Joe Biden has said Benjamin Netanyahu is not doing enough to secure a hostage deal and ceasefire with Hamas, amid reports suggesting a new proposal would be sent to the Israeli prime minister as “final”.

The US president and Kamala Harris, his vice-president, met negotiators in the Situation Room to hammer out a proposal, as protests engulfed Israel on Monday over the weekend deaths of six hostages in Gaza.

Asked whether Mr Netanyahu was doing enough, Mr Biden replied “no”. He added that the US would not give up, and would “push as hard as we can” for a deal.

US officials have categorised this latest proposal as a “take it or leave it deal”, the Washington Post reported.

It comes after Israel recovered the bodies of six hostages in Gaza on Saturday.

Their deaths have caused widespread protests in Israel from those critical of Mr Netanyahu’s handling of the war and hostage crisis.

On Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan met the US families of remaining hostages. The Axios news website reported that he relayed the news that Mr Biden would present a “final” hostage release and ceasefire proposal later this week.

The US family of Edan Alexander, a member of the Israeli military who is still a hostage in Gaza, have pushed for Israel to accept the deal, saying it is “now or never”.

His father Adi Alexander praised the US for its “dedication and commitment” to secure a deal, saying that Sunday was his 15th meeting with Mr Sullivan since his son’s abduction on 7 October.

But in an interview with BBC’s US partner CBS News on Monday, he appealed to US officials to “do something different, because the outcome is the same after 11 months”.

Mr Alexander accused Mr Netanyahu of “prolonging the war for short-term political gain”.

“Time is passing by and we’re getting more bodies out of Gaza. This is unacceptable,” he said.

The Washington Post reported the killing of the six hostages increased the urgency among Mr Biden’s aides to push for a deal.

“You can’t keep negotiating this. This process has to be called at some point,” one senior official told the newspaper.

“Does it derail the deal? No. If anything, it should add additional urgency in this closing phase, which we were already in,” they added.

The US, Qatar and Egypt have for months tried to secure a deal that includes a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas.

The Biden administration has criticised Hamas for failing to agree to a deal, though US foreign officials have also accused Mr Netanyahu of making demands that have also derailed efforts.

The war in the strip began after Hamas breached the Gaza border, killed 1,200 Israelis and abducted 251 on 7 October.

Israel has since killed over 40,000 Palestinians in retaliatory attacks, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.

The US response to the war has had implications for the Biden administration and Ms Harris, the Democratic nominee in November’s US presidential election. Pro-Palestinian factions in the party have urged for a ceasefire.

Ms Harris’s opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump, has blamed Ms Harris and Mr Biden’s failure to secure a deal for the hostage deaths last weekend.

It was the image that made the Titanic’s wreck instantly recognisable – the ship’s bow looming out of the darkness of the Atlantic depths.

But a new expedition has revealed the effects of slow decay, with a large section of railing now on the sea floor.

The loss of the railing – immortalised by Jack and Rose in the famous movie scene – was discovered during a series of dives by underwater robots this summer. The images they captured show how the wreck is changing after more than 100 years beneath the waves.

The ship sank in April 1912 after hitting an iceberg, resulting in the loss of 1,500 lives.

“The bow of Titanic is just iconic – you have all these moments in pop culture – and that’s what you think of when you think of the shipwreck. And it doesn’t look like that any more,” said Tomasina Ray, director of collections at RMS Titanic Inc, the company that carried out the expedition.

“It’s just another reminder of the deterioration that’s happening every day. People ask all the time: ‘How long is Titanic going to be there?’ We just don’t know but we’re watching it in real time.”

The team believes the section of railing, which is about 4.5m (14.7ft) long, fell off at some point in the last two years.

Images and a digital scan from an 2022 expedition carried out by deep-sea mapping company Magellan and documentary makers Atlantic Productions show that the railing was still attached – though it was starting to buckle.

“At some point the metal gave way and it fell away,” said Tomasina Ray.

It is not the only part of the ship, which lies 3,800m down, that is being lost to the sea. The metal structure is being eaten away by microbes, creating stalactites of rust called rusticles.

Previous expeditions have found that parts of the Titanic are collapsing. Dives led by explorer Victor Vescovo in 2019 showed that the starboard side of the officer’s quarters were collapsing, destroying state rooms and obliterating features like the captain’s bath from view.

This summer’s RMS Titanic Inc expedition took place over July and August.

Two remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) captured more than two million images and 24 hours of high definition footage of both the wreck, which split apart as it sank with the bow and stern lying about 800m apart, and the debris field surrounding it.

The company is now carefully reviewing the footage to catalogue the finds and will eventually create a highly detailed digital 3D scan of the entire wreck site.

More images from the dives will be revealed over the coming months.

The team has also announced another discovery of an artefact they were hoping to find even though it was against all the odds.

In 1986 a bronze statue called the Diana of Versailles was spotted and photographed by Robert Ballard, who had found the wreck of the Titanic a year earlier.

But its location was not known and the 60cm-tall figure was not documented again. Now, though, it has been discovered lying face up in the sediment in the debris field.

“It was like finding a needle in a haystack, and to rediscover this year was momentous,” said James Penca, a Titanic researcher and presenter of the Witness Titanic podcast.

The statue was once on display for the Titanic’s first-class passengers.

“The first-class lounge was the most beautiful, and unbelievably detailed, room on the ship. And the centrepiece of that room was the Diana of Versailles,” he said.

“But unfortunately, when Titanic split in two during the sinking, the lounge got ripped open. And in the chaos and the destruction, Diana got ripped off her mantle and she landed in the darkness of the debris field.”

RMS Titanic Inc has the salvage rights to the Titanic, and is the only company legally allowed to remove items from the wreck site.

Over the years, the company has retrieved thousands of items from the debris field, a selection of which are put on display around the world.

They plan to return next year to recover more – and the Diana statue is one of the items they would like to bring back to the surface.

But some believe the wreck is a grave site that should be left untouched.

“This rediscovery of the Diana statue is the perfect argument against leaving Titanic alone,” Mr Penca said in response.

“This was a piece of art that was meant to be viewed and appreciated. And now that beautiful piece of art is on the ocean floor… in pitch black darkness where she has been for 112 years.

“To bring Diana back so people can see her with their own eyes – the value in that, to spark a love of history, of diving, of conservation, of shipwrecks, of sculpture, I could never leave that on the ocean floor.”

The collapse of a massive statue of a 17th Century ruler has sparked protests and a political controversy in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

Shivaji Shahaji Bhosale was a warrior king whose exploits against the Mughals made him a hero during his own lifetime. He is revered in the state and celebrated as an icon of the Hindu right.

So the statue’s collapse, weeks before elections are due in Maharashtra, has put the state’s ruling coalition on the back foot and given opposition parties a potent issue to raise.

It even drew an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who inaugurated the statue in December and whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is part of Maharashtra’s ruling coalition.

“I extend my apologies to all those who worship Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (Emperor Shivaji) as their revered deity. I know their sentiments are hurt,” he said on Friday.

The BJP is part of an alliance which runs the state government along with breakaway factions of two regional parties, the Shiv Sena and the National Congress Party (NCP).

Even members of the NCP held “silent protests” last week, demanding action from the state government that they are part of.

Built at a cost of 23.6m rupees ($281,285; £214,185), the 35-ft (10.6m) statue in Sindhudurg district collapsed on 26 August amid heavy monsoon rains.

The opposition has demanded Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s resignation, alleging corruption in its construction.

Senior opposition leader Sharad Pawar said during a protest rally that numerous statues of Shivaji across the state were still standing but only the newly installed one had collapsed.

“There was corruption in the process of installing the statue. This is an insult to Chhatrapati Maharaj,” he alleged.

Mr Shinde has denied the charges, saying the statue collapsed because of strong winds in the coastal town.

Ravindra Chavan, a state minister, said that the public works department, which he heads, had already informed the Indian Navy – responsible for overseeing the statue’s construction – about rust in its nuts and bolts.”

Ashish Shelar, the BJP’s state chief, has also apologised publicly, saying the mistake will be rectified and the culprits will face punishment. Police have arrested one person, the structural consultant on the project, and say they are on the lookout for the statue’s sculptor.

Formally crowned as Chhatrapati – king in Sanskrit – in 1674 at Rajkot fort where the collapsed statue was installed, Shivaji ruled over a Maratha kingdom which included parts of western, central and southern India. He was seen as an astute leader who successfully made alliances with or militarily resisted the ruling powers of his time.

He has become an increasingly central figure in Maharashtra’s politics of late and no political party can afford to ignore him or be accused of insulting him. Marathas from Shivaji’s caste dominate the political landscape of the state – 12 of 20 chief ministers since the state’s formation have been Marathas.

Politicians would also not prefer to inflame the sentiments of the Maratha community, who have repeatedly protested in recent years demanding quotas in government jobs and educational institutions.

So the opposition will hope to frame the issue as an insult to the state and Maratha pride.

The opposition alliance, called Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) has organised state-wide protests. In response, the BJP has held counter-protests, accusing the MVA of politicising the issue.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has urged mainstream parties not to lend support to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which won a big victory in the eastern state of Thuringia in Sunday’s regional election.

The result gives the far right its first win in a state parliament election since World War Two.

The AfD also came a close second in Sunday’s other big state election, in the more populous neighbouring state of Saxony.

The AfD has been designated as right-wing extremist in both Thuringia and Saxony. Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in Thuringia, has previously been fined for using a Nazi slogan, although he denies knowingly doing so.

On Monday, Mr Scholz urged other parties to block the AfD from governing by maintaining a so-called firewall against it.

“All democratic parties are now called upon to form stable governments without right-wing extremists,” he said, calling the results “bitter” and “worrying”.

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said that voters in Thuringia and Saxony had given her party a “very clear mandate to govern”.

She urged parties to ignore Mr Scholz’s call to build government coalitions without the AfD, and said that doing so would “undermine the democratic participation of large sections of the population”.

“Firewalls are undemocratic,” Ms Weidel added.

Without the support of other parties, the AfD cannot govern in Thuringia. The second-largest party, the conservative CDU, has made clear it will not consider ruling with the far right.

Mathematically, then, the conservatives will need support from parties on the left to form a majority.

They have previously refused to work with the left-wing Die Linke, meaning they could have to look at the more radical left populist Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW to form a ruling coalition – an unpalatable option for many within the CDU.

Mr Höcke, the AfD’s top candidate in Thuringia has suggested there were plenty of CDU voters who would be happy if they worked together instead.

In any case, with over 30% of the vote the AfD has a so-called “blocking minority” – meaning it will be able to stop the appointment of new judges or any constitutional change.

Any coalition that emerges is likely to be highly unstable.

In Saxony, the conservatives won 42 seats, just ahead of the AfD with 41, while Sahra Wagenknecht’s party is in third with 15 seats.

In Thuringia, Mr Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) won just six seats, with none for his coalition partners the Greens and the liberal FDP. The SPD also fared badly in Saxony, where it came fifth.

The elections underlined the unpopularity of Germany’s ruling “traffic-light” coalition, so named because of the red, yellow and green of the party colours.

Each of the three governing parties did badly, meaning they will fight their corner in the national coalition even more assertively.

Already leading figures within each party are saying they need to stand up for their own values. This will likely lead to more rifts within the national government. Ministers are saying they won’t break up the coalition, and bring down the government – but the fact they are saying this at all is a sign of how difficult things are within the coalition.

Ms Weidel said people “voted out” the coalition and called on Mr Scholz and his partners to “pack their bags and vacate their chairs, because the voters want a different government, they want a different politics”.

The biggest issue for AfD voters on Sunday was immigration, and in particular the issue of refugees and asylum.

Even though the AfD is still blocked out of governmental power both in the regions and nationally, the party does have an impact on mainstream politics.

When the AfD entered the Bundestag in Berlin in 2017 critics say their fierce anti-migrant rhetoric coarsened the debate.

Some believe the discourse in politics and the media has become more aggressive, and CDU leader Friedrich Merz is accused of aping AfD rhetoric.

Either way, to win back AfD voters mainstream parties are talking tougher on issues like migration and pushing through measures to make it easier to deport asylum seekers whose application has been rejected.

The federal chairwoman of the umbrella organization of Turkish communities in Berlin, Aslihan Yesilkaya-Yurtbay, said that the results of the elections were “shocking and frightening”. She added that many younger people of her generation are already planning to leave Germany.

“The future in this country for citizens with a migration background is being called into question,” she said.

The AfD also wants to stop weapons supplies to Ukraine, as does Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW.

Some five million Germans in the east were eligible to vote on Sunday.

A third eastern state, Brandenburg, is due to vote in three weeks’ time and although the AfD is ahead in the opinion polls, the Social Democrats and conservatives are only a few points behind.

Russia has fired a barrage of missiles at Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, hours before thousands of children returned to school for the first day of the academic year.

