At least 51 people have been killed and 271 others injured in a Russian missile strike on the city of Poltava, in central Ukraine.

A military academy and a nearby hospital were hit. Ukraine’s land forces confirmed that military personnel were killed in the attack.

People did not have enough time to get to bomb shelters after the air raid alarm sounded, Ukraine’s ministry of defence said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky promised that what he called “Russian scum” would pay for the attack, and repeated calls for more air defences so that Ukraine could protect itself by carrying out its own long-range missile attacks. Moscow has not commented on the attack.

People nearby told us their windows were blown out by the force of the impact.

We met 26-year-old Mykyta Petrov, a cadet who only started at the Poltava Military Communications Institute two weeks ago.

He described the moment the attack unfolded just after 09:00 local time on Tuesday morning (06:00 GMT), saying the second missile hit just three seconds after the first.

“I ran outside, there was smoke and dust everywhere…lots of people were outside having a cigarette, and many were killed…”

He says that what he saw has affected him psychologically, that there was “too much blood, too many dead bodies.”

Earlier reports from Russian military bloggers suggested that cadets were gathered at a military parade being held at the institute, but the ministry confirmed there was no parade happening at the time of the strike.

Alarms sounded at 09:08 local time and everyone headed to the shelter, the defence ministry added. The explosions started a few minutes after the alarms.

Thirty-year-old year old Jana Kulishova was one of them. She was woken by the air raid siren but did not have time to reach a shelter.

For her, the attack is personal. Her husband is fighting on the front line in the Donbas region.

“Soldiers have died here and I know there are still soldiers still under the rubble. Their wives are waiting for them.”

Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko told the BBC the two minutes between the air raid siren in Poltava and the missiles landing was “nothing”.

“You just imagine you’re on the sixth floor of some building and you need to run away downstairs. Is it realistic that you can do this in two minutes?” he said.

“Just imagine this life and like this several times per day. We can’t continue like this. It’s just not fair.”

In a statement on Telegram which confirmed the deaths of the military personnel, Ukraine’s land forces said an investigation was under way to establish whether enough was done to protect those in the facility the missile hit.

It confirmed additional measures to ensure safety at military facilities would be increased.

Firefighters have been on the scene with all their equipment clearing out buildings, and army personnel outside have stopped people. They cannot get too close due to the sensitivity of the site.

Earlier, one Poltava resident, Olena Serdyuk, said: “The air raid alert started in just a minute, and then there were two explosions.

“At home, we immediately ran into the bathroom with the child, but then gathered ourselves”.

She added that there is no bomb shelter “in our radius”, and it “takes a long time to run somewhere”.

Another local, Anastasiia Artyukh, heard “two very strong explosions” and called the situation “really scary”.

“There is a house nearby, everything was blown out, all the windows. We don’t have a basement in our house. So our only option was to sit [and wait].”

Poltava regional governor Philip Pronin called the attack a “cunning and cynical Russian strike,” and later said that 15 people were still thought to be trapped under the rubble.

Mr Pronin said search groups were on site, and that 10 residential buildings had been damaged in the attack.

More details could not immediately be given due to security reasons, he said.

Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska posted on X calling the attack “a stunning tragedy for all of Ukraine,” and added: “Russia is taking away the most valuable thing from us – life.”

In a video on the Ukrainian presidential website, President Zelensky said Russia would be held accountable for the strike.

In the clip, which was also posted on X, Mr Zelensky said a “full and prompt” investigation had been ordered and that “all necessary services are involved in the rescue operation”.

He went on to say that Ukraine needed long-range air defence systems “that can protect us from Russian terror” and added that “every day of delay, unfortunately, means more lost lives”.

The UK’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy condemned the “sickening act of aggression in Putin’s abhorrent and illegal war in Ukraine,” and said “my thoughts are with all the victims and their loved ones.”

US President Joe Biden described it as a “deplorable attack”, adding that it was “a tragic reminder of Putin’s ongoing and outrageous attempts to break the will of a free people”.

“The United States will continue stand with [the people of Ukraine] – including providing the air defense systems and capabilities they need to protect their country,” he said in a White House statement.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said President Putin “knows no limits to brutality”.

There has also been criticism of the Ukrainian authorities in the aftermath of the attack.

Maria Bezugla, a Ukrainian MP who often criticizes the country’s military leadership, accused officials of putting soldiers in danger.

“These tragedies keep repeating themselves. When will it stop?” she wrote on Telegram.

Since the attack, changes within the Ukrainian government have been announced – with potentially more to come.

The minister in charge of weapons reduction resigned on Tuesday and one senior lawmaker for Mr Zelensky’s party said a “major government reset” was coming that would see more than half of minsters change.

“Tomorrow a day of sackings awaits us, and a day of appointments the day after,” David Arakhamia said.

The attack on the military institute in Poltava came as Russian leader Vladimir Putin arrived in Mongolia – his first visit to an International Criminal Court (ICC) member since it issued a warrant for his arrest last year.

Poltava, located in central Ukraine, had a pre-war population of 300,000 and is located 300 kilometres (189 miles) east of Kyiv.

Founded in the 1960s, when Ukraine was still part of the USSR, the Poltava military communications institute trains telecommunications specialists.

A former Philippine mayor who was on the run for weeks after being accused of spying for China has been arrested in Indonesia.

Philippine authorities have been pursuing Alice Guo across four countries even since she disappeared in July following an investigation into her alleged criminal activities.

She has been accused of protecting online casinos, which were a front for scam centres and human trafficking syndicates in her sleepy pig farming town, Bamban.

Ms Guo denies the allegations. Philippine officials said they were co-ordinating with their Indonesian counterparts for her return to the Philippines “at the soonest possible time”.

The former mayor said she grew up on the family farm with her Chinese father and Filipina mother, but MPs who investigated the scam centre operations accused her of being a Chinese national named Guo Hua Ping, and a spy who provided cover for criminal gangs.

The dramatic nature of her case, which has since seen her sister arrested and questioned before by the Philippine Senate, sparked fury in the country and drew international attention.

Authorities believe that Guo slipped past border checks in July and took several boats, crossing neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore, on her way to Indonesia, where she was arrested on Tuesday on the western border of the capital Jakarta.

While online casinos or Philippine Online Gaming Operations are not illegal, they are increasingly being exposed as cover for other crimes.

The firms, which mostly cater to mainland Chinese clients, flourished under former president Rodrigo Duterte, who sought close economic and political ties with Beijing.

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

China has announced a probe of Canadian canola imports, escalating a trade fight between the two countries.

The move, which could lead to tariffs on a key Canadian export, came a week after Canada said it would impose new border taxes on Chinese-made electric vehicles, steel and aluminium.

Beijing also said it would file a complaint with the World Trade Organization over the EV tariffs, which it criticised as “discriminatory” and “unilateral”.

Canada’s minister of agriculture said plans for the canola investigation were “deeply concerning” and the government was closely monitoring the situation.

The latest tit-for-tat comes as a rising number of governments, including the US and European Union, erect barriers against Chinese-made electric cars.

In announcing the EV tariffs last week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said countries such as China had “chosen to give themselves an unfair advantage in the global marketplace”.

Western countries allege that Chinese firms are benefiting from subsidies and other government help, allowing for “dumping”, which is when product is sold below cost, making it difficult for other firms to compete.

China cited similar dumping complaints in its probe of Canadian canola oil, noting that imports had jumped 170% since 2023, while prices had “continuously fallen”.

“China’s position is clear-cut. The country will take all measures necessary to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies,” a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in announcing the measures.

China has also launched investigations of European pork and dairy products. It recently declined to impose tariffs on French cognac, despite alleged dumping.

Canola, also known as rapeseed, is a major agricultural product in Canada, accounting for roughly one-quarter of all farm crop receipts, according to the Canola Council, an industry group.

Canada exports more than 90% of its canola, which is sold as raw seed, oil, or meal and is used for cooking, animal feed and some forms of energy, according to the council.

China’s imports of Canadian canola were worth roughly $C5bn ($3.7bn;£2.8bn) last year, making the country the second biggest market after the US.

It has been the target in previous trade disputes.

Beijing blocked exports from two major Canadian grain companies for three years citing pest concerns, following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Chinese businesswoman Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of the tech firm Huawei.

Canada’s agriculture minister, Lawrence MacAulay, said Canadian farmers “depend on, and play by, a rules-based global trading order that provides reliable market access”.

Calling Beijing’s announcement “deeply concerning”, he said Ottawa is monitoring developments closely.

“We will continue to defend and support the sector every step of the way,” he said.

The family of the man who designed Nigeria’s national flag have told the BBC they have given up waiting for a promised state funeral, a year after he died.

Instead Taiwo Michael Akinkunmi, who died a year ago aged 87, is going to be buried this week in Oyo state, where he lived.

Akinkunmi, known by many as “Mr Flag Man” and whose house was painted in the distinctive green and white colours of the national flag, was a humble man.

But his son hopes that during his send-off, which Oyo state has agreed to fund, he will be remembered for the design that became a symbol of a united Nigeria.

“We have to give him the befitting burial he deserves,” his son Akinwumi Akinkunmi told the BBC Focus on Africa podcast.

Taiwo Akinkunmi always said he was an unlikely flag designer. He entered a competition for a new design ahead of Nigeria’s independence from the UK in October 1960.

At the time he was studying electrical engineering in London and had spotted a newspaper advert about the competition.

According to flag expert Whitney Smith, 3,000 designs were submitted – “many of great complexity”.

But Akinkunmi’s was a simple affair, with equal green-white-green vertical stripes – and it replaced the colonial flag that had included the British union jack and a six-pointed green star under a red disk.

Akinkunmi’s original design included at its centre a red sun surrounded by rays. This was intended as “as a symbol of divine protection and guidance”, Mr Smith wrote in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

However the sun was omitted by the committee, which awarded the then 23-year-old £100 (then worth $280) for his winning design.

Akinkunmi always said his inspiration came from his childhood as he had travelled and lived in various parts of Nigeria.

Born in Ibadan in the south-west, now capital of Oyo state, he spent his early years in the north of the country because of his parents’ work. He grew up in what he said was a happy polygamous family and was one of his father’s 10 children.

He returned to Ibadan to finish his education. He once told ThisDay journalist Funke Olade that his secondary school was like a “mini-Nigeria” as it had students from all over the country.

Nigeria is home to more than 300 ethnic groups and while Africa’s most populous country has no official religion, the nation is roughly divided between the mainly Muslim north and the largely Christian south, though many communities are mixed.

For Akinkunmi the green in his flag symbolised the nation’s rich agricultural heritage, while the white represented peace and unity.

“It is typical that Nigeria, like many other culturally diverse countries, chose a simple flag design. A more complex design might have explicitly honoured some ethnic and religious groups while excluding others,” Mr Smith wrote.

Agriculture was always close to Akinkunmi’s heart and he was excited to return to Nigeria after independence to take up at a job with the Ministry of Agriculture, where he worked as a civil servant until he retired in 1994.

But for much of his life very few people knew about his contribution to the country, though wherever he lived he reportedly used to paint the outside of his house green and white.

It was not until Nigeria celebrated its 50th year of independence that he was recognised as one of 50 distinguished Nigerians.

His son says an Oyo state politician later lobbied for him to be given a national honour and pension – and in 2014 he was made an Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic (OFR), one of Nigeria’s highest awards.

After Akinkunmi’s death last year, a senator sponsored a successful motion that he be given a state burial.

However, no plans have ever been made and as they waited, Akinkunmi’s family have been paying 2,000 naira ($1.30; £1.00) a day to keep the body at a morgue.

The flag designer’s son said that in June they found out that the arts ministry’s National Institute for Cultural Orientation (Nico) had been directed to sort out the state funeral.

But apart from one phone call, he said the institution had failed to communicate any further.

He feels waiting any longer would just sully his father’s name.

This is when the Oyo state government decided to step in to fund the burial rites for the flag designer.

“My late father was an easy-going person who didn’t want anything to tarnish his image,” his son told the BBC.

“He was well brought up, he was a very intelligent man, and a good person that everyone wanted to associate with,” he added.

• Outrage as Nigeria changes national anthem
• Can Africa’s most populous nation remain united?
• ‘I’ve been sleeping under a bridge in Lagos for 30 years’
• Is Nigeria on the right track after a year of Tinubu?
• Celebrating 50 years of marriage in Nigeria’s ‘divorce capital’

The US has charged Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and several other prominent figures in the Palestinian group in connection with its deadly attack in Israel on 7 October last year.

The justice department said it was indicting six Hamas members with seven charges, including the murder of US citizens, conspiracy to finance terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction.

The criminal complaint covers decades of alleged attacks by Hamas, as well as the unprecedented assault on southern Israel nearly a year ago.

It is the first step by US law enforcement to hold accountable the ringleaders of the 7 October attack, though up to three of those named in the indictment are dead and Sinwar is believed to be hiding in tunnels somewhere under Gaza.

In a video statement on Tuesday, Mr Garland said the defendants were responsible for “financing and directing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the security of the United States”.

The group also “led Hamas’s efforts to destroy the state of Israel and murder civilians in support of that aim”.

He noted the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, in which the group “murdered entire families” in “the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust”.

“They murdered the elderly and they murdered young children. They weaponised sexual violence against women, including rape and genital mutilation.”

He added that during the attack the group “murdered over 1,200 people” and “perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust”.

Other Hamas leaders charged include former leader Ismail Haniyeh; Marwan Issa, the deputy leader of the organisation’s armed wing; Khaled Mashaal, who leads the group outside Gaza and the West Bank; along with Mohammed Deif and Ali Baraka.

The charges include conspiracy to bomb a place of public use resulting in death, conspiracy to finance terrorism and material support for acts of terrorism resulting in death.

The justice department’s complaint notes that all the “defendants are either deceased or remain at large”.

Haniyeh, Issa and Deif have all been reported killed in the past few months in attacks that were either claimed by or attributed to Israel.

The attorney general referred in Tuesday’s remarks to the killing last week of US-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, in addition to 42 other American citizens killed in the 7 October attack and 10 taken hostage.

“We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of Hamas’ brutal murders of Americans, as an act of terrorism,” Mr Garland said.

If convicted, the group faces a maximum penalty of life in prison or a death sentence.

The charges were filed in February, but were kept under wraps until Tuesday in case the US had the opportunity to arrest any of the accused, an unnamed justice department official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden condemned the Hamas killing of Goldberg-Polin, calling it “as tragic as it is reprehensible”.

“Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes,” Mr Biden said.

Meanwhile, the UK has defended its decision to ban some weapons sales to Israel over concerns about how they might be used in Gaza.

Hamas attacked southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then in Israel’s ongoing military campaign, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

A top New York state government aide secretly helped the Chinese government access an official call about Covid-19 while enjoying a lavish lifestyle as an undercover agent for Beijing, according to a US indictment.

Over a period of roughly 14 years, Linda Sun rose through the ranks to become deputy chief of staff to the governor.

But according to federal prosecutors, the 41-year-old used her position to aid Chinese officials, including by blocking Taiwanese diplomats from contacting the state government and covertly sharing internal documents with Beijing.

In return, China allegedly showered Ms Sun and her husband, Christopher Hu, with millions of dollars in kickbacks that helped them buy a $4.1m (£3.1m) house in New York and perks including special home deliveries of salted duck.

They also bought a $2.1m ocean-view condominium in Honolulu, Hawaii, and luxury vehicles including a 2024 Ferrari Roma sports car, according to the indictment.

The couple pleaded not guilty on Tuesday in a Brooklyn federal court to a range of charges, from failing to register as a foreign agent to visa fraud and money laundering.

US law requires that individuals acting for or in the interests of foreign countries or political parties register as foreign agents.

Ms Sun never did – and, according to prosecutors, the Chinese-born naturalised citizen “actively concealed that she took actions at the order, request, or direction” of Chinese government officials and representatives.

In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread through the state, Ms Sun allegedly found ways for Chinese consular officials to gain access to New York leaders.

So brazen were her efforts that, in one instance, she surreptitiously added a Chinese official to a private state government call about the public health response to the virus, according to prosecutors.

Former New York prosecutor Howard Master told the BBC the charges reflect a “disturbing” trend of senior public officials – including former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez – corruptly receiving gifts from foreign governments.

The indictment against Ms Sun lists occasions in which she worked to prevent Taiwanese representatives from either communicating with or meeting high-ranking officials in the US government.

“It’s all been taken care of satisfactorily,” Ms Sun is said to have bragged in one 2016 message to a Chinese consular official after successfully diverting a top New York politician from an event hosted by Taiwan.

And when the island’s president travelled to New York City in 2019, she was even pictured joining a pro-Beijing protest against his visit.

Up until January 2021, she worked behind the scenes to scrub mentions of Beijing’s detention of Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group in Xinjiang Province.

When Chinese officials asked if the governor could record a Lunar New Year video, Ms Sun asked what “talking points” they wanted.

“Mostly holiday wishes and hope for friendship and co-operation,” the Chinese officials wrote. “Nothing too political.”

Ms Sun later told another Chinese official that she had argued with Ms Hochul’s speechwriter to get a mention of the “Uyghur situation” removed from a draft of the governor’s remarks.

In 2023, while working in the New York labour department, Ms Sun obtained a framed official Lunar New Year proclamation from Governor Kathy Hochul and presented it to a Chinese official.

The proclamation was produced outside of ordinary channels and even without the permission of Ms Hochul’s office.

Ms Sun also drafted fraudulent invitation letters for Chinese politicians to travel to the US and wrote an unauthorised letter of employment to add a compatriot to the New York governor’s Asian American advisory council.

In return, Ms Sun and Mr Hu “received substantial economic and other benefits from [Beijing] representatives”, prosecutors say.

The gifts included all-expenses-paid travel to China; tickets to top shows, concerts and sporting events; employment in China for Ms Sun’s cousin; and home deliveries of Nanjing-style salted ducks prepared by a Chinese government official’s personal chef.

According to the indictment, the duck delicacy was gifted to Ms Sun – and sent directly to her parents’ home – on at least 16 different occasions.

On Tuesday morning, federal agents entered the couple’s Long Island home and detained them on 10 criminal counts.

Her lawyer, Jarrod Schaeffer, was quoted by AP news agency as saying: “We’re looking forward to addressing these charges in court. Our client is understandably upset that these charges have been brought.”

A judge released the pair on bail, limiting their travel to three US states and ordering Ms Sun to avoid any contact with representatives from the Chinese consulate or mission in New York.

Columbia University students began the school year with fresh protests and increased security just outside their famous New York City campus.

Last term, the Ivy League college saw some of the largest and tensest campus demonstrations in the US as students protested against Israel’s military operation in Gaza.

On Tuesday, the first day of term, all eyes were on the demonstrators who gathered at the school gates to see whether they would reflect the scale of the earlier protests.

Police said there were at least two arrests on Tuesday, but characterised the gatherings as “peaceful”.

Pro-Palestinian protesters – many of their faces covered in traditional keffiyeh scarves – could be heard several blocks from the site of the demonstration on Tuesday morning. They chanted “Free Palestine” as they banged on drums and marched in circles outside Columbia University’s famous iron gates.

On the other side of metal barricades, students and staff watched the demonstration as they queued up to have their identification thoroughly checked before they could enter campus.

Inside, the biggest disruption occurred around noon on Tuesday, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner. The Alma Mater statue outside Low Memorial Library was doused with red paint – allegedly by protesters. The area was reportedly blocked off, as a crew worked to clean the statue.

Columbia’s previous academic year concluded with the New York Police Department raiding a pro-Palestinian encampment that had taken over the campus quad. Student protesters then briefly occupied an academic building that police ultimately cleared, leading to more than 100 arrests.

The school cancelled its main graduation and the student body left for the summer under a cloud of deep unease.

Last month Minouche Shafik – who served as Columbia’s president during the encampment and permitted the police raid – resigned.

On Tuesday, the pro-Palestinian protesters asked the returning students to remember why they had demonstrated during the last academic year.

“We ask that you put aside your excitement for a new school year and remember the Palestinians who died by our very dollars,” read a flier that the protesters distributed.

Multiple protesters declined the BBC’s interview requests on Tuesday, and participants were generally unwilling to speak to the press.

By mid-afternoon, the pro-Palestinian demonstration concluded – though protesters chanted: “We’ll be back.”

Most students on Tuesday appeared unfazed by the demonstrators. Several excitedly greeted each other, hugging after a summer apart. Two students manoeuvred a flatscreen television through protesters and metal security barriers.

Stephanie Lee, a 28-year-old graduate student studying business, said she expected there to be protests, but she felt “OK” on her first day on campus.

“Security is pretty good,” she added.

Rachel Black, a freshman from North Carolina, said that she saw the protests as a welcome part of her overall experience at Columbia University.

“I’m interested in becoming more educated,” she said. “I’m hoping to learn what the conflict [is] about.”

Columbia University spokesperson Samantha Slater did not acknowledge the protests in a statement provided to BBC News.

“As we begin the new semester, we are focused on our mission of teaching, creating, and advancing knowledge and ensuring a safe, respectful campus environment for our community.”

Multiple protests and counter-protests have been staged at Columbia University since Hamas’s attack in Israel on 7 October, 2023. The attack left about 1,200 people dead, while 251 people were taken hostage.

About 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, since Israel began a retaliatory military campaign that has drawn international criticism.

On Sunday, Israel announced it had recovered the bodies of six of the hostages who were taken to Gaza. Among them was 23-year-old Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents waged a public campaign calling for his release.

David Lederer, a 22-year-old junior at Columbia University, held a small-counter protest along with a fellow Jewish student outside the university gates on Tuesday.

His friend held a photo of Goldberg-Polin, and the two unfurled a large banner that read “Get Support for Terrorism Off Our Campus”.

Mr Lederer – who was sworn at by one passerby – is one of several pro-Israel Jewish students who have expressed concern about antisemitism on campus. They said the pro-Palestinian groups had not sufficiently condemned the 7 October attack or its perpetrators.

“To be anti-war is one thing, but to be pro a terrorist organisation is another, and that has no place at Columbia,” Mr Lederer said.

Financial markets in Asia and the US have tumbled on concerns that the world’s largest economy could be headed towards a recession.

Shares in American chip giant Nvidia slumped by almost 10% as concerns over the economy dampened optimism about the boom in artificial intelligence (AI).

On Wednesday, major Asian indexes dropped after major stock indexes in New York fell sharply.

Investors turned more cautious as new data showed US manufacturing activity remains subdued, with the focus now on key jobs figures due on Friday.

“Growth concerns are dominating market moves,” Julia Lee at FTSE Russell told the BBC.

In New York on Tuesday, the S&P 500 index closed more than 2% lower, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq fell by over 3%.

Nasdaq-listed Nvidia fell by 9.5%, wiping $279bn (£212.9bn) off its stock market valuation.

Other US tech giants – including Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft – also saw their shares tumble.

On Wednesday morning, Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 3.3%, South Korea’s Kospi was trading 2.7% lower and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong dropped by 0.7%.

Major Asian technology firms including TSMC, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Tokyo Electron were sharply lower.

“Concerns around global growth look to be hitting exporting countries in the region particularly hard,” Ms Lee added.

The highly-anticipated US non-farm payrolls jobs market report is due to be released on Friday.

Investors will be watching those figures closely for clues on how much the US Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by when officials meet next week.

Australian actor and director Simon Baker has pleaded guilty to drink driving in a New South Wales (NSW) court.

Baker was caught intoxicated behind the wheel on a road near his home in the Byron Bay region in the early hours of 20 July.

He was excused from appearing at Mullumbimby Court House on Wednesday, but court documents show the 55-year-old admitted to a single charge of driving under the influence of alcohol, his first such offence.

Baker has starred in Home and Away, the Devil Wears Prada and earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for his lead role in the US-crime drama series The Mentalist.

He grew up in northern NSW and cut his teeth on classic Australian shows like Heartbreak High and A Country Practice.

He won Best New Talent at the Logies – Australia’s top television awards – in 1993, but soon made the move to the US, where he landed a role in the Academy Award winning film L.A. Confidential.

After two decades in Hollywood, for which he received a star on the city’s Walk of Fame, Baker returned to Australian film and TV, branching into directing as well as acting.

He was most recently nominated for Best Lead Actor at the Logies for his role in the hit Netflix show Boy Swallows Universe.

He is listed to appear in Mullumbimby Court House again on September 11 where he is due to face sentencing.

At least six Ukrainian officials, including members of the cabinet, have stepped down from their positions ahead of an anticipated major government reshuffle.

The resignations leave some of the government’s top jobs vacant, including the strategic industries minister in charge of weapons production.

The changes come as the parliamentary leader of the ruling Servant of the People party said half of the cabinet would be changed in a major government reshuffle this week.

The switch-up comes as Ukraine continues to deal with the daily Russian bombardment of its cities, and is struggling to hold back Moscow’s gains in the east while also ploughing resources into its incursion in Russia’s Kursk region.

Those who handed in their resignations on Tuesday included strategic industries minister Alexander Kamyshin, justice minister Denys Maliuska, environmental protection minister Ruslan Strilets, deputy prime ministers Olha Stefanishyna and Iryna Vereshchuk, and the head of Ukraine’s Sate Property Fund Vitaliy Koval.

One of the president’s most senior aides, Rostyslav Shurma, was also dismissed as per a presidential decree.

Writing on Telegram, David Arakhamia, the parliamentary leader of the ruling Servant of the People party, said: “As promised, a major government reset can be expected this week. More than 50% of the Cabinet of Ministers’ staff will be changed.

“Tomorrow we will have a day of dismissals, and the day after that a day of appointments,” he added.

Speaking during his nightly video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said state institutions “should be configured so that Ukraine achieves all the results that we need” ahead of a planned visit by him to the US next month, where he is expected to present a “victory plan” to President Joe Biden.

“For this, we must strengthen some areas of the government and changes in its make-up have been prepared. There will also be changes in the (president’s) office,” he said.

Opposition MP Iryna Gerashchenko criticised the government’s reshuffle, stating that this is “a government without ministers. A parliament without a mono-majority. An intellectual and personnel crisis to which the authorities turn a blind eye.”

She called for a unity government and the end of President Zelensky’s political team’s grip on power.

On the same day as the changes were announced, a Russian strike on the central city of Poltava killed 51 people and injured a further 271.

President Zelensky promised Russia would pay for the attack, and repeated calls for more air defences to be supplied from Western powers “that can protect us from Russian terror”.

President Zelensky has revamped his government several times since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In May last year, he sacked defence minister Oleksii Reznikov after a series of corruption scandals, and sacked Kyiv’s top commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi earlier this year.

At least five government portfolios, including the infrastructure and agriculture portfolios, have remained vacant since ministers either stepped down or were dismissed earlier this year.

Zelensky’s first presidential term was due to end in May 2024, but he remains in his position under martial law.

Six children and a pregnant woman were among 12 people who died after a boat carrying dozens of migrants sank off the French coast, in the English Channel.

In total, 10 of the dead were female and two were male, according to the local prosecutor’s office.

More than 50 people were rescued off Cape Gris-Nez, near Boulogne-sur-Mer, the French coast guard reports. Two are said to be in critical condition.

Officials say the boat was overloaded and that its bottom “ripped open”, while fewer than eight people on board were wearing life jackets.

The disaster is the deadliest loss of life in the Channel this year.

One source suggested a Syrian smuggler might have been involved.

Local prosecutor Guirec Le Bras said officials believed the victims had been “primarily of Eritrean origin” though they could not yet “specify the exact nationalities”.

Before Tuesday’s incident, 30 people had already died crossing the Channel in 2024 – the highest figure for any year since 2021, when 45 deaths were recorded, according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration.

Mr Darmanin said French authorities were preventing 60% of small boat departures. But people smugglers are cramming up to 70 people on vessels which used to carry 30 to 40 people – leading to deadlier shipwrecks.

He urged the UK and EU to agree a “treaty on migration” to curb small boat crossings.

UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described the incident as “horrifying and deeply tragic”.

“The gangs behind this appalling and callous trade in human lives have been cramming more and more people on to increasingly unseaworthy dinghies, and sending them out into the Channel even in very poor weather,” she said.

The effort to “dismantle these dangerous and criminal smuggler gangs and to strengthen border security is so vital and must proceed apace”, she added.

Steve Smith, CEO of Care4Calais, a charity set up to aid migrants in Calais, said: “These tragedies have occurred with much more frequency.”

“Every political leader, on both sides of our Channel, needs to be asked: ‘How many lives will be lost before they end these avoidable tragedies?'”

The French coastguard said helicopters, Navy boats and fishing ships had been involved in the rescue operation.

