A boy accused of killing four people at his high school in Georgia was interviewed last year by police about anonymous online threats, the FBI has said.

Colt Gray, 14, denied to police in May 2023 he was behind internet posts that contained images of guns, warning of a school shooting.

The suspect opened fire on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in the city of Winder, killing two teachers and two pupils, investigators say. Eight students and one teacher were injured.

He was arrested on campus and will be prosecuted as an adult.

Police have identified the victims as teachers Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall and 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo.

In a news conference, Georgia Bureau of Investigation director Chris Hosey said the gun used was an “AR-platform style weapon”.

In a statement, the FBI said its National Threat Operations Center had alerted local law enforcement in May 2023 after receiving anonymous tips about “online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time”.

The agency said that within 24 hours investigators had determined that the threats originated in Georgia.

Sheriff’s deputies interviewed the boy and his father, who “stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them”, the FBI said.

The suspect, who was 13 years old at the time, denied making the online threats and officials “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject”.

“At the time, there was no probable cause for an arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels,” added the FBI statement.

Sheriff Jud Smith described the attack as “pure evil” and said officers were on scene within minutes of receiving 911 calls at 10:20 local time (14:20 GMT).

Two officers assigned to the school “immediately encountered the subject”, the sheriff said, adding that the boy “immediately surrendered”.

The boy has been interviewed and spoke with investigators once while in custody, Sheriff Smith said.

The sheriff added that no motive had been identified and that law enforcement did not know of “any targets at this point”.

Students described chaotic scenes as alerts went out that an attacker was on campus. Classes at Apalachee began last month, but many students across the US are returning to schools this week.

Lyela Sayarath, who was in the alleged attacker’s class, told CNN that the suspect left the room at the beginning of an algebra lesson.

She said he came back and knocked on the door, which had locked automatically, but another student refused to let him in after noticing he had a gun.

Lyela told CNN the attacker then went to the classroom next door, where he began shooting.

Marques Coleman, 14, said he saw the attacker holding a “big gun” just before the shooting began.

“I got up, I started running, he started shooting like, like 10 times. He shot at least 10 times,” he told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

“My teacher started barricading the door with desks,” he said.

After standing up, the pupil said he saw “one of my classmates on the ground bleeding so bad”, another girl shot in the leg and a friend shot in the stomach.

A vigil was held on Wednesday evening in the city of 18,000 residents about 50 miles (80km) from Atlanta.

This was the 23rd US school shooting of 2024, according a database maintained by magazine Education Week, which counts 11 dead and 38 injured in such attacks so far this year.

David Riedman, who runs the K-12 School Shooting Database, told Reuters news agency that the shooting in Georgia was the first “planned attack” at a school during this autumn term.

Tonga’s sleepy capital Nuku’alofa was buzzing last week as leaders from across the Pacific region descended upon it for the annual Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting.

Every so often, a police escort would speed through its streets, sirens blaring. On the bonnet of the cars, small flags identified the foreign delegations. China and Taiwan were visible, as well as the Union Jack and the United Nations.

All of them only participated as dialogue partners or observers. But they made a lot of noise. Their security detail was bigger than those of most of the 18 PIF members, save perhaps New Zealand and Australia. Tonga’s Royal Palace looked understated in comparison with only a sole guard looking after the King, according to sources.

Throughout the week, diplomats called the meeting fascinating – but the underlying concern is that the interest by these delegations is not necessarily in line with what PIF leaders or its people want.

The PIF is made up of 18 members – mostly Pacific Island nations as well as Australia and New Zealand – but delegations from across the world also attend, keen to play a role in the region, which is assuming greater geopolitical significance.

The big players are no longer just Australia and the US. China is a rising power in the Pacific and one that causes ructions.

Nuku’alofa has almost buckled under the pressure of all this interest. Outside one of its top hotels, where the big delegations were staying, there was a billboard looking for staff – declaring “no experience necessary – all positions”.

Inside the hotel, another notice warned that Tonga was facing a scarcity of skilled workers and therefore couldn’t service the general public during the forum.

It was a pertinent reminder of the “brain drain” that many Pacific nations face as their people head to Australia and New Zealand for a better future.

At the forum itself, Australia scored a victory quite early on when it announced a A$400m ($268m; £204m) Pacific Policing Initiative that aims to set up a police training facility in Brisbane and four centres across the Pacific. It will also train regional officers to be deployed across the region for major disasters or big events.

No sooner than the plan had been announced, it was eclipsed by a “hot mic” moment. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was caught on camera calling the deal “a cracker” in a conversation with US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell. In a conversation he didn’t think was being filmed, he even joked with Mr Campbell about going “halfsies on the cost”.

It was an awkward gaffe that made it pretty clear that the policing initiative was a “win” against China’s growing influence in the region – 1-0 to Australia and its friends.

That Mr Albanese’s remarks were made in the auditorium that was built by the Chinese makes the competition all the more relevant. Chinese influence on the island is clear. Next to the auditorium is a large patch of land that holds the Royal Tombs, which has now been boarded up with big signs on the outside saying a renovation is being carried out with the help of China Aid. It’s a similar story across the Pacific.

But the conversation also backed up reservations made by Vanuatu’s Prime Minister and the head of the Melanesian Spearhead Group that the policing initiative could be seen more about cutting out China than focusing on the benefits for the Pacific Islands.

Mr Albanese’s “cracker” comments weren’t the only controversy last week. In the final communique issued by PIF leaders on Friday afternoon, there was a reaffirmation of a 1992 agreement allowing Taiwan to play a role in forum leaders’ meetings. The communique was then removed and put up again, removing the reference to Taiwan. That then led to accusations that PIF leaders had given in to pressure from China although they suggested it was in fact an administrative error.

Of the 18 countries in the Pacific Islands Forum, just three have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. While China is a “dialogue partner’” Taiwan is a “development partner”, which is a step down in importance.

What all these arguments show is the very real competition that is hotting up in the Pacific. Everyone wants to come to the PIF because everyone wants a piece of the region.

The thing is, while superpowers fight it out for relevance, so too do the Pacific Islands. There’s a real emphasis on making sure that those who participate in this forum do so in the Pacific way – and for the benefit of people in the Pacific.

A recent report by the Lowy Institute found that strategic rivalry can at times forget the needs of people.

“Many of these economies are struggling to meet basic development needs,” according to the report entitled ‘The Great Game in the Pacific islands’.

“Larger powers often prioritise projects that deliver strategic gains such as telecommunications, ports and military facilities, or political dividends such as stadiums and convention centres, over less visibly impressive projects.”

On the penultimate day, leaders went on a retreat on the island of Vava’u. Meanwhile in Nuku’alofa, side events carried on. One was on the Pacific Resilience Facility, the first Pacific-led climate and disaster resilience financing fund whose headquarters will be in Tonga.