The mayor, Vitali Klitschko, says a water treatment plant and the entrance of a metro station used as a shelter were hit. Two schools and a university were also damaged.

According to Ukraine’s military, 22 cruise and air ballistic missiles were destroyed by the air force.

Local authorities say three people were injured by debris from destroyed missiles.

For schoolchildren across the capital, Monday’s bombardment coincided with the first day of the school year, a day of celebration in Ukraine.

Teachers and parents tried to keep a sense of normality, with music playing while smiling students were welcomed by a sea of flowers.

One parent, who hid with her daughter at home during the missile attack before taking her to school, said they were showing once more “that this nation is invincible”.

“Children are smiling, but you can see the strain on the faces of their teachers [who] carry this burden”, she told the BBC.

“I’m so thankful to them for all they did to make it a real holiday for the kids.”

For 33-year-old Yevheniia, who was taking her six-year-old daughter to school for the first time, the day was marred by fear.

“Her hands were shaking,” Yevheniia told the Reuters news agency.

“Our apartment started to stink of smoke, but we still need to go to school, right? We are Ukrainians,” she said she told her daughter that morning.

Alina, a student at the damaged university, told Ukrainian TV she “started screaming” when the air raid alert sounded, with everyone running into their dormitory’s bomb shelter.

Air raid sirens rang out for nearly two hours during the attack, before the skies were deemed clear by the military.

“We were very scared,” Alina said, adding they saw a fire following the sound of explosions.

Following the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the first day of school “one of the most important days of the year” for children, and their families and teachers.

“All our schools, all higher education institutions that are working today are proof of the resilience of our people and the strength of Ukraine,” he said on his Telegram channel.

All of Ukraine was placed on alert for several hours, and neighbouring Nato state Poland said it had deployed its own as well as allied aircraft to secure its airspace during the Russian strikes.

Russia’s forces last month advanced on 477 sq km (184 sq miles) of Ukrainian territory – the biggest monthly increase by Moscow since October 2022 – according to data from the Institute for the Study of War analysed by AFP.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said his forces have not advanced with “such a pace” in the Donbas “for a long time” and are taking several sq km of territory per day.

Meanwhile, in Russia’s Kursk region – where Ukraine launched a surprise incursion on 6 August – progress has slowed with Kyiv most recently claiming to control 1,294 sq km (500 sq miles) of territory, including 100 settlements.

Nearly 600 Russian soldiers have also been captured, it added.

But President Putin – who was speaking to children starting their own new school year – said this will not deter his forces’ advance into eastern Ukraine, claiming they were moving forward at the fastest rate in a “long time”.

“Their calculation was to stop our offensive actions in key parts of the Donbas. The result is known… they did not achieve stopping our advance,” he said.

Some critics in Ukraine have suggested that the incursion in Kursk has diverted seasoned troops from the Donbas frontline at a critical moment.

However, President Zelensky defended the offensive on Monday, saying it was proceeding “according to the plan”. He said the attack could ease the pressure on the eastern front.

A man has gone on trial in France for repeatedly drugging and raping his wife as well as arranging for dozens of other men to rape her.

The defendant, named as 71-year-old Dominique P, is accused of recruiting strangers online to come to his home and sexually assault the victim for over a decade.

The woman was so heavily sedated she was not aware of the repeat abuse, her lawyers say.

The case has horrified France for the mass scale of the grave crimes.

Police identified at least 92 rapes committed by 72 men. Fifty were identified and charged and are standing trial alongside the husband.

The victim, now 72, only learnt of the abuse in 2020 after being informed by police.

The trial will be “a horrible ordeal” for her, said her lawyer Antoine Camus, as it will be the first time she sees video evidence of the abuse.

“For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told AFP news agency.

Dominique P was investigated by police after an incident in September 2020, when a security guard caught him secretly filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping centre.

Police then found hundreds of pictures and videos of his wife on his computer in which she appeared to be unconscious.

The images are alleged to show dozens of assaults in the couple’s home. The abuse is alleged to have started in 2011.

Investigators also found chats on a website in which Dominique P allegedly recruited strangers to come to their home and rape his wife.

He admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilisers, including an anxiety-reducing drug.

He is accused of taking part in the rapes, filming them and encouraging the other men using degrading language, according to prosecutors.

No money is alleged to have changed hands.

The accused rapists – aged between 26 and 74 – came from all walks of life and while most participated once, some took part up to six times, according to prosecutors.

Their defence is that they were helping a couple live out their fantasies but Dominique P told investigators that everyone was aware his wife had been drugged without her knowledge.

An expert said her state “was closer to a coma than to sleep”.

Dominique P, who said he was raped when he was nine, is ready to face “his family and his wife”, his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro told news agency AFP.

He has also been charged with a 1991 murder and rape, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, which he admitted after DNA testing.

The trial, which is being held in Parc des Expositions in Avignon, southern France, is due to last until 20 December.

On Monday, the opening day of the trial, the woman turned up to court supported by her three children, AFP reported.

Mr Camus, her lawyer, said she could have opted for a trial behind closed doors, but “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”.

A former childcare worker in Australia has pleaded guilty to raping and sexually abusing dozens of young girls under his care for over 20 years.

Ashley Paul Griffith, 46, confessed to committing 307 offences at childcare centres in Brisbane and Italy between 2003 and 2022, a Queensland court heard on Monday.

Most of Griffith’s victims were under the age of 12, the court heard. The judge’s associate took over two hours to read out all of the charges against him.

Police have previously described Griffith as one of Australia’s worst-ever paedophiles.

The charges against him included 28 counts of rape, 190 counts of indecent treatment, 67 counts of making child exploitation material, four counts of producing such material, and one count of distributing it.

Several of his victims and their families were in court on Monday, and some parents cried when the names of their children were read out, according to ABC News.

“We see people going [into the childcare centre now] and I think, this happened to my child in that room,” said one child’s mother. “It’s a room of horrors.”

The same child’s father said he could not believe how Griffith could have gotten away with his crimes for 20 years.

The couple said that while they told their daughter about what happened, she was not able to fully understand because of her young age, ABC News reported.

“As she grows up, we’ll deal with that as it comes but it’s going to be something we deal with through our lives now,” her father said.

Griffith was arrested in August 2022 by Australia’s federal police, after they found thousands of photographs and videos related to his abuse that were uploaded onto the dark web.

Although faces were cropped out of the footage, investigators managed to trace them to Griffith because of a unique set of bedsheets seen in the background of the videos.

Police believe he recorded all his offences on his phones and cameras.

He was charged in November last year with more than 1,600 child sex offences, but most of these were eventually dropped.

Griffith remains in custody and will be sentenced at a later date.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has triggered a heated debate by saying she wants to keep the Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower after the summer Games are over.

“The decision is up to me, and I have the agreement of the IOC [International Olympic Committee],” she told the Ouest-France newspaper over the weekend.

“So yes, they [the rings] will stay on the Eiffel Tower,” she added.

Some Parisians backed the move, but others – including heritage campaigners – said it was a bad idea and would “defile” the French capital’s iconic monument.

The five rings – 29m (95ft) wide, 15m high and weighing 30 tonnes – were installed on the Eiffel Tower before the Paris Olympics opened on 26 July, and were expected to be taken down after the Paralympics’ closing ceremony on 8 September.

But Ms Hidalgo said she wanted to keep the interlaced rings of blue, yellow, black, green and red, symbolising the five continents.

She added that the current rings – each one measuring 9m in diameter – were too heavy and would be replaced by a lighter version at some point.

The Socialist mayor also claimed that “the French have fallen in love with Paris again” during the Games, and she wanted “this festive spirit to remain”.

Some Parisians as well as visitors to the French capital supported the mayor.

“The Eiffel Tower is very beautiful, the rings add colour. It’s very nice to see it like this,” a young woman, who identified herself as Solène, told the France Bleu website.

But Manon, a local resident, said this was “a really bad idea”.

“It’s a historic monument, why defile it with rings? It was good for the Olympics but now it’s over, we can move on, maybe we should remove them and return the Eiffel Tower to how it was before,” he told France Bleu.

Social media user Christophe Robin said Ms Hidalgo should have consulted Parisians before going ahead with her plan.

In a post on X, he reminded that the Eiffel Tower featured a Citroën advert in 1925-36.

The Eiffel Tower was built in1889 for the World’s Fair. The wrought-iron lattice tower was initially heavily criticised by Parisian artists and intellectuals – but is now seen by many as the symbol of the “City of Light”.

Ms Hidalgo, who has been running Paris since 2014, is known for her bold – and sometimes controversial – reforms.

Under her tenure, many city streets, including the banks of the river Seine, have been pedestrianised.

Last year, she won convincingly a city referendum to ban rental electric scooters. However, fewer than 8% of those eligible turned out to vote.

In February, Ms Hidalgo was again victorious after Parisians approved a steep rise in parking rates for sports utility vehicles (SUVs).

But both drivers’ groups and opposition figures attacked the scheme, saying the SUV classification was misleading as many family-size cars would be affected.

France’s Environment Minister Christophe Béchu said at the time that the surcharge amounted to “punitive environmentalism”.

And just before the Paris Olympics, Ms Hidalgo and other officials went into the Seine to prove the river was safe to swim.

But during the Olympics, triathlon events were subject to several delays caused by heavy rain.

And Para-triathlon events – originally scheduled for 1 September – had to be postponed by 24 hours because of poor water quality.

Residents of Seville have organised a protest to demand action to tackle the West Nile virus, which has caused five deaths in the southern Spanish province this summer.

The virus spreads to humans when mosquitoes bite infected birds and then subsequently bite humans.

All the deaths and 61 cases registered near the city of Seville occurred in the Lower Guadalquivir Valley area.

This is the worst year on record with the exception of 2020, which saw 76 registered cases and eight deaths.

The protest is scheduled to take place on Monday evening in the town of Isla Mayor in Seville province.

It is organised by the platform Fight against the Nile Virus, which demands more action by local and national authorities to control the spread of the disease.

The regional government of Andalusia has called for calm and said it will increase cooperation between provinces and town halls to battle the virus.

The family of Granada Romero Ruiz, an 86-year-old woman who died of the virus this summer, wrote a letter to the local authorities shortly before her death, expressing “anger and desperation”.

“This tragedy could have been avoided if you, in your comfortable offices, had acted with the responsibility and humanity that we expect from your position,” they said.

The family blamed the spread of the virus on a failure to fumigate rice fields near them.

Modesto González, mayor of Coría del Río, from where three of this summer’s fatalities were from, has called for the central government to coordinate with local authorities in order to take more drastic action against the virus.

“This goes way beyond the local area and no more time can be wasted because the lives of people are at risk,” he said, warning that Andalusian families now feel “enormous worry during the summer months”.

Mosquitoes pass the virus to humans and other mammals from birds. With a large area of marshes and rice fields, the Guadalquivir Valley has an eco-system that encourages the propagation of mosquitoes.

Jordi Figuerola, of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in the Doñana biological station, said that a mild winter and a wet spring had brought the circulation of the virus forward this year.

“It is likely that the circulation of the West Nile virus will keep increasing,” he said.

He said improved coordination between local and national governments and farmers was needed, to ensure adequate fumigation of rice fields.

The western Spanish region of Extremadura, which also has substantial marshlands, has seen 17 cases.

In most cases, the West Nile virus causes either very minor or no symptoms. In around 20% of cases its effects are more serious, including headache, high fever and skin eruptions.

In less than 5% of cases symptoms are extremely serious and can cause death. The elderly are a particularly high-risk group.

Experts recommend eliminating standing water sources where mosquitoes breed and using eco-friendly larvicides, alongside increasing awareness of the personal measures people can take to protect themselves.

These include:

• using insecticide-treated bed nets
• sleeping in air-conditioned rooms
• using window screens
• wearing clothes that cover most of the body
• using mosquito repellent

For the previous 72 hours, the menacing whirr above our heads has belonged to Russia’s suicide drones, passing over and then bearing down on their targets.

Now the buzz comes from a Ukrainian unmanned aircraft which has not been sent up to kill, but to relay footage from the training ground to commanders back at base.

We’ve been brought to a secret training location in the Chernihiv region where the latest army intake is being fast tracked to the battlefield in the renewed effort to blunt Moscow’s grinding advance.

In the hail of machine gun fire and instructors’ commands, the most striking aspect of the scene is the age of the new recruits. Most seem to be in their 40s and 50s.

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Among the grey-haired contingent, Rostyslav, whose wife and two children are waiting for him back home in the Odesa region.

A month ago he was a driver. Next month he could find himself fighting on Russian soil, with Ukraine vowing to hold on to the land it seized in the Kursk region during its lightning incursion a month ago.

“I think this is the right thing to do,” he says of the operation.

