but said he had a responsibility to “take care of all our warriors”.

The US-made F-16 – one of several delivered earlier this month by Ukraine’s Western allies – went down on Monday, killing the pilot.

Even though it happened during a barrage of Russian missiles, Ukraine said the cause of the crash was not a direct result of an enemy strike, and Lt Gen Oleshchuk sparred with some politicians over who was to blame for the loss.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and has seized a large part of territory in the east of the country.

But Ukraine also launched a surprise incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region early this month – and says its troops have been advancing deeper into Russia.

In response, Russia has intensified its attacks across Ukraine.

On Friday, a 14-year-old girl was killed after a Russian guided bomb hit a playground in the north-eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, local officials say.

At least six other people were killed and 59 injured as a 12-storey residential building was also hit in the city which is close to the Russian border.

President Zelensky renewed his calls for all Ukraine’s international partners to allow it to hit targets inside Russia to prevent such attacks.

His office said Moscow’s forces had fired more than 400 drones and missiles at Ukraine over the past week.

In a post on Telegram, Mr Zelensky said he had decided to replace Lt Gen Oleschuk, noting that “at the command level, we must strengthen ourselves and protect our people”.

Ukraine’s air force earlier named the killed pilot as Col Oleksiy Mes.

“He fought heroically his last battle in the skies,” it said, adding that he had shot down three cruise missiles and a drone on 26 August.

Col Mes, whose call sign was Moonfish, was one of Ukraine’s most experienced pilots. He had been trained abroad for F-16 missions.

Lt Gen Anatolii Kryvonozhko was appointed interim commander of Ukraine’s air force, the army’s general staff said in a statement. He previously oversaw the central air command, leading operations in the centre of the country.

He takes charge as officials have clashed over the loss of the F-16 jet, which has ignited fierce debate in Ukraine.

Ukrainian politician Mariana Bezuhla, who sits on a parliamentary defence committee, claimed on Thursday that the jet was downed by Ukraine’s Patriot air defence system.

Mr Oleshchuk responded earlier on Friday that an investigation was under way and no-one was hiding anything. He accused Ms Bezuhla of discrediting military leadership and said the time would come for an apology.

Around 65 F-16s have been pledged by Nato countries since US President Joe Biden first authorised willing European allies to send them to Ukraine in August 2023.

Mr Zelensky has dismissed several military commanders since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

In February this year, he sacked the commander-in-chief of the country’s armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

And in June, he dismissed Lt Gen Yuriy Sodol after public criticism of excessive casualties and accusations of incompetence.

The US says its military forces in Iraq have killed 15 Islamic State (IS) “operatives” in a joint operation with Iraqi Security Forces that targeted the militant group’s leadership.

US Central Command (Centcom) said it had performed the joint operation in western Iraq early on Thursday.

American and Iraqi troops were met by IS members equipped with “numerous weapons, grenades and explosive ‘suicide’ belts”, it said in a statement. “There is no indication of civilian casualties.”

Meanwhile, US media quoted US defence officials as saying that seven American troops were injured. Centcom has not commented on this.

The Iraqi military said in an earlier statement that “air strikes targeted the hideouts, followed by an airborne operation” in the country’s “desert and caves”.

“All hideouts, weapons, and logistical support were destroyed, explosive belts were safely detonated and important documents, identification papers and communication devices were seized.”

The White House National Security Council and the Pentagon referred the BBC to Centcom for comment.

Centcom said it had targeted members of IS leadership in an effort to “disrupt and degrade” the group’s ability to plan, organise and attack Americans, Iraqis and allies within and outside the region.

There are approximately 2,500 US troops currently in Iraq, though they remain there in an “advise and assist” capacity since the US military announced the end of its combat effort in the country in December 2021.

Iraq announced on 15 August that it would postpone a planned end-date for the US military operations in the country.

Thursday’s operation follows a recent attack in Germany and a plot in Austria that are being investigated for their links to IS.

Authorities said that the suspect behind the planned attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna – a 19-year-old Austrian citizen – had pleged allegiance to the Islamic State before targeting the singer’s Eras tour.

Intelligence provided by the CIA to Austrian authorities allowed them to disrupt the plot and save “hundreds of lives” , the agency’s deputy director David Cohen said on Wednesday.

It also follows an attack in Solingen, Germany, in which three people died and eight others were wounded.

The attack has caused outrage in Germany ahead of state elections, and the murder suspect – Issa Al H, 26 – is being investigated for his links to IS.

Earlier this summer, the militant group took some responsibility for a rare shooting attack near a Shia Muslim mosque in Oman’s capital, Muscat. Six people – including a policeman – were killed and 28 others injured.

The Islamic State once had a strong foothold in Iraq and Syria, but a US-led coalition of more than 70 countries largely drove them out from the physical caliphate they had created there.

The BBC’s Frank Gardner reported in June that intelligence-sharing between police forces and security agencies had largely quelled IS’s co-ordinated attacks in European cities.

But the jihadist propaganda it continues to produce online still has the ability to motivate extremists who are radicalised by it, he reported.

A senior Whitehall official in London described the status of the group as “down but not out”.

The man who walked out into the rain in Dhaka hadn’t seen the sun in more than five years.

Even on a cloudy day, his eyes struggled to adjust after half a decade locked in a dimly lit room, where his days had been spent listening to the whirr of industrial fans and the screams of the tortured.

Standing on the street, he struggled to remember his sister’s telephone number.

More than 200km away, that same sister was reading about the men emerging from a reported detention facility in Bangladesh’s infamous military intelligence headquarters, known as Aynaghor, or “House of Mirrors”.

They were men who had allegedly been “disappeared” under the increasingly autocratic rule of Sheikh Hasina – largely critics of the government who were there one day, and gone the next.

But Sheikh Hasina had now fled the country, unseated by student-led protests, and these men were being released.

In a remote corner of Bangladesh, the young woman staring at her computer wondered if her brother – whose funeral they had held just two years ago, after every avenue to uncover his whereabouts proved fruitless – might be among them?

The day Michael Chakma was forcefully bundled into a car and blindfolded by a group of burly men in April 2019 in Dhaka, he thought it was the end.

He had come to authorities’ attention after years of campaigning for the rights of the people of Bangladesh’s south-eastern Chittagong Hill region – a Buddhist group which makes up just 2% of Bangladesh’s 170m-strong, mostly Muslim population.

He had, according to rights group Amnesty International, been staunchly vocal against abuses committed by the military in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and has campaigned for an end to military rule in the region.

A day after he was abducted, he was thrown into a cell inside the House of Mirrors, a building hidden inside the compound the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) used in the capital Dhaka.