Attending the event were ministers and diplomats from members including Tonga, Tuvalu and Australia. There was great pride in the fund with expectations that this could be the answer to supporting climate change concerns across the region. Australia has been the biggest donor so far, with A$100m. The US, China and Saudi Arabia have also contributed but the fund still only has US$137m in total – that’s a long way from their target of US$500m by 2026 and a long-term goal of US$1.5bn.

“I think it’s harder to get funding for climate change,” Paulson Panapa, Tuvalu’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Labour and Trade told the BBC. “We want all donors to treat both as very important just like it’s important to us.

”The Pacific Islands are small but in many ways they are mighty. These nations sit in an ocean that accounts for a third of the world’s surface area – what happens in their waters – politically, economically, diplomatically will shape the future of the world – both for good and bad.”

A court in Greenland has ruled that anti-whaling activist Paul Watson must remain in custody pending a decision to extradite him to Japan.

The veteran campaigner, who has featured in the reality television show “Whale Wars”, was apprehended by police in July as his ship docked in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.

They were acting on a 2012 Japanese warrant which accuses him of causing damage to a Japanese whaling ship, obstructing business and injuring a crew member during an encounter in Antarctic waters in February 2010.

Officials in Japan argue that whaling and eating whale meat is part of the country’s culture and way of life. However, it has been heavily criticised by conservation groups.

Dressed in jeans and a white shirt, Mr Watson sat beside his defence lawyers and listened to proceedings through an interpreter as several of his supporters looked on.

“This is about revenge for a television show that extremely embarrassed Japan in the eyes of the world,” he told the small courtroom.

“What happened in the Southern Ocean is documented by hundreds of hours of video,” Mr Watson said.

“I think a review of all the video and of all the documentation will exonerate me from the accusations.”

However the prosecution argued that the defendant was a flight risk, and the judge concluded he should remain in custody until 2 October.

Paul Watson is the former head of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which he left in 2022 to set up the Captain Paul Watson Foundation.

He was also a founding member of Greenpeace, but they parted ways in 1977, amid disagreements over his radical tactics.

The 73-year old Canadian-American campaigner has been a controversial figure known for confrontations with whaling vessels at sea.

Mr Watson’s vessel, called the M/Y John Paul DeJoria, had been heading to the North Pacific with a crew of 26 volunteers on board, in a bid to intercept a new Japanese whaling ship when it docked to refuel in Nuuk on 21 July.

He was arrested and led away in handcuffs, and has been held at the local prison for the last seven weeks.

His defence team have appealed against the decision to keep him in custody before Greenland’s High Court.

Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark and, although the court in Nuuk is overseeing the custody hearings, the decision about Mr Watson’s extradition lies with Danish authorities in Copenhagen.

Last month, Japan asked Denmark to hand Paul Watson over, even though there is no extradition treaty between the two countries.

Police in Nuuk are carrying out an investigation before handing their findings to Denmark’s ministry of justice and a decision could be expected within the next few weeks.

“It’s a serious case, and it has to have some serious consideration. It has a deep impact on Mr Watson if we get to the point that he has to be extradited. So I will take the time needed to do it properly,” Greenland chief prosecutor Mariam Khalil told the BBC.

At the defence’s request, the judge granted permission for a video clip to be played, which appeared to show a zodiac-type speedboat sailing alongside a Japanese ship and firing a stink bomb.

However, Mr Watson’s lawyers say a second video clip, which was not shown, proves no-one was on deck at the time.

“We have video footage of a stink bomb being shot on to the ship, and the position that the Japanese claim the sailor should be in, he simply isn’t there,” Jonas Christoffersen told BBC.

“There’s no evidential basis for the allegation that somebody got got injured.”

Lyon-based international police body Interpol has confirmed the existence of an outstanding red notice for the arrest of Mr Watson.

In 2012, Paul Watson was also detained in Germany, but left the country after learning that he was sought for extradition by Japan.

Masashi Mizobuchi, assistant press secretary for the Japanese ministry of foreign affairs, told the BBC that Japan had not yet received any response from the Danish authorities.

“We will continue to take appropriate measures, including necessary outreach to the relevant countries and organisations,” Mr Mizobuchi said.

Japan withdrew from the International Whaling Commission and resumed commercial whaling in 2019, after a 30-year hiatus. However, it had continued whaling for what it said were research purposes.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s office has asked Denmark not to extradite Paul Watson, and there has been vocal support from legendary actress turned animals rights activist Brigitte Bardot.

Meanwhile a petition calling for Mr Watson’s release has surpassed 120,000 signatures.

Australian Olympian Rachael Gunn has apologised to the nation’s breakdancing community for the “backlash” they have experienced following her controversial routine in Paris, which made headlines globally.

Gunn, who competes as Raygun, was eliminated from the B-Girls competition with a score of zero, prompting ridicule and praise for her unorthodox style by users across social media.

In her first sit-down interview since taking part in the Games – and amid questions over her qualification and performance – Gunn was asked if she genuinely thought she was Australia’s best female breakdancer.

“I think my record speaks to that,” she told Network 10’s The Project.

“It is really sad to hear those criticisms and I am very sorry for the backlash that the community has experienced, but I can’t control how people react,” she continued, addressing the flood of critiques her routine has garnered online.

The 36-year-old university lecturer lost all three of her Olympic battles, with her green tracksuit and eccentric performance – which included the sprinkler move and kangaroo-inspired hopping – generating a sea of memes.

In the aftermath of her performance, Gunn faced accusations that she had manipulated the selection process, including allegations that she had set up her own governing body and that her husband had judged her qualification trial.

These claims have since been denounced as false by several organisations, including the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) and the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF).

“The conspiracy theories were just awful,” Gunn told Network 10.

“I was the top-ranked Australian B-girl in 2020 and 2022 and 2023. I have been invited to represent at how many World Championships… So, the record is there. But anything can happen in a battle,” she added.

Gunn, who has a background as a jazz, tap and ballroom dancer, had publicly defended her routine as “artistic and creative”.

“I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently,” she said last month.

The top judge who oversaw the B-Girls competition has also thrown his weight behind Gunn, as have team officials and the broader Olympic breakdancing community.

But the fallout has divided and disappointed those involved in the sport in Australia.

“It made a mockery of the Australian scene and I think that’s why a lot of us are hurting,” Australian hip-hop pioneer Spice previously told the BBC.

A hip-hop inspired dance born in the boroughs of New York in the 1970s, breaking was introduced into this year’s Olympic schedule to attract a younger audience to the Games.

But some critics say it should never have been included, due to the organic nature of the genre, which doesn’t necessarily suit organised competition.

After her performance in Paris, Gunn appealed to the media directly in a video posted on her Instagram to stop “harassing” her family and friends.