The number of people making the dangerous crossing across the English Channel in small boats has risen, with more than 135,000 people coming to the UK by this route since 2018.

More than 21,000 people have crossed the Channel this year.

That is more than in the same period in the previous year, but fewer than in 2022. The number of people who crossed in 2022 – 45,755 – was the highest since figures were first collected in 2018.

Both Labour and the previous Conservative government have vowed to tackle the problem.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer cancelled the previous Tory government’s plan to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda, which was first announced in 2022 but never put into effect.

Sir Keir has vowed to take tougher measures to “smash” the people-smuggling gangs responsible.

Downing Street says it has already taken action to target the criminal gangs by recruiting more officers to the National Crime Agency and setting up the government’s Border Security Command.

But critics say the government should be doing more to offer safe routes for asylum seekers.

Amnesty International UK said on Tuesday: “No amount of ‘smash the gangs’ policing and Government rhetoric is going to stop these disasters from unfolding time and again if the needs of people exploited by those gangs remain unaddressed.”

There were almost 2,400 allegations of sexual abuse in more than 300 schools run by religious orders in Ireland, according to a report commissioned by the Irish government.

The Education Minister Norma Foley said it was the first time the scale of abuse had been disclosed, and it was “truly shocking”.

At a news conference, Ms Foley said the report found there were 884 alleged abusers in 42 orders which formerly ran schools or still do.

The body which represents Catholic religious orders said it was “deeply sorry” about the abuse which had happened in schools.

The Irish cabinet has agreed to establish a full statutory investigation, following the findings of the “scoping inquiry report”, which was published on Tuesday evening.

The primary source of data on allegations of sexual abuse was the religious orders and the schools themselves, the report said.

There were 2395 allegations of sexual abuse recorded in respect of 308 schools, though the report warns that the real number of allegations is likely to be more, given that abuse is generally under-reported.

More than half of the 884 people accused of historical sexual abuse are now dead.

The report author, lawyer Mary O’Toole SC, said there was a “particularly high number of allegations in special schools.”

590 allegations were recorded in 17 special schools, involving 190 alleged abusers.

149 survivors gave interviews or provided a written submission to the scoping inquiry.

According to the report, the sexual abuse “was often reported as having been accompanied by ferocious violence”.

The victims said the abuse happened in classrooms, dormitories, sports facilities, and at musical and other extracurricular activities.

For many, “their childhood stopped the day the abuse began.”

The testimonies related to the years between the 1960s and the 1990s.

Survivors also had a “strong belief that what was happening was so pervasive that it could not possibly have gone unnoticed by other staff, and the members and leadership of the religious orders”.

People who had been abused told the report authors that “the power of the Catholic Church permeated their lives in every way” and they believed there was no-one they could tell, including their parents.

The personal stories also show how survivors suffered mental health problems and addictions in later life as a result of the trauma they suffered as children.

Ms Foley noted that the report recommended that the religious organisations should contribute to a financial redress scheme.

She said victims and survivors had shown “extraordinary courage” in coming forward to share their personal stories.

She also paid tribute to the late Mark Ryan, who spoke out about his experience of being abused at Blackrock College in Dublin in the 1970s.

His testimony, along with that of his brother David, featured in a radio documentary by the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ called “Blackrock Boys” in 2022, which made a huge public impact.

The Association of Leaders of Missionaries and Religious in Ireland (AMRI) said: “We recognise that we can never know the depth of pain and suffering which survivors have endured and continue to endure.”

The organisation said it had worked with members to “facilitate the fullest cooperation” with the scoping inquiry and would “carefully examine the recommendations and respond accordingly.”

Ms Foley said schools should be places of “haven, not horror” and that abusers “broke down” young people in their care instead of building them up.

The government now plans to appoint a chair for the full inquiry, called a Commission of Investigation, and draw up terms of reference.

Tánaiste (Irish deputy Prime Minister) Micheál Martin said that the “level and scale of the horrific abuse within schools revealed in the report’s pages is shocking, and there must be full accountability and justice for those abused”.

A new street in Prague has been named after Sir Nicholas Winton, the British man who helped save hundreds of mostly Jewish children from the Nazis.

Four of them – now in their 80s and 90s – attended the ceremony for the street, which runs past a small train station from where tens of thousands of Czechoslovak Jews were deported during the Holocaust.

It coincided with the 85th anniversary of the last planned Kindertransport journey from Prague, which was prevented from departing due to the outbreak of World War Two.

“This was my passport to freedom,” said Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, clutching a document the size of a birthday card.

The card, slightly yellowed with age, showed that Milena Fleischmann (her maiden name), aged nine, was granted leave by His Majesty’s Government to enter the United Kingdom.

A photo of a cheerful girl wearing a smart, white-collared shirt was stuck to the front. The reverse was stamped with a swastika.

Clutching this document, and with a name tag hung around her neck, Milena travelled by train across Nazi Germany, watching over her three-year-old sister, Eva.

From there, they and dozens of other unaccompanied Jewish children crossed into Holland, before boarding a boat for England.

“We were all given cups of tea with milk. Nobody had ever had tea with milk. We all poured it out,” she said.

Eventually Milena and Eva were reunited with their parents, who also managed to escape. The Fleischmanns were the lucky ones. Many of their friends and relatives were not.

“I think it’s so important, because very soon, no eyewitnesses will be here anymore,” Milena, a youthful 94, told the BBC.

She spoke sitting on a chair on the same railway platform where tens of thousands of Czechoslovak Jews were herded onto trains bound for the Theresienstadt ghetto. Most would later be murdered at Auschwitz.

The station – Praha Bubny – has since been transformed into a memorial, and a much larger, modern station is being built nearby. A path for pedestrians and cyclists running beneath the tracks will from now on be known as Nicholas Winton Street.

“People need to remember why that street is called Nicholas Winton Street,” Milena went on. “Because there is a big generation – thanks to him – alive today.”

She and three other ‘children’ were brought to Prague to attend the ceremony organised by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR).

“In remembering Sir Nicholas, we also honour the parents who sent away their children to an uncertain future, as well as the foster families who gave sanctuary to the youngest victims of Nazi oppression,” said Michael Newman, head of the AJR.

“In today’s world, it’s really important that people don’t wait for someone else to initiate an act of goodness, but that they themselves start doing it,” Jan Cizinsky, mayor of Prague’s seventh district, told the BBC.

“It’s important that they take the first step, and then others will follow.”

Milena didn’t find out that the card – and therefore her survival – was largely the work of a 29-year-old British stockbroker until the 1980s, when the story appeared on the BBC programme That’s Life.

In now legendary footage, a speechless Winton was reunited with dozens of the then children he had helped to save in the final months before the outbreak of war.

In subsequent interviews he was always at pains to stress the operation was a team effort.

Apart from a month spent in Prague from Christmas 1938 to January 1939, most of the work – badgering politicians and diplomats, finding foster families, sometimes creating fake documents – was done from the safety of his home in London.

He was knighted in 2003 and died in 2015 at the age of 106.

Most of all, he remained haunted by the children he was unable to save.

Milena’s train was the eighth – and final – transport to leave occupied Prague.

A ninth – the largest, carrying some 250 children – was scheduled to leave on September 1st, 1939. But war intervened, and the train never left the station. All but a handful of the children are believed to have perished.

Last Saturday, a Telegram message popped up on Heejin’s phone from an anonymous sender. “Your pictures and personal information have been leaked. Let’s discuss.”

As the university student entered the chatroom to read the message, she received a photo of herself taken a few years ago while she was still at school. It was followed by a second image using the same photo, only this one was sexually explicit, and fake.

Terrified, Heejin, which is not her real name, did not respond, but the images kept coming. In all of them, her face had been attached to a body engaged in a sex act, using sophisticated deepfake technology.

Deepfakes, the majority of which combine a real person’s face with a fake, sexually explicit body, are increasingly being generated using artificial intelligence.

“I was petrified, I felt so alone,” Heejin told the BBC.

But she was not alone.

Two days earlier, South Korean journalist Ko Narin had published what would turn into the biggest scoop of her career. It had recently emerged that police were investigating deepfake porn rings at two of the county’s major universities, and Ms Ko was convinced there must be more.

She started searching social media and uncovered dozens of chat groups on the messaging app Telegram where users were sharing photos of women they knew and using AI software to convert them into fake pornographic images within seconds.

“Every minute people were uploading photos of girls they knew and asking them to be turned into deepfakes,” Ms Ko told us.

Ms Ko discovered these groups were not just targeting university students. There were rooms dedicated to specific high schools and even middle schools. If a lot of content was created using images of a particular student, she might even be given her own room. Broadly labelled “humiliation rooms” or “friend of friend rooms”, they often come with strict entry terms.

Ms Ko’s report in the Hankyoreh newspaper has shocked South Korea. On Monday, police announced they were considering opening an investigation into Telegram, following the lead of authorities in France, who recently charged Telegram’s Russian founder for crimes relating to the app. The government has vowed to bring in stricter punishments for those involved, and the president has called for young men to be better educated.

Telegram said it “actively combats harmful content on its platform, including illegal pornography,” in a statement provided to the BBC.

The BBC has viewed the descriptions of a number of these chatrooms. One calls for members to post more than four photos of someone along with their name, age and the area they live in.

“I was shocked at how systematic and organised the process was,” said Ms Ko. “The most horrific thing I discovered was a group for underage pupils at one school that had more than 2,000 members.”

In the days after Ms Ko’s article was published, women’s rights activists started to scour Telegram too, and follow leads.

By the end of that week, more than 500 schools and universities had been identified as targets. The actual number impacted is still to be established, but many are believed to be aged under 16, which is South Korea’s age of consent. A large proportion of the suspected perpetrators are teenagers themselves.

Heejin said learning about the scale of the crisis had made her anxiety worse, as she now worried how many people might have viewed her deepfakes. Initially she blamed herself. “I couldn’t stop thinking did this happen because I uploaded my photos to social media, should I have been more careful?”

Scores of women and teenagers across the country have since removed their photos from social media or deactivated their accounts altogether, frightened they could be exploited next.

“We are frustrated and angry that we are having to censor our behaviour and our use of social media when we have done nothing wrong,” said one university student, Ah-eun, whose peers have been targeted.

Ah-eun said one victim at her university was told by police not to bother pursuing her case as it would be too difficult to catch the perpetrator, and it was “not really a crime” as “the photos were fake”.

At the heart of this scandal is the messaging app Telegram. The app is known for having a ‘light touch’ moderation stance and has been accused of not doing enough to police content and particularly groups for years.

This has made it a prime space for criminal behaviour to flourish.

Last week, politicians and the police responded forcefully, promising to investigate these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice.

On Monday, Seoul National Police Agency announced it would look to investigate Telegram over its role in enabling fake pornographic images of children to be distributed.

• South Korea faces deepfake porn ’emergency’
• South Korean women protest in Seoul over hidden sex cameras

The app’s founder, Pavel Durov, was charged in France last week with being complicit in a number of crimes related to the app, including enabling the sharing of child pornography.

But women’s rights activists accuse the authorities in South Korea of allowing sexual abuse on Telegram to simmer unchecked for too long, because Korea has faced this crisis before. In 2019, it emerged that a sex ring was using Telegram to coerce women and children into creating and sharing sexually explicit images of themselves.

Police at the time asked Telegram for help with their investigation, but the app ignored all seven of their requests. Although the ringleader was eventually sentenced to more than 40 years in jail, no action was taken against the platform, because of fears around censorship.

“They sentenced the main actors but otherwise neglected the situation, and I think this has exacerbated the situation,” said Ms Ko.

Park Jihyun, who, as a young student journalist, uncovered the Nth room sex-ring back in 2019, has since become a political advocate for victims of digital sex crimes. She said that since the deepfake scandal broke, pupils and parents had been calling her several times a day crying.

“They have seen their school on the list shared on social media and are terrified.”

Ms Park has been leading calls for the government to regulate or even ban the app in South Korea. “If these tech companies will not cooperate with law enforcement agencies, then the state must regulate them to protect its citizens,” she said.

Before this latest crisis exploded, South Korea’s Advocacy Centre for Online Sexual Abuse victims (ACOSAV) was already noticing a sharp uptick in the number of underage victims of deepfake pornography.

In 2023 they counselled 86 teenage victims. That jumped to 238 in just the first eight months of this year. In the past week alone, another 64 teen victims have come forward.

One of the centre’s leaders, Park Seonghye, said over the past week her staff had been inundated with calls and were working around the clock. “It’s been a full scale emergency for us, like a wartime situation,” she said.

“With the latest deepfake technology there is now so much more footage than there used to be, and we’re worried it’s only going to increase.”

As well as counselling victims, the centre tracks down harmful content and works with online platforms to have it taken down. Ms Park said there had been some instances where Telegram had removed content at their request. “So it’s not impossible,” she noted.

In a statement, Telegram told the BBC that its moderators “proactively monitor public parts of the app, use AI tools and accept user reports in order to remove millions of pieces of content each day that breach Telegram’s terms of service”.

While women’s rights organisations accept that new AI technology is making it easier to exploit victims, they argue this is just the latest form of misogyny to play out online in South Korea.

First women were subjected to waves of verbal abuse online. Then came the spy cam epidemic, where they were secretly filmed using public toilets and changing rooms.

“The root cause of this is structural sexism and the solution is gender equality,” read a statement signed by 84 women’s groups.

This is a direct criticism of the country’s President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has denied the existence of structural sexism, cut funding to victim support groups and is abolishing the government’s gender equality ministry.

Lee Myung-hwa, who treats young sex offenders, agreed that although the outbreak of deepfake abuse might seem sudden, it had long been lurking under the surface. “For teenagers, deepfakes have become part of their culture, they’re seen as a game or a prank,” said the counsellor, who runs the Aha Seoul Youth Cultural Centre.

Ms Lee said it was paramount to educate young men, citing research that shows when you tell offenders exactly what they have done wrong, they become more aware of what counts as sexual abuse, which stops them from reoffending.

Meanwhile, the government has said it will increase the criminal sentences of those who create and share deepfake images, and will also punish those who view the pornography.

It follows criticism that not enough perpetrators were being punished. One of the issues is that the majority of offenders are teenagers, who are typically tried in youth courts, where they receive more lenient sentences.

Since the chatrooms were exposed, many have been closed down, but new ones will almost certainly take their place. A humiliation room has already been created to target the journalists covering this story. Ms Ko, who broke the news, said this had given her sleepless nights. “I keep checking the room to see if my photo has been uploaded,” she said.