It was here they gathered local and foreign intelligence, but it would become known as somewhere far more sinister.

The small cell he was kept in, he said, had no windows and no sunlight, only two roaring exhaust fans.

After a while “you lose the sense of time and day”, he recalls.

“I used to hear the cries of other prisoners, though I could not see them, their howling was terrifying.”

The cries, as he would come to know himself, came from his fellow inmates – many of whom were also being interrogated.

“They would tie me to a chair and rotate it very fast. Often, they threatened to electrocute me. They asked why I was criticising Ms Hasina,” Mr Chakma says.

Outside the detention facility, for Minti Chakma the shock of her brother’s disappearance was being replaced with panic.

“We went to several police stations to enquire, but they said they had no information on him and he was not in their custody,” she recalls. “Months passed and we started getting panicky. My father was also getting unwell.”

A massive campaign was launched to find Michael, and Minti filed a writ petition in the High Court in 2020.

Nothing brought any answers.

“The whole family went through a lot of trauma and agony. It was terrible not knowing the whereabouts of my brother,” she says.

Then in August 2020, Michael’s father died during Covid. Some 18 months later, the family decided that Michael must have died as well.

“We gave up hope,” Minti says, simply. “So as per our Buddhist tradition we decided to do hold his funeral so that the soul can be freed from his body. With a heavy heart we did that. We all cried a lot.”

Rights groups in Bangladesh say they have documented about 600 cases of alleged enforced disappearances since 2009, the year Sheikh Hasina was elected.

In the years that followed, Sheikh Hasina’s government would be accused of targeting their critics and dissenters in an attempt to stifle any dissent which posed a threat to their rule – an accusation she and the government always denied.

Some of the so-called disappeared were eventually released or produced in court, others were found dead. Human Rights Watch says nearly 100 people remain missing.

Rumours of secret prisons run by various Bangladeshi security agencies circulated among families and friends. Minti watched videos detailing the disappearances, praying her brother was in custody somewhere.

But the existence of such a facility in the capital was only revealed following an investigation by Netra News in May 2022.

The report found it was inside the Dhaka military encampment, right in the heart of the city. It also managed to get hold of first-hand accounts from inside the building – many of which tally with Michael’s description of being held in a cell without sunlight.

The descriptions also echo those of Maroof Zaman, a former Bangladeshi ambassador to Qatar and Vietnam, who was first detained in the House of Mirrors in December 2017.

His interview with the BBC is one of the few times he has spoken of his 15-month ordeal: as part of his release, he agreed with officials not to speak publicly.

Like others who have spoken of what happened behind the complex’s walls, he was fearful of what might happen if he did. The detainee who spoke openly to Netra News in 2022 only did so because he was no longer in Bangladesh.

Maroof Zaman has only felt safe to speak out since Sheikh Hasina fled – and her government collapsed – on 5 August.

He describes how he too was held in a room without sunlight, while two noisy exhaust fans drowned out any sound coming from outside.

The focus of his interrogations were on the articles he had written alleging corruption at the heart of government. Why, the men wanted to know, was he writing articles alleging “unequal agreements” signed with India by Ms Hasina, that favoured Delhi.

“For the first four-and-a-half months, it was like a death zone,” he says. “I was constantly beaten, kicked and threatened at gunpoint. It was unbearable, I thought only death will free me from this torture.”

But unlike Michael, he was moved to a different building.

“For the first time in months I heard the sound of the birds. Oh, it was so good, I cannot describe that feeling,” Maroof recounted.

He was eventually released following a campaign by his daughters and supporters in late March 2019 – a month before Michael found himself thrown into a cell.

Few believe that enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings could have been carried out without the knowledge of the top leadership.

But while people like Mr Chakma were languishing in secret jails for years, Ms Hasina, her ministers and her international affairs advisor Gowher Rizvi were flatly rejecting allegations of abductions.

Ms Hasina’s son, Sajeed Wazed Joy, has continued to reject the allegations, instead turning the blame on “some of our law enforcement leadership [who] acted beyond the law”.

“I absolutely agree that it’s completely illegal. I believe that those orders did not come from the top. I had no knowledge of this. I am shocked to hear it myself,” he told the BBC.

There are those who raise their eyebrows at the denial.

Alongside Michael, far higher profile people emerged from the House of Mirrors – including two senior members of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami, a retired brigadier, Abdullahi Aman Azmi and Barrist Ahmed Bin Quasem. Both had spent about eight years in secret incarceration.

What is clear is that the re-emergence of people like the politicians, and Michael, shows “the urgency for the new authorities in Bangladesh to order and ensure that the security forces to disclose all places of detention and account for those who have been missing”, according to Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the UN Human Rights office in Geneva.

Bangladesh’s interim government agreed: earlier this week, it established a five-member commission to investigate cases of enforced disappearances by security agencies during Ms Hasina’s rule since 2009.

And those who have survived the ordeal want justice.

“We want the perpetrators to be punished. All the victims and their families should be compensated,” Maroof Zaman said.

Back on the street outside the House of Mirrors – just two days after Sheikh Hasina fled to India – Michael was struggling to decide what to do. He had only been told about his release 15 minutes before. It was a lot to take in.

“I forgot the last two digits of my sister’s phone number,” he says. “I struggled a lot to remember that, but I couldn’t. Then I called a relative who informed them.”

But Minti already knew: she had seen the news on Facebook.

“I was ecstatic,” she recalls through tears two weeks later. “Next day, he called me, I saw him on that video phone call after five years. We were all crying. I couldn’t recognise him.”

Last week, she saw him in person for the first time in five years: weaker, traumatised – but alive.

“His voice sounds different,” she says.

Michael, meanwhile, is dealing with the long term health implications of being held in the dark for so long.

“I cannot look at contacts or phone numbers properly, it’s a blurred vision. I am getting treatment, and the doctor is giving me spectacles.”

More than that, there is coming to terms with what he has missed. He was told of his father’s death a few days after his release.

And yet, amid the pain, he is hopeful – even happy.

“It’s more than a new lease of life, a resurrection. It feels like I was dead and have come back to life again. I cannot describe this feeling.”

It has been described as the “most invasive species” to ever hit Thailand – one which risks enormous damage to the environment, according to officials.

Attempts to control it have seen crowds wading out into lakes, and genetic modification.

And yet the blackchin tialapia continues to spread through Thailand’s waterways, so far impacting 17 provinces.

An investigation in parliament has aimed to uncover the cause and its proponent, with Bangkok MP Nattacha Boonchaiinsawat declaring: “We will not pass a devastated ecosystem to the next generation.”

So can Thai authorities win the battle – and how exactly did this West African fish end up causing havoc half a world away?