In her interview with Network 10, she described being chased by reporters in the aftermath of the fallout as “really wild”.

“That really did put me in a state of panic… Dancing was my medicine, and then it turned into my source of stress,” she said.

Gunn admitted that she is “not in a place yet” to watch her performance back, but was touched by the support she has received from her fellow Olympians at the Closing Ceremony as well as from some of the general public.

“It so warmed my heart,” she said. “I would rather much focus on the positives out of this and the joy that I’ve brought people.”

A funeral has been held for a 16-year-old Palestinian girl reportedly killed by Israeli forces in the north of the occupied West Bank on the seventh day of a wide-scale Israeli operation.

Lujain Musleh’s father said she was shot in the head as she looked out of a window of her home in Kafr Dan, just outside Jenin, after soldiers surrounded a neighbouring house on Tuesday.

The Israeli military said armed fighters fired at the soldiers and that they “fired back at a suspect who observed” them.

The Palestinian health ministry says 30 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched what it called an operation to dismantle “terrorist cells”.

Most of the dead have been claimed by armed groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as members, but several children are also among them, according to the ministry.

The Israeli military has said that one Israeli soldier has been killed.

There has been a spike in violence in the West Bank since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Defence for Children Palestine (DCIP), a rights group, said Israeli soldiers entered Kafr Dan around 11:30 (09:30 BST) on Tuesday, prompting clashes with armed Palestinians.

“Israeli soldiers surrounded and besieged the home of a wanted Palestinian man, firing live ammunition and shells at the house,” it said.

“Around 14:10, 16-year-old Loujain was inside her family’s home … when an Israeli sniper shot her in the head through a window.”

During a funeral procession for Loujain on Wednesday, her father, Osama, told reporters: “She didn’t go to the roof, she didn’t hurl a stone, and she wasn’t carrying a weapon.”

“The only thing she did is look from the window and the soldier saw her and shot her.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said soldiers surrounded two civilian structures in Kafr Dan where they believed armed fighters were sheltering, and that they “called for civilians to evacuate from both structures prior to the exchange of fire that took place”.

“During the encircling of the structures, the terrorists opened fire at IDF soldiers in the area, and in response the soldiers fired back at a suspect who observed the forces in the area, in order to remove a threat,” it added.

“The IDF is aware of the report regarding a 16-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed during the exchange of fire. The details of the incident are under review.”

Pictures from the funeral showed mourners carrying a body wrapped in a Hamas flag. The bodies of those killed by Israel are often wrapped in the flags of movements supported by friends or family members – even when the deceased are not supporters themselves.

DCIP also cited documentation it had collected which said a 14-year-old boy, Mohammed Kanaan, was shot dead by an Israeli sniper on Tuesday morning at an entrance to the Tulkarm refugee camp, in Tulkarm city. The IDF said it was looking into that report.

When asked by the BBC on Tuesday to comment on the reports of civilian deaths, the IDF said its forces operated in strict accordance with international law.

“The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target civilians,” it added. “Given the ongoing exchanges of fire, remaining in an active combat zone has inherent risks. The IDF will continue to counter threats while persisting to mitigate harm to civilians.”

The IDF said its soldiers had killed two armed fighters during an exchange of fire in Tulkarm on Tuesday, and also located what an explosive device in a baby stroller.

On Monday evening, it announced that 14 “terrorists” had been killed in Jenin since the start of the operation and that 25 suspects had been detained.

“Every terrorist must be eliminated, and if they surrender, they must be arrested. There is no other option, use all the forces, everyone who is needed, with full strength,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told IDF officers on Wednesday.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa said on Tuesday that the losses caused by the raids, especially of infrastructure, might be the most extensive in two decades.

The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees expressed particular concern about Jenin, saying it had been “ravaged by violence and destruction”.

Jenin’s streets have been so damaged that cars cannot pass some roads. Israeli bulldozers have destroyed many shops in the city centre, although those on the periphery were still open.

The local municipality said the IDF had bulldozed more than 70% of streets, cut off water to 80% of the city, and damaged 20km (12 miles) of water, sewage, communications and electricity networks.

The IDF said: “The terrorists in [the West Bank] exploit the civilian population and use them as human shields for murderous purposes, establishing terrorist infrastructures and planting explosives underneath traffic routes to harm the IDF troops in their attempts to thwart threats to the lives of Israeli citizens.”

It also said it would work quickly to enable local authorities to repair damaged infrastructure and ensure the functionality of essential services.

Israeli forces have also surrounded Jenin’s government hospital throughout the operation.

Hospital director Dr Wisam Baker told the BBC on Monday that no-one could come in and out, including doctors like him travelling home, except in ambulances.

Troops searched the vehicles and checked the IDs of those inside, he added.

Ambulance drivers are “afraid” to bring wounded to the hospital or are delayed from entering because of searches, he said, adding the delay could put lives at risk.

The hospital has been running on a generator, and 10 tanks of water are brought in each day, Dr Baker said. Ambulances have also been delivering food.

Asked about the presence of troops outside the hospital, the IDF alleged that armed groups were exploiting medical and other facilities that were protected under international law.

“The hospitals continue to operate as usual. In appropriate cases, inspections are conducted on those arriving at the hospital, provided that this does not prevent their treatment or endanger their health,” it said.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said its teams were “tirelessly providing humanitarian and emergency services to the besieged citizens in the Jenin camp, despite continuous obstructions by Israeli occupation forces, who are hindering [their] work.”

On Monday, it said many Jenin residents were in urgent need of medicine, baby formula or food supplies, and that two paramedics and a volunteer doctor had been injured while on duty.

Four-year-old Sandhya was sleeping outside her mud hut in India’s Uttar Pradesh state on the night of 17 August when a power cut plunged the village into darkness.

“The wolves attacked within two minutes of the lights going out. By the time we realised what was happening, they had taken her away,” recalls her mother, Sunita.

Sandhya’s body was found lying next day in the sugarcane farms, some 500 metres from her home.

Earlier in the month, in a neighbouring village, eight-year-old Utkarsh was sleeping under a mosquito net when his mother spotted a wolf creeping into their hut.

“The animal lunged from the shadows. I screamed, ‘Leave my son alone!’ My neighbours rushed in, and the wolf fled,” she recounts.

Since mid-April, a wave of wolf attacks has terrorised around 30 villages in Bahraich district, near the border with Nepal. Nine children and an adult have been carried off and killed by the wolves. The youngest victim was a one-year-old boy, and the oldest was a 45-year-old woman. At least 34 others have been injured.

Fear and hysteria have gripped the affected villages. With many village homes lacking locks, children are being kept indoors, and men are patrolling the darkly lit streets at night. Authorities have deployed drones and cameras, set traps and used firecrackers to scare away the wolves. So far, three wolves have been captured and relocated to zoos.