Such anxiety has spread to almost every teenage girl and young woman in South Korea. Ah-eun, the university student, said it had made her suspicious of her male acquaintances.

“I now can’t be certain people won’t commit these crimes behind my back, without me knowing,” she said. “I’ve become hyper-vigilant in all my interactions with people, which can’t be good.”

It’s been nearly a month since former Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina hurriedly landed at a military base near Delhi after a chaotic exit from her country.

Ms Hasina’s dramatic ouster on 5 August followed weeks of student-led protests which spiralled into deadly, nationwide unrest. She was initially expected to stay in India for just a short period, but reports say her attempts to seek asylum in the UK, the US and the UAE have not been successful so far.

Her continued presence in India has generated challenges for Delhi in developing a strong relationship with the new interim government in Dhaka. 

For India, Bangladesh is not just any neighbouring country. It’s a strategic partner and a close ally crucial to India’s border security, particularly in the north-eastern states. 

The two countries share a porous border 4,096km (2,545 miles) long which makes it relatively easy for armed insurgent groups from India’s north-eastern states to cross into Bangladesh for a safe haven. 

• Sheikh Hasina: The pro-democracy icon who became an autocrat

After Ms Hasina’s Awami League party came to power in 2009, it cracked down on some of these ethnic militant groups. Ms Hasina also amicably settled several border disputes with India.  

While border security is at the core of the relationship, there are financial aspects too. During Ms Hasina’s 15-year rule, trade relations and connectivity between the two countries flourished. India has gained road, river and train access via Bangladesh to transport goods to its north-eastern states. 

Since 2010, India has also given more than $7bn (£5.3bn) as a line of credit to Bangladesh for infrastructure and development projects. 

Ms Hasina’s sudden exit means that Delhi has to work hard to ensure that these gains are not lost. 

“It’s a setback in the sense that any turbulence in our neighbourhood is always unwanted,” says Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, a former Indian High Commissioner in Dhaka. 

But the former diplomat insists that Delhi will work with the interim government in Dhaka because “there is no choice” and “you can’t dictate what they do internally”. 

The Indian government has wasted no time in reaching out to the interim government in Dhaka, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi holding a telephone conversation with leader Muhammad Yunus.

However, it will take a while for Delhi to assuage the anger in Bangladesh over its unwavering support for Ms Hasina and her Awami League for the last 15 years.  

Many Bangladeshis attribute the anger against India to Delhi’s swift endorsement of three controversial elections won by Ms Hasina’s party amid allegations of widespread vote-rigging. 

With Ms Hasina’s fall, Delhi’s “neighbourhood first” policy has taken another jolt with Bangladesh joining the Maldives and Nepal in resisting any attempt at dominance by India. 

Analysts say that Delhi can’t afford to lose its influence in another neighbouring country if it wants to protect its status as a regional powerhouse – especially as rival China is also jostling for influence in the region. 

Just last year, Mohamed Muizzu won the presidency in the Maldives on the back of his very public anti-India stand. 

“It’s time for India to do some introspection regarding its regional policy,” says Debapriya Bhattacharya, a senior economist with the Centre for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka.

Delhi needs to look at whether it has adequately taken on board the perspectives of its regional partners, he says.

“I am not only talking about Bangladesh, [but also] almost all other countries in the region,” adds Mr Bhattacharya, who heads a committee appointed by the interim government to prepare a white paper on the state of Bangladesh’s economy.

• Can India help its special ally Bangladesh defuse the crisis?

For example, in the case of Bangladesh, analysts point out that successive Indian governments have failed to engage with other opposition parties, particularly the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). 

“India somehow thought that the Awami League and its government are the only allies inside Bangladesh. That was a strategic blunder,” says Abdul Moyeen Khan, a senior leader of the BNP.  

If free and fair elections are held in Bangladesh in the coming months, BNP leaders are confident of victory.

That will pose a diplomatic challenge for Delhi. There is a perceived trust deficit between India and the BNP, which is led by Begum Khaleda Zia, who had been prime minister for two terms earlier. 

Ms Zia, who spent most of her time in jail since 2018, has always denied corruption charges against her and has accused Ms Hasina of political vendetta. She has now been released from jail and is recovering from her illness.  

In the coming days, Delhi and the BNP leaders will have to find a way to work past their differences.

During the previous BNP-led coalition government from 2001 to 2006, the bilateral relationship deteriorated with Delhi accusing Dhaka of harbouring insurgents from India’s north-east.

During Ms Zia’s rule, Hindu leaders in Bangladesh said there were a series of attacks against them – including murder, looting and rape – by Islamist parties and the BNP which began as the election results were announced in 2001. 

The BNP denies the charges of giving shelter to anti-Indian insurgents and also of carrying out attacks on minority Hindus in 2001.

BNP leaders, including Mr Khan, say India hasn’t been forthcoming in engaging with them, adding that “now it’s time for a policy shift on the part of Delhi”.

He also stresses that given India’s proximity, population, geographical size and its growing economic and military might, a party like the BNP cannot afford to make the mistake of harbouring any anti-Indian insurgents within Bangladesh.

• ‘There is no law and order. And Hindus are being targeted again’

There are other factors also behind the anger against India. India and Bangladesh share 54 rivers and the sharing of water resources is a contentious issue.

The recent floods triggered by heavy rains in eastern Bangladesh are an example of how misinformation can fuel suspicions between the two countries. 

Following a sudden heavy downpour in the Indian state of Tripura, the excess water flowed into the Gumti river – which flows between the two countries – inundating vast areas inside the state as well as downstream in neighbouring Bangladesh.  

Millions of people were affected with many losing their houses, belongings and farmland. Many villagers and social media users accused India of deliberately releasing water from a dam in the night, leading to the floods. 

The Indian external affairs ministry was forced to issue a statement denying this, explaining that the floods had been caused by heavy rains in the catchment areas of the Gumti river. 

Then there is another factor – China. Beijing is keen to extend its footprint in Bangladesh as it battles for regional supremacy with India. 

It rolled out the red carpet for Mr Muizzu when he chose China for his first state visit after winning the Maldives election.

Delhi would want to avoid the same fate with Bangladesh. And it would hope that Bangladesh’s reliance on Indian goods and trade will buy it some time to work out its diplomatic strategy and change its image. 

So Delhi will have to tread carefully around Ms Hasina’s presence in India, especially if the new government makes a formal extradition request.

A statement issued on her behalf by her son Sajeeb Wazed Joy last month had already stoked anger in Bangladesh. 

But India wouldn’t want to ask Ms Hasina to leave the country when her future remains uncertain and come across as leaving a formidable former ally in the lurch. 

“It doesn’t matter how she is accorded hospitality in India. But it matters to Bangladeshis how she intervenes in the domestic matters staying over there. If she speaks against the current interim government, that would be considered as an act of hostility,” Mr Bhattacharya warned.  

Diplomats in Delhi will hope that Ms Hasina makes a choice for herself without forcing India’s hand.

Sir Tony Blair has been out of power in government for 17 years.

Yet he thinks he’s learned almost as much after leaving Number 10 as when he was in it.

One of the key insights from the revolutions in behavioural economics and neuroscience of the past 20 years is the degree to which our biases and experience frame our understanding of fresh information.

Even when we don’t want to, we make sense of the new by reference to the old.

It is inevitable, then, that the recent election of a Labour prime minister after more than a decade of Tory rule has occasioned endless comparison with the last time that happened, in 1997.

Both Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Tony are lawyers by training.

Both have cast themselves against the Left of the Labour Party.

But the similarities pretty much end there.

“The zeitgeist today is different,” Mr Blair says.

New Labour was approaching not just the turn of the century, but of the millennium, and the mood in the country was “pretty optimistic”.

And today?

“More anxious.”

Britain is not, as Sir John Major, Mr Blair’s predecessor, wanted, a nation at ease with itself.

In particular, our recent economic history is, like that of many other Western democracies, a tale of shocks and stagnation: a “vicious cycle of increased costs, increased taxes, and poor outcomes”.

Aside from the UK being very different under each of their tenures, Sir Tony and Sir Keir have very different political antennae and life experiences.

Mr Blair, while concerned about inequality and the plight of the poor, wrote in his memoir, A Journey, that he identified more with the aspirations of the middle class than the anxieties of the working class.

He said he wanted to move Labour beyond class struggle.

Sir Keir has said his “project” is “to return Labour to the service of working people, to become once again the natural vehicle for hopes and aspirations.”

But I am told that the question “What would Tony do?” is often heard, explicitly or implicitly, within the new government, just as those who ran the coalition government referred to him, with tongue only loosely in cheek, as the Master.

Luckily for all concerned, he has written down some answers in a new book, called On Leadership.

It has two central arguments.

First, the quality of governance and leadership is the difference between success and failure for countries.

Effective leadership requires stability and decisions for the long term.

When Mr Blair stood down, Britain had been led by just three people over 28 years.

Now we’re on our sixth prime minister in eight years.

The second, which is not new coming from Sir Tony, is that we are living through a technology revolution greater in consequence than previous industrial revolutions.

Primarily, this concerns Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The former prime minister is of the school that AI will change everything everywhere.

He’s all in.

And his argument, which forms a key plank of his institute’s work, is “the big question for any political leader in modern politics is how do I understand, master and harness the technology revolution?”

He is sometimes criticised for talking in generalities or abstractions about technology rather than specifics, but this overlooks the many detailed policy recommendations his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has made.

This think tank works in over 40 countries, advising governments, they say, on policy, delivery and strategy.

Prime among them: a digital ID, kept in a personalised digital wallet for each person to control who it is shared with.

In power, Mr Blair spent a lot of capital on ID cards, and lost the argument.

Today, although Labour has ruled out Digital ID, figures such as former chancellor George Osborne have changed their mind, accepting Sir Tony’s point that given how much data we hand over to tech companies, and the potential gains in running services and controlling migration, the idea should be revisited.

Technology allows Sir Tony to channel the optimism that he exuded after winning the Labour leadership.

There has never been a more exciting time to be in politics, he argues, such is the potential of this technology revolution.

But there is no getting away from the sheer scale of the challenges.

I ask him how he would describe Britain’s standing in the world compared with 20 years ago.

Initially at least he is, as it were, diplomatic.

His foreign policy, he says, had three pillars.

First, he believed Britain should be “America’s strongest ally”, and second, that we should be “key players in Europe”.

The third pillar was that we should exert soft power globally through a Department for International Development.

“And the truth of the matter is”, he says, “where we are on all three now?”

I ask him if what he’s really saying is, Britain is smaller and less influential in a more dangerous world.

“Yes,” he says, “but it’s a consequence of decisions that we’ve taken”.

Brexit is just one of those. “We’re going to have to rebuild our defence capabilities,” he says, costly though that may be.

As you will see in the interview, we had a strident exchange on globalisation.

I put to him an argument that Gordon Brown has made: that globalisation created a lot of losers, and that perhaps his government wasn’t sufficiently ready for, or sensitive to, that.

And that national populism, which is surging across much of the world, is in part a reaction to that.

He resists.

An unrepentant globalist, Mr Blair insists that “the world is not going to slow down”, and that you have to re-skill and equip people for a world that is doing the opposite.

Asked why politics in many Western democracies has shifted toward socio-cultural issues of identity and belonging, potentially more uncomfortable terrain for those on the left than socio-economic policy, he says: “Where people feel the world is changing in a way in which they don’t have a lot of control, then they cling to their identity.”

And on whether the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq also eroded public trust in democracy, Mr Blair argues that none of the public inquiries into the Iraq War ever found deception.

The mistake, he continues to insist, was failure to sufficiently understand the terrain Britain and America were entering.

To spend time in the Blair universe is to come across familiar patterns of thought.

He often describes people he rates highly as “capable”; uses the phrase “I always say to people” constantly; says of laudable figures that such and such person “was and is” admirable; and leans on tropes such as, you can look at politics in terms of right and left, or in terms of right and wrong.

But the biggest surprise in his new book is the constant Biblical references, and in particular, Moses.

In his 2010 memoir, Sir Tony said he always had a passion greater than politics, which is religion.

That can be keenly felt now.

When, in preparation for this interview, I spoke to over a dozen people who know him well, including former prime ministers, the word they most frequently attached to him was “messianic”.

At 71, he retains that zeal. Whether for good or for ill you can decide; but his continued influence around the world, and in 10 Downing Street, is not in doubt.

A woman who developed a rare type of cancer linked to her breast implants has warned that girls with similar implants could be “walking around like timebombs”.

Susan Axelby, 68, was recently paid £57,000 by Allergan Limited after she fell ill with breast-implant associated anaplastic large-cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL).

It is thought to be one of the first payouts of this kind linked to Allergan breast implants in the UK.

She had her breasts removed to avoid the risk of inherited breast cancer – but went on to develop cancer after the implants.

Regulators have received at least 106 reports of BIA-ALCL relating to surgery in the UK, involving six manufacturers.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is currently collecting data on women who are affected.

In her first broadcast interview, Susan told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme about the ordeal – and while her case is very rare, she has a warning for others.

“I’m thinking, not so much me – I’m nearly 70 – but there’s young girls, because they wanted breast augmentation, and they’re walking around like timebombs,” she said.

“They’ve no idea what’s in their body now – and if it’s happened to me and a few other people, you know, they can be walking around like that.”

Susan had the implants in Sheffield, where she lives, after her own breasts were removed to protect her against an inherited cancer risk.

A few years later, she noticed some swelling in one of her new breasts, which felt hot to the touch.

“I went back to the hospital and they drained 500 millilitres of fluid out of it,” Susan said.

“Then I went back home and it swelled up again.

“I went back again and they drained the same amount off – within a month, that was.”

Susan was referred to a surgeon, who discovered she had BIA-ALCL – a cancer of the immune system, not a type of breast cancer, that can develop in the scar tissue around breast implants.

“I didn’t believe it,” she said.

“I was in denial because I’d had my breasts off to stop me getting cancer and now I’ve got cancer.

“I thought, ‘How can that be?'”

The surgeon then told Susan the implant had to be removed.

“He said, ‘we’re going to have to take it out and take the breasts off again’,” she said.

“And they said I could never, ever have another implant.

“The only way around it is to take stuff from another part of my body and rebuild it.

“I just said to him, ‘I can’t go through that again’.”

Susan now has no implants, breast tissue or nipples.

“There’s actually nothing,” she said.