Thailand had experienced outbreaks of blackchin tilapia in the past, but none has been as widespread as this most recent episode.

Mr Nattacha estimates that this particular outbreak is going to cost Thai economy at least 10 billion baht ($293m; £223m).

The core problem is that the blackchin tilapia prey on small fish, shrimp, and snail larvae, which are among Thailand’s important aquaculture products.

So for months now, the government has encouraged people to catch blackchin tilapia, which have found their way in rivers and swamps. The fish thrive in brackish water, but can also survive in fresh and salt water.

The Thai government has also doubled the amount that it will pay people who catch the fish, to 15 baht ($0.42; £0.33) per kilogram. The result? In Bangkok’s suburbs, crowds have waded in knee-deep waters hoping to catch blackchin tilapia with their plastic basins.

Authorities have also released the blackchin tilapia’s predators – Asian seabass and long-whiskered catfish – to hunt them down.

However, they are battling a species which reproduces at speed: females are able to produce 500 fingerlings at a time.

And so authorities have also gone to the extent of developing genetically-modified blackchin tilapia that would produce sterile offspring, planning to release them as early as the end of this year, in the hopes of stopping their population from exploding further.

But Mr Nattacha told BBC Thai the government needed to do even more.

“Who will win?” he wondered. “We need the people to follow the case closely, otherwise this matter will be quiet, and we will pass on this kind of environment to the next generation.”

So how exactly did this fish – easily identifiable thanks to the black spots on their chins and cheeks – come to be in Thailand?

One theory that parliament has looked into is that an experiment by food behemoth Charoen Pokphand Food (CPF) 14 years ago had caused the spread.

The company, which produces animal feed and runs shrimp and livestock farms, imported 2,000 from Ghana in late 2010. It said all the fish died and were buried properly.

Two years later, outbreaks of blackchin tilapia were reported in Thailand, including the area of a CPF laboratory, according to local broadcaster Thai PBS.

But CPF – the agribusiness arm of one of Thailand’s largest conglomerate, Charoen Pokphand Group (CP Group) – has rejected the allegations. It has also threatened to sue those spreading what it calls “misinformation” on the matter.

It is co-operating with state agencies fighting the spread of the alien species.

“Although the company is confident that it is not the cause of the outbreak, it is not indifferent and is ready to cooperate with the government to alleviate the suffering of the people,” said Premsak Wanuchsoontorn, CPF’s aquaculture and research development officer.

However, CPF officials have attended parliament hearings in person only once. They have previously given their explanation to lawmakers in writing.

The director-general of Thailand’s Department of Fisheries, Bancha Sukkaew, notes only one private company had sought permission to import blackchin tilapia.

He told the BBC that there was a possibility that some escaped from the laboratory.

However, he is also not discounting the possibility that the invasive fish species could have been smuggled into Thailand.

In the end, though, how they came to be in Thai waterways is the past – the problem is the future, and getting the outbreak under control. But is it possible?

Experts told BBC Thai that the battle against the blackchin tilapia could be a losing one.

“I don’t see the possibility of eradicating it,” said Dr Suwit Wuthisuthimethavee, an expert in aquatic animal genetics at Walailak University.

“Because we cannot limit its range. When it is in nature, it reproduces continuously, has a fast reproductive cycle,” Dr Suwit added.

Nonn Panitvong, an expert in freshwater ecosystems, agreed.

“The problem with alien species is that once they are established, they are very difficult to eradicate,” he said.

Russia has made sweeping advances in recent days that threaten to outweigh the gains made by Ukraine in its cross-border attack into the Kursk region.

Russian forces are just a few kilometres from the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a crucial logistics hub used by the Ukrainian military.

Home to a key railway station and major roads, Pokrovsk is an essential supply and reinforcement point for Ukraine’s troops on the eastern front line.

Critics in Kyiv fear that the country’s military has made a serious miscalculation.

By sending troops into Kursk instead of reinforcing the eastern frontline, the military has left Pokrovsk and other important Ukrainian towns exposed, these critics say.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

On a visit to the front line, Ukraine’s armed forces chief Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi said Russia was throwing “everything that can move” into its assault.

“The situation is extremely difficult,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky conceded on Wednesday.

“If we lose Pokrovsk,” military expert Mykhaylo Zhyrokhov warned, “the entire front line will crumble.”

Pokrovsk is next to another town, Myrnohrad. Together, the two settlements had a pre-war population of over 100,000, most of whom have now fled. They are the last major cities in that part of the Donetsk region that remain under Ukrainian control.

The battle for Pokrovsk is really a continuation of the battle for Avdiivka, which Ukraine lost in February after months of bloody fighting.

Avdiivka, which is about 40km (25 miles) south-east of Pokrovsk, was seen as a fortress that protected the settlements and roads to its west – helping to bolster Ukraine’s presence along the entire frontline.

When it finally fell, Avdiivka was left in ruins. It was a serious loss for Ukraine.

It meant that Russia could move its focus to Pokrovsk and the key hilltop town of Chasiv Yar, which overlooks some of the important cities in Donetsk still under Ukrainian control. Intense fighting there on Saturday left five people dead.

For weeks now a mass evacuation of Ukrainian civilians from Pokrovsk has been under way, with thousands said to have left already.

Gen Syrskyi said he was working “to strengthen the defence of our troops in the most difficult areas of the front, to provide the brigades with a sufficient amount of ammunition and other material and technical means”.

Russia has long held Pokrovsk as one of its key objectives. For months its forces have slowly ground towards it.

Experts believe Moscow has deployed around one third of its Central Army Group, or about 30,000 troops, to the offensive – as well as its most battle-ready reserves.

This week, it took the Ukrainian town of Novohrodivka, infuriating some in Ukraine who felt it should have been better defended.

“The trenches in front of Novohrodivka were empty. There was practically no Ukrainian army in the once 20,000-strong city,” Ukrainian MP Mariana Bezuhla wrote on Facebook.

With its forces undermanned and outnumbered, it is believed the Ukrainian military withdrew from Novohrodivka to strengthen its defence of Pokrovsk.

“The Ukrainian command likely deemed the defence of Novohrodivka not worth the potential losses,” said the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Elsewhere, Russian forces have launched assaults on the town of Selidove, just south of Novohrodivka, and other areas of the Donetsk region nearby.

The Russian offensive has been helped by a shift in tactics, which are increasingly mirroring those used earlier in the war by the Wagner mercenary group.

Ukrainian forces report coming up against wave after wave of Russian infantry sent forwards in an attempt to storm their positions.

Some have dubbed these tactics “meat assaults”.