Such attacks on humans are extremely rare and most involve wolves infected with rabies, a viral disease that affects the central nervous system. A rabid wolf will typically make multiple assaults without consuming the victims.

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A report by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research reported 489 “relatively reliable cases” of wolf attacks in 21 countries – including India – between 2002 and 2020. Only 26 of them were fatal. Around 380 people were victims of “rabid attacks”.

There have been only two confirmed cases of wolf-related fatalities in North America over the past 50 years, Dave Mech, a renowned American biologist who specialises in wolf behaviour, told the BBC. This is despite a population of approximately 70,000 wolves spread across North America.

So why are wolves attacking humans in Bahraich?

Nestled between a river and forests, parts of Bahraich have long been a traditional wolf habitat. Located in the floodplain of the Ghaghara river, the district, home to 3.5 million people, is prone to seasonal flooding.

Heavy rains and flooding during the monsoons have drastically altered the landscape. The swollen river has inundated the forests, potentially driving the wolves out in search of food and water. Indian wolves prey on black buck, chinkara (Indian gazelle) and hare.

“Climate change is a gradual process but flooding can lead to habitat disruptions for the wolves, forcing them into human settlements in search of food,” says Amita Kanaujia of the Institute of Wildlife Sciences in Lucknow University.

Why would children be a target of the wolves in search of food?

During an investigation into killings of a large number of children in wolf attacks in Uttar Pradesh villages in 1996, wildlife experts found there was minimal supervision of children because most victims came from impoverished single-parent households, usually led by mothers.

In these poor Indian villages, livestock is often better protected than children. When a hungry wolf, facing a depleted prey habitat and limited access to livestock, encounters such vulnerable children, they become more likely targets. “Nowhere else in the world have we witnessed surges of wolf attacks on children,” Yadvendradev Jhala, a leading Indian scientist and conservationist, told me.

The current wolf attacks in Uttar Pradesh are possibly the fourth such wave in four decades. In 1981-82, wolf attacks in Bihar claimed the lives of at least 13 children. Between 1993 and 1995, another 80 children were attacked, this time by what were believed to be five wolf packs in the region’s Hazaribagh district.

The deadliest episode occurred over eight months in 1996, when at least 76 children from more than 50 villages in Uttar Pradesh were attacked, resulting in 38 deaths. The killings stopped after authorities killed 11 wolves. The media described them as “man-eating” wolves.

Mr Jhala and his colleague Dinesh Kumar Sharma conducted a meticulous investigation into the 1996 killings, examining body remains, wolf hair, village hutments, population density, livestock and autopsy reports. The current attacks in Uttar Pradesh bear an eerie resemblance to their findings from nearly 30 years ago.

In both instances, children were killed and partially consumed, showing bite marks on their throats and puncture wounds on various parts of their bodies. Most attacks occurred at night, with children sleeping outdoors in the heart of villages being taken away. Victims were frequently discovered in open areas, such as farms or meadows.

Like Bahraich today, the 1996 wolf attacks took place in villages near riverbanks, surrounded by rice and sugarcane farms and swampy groves. Both cases involved crowded villages and a large number of vulnerable children from poor farming families, which increased the risk.

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It is unclear whether the ongoing attacks are by a lone wolf or a pack. Based on his 30 years of studying wolves, Mr Jhala believes that a single wolf – like in 1996 – is probably responsible for the recent killings. Villagers have reported seeing a group of five to six wolves in their fields during the day, while the mother of eight-year-old Utkarsh, who survived, saw a single wolf entering her home and attacking her son.

For centuries, humans and wolves in India co-existed peacefully, thanks to the traditional tolerance of pastoralist communities, say wildlife experts. This long-standing co-existence has allowed wolves to persist despite frequent conflicts, particularly over livestock. However, times have changed, and the recent surge in attacks has raised new concerns.

Wildlife experts like Mr Jhala advise that children in the affected villages should stay indoors, sleep between adults if housing is inadequate, and be accompanied by an adult to the toilet at night. Villagers should avoid letting children roam unsupervised in areas where wolves might be hiding and appoint night watchmen to patrol the streets.

“Until we determine the exact reasons behind these attacks, these precautions are crucial to keep people safe,” Mr Jhala says. Meanwhile, people in Bahraich remain on edge every night.

A new queen was crowned as the eighth Māori monarch in New Zealand as her father, King Tuheitia Pōtatau Te Wherowhero VII, was laid to rest.

Twenty-seven-year-old Ngā Wai hono i te pō was chosen as Kuini by a council of New Zealand’s indigenous Māori chiefs during an elaborate ceremony in the country’s North Island.

She is only the second Māori queen, the first being her grandmother, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu.

Ngā Wai hono i te pō is the youngest child of King Tuheitia, who died last Friday at the age of 69.

Sitting on a carved wooden throne, the new queen was announced at a gathering at Tûrangawaewae Marae, which is the seat of the Kiingitanga or Māori king movement.

She sat in front of her father’s coffin, wearing a wreath and a cloak as prayers and chants were performed ahead of his burial.

A flotilla of war canoes then transported the king – who laid in state for six days before his burial – to his final resting place on Mount Taupiri, sacred to the Māori people.

The king had been recovering from heart surgery in hospital when he died, just days after celebrating the 18th anniversary of his coronation.

“The death of Kiingi Tuheitia is a moment of great sadness for followers of Te Kiingitanga, Maaoridom and the entire nation,” Rahui Papa, spokesman for the Kiingitanga or Māori king movement said at the time. “A chief who has passed to the great beyond. Rest in love.”

“Our country will be in mourning,” said Chris Hipkins, leader of New Zealand’s opposition Labour party, shortly after the king’s death. “He was a fantastic king with a wicked sense of humour, but also a very good man… with a real focus on bringing New Zealanders together.”

New Zealand’s prime minister Christoper Luxon praised King Tuheitia as a leader “whose commitment to Māori and all New Zealanders has been felt right across the country”.

However, Mr Luxon – whose policies have been accused by some indigenous New Zealanders of being anti-Māori – is on an official trip to South Korea and has not attended the funeral.

Last year thousands of protesters across New Zealand rallied against the government’s plans to reverse policies which boosted Indigenous rights, including plans to close the Māori Health Authority, Te Aka Whai Ora, set up during Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government and to switch the names of some departments from Māori to English.

King Tuheitia’s official period of mourning was extended from the usual three days to seven days, in order to accommodate the huge delegations that came to pay tribute to the king.

“I have never experienced anything like this,” Mereana Hond, a Māori journalist told BBC Newsday.

“It is no small thing to lose a king, but he was just really starting to rise to prominence, leading all tribes of Altara and New Zealand at a time when we’re under a lot of political and social pressure under this coalition.”