“Look how long they’ve been on our land. We’ve been suffering for so long, we have to do something. You can’t just sit there while they are capturing our territory. What will we do then? Will we become their slaves?”

The training schedule we’re witnessing reflects the accelerated programme new army joiners are undergoing as Ukraine tries to deal with the sheer mass of men Russia is committing to the frontline.

The Ministry of Defence in London estimated there were 70,000 Russian casualties in Ukraine in May and June alone.

Under the scorching sun, the new Ukrainian recruits jump in and out of American-made armoured fighting vehicles and open fire on enemy positions.

The military, anxious that the location of this training remains secret, asked to see the footage we recorded on location before this story was reported across BBC News – but did not see any scripts nor have any editorial control.

In a nearby woodland, a simulated Russian attack on Ukrainian trenches is repelled while the boom of grenade target practice shudders across the plain.

Two and a half years into the war, and Ukraine is desperate for more troops and brought into force a new conscription law which lowered the age of men joining from 27 to 25. Military service for women is not mandatory.

The drive for younger conscripts has not hit this group of men.

All the recruits we see before us have already had 30 days of basic training and today it’s more advanced care – dealing with broken bones, gunshots and catastrophic bleeding – using medical equipment sent from the UK.

Light-hearted moments – a decidedly wonky tourniquet here or there – punctuate a heavy air.

There’s no escaping the fact the simulated emergency care being given under shade of spruces could be carried out in grim reality in the coming weeks and months.

One soldier who’s accompanied us to the site says that if the new intake have not acquired enough fighting skills they will not be sent to the frontline.

“We’re not going to send them to their deaths,” he says sharply.

Still, we have heard complaints, notably from professional soldiers, that raw recruits have been sent to other fronts without adequate training and thrust prematurely into frontline combat.

Ukraine is on the back foot in key parts of the battlefield at home, most notably around the strategically important city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk.

But last month’s incursion into Russia has boosted morale and has added a new dimension to the war.

However, Kyiv is now fighting a battle on yet another front and this is a huge personal gamble for President Zelensky.

His generals have tough strategic decisions to make about where to send their new recruits.

Maxim, a 30-year-old builder by trade, looks to be the most youthful of the cohort.

“We need to train, train and train again. The more we train the more we will learn here. It will help us on the frontline.”

Where will that be, I ask? “We are ready to defend our land either in Donbas – or Kursk,” he says proudly but with a nervous laugh.

Earlier, in Ukraine’s Sumy region, we had travelled under military escort to a new Ukrainian base just a few miles away from the Russian border.

Along the way, we passed whole streets blasted to pieces by previous Russian artillery fire.

The civilians had long gone, and the only human life was clad in the green and driving army vehicles.

As we arrive at the camp, an armoured personnel carrier (APC) fresh from the Kursk incursion roars into life and springs up backwards out of its sunken hiding place.

It pivots and then speeds off through the canopy lined track, leaving a huge plume of copper-coloured dust.

“The Russian soldiers who surrendered, we took as prisoners of war. The Russians who attacked us, we killed.”

It’s a blunt synopsis from the Ukrainian commander who goes by the call-sign “Storm”.

His 22nd Mechanised Brigade was the first to enter Russian territory and now he’s returned to tell the tale.

“We went far into the Kursk region. We were alone as the forward team. We were on foreign soil and we felt like foreigners. Not in our home.”

A father of five with five degrees, Storm cuts a distinctive shadow in the dense forest.

A giant of a man with greying goatee and military tattoos on the skin not covered by his army fatigues and body armour.

“That’s us, in there,” he says showing us a video on his phone of an APC tearing through the Russian countryside.

What was it like fighting the Russians on their home soil, I ask?

“I worried for myself and for my group, for my servicemen, for everyone. Of course, there was fear. “

Like all of the Ukrainian military we met, Storm is understandably reluctant to give any operational information which may help the Russians.

So when I ask if he knows how long he’ll stay on Russian territory when he returns, it is an answer predictably long on patriotism and short on specifics.

“We are fulfilling an order. We’ll be there as long as we are told to. If we are told to move forward, we will move forward. If they tell us to withdraw, we will withdraw.”

He continues in the same vein: “If we have an order to move forward, we can get to Moscow – and we’ll show what Ukraine means and what are our guys are like – real Cossacks.”

It’s been reported that Ukraine sent up to 10,000 elite troops into Russia as part of its rapid advance.

The Russian defence ministry claims Kyiv has suffered thousands of casualties.

The head of the Ukrainian army, Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, announced the Russians had now sent 30,000 troops to defend Kursk. All these figures are hard to verify.

In another clandestine location, a team clambers out of a German-made Bergepanzer armoured recovery vehicle.

The driver, who goes by the call sign “Producer”, is a father of two who hasn’t seen his two children for three years.

They escaped to Italy with their mother in the weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

While we’re unable to ascertain the level of Ukrainian losses, it’s clear that Producer has been busy bringing back damaged and destroyed vehicles from inside Russia.

“I want this war to come to an end,” he tells us wearily in very good English.

“That’s because there is no reason for this (war). One man, Vladimir Putin, attacked our country. So what do we have to do? We must defend our home. Defending, defending, defending. But Ukraine is the smaller country.”

The mismatch between Moscow and Kyiv remains a key thread of President Zelensky’s ongoing call for greater Western help.

Through taking the fight into Russia, Ukraine galvanised its public but worried some allies who remain fearful of Vladimir Putin’s response and the spectre of a wider conflict.

So far, President Putin has largely ignored, at least publicly, the wound inflicted on his country’s side.

Ukraine says that, unlike Russia, it doesn’t have unlimited reserves of conscripts to catapult to the frontline.

We saw a glimpse of the deployment dilemma with our own eyes in the locations we visited this past week.

President Zelensky argues that much greater American and European assistance in air defence is more vital than ever and that permission to use foreign-made long range missiles to strike further into Russia urgently needs to be granted.

Especially now that Kyiv is fighting a battle at home and abroad.

As we leave the training ground, the exhausted soldiers loll on the ground – water bottle and cigarette in hand for many.

Rostyslav, who longs to return to his Odesa, believes his president is absolutely right.

“The Russians can reach our territory with long range weapons and we don’t have such a weapon to reach their territory. We can’t stand this anymore” he explains.

“We would like to hit Moscow to end this dirty war. Children and civilians suffer, everyone does.”

Another rocket-propelled grenade thunders across the parched training field.

Next time, it won’t be a drill.

Brazil’s Supreme Court has upheld a ban on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

A majority of three out of five justices have already voted in favour of the measure, meaning the ban will stay in place even if the two remaining justices were to vote against it.

X has been suspended in Brazil since the early hours of Saturday after it failed to appoint a new legal representative in the country before a court-imposed deadline.

It is the culmination of a feud between Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and X’s owner Elon Musk which began in April, when the judge ordered the suspension of dozens of accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation.

Justice Moraes had called for the five-member panel to rule on the suspension, which has caused division in Brazil.

The panel – which includes Mr Moraes – has until midnight local time (03:00 GMT) to cast its votes.

So far, Mr Moraes, Flávio Dino and Cristiano Zanin have cast their votes – all three in favour of upholding the ban.

Justice Dino argued that “freedom of expression is closely linked to a duty of responsibility”.

“The first can’t exist without the second, and vice-versa,” he added.

Two more justices are still due to vote, but even if they were to vote “no”, they would be in the minority and the suspension would remain in place for the time being.

Reacting to the decision to ban X, Mr Musk had earlier said: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.”

In his ruling, Justice Moraes gave companies, including Apple and Google, a five-day deadline to remove X from its app stores and block its use on iOS and Android devices.

He added that individuals or businesses that are found to still be accessing X by using virtual private networks (VPNs) could be fined R$50,000 ($8,910; £6,780).

X closed its office in Brazil last month, saying its representative had been threatened with arrest if she did not comply with orders it described as “censorship”, which it said was illegal under Brazilian law.

Justice Moraes had ordered that X accounts accused of spreading disinformation – many of which belonged to supporters of the former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro – must be blocked while they are under investigation.

Brazil is said to be one of the largest markets for Mr Musk’s social media network.

With access to X blocked, many Brazilians have been turning to microblogging platform Bluesky as an alternative.

Bluesky announced on Saturday that it had registered half a million new users in the South American country over the two previous days alone.

Among those pointing followers to his Bluesky account was Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who on Thursday tweeted links to his social media accounts on platforms other than X.

Lula’s Bluesky profile was top of the list, which also included links to his Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, TikTok and Facebook accounts.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber expressed her delight at the influx of new users, posting in Portuguese and English: “Good job Brazil, you made the right choice.”

Kike España gazes across Málaga’s Plaza de la Merced.

It’s late morning and it’s still a peaceful spot at this time of day – jacaranda trees fill the square, an obelisk monument sits at its centre and on the far side is the house where Pablo Picasso was born.

But it’s the city’s tourists, many of whom are already gathering in the host of nearby cafés, who concern Kike.

“The situation is so saturated that Málaga has really reached a turning point at which people feel that the city is collapsing,” he says.

“It’s the same feeling you have when you enter a theme park,” he adds. “There is a stream of people that are consuming the city and not really inhabiting it.”

Kike is an urban planner and a local activist with the Málaga Tenants’ Union, which has been campaigning for a change in how the southern Spanish city manages tourism.

The organisation led a protest in late June in which thousands of local people took to the streets to voice their concern at the negative impact that tourism is having on their city, including pushing up housing costs, gentrification and crowds.

And it’s not just Málaga. Spaniards have been protesting throughout the summer for the same reasons in other major tourist destinations, including Barcelona, Alicante and the Canary and Balearic Islands.

In April, a group of activists on Tenerife staged a three-week hunger strike against the building of new tourist megaprojects. In Barcelona, demonstrators fired at foreign visitors with water pistols and among the slogans daubed on their banners were: “Tourism kills the city” and “Tourists go home.”

Spain first established itself as a tourist hub more than half a century ago, as northern Europeans started to flock to its coastline and islands.

Today, the industry represents about 13% of Spanish GDP and, having bounced back from the Covid-19 pandemic, it is surpassing records in terms of both revenue and arrivals.

In 2023, the country received 85 million foreign visitors and more than 90 million are expected this year, putting it close behind France, the world’s most popular tourist destination.

José Luis Zoreda, president of the Exceltur, a tourism industry association, prefers to talk about the amount of revenue the industry generates – €200bn (£171bn) in direct and indirect activity this year, he estimates – rather than the number of visitors.

He also highlights how tourism has ensured that the Spanish economy has outperformed most of its European neighbours in the wake of Covid-19.

“We have been responsible in the last few years for the most important percentage of growth of our economy,” he says. “In 2023, we were responsible for 80% of the whole GDP growth of Spain.”

So the sheer size of the tourism sector and its strong growth have driven the overall expansion of the Spanish economy.

But there is a growing belief that the cost of such success is too high and the wave of recent protests has created the sense of a tipping point. Many Spaniards are now convinced that the towns and cities they inhabit are catering more for visitors than for residents.

“Tourism was perceived as a positive economic activity that is a huge part of our GDP, but the numbers have become so huge in terms of international arrivals that we are now seeing the negative impacts, especially in cities,” says Paco Femenia-Serra, lecturer in tourism and geography at Madrid’s Complutense University.

“Tourism is competing for space and the number of people out on the streets is unbearable for many residents.”

Besides making these places less pleasant, locals say tourism has also pushed many smaller businesses out of the centre of cities. In their place have come franchise restaurants, bars and shops – and prices have risen.

But the most-cited problem is that of housing.

Spain’s biggest tourist destinations have large numbers of short-term rental properties aimed at tourists.

A recent study by El País newspaper found that several areas of Málaga had the highest proportion of Airbnb properties in Spain. A quarter of all apartments in the area around the Plaza de la Merced are dedicated to tourist rental.

Owners of apartments are able to charge more for short-term rentals than they would charge longer-term tenants and this has the effect of pushing up prices across the board. Locals say it is difficult to find an apartment for less than €1,200-1,300 per month in the centre of Málaga. With the average salary in the surrounding Andalusia region at just €1,600 per month, they are being priced out of their city.

“If the people of Málaga don’t have somewhere to live, who will provide services for the tourists?” asked Isabel Rodríguez, housing minister for Spain’s governing Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE).

Speaking at a housing forum in the city in July, she continued: “Where will the waiters who serve us a glass of wine and a plate of sardines live?”

As Ms Rodríguez’s comments suggest, Spain’s political class is now starting to grapple with the tourism conundrum.

Catalonia and the Balearic Islands have already introduced a “tourist tax”, charging a sliding sum of up to €4 per person per day, depending on the type of accommodation used.

Palma de Mallorca has sought to limit numbers of arrivals by sea, with no more than three cruise liners allowed to dock at the city per day, only one of them carrying more than 5,000 passengers.