“There’s just a straight line all the way across the top of my body.”

It has affected her confidence and wellbeing.

“I don’t like anyone to see me without any clothes on and that does quite include my husband, although he’s not bothered at all.

“I have bad days.

“I still get problems with my anxiety and my depression, so it’s never gone away.”

Susan had sued Allergan, she said, not just for her own sake but for others too.

The claim was settled and Allergan, a US pharmaceutical company, paid Susan the £57,000 in October 2023, with no admission of liability.

Scientists say BIA-ALCL could be a reaction to the implant’s textured surface or a bacterial infection.

As of December 2023, the estimated incidence of BIA-ALCL, based on confirmed cases requiring surgery in the UK, is one per 14,200 implants sold.

Other affected people in the UK are coming together to take legal action.

And another group is seeking compensation from Allergan on behalf of 60,000 women from the Netherlands.

In 2019, Allergan issued a voluntary global recall of Biocell textured breast implants and tissue expanders and no longer manufactures these types of implants.

The MHRA says there is no need for people with breast implants but no signs or symptoms of BIA-ALCL, to have them removed or checked.

But anyone with unusual signs or symptoms, such as swelling around their breast implant, should see a doctor.

With pomp and splendour, China has welcomed more than 50 Africans leaders to Beijing this week for a summit to strengthen ties at a time of increasing political and economic turmoil around the world.

“It appeals to their vanities,” Macharia Munene, a Kenya-based professor of international relations tells the BBC, referring to the red carpet welcome – spiced up with entertainment by dancers in colourful costumes – that the leaders received.

The optics were carefully choreographed to make the leaders feel that it is a meeting of equals.

Many of them – including South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and Kenya’s William Ruto – held one-to-one meetings with their Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and were given tours of Beijing and other cities at the heart of China’s development ahead of the summit.

As Prof Munene puts it, China’s aim is to show African leaders that “we are in the same boat, we are all victims of Western imperialism”.

Paul Frimpong, executive director of the Ghana-based Africa-China Centre for Policy and Advisory, says that Western powers – as well as oil-rich Gulf states – are trying to match China’s influence in Africa.

“There is a keen interest and competition in and around what Africa’s potential is,” he tells the BBC.

Cobus van Staden, co-founder of the China-Global South Project, writes that China goes out of its way to emphasise its own status as a developing country, signalling solidarity with Africa and the rest of the Global South.

“It avoids the dreariness of the US and EU’s ongoing aid focus with its attendant conditionality and preaching,” he adds.

Over the last two decades, China’s diplomacy has paid off. Out of all the countries in the world, it has risen to become Africa’s largest trading partner.

Data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows that a fifth of Africa’s exports go to China, the bulk of which includes metals, mineral products and fuel. The exports have quadrupled in US dollar terms since 2001.

For African countries, China is also the “single largest source of imports” of manufactured goods and machinery, according to the IMF.

But the balance of trade, in most cases, favours China massively.

This is something Mr Ramaphosa sought to address in his bilateral meeting with President Xi.

“We would like to narrow the trade deficit and address the structure of our trade,” South Africa’s president said.

A joint communique issued afterwards said that “China showed it was willing to uplift job creation, citing recruitment conferences for Chinese enterprises to promote local employment in South Africa”.

Kenya, on the other hand, is seeking more credit, despite a heavy debt burden that gobbles up nearly two thirds of its annual revenue and which recently triggered street protests after the government sought to introduce new taxes to fund the budget deficit.

Mr Ruto hopes to secure funding for various infrastructure projects, including the completion of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) to connect Kenya’s coast to neighbouring Uganda, the building of roads and dams, the establishment of a pharmaceutical park and a technology-driven transport system for the capital, Nairobi.

After connecting Nairobi to the port city of Mombasa, China discontinued its financing of the controversial SGR four years ago, leading to rail tracks ending in a field outside the lake city of Naivasha.

As a major bilateral lender to many African countries, China has often come under scrutiny for its deals, particularly in recent years when several African countries, including Ghana, Zambia and Ethiopia, experienced debt distress.

Debt sustainability is at the centre of discussions at every major forum on Chinese and African relations, and it is likely to be the case at the latest summit as well, Mr Frimpong says.

The debt crisis is a reminder that foreign powers are motivated by their own interests – and African states need to improve their economies and finances in order to reduce their reliance on them.

This is especially the case as the IMF predicts that China’s economic growth will continue to slow – and recommends that African countries adapt by deepening regional economic integration and implementing structural reforms to increase local revenue.

Most of all, as Dr Van Staden points out, African leaders need to “overcome the velvet rope aspect of these summits to make their own deals, set their own terms, and throw their own parties”.

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Like many full-time workers Laura Etchells had longed for hours more flexible than the traditional Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.

The mum-of-two from Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, now works her full-time job in publishing, compressed into four days, and wouldn’t have it any other way.

She says the extra day off – Friday in her case – saves her around £350 a month in childcare costs, and she says makes her more productive in her job.

“The longer days allow me to get my teeth stuck into things a bit more,” she says, adding that if she were to work anywhere else then a compressed week would be a “must”.

“Cost wasn’t the deciding factor to condense into four days, but it did contribute to the decision. The overall benefit was spending more time with my children whilst maintaining my full-time job.”

The BBC has heard from several people, like Laura, who work compressed hours, after Labour said it wants to strengthen workers’ rights for more flexible hours.

On Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds held a meeting with business leaders to discuss their plan, which is part of the upcoming Employment Bill.

Since April, employees have had the right to request flexible working from day one, including compressed hours, but legal experts think Labour’s plan will likely aim to make it harder for employers to reject requests for greater flexibility.

Currently, workers need to convince their employers to allow flexible hours. Under Labour’s plan, employment solicitor Alison Loveday says companies may need to explain “on what grounds can they justify refusing a four-day week”.

The proposals do not match the definition as set out by the official four-day week campaign, which calls for the same pay for fewer hours.

Rather, Labour has said that employees would “still be doing the same amount of work” across different working patterns – such as, for example, four 10-hour shifts.

Laura’s employer, Emerald Publishing, offers a range of flexible working options, which it says makes staff more productive and improves work-life balance.

However, the company’s chief legal and people officer Emma Tregenza admits: “While the benefits are clear, it’s worth noting that it can be a long day for people doing compressed hours.

“That can also have a knock-on effect on others in the team who work a ‘normal pattern’… what it does to their schedules. It can be challenging to work around multiple variations of working hours.”

Jason Magee had a rather different experience to Laura when Cortex, the Guernsey-based software firm he works for, trialled compressing staff’s hours last August, with everyone working 35 hours across four days, rather than five.

Although he was eager to give it a go and recalls making full use of his Fridays off, he says the longer working days were a challenge and thinks he was less productive.

“After about seven or eight hours, you start to feel run down and you’re not working as best as you can,” he says.

Matt Thornton, one of Cortex’s founders, says it shifted the firm’s focus.

“We’re not a company that clock watches. But during the trial period, we became far more conscious of working hours, rather than whether they were getting the work done.

“We’re a software business and have longer-term business goals rather than weekly, but when you compress working hours, you put the spotlight on those four days rather than the outcome.”

Cortex is now experimenting with a four-day week with reduced hours, meaning four eight-hour days, in line with the official campaign, and Matt says the feedback to this has been much more positive.

There is limited research around the benefits of working compressed hours.

A 2023 report for the International Labour Organization states: “Studies of the effects of existing compressed workweeks generally conclude that they positively affect work–life balance.”

But it adds: “However, there is a lack of consensus concerning the physiological and psychological health effects of compressed workweeks.”

For Kelly Burton, a mental health nurse from Crewe, condensing her hours into a four-day week since July has given her “perfect work-life balance”.

“I’m happier at work, can spend the extra day looking after elderly parents and still have my weekend,” she told the BBC.

Peter Meacham, a dispensing optician at a pharmacy in Basildon, Essex, made the same move in September 2020.

Both Kelly and Peter say they had to convince their bosses that they could get the same amount of work done over four days.

Peter works Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, which gives him Tuesday and Wednesday off for his hobby – performing magic shows for charity.

If he were to get a new job, he says the ability to work a compressed week would be “an absolute key factor” in his decision.

Despite the success stories from people like Laura, Kelly and Peter, Michelle Ovens, founder of Small Business Britain, has mixed views on compressed hours.

She describes it as “a limited solution that will not work for all, particularly the small businesses that need to stay open throughout the week, often with peak periods of activity”.

She says that introducing a four-day week could lead to higher staffing costs and that there are other ways of improving flexibility and accommodating staff “rather than simply implementing compressed hours and a strict four-day week system”.

She advises businesses not to be alarmed by the government’s proposals, though.

“Labour has been clear that it is not mandating the four-day working week,” she says.

“It is important that small businesses are reassured that there is no cause for concern, especially for sectors where this policy would not be feasible.”

For those who are still unsure about whether a compressed week will work for them, those words will come as some relief.

The day Beslan began burying its dead, there were so many cars loaded with coffins that there was gridlock on the road to the cemetery.

In the small Caucasus town, everyone had lost a relative or knew someone killed in the siege of School No. 1.

Launched by heavily armed militants, mainly from Chechnya, the terror attack lasted three days.

Three hundred and thirty-four people died; 186 of them were children.

It’s 20 years today since the siege ended suddenly in devastating explosions, but I can still hear the wailing of Beslan’s mothers; the grief that rolled over the town in waves.

I can picture the white open coffin of 11-year-old Alina, laid out in her front yard with her dolls placed carefully beside her.

And I will always remember Rima, who spent three days crammed into the stifling school gym with her grandchildren and hundreds of other hostages, bombs strung from the basketball hoops above them.

Back then, she confessed that she was ashamed to have survived.

As she and her grandchildren ran for the exit, under fire, they had to climb over the dead body of a small boy.

“God forgive us for that,” Rima begged, through streams of tears.

In 2004, the suffering of Beslan was felt all over Russia and resonated all over the world.

First and foremost, the tragedy was caused by the dozens of men and women who stormed the school, firing in the air and taking hundreds of petrified people hostage.

They had rounded up mothers with babies and balloons, and little girls with big white bows in their hair. Whole families who had been celebrating the first day back to school. The militants stuffed the gym with explosives and began executing the male hostages.

That summer, Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against separatists in Chechnya – launched four years earlier – had already burst beyond the borders of the southern Russian republic.

The day before the Beslan siege, 10 people were killed when a Chechen woman blew herself up outside a Moscow metro station. Before that, suicide bombers blew two planes from the sky and there was a deadly attack on a music festival.

But for two decades now there have been persistent, troubling questions about how Mr Putin and his officials handled the attack on Beslan in their determination not to “give in” to terrorists.

Did they even try to negotiate?

Why claim the attackers made no political demands when they had called for Russian troops to pull out of Chechnya?

Could more children have been freed?

Most critically, why did rescuers fire from tanks and use flamethrowers when there were still hundreds of hostages inside the school?

To many, the siege of Beslan offered crucial early lessons in Putinism, including that he would spare nothing and no one to crush those who challenged him.

It took 20 years for Mr Putin to visit the ruins of School No. 1.

Even then, he didn’t join the anniversary events with the families. He only travelled there two weeks ago, alone.

A few shattered walls of the school were left standing as a memorial, eventually encased in a gold-tinted shroud and hung with framed photographs of the dead.

There, in the middle of the gym where the hostages were held, Mr Putin placed flowers beneath a wooden cross.

For most world leaders, it would be unfathomable not to have visited this spot before. It was Russia’s deadliest ever terror attack. But Mr Putin has always preferred to be filmed in a fighter jet or flanked by soldiers.

The graves of children that he couldn’t save do nothing for his action man image.

In fact, he had been to Beslan before, but barely noticed.

Right after the siege collapsed, he flew in late at night to visit a hospital under cover of darkness. He told Beslan that all Russia was mourning with them but by sunrise he was gone.

“He came far too late,” I remember hearing back then, from grieving families. “He should have stayed with us.”

But President Putin didn’t dare.

Four years earlier, a previous encounter with grieving women had scarred and scared him. When the Kursk submarine sank in 2000 it took him five days to break off his holiday and by the time he met the relatives, they tore shreds off him.

So Mr Putin began making the carefully-choreographed meeting a hallmark of his presidency. Only small, pre-vetted crowds. Everything under control.

Last month in Beslan, just three mothers were brought to meet him.

“It was an awful act of terror that took the lives of 334 people,” Mr Putin described their tragedy to them, for the sake of the state TV camera.

“Of that number, 136 were children.”

The mothers are not in vision at that moment, but they surely winced at his mistake.

Because 186 children were killed in Beslan.

It’s a number engrained on the brains of everyone in that town. It’s the one thing you don’t forget.

But Mr Putin didn’t visit Beslan to empathise. The mothers in black were just a prop.

He was using them to make a point.

Two decades ago, he reminded Russians, he had fought and won his war on terror. Now he was battling “neo-Nazis” and a hostile West in Ukraine, and he vowed he would win that war too.

Distortion and lies were already in the 2004 Putin playbook. Then, officials grossly under reported the number of hostages in Beslan.

I arrived in town on the first day of the siege and soon realised there were three times more hostages captive in that school than officials were admitting to.

Every local told us so. But state TV reporters, under instruction, continued to repeat the lie.

People feared that troops were preparing to storm the school, so the authorities were playing down the potential casualty-count.

I’ve often wondered what would happen to a government in a Western democracy after an attack that ended with many more hostages dead, than terrorists.

I think it would struggle to survive the inevitable official inquiry, or the next election.

Vladimir Putin didn’t have to worry about either.

In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia had failed in its duty to protect the hostages and used ‘indiscriminate force’ as the siege collapsed. The case was brought by desperate, bereaved mothers, hunting for justice.

But there was no new investigation in Russia itself. No senior officials held to account.

When the 3 Beslan mothers complained to Putin about that in August, at their meeting, he professed surprise and promised to look into it.

He’s had 20 years.

He did address one thing, though, right after the siege.

In 2004, Mr Putin announced he was cancelling direct elections for governors in Russia’s regions, claiming that would help improve security. There was no connection whatsoever to the Beslan attack.

When parliament gathered to vote on the move, opposition politicians picketed the building warning of a creeping dictatorship.

Two decades on, there is no more opposition.

State media has been fully tamed. Democracy has been crushed.

The prime lesson Mr Putin took from the siege of Beslan was one about increasing control.