The king was born Tūheitia Paki in 1955. He was crowned in 2006 following the death of his mother, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu.

Like his mother, King Tuheitia was seen as a great unifying figure – recently calling on Māori to stand together in the face of policies targeting them.

The Māori monarchy dates back to 1858, when the Māori people decided to create a unifying figure similar to that of a European monarch in order to try and prevent the widespread loss of land to New Zealand’s British colonisers and to preserve Māori culture. The role is largely ceremonial.

Bangladesh is the beating heart of the global fast fashion business.

The clothes its factories export stock the shelves at H&M, Gap and Zara. Over three decades, this has transformed the country from one of the world’s poorest to a lower-middle income nation.

But its garment industry, worth $55bn (£42bn) a year, is now facing an unsettled future after weeks of protests toppled the government of Sheikh Hasina in August. Hundreds of people were killed in the unrest.

At least four factories were set alight, while manufacturers struggled to operate under a nationwide internet blackout. Already, three big brands, including Disney and US supermarket chain Walmart, have looked elsewhere for next season’s clothes.

The disruption is continuing. From Thursday, some 60 factories outside Dhaka are expected to be closed because of worker unrest. Staff have been protesting with various demands, including for better wages.

Recent events “will impact the confidence level of brands”, says Mohiuddin Rubel, a director at the country’s garments manufacturers and exporters association.

“And probably they might think – should we put all our eggs in one basket?” he says, noting rival garment-producing countries like Vietnam.

Indeed, Kyaw Sein Thai, who has sourcing offices in both Bangladesh and the US, suggests the recent political unrest could result in a “10-20% drop in exports this year”. That’s no small amount when fast fashion exports account for 80% of Bangladesh’s export earnings.

Even before the events of the past few months, Bangladesh’s garment industry – and its economy – were not in good health. Child labour scandals, deadly accidents and the Covid-19 shutdown had all taken their toll.

Soaring prices had made manufacturing more expensive – but slowing demand meant you couldn’t sell for as much. This was especially bad for Bangladesh, which relies heavily on exports. As profits from exports shrank, so did foreign currency reserves.

There were other problems too: excessive spending on showpiece infrastructure projects had drained the government’s coffers. And rampant cronyism weakened its banks, as powerful businessmen with links to former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League party failed to repay loans.

“It wasn’t benign neglect but a designed robbery of the financial system,” the country’s new central bank governor, Dr Ahsan Mansur, told the BBC in an recent exclusive interview.

Fixing this, Dr Mansur said, was his top priority, but he warned it would take years and the country would need more financial support, including another IMF bailout.

“We are in a difficult spot and we want to remain fully compliant in terms of servicing our foreign obligations, every penny of it. But we need some additional cushion for now,” said Dr Mansur.

Mahaburbur Rahman, whose family founded clothing manufacturing firm Sonia Group two decades ago, points out that the country’s falling reserves of foreign currencies alone are enough to dent confidence.

“They are concerned about how we will pay for imports of yarn from India and China if we don’t have enough dollars. Many of them are not even able to come to Bangladesh anymore to place new orders because they aren’t getting travel insurance,” Mr Rahman says.

But Bangladesh has a bigger problem at hand – the protests that ousted Ms Hasina were driven by students who were frustrated over the lack of well-paying jobs and opportunities.

While the clothing factories may have created millions of jobs, they don’t pay well. Some factory workers who spoke to the BBC said they struggled to survive on pay that was barely half the national minimum wage, which meant they were forced to take out loans to feed their children.

Many of them joined the student-led protests in recent months to demand better pay and conditions.

“We will settle for nothing less than a doubling,” union leader Maria said. “Wages have to reflect the increase in cost of living.”

The student protesters, though, are calling for a more radical shake-up of the jobs market.

Abu Tahir, Mohammad Zaman, Mohammad Zaidul and Sardar Armaan were all part of the demonstrations.

All unemployed for between two and five years, they tell the BBC that they are keen to work for the private sector but don’t feel as if they are qualified for the jobs that are available.

“[My parents] hardly understand how competitive the job market is. To be unemployed is a major source of pressure in my family. I feel belittled,” Mr Zaman says.

“We just get a degree, we are not getting the right skills,” says Mr Zaidul.

“The new adviser is an entrepreneur himself though, so we all feel more hopeful he’ll do something about this,” he adds, referring to the country’s interim leader, Muhammad Yunus. Mr Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in micro loans.

Dr Fahmida Khatun of the Centre for Policy Dialogue think tank points out that diversifying the economy will be critical to meet the aspirations of educated youth – arguing that that would be no bad thing for the economy.

“No country can survive for a long time based on only one sector,” she says. “It will take you so far, but no further. There have been [diversification] attempts, but so far it’s only been in the books.”

A disused technology park outside the capital Dhaka offers evidence of this. Inaugurated in 2015, it was meant to be part of a nationwide initiative to create higher paid jobs and cut Bangladesh’s reliance on garment production.

It now sits abandoned – a reminder of the previous administration’s economic failures.

“This is the perfect example of the gap between what industry needs and what the government has provided,” says Russel T Ahmed, a software entrepreneur.

“Nobody asked us if we needed these parks. Bangladesh has been investing in physical infrastructure, but how much have we invested in human infrastructure? That is the raw material this industry needs.”

What the new government needs to do, says Dr Khatun, is remove bottlenecks like corruption and red tape to encourage foreign and private investment.

Mr Yunus has vowed to bring comprehensive reforms to the country’s economy and fix institutions that have, as Dr Khatun says, been “systematically destroyed” over the past few years.

He has a formidable task ahead – steadying the economy, delivering free and fair elections, and preventing government policymaking from being controlled by vested interests.

All of this has to be done as the country faces a raft of other problems: slowing global demand for the goods it makes, deteriorating relations with its giant neighbour and trading partner India, which is harbouring Ms Hasina, and climate change causing more intense cyclones in the flood-prone nation.

These challenges are as vast as the hopes many people have heaped on Mr Yunus’ shoulders.

Tuesday’s deaths in the English Channel have, as usual, done nothing to deter the smuggling gangs from launching more flimsy, overcrowded boats from the French coastline.

A BBC team watched a packed inflatable craft heading north, close to shore, early on Wednesday morning.

An hour later, a similar boat – very possibly the same one – was seen veering towards a French beach favoured by smugglers near the town of Wimereux to pick up even more paying customers.

French police rushed to intercept the group before they could clamber on board, but arrived moments too late. The boat set off with well over 40 people on it, some standing or clinging to the sides.

• How many people cross the Channel in small boats?
• France sees Channel migrant deaths as a problem of Britain’s making

While investigations into Tuesday’s disaster continue, local authorities chose to send bulldozers and teams of cleaners to dismantle the makeshift migrant camp outside Calais that was used by many of those who were on the boat that capsized.