The tactics – though costly – quickly exhaust Ukrainian units forced to fend off constant attacks.

Armoured vehicles are used sparingly – complicating the task of Ukrainian tanks and artillery, which have little to aim at on the battlefield.

Russia has also been using powerful glide bombs, forcing Ukraine to disperse its units when shelling begins and sometimes even withdraw troops from the front line.

Meanwhile, the progress of Ukraine’s landmark cross-border offensive has slowed considerably in the past week.

Sudzha – the largest settlement Ukraine has captured inside Russia – has a population of around 5,000, which is three times less than that of Novohrodivka, the settlement Russia captured earlier this week.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s commander in chief said that Kyiv’s forces had taken 1,294 sq km (500 sq miles) of territory inside Kursk, including 100 settlements – and captured 594 Russian soldiers in the process.

These figures should be treated with caution, but they are no doubt significant. The question is whether they will justify the potential losses on Ukraine’s eastern frontline.

“One of the objectives of the offensive operation in the Kursk direction was to divert significant enemy forces from other directions, primarily from the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove directions,” Gen Syrskyi said on Tuesday.

But that objective appears to have failed. Russian forces have not been redeployed from the Pokrovsk frontline.

On the contrary they’ve been strengthened by additional troops and their advance has quickened.

Vice-President Kamala Harris is criticising former president Donald Trump over a recent controversy involving his campaign at Arlington National Cemetery, saying the military burial site is “not a place for politics”.

Ms Harris took aim at Trump on Saturday in a post on social media, writing that he “disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt”.

The US Army said a Trump staffer “abruptly pushed aside” a cemetery employee who was trying to warn his team about rules against filming in the cemetery.

The Trump campaign has disputed the cemetery’s version of events and said it received permission from the families of the fallen soldiers to film.

The incident happened on Monday, when Trump was at an event honouring 13 US military service members who were killed during the country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.

Saturday’s post marks the first time Ms Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, has commented on the controversy.

She wrote that she has visited Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia several times during her tenure as vice-president, and she would never use the site for political gain.

“If there is one thing on which we as Americans can all agree, it is that our veterans, military families, and service members should be honored, never disparaged, and treated with nothing less than our highest respect and gratitude,” Ms Harris said.

“And it is my belief that someone who cannot meet this simple, sacred duty should never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States of America.”

At a campaign rally in Michigan on Thursday, Trump hit back at those who had criticised him over the incident.

He said he had been asked to pose for a photo at the site after the memorial by family members of the soldiers who had died.

“I go there, they ask me to have a picture and they say I was campaigning,” Trump said. “The one thing I get plenty of is publicity. I don’t need that. I don’t need the publicity.”

Trump’s running mate JD Vance used the controversy to attack the Biden administration over its handling of the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying that Ms Harris “can go to hell”.

“Three years ago, 13 brave, innocent Americans died, and they died because Kamala Harris refused to do her job,” Mr Vance said on Wednesday in response to questions from BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

NPR reported earlier that two members of Trump’s campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the cemetery worker aside when she tried to intervene.

Federal law prevents use of the cemetery for political campaigning and the US Army said participants were warned of the rules in advance.

A US Army spokesperson said on Thursday that “the incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked.”

The Trump campaign has denied that a physical altercation took place at the cemetery, adding “we are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made”.

House Democrats have since asked the US Army for a report into the incident, asking for a “full account” of what happened.

In early August, Pablo González was taken from a prison in Poland and flown to Moscow on a plane carrying Russian deep-cover agents, hackers and a hitman for the FSB intelligence service.

The group was met at the airport by a military guard, red carpet and Vladimir Putin – thanking them for their loyal service to the country.

Video footage from that night in Moscow shows Mr González smiling as he shakes hands with President Putin at the foot of the plane steps. Black-bearded, with a shaven and shiny head, he’s wearing a Star Wars T-shirt that declares “Your Empire Needs You”.

Known by his Russian friends as “Pablo, the Basque journalist”, the 42-year-old was part of a major prisoner swap for Westerners held in Russian jails and Russian dissidents.

In the group freed by Vladimir Putin were two opposition activists Mr González was accused of spying on.

He’d been arrested in Poland in 2022 for alleged espionage.

“I got my first suspicions in 2019. It just dawned on me,” Zhanna Nemtsova tells me, in the first interview she’s given about the man who spied on her.

The two met in 2016 at an event about the investigation into her father’s murder. Boris Nemtsov, a staunch opponent of Vladimir Putin, had been assassinated a year earlier, right beside the Kremlin.

His daughter – herself a vocal Putin critic – eventually moved to Europe for safety.

That day in Strasbourg, Pablo González asked Ms Nemtsova for an interview for a newspaper in the Basque region. She refused, at first. But the journalist – Spanish, with Russian roots – gradually became something of a fixture in her circle: attending events, taping interviews, mingling.

Looking back, Ms Nemtsova remembers becoming wary.

“I shared my suspicions with a couple of people and they were like, ‘No, this is nonsense!’ People regard you as crazy if you bring up some things. They can think you paranoid.

“But I was absolutely right.”

That’s why she’s decided to speak out openly now.

“I want other people to be very careful,” Zhanna Nemtsova explains. “The threat is not something you can just read in books or watch at the movies. It’s very close.”

Mr González was only formally charged with espionage a week after he left Poland, flown to Moscow as part of the August prisoner swap. By then, he’d spent well over two years locked up, awaiting trial.

All along, Polish prosecutors have deflected questions about the case and the process. Intelligence sources remain tight-lipped. The Polish lawyer who first represented Mr González says he can’t comment.

By the time of his arrest, Mr González had been living in Warsaw for at least three years, much of that time with his Polish girlfriend. He was a freelance journalist, working mostly for Spanish-language press.

He reported from the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and travelled to Ukraine. At some point, he joined a media trip to Syria run by the Russian defence ministry, always very selective about who it takes.

It was in 2022 that he was detained, briefly, in Ukraine, though the SBU security service there won’t divulge any details. Then, on 28 February, Mr González was arrested in Przemysl, eastern Poland, where he was part of the media pack covering the start of Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine.

The trigger for the arrest has not been made public.

Last year, Zhanna Nemtsova was shown evidence of Mr González’s activity as part of the criminal investigation.

“I have no doubt he was a spy. I am sure, 100%,” she told me this week.

Ms Nemtsova is banned by a non-disclosure agreement from sharing details of the evidence. As a result, she’s had to watch people continue to profess that Mr González is innocent.

“It’s scary. We shouldn’t downplay this. These people have no moral scruples. They regard you as their enemies,” she warns, referring to Russian intelligence agents.