A businesswoman who styled herself as the “Queen of Trash” has gone on trial in Sweden accused of illegally dumping mountains of waste, in the country’s biggest ever environmental crime case.

Bella Nilsson is one of 11 people charged with “aggravated environmental crime”.

She was chief executive of waste management company NMT Think Pink, which is accused of dumping or burying 200,000 tonnes of waste in 21 locations between 2015 and 2020.

Lawyers for Ms Nilsson who is now called Fariba Vancor, and another former chief executive Leif-Ivan Karlsson say they deny any wrongdoing.

Entering Attunda district court north of Stockholm, Ms Nilsson refused to answer reporters’ questions.

Prosecutors said the way the company mismanaged the waste led to harmful levels of carcinogenic chemicals, lead, arsenic and mercury being released into the air, soil and water.

In one incident, a Think Pink waste pile close to a nature reserve burned for two months after spontaneously combusting.

Ms Nilsson has previously told Swedish media that her company acted in line with the law.

Prosecutors said that NMT Think Pink – which went bankrupt in 2020 when Bella Nilsson was arrested – had “no intention or ability to handle [the waste] in line with environmental legislation”.

The way the rubbish was discarded at the sites endangered the “health of humans, animals and plant life”, they added.

Think Pink was hired by building companies, municipalities and private individuals, to dispose of everything from building materials, electronics, metals, plastics, wood, tyres and toys. But it left the piles “unsorted” and abandoned, according to prosecutors.

All 11 defendants have denied wrongdoing. They include Bella Nilsson’s ex husband Thomas Nilsson, whose lawyer said that as chief executive before 2015 he had was not in charge when the offences were committed.

A preliminary investigation into the scandal ran to 45,000 pages.

Prosecutor Anders Gustafsson argues that as well as dumping waste, the defendants used falsified documents to mislead authorities and make money which was used for private purposes.

Several municipalities are seeking damages of 260m kronor ($25.4 million) for cleaning up the mountains of waste as well as decontaminating the sites.

Botkyrka council, south of Stockholm, has sought 125m kronor in damages, having spent far more than that merely on removing the waste.

One fire in Kagghamra forced parents to keep their children indoors for miles around because of toxic smoke fumes.

Supermodel Elle McPherson has revealed she was diagnosed with breast cancer seven years ago.

Nicknamed “The Body”, McPherson told Australian Woman’s Weekly that she found out she had cancer following a lumpectomy to remove a growth in 2017.

McPherson used what she described as holistic therapies, rather than traditional medicine.

Cancer Research UK states on its website that “there is no scientific or medical evidence” to show that alternative therapies can help to treat or cure cancer.”

It also states that some alternative therapies might be harmful and cause side effects.

McPherson said she is now in “clinical remission but I would say I’m in utter wellness”.

The news of her illness was also revealed in a chapter of her new book, titled Elle: Life, Lessons and How to Trust Yourself, under the heading Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.

The model, now 60, told Woman’s Weekly that her doctor had recommended a mastectomy with radiation, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, plus reconstruction of her breast.

“It was a shock, it was unexpected, it was confusing, it was daunting in so many ways,” she told the magazine. “And it really gave me an opportunity to dig deep in my inner sense to find a solution that worked for me.”

She said she spent several weeks deliberating over treatment options and sought advice from “32 doctors and experts” – but we don’t know who they were or anything about their qualifications or experience.

Ultimately, she decided not to have chemotherapy and use what she described as “an intuitive, heart-led, holistic approach”.

“I came to the understanding that there was no sure thing and absolutely no guarantees. There was no ‘right’ way, just the right way for me,” she wrote in her book, quoted in the magazine.

“I chose an holistic approach. Saying no to standard medical solutions was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But saying no to my own inner sense would have been even harder,” she added.

McPherson, who is also the founder of beauty and wellness firm WelleCo, said she was under the care of several specialists, including her primary doctor, a doctor of naturopathy, an holistic dentist, an osteopath and a chiropractor. It is not known what qualifications each member of her medical team holds.

Research suggests alternative treatments are linked to reduced survival rates.

McPherson added that she spent eight months in a rental property in Phoenix, Arizona, under her health team’s care.

In her book, the model said her treatment decision received mixed reactions from her family, with one of her then teenage sons supportive of her not having chemotherapy, while the other “being more conventional, wasn’t comfortable with my choice at all”.

She added that he was still supportive even if he didn’t agree with her, as was her former partner and the father of her sons, Arki Busson, who thought avoiding a traditional treatment plan was “extreme”.

McPherson said she had previously found a cyst in one of her breasts in 2014, but it had turned out to be benign.

Cancer charity Macmillan says that if you are considering using alternative therapies, talk to your cancer doctor for advice and support.

Doctors are generally supportive of people using any complementary therapies that may help them cope better with their illness.

Complementary therapies are used alongside conventional breast cancer treatments such as chemotherapy. But doctors usually advise against using alternative therapies, which are used instead of medical treatment.

Macmillan adds that if you decide to use an alternative therapy, it is important to check it is safe: “Always check the credentials of the therapist. Alternative therapies can be expensive, and some can cause serious side effects. They can also make you feel unwell and be harmful to your health.

Cancer Research UK says: “Therapists and companies who promote alternative therapies can cause harm by convincing people an alternative therapy will cure them, when it can’t. This can be especially harmful if a person is also encouraged to give up their conventional cancer treatment.”

Responding to the news of Elle Macpherson’s breast cancer diagnosis, Jane Murphy, clinical nurse specialist at Breast Cancer Now, said: “Each person’s breast cancer diagnosis is different, and as such the treatment they are recommended will be tailored to their individual situation and agreed by them and a team of breast cancer experts. Specialists base this on robust clinical evidence.”

The ruins of a Greek village that lay submerged for decades have re-appeared after record temperatures caused a major reservoir to partially dry up.

Residents of the village of Kallio were forced to evacuate their homes more than 40 years ago to make way for the Mornos dam in southern Greece, which supplies water to the capital, Athens.

However, drought conditions in recent months caused the reservoir’s water levels to drop dramatically – revealing what remained of several homes and a school.

It is only the second time since Kallio was abandoned that the village has been seen, according to a former resident. The first time was in the 1990s during another period of drought.

“You see the first floor that remains of my father-in-law’s two-storey house… and next to it you can see what’s left of my cousins’ house,” Yorgos Iosifidis, a 60-year-old pensioner who lived in Kallio as a young man, told the AFP news agency.

The village was made up of 80-or-so houses, a church and a school.

“If it doesn’t rain soon, the level will drop further and the problem will be more acute than it was then,” said Mr Iosifidis.

Greece experienced its hottest June and July on record this year and state water operator EYDAP said water levels at the Mornos dam were down by 30%.

Other reservoirs supplying water to the Attica region, which includes Athens, have also recorded a significant drop in water levels.

With reservoir levels down, the Greek authorities have called on the 3.7 million people living in the region not to waste water.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis warned this week that Greece needs to do more to protect water resources.

“We don’t have the luxury to waste water…at a time when we know with certainty that we will have less,” he said.

Ugandan opposition leader Bobi Wine has been injured in the leg in a confrontation with a policeman in uniform, his personal assistant has told the BBC.

Najja Ssenyonjo said the pop star-turned-politician was believed to have been shot and was currently receiving treatment at Nsambya Hospital in the capital, Kampala.

He said the incident had occurred while Bobi Wine was on his way to visit his lawyers in Bulindo, which is about 20km (12 miles) north of the city.

A statement from the police said officers on site reported that the opposition leader had stumbled while getting into his vehicle.

An investigation would be conducted to clarify the facts, the statement added.

The X account of Bobi Wine, leader of the National Unity Platform (NUP), whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, first broke the news, saying: “@HEBobiwine has been shot in the leg by police in Bulindo.”

Footage has been shared on social media by journalist Solomon Serwanjja, who was at the scene, showing the 42-year-old opposition leader being helped from a building with a bleeding injury from his left shin.

“We only heard bullet sounds in the scuffle so it’s doctors to confirm but as of now it’s believed to be a bullet,” Mr Ssenyonjo told the BBC.

The police say Bobi Wine had attended an event at Bulindo and afterwards “he and his team moved out of their cars and embarked on a procession up to Bulindo town.

“However, the police advised against it. Despite their guidance, he insisted on proceeding… closing the road, leading to police intervention to prevent the procession.

“During the ensuing altercation, it is alleged that he sustained injuries,” the statement said.

Bobi Wine was first elected to parliament in 2017, and ran against President Yoweri Museveni in the 2021 election, which was marred by state repression.

He is popular among young people and has been arrested – and beaten up – numerous times.

The country’s security forces have a long history of pursuing political opponents of President Museveni, who has been in power for almost 40 years.

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A British national has said he is at a loss as to why the Nigerian police have accused him of planning to overthrow Nigeria’s government and placed a bounty on his head.

It was alleged by Nigeria’s police spokesperson on Monday that Andrew Wynne – and a co-conspirator – had built up a network of sleeper cells to destabilise Nigeria and had fled the country in the wake of last month’s cost-of-living protests.

Speaking from the UK, Mr Wynne told Nigeria’s Channels Television he was not aware of accusations and would be happy to talk to officials.

He said he ran a bookshop in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, and had been visiting the West African nation for 25 years without any problems.

A reward of 10m naira ($6,000, £5,000) has been offered by Nigeria’s police to anyone who has information that could lead to the arrest of Mr Wynne – and the same amount for his alleged Nigerian accomplice Lucky Obiyan.

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“I am more than happy to talk with the police; I am more than happy to have a discussion on WhatsApp or Zoom; I am more than happy to go to London and meet with officials from the Nigerian High Commission,” said Mr Wynne, who is also known by the name Andrew Povich.

He was declared a fugitive on the day that 10 Nigerians were charged with treason for taking part in the protests that were dubbed “10 days of rage”.

These demonstrations were mainly organised via social media but also had the backing of the country’s trade unions.

All of those who were accused on Monday in the federal high court of treason, destruction of public property and injuring police officers pleaded not guilty. Their charge sheet also alleged that they had been working with Mr Wynne.

Later, police spokesperson Muyiwa Adejobi gave more details about Mr Wynne, saying he had rented a space at Abuja’s Labour House, the headquarters of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) – the country’s main trade union body.

He also said the British national had established a school to cover up his activities – working towards the overthrow of President Bola Tinubu’s government.

“I am not aware that I am a fugitive; I am not aware that I am running away from the law,” Mr Wynne told Channels TV.

“I have had a bookshop at the NLC offices right at the centre of Abuja for seven years and all that time, of course the security forces have paid no interest in me,” he said.

The August demonstrations turned violent in some places as protesters clashed with security forces leaving at least seven dead, according to police, though rights groups have put the death toll at 23.

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A man whose body was found frozen in a Pennsylvania cave in 1977 has been identified by authorities nearly five decades later.

The Berks County Coroner’s Office said the body was that of 27-year-old Nicholas Paul Grubb from Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.

Authorities said they worked out the identity of the so-called “Pinnacle Man” after finally tracking down and matching Grubb’s fingerprints.

Grubb’s body was found frozen in a cave just below the Pinnacle in Albany Township, a hiking area 75 miles (122km) northwest of Philadelphia.

It ends a near 50-year mystery, multiple unsuccessful attempts to identify the frozen remains, and an exhumation five years ago to extract DNA.

The initial post-mortem examination determined that “Pinnacle Man” died from a drug overdose. Police ruled out foul play.

Dental records and fingerprints were taken, but no match was found.

It was nearly half a century later, in August, when a Pennsylvania police detective tracked down Grubb’s fingerprints, the Berks County Coroner’s Office said.

They were then submitted to NamUs, a national missing persons’ database, and the FBI was able to uncover Grubb’s identity in less than an hour.

The coroner’s office said the discovery highlighted the “considerable effort” taken to identify unclaimed bodies.

They added that the Pinnacle body had been unsuccessfully compared to around 10 missing people in the last 15 years, and the body’s 2019 exhumation for DNA proved similarly fruitless.

Officials were considering re-burying his remains when the discovery of his identity was made, they said.

Grubb, known as “Nicky” to his family, had served with the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, they said, and received an honourable discharge in 1971.

The coroner’s office said his family was “very appreciative” of the efforts to identify him.

A top New York state government aide secretly helped the Chinese government access an official call about Covid-19 while enjoying a lavish lifestyle as an undercover agent for Beijing, according to a US indictment.

Over a period of roughly 14 years, Linda Sun rose through the ranks to become deputy chief of staff to the governor.

But according to federal prosecutors, the 41-year-old used her position to aid Chinese officials, including by blocking Taiwanese diplomats from contacting the state government and covertly sharing internal documents with Beijing.

In return, China allegedly showered Ms Sun and her husband, Christopher Hu, with millions of dollars in kickbacks that helped them buy a $4.1m (£3.1m) house in New York and perks including special home deliveries of salted duck.

They also bought a $2.1m ocean-view condominium in Honolulu, Hawaii, and luxury vehicles including a 2024 Ferrari Roma sports car, according to the indictment.

The couple pleaded not guilty on Tuesday in a Brooklyn federal court to a range of charges, from failing to register as a foreign agent to visa fraud and money laundering.

US law requires that individuals acting for or in the interests of foreign countries or political parties register as foreign agents.

Ms Sun never did – and, according to prosecutors, the Chinese-born naturalised citizen “actively concealed that she took actions at the order, request, or direction” of Chinese government officials and representatives.

In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread through the state, Ms Sun allegedly found ways for Chinese consular officials to gain access to New York leaders.

So brazen were her efforts that, in one instance, she surreptitiously added a Chinese official to a private state government call about the public health response to the virus, according to prosecutors.

Former New York prosecutor Howard Master told the BBC the charges reflect a “disturbing” trend of senior public officials – including former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez – corruptly receiving gifts from foreign governments.

The indictment against Ms Sun lists occasions in which she worked to prevent Taiwanese representatives from either communicating with or meeting high-ranking officials in the US government.

“It’s all been taken care of satisfactorily,” Ms Sun is said to have bragged in one 2016 message to a Chinese consular official after successfully diverting a top New York politician from an event hosted by Taiwan.

And when the island’s president travelled to New York City in 2019, she was even pictured joining a pro-Beijing protest against his visit.

Up until January 2021, she worked behind the scenes to scrub mentions of Beijing’s detention of Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group in Xinjiang Province.

When Chinese officials asked if the governor could record a Lunar New Year video, Ms Sun asked what “talking points” they wanted.