“I’m stressed. I knew some of the [dead]. The police have now taken my tent and all my things,” said a 23-year-old Eritrean man who asked us to hide his identity.

French officials have suggested that most – if not all – of those who died were from the troubled east African nation of Eritrea. Many young men have abandoned the country in order to avoid military service.

“I’ve been waiting here a year. I don’t have money [to pay the smugglers]. It happens all the time – the drownings,” said the Eritrean, who remains determined to cross to the UK, believing he can find work there.

Further south, French fishermen who had been involved in Tuesday’s rescue operation, returned to the port of Boulogne with another day’s catch.

Several men told us they had helped to haul bodies from the water, having arrived at the scene less than half an hour after the boat had disintegrated, leaving all those onboard struggling in choppy, cold waters.

“The less we have to talk about that, the less we have to think about it,” said Bruno Hecquet sombrely, as he unloaded boxes of fresh whelks on the quayside.

“It’s sad. It shouldn’t be happening,” said captain Gaetan Baillet, but he shrugged when asked who was to blame for the rising death toll.

Dany Patoux, from a local migrant charity, Osmos 62, said the smuggling gangs were obviously responsible, but added that the growing militarisation of the French coast was driving those gangs to take ever greater risks – or rather to put their paying passengers at ever greater risk.

“All this extra security forces active on our coastline… the buggies and drones and helicopters… this is achieving nothing but to provoke more deaths. Those migrants who want to cross take ever greater risks,” said Patoux, arguing that more people were forced to cram on to each boat because so many of the inflatables were being destroyed by the police.

While the general mood regarding the migrant crisis here appears to be sombre, and largely sympathetic to those attempting to make the Channel crossing in small boats, some warn that frustration with the rising death toll is starting to reshape public opinion.

The UK must completely close its border or do something to make the crossing safer, said Olivier Barbarin, mayor of Le Portel.

“We can’t keep exposing to such risk all these freedom-loving men and women, who’ve fled war and whose one desire is to reach England.”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has again insisted that Israeli forces will not leave the Philadelphi Corridor – a strategically important strip of land in southern Gaza along the border with Egypt.

He told foreign media in Jerusalem that he is “open” to considering alternatives to the presence of Israeli troops along the Gaza-Egypt border, as part of any future permanent ceasefire deal – but that he did not see it happening.

Mr Netanyahu argued that Israeli troops must remain in this buffer zone to prevent weapons and possibly Israeli hostages being smuggled across the border.

Hamas said in a statement cited by Reuters news agency that Mr Netanyahu’s decision not to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor is an attempt to thwart the ceasefire agreement, adding that it was time to put pressure on Israel.

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Earlier on Wednesday, Mr Netanyahu said conditions for any permanent ceasefire must include “a situation where the Philadelphi corridor cannot be perforated.”

He said if someone could show, “not on paper, not in words, not in a slide, but on the ground, day after day, week after week, month after month that they can actually prevent the recurrence of what happened there before we’re open to consider it.”

But, he continued, “I don’t see that happening […] And until that happens, we are there.”

His comments open a miniscule crack in his repeated insistence that Israeli forces would not leave Gaza’s southern border.

But he also doubled-down on his insistence that Israel needed to keep troops there for its security, describing it as a “red line”.

“People said: this will kill the deal,” he continued. “And I say: such a deal will kill us.”

Making more concessions after Hamas killed six hostages last week would be “illogical”, “immoral” and “insane,” he insisted.

“We have red lines. They haven’t changed. We’ll hold to them.”

His security chiefs, including his defence minister, are widely reported to have backed alternatives to a military presence along the border, such as technological solutions to monitor activity there, or the presence of allied forces.

Leaks to Israeli media have described shouting matches between the prime minister and his defence chiefs in meetings, with Mr Netanyahu reportedly accused of not wanting a deal at all.

A growing number of people here appear to believe that the prime minister is playing for time, and that his real goal is to find and kill the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, before ending the war.

Mr Netanyahu says he is safeguarding Israel’s security in the face of extraordinary international pressure. And that it is Hamas who is blocking a deal.

Talks on a permanent ceasefire would only take place once Israel and Hamas agree to begin the first phase of a three-step plan, which is being pushed heavily by US President Joe Biden.

Israel’s national public radio quoted an unnamed senior official who said that the chief negotiator, Mossad head David Barnea, had conveyed to mediators Israel’s agreement to withdraw troops from the border at a later stage in the ceasefire process.

But even getting agreement on the first stage is proving tricky, with many issues still unresolved.

A story posted on a mysterious website has been widely circulated on social media after it made a baseless claim that Kamala Harris – the Democratic presidential nominee – was involved in an alleged hit-and-run incident.

It claims, without providing evidence, that a 13-year-old girl was left paralysed by the crash, which it says took place in San Francisco in 2011.

The story, which was published on 2 September by a website purporting to be a media organisation called KBSF-San Francisco News, has been widely shared online. Some online posts by right-leaning users citing the story have been viewed millions of times.

BBC Verify has found numerous false details indicating it is fake and the website has now been taken down.

The online article – accompanied by a five-minute video – contains an interview with a woman who it identifies as 26-year-old Alicia Brown and who it claims is paralysed.

There is no evidence to confirm her identity or whether she is paralysed (she is filmed sitting down and from the waist up in an undisclosed location).

The article refers to her as both Alisha and Alicia, without explanation.

In the video, she claims she was hit by a car while crossing the road in June 2011 with her mother in San Francisco and later claims, again without providing any evidence, that the person who hit her was Kamala Harris.

A narrator in the video then say this woman has undergone 11 surgeries and two X-rays are shown.

No evidence of the incident occurring nor the involvement of Ms Harris are provided.

BBC Verify ran a search for the website’s registration details, which revealed the domain was set up within the last few weeks – on 20 August 2024.

There is also no public record of a KBSF news outlet in San Francisco.

The website has now been taken offline and is no longer accessible.

The top image in the story, which also features in the video, shows a close up of a smashed car windscreen with what looks like a police officer and a number of fire crew standing by the side of the road next to it.

BBC Verify downloaded the image and searched for previous versions of it online – using a reverse image search tool – and found that it was originally posted in a news story about a crash in Mangilao, Guam, in 2018.

Next, we examined the X-rays shown in the video.

Using reverse image search again, it is clear that these images have been lifted from medical research articles posted in 2010 and 2017.

According to the articles, the first X-ray belongs to a 58-year-old patient admitted to a hospital in China.

The second X-ray belongs to a 12-year-old girl admitted to the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

On the video interview itself, we approached several experts to see whether it had been generated by AI.

Professor Hany Farid, an expert in digitally manipulated images, analysed the video and found no evidence of digital manipulation or AI-generation in either the audio or visuals.