Although Ms Nemtsova says she never trusted Mr González as a true friend, he did manage to insert himself into her circle. He was informing on the group from the start, she says.

“He can be very charming, he knows how to communicate with people, make them feel at ease.”

Her ex-husband, Pavel Elizarov, agrees. He and Mr González were “quite close for some period of time”. He would visit him in Spain, talk politics and do tourism. He introduced others to his friend.

Ilya Yashin, another prominent activist, went to football matches with Mr González in Spain and even coat shopping. When Mr González was released in the prisoner swap, Mr Yashin was one of the trades: he’d been imprisoned in Russia for condemning the war on Ukraine.

Vadim Prokhorov, the Nemtsov family lawyer, recalls another detail.

“He drank like a Russian,” Mr Prokhorov told me. “He could hold his drink without falling over. We should have suspected him back then!”

We did ask to interview Mr González via his wife, who lives in Spain and has been his most avid supporter. So far, he hasn’t replied.

Instead, he appeared on Kremlin-controlled television, filmed wandering through a Moscow suburb, reminiscing in perfect Russian about sledging on cardboard as a child.

He was born, he explains, Pavel Rubtsov – still the name in his Russian passport.

He became Pablo González when he moved to Spain with his mother in 1991. His grandfather had been evacuated to the USSR during the Spanish Civil War, so Pavel and his mother were entitled to Spanish citizenship.

It all made him ideal recruitment material for Russian intelligence, but the state TV report declared that Poland had no evidence of that.

“They threatened and pressured me,” Mr González says, in his extremely deep voice. “I asked, ‘What did I do?’ and they said, ‘You know.’ But I didn’t.”

No-one I’ve interviewed has characterised Mr González as a Putin fan, although Zhanna Nemtsova says she and he were on “different sides of the political spectrum”.

“I didn’t get any pro-Russian vibe off him,” a Polish contact said.

But on Russian TV, Mr González is quite clearly excited as he describes meeting “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” at Vnukovo airport in Moscow.

Coming down the plane steps, he says, he was “practising” all the way how to greet his president. “I wanted to be sure it was a strong, manly handshake,” Mr González explains, with a big grin.

The BBC has not had direct access to any of the material in this case. But we have interviewed reliable sources whose accounts, taken together, reveal that Pablo González was informing on a number of people in Europe.

When he was detained, Polish investigators discovered reports detailing the movements, contacts and profiles of people ranging over several years.

Russian opposition activists were one target, including those close to Zhanna Nemtsova. There’s a report on at least one Polish citizen, as well as students of a journalism summer school run by Ms Nemtsova. Investigators also found emails that Mr González had copied from a laptop he had been lent.

We don’t know who these reports were sent to, but they list expenses incurred in gathering information, including transport costs. “There were a lot of details, including what they ate for lunch,” the BBC was told.

In some cases, that source says, questions have been added, apparently by a superior seeking clarification or more detail.

One of the reports concerns the Russian defence ministry press trip to Syria that Mr González went on, though its main focus is to criticise the ministry for poor organisation of the tour.

The official charge sheet accuses Mr González of espionage – namely, providing intelligence, spreading disinformation and “conducting operational reconnaissance” for Russian military intelligence, the GRU.

We don’t know what other evidence there might be, but the value of what he gathered on the Russian opposition is unclear.

I was told that some reports are “sloppy” and include information taken from the internet. “Some were really wordy, with 10 pages instead of one. Probably to get more funding,” the source thought.

The first part matches the comments of a close friend of Mr González who told me he was “a bit lazy”.

The BBC also understands that the accuracy of the reports deteriorates notably after 2018, with fewer notes or corrections by a senior officer, or handler. It may be coincidental, but that’s when large numbers of Russian intelligence assets were expelled from Europe, after double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in the British city of Salisbury.

And although Russian activists who socialised with “Pablo, the Basque journalist” were shocked to learn he’d betrayed them, they doubt he had access to sensitive information.

“We are not in the habit of sharing this information with anyone, as we’ve always known we could face such problems,” Zhanna Nemtsova confirms.

“Everything we said to him, we’d say to anyone else in public,” opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza told me after his release as part of the same prisoner swap.

One source sought to downplay the case against Mr González, describing the contents of the reports as “not serious”. But Ms Nemtsova – whose father was murdered in Moscow for his politics – strongly disagrees.

“His words were important for the GRU [Russian military intelligence]. They might have led to serious consequences. This does not suggest that Pablo himself would do some damage. But they have other people who do this.

“That’s why this is serious.”

When Mr González was detained, there was a flurry of protest over accusing a journalist of espionage. The EU had significant concerns about the rule of law under the previous Polish government, while groups such as Reporters Without Borders called for Mr González to be brought to trial, allowed to defend himself against any evidence, or be set free.

“I thought maybe they were mistaken about the arrest,” a Polish journalist who knew Mr González remembers his own initial doubts. “I thought maybe it was just to show the government were doing stuff about Russia.”

As Mr González was never convicted, his staunchest supporters still argue that Poland has “got away” with an injustice. But most were silenced by last month’s prisoner swap and the ceremonial welcome in Moscow.

The government in Madrid has been notably quiet on the case, in public, from the start.

“But that prisoner exchange, and González’s reception, are the reply to everything,” one official there told me. As she put it, it would be very odd for Vladimir Putin – crusher of the free media – to “save” a mere journalist.

Weeks after Mr González was returned to Moscow, the spy scandal is still causing headaches for Ms Nemtsova.

In 2018 and 2019, the foundation she set up after her father’s killing invited “Pablo, the Basque journalist” to Prague to give a lecture on war reporting. The summer school for young journalists was hosted by Charles University.

Now Czech media have declared that academia has been “infiltrated”, prompting a PhD student to write a dramatic letter to the university Arts Faculty, warning that the Nemtsov Foundation may pose a security threat “to the entire Czech Republic”.

The student, Aliaksandr Parshankou, suggested suspending a Russian Studies MA, supported by Ms Nemtsova’s group, pending an investigation. He told the BBC the course was “by definition a point of attraction for Putin” and called for it to carry a warning that the safety of students “cannot be guaranteed”.

Ms Nemtsova calls the student’s claims “groundless and manipulative” and he admits he has no actual evidence. But the foundation is part of the legacy of Ms Nemtsova’s father and she fears the aim is to “kick us out of the faculty”.

“I am a victim of espionage,” she protested. “It can happen to people like me, but that doesn’t mean we represent a threat to the Czech Republic.”

Pablo González was flown back to Moscow by Russia, where his passport identifies him as Pavel Rubtsov.