Measures are also being taken to tackle the tourist accommodation issue. This year, the regional government in Andalusia has handed town and city halls the power to introduce their own controls on short-term rentals.

In the north-east, Barcelona has already announced its intention to revoke all of the 10,000 or so tourist accommodation licences currently in circulation in 2028.

Mr Femenia-Serra describes the reining in of Spanish tourism as “a very tricky problem” given the economic weight of the industry but he believes restrictions are needed.

“If we want to talk about sustainable tourism or a lower number of tourists we should discuss limits on activity and higher restrictions and more regulation of the sector, which until now has been kind of free to act,” he says. He suggests introducing limits on the number of flights to certain destinations as a possible measure.

In Málaga, Kike España wants to see caps on rental prices and efforts to provide more housing for locals as immediate measures to counter the tourism crisis.

While he insists that he and his fellow activists are not opposed to tourism, just the way it is being managed in Spain, he says he also hopes the protests will continue.

“We are against city models that only focus on tourism,” he says. “We cannot lose all the energy and complexity and heterogeneity of our cities.”

Last year, Hugo watched a friend die in a vast field of sweet potatoes, his lifeless body leaning against a truck tyre – one of few shaded areas on the sweltering North Carolina farm.

“They forced him to work,” Hugo recalled. “He kept telling them he was feeling bad, that he was dying.”

“An hour later, he passed out.”

Hugo, which is not his real name, has spent most of his time in the US as a migrant farm worker, a job where the pay generally hovers at or below minimum wage, and where work conditions can be fatal. The BBC agreed to use a pseudonym because he expressed concern he could face repercussions for speaking out about the incident.

Hugo departed Mexico in 2019 with a visa to work in the US, leaving behind a wife and two children to pursue the “American Dream”, unsure of when he would return. Or if.

His friend who died on the sweet potato farm was Jose Arturo Gonzalez Mendoza.

It was Mendoza’s first trip to the US for work. He died within his first few weeks on the farm in September 2023. Mendoza, 29, had also left his wife and children in Mexico.

“We come here out of need. That’s what makes us come to work. And you leave behind what you most wished for, a family,” Hugo says.

From farmers and meatpackers to line cooks and construction workers, migrants often do dangerous jobs where workplace deaths typically go unnoticed by the wider public. But in the past year, the issue has been thrust into the spotlight, by multiple high-profile deaths and by a migrant crisis at the border that has amplified anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The day Mendoza died, the heat was intense.

Temperatures hovered around 32C (90F). There was not enough drinking water for workers and the farm only allowed one five-minute break during hours-long shifts.

The one place to escape the heat was a bus without air conditioning parked in an open field.

The details are outlined in a report by the North Carolina Department of Labor, which fined the farm – Barnes Farming Corporation – this year for its “hazardous” conditions.

The report confirmed the death on the farm and mentioned that management “never” called healthcare services or provided first-aid treatment.

In the hours before his death, Mendoza “became confused, demonstrated difficulty walking, talking and breathing and lost consciousness”, the report said.

Another farm worker eventually called emergency services, according to the report, but Mendoza went into cardiac arrest and died before they arrived.

The farm’s legal representation said in a statement to the BBC that it takes the health and safety of its workers “very seriously” and is contesting the labour department’s findings.

“Many of the team members have been returning to Barnes for years, and returned again for this growing season, because of the farm’s commitment to health and safety,” they said.

But Hugo did not return. He says he now works for a welding company.

“Bad things happen to a lot of us,” Hugo says. “I know it could happen to me, too.”

The agricultural industry also has the highest rate of workplace deaths, followed by transportation and construction, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Earlier this year, back-to-back deaths highlighted some of these dangers.

Six Latin American workers died in Baltimore when the bridge they were repairing overnight collapsed in late March.

Weeks later, a bus carrying Mexican farm workers to the fields crashed in Florida. Eight were killed.

Speaking at the Democratic National Convention, Maryland Governor Wes Moore recalled the Baltimore incident, honouring the workers who died “fixing potholes on a bridge while we slept”.

Both Mendoza and Hugo had H2A visas that allowed them temporarily to work in US agriculture. And the number of foreign-born workers who rely on this type of visa has grown.

Between 2017-2022, H2A visa holders have increased by 64.7%, or by nearly 150,000 workers.

In total, about 70% of farmworkers are foreign born, and over three-quarters are Hispanic, according to the National Center for Farmworker Health.

“Immigration is the key source of workers for many jobs in the US,” Chloe East, a University of Colorado Denver economics professor who focuses on immigration policy, says.

“We know for a fact that foreign-born workers are taking these types of dangerous jobs that US-born workers don’t.”

A 2020 federal investigation into agricultural H2A labourers in Florida, Texas and Georgia described conditions akin to “modern-day slavery”. Due to the investigation, 24 people were charged with trafficking, money laundering and other crimes.

“The American dream is a powerful attraction for destitute and desperate people across the globe, and where there is need, there is greed from those who will attempt to exploit,” Acting US Attorney David Estes said in a press release at the time.

Migrants that enter the country illegally can have even less protections if they’re hired to work, experts say. And almost half of agricultural workers are undocumented, according to the Centre for Migration Studies.

“Undocumented immigrant workers are concentrated in the most dangerous, hazardous, and otherwise unappealing jobs in US,” according to an article published in the International Migration Review.

One of the most dangerous jobs in the agricultural industry is dairy farming.

The dangers include overexposure to poisonous chemicals or hazardous machinery. Manure pits pose the risks of deadly toxic gases and drowning. The animals themselves can also be a threat.

Olga, who moved to the US from Mexico as a teenager, is an undocumented migrant dairy farm worker in Vermont. She says she saw her sister nearly trampled to death by a cow.

“The cow basically stomped on her and she was basically dying. Her tongue was even out,” Olga recalls.

Olga says that although the incident left her sister with a broken arm and two broken ribs, the farm’s manager demanded her return to work almost immediately.

It wasn’t until she provided a doctor’s note showing that her sister couldn’t work that “the boss left her alone”, Olga says. Her sister no longer works in farming.

Olga, however, still does.

The 29-year-old says she’s there “12 hours a day, every day”.

“There’s no raises. There’s no rest, and they don’t even pay on time,” she says. “They pay you when they want.”

Earlier this summer, the US Department of Labor implemented new rules designed to make working conditions for temporary farm workers safer, including protecting workers that organise to advocate for their rights from employer retaliation, and prohibiting employers from withholding workers’ passports and immigration documents.

But just as authorities have tried to crack down on migrant abuse, anti-migrant rhetoric, fuelled by political debates over record-breaking levels of illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border, have added to Hispanic migrants’ difficulties.

On multiple occasions, Donald Trump has referred to illegal immigration as an “invasion” and called those who cross “animals”, “drug dealers”, and “rapists”.

“It makes me feel sad. We’re always being attacked for being migrants,” Olga said.

“They should see how we live to survive in this country.”

Enhanced border restrictions, enacted by President Joe Biden in June, may also make safety conditions worse, Prof East said, noting how stricter immigration laws can make workers afraid to speak up for safety protocols.

“Most people stay quiet because they are scared of all the laws being passed,” Hugo says. “You can’t complain.”

Hugo says lately he has noticed more discrimination, recalling a recent experience where a store owner refused to sell him water because he struggled to speak English.

“People treat us badly,” he says.

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 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?

It was 2022 and Cai, then 16, was scrolling on his phone. He says one of the first videos he saw on his social media feeds was of a cute dog. But then, it all took a turn.

He says “out of nowhere” he was recommended videos of someone being hit by a car, a monologue from an influencer sharing misogynistic views, and clips of violent fights. He found himself asking – why me?

Over in Dublin, Andrew Kaung was working as an analyst on user safety at TikTok, a role he held for 19 months from December 2020 to June 2022.

He says he and a colleague decided to examine what users in the UK were being recommended by the app’s algorithms, including some 16-year-olds. Not long before, he had worked for rival company Meta, which owns Instagram – another of the sites Cai uses.

When Andrew looked at the TikTok content, he was alarmed to find how some teenage boys were being shown posts featuring violence and pornography, and promoting misogynistic views, he tells BBC Panorama. He says, in general, teenage girls were recommended very different content based on their interests.

TikTok and other social media companies use AI tools to remove the vast majority of harmful content and to flag other content for review by human moderators, regardless of the number of views they have had. But the AI tools cannot identify everything.

Andrew Kaung says that during the time he worked at TikTok, all videos that were not removed or flagged to human moderators by AI – or reported by other users to moderators – would only then be reviewed again manually if they reached a certain threshold.

He says at one point this was set to 10,000 views or more. He feared this meant some younger users were being exposed to harmful videos. Most major social media companies allow people aged 13 or above to sign up.

TikTok says 99% of content it removes for violating its rules is taken down by AI or human moderators before it reaches 10,000 views. It also says it undertakes proactive investigations on videos with fewer than this number of views.

When he worked at Meta between 2019 and December 2020, Andrew Kaung says there was a different problem. He says that, while the majority of videos were removed or flagged to moderators by AI tools, the site relied on users to report other videos once they had already seen them.

He says he raised concerns while at both companies, but was met mainly with inaction because, he says, of fears about the amount of work involved or the cost. He says subsequently some improvements were made at TikTok and Meta, but he says younger users, such as Cai, were left at risk in the meantime.

Several former employees from the social media companies have told the BBC Andrew Kaung’s concerns were consistent with their own knowledge and experience.

Algorithms from all the major social media companies have been recommending harmful content to children, even if unintentionally, UK regulator Ofcom tells the BBC.

“Companies have been turning a blind eye and have been treating children as they treat adults,” says Almudena Lara, Ofcom’s online safety policy development director.

TikTok told the BBC it has “industry-leading” safety settings for teens and employs more than 40,000 people working to keep users safe. It said this year alone it expects to invest “more than $2bn (£1.5bn) on safety”, and of the content it removes for breaking its rules it finds 98% proactively.

Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, says it has more than 50 different tools, resources and features to give teens “positive and age-appropriate experiences”.

Cai told the BBC he tried to use one of Instagram’s tools and a similar one on TikTok to say he was not interested in violent or misogynistic content – but he says he continued to be recommended it.

He is interested in UFC – the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He also found himself watching videos from controversial influencers when they were sent his way, but he says he did not want to be recommended this more extreme content.

“You get the picture in your head and you can’t get it out. [It] stains your brain. And so you think about it for the rest of the day,” he says.

Girls he knows who are the same age have been recommended videos about topics such as music and make-up rather than violence, he says.

Meanwhile Cai, now 18, says he is still being pushed violent and misogynistic content on both Instagram and TikTok.

When we scroll through his Instagram Reels, they include an image making light of domestic violence. It shows two characters side by side, one of whom has bruises, with the caption: “My Love Language”. Another shows a person being run over by a lorry.

Cai says he has noticed that videos with millions of likes can be persuasive to other young men his age.

For example, he says one of his friends became drawn into content from a controversial influencer – and started to adopt misogynistic views.

His friend “took it too far”, Cai says. “He started saying things about women. It’s like you have to give your friend a reality check.”

Cai says he has commented on posts to say that he doesn’t like them, and when he has accidentally liked videos, he has tried to undo it, hoping it will reset the algorithms. But he says he has ended up with more videos taking over his feeds.

So, how do TikTok’s algorithms actually work?

According to Andrew Kaung, the algorithms’ fuel is engagement, regardless of whether the engagement is positive or negative. That could explain in part why Cai’s efforts to manipulate the algorithms weren’t working.

The first step for users is to specify some likes and interests when they sign up. Andrew says some of the content initially served up by the algorithms to, say, a 16-year-old, is based on the preferences they give and the preferences of other users of a similar age in a similar location.

According to TikTok, the algorithms are not informed by a user’s gender. But Andrew says the interests teenagers express when they sign up often have the effect of dividing them up along gender lines.

The former TikTok employee says some 16-year-old boys could be exposed to violent content “right away”, because other teenage users with similar preferences have expressed an interest in this type of content – even if that just means spending more time on a video that grabs their attention for that little bit longer.

The interests indicated by many teenage girls in profiles he examined – “pop singers, songs, make-up” – meant they were not recommended this violent content, he says.

He says the algorithms use “reinforcement learning” – a method where AI systems learn by trial and error – and train themselves to detect behaviour towards different videos.

Andrew Kaung says they are designed to maximise engagement by showing you videos they expect you to spend longer watching, comment on, or like – all to keep you coming back for more.

The algorithm recommending content to TikTok’s “For You Page”, he says, does not always differentiate between harmful and non-harmful content.

According to Andrew, one of the problems he identified when he worked at TikTok was that the teams involved in training and coding that algorithm did not always know the exact nature of the videos it was recommending.