“Mostly holiday wishes and hope for friendship and co-operation,” the Chinese officials wrote. “Nothing too political.”

Ms Sun later told another Chinese official that she had argued with Ms Hochul’s speechwriter to get a mention of the “Uyghur situation” removed from a draft of the governor’s remarks.

In 2023, while working in the New York labour department, Ms Sun obtained a framed official Lunar New Year proclamation from Governor Kathy Hochul and presented it to a Chinese official.

The proclamation was produced outside of ordinary channels and even without the permission of Ms Hochul’s office.

Ms Sun also drafted fraudulent invitation letters for Chinese politicians to travel to the US and wrote an unauthorised letter of employment to add a compatriot to the New York governor’s Asian American advisory council.

In return, Ms Sun and Mr Hu “received substantial economic and other benefits from [Beijing] representatives”, prosecutors say.

The gifts included all-expenses-paid travel to China; tickets to top shows, concerts and sporting events; employment in China for Ms Sun’s cousin; and home deliveries of Nanjing-style salted ducks prepared by a Chinese government official’s personal chef.

According to the indictment, the duck delicacy was gifted to Ms Sun – and sent directly to her parents’ home – on at least 16 different occasions.

On Tuesday morning, federal agents entered the couple’s Long Island home and detained them on 10 criminal counts.

Her lawyer, Jarrod Schaeffer, was quoted by AP news agency as saying: “We’re looking forward to addressing these charges in court. Our client is understandably upset that these charges have been brought.”

A judge released the pair on bail, limiting their travel to three US states and ordering Ms Sun to avoid any contact with representatives from the Chinese consulate or mission in New York.

A former Philippine mayor who was on the run for weeks after being accused of spying for China has been arrested in Indonesia.

Philippine authorities have been pursuing Alice Guo across four countries even since she disappeared in July following an investigation into her alleged criminal activities.

She has been accused of protecting online casinos, which were a front for scam centres and human trafficking syndicates in her sleepy pig farming town, Bamban.

Ms Guo denies the allegations. Philippine officials said they were co-ordinating with their Indonesian counterparts for her return to the Philippines “at the soonest possible time”.

The former mayor said she grew up on the family farm with her Chinese father and Filipina mother, but MPs who investigated the scam centre operations accused her of being a Chinese national named Guo Hua Ping, and a spy who provided cover for criminal gangs.

The dramatic nature of her case, which has since seen her sister arrested and questioned before by the Philippine Senate, sparked fury in the country and drew international attention.

Authorities believe that Guo slipped past border checks in July and took several boats, crossing neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore, on her way to Indonesia, where she was arrested on Tuesday on the western border of the capital Jakarta.

While online casinos or Philippine Online Gaming Operations are not illegal, they are increasingly being exposed as cover for other crimes.

The firms, which mostly cater to mainland Chinese clients, flourished under former president Rodrigo Duterte, who sought close economic and political ties with Beijing.

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

Financial markets in Asia and the US have tumbled on concerns that the world’s largest economy could be headed towards a recession.

Shares in American chip giant Nvidia slumped by almost 10% as concerns over the economy dampened optimism about the boom in artificial intelligence (AI).

On Wednesday, major Asian indexes dropped after major stock indexes in New York fell sharply.

Investors turned more cautious as new data showed US manufacturing activity remains subdued, with the focus now on key jobs figures due on Friday.

“Growth concerns are dominating market moves,” Julia Lee at FTSE Russell told the BBC.

In New York on Tuesday, the S&P 500 index closed more than 2% lower, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq fell by over 3%.

Nasdaq-listed Nvidia fell by 9.5%, wiping $279bn (£212.9bn) off its stock market valuation.

Other US tech giants – including Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft – also saw their shares tumble.

On Wednesday morning, Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 3.3%, South Korea’s Kospi was trading 2.7% lower and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong dropped by 0.7%.

Major Asian technology firms including TSMC, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Tokyo Electron were sharply lower.

“Concerns around global growth look to be hitting exporting countries in the region particularly hard,” Ms Lee added.

The highly-anticipated US non-farm payrolls jobs market report is due to be released on Friday.

Investors will be watching those figures closely for clues on how much the US Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by when officials meet next week.

With pomp and splendour, China has welcomed more than 50 Africans leaders to Beijing this week for a summit to strengthen ties at a time of increasing political and economic turmoil around the world.

“It appeals to their vanities,” Macharia Munene, a Kenya-based professor of international relations tells the BBC, referring to the red carpet welcome – spiced up with entertainment by dancers in colourful costumes – that the leaders received.

The optics were carefully choreographed to make the leaders feel that it is a meeting of equals.

Many of them – including South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and Kenya’s William Ruto – held one-to-one meetings with their Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and were given tours of Beijing and other cities at the heart of China’s development ahead of the summit.

As Prof Munene puts it, China’s aim is to show African leaders that “we are in the same boat, we are all victims of Western imperialism”.

Paul Frimpong, executive director of the Ghana-based Africa-China Centre for Policy and Advisory, says that Western powers – as well as oil-rich Gulf states – are trying to match China’s influence in Africa.

“There is a keen interest and competition in and around what Africa’s potential is,” he tells the BBC.

Cobus van Staden, co-founder of the China-Global South Project, writes that China goes out of its way to emphasise its own status as a developing country, signalling solidarity with Africa and the rest of the Global South.

“It avoids the dreariness of the US and EU’s ongoing aid focus with its attendant conditionality and preaching,” he adds.

Over the last two decades, China’s diplomacy has paid off. Out of all the countries in the world, it has risen to become Africa’s largest trading partner.

Data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows that a fifth of Africa’s exports go to China, the bulk of which includes metals, mineral products and fuel. The exports have quadrupled in US dollar terms since 2001.

For African countries, China is also the “single largest source of imports” of manufactured goods and machinery, according to the IMF.

But the balance of trade, in most cases, favours China massively.

This is something Mr Ramaphosa sought to address in his bilateral meeting with President Xi.

“We would like to narrow the trade deficit and address the structure of our trade,” South Africa’s president said.

A joint communique issued afterwards said that “China showed it was willing to uplift job creation, citing recruitment conferences for Chinese enterprises to promote local employment in South Africa”.

Kenya, on the other hand, is seeking more credit, despite a heavy debt burden that gobbles up nearly two thirds of its annual revenue and which recently triggered street protests after the government sought to introduce new taxes to fund the budget deficit.

Mr Ruto hopes to secure funding for various infrastructure projects, including the completion of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) to connect Kenya’s coast to neighbouring Uganda, the building of roads and dams, the establishment of a pharmaceutical park and a technology-driven transport system for the capital, Nairobi.

After connecting Nairobi to the port city of Mombasa, China discontinued its financing of the controversial SGR four years ago, leading to rail tracks ending in a field outside the lake city of Naivasha.

As a major bilateral lender to many African countries, China has often come under scrutiny for its deals, particularly in recent years when several African countries, including Ghana, Zambia and Ethiopia, experienced debt distress.

Debt sustainability is at the centre of discussions at every major forum on Chinese and African relations, and it is likely to be the case at the latest summit as well, Mr Frimpong says.

The debt crisis is a reminder that foreign powers are motivated by their own interests – and African states need to improve their economies and finances in order to reduce their reliance on them.

This is especially the case as the IMF predicts that China’s economic growth will continue to slow – and recommends that African countries adapt by deepening regional economic integration and implementing structural reforms to increase local revenue.

Most of all, as Dr Van Staden points out, African leaders need to “overcome the velvet rope aspect of these summits to make their own deals, set their own terms, and throw their own parties”.

• China’s mission to win African hearts with satellite TV
• Why South Africans are flocking to a Chinese hospital ship
• Kenya, China and a railway to nowhere
• PODCAST: How China sees itself in Africa

At least 51 people have been killed and 271 others injured in a Russian missile strike on the city of Poltava, in central Ukraine.

A military academy and a nearby hospital were hit. Ukraine’s land forces confirmed that military personnel were killed in the attack.

People did not have enough time to get to bomb shelters after the air raid alarm sounded, Ukraine’s ministry of defence said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky promised that what he called “Russian scum” would pay for the attack, and repeated calls for more air defences so that Ukraine could protect itself by carrying out its own long-range missile attacks. Moscow has not commented on the attack.

People nearby told us their windows were blown out by the force of the impact.

We met 26-year-old Mykyta Petrov, a cadet who only started at the Poltava Military Communications Institute two weeks ago.

He described the moment the attack unfolded just after 09:00 local time on Tuesday morning (06:00 GMT), saying the second missile hit just three seconds after the first.

“I ran outside, there was smoke and dust everywhere…lots of people were outside having a cigarette, and many were killed…”

He says that what he saw has affected him psychologically, that there was “too much blood, too many dead bodies.”

Earlier reports from Russian military bloggers suggested that cadets were gathered at a military parade being held at the institute, but the ministry confirmed there was no parade happening at the time of the strike.

Alarms sounded at 09:08 local time and everyone headed to the shelter, the defence ministry added. The explosions started a few minutes after the alarms.

Thirty-year-old year old Jana Kulishova was one of them. She was woken by the air raid siren but did not have time to reach a shelter.

For her, the attack is personal. Her husband is fighting on the front line in the Donbas region.

“Soldiers have died here and I know there are still soldiers still under the rubble. Their wives are waiting for them.”

Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko told the BBC the two minutes between the air raid siren in Poltava and the missiles landing was “nothing”.

“You just imagine you’re on the sixth floor of some building and you need to run away downstairs. Is it realistic that you can do this in two minutes?” he said.

“Just imagine this life and like this several times per day. We can’t continue like this. It’s just not fair.”

In a statement on Telegram which confirmed the deaths of the military personnel, Ukraine’s land forces said an investigation was under way to establish whether enough was done to protect those in the facility the missile hit.

It confirmed additional measures to ensure safety at military facilities would be increased.

Firefighters have been on the scene with all their equipment clearing out buildings, and army personnel outside have stopped people. They cannot get too close due to the sensitivity of the site.

Earlier, one Poltava resident, Olena Serdyuk, said: “The air raid alert started in just a minute, and then there were two explosions.

“At home, we immediately ran into the bathroom with the child, but then gathered ourselves”.

She added that there is no bomb shelter “in our radius”, and it “takes a long time to run somewhere”.

Another local, Anastasiia Artyukh, heard “two very strong explosions” and called the situation “really scary”.

“There is a house nearby, everything was blown out, all the windows. We don’t have a basement in our house. So our only option was to sit [and wait].”

Poltava regional governor Philip Pronin called the attack a “cunning and cynical Russian strike,” and later said that 15 people were still thought to be trapped under the rubble.

Mr Pronin said search groups were on site, and that 10 residential buildings had been damaged in the attack.

More details could not immediately be given due to security reasons, he said.

Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska posted on X calling the attack “a stunning tragedy for all of Ukraine,” and added: “Russia is taking away the most valuable thing from us – life.”

In a video on the Ukrainian presidential website, President Zelensky said Russia would be held accountable for the strike.

In the clip, which was also posted on X, Mr Zelensky said a “full and prompt” investigation had been ordered and that “all necessary services are involved in the rescue operation”.

He went on to say that Ukraine needed long-range air defence systems “that can protect us from Russian terror” and added that “every day of delay, unfortunately, means more lost lives”.

The UK’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy condemned the “sickening act of aggression in Putin’s abhorrent and illegal war in Ukraine,” and said “my thoughts are with all the victims and their loved ones.”

US President Joe Biden described it as a “deplorable attack”, adding that it was “a tragic reminder of Putin’s ongoing and outrageous attempts to break the will of a free people”.

“The United States will continue stand with [the people of Ukraine] – including providing the air defense systems and capabilities they need to protect their country,” he said in a White House statement.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said President Putin “knows no limits to brutality”.

There has also been criticism of the Ukrainian authorities in the aftermath of the attack.

Maria Bezugla, a Ukrainian MP who often criticizes the country’s military leadership, accused officials of putting soldiers in danger.

“These tragedies keep repeating themselves. When will it stop?” she wrote on Telegram.

Since the attack, changes within the Ukrainian government have been announced – with potentially more to come.

The minister in charge of weapons reduction resigned on Tuesday and one senior lawmaker for Mr Zelensky’s party said a “major government reset” was coming that would see more than half of minsters change.

“Tomorrow a day of sackings awaits us, and a day of appointments the day after,” David Arakhamia said.

The attack on the military institute in Poltava came as Russian leader Vladimir Putin arrived in Mongolia – his first visit to an International Criminal Court (ICC) member since it issued a warrant for his arrest last year.

Poltava, located in central Ukraine, had a pre-war population of 300,000 and is located 300 kilometres (189 miles) east of Kyiv.

Founded in the 1960s, when Ukraine was still part of the USSR, the Poltava military communications institute trains telecommunications specialists.

The US has charged Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and several other prominent figures in the Palestinian group in connection with its deadly attack in Israel on 7 October last year.

The justice department said it was indicting six Hamas members with seven charges, including the murder of US citizens, conspiracy to finance terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction.

The criminal complaint covers decades of alleged attacks by Hamas, as well as the unprecedented assault on southern Israel nearly a year ago.

It is the first step by US law enforcement to hold accountable the ringleaders of the 7 October attack, though up to three of those named in the indictment are dead and Sinwar is believed to be hiding in tunnels somewhere under Gaza.

In a video statement on Tuesday, Mr Garland said the defendants were responsible for “financing and directing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the security of the United States”.

The group also “led Hamas’s efforts to destroy the state of Israel and murder civilians in support of that aim”.

He noted the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, in which the group “murdered entire families” in “the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust”.

“They murdered the elderly and they murdered young children. They weaponised sexual violence against women, including rape and genital mutilation.”

He added that during the attack the group “murdered over 1,200 people” and “perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust”.

Other Hamas leaders charged include former leader Ismail Haniyeh; Marwan Issa, the deputy leader of the organisation’s armed wing; Khaled Mashaal, who leads the group outside Gaza and the West Bank; along with Mohammed Deif and Ali Baraka.

The charges include conspiracy to bomb a place of public use resulting in death, conspiracy to finance terrorism and material support for acts of terrorism resulting in death.

The justice department’s complaint notes that all the “defendants are either deceased or remain at large”.

Haniyeh, Issa and Deif have all been reported killed in the past few months in attacks that were either claimed by or attributed to Israel.