Spain does not deprive people of citizenship, even those suspected of espionage. But Mr González would have to reapply for his Spanish passport.

The chances of him heading there seem slim while there’s a case for espionage open in the EU. It’s unclear how long that case might be left pending.

As for visiting his sons there, an official in Madrid was clear: “They are free to go and see him in Moscow.”

Once an intelligence agent is unmasked, their career options and movements are limited.

Other Russians who’ve followed a similar path have ended up starring on state-controlled TV. Perhaps Pablo will restyle himself as Pavel, and find himself praising Vladimir Putin a lot more.

As for Zhanna Nemtsova, she admits she’s even more cautious about who she deals with.

“Now I always think about security,” she told me. “I did think about my security before, because I left Russia. But I didn’t think about security in Europe. Now of course, I do. And I am careful.”

Princess Märtha Louise of Norway has married American self-styled shaman Durek Verrett in a wedding that has divided the country.

The couple tied the knot at a private ceremony at a hotel in Geiranger, Western Norway on Saturday following two days of celebrations.

Unlike other royal weddings where the public throngs the streets, there were only a handful of people present to watch – views of the happy couple prior to or during the wedding were obscured by a tent or white sheets after they sold the exclusive rights to Hello! Magazine.

A documentary crew from Netflix was also in tow. The presence of the two major media companies caused some controversy, with local outlets largely excluded.

The princess’s parents, King Harald and Queen Sonja, attended the nuptials along with other members of Norway’s royal family, as well as princes and princesses from Sweden and the Netherlands.

Princess Märtha Louise’s three daughters from her first marriage, to the late Norwegian writer Ari Behn, were also at the ceremony.

Around 350 guests attended Saturday’s gathering, though there was no evidence that Mr Verrett’s purported A-list American chums were among them.

The 49-year old Californian counts actress and wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow as a friend – Mr Verrett calls her his “soul sister”.

But it was reported that Cynthia Bailey, reality TV star of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, was in attendance.

Princess Märtha Louise, 52, and Mr Verrett, who will not become a prince following the wedding, announced their engagement in 2022. While their relationship has divided Norway, King Harald has previously told Norwegian reporters that Mr Verrett was “a great guy” and that the two of them “laughed a lot, even in this difficult time”.

In 2022, the Norwegian palace announced Märtha Louise would “relinquish her patronage role” as she and Mr Verrett sought to “distinguish more clearly between their activities and the Royal House of Norway” and to “prevent misunderstandings regarding the Royal House”.

Since then, the pair have been criticised by the palace and members of Norway’s parliament for linking commercial activities to the princess’s royal status.

Kristi Marie Skrede, royal correspondent for Norway’s NRK TV, said their relationship it has caused a conflict within the royal family, as well as public controversy.

“Many Norwegians are disturbed that she uses her royal connections to earn money,” said Ms Skrede, adding that some believe it is a sign of “disrespect” to King Harald.

Last year, Märtha Louise told the BBC’s Katty Kay that there had been so much “turmoil” concerning her decision to take a different path than that of a “traditional royal”.

“There’s been a lot of criticism over the years, especially with me being spiritual – and in Norway, that’s taboo,” she said.

But others admire the couple for their honesty, said Ms Skrede. In particular, both been open about their spiritual beliefs.

Princess Märtha Louise has claimed in the past she is clairvoyant, and until 2018, ran a school which she said taught students to “create miracles” and talk to angels. Mr Verrett has said he is the latest in six generations of shamans and once said he died for four minutes and 25 seconds.

“I got all the information from the other side. I came back,” he told the New York Times.

A new show in the Indian capital Delhi showcases a rich collection of early photographs of monuments in the country.

The photographs from the 1850s and 1860s capture a period of experimentation when new technology met uncharted territory.

British India was the first country outside Europe to establish professional photographic studios, and many of these early photographers were celebrated internationally. (Photography was launched in 1839.)

They blended and transformed pictorial conventions, introduced new artistic traditions, and shaped the visual tastes of diverse audiences, ranging from scholars to tourists.

While the works of leading British photographers often reflect a colonial perspective, those by their Indian contemporaries reveal overlooked interactions with this narrative.

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The pictures at the show called Histories in the Making have been gathered from the archives of DAG, a leading art firm. They highlight photography’s crucial role in shaping an understanding of India’s history.

They also contributed to the development of field sciences, fostered networks of knowledge, and connected the histories of politics, fieldwork, and academic disciplines like archaeology.

“These images capture a moment in history when the British Empire was consolidating its power in India, and the documentation of the subcontinent’s monuments served both as a means of asserting control and as a way to showcase the empire’s achievements to audiences back in Europe,” says Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG.

This is a a picture of Caves of Elephanta taken by William Johnson and William Henderson.

The Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage site, are a group of temples primarily dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva in the state of Maharashtra.

William Johnson began his photographic career in Bombay (now Mumbai) around 1852, initially working as a daguerreotypist – the daguerreotype was an early photographic process that produced a single image on a metal plate.

In the mid-1850s, Johnson partnered with William Henderson, a commercial studio owner in Bombay, to establish the firm Johnson & Henderson.

Together, they produced The Indian Amateur’s Photographic Album, a monthly series published from 1856 to 1858.

Linnaeus Tripe arrived in India in 1839 at the age of 17, joining the Madras regiment of the East India Company.

He began practicing photography and in December 1854, captured images in the towns of Halebidu, Belur, and Shravanabelagola.

Sixty-eight of these photographs, primarily of temples, were exhibited in 1855 at an exhibition in Madras (now a major city called Chennai), earning him a first-class medal for the “best series of photographic views on paper”.

In 1857, Tripe became the photographer for the Madras Presidency – a former province of British India – and photographed sites at Srirangam, Tiruchirapalli, Madurai, Pudukkottai, and Thanjavur.

Over 50 of these photographs were displayed at the Photographic Society of Madras exhibition the following year, where they were widely praised as the best exhibits.

John Murray, a surgeon in the Bengal Indian Medical Service, began photographing in India in the late 1840s.

Appointed civil surgeon in the city of Agra in 1848, he spent the next 20 years producing a series of studies on Mughal architecture in Agra and the neighbouring cities of Sikandra, and Delhi.

In 1864, he created a comprehensive set of pictures documenting the iconic Taj Mahal.

Throughout his career, Murray used paper negatives and the calotype process – a technique of creating “positive” prints from one negative – to produce his images.

Thomas Biggs arrived in India in 1842 and joined the Bombay Artillery as a captain in the British East India Company.

He soon took up photography and became a founding member of the Photographic Society of Bombay in 1854.

After exhibiting his work at the Society’s first exhibition in January 1855, he was appointed as the government photographer for the Bombay Presidency, tasked with documenting architectural and archaeological sites.