“They see the number of viewers, the age, the trend, that sort of very abstract data. They wouldn’t necessarily be actually exposed to the content,” the former TikTok analyst tells me.

That was why, in 2022, he and a colleague decided to take a look at what kinds of videos were being recommended to a range of users, including some 16-year-olds.

He says they were concerned about violent and harmful content being served to some teenagers, and proposed to TikTok that it should update its moderation system.

They wanted TikTok to clearly label videos so everyone working there could see why they were harmful – extreme violence, abuse, pornography and so on – and to hire more moderators who specialised in these different areas. Andrew says their suggestions were rejected at that time.

TikTok says it had specialist moderators at the time and, as the platform has grown, it has continued to hire more. It also said it separated out different types of harmful content – into what it calls queues – for moderators.

Panorama: Can We Live Without Our Phones?

What happens when smartphones are taken away from kids for a week? With the help of two families and lots of remote cameras, Panorama finds out. And with calls for smartphones to be banned for children, Marianna Spring speaks to parents, teenagers and social media company insiders to investigate whether the content pushed to their feeds is harming them.

Watch on Monday on BBC One at 20:00 BST (20:30 in Scotland) or on BBC iPlayer (UK only)

Andrew Kaung says that from the inside of TikTok and Meta it felt really difficult to make the changes he thought were necessary.

“We are asking a private company whose interest is to promote their products to moderate themselves, which is like asking a tiger not to eat you,” he says.

He also says he thinks children’s and teenagers’ lives would be better if they stopped using their smartphones.

But for Cai, banning phones or social media for teenagers is not the solution. His phone is integral to his life – a really important way of chatting to friends, navigating when he is out and about, and paying for stuff.

Instead, he wants the social media companies to listen more to what teenagers don’t want to see. He wants the firms to make the tools that let users indicate their preferences more effective.

“I feel like social media companies don’t respect your opinion, as long as it makes them money,” Cai tells me.

In the UK, a new law will force social media firms to verify children’s ages and stop the sites recommending porn or other harmful content to young people. UK media regulator Ofcom is in charge of enforcing it.

Almudena Lara, Ofcom’s online safety policy development director, says that while harmful content that predominantly affects young women – such as videos promoting eating disorders and self-harm – have rightly been in the spotlight, the algorithmic pathways driving hate and violence to mainly teenage boys and young men have received less attention.

“It tends to be a minority of [children] that get exposed to the most harmful content. But we know, however, that once you are exposed to that harmful content, it becomes unavoidable,” says Ms Lara.

Ofcom says it can fine companies and could bring criminal prosecutions if they do not do enough, but the measures will not come in to force until 2025.

TikTok says it uses “innovative technology” and provides “industry-leading” safety and privacy settings for teens, including systems to block content that may not be suitable, and that it does not allow extreme violence or misogyny.

Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, says it has more than “50 different tools, resources and features” to give teens “positive and age-appropriate experiences”. According to Meta, it seeks feedback from its own teams and potential policy changes go through robust process.

When fans saw rapper Macklemore had cancelled an upcoming gig, some of them assumed it was in solidarity with Gaza.

But it wasn’t. The gig was in Dubai and he had cancelled over the war in Sudan, which has already killed tens of thousands of people, left millions more hungry and triggered a humanitarian disaster.

The glamorous Gulf city of Dubai is the biggest in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – which has been widely accused of funding the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the warring sides in Sudan.

“The crisis in Sudan is catastrophic,” Macklemore said in an Instagram post on Monday. Some food security specialists estimate up to 2.5 million people could die of starvation and illness by October.

“I have to ask myself what is my intention as an artist?” continued the rapper, who rose to fame with 2012 classic Thrift Shop.

“If I take the money,” Macklemore said, “while knowing it doesn’t sit right with my spirit, how am I any different from the politicians I’ve been actively protesting against?”

His moral stand has thrust the brutal conflict – which has garnered far less global attention than Ukraine or Gaza – into popular culture, and activists hope other artists will follow suit.

“It was huge,” says an activist who has been campaigning for a ceasefire with the group London for Sudan. “In the comments there were a lot of people saying, ‘oh, my God, what’s happening in Sudan?’

“I think it opened people’s eyes.”

The RSF is battling the Sudanese army for control of the country and has been accused of sexual violence, looting and ethnic cleansing in areas it controls.

A Human Rights Watch report suggests the RSF may have committed genocide against non-Arabs in a city where 15,000 people are feared to have been killed, something the group denies.

The RSF traces its roots to a militia, known as the Janjaweed, which were also accused of genocide 20 years ago in Sudan – an estimated 300,000 people died back then.

Evidence tying the UAE to the RSF has been mounting.

During the war it emerged that the RSF had used drones which a weapons expert from Amnesty International described as the “same drones” the UAE had supplied to its allies in other conflicts, including in Ethiopia and Yemen.

Experts have also seen civilian aircraft allegedly transporting weapons from the UAE to the RSF, according to a UN report presented to the Security Council earlier this year.

The allegation is that the UAE is trying to gain an economic foothold in the Red Sea and profit from Sudan’s resources.

The RSF controls some of Sudan’s most lucrative gold mines, located in the Darfur region.

A Swiss aid organisation alleges the Emiratis are importing billions of dollars worth of the precious metal that are smuggled out of Africa, including Sudan.

And before widespread fighting broke out in the country last year, the UAE signed a deal worth $6 billion to build and operate a port, airport and economic zone on the country’s Red Sea coast.

The UAE government has described the allegations over its involvement in the Sudan conflict as “baseless and unfounded”, and meant “to divert attention from the ongoing fighting and humanitarian catastrophe”.

“UAE reiterates its call for an immediate ceasefire in the ongoing conflict. The warring parties must stop fighting and work towards finding a peaceful solution to the conflict through dialogue,” it said in a statement to the UN.

Macklemore said on Instagram that several groups had been reaching out to him over the Sudan crisis for months.

A representative of Madaniya, an organisation for Sudanese people living in the UK, told BBC News: “A boycott by a major artist is obviously going to bring more attention to the Sudanese cause, which is great.

“What would be a wonderful secondary consequence is if more people were to look into the UAE’s involvement in Sudan.”

Over the next few weeks, Calvin Harris is due to give a performance in Dubai’s harbour and Sophie Ellis-Bextor has a date at the opera house.

Neither replied to a request for comment.

Prof Alex de Waal, an expert on Sudan based at Tufts University in Massachusetts, thinks a cultural and sporting boycott could be an effective way of targeting the regional powers accused of fuelling the war.

He says the UAE and Saudi Arabia are competing for influence in Africa and are backing opposing sides in Sudan. The Emirati and Saudi embassies in London have not responded to a BBC request for comment.

Prof de Waal is convinced that the Arab rivals are so economically powerful that no-one is likely to sanction them – and says that any such measures would be difficult to implement.

It wouldn’t be a priority for many Western countries, he adds, which are pre-occupied with the Israel-Gaza war and tensions with Iran.

But he also suggests the UAE and Saudi Arabia care greatly about their reputation on the international stage.

“Cultural figures and sports figures saying ‘we’re not going there’ counts for much, much more than a threat of trade sanctions or financial penalties.

“I think, interestingly, the [threat to them] of soft power is much stronger, and has much greater potential, than hard power.”

Dr Crystal Murphy, a specialist on East African finance based at Chapman University in California, points towards protests against apartheid in South Africa which ultimately “rewrote political science and international relations”.

She explains: “The boycotts came as a result of tonnes of public and celebrity [organising] and raising awareness of the issue, where enough people were pushing their governments.

“So it can happen,” she adds. “What’s the difference between Macklemore and the South Africa boycotts?”

Campaigners are a long way from achieving boycotts of that scale, but are hopeful that momentum will gather after Macklemore’s move.

The representative of Madaniya describes warring generals as trying to destroy the fabric of Sudanese society. But that doesn’t deter activists. “There’s always a hope for the Sudanese people.”

Already, some people may be following in Macklemore’s footsteps.

One commenter on his post said they’d been invited to speak at a convention in the UAE, but now said: “Your post encouraged me to research a bit more and I decided to decline the offer.”

BBC Radio 4 – What’s happening in Sudan?

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 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 – retired brigadier Abdullahi Aman Azmi and barrister 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.”

The collapse of a massive statue of a 17th Century ruler has sparked protests and a political controversy in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

Shivaji Shahaji Bhosale was a warrior king whose exploits against the Mughals made him a hero during his own lifetime. He is revered in the state and celebrated as an icon of the Hindu right.

So the statue’s collapse, weeks before elections are due in Maharashtra, has put the state’s ruling coalition on the back foot and given opposition parties a potent issue to raise.

It even drew an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who inaugurated the statue in December and whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is part of Maharashtra’s ruling coalition.

“I extend my apologies to all those who worship Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (Emperor Shivaji) as their revered deity. I know their sentiments are hurt,” he said on Friday.

The BJP is part of an alliance which runs the state government along with breakaway factions of two regional parties, the Shiv Sena and the National Congress Party (NCP).

Even members of the NCP held “silent protests” last week, demanding action from the state government that they are part of.

Built at a cost of 23.6m rupees ($281,285; £214,185), the 35-ft (10.6m) statue in Sindhudurg district collapsed on 26 August amid heavy monsoon rains.

The opposition has demanded Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s resignation, alleging corruption in its construction.

Senior opposition leader Sharad Pawar said during a protest rally that numerous statues of Shivaji across the state were still standing but only the newly installed one had collapsed.

“There was corruption in the process of installing the statue. This is an insult to Chhatrapati Maharaj,” he alleged.

Mr Shinde has denied the charges, saying the statue collapsed because of strong winds in the coastal town.

Ravindra Chavan, a state minister, said that the public works department, which he heads, had already informed the Indian Navy – responsible for overseeing the statue’s construction – about rust in its nuts and bolts.”

Ashish Shelar, the BJP’s state chief, has also apologised publicly, saying the mistake will be rectified and the culprits will face punishment. Police have arrested one person, the structural consultant on the project, and say they are on the lookout for the statue’s sculptor.

Formally crowned as Chhatrapati – king in Sanskrit – in 1674 at Rajkot fort where the collapsed statue was installed, Shivaji ruled over a Maratha kingdom which included parts of western, central and southern India. He was seen as an astute leader who successfully made alliances with or militarily resisted the ruling powers of his time.

He has become an increasingly central figure in Maharashtra’s politics of late and no political party can afford to ignore him or be accused of insulting him. Marathas from Shivaji’s caste dominate the political landscape of the state – 12 of 20 chief ministers since the state’s formation have been Marathas.

Politicians would also not prefer to inflame the sentiments of the Maratha community, who have repeatedly protested in recent years demanding quotas in government jobs and educational institutions.

So the opposition will hope to frame the issue as an insult to the state and Maratha pride.

The opposition alliance, called Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) has organised state-wide protests. In response, the BJP has held counter-protests, accusing the MVA of politicising the issue.

After being hounded over her nationality and forced to drop out of the Miss South Africa contest, Chidimma Adetshina has been crowned beauty queen of a totally different country.

Ms Adetshina cried tears of joy as she was named Miss Universe Nigeria on Saturday.

“This crown is not just for beauty; it’s a call for unity,” the 23-year-old law student stated after weeks at the centre of an intense media storm.

She was invited to participate in Miss Universe Nigeria after her position as a finalist in the Miss South Africa contest sparked a wave of criticism.

Some people in South Africa had questioned her eligibility to compete in the beauty pageant because despite being a South African citizen, Ms Adetshina’s father is Nigerian and her mother has Mozambican roots.

• Beauty contest sparks row over who counts as South African
• Tyla’s racial identity: South African singer sparks culture war

In interviews Ms Adetshina said she was born in Soweto – the South African township next to Johannesburg – and grew up in Cape Town.

The row over her nationality sparked an investigation with the organisers of Miss South Africa asking the nation’s home affairs department to look into her eligibility.

After an initial probe, the department announced that Miss Adetshina’s mother may have committed “identity theft” to become a South African national.

However, the statement added that Ms Adetshina “could not have participated in the alleged unlawful actions of her mother as she was an infant at the time”.

A day after the announcement, Ms Adetshina dropped out of the contest, saying she took the decision for her and her family’s safety and wellbeing.

By now, her ordeal had made headlines around the world.

After hearing of Ms Adetshina’s story, the organisers of Miss Universe Nigeria invited her to participate in their contest.

They said she would be able to “represent her father’s native land on the international stage”.

After winning the contest on Saturday, Ms Adetshina will represent Nigeria at November’s Miss Universe competition.

Her success has been celebrated on social media.

“Your story is inspirational – you are stronger than you think and we love you our African sister,” one South African woman wrote on Instagram.

Another supporter said: “Trust me guys we Nigerians are proud of her… she’s our very own sister, a very smart, intelligent girl, our Nigerian blood runs through her veins.”