The attorney general referred in Tuesday’s remarks to the killing last week of US-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, in addition to 42 other American citizens killed in the 7 October attack and 10 taken hostage.

“We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of Hamas’ brutal murders of Americans, as an act of terrorism,” Mr Garland said.

If convicted, the group faces a maximum penalty of life in prison or a death sentence.

The charges were filed in February, but were kept under wraps until Tuesday in case the US had the opportunity to arrest any of the accused, an unnamed justice department official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden condemned the Hamas killing of Goldberg-Polin, calling it “as tragic as it is reprehensible”.

“Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes,” Mr Biden said.

Meanwhile, the UK has defended its decision to ban some weapons sales to Israel over concerns about how they might be used in Gaza.

Hamas attacked southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then in Israel’s ongoing military campaign, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

There were almost 2,400 allegations of sexual abuse in more than 300 schools run by religious orders in Ireland, according to a report commissioned by the Irish government.

The Education Minister Norma Foley said it was the first time the scale of abuse had been disclosed, and it was “truly shocking”.

At a news conference, Ms Foley said the report found there were 884 alleged abusers in 42 orders which formerly ran schools or still do.

The body which represents Catholic religious orders said it was “deeply sorry” about the abuse which had happened in schools.

The Irish cabinet has agreed to establish a full statutory investigation, following the findings of the “scoping inquiry report”, which was published on Tuesday evening.

The primary source of data on allegations of sexual abuse was the religious orders and the schools themselves, the report said.

There were 2395 allegations of sexual abuse recorded in respect of 308 schools, though the report warns that the real number of allegations is likely to be more, given that abuse is generally under-reported.

More than half of the 884 people accused of historical sexual abuse are now dead.

The report author, lawyer Mary O’Toole SC, said there was a “particularly high number of allegations in special schools.”

590 allegations were recorded in 17 special schools, involving 190 alleged abusers.

149 survivors gave interviews or provided a written submission to the scoping inquiry.

According to the report, the sexual abuse “was often reported as having been accompanied by ferocious violence”.

The victims said the abuse happened in classrooms, dormitories, sports facilities, and at musical and other extracurricular activities.

For many, “their childhood stopped the day the abuse began.”

The testimonies related to the years between the 1960s and the 1990s.

Survivors also had a “strong belief that what was happening was so pervasive that it could not possibly have gone unnoticed by other staff, and the members and leadership of the religious orders”.

People who had been abused told the report authors that “the power of the Catholic Church permeated their lives in every way” and they believed there was no-one they could tell, including their parents.

The personal stories also show how survivors suffered mental health problems and addictions in later life as a result of the trauma they suffered as children.

Ms Foley noted that the report recommended that the religious organisations should contribute to a financial redress scheme.

She said victims and survivors had shown “extraordinary courage” in coming forward to share their personal stories.

She also paid tribute to the late Mark Ryan, who spoke out about his experience of being abused at Blackrock College in Dublin in the 1970s.

His testimony, along with that of his brother David, featured in a radio documentary by the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ called “Blackrock Boys” in 2022, which made a huge public impact.

The Association of Leaders of Missionaries and Religious in Ireland (AMRI) said: “We recognise that we can never know the depth of pain and suffering which survivors have endured and continue to endure.”

The organisation said it had worked with members to “facilitate the fullest cooperation” with the scoping inquiry and would “carefully examine the recommendations and respond accordingly.”

Ms Foley said schools should be places of “haven, not horror” and that abusers “broke down” young people in their care instead of building them up.

The government now plans to appoint a chair for the full inquiry, called a Commission of Investigation, and draw up terms of reference.

Tánaiste (Irish deputy Prime Minister) Micheál Martin said that the “level and scale of the horrific abuse within schools revealed in the report’s pages is shocking, and there must be full accountability and justice for those abused”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Mongolia, his first visit to an International Criminal Court (ICC) member since it issued a warrant for his arrest last year.

He was welcomed by Mongolia’s leader at a lavish ceremony in the Asian nation’s capital Ulaanbaatar on Tuesday.

The Russian leader is wanted by the court for the alleged illegal deportation of Ukrainian children.

A spokesperson from the Kremlin said it was not concerned Mr Putin would be arrested during the visit.

Soldiers on horseback lined the capital’s Genghis Khan Square as martial anthems were played by a live band to welcome the Russian leader, who met with the Mongolian president Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh.

A small group of protesters gathered at the square on Monday afternoon, holding a sign demanding “Get War Criminal Putin out of here”.

Another protest is planned for midday Tuesday at Ulaanbaatar’s Monument for the Politically Repressed, which commemorates those who suffered under Mongolia’s decades-long Soviet-backed communist regime.

Other protestors were prevented from getting close to the Russian president on his arrival by security forces.

Ahead of his visit, Ukraine had urged Mongolia to arrest Mr Putin.

“We call on the Mongolian authorities to comply with the mandatory international arrest warrant and transfer Putin to the International Criminal Court in the Hague,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said on Telegram.

The court alleged last year that the Russian president was responsible for war crimes, focusing on the unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.

It has also issued a warrant for the arrest of Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the same crimes.

It alleges the crimes were committed in Ukraine from 24 February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

Moscow has previously denied the allegations and said the warrants were “outrageous”.

ICC members are expected to detain suspects if an arrest warrant has been issued, but there is no enforcement mechanism.

The Hague-based court last week said members had “an obligation” to take action. Mongolia has not publicly responded to Ukraine or the ICC’s call.

The former Soviet satellite state has maintained friendly relations with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

It has not condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and declined to vote on the conflict at the United Nations.

The landlocked country, which also borders China, also relies on Russia for gas and electricity.

Russia has been in talks for years about building a pipeline to carry 50 billion cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas a year from its Yamal region to China via Mongolia.

The project, known as Power of Siberia 2, is part of a strategy to compensate for the drop in gas sales in Europe, following widespread boycott of Russian resources due to the invasion of Ukraine.

China has announced a probe of Canadian canola imports, escalating a trade fight between the two countries.

The move, which could lead to tariffs on a key Canadian export, came a week after Canada said it would impose new border taxes on Chinese-made electric vehicles, steel and aluminium.

Beijing also said it would file a complaint with the World Trade Organization over the EV tariffs, which it criticised as “discriminatory” and “unilateral”.

Canada’s minister of agriculture said plans for the canola investigation were “deeply concerning” and the government was closely monitoring the situation.

The latest tit-for-tat comes as a rising number of governments, including the US and European Union, erect barriers against Chinese-made electric cars.

In announcing the EV tariffs last week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said countries such as China had “chosen to give themselves an unfair advantage in the global marketplace”.

Western countries allege that Chinese firms are benefiting from subsidies and other government help, allowing for “dumping”, which is when product is sold below cost, making it difficult for other firms to compete.

China cited similar dumping complaints in its probe of Canadian canola oil, noting that imports had jumped 170% since 2023, while prices had “continuously fallen”.

“China’s position is clear-cut. The country will take all measures necessary to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies,” a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in announcing the measures.

China has also launched investigations of European pork and dairy products. It recently declined to impose tariffs on French cognac, despite alleged dumping.

Canola, also known as rapeseed, is a major agricultural product in Canada, accounting for roughly one-quarter of all farm crop receipts, according to the Canola Council, an industry group.

Canada exports more than 90% of its canola, which is sold as raw seed, oil, or meal and is used for cooking, animal feed and some forms of energy, according to the council.

China’s imports of Canadian canola were worth roughly $C5bn ($3.7bn;£2.8bn) last year, making the country the second biggest market after the US.

It has been the target in previous trade disputes.

Beijing blocked exports from two major Canadian grain companies for three years citing pest concerns, following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Chinese businesswoman Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of the tech firm Huawei.

Canada’s agriculture minister, Lawrence MacAulay, said Canadian farmers “depend on, and play by, a rules-based global trading order that provides reliable market access”.

Calling Beijing’s announcement “deeply concerning”, he said Ottawa is monitoring developments closely.

“We will continue to defend and support the sector every step of the way,” he said.

It’s been nearly a month since former Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina hurriedly landed at a military base near Delhi after a chaotic exit from her country.

Ms Hasina’s dramatic ouster on 5 August followed weeks of student-led protests which spiralled into deadly, nationwide unrest. She was initially expected to stay in India for just a short period, but reports say her attempts to seek asylum in the UK, the US and the UAE have not been successful so far.

Her continued presence in India has generated challenges for Delhi in developing a strong relationship with the new interim government in Dhaka. 

For India, Bangladesh is not just any neighbouring country. It’s a strategic partner and a close ally crucial to India’s border security, particularly in the north-eastern states. 

The two countries share a porous border 4,096km (2,545 miles) long which makes it relatively easy for armed insurgent groups from India’s north-eastern states to cross into Bangladesh for a safe haven. 

• Sheikh Hasina: The pro-democracy icon who became an autocrat

After Ms Hasina’s Awami League party came to power in 2009, it cracked down on some of these ethnic militant groups. Ms Hasina also amicably settled several border disputes with India.  

While border security is at the core of the relationship, there are financial aspects too. During Ms Hasina’s 15-year rule, trade relations and connectivity between the two countries flourished. India has gained road, river and train access via Bangladesh to transport goods to its north-eastern states. 

Since 2010, India has also given more than $7bn (£5.3bn) as a line of credit to Bangladesh for infrastructure and development projects. 

Ms Hasina’s sudden exit means that Delhi has to work hard to ensure that these gains are not lost. 

“It’s a setback in the sense that any turbulence in our neighbourhood is always unwanted,” says Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, a former Indian High Commissioner in Dhaka. 

But the former diplomat insists that Delhi will work with the interim government in Dhaka because “there is no choice” and “you can’t dictate what they do internally”. 

The Indian government has wasted no time in reaching out to the interim government in Dhaka, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi holding a telephone conversation with leader Muhammad Yunus.

However, it will take a while for Delhi to assuage the anger in Bangladesh over its unwavering support for Ms Hasina and her Awami League for the last 15 years.  

Many Bangladeshis attribute the anger against India to Delhi’s swift endorsement of three controversial elections won by Ms Hasina’s party amid allegations of widespread vote-rigging. 

With Ms Hasina’s fall, Delhi’s “neighbourhood first” policy has taken another jolt with Bangladesh joining the Maldives and Nepal in resisting any attempt at dominance by India. 

Analysts say that Delhi can’t afford to lose its influence in another neighbouring country if it wants to protect its status as a regional powerhouse – especially as rival China is also jostling for influence in the region. 

Just last year, Mohamed Muizzu won the presidency in the Maldives on the back of his very public anti-India stand. 

“It’s time for India to do some introspection regarding its regional policy,” says Debapriya Bhattacharya, a senior economist with the Centre for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka.

Delhi needs to look at whether it has adequately taken on board the perspectives of its regional partners, he says.

“I am not only talking about Bangladesh, [but also] almost all other countries in the region,” adds Mr Bhattacharya, who heads a committee appointed by the interim government to prepare a white paper on the state of Bangladesh’s economy.

• Can India help its special ally Bangladesh defuse the crisis?

For example, in the case of Bangladesh, analysts point out that successive Indian governments have failed to engage with other opposition parties, particularly the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). 

“India somehow thought that the Awami League and its government are the only allies inside Bangladesh. That was a strategic blunder,” says Abdul Moyeen Khan, a senior leader of the BNP.  

If free and fair elections are held in Bangladesh in the coming months, BNP leaders are confident of victory.

That will pose a diplomatic challenge for Delhi. There is a perceived trust deficit between India and the BNP, which is led by Begum Khaleda Zia, who had been prime minister for two terms earlier. 

Ms Zia, who spent most of her time in jail since 2018, has always denied corruption charges against her and has accused Ms Hasina of political vendetta. She has now been released from jail and is recovering from her illness.  

In the coming days, Delhi and the BNP leaders will have to find a way to work past their differences.

During the previous BNP-led coalition government from 2001 to 2006, the bilateral relationship deteriorated with Delhi accusing Dhaka of harbouring insurgents from India’s north-east.

During Ms Zia’s rule, Hindu leaders in Bangladesh said there were a series of attacks against them – including murder, looting and rape – by Islamist parties and the BNP which began as the election results were announced in 2001. 

The BNP denies the charges of giving shelter to anti-Indian insurgents and also of carrying out attacks on minority Hindus in 2001.

BNP leaders, including Mr Khan, say India hasn’t been forthcoming in engaging with them, adding that “now it’s time for a policy shift on the part of Delhi”.

He also stresses that given India’s proximity, population, geographical size and its growing economic and military might, a party like the BNP cannot afford to make the mistake of harbouring any anti-Indian insurgents within Bangladesh.

• ‘There is no law and order. And Hindus are being targeted again’

There are other factors also behind the anger against India. India and Bangladesh share 54 rivers and the sharing of water resources is a contentious issue.

The recent floods triggered by heavy rains in eastern Bangladesh are an example of how misinformation can fuel suspicions between the two countries. 

Following a sudden heavy downpour in the Indian state of Tripura, the excess water flowed into the Gumti river – which flows between the two countries – inundating vast areas inside the state as well as downstream in neighbouring Bangladesh.  

Millions of people were affected with many losing their houses, belongings and farmland. Many villagers and social media users accused India of deliberately releasing water from a dam in the night, leading to the floods. 

The Indian external affairs ministry was forced to issue a statement denying this, explaining that the floods had been caused by heavy rains in the catchment areas of the Gumti river. 

Then there is another factor – China. Beijing is keen to extend its footprint in Bangladesh as it battles for regional supremacy with India. 

It rolled out the red carpet for Mr Muizzu when he chose China for his first state visit after winning the Maldives election.

Delhi would want to avoid the same fate with Bangladesh. And it would hope that Bangladesh’s reliance on Indian goods and trade will buy it some time to work out its diplomatic strategy and change its image. 

So Delhi will have to tread carefully around Ms Hasina’s presence in India, especially if the new government makes a formal extradition request.

A statement issued on her behalf by her son Sajeeb Wazed Joy last month had already stoked anger in Bangladesh. 

But India wouldn’t want to ask Ms Hasina to leave the country when her future remains uncertain and come across as leaving a formidable former ally in the lurch. 

“It doesn’t matter how she is accorded hospitality in India. But it matters to Bangladeshis how she intervenes in the domestic matters staying over there. If she speaks against the current interim government, that would be considered as an act of hostility,” Mr Bhattacharya warned.  

Diplomats in Delhi will hope that Ms Hasina makes a choice for herself without forcing India’s hand.