He photographed Bijapur, Badami, Aihole, Pattadakal, Dharwad, and Mysore before being recalled to military service in December 1855.

Biggs experimented with the calotype process, producing “positive” prints from one negative.

Felice Beato, one of the most renowned war and travel photographers of the 19th Century, arrived in India in 1858 to document the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny.

Indian soldiers, known as sepoys, had set off a rebellion against the British rule, often referred to as the first war of independence.

Although the mutiny was nearly over when Beato arrived, he photographed its aftermath with a focus on capturing the immediacy of events.

He extensively documented cities deeply affected by the uprising, including Lucknow, Delhi, and Kanpur, with notable images of Sikandar Bagh, Kashmiri Gate, and the barracks of Kanpur. His chilling photograph of the hanging of sepoys, stands out for its stark depiction.

As a commercial photographer, Beato aimed to sell his work widely, spending over two years in India photographing iconic sites. In 1860, Beato left India for China to photograph the Second Opium War.

Andrew Neill, a Scottish doctor in the Indian Medical Service in Madras, was also a photographer who documented ancient monuments for the Bombay Presidency.

His calotypes were featured in the 1855 exhibition of the Photographic Society of Madras and in March 1857, and 20 of his architectural views of Mysore and Bellary were shown by the Photographic Society of Bengal.

Neill also documented Lucknow after the 1857 revolt.

Edmund Lyon, who served in the British Army from 1845 to 1854 and briefly as governor of Dublin District Military Prison, arrived in India in 1865 and established a photographic studio in the southern city of Ooty.

Working as a commercial photographer until 1869, Lyon gained significant recognition, particularly for his photographs of the Nilgiris mountain range, which were showcased at the 1867 Paris Exposition.

Accompanied by his wife, Anne Grace, Lyon also captured southern India’s archaeological sites and architectural antiquities.

His work resulted in a remarkable collection of 300 photographs documenting sites in Trichinopoly, Madurai, Tanjore, Halebid, Bellary, and Vijayanagara

Samuel Bourne’s stunning images of India, especially from his Himalayan expeditions between 1863 and 1866, stand among the finest examples of 19th-Century travel photography. A former bank clerk, Bourne left his job in 1857 to pursue photography full-time.

Arriving in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1863, he soon moved to Shimla, where he partnered with William Howard to establish the Howard & Bourne studio.

Later that year, Charles Shepherd joined them, forming ‘Howard, Bourne & Shepherd’. When Howard left, the studio became ‘Bourne & Shepherd,’ a name that would become iconic.

Bourne embarked on three major Himalayan expeditions, covering vast regions including Kashmir and the challenging terrain of Spiti. His 1866 photographs of the Manirung Pass, at over 18,600ft (5,669m), gained international acclaim.

In 1870, Bourne returned to England, selling his shares, though Bourne & Shepherd continued to operate in Calcutta and Simla. The studio, which later documented the spectacular Delhi Durbar – the ‘Court of India’ of 1911, an event that saw 20,000 soldiers marching or riding past the silk-robed Emperor and Empress – had a remarkable 176-year legacy before closing in 2016.

The Oasis comeback tour has sold out for all the dates the band announced it would play across the UK and Ireland next summer.

The band wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that tickets for all 17 gigs had been scooped up as of 19:00 BST – but many fans criticised the sales process and prices.

Throughout the day, hundreds of thousands of fans sat in online queues in the hope of being able to buy a first-hand view of a tour that comes 15 years after the group disbanded in an acrimonious split.

“Dynamic pricing” on Ticketmaster, where prices rise in line with demand, set some remaining tickets at more than £350 – up from £135 when the sale began.

Earlier this week, standing price tickets for Cardiff, London and Edinburgh were advertised as £135 plus fees. But angry fans online said they noted “in demand” pricing on Ticketmaster had increased prices to £355 plus fees.

Ticketmaster say they do not set ticket prices.

A link on the ticketing website stated: “Promoters and artists set ticket prices. Prices can be either fixed or market-based. Market-based tickets are labelled as ‘Platinum’ or ‘In Demand’.”

Ticketmaster confirmed that fans did not get anything else for the price increase.

Oasis and the band’s promoter were not commenting on the issue on Saturday evening.

Dynamic pricing is not new and is allowed under consumer protection laws.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) told the BBC it could not pass comment on Ticketmaster’s pricing in this instance.

“We encourage anyone with concerns to get in touch with us and we’d carefully assess whether there were any grounds for action,” an ASA spokesperson said.

But they added: “Our rules (the Advertising Codes) are clear – quoted prices must not mislead.”

Within minutes of Saturday’s morning sale, some people looking for tickets for gigs at London’s Wembley Stadium next July and August found more than one million people ahead of them in the queue.

Others were put into a “queue for the queue” with all three ticket sellers redirecting people to a page saying their sites were experiencing high demand.

Tickets were on sale from 09:00 BST and an hour earlier for Ireland, where issues accessing the Ticketmaster website were also reported.

Some hopefuls also said they had been “suspended” by Ticketmaster after it accused them of being bots – automatic computer programmes that can snap up tickets quicker than humans.

Jamie Moore, 50, from East Kilbride, was hoping to get tickets to see Oasis and “re-live the good times” but was kicked out when he reached the front of the online queue after being mistaken for a bot.

Mr Moore says he has “never been so let down by a website” in his life.

Many others have expressed frustration and anger at how the website handled demand.

Ticketmaster’s website called for patience from fans, saying that “as expected Oasis is incredibly popular” and encouraged people to keep their places, “clear cookies”, and avoid using VPN software on their device.

Noel and Liam Gallagher announced on Tuesday that they had put their differences behind them, confirming the band’s long-awaited reunion.

The group disbanded 15 years ago following a backstage brawl between the brothers at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris.

On Friday, shortly after a three-hour pre-sale for a limited number of fans began, tickets for the UK gigs were being listed on resale websites like StubHub and Viagogo for more than £6,000 – around 40 times the face value of a standing ticket.

They included:

• £6,000 for Oasis’s show at Wembley Stadium in London on 26 July
• Between £916 and £4,519 for the first concert of the tour at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on 4 July
• Over £4,000 for standing tickets at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium on 12 August
• More than £2,500 for the band’s homecoming concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park on 12 July

Standing tickets for the shows were expected to cost about £150, while standard seated tickets range from £73 to about £205. Prices for official premium packages go up to £506.

About 1.4 million tickets are expected to be available for the 17 outdoor concerts.

Oasis urged people not to resell tickets at higher prices on websites not linked to their promoter, and said those tickets would be “cancelled”.