However, others alleged the contest was “rigged” in Ms Adetshina’s favour – an accusation the Miss Nigeria organisers have not responded to.

“She’s undeserving,” one Instagram user said.

“She has never lived in Nigeria and was merely invited to compete after the final delegates had been chosen… she arrived in Nigeria for the first time after 20 years last week, only to be given our crown. This organisation reeks of sheer bias.”

Another wrote: “In all honesty you won out of pity… feeling very sorry for the other contestants who were there long before you came.”

At the Miss Universe contest in November, the law student’s rivals will include Mia le Roux, who won this year’s Miss South Africa competition after Ms Adetshina dropped out.

Ms le Roux became the first deaf woman in history to win the crown.

• Mia le Roux: ‘I never thought someone like me could become Miss South Africa’
• Inside the beauty pageant in one of the world’s worst places to be a woman
• How common are xenophobic attacks in South Africa?

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.

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 tilapia 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.

Air travellers who hoped the era of “tiny toiletries” was nearly over are facing fresh disappointment, as European airports re-introduce strict cabin bag rules.

Some EU destinations had scrapped the 100ml limit for liquids being carried in hand luggage.

But from Sunday, they must all bring it back due to a “temporary technical issue” with new security scanners. It follows a similar move by the UK earlier this summer.

It means if you have been on holiday, you cannot buy a large bottle of suncream, perfume or a local tipple before you get to the airport and expect to carry it home in your hand luggage.

But why has it happened? And will the relaxed rules that had started in some locations ever return?

Airline passengers around the world had grown used to strict 100ml restrictions on liquids, pastes and gels, which had to be put in a clear plastic bag.

But new scanning machines which use CT X-ray technology should in theory enable larger volumes of liquids to go through, and laptops to stay in bags.

Some EU airports, for example in Rome and Amsterdam, had already put them in place and eased their rules. Most had not yet. Some others have been trialling the new technology.

The Europe branch of the Airports Council International (ACI) estimates around 350 of these scanners are now in use across 13 EU countries such as Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

However, the EU has reinstated the 100ml limit so a technical issue with the new equipment can be addressed, although it has not said what this issue is.

Reports have suggested that the scanners were not accurate for some liquid containers being carried in bags.

In July, ACI Europe criticised the restriction as a “setback for the passenger experience and a blow to major investments made by airports”.

Its director general, Olivier Jankovec, said security was the top priority, but added that those “which have been early adopters of this new technology are being heavily penalised both operationally and financially”.

He also argued that restricting their use “questions the trust and confidence the industry can place in the current EU certification system for aviation security equipment”.

Predictions that all the UK’s airports would scrap their hand luggage liquid limits this year did not come to pass.

The previous Conservative government had required state-of-the-art scanning equipment to be installed in security lanes by June 2024.

It hasn’t proved that straightforward.

Some smaller airports, which have fewer lanes to update, did meet a deadline of June 2024.

London City, Teesside, Newcastle, Leeds-Bradford, Aberdeen and Southend had complied on time and dropped the old liquids rules.

However, the likes of Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester didn’t. Reasons varied from the need for construction work, to supply chain problems. They were given more time to get the new kit in place.

But in mid-June, the Department for Transport suddenly announced 100ml liquids limits must be re-introduced where they had been dropped.

Those airports that had scrapped the rule needed to swiftly change their processes and airport bosses were angry at the sudden U-turn.

The European Commission announced in late July that the maximum size allowed for individual liquid containers would revert back to 100ml.

There is no date for when the rules will be relaxed again.

The Commission said this wasn’t “in response to any new threat but addresses a temporary technical issue” with the new generation of scanners.

It said it was taking the action “in alignment with the EU’s international partners”, and that “swift technical solutions” would be developed.

The UK government previously said the systems needed improving after new information came to light.

However it has also given no end date for the 100ml limit, so it’s unclear how long the situation will last.

The Department for Transport said it was “working with manufacturers, airports and international partners to lift restrictions when possible.”

So for the foreseeable future it’s best for passengers to assume the old 100ml restrictions apply, and check the rules at both departure and return airports before travelling.

Vice-President Kamala Harris has criticised 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”.

Earlier in the week, the US Army said a Trump staffer “abruptly pushed aside” an Arlington employee as they tried to warn his team about rules against filming in the cemetery.

The event attended by Trump on Monday was to honour 13 US military service members who were killed during the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.

The Trump campaign has disputed the cemetery’s version of events, and was invited by the families of the fallen soldiers.

Ms Harris wrote that Trump “disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt”.

Saturday’s social media post marked the first time Ms Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, commented on the controversy.

She said she had visited the 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 honoured, 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.”

On Sunday, the Trump campaign released a statement from the Gold Star military families that invited him to the event, saying the former president was there to honour the sacrifice of their relatives who were killed.

They also took aim at Ms Harris in the statement, saying she has “disgracefully twisted this sacred moment into a political ploy”.

Meanwhile, 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 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 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.

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.

The collapse of a massive statue of a 17th Century ruler has sparked protests and a political controversy in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

Shivaji Shahaji Bhosale was a warrior king whose exploits against the Mughals made him a hero during his own lifetime. He is revered in the state and celebrated as an icon of the Hindu right.

So the statue’s collapse, weeks before elections are due in Maharashtra, has put the state’s ruling coalition on the back foot and given opposition parties a potent issue to raise.

It even drew an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who inaugurated the statue in December and whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is part of Maharashtra’s ruling coalition.

“I extend my apologies to all those who worship Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (Emperor Shivaji) as their revered deity. I know their sentiments are hurt,” he said on Friday.

The BJP is part of an alliance which runs the state government along with breakaway factions of two regional parties, the Shiv Sena and the National Congress Party (NCP).

Even members of the NCP held “silent protests” last week, demanding action from the state government that they are part of.

Built at a cost of 23.6m rupees ($281,285; £214,185), the 35-ft (10.6m) statue in Sindhudurg district collapsed on 26 August amid heavy monsoon rains.

The opposition has demanded Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s resignation, alleging corruption in its construction.

Senior opposition leader Sharad Pawar said during a protest rally that numerous statues of Shivaji across the state were still standing but only the newly installed one had collapsed.

“There was corruption in the process of installing the statue. This is an insult to Chhatrapati Maharaj,” he alleged.

Mr Shinde has denied the charges, saying the statue collapsed because of strong winds in the coastal town.

Ravindra Chavan, a state minister, said that the public works department, which he heads, had already informed the Indian Navy – responsible for overseeing the statue’s construction – about rust in its nuts and bolts.”

Ashish Shelar, the BJP’s state chief, has also apologised publicly, saying the mistake will be rectified and the culprits will face punishment. Police have arrested one person, the structural consultant on the project, and say they are on the lookout for the statue’s sculptor.

Formally crowned as Chhatrapati – king in Sanskrit – in 1674 at Rajkot fort where the collapsed statue was installed, Shivaji ruled over a Maratha kingdom which included parts of western, central and southern India. He was seen as an astute leader who successfully made alliances with or militarily resisted the ruling powers of his time.

He has become an increasingly central figure in Maharashtra’s politics of late and no political party can afford to ignore him or be accused of insulting him. Marathas from Shivaji’s caste dominate the political landscape of the state – 12 of 20 chief ministers since the state’s formation have been Marathas.

Politicians would also not prefer to inflame the sentiments of the Maratha community, who have repeatedly protested in recent years demanding quotas in government jobs and educational institutions.

So the opposition will hope to frame the issue as an insult to the state and Maratha pride.

The opposition alliance, called Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) has organised state-wide protests. In response, the BJP has held counter-protests, accusing the MVA of politicising the issue.

A man has gone on trial in France for repeatedly drugging and raping his wife as well as arranging for dozens of other men to rape her.

The defendant, named as 71-year-old Dominique P, is accused of recruiting strangers online to come to his home and sexually assault the victim for over a decade.

The woman was so heavily sedated she was not aware of the repeat abuse, her lawyers say.

The case has horrified France for the mass scale of the grave crimes.

Police identified at least 92 rapes committed by 72 men. Fifty were identified and charged and are standing trial alongside the husband.

The victim, now 72, only learnt of the abuse in 2020 after being informed by police.

The trial will be “a horrible ordeal” for her, said her lawyer Antoine Camus, as it will be the first time she sees video evidence of the abuse.

“For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told AFP news agency.

Dominique P was investigated by police after an incident in September 2020, when a security guard caught him secretly filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping centre.

Police then found hundreds of pictures and videos of his wife on his computer in which she appeared to be unconscious.

The images are alleged to show dozens of assaults in the couple’s home. The abuse is alleged to have started in 2011.

Investigators also found chats on a website in which Dominique P allegedly recruited strangers to come to their home and rape his wife.

He admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilisers, including an anxiety-reducing drug.

He is accused of taking part in the rapes, filming them and encouraging the other men using degrading language, according to prosecutors.

No money is alleged to have changed hands.

The accused rapists – aged between 26 and 74 – came from all walks of life and while most participated once, some took part up to six times, according to prosecutors.

Their defence is that they were helping a couple live out their fantasies but Dominique P told investigators that everyone was aware his wife had been drugged without her knowledge.

An expert said her state “was closer to a coma than to sleep”.

Dominique P, who said he was raped when he was nine, is ready to face “his family and his wife”, his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro told news agency AFP.

He has also been charged with a 1991 murder and rape, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, which he admitted after DNA testing.

The trial, which is being held in Parc des Expositions in Avignon, southern France, is due to last until 20 December.

On Monday, the opening day of the trial, the woman turned up to court supported by her three children, AFP reported.

Mr Camus, her lawyer, said she could have opted for a trial behind closed doors, but “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”.

When fans saw rapper Macklemore had cancelled an upcoming gig, some of them assumed it was in solidarity with Gaza.

But it wasn’t. The gig was in Dubai and he had cancelled over the war in Sudan, which has already killed tens of thousands of people, left millions more hungry and triggered a humanitarian disaster.

The glamorous Gulf city of Dubai is the biggest in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – which has been widely accused of funding the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the warring sides in Sudan.

“The crisis in Sudan is catastrophic,” Macklemore said in an Instagram post on Monday. Some food security specialists estimate up to 2.5 million people could die of starvation and illness by October.

“I have to ask myself what is my intention as an artist?” continued the rapper, who rose to fame with 2012 classic Thrift Shop.

“If I take the money,” Macklemore said, “while knowing it doesn’t sit right with my spirit, how am I any different from the politicians I’ve been actively protesting against?”

His moral stand has thrust the brutal conflict – which has garnered far less global attention than Ukraine or Gaza – into popular culture, and activists hope other artists will follow suit.

“It was huge,” says an activist who has been campaigning for a ceasefire with the group London for Sudan. “In the comments there were a lot of people saying, ‘oh, my God, what’s happening in Sudan?’

“I think it opened people’s eyes.”

The RSF is battling the Sudanese army for control of the country and has been accused of sexual violence, looting and ethnic cleansing in areas it controls.

A Human Rights Watch report suggests the RSF may have committed genocide against non-Arabs in a city where 15,000 people are feared to have been killed, something the group denies.

The RSF traces its roots to a militia, known as the Janjaweed, which were also accused of genocide 20 years ago in Sudan – an estimated 300,000 people died back then.

Evidence tying the UAE to the RSF has been mounting.

During the war it emerged that the RSF had used drones which a weapons expert from Amnesty International described as the “same drones” the UAE had supplied to its allies in other conflicts, including in Ethiopia and Yemen.

Experts have also seen civilian aircraft allegedly transporting weapons from the UAE to the RSF, according to a UN report presented to the Security Council earlier this year.

The allegation is that the UAE is trying to gain an economic foothold in the Red Sea and profit from Sudan’s resources.

The RSF controls some of Sudan’s most lucrative gold mines, located in the Darfur region.

A Swiss aid organisation alleges the Emiratis are importing billions of dollars worth of the precious metal that are smuggled out of Africa, including Sudan.

And before widespread fighting broke out in the country last year, the UAE signed a deal worth $6 billion to build and operate a port, airport and economic zone on the country’s Red Sea coast.

The UAE government has described the allegations over its involvement in the Sudan conflict as “baseless and unfounded”, and meant “to divert attention from the ongoing fighting and humanitarian catastrophe”.

“UAE reiterates its call for an immediate ceasefire in the ongoing conflict. The warring parties must stop fighting and work towards finding a peaceful solution to the conflict through dialogue,” it said in a statement to the UN.

Macklemore said on Instagram that several groups had been reaching out to him over the Sudan crisis for months.

A representative of Madaniya, an organisation for Sudanese people living in the UK, told BBC News: “A boycott by a major artist is obviously going to bring more attention to the Sudanese cause, which is great.