“I think it is most likely that this is an old-fashioned (and not particularly well executed) cheap fake that is simply staged,” he said.

Prof Farid explained that unlike “deepfakes” which are typically created or edited by using artificial intelligence tools, a “cheap fake” can be created by using lower-tech software that is cheaper and more accessible.

A cheap fake, he said, encompasses everything from slowing down an audio to make someone sound drunk to cropping an image.

“It is a good reminder that we don’t need a lot of technology to perpetrate lies,” Prof Farid added.

We looked for any press reports from 2011 about a hit and run incident in San Francisco allegedly involving Ms Harris – who was then Attorney General of California – but could find none.

We have also contacted the San Francisco police department and the Harris campaign.

The story and the website it originally appeared on share striking similarities with a network of fake news websites that masquerade as US local news outlets, which BBC Verify has previously extensively reported on.

John Mark Dougan, a former Florida police officer who relocated to Moscow is one of the key figures behind the network.

Approached by BBC Verify to comment on the hit-and-run story, Mr Dougan denied any involvement, saying: “Do I ever admit to anything? Of course it’s not one of mine.”

The websites mix dozens of genuine news stories taken from real news outlets with what is essentially the real meat of the operation – totally fabricated stories that often include misinformation about Ukraine or target US audiences.

The websites are often set up shortly before the fake stories appear on them, and then go offline after they serve their purpose.

These fabricated stories often include videos featuring people who claim to be “whistleblowers” or “independent journalists”. In some cases the videos are narrated by actors – in others it appears they are AI-generated voices.

Examples of the fake stories include a rare Bugatti car purchased by Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska, an expensive UK mansion purchased by President Zelensky, and a secret wiretapping operation at Donald Tump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Car company Volvo has announced it has abandoned its target to produce only fully electric cars by 2030, saying it now expects it will also be selling some hybrid vehicles by that date.

The car maker blamed changing market conditions for its decision to give up a target it had announced only three years ago.

It comes as the industry faces a slowdown in demand in some major markets for electric vehicles (EVs) and uncertainty due to the imposition of trade tariffs on EVs made in China.

Volvo, which has traditionally flaunted its environmental credentials, joins other major car makers General Motors and Ford, which have also rowed back on their EV ambitions.

Volvo now expects at least 90% of its output to be made up of both electric cars and plug-in hybrids by 2030.

The Swedish company may also sell a small number of so-called mild hybrids, which are more conventional vehicles with limited electrical assistance.

“We are resolute in our belief that our future is electric,” said Jim Rowan, chief executive of Volvo, in a statement.

“However, it is clear that the transition to electrification will not be linear, and customers and markets are moving at different speeds.”

The company also said the business climate for EVs had changed, due to factors such as a slow rollout of charging infrastructure and the withdrawal of consumer incentives.

Volvo is majority-owned by Chinese car giant Geely and because it uses factories in China, it will also be affected by tariffs on imports of Chinese-made EVs in Europe and North America.

Last week, Canada announced it was imposing a 100% tariff on imports of China-made electric vehicles, after similar announcements by the US and the EU.

Western countries have accused China of subsidising its EV industry, giving its car makers an unfair advantage.

China has rejected those allegations and criticised the tariffs as “discriminatory”.

Ford has also been scaling back on its EV ambitions. Just last month, the US car giant announced it was scrapping plans for a large, three-row, all-electric sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and postponing the launch of its next electric pick-up truck.

Its rival General Motors has also been cutting EV production goals in the last year.

Canada’s left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) has pulled the plug on a two-and-a-half-year-old agreement with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals that had helped keep his minority government in power.

In a video posted to social media on Wednesday, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said he had informed the prime minister of his decision, saying the Liberals were “too weak, too selfish” to fight for Canadians.

The deal – called a “supply and confidence” agreement – had the NDP supporting the Liberals in confidence votes.

The announcement does not automatically mean a federal election is imminent but that Canadians may go to the polls before the election scheduled for October 2025.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Mr Singh said a non-confidence vote would be “on the table” with every confidence measure.

Losing a confidence vote in parliament can trigger a general election.

“The NDP is ready for an election,” Mr Singh said.

Mr Trudeau and Mr Singh reached the agreement in March 2022, with the Liberals pledging to support the NDP on several of the party’s key priorities in parliament.

The deal differed to a coalition, where parties share power.

Instead, the Liberals – who failed to win a majority in the past two elections – governed as a minority, but with assurances the NDP would support them in confidence votes.

In exchange, Mr Singh’s party secured progress on key priorities, including dental benefits for lower-income families and a national pharmacare programme covering birth control and insulin.

• Canada’s NDP agrees to support Trudeau’s Liberals until 2025

It was the first such formal agreement between two parties at the federal level.

Until this spring, Mr Singh and senior members of his party remained publicly committed to the deal.

But NDP’s leadership reportedly began to re-evaluate the agreement last month, after Mr Trudeau’s cabinet directed its industrial relations board to impose binding arbitration after Canada’s two largest railways began a work stoppage.

Announcing he was tearing up the deal, Mr Singh said the Liberals had “let people down” and didn’t “deserve another chance from Canadians”.

Mr Trudeau, speaking at an event in Newfoundland, told reporters he was confident he could make parliament work and will focus on “delivering for Canadians”.

“I’ll let others focus on politics,” he said, adding he hoped the next election will not happen “until next fall” so that his government has time to move forward on its agenda.

In recent years, Canadian voters have shown increasing frustration with issues like rising inflation and a housing affordability crisis.

That has been reflected in the polls, where the Liberals have been down for months, with national opinion surveys suggesting the party is lagging about 18 points behind the opposition Conservatives.

On Wednesday, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre criticised Mr Singh for not committing to a non-confidence vote, dismissing the announcement as a “stunt”.

Last week, he penned an open letter urging Mr Singh to abandon his agreement with the Liberals.

“No one voted for you to keep Trudeau in power. You do not have a mandate to drag out his government another year,” Mr Poilievre wrote.

Mr Trudeau has been in power since 2015, with the Liberals winning re-election – albeit with a minority – in 2019 and 2021.

Gillian Anderson tells me she is “very comfortable” talking about sex. The clues were obvious even before we met to talk about her new book, Want, a collection of women’s sexual fantasies.

The actor – once deemed the sexiest woman in the world by FHM magazine – wore a dress covered in vulvas to an awards ceremony and has a soft drinks brand called the G Spot.

She’ll forever be associated with frank discussions about intimate activities, after her role as a sex therapist in the hit Netflix show Sex Education.

But Anderson says even she “struggled” to express her own sexual fantasy in words for the book, as requested by her publishers.