It added that they could only be resold at face value on the websites Ticketmaster and Twickets.

“Tickets sold in breach of the terms and conditions will be cancelled by the promoters,” the band said.

Meanwhile, Viagogo issued a statement in which it said “resale is legal in the UK”.

Cris Miller, Viagogo global managing director, said “demand will be at its peak when tickets hit the on-sale but it’s not a normal reflection of what tickets can and will go for.”

A consultation into ticket resale prices and “rip off” touts will be launched in the Autumn, the government has said.

There was joy for some fans who managed to get tickets.

Nayat Karakose, 41, from Istanbul got two tickets to see the band in Wembley in the pre-sale on Friday.

She told the BBC that when she found out she got the tickets, she said she felt “supersonic”.

“My heart was beating, I was super, super excited, I couldn’t believe it for the moment. I thought I’d have to pay a couple of thousands pounds,” she said.

Ms Karakose has been a fan since she was 13 and this will be her third time seeing the band live.

Six years ago she met Liam Gallagher in Istanbul and got a photograph with him as he was about to leave a hotel, but added “it would be a dream to meet Noel Gallagher”.

Rachael Board, 51, from Devon, got two tickets to see Oasis at Wembley – but paid more than £900 after failing to get cheaper tickets.

A longstanding fan, she told the BBC that “we got caught up in the vibe,” adding that she “would never think I was that person who would spend so much on a concert ticket”.

Oasis were formed in Manchester in 1991 – their original line-up comprised of Liam and Noel Gallagher, guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, bassist Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan and drummer Tony McCarroll.

As hype for the gigs builds, sales and streams of the band’s back catalogue have surged, putting three albums into the top five of the UK charts on Friday.

Greatest hits collection Time Flies is at number three, 1995’s What’s The Story Morning Glory is at four, and debut Definitely Maybe – released on 29 August 1994 – is in fifth place, at the time of writing.

A 30th anniversary edition of Definitely Maybe was released on Friday.

US rapper Fatman Scoop has died aged 53 after collapsing at his concert on Friday in Connecticut, his representative has told the BBC.

He was halfway through his set at the Town Center Park in the city of Hamden when he collapsed on stage.

Mayor Lauren Garrett said in a post to Facebook that the rapper was taken to a local hospital by ambulance.

But his booking agency, MN2S, confirmed his death in a statement to the BBC, saying the New York native’s “legacy will live on through his timeless music”.

“Scoop was a beloved figure in the music world, whose work was loved by countless fans across the globe,” an agency spokesperson.

“His iconic voice, infectious energy, and great personality made an indelible mark on the industry.”

In a tribute on social media, Scoop’s family said he was “a radiant soul, a beacon of light on the stage and in life.”

“FatMan Scoop was not just a world class performer, he was a father, brother, uncle and a friend,” his family said.

“He was the laughter in our lives, a constant source of support, unwavering strength and courage.”

Scoop, whose legal name is Isaac Freeman III, has been credited as an influential figure in New York City’s hip hop scene in the 1990s.

He has featured on popular songs including Grammy award-winning Lose Control by Missy Elliott and It’s Like That by Mariah Carey.

Scoop is also known for his sleeper hit Be Faithful, which was originally released in 1999 but garnered international success in 2003, topping the charts in Ireland and the UK.

In 2004, the rapper was featured in the UK TV series Chancers on Channel 4, which featured musicians mentoring aspiring UK artists looking to achieve success in the US.

Fatman Scoop was also a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother 16: UK vs USA, which was housed in the UK and aired in 2015. He was the third housemate to be evicted.

His tour manager, DJ Pure Cold, wrote in a post on Instagram that he was “lost for words” at the news of his friend’s death.

“You took me all over the world and had me performing alongside you on some of the biggest and greatest stages on this planet,” he wrote.

“The things you taught me have truly made me the man I am today.”

Fatman Scoop was due to perform at the UK’s Reminisce Festival on 7 September. In a post on Instagram, the festival called the news of his death “devastating”.

“He was not just one of our most popular performers, he was a cherished member of the Reminisce family,” the festival said.

“His energy, talent and infectious spirit will be missed more than words can express.”

China and the Philippines have accused each other of ramming coast guard vessels in a disputed area of the South China Sea.

The Philippines has claimed a Chinese ship “directly and intentionally rammed” into its vessel, while Beijing has accused the Philippines of “deliberately” crashing into a Chinese ship.

Saturday’s collision near the Sabina Shoal is the latest in a long-running – and escalating – row between the two countries over various islands and zones in the South China Sea.

Within the past two weeks, there have been at least three other incidents in the same area involving ships belonging to the two countries.

The Sabina Shoal, claimed by China as Xianbin Jiao and as Escoda Shoal by the Philippines, is located some 75 nautical miles from the Philippines’ west coast and 630 nautical miles from China.

The South China Sea is a major shipping route through which $3 trillion worth of trade passes through a year. Beijing claims almost all of the South China Sea, including parts claimed by the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Following the latest clash, China’s coast guard called on the Philippines to withdraw from the Sabina Shoal while pledging to “resolutely thwart all acts of provocation, nuisance and infringement”.

The Philippines coast guard said it would not move its vessel – the Teresa Magbanua – “despite the harassment, the bullying activities and escalatory action of the Chinese coast guard”.

There were no casualties following the crash but Philippines Coast Guard Commodore Jay Tarriela said that the 97-meter (318-feet) Teresa Magbanua had sustained some damage after being hit “several times” by the Chinese ship.

The US ambassador to the Phillipines, MaryKay L Carlson, criticised what she called China’s dangerous actions in the region.

“The US condemns the multiple dangerous violations of international law by the [People’s Republic of China], including today’s intentional ramming of the BRP Teresa Magbanua while it was conducting lawful operations within the[Philippines] EEZ.” she wrote in a post to X.

“We stand with the Philippines in upholding international law.”

China has repeatedly blamed the Philippines and its ally the US for the escalating tensions. Last week, a defence ministry spokesperson said Washington was “emboldening” Manila to make “reckless provocations”.

Observers worry the dispute could eventually spark a larger confrontation in the South China Sea.

A previous attempt by the Philippines to get the United Nations to arbitrate ended with the decision that China had no lawful claims within its so-called nine dash line, the boundary it uses to claim a large swathe of the South China Sea. Beijing has refused to recognise the ruling.

But in recent weeks both countries have made an attempt to de-escalate the immediate conflicts out at sea.

Last month they agreed to allow the Philippines to restock the outpost in the Second Thomas Shoal with food, supplies and personnel. Since then this has taken place with no reported clashes.