“What would be a wonderful secondary consequence is if more people were to look into the UAE’s involvement in Sudan.”

Over the next few weeks, Calvin Harris is due to give a performance in Dubai’s harbour and Sophie Ellis-Bextor has a date at the opera house.

Neither replied to a request for comment.

Prof Alex de Waal, an expert on Sudan based at Tufts University in Massachusetts, thinks a cultural and sporting boycott could be an effective way of targeting the regional powers accused of fuelling the war.

He says the UAE and Saudi Arabia are competing for influence in Africa and are backing opposing sides in Sudan. The Emirati and Saudi embassies in London have not responded to a BBC request for comment.

Prof de Waal is convinced that the Arab rivals are so economically powerful that no-one is likely to sanction them – and says that any such measures would be difficult to implement.

It wouldn’t be a priority for many Western countries, he adds, which are pre-occupied with the Israel-Gaza war and tensions with Iran.

But he also suggests the UAE and Saudi Arabia care greatly about their reputation on the international stage.

“Cultural figures and sports figures saying ‘we’re not going there’ counts for much, much more than a threat of trade sanctions or financial penalties.

“I think, interestingly, the [threat to them] of soft power is much stronger, and has much greater potential, than hard power.”

Dr Crystal Murphy, a specialist on East African finance based at Chapman University in California, points towards protests against apartheid in South Africa which ultimately “rewrote political science and international relations”.

She explains: “The boycotts came as a result of tonnes of public and celebrity [organising] and raising awareness of the issue, where enough people were pushing their governments.

“So it can happen,” she adds. “What’s the difference between Macklemore and the South Africa boycotts?”

Campaigners are a long way from achieving boycotts of that scale, but are hopeful that momentum will gather after Macklemore’s move.

The representative of Madaniya describes warring generals as trying to destroy the fabric of Sudanese society. But that doesn’t deter activists. “There’s always a hope for the Sudanese people.”

Already, some people may be following in Macklemore’s footsteps.

One commenter on his post said they’d been invited to speak at a convention in the UAE, but now said: “Your post encouraged me to research a bit more and I decided to decline the offer.”

BBC Radio 4 – What’s happening in Sudan?

Two people have died in the Japanese city of Yokohama after a teenage girl jumped to her death from a shopping centre, hitting a pedestrian below.

The 17-year-old high school student jumped from a building in a crowded shopping district, hitting a 32-year-old woman who was out with her friends on Saturday evening.

The two were immediately taken to hospital around 18:00 local time (09:00 GMT), where the girl died an hour later. The woman also died soon after.

It’s not clear why she might have killed herself, though more people under the age of 18 in Japan kill themselves on 1 September – just ahead of the new school term – than on any other day, according to official statistics.

Last year, 513 children took their own lives in Japan, with “school problems” cited as the most common factor.

Students who don’t want to return to school are known as futoko, or “people who don’t go to school.”

The main reasons why these futoko avoid school include family circumstances, personal issues with friends, and bullying, according to a previous survey by the ministry of education.

In recent years, authorities and media organisations have tried to raise public awareness of the challenges students face at this time of year.

Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, for example, mounted a campaign on Twitter called “on the night of August 31″.

The most recent incident in Yokohama mirrors a similar episode in 2020, when a 17-year-old boy jumped from the roof of a shopping centre, killing a 19-year-old female student in a busy district of Osaka.

At the time, the boy was posthumously charged with manslaughter, meaning that his family owed compensation to the family of the victim he killed. However, the charge was dropped shortly afterwards.

So far, the authorities have not indicated any culpability with regard to Saturday night’s deaths.

While Japan’s suicide rate is slowly decreasing among the general population, it is rising among young Japanese people.

Japan is the only G7 country where suicide is the leading cause of death for teenagers.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has urged mainstream parties not to lend support to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which won a big victory in the eastern state of Thuringia in Sunday’s regional election.

The result gives the far right its first win in a state parliament election since World War Two.

The AfD also came a close second in Sunday’s other big state election, in the more populous neighbouring state of Saxony.

The AfD has been designated as right-wing extremist in both Thuringia and Saxony. Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in Thuringia, has previously been fined for using a Nazi slogan, although he denies knowingly doing so.

On Monday, Mr Scholz urged other parties to block the AfD from governing by maintaining a so-called firewall against it.

“All democratic parties are now called upon to form stable governments without right-wing extremists,” he said, calling the results “bitter” and “worrying”.

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said that voters in Thuringia and Saxony had given her party a “very clear mandate to govern”.

She urged parties to ignore Mr Scholz’s call to build government coalitions without the AfD, and said that doing so would “undermine the democratic participation of large sections of the population”.

“Firewalls are undemocratic,” Ms Weidel added.

Without the support of other parties, the AfD cannot govern in Thuringia. The second-largest party, the conservative CDU, has made clear it will not consider ruling with the far right.

Mathematically, then, the conservatives will need support from parties on the left to form a majority.

They have previously refused to work with the left-wing Die Linke, meaning they could have to look at the more radical left populist Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW to form a ruling coalition – an unpalatable option for many within the CDU.

Mr Höcke, the AfD’s top candidate in Thuringia has suggested there were plenty of CDU voters who would be happy if they worked together instead.

In any case, with over 30% of the vote the AfD has a so-called “blocking minority” – meaning it will be able to stop the appointment of new judges or any constitutional change.

Any coalition that emerges is likely to be highly unstable.

In Saxony, the conservatives won 42 seats, just ahead of the AfD with 41, while Sahra Wagenknecht’s party is in third with 15 seats.

In Thuringia, Mr Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) won just six seats, with none for his coalition partners the Greens and the liberal FDP. The SPD also fared badly in Saxony, where it came fifth.

The elections underlined the unpopularity of Germany’s ruling “traffic-light” coalition, so named because of the red, yellow and green of the party colours.

Each of the three governing parties did badly, meaning they will fight their corner in the national coalition even more assertively.

Already leading figures within each party are saying they need to stand up for their own values. This will likely lead to more rifts within the national government. Ministers are saying they won’t break up the coalition, and bring down the government – but the fact they are saying this at all is a sign of how difficult things are within the coalition.

Ms Weidel said people “voted out” the coalition and called on Mr Scholz and his partners to “pack their bags and vacate their chairs, because the voters want a different government, they want a different politics”.

The biggest issue for AfD voters on Sunday was immigration, and in particular the issue of refugees and asylum.

Even though the AfD is still blocked out of governmental power both in the regions and nationally, the party does have an impact on mainstream politics.

When the AfD entered the Bundestag in Berlin in 2017 critics say their fierce anti-migrant rhetoric coarsened the debate.

Some believe the discourse in politics and the media has become more aggressive, and CDU leader Friedrich Merz is accused of aping AfD rhetoric.

Either way, to win back AfD voters mainstream parties are talking tougher on issues like migration and pushing through measures to make it easier to deport asylum seekers whose application has been rejected.

The federal chairwoman of the umbrella organization of Turkish communities in Berlin, Aslihan Yesilkaya-Yurtbay, said that the results of the elections were “shocking and frightening”. She added that many younger people of her generation are already planning to leave Germany.

“The future in this country for citizens with a migration background is being called into question,” she said.

The AfD also wants to stop weapons supplies to Ukraine, as does Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW.

Some five million Germans in the east were eligible to vote on Sunday.

A third eastern state, Brandenburg, is due to vote in three weeks’ time and although the AfD is ahead in the opinion polls, the Social Democrats and conservatives are only a few points behind.

Joe Biden has said Benjamin Netanyahu is not doing enough to secure a hostage deal and ceasefire with Hamas, amid reports suggesting a new proposal would be sent to the Israeli prime minister as “final”.

The US president and Kamala Harris, his vice-president, met negotiators in the Situation Room to hammer out a proposal, as protests engulfed Israel on Monday over the weekend deaths of six hostages in Gaza.

Asked whether Mr Netanyahu was doing enough, Mr Biden replied “no”. He added that the US would not give up, and would “push as hard as we can” for a deal.

US officials have categorised this latest proposal as a “take it or leave it deal”, the Washington Post reported.

It comes after Israel recovered the bodies of six hostages in Gaza on Saturday.

Their deaths have caused widespread protests in Israel from those critical of Mr Netanyahu’s handling of the war and hostage crisis.

On Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan met the US families of remaining hostages. The Axios news website reported that he relayed the news that Mr Biden would present a “final” hostage release and ceasefire proposal later this week.

The US family of Edan Alexander, a member of the Israeli military who is still a hostage in Gaza, have pushed for Israel to accept the deal, saying it is “now or never”.

His father Adi Alexander praised the US for its “dedication and commitment” to secure a deal, saying that Sunday was his 15th meeting with Mr Sullivan since his son’s abduction on 7 October.

But in an interview with BBC’s US partner CBS News on Monday, he appealed to US officials to “do something different, because the outcome is the same after 11 months”.

Mr Alexander accused Mr Netanyahu of “prolonging the war for short-term political gain”.

“Time is passing by and we’re getting more bodies out of Gaza. This is unacceptable,” he said.

The Washington Post reported the killing of the six hostages increased the urgency among Mr Biden’s aides to push for a deal.

“You can’t keep negotiating this. This process has to be called at some point,” one senior official told the newspaper.

“Does it derail the deal? No. If anything, it should add additional urgency in this closing phase, which we were already in,” they added.

The US, Qatar and Egypt have for months tried to secure a deal that includes a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas.

The Biden administration has criticised Hamas for failing to agree to a deal, though US foreign officials have also accused Mr Netanyahu of making demands that have also derailed efforts.

The war in the strip began after Hamas breached the Gaza border, killed 1,200 Israelis and abducted 251 on 7 October.

Israel has since killed over 40,000 Palestinians in retaliatory attacks, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.

The US response to the war has had implications for the Biden administration and Ms Harris, the Democratic nominee in November’s US presidential election. Pro-Palestinian factions in the party have urged for a ceasefire.

Ms Harris’s opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump, has blamed Ms Harris and Mr Biden’s failure to secure a deal for the hostage deaths last weekend.

It was the image that made the Titanic’s wreck instantly recognisable – the ship’s bow looming out of the darkness of the Atlantic depths.

But a new expedition has revealed the effects of slow decay, with a large section of railing now on the sea floor.

The loss of the railing – immortalised by Jack and Rose in the famous movie scene – was discovered during a series of dives by underwater robots this summer. The images they captured show how the wreck is changing after more than 100 years beneath the waves.

The ship sank in April 1912 after hitting an iceberg, resulting in the loss of 1,500 lives.

“The bow of Titanic is just iconic – you have all these moments in pop culture – and that’s what you think of when you think of the shipwreck. And it doesn’t look like that any more,” said Tomasina Ray, director of collections at RMS Titanic Inc, the company that carried out the expedition.

“It’s just another reminder of the deterioration that’s happening every day. People ask all the time: ‘How long is Titanic going to be there?’ We just don’t know but we’re watching it in real time.”

The team believes the section of railing, which is about 4.5m (14.7ft) long, fell off at some point in the last two years.

Images and a digital scan from an 2022 expedition carried out by deep-sea mapping company Magellan and documentary makers Atlantic Productions show that the railing was still attached – though it was starting to buckle.

“At some point the metal gave way and it fell away,” said Tomasina Ray.

It is not the only part of the ship, which lies 3,800m down, that is being lost to the sea. The metal structure is being eaten away by microbes, creating stalactites of rust called rusticles.

Previous expeditions have found that parts of the Titanic are collapsing. Dives led by explorer Victor Vescovo in 2019 showed that the starboard side of the officer’s quarters were collapsing, destroying state rooms and obliterating features like the captain’s bath from view.

This summer’s RMS Titanic Inc expedition took place over July and August.

Two remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) captured more than two million images and 24 hours of high definition footage of both the wreck, which split apart as it sank with the bow and stern lying about 800m apart, and the debris field surrounding it.

The company is now carefully reviewing the footage to catalogue the finds and will eventually create a highly detailed digital 3D scan of the entire wreck site.

More images from the dives will be revealed over the coming months.

The team has also announced another discovery of an artefact they were hoping to find even though it was against all the odds.

In 1986 a bronze statue called the Diana of Versailles was spotted and photographed by Robert Ballard, who had found the wreck of the Titanic a year earlier.

But its location was not known and the 60cm-tall figure was not documented again. Now, though, it has been discovered lying face up in the sediment in the debris field.

“It was like finding a needle in a haystack, and to rediscover this year was momentous,” said James Penca, a Titanic researcher and presenter of the Witness Titanic podcast.

The statue was once on display for the Titanic’s first-class passengers.

“The first-class lounge was the most beautiful, and unbelievably detailed, room on the ship. And the centrepiece of that room was the Diana of Versailles,” he said.

“But unfortunately, when Titanic split in two during the sinking, the lounge got ripped open. And in the chaos and the destruction, Diana got ripped off her mantle and she landed in the darkness of the debris field.”

RMS Titanic Inc has the salvage rights to the Titanic, and is the only company legally allowed to remove items from the wreck site.

Over the years, the company has retrieved thousands of items from the debris field, a selection of which are put on display around the world.

They plan to return next year to recover more – and the Diana statue is one of the items they would like to bring back to the surface.

But some believe the wreck is a grave site that should be left untouched.

“This rediscovery of the Diana statue is the perfect argument against leaving Titanic alone,” Mr Penca said in response.

“This was a piece of art that was meant to be viewed and appreciated. And now that beautiful piece of art is on the ocean floor… in pitch black darkness where she has been for 112 years.

“To bring Diana back so people can see her with their own eyes – the value in that, to spark a love of history, of diving, of conservation, of shipwrecks, of sculpture, I could never leave that on the ocean floor.”

Russia has fired a barrage of missiles at Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, hours before thousands of children returned to school for the first day of the academic year.

The mayor, Vitali Klitschko, says a water treatment plant and the entrance of a metro station used as a shelter were hit. Two schools and a university were also damaged.

According to Ukraine’s military, 22 cruise and air ballistic missiles were destroyed by the air force.

Local authorities say three people were injured by debris from destroyed missiles.

For schoolchildren across the capital, Monday’s bombardment coincided with the first day of the school year, a day of celebration in Ukraine.

Teachers and parents tried to keep a sense of normality, with music playing while smiling students were welcomed by a sea of flowers.

One parent, who hid with her daughter at home during the missile attack before taking her to school, said they were showing once more “that this nation is invincible”.

“Children are smiling, but you can see the strain on the faces of their teachers [who] carry this burden”, she told the BBC.

“I’m so thankful to them for all they did to make it a real holiday for the kids.”

For 33-year-old Yevheniia, who was taking her six-year-old daughter to school for the first time, the day was marred by fear.

“Her hands were shaking,” Yevheniia told the Reuters news agency.

“Our apartment started to stink of smoke, but we still need to go to school, right? We are Ukrainians,” she said she told her daughter that morning.

Alina, a student at the damaged university, told Ukrainian TV she “started screaming” when the air raid alert sounded, with everyone running into their dormitory’s bomb shelter.

Air raid sirens rang out for nearly two hours during the attack, before the skies were deemed clear by the military.

“We were very scared,” Alina said, adding they saw a fire following the sound of explosions.

Following the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the first day of school “one of the most important days of the year” for children, and their families and teachers.

“All our schools, all higher education institutions that are working today are proof of the resilience of our people and the strength of Ukraine,” he said on his Telegram channel.

All of Ukraine was placed on alert for several hours, and neighbouring Nato state Poland said it had deployed its own as well as allied aircraft to secure its airspace during the Russian strikes.

Russia’s forces last month advanced on 477 sq km (184 sq miles) of Ukrainian territory – the biggest monthly increase by Moscow since October 2022 – according to data from the Institute for the Study of War analysed by AFP.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said his forces have not advanced with “such a pace” in the Donbas “for a long time” and are taking several sq km of territory per day.

Meanwhile, in Russia’s Kursk region – where Ukraine launched a surprise incursion on 6 August – progress has slowed with Kyiv most recently claiming to control 1,294 sq km (500 sq miles) of territory, including 100 settlements.

Nearly 600 Russian soldiers have also been captured, it added.

But President Putin – who was speaking to children starting their own new school year – said this will not deter his forces’ advance into eastern Ukraine, claiming they were moving forward at the fastest rate in a “long time”.

“Their calculation was to stop our offensive actions in key parts of the Donbas. The result is known… they did not achieve stopping our advance,” he said.

Some critics in Ukraine have suggested that the incursion in Kursk has diverted seasoned troops from the Donbas frontline at a critical moment.

However, President Zelensky defended the offensive on Monday, saying it was proceeding “according to the plan”. He said the attack could ease the pressure on the eastern front.

For the previous 72 hours, the menacing whirr above our heads has belonged to Russia’s suicide drones, passing over and then bearing down on their targets.

Now the buzz comes from a Ukrainian unmanned aircraft which has not been sent up to kill, but to relay footage from the training ground to commanders back at base.

We’ve been brought to a secret training location in the Chernihiv region where the latest army intake is being fast tracked to the battlefield in the renewed effort to blunt Moscow’s grinding advance.

In the hail of machine gun fire and instructors’ commands, the most striking aspect of the scene is the age of the new recruits. Most seem to be in their 40s and 50s.

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Among the grey-haired contingent, Rostyslav, whose wife and two children are waiting for him back home in the Odesa region.

A month ago he was a driver. Next month he could find himself fighting on Russian soil, with Ukraine vowing to hold on to the land it seized in the Kursk region during its lightning incursion a month ago.

“I think this is the right thing to do,” he says of the operation.

“Look how long they’ve been on our land. We’ve been suffering for so long, we have to do something. You can’t just sit there while they are capturing our territory. What will we do then? Will we become their slaves?”

The training schedule we’re witnessing reflects the accelerated programme new army joiners are undergoing as Ukraine tries to deal with the sheer mass of men Russia is committing to the frontline.

The Ministry of Defence in London estimated there were 70,000 Russian casualties in Ukraine in May and June alone.

Under the scorching sun, the new Ukrainian recruits jump in and out of American-made armoured fighting vehicles and open fire on enemy positions.

The military, anxious that the location of this training remains secret, asked to see the footage we recorded on location before this story was reported across BBC News – but did not see any scripts nor have any editorial control.

In a nearby woodland, a simulated Russian attack on Ukrainian trenches is repelled while the boom of grenade target practice shudders across the plain.

Two and a half years into the war, and Ukraine is desperate for more troops and brought into force a new conscription law which lowered the age of men joining from 27 to 25. Military service for women is not mandatory.

The drive for younger conscripts has not hit this group of men.

All the recruits we see before us have already had 30 days of basic training and today it’s more advanced care – dealing with broken bones, gunshots and catastrophic bleeding – using medical equipment sent from the UK.

Light-hearted moments – a decidedly wonky tourniquet here or there – punctuate a heavy air.

There’s no escaping the fact the simulated emergency care being given under shade of spruces could be carried out in grim reality in the coming weeks and months.

One soldier who’s accompanied us to the site says that if the new intake have not acquired enough fighting skills they will not be sent to the frontline.

“We’re not going to send them to their deaths,” he says sharply.

Still, we have heard complaints, notably from professional soldiers, that raw recruits have been sent to other fronts without adequate training and thrust prematurely into frontline combat.

Ukraine is on the back foot in key parts of the battlefield at home, most notably around the strategically important city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk.

But last month’s incursion into Russia has boosted morale and has added a new dimension to the war.

However, Kyiv is now fighting a battle on yet another front and this is a huge personal gamble for President Zelensky.

His generals have tough strategic decisions to make about where to send their new recruits.

Maxim, a 30-year-old builder by trade, looks to be the most youthful of the cohort.

“We need to train, train and train again. The more we train the more we will learn here. It will help us on the frontline.”

Where will that be, I ask? “We are ready to defend our land either in Donbas – or Kursk,” he says proudly but with a nervous laugh.

Earlier, in Ukraine’s Sumy region, we had travelled under military escort to a new Ukrainian base just a few miles away from the Russian border.

Along the way, we passed whole streets blasted to pieces by previous Russian artillery fire.

The civilians had long gone, and the only human life was clad in the green and driving army vehicles.

As we arrive at the camp, an armoured personnel carrier (APC) fresh from the Kursk incursion roars into life and springs up backwards out of its sunken hiding place.

It pivots and then speeds off through the canopy lined track, leaving a huge plume of copper-coloured dust.

“The Russian soldiers who surrendered, we took as prisoners of war. The Russians who attacked us, we killed.”

It’s a blunt synopsis from the Ukrainian commander who goes by the call-sign “Storm”.

His 22nd Mechanised Brigade was the first to enter Russian territory and now he’s returned to tell the tale.

“We went far into the Kursk region. We were alone as the forward team. We were on foreign soil and we felt like foreigners. Not in our home.”

A father of five with five degrees, Storm cuts a distinctive shadow in the dense forest.

A giant of a man with greying goatee and military tattoos on the skin not covered by his army fatigues and body armour.

“That’s us, in there,” he says showing us a video on his phone of an APC tearing through the Russian countryside.

What was it like fighting the Russians on their home soil, I ask?

“I worried for myself and for my group, for my servicemen, for everyone. Of course, there was fear. “

Like all of the Ukrainian military we met, Storm is understandably reluctant to give any operational information which may help the Russians.

So when I ask if he knows how long he’ll stay on Russian territory when he returns, it is an answer predictably long on patriotism and short on specifics.

“We are fulfilling an order. We’ll be there as long as we are told to. If we are told to move forward, we will move forward. If they tell us to withdraw, we will withdraw.”

He continues in the same vein: “If we have an order to move forward, we can get to Moscow – and we’ll show what Ukraine means and what are our guys are like – real Cossacks.”

It’s been reported that Ukraine sent up to 10,000 elite troops into Russia as part of its rapid advance.

The Russian defence ministry claims Kyiv has suffered thousands of casualties.

The head of the Ukrainian army, Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, announced the Russians had now sent 30,000 troops to defend Kursk. All these figures are hard to verify.

In another clandestine location, a team clambers out of a German-made Bergepanzer armoured recovery vehicle.

The driver, who goes by the call sign “Producer”, is a father of two who hasn’t seen his two children for three years.

They escaped to Italy with their mother in the weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

While we’re unable to ascertain the level of Ukrainian losses, it’s clear that Producer has been busy bringing back damaged and destroyed vehicles from inside Russia.

“I want this war to come to an end,” he tells us wearily in very good English.

“That’s because there is no reason for this (war). One man, Vladimir Putin, attacked our country. So what do we have to do? We must defend our home. Defending, defending, defending. But Ukraine is the smaller country.”

The mismatch between Moscow and Kyiv remains a key thread of President Zelensky’s ongoing call for greater Western help.

Through taking the fight into Russia, Ukraine galvanised its public but worried some allies who remain fearful of Vladimir Putin’s response and the spectre of a wider conflict.

So far, President Putin has largely ignored, at least publicly, the wound inflicted on his country’s side.

Ukraine says that, unlike Russia, it doesn’t have unlimited reserves of conscripts to catapult to the frontline.

We saw a glimpse of the deployment dilemma with our own eyes in the locations we visited this past week.

President Zelensky argues that much greater American and European assistance in air defence is more vital than ever and that permission to use foreign-made long range missiles to strike further into Russia urgently needs to be granted.

Especially now that Kyiv is fighting a battle at home and abroad.

As we leave the training ground, the exhausted soldiers loll on the ground – water bottle and cigarette in hand for many.

Rostyslav, who longs to return to his Odesa, believes his president is absolutely right.

“The Russians can reach our territory with long range weapons and we don’t have such a weapon to reach their territory. We can’t stand this anymore” he explains.

“We would like to hit Moscow to end this dirty war. Children and civilians suffer, everyone does.”

Another rocket-propelled grenade thunders across the parched training field.

Next time, it won’t be a drill.

A former childcare worker in Australia has pleaded guilty to raping and sexually abusing dozens of young girls under his care for over 20 years.

Ashley Paul Griffith, 46, confessed to committing 307 offences at childcare centres in Brisbane and Italy between 2003 and 2022, a Queensland court heard on Monday.

Most of Griffith’s victims were under the age of 12, the court heard. The judge’s associate took over two hours to read out all of the charges against him.

Police have previously described Griffith as one of Australia’s worst-ever paedophiles.

The charges against him included 28 counts of rape, 190 counts of indecent treatment, 67 counts of making child exploitation material, four counts of producing such material, and one count of distributing it.

Several of his victims and their families were in court on Monday, and some parents cried when the names of their children were read out, according to ABC News.

“We see people going [into the childcare centre now] and I think, this happened to my child in that room,” said one child’s mother. “It’s a room of horrors.”

The same child’s father said he could not believe how Griffith could have gotten away with his crimes for 20 years.

The couple said that while they told their daughter about what happened, she was not able to fully understand because of her young age, ABC News reported.

“As she grows up, we’ll deal with that as it comes but it’s going to be something we deal with through our lives now,” her father said.

Griffith was arrested in August 2022 by Australia’s federal police, after they found thousands of photographs and videos related to his abuse that were uploaded onto the dark web.

Although faces were cropped out of the footage, investigators managed to trace them to Griffith because of a unique set of bedsheets seen in the background of the videos.

Police believe he recorded all his offences on his phones and cameras.

He was charged in November last year with more than 1,600 child sex offences, but most of these were eventually dropped.

Griffith remains in custody and will be sentenced at a later date.