“Suddenly describing the imagery that’s been in my head for a while and the action of doing that, added a level of intimacy that I wouldn’t have expected, and I wouldn’t have expected myself to be so shy around it.”

Anderson’s fantasy is hidden amongst 174 in a book she curated that is not for the prudish.

The actor, who first made her mark as Dana Scully in the TV show The X Files, and her publishers received 1,800 anonymous submissions from women around the world.

The letters were whittled down and collated into 13 chapters with titles including “To Be Worshipped”, “Exploration”, “Power and Submission” and “The Watchers and the Watched”.

The contributors were self-selecting and anonymous detailing only sexual identity, age, income, relationship status.

Clinical psychologist Professor Susan Young, who’s read the book, tells me “sexual fantasies are a healthy and normal aspect of sexual expression, provided they do not cause distress and harm”.

They allow people to explore “in a safe, private and controlled environment – their minds”.

Some of the fantasies in Want are moving – the bereaved woman who craves touch and mourns the secondary loss of sexual relations. “I do wish there were more discussion of grief and spouse loss and sexuality,” she writes.

Others are almost pastiches – a fantasy about “very hot, sensual, passionate sex” with Harry Styles.

One contributor, whose orthodox religion forbids women from stepping up to the altar, fantasises about getting intimate on an altar in an abandoned church.

Anderson describes the stories as “honest and raw and intimate and beautiful”, adding: “We’ve got letters fantasising about having sex with strangers and talking about being turned on by the idea of voyeurism.”

“What I was most interested in was the joy and the enjoyment that the women had clearly in writing, how much it opened them up to understanding themselves more, it seemed. Ultimately, this is not my book. This is the book of every woman who contributed.”

Want is a 21st Century take on another collection of women’s fantasies, My Secret Garden, published in 1973. The journalist Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking book became a global bestseller, the first time female desires had been made so public.

Fifty-one years after My Secret Garden, Anderson says she was “surprised” how much shame there still is around talking about sex and sharing sexual fantasies with friends or partners.

“I would have thought there would be less of it today” and it was “quite an eye opener.”

Her book is an attempt to get us all to be more upfront about our desires.

“Sex and sexual fantasy are still very much taboo, even though we have shows like Sex Education and Euphoria and Fifty Shades of Grey,” Anderson says. And then there’s “the multi-billion dollar porn industry,” which she describes as being “in our faces, on our screens, on our phones all the time”.

One of the contributions in Want begins: “I found it so difficult to understand what truly my own fantasies are. So much of what is played out in porn is geared towards men, and so many expectations set on us as women, that I have a very difficult time navigating what really turns me on versus how I feel I should perform.”

Anderson would encourage young people to read her book “because there are so many different versions of how sex can be that is outside what is handed to them by the porn industry”.

“There’s a lot of tenderness and women really wanting to be seen for themselves and who they are and be cared for – and there’s a lot of romance in it as well.”

Prof Young highlights a difference between male and female desire. “Women’s fantasies often include an emotional or narrative context that is likely to differ from the more visual, and sexually explicit content reported by men.”

Porn is “typically less attractive to women as pornography is typically generated and focused on men’s desires”, she adds.

In 1973, My Secret Garden contained explicit chapters about fantasies of non-consensual and illegal sex, including a chapter of rape fantasies.

We live in more sensitive times and in 2024, Anderson wanted to create “a safe space for women to share and for women to read and not feel like they have to be wary or afraid of what they’re going to find from one page to the next”.

It was “the right call” to refuse “letters that bordered on illegality or bestiality or incest”, she says.

Despite that choice, a short chapter The Captive contains material Anderson says strays into “dangerous topics and it almost felt disingenuous for us not to include them because they are fantasies that women have”.

Prof Young says these types of fantasy “about intense domination, submission, violent and/or even non-consensual acts are not intended to be acted upon”.

“They provide a safe place to explore interests and desires that are considered taboo, dangerous or socially unacceptable.”

Crucially, for Anderson, in fantasy the woman “is in charge, she can decide with whom, when, where, how much, how often, when to stop, when to continue”.

“So it feels like an empowering admission and revelation rather than something that is under somebody else’s control.”

The 56-year-old star, very much in her prime, recalls “a fair few” of the characters she has played have taught her about sex and sexuality. It’s “vital” for her to understand the inner lives, desires and fantasies of these women, in order to understand “what makes them tick”.

We don’t have time to get into what that meant for her preparation for roles including Miss Havisham in Great Expectations or Emily Maitlis in Emmy-nominated Scoop, a dramatisation of Newsnight’s car-crash interview with Prince Andrew.

But she tells me firmly, when it came to her role in The Crown, she “did not think about Margaret Thatcher’s sexual fantasies”.

In person, Anderson is every inch the star; glowing, smooth-skinned, petite. Some of the anonymous women in her book struggle with body image and don’t feel desirable.

Even Anderson admits to having “gone through periods where it’s struck me quite harshly that I too am ageing”.

She continues: “Being on camera, there are certainly times… when I’m seeing the final product and thinking, ‘Oh my God, is that really what I look like?’”

Her philosophy is to remember “that’s going to be the youngest that I look from here on out, so I better embrace it”.

Some of her peers resort to plastic surgery. “I haven’t reached for that yet,” she notes. “But at some point, who knows?”

She’s recently finished shooting a female-led period western for Netflix called The Abandons. Anderson plays a silver baron, one of a pair of “duelling matriarchs” opposite Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey.

“I own the town… This is my town. I say that a lot as I’m walking down the middle of the town,” she smiles.

When we met, Anderson sounded British, but often, in interviews and on her Instagram feed, her accent is American.

She was born in the US but has lived permanently in Britain for decades.

“My cells are American, but my soul is British,” she tells me.

Her next role is a Channel 4 drama that she’s about to start filming in Belfast. Her Northern Irish accent is also “not bad, actually”, she says.

But before that, there’s a round of book publicity to get through. And the obvious question, asked not just by me I assume: can she offer up any clues which fantasy is hers?

“No way,” she laughs. Like the others “mine will stay anonymous”.

On a chilly Saturday morning in December 1976, postman Nigel Rossiter pulled up outside an isolated farmhouse in west Wales.

It was his first week in the job and he spotted a couple of letters still lying on the floor of the porch, where he had delivered them days before.

Smelling burning inside, he raised the alarm. This led to the discovery of two bodies – a man who was badly burnt, and his sister, who had severe injuries.

Almost 50 years on, with family challenging the official version of events, Dyfed-Powys Police is now undertaking a forensic review to see if the case should be re-opened.

Describing what happened, Nigel, who was then 19, said: “I started shouting ‘hello, anybody here?’

“As I opened the door, I could smell burning, smokiness, coming from the chimney, I thought.”

It was then he saw the badly-burnt body of 73-year-old Griff Thomas, lying in a pile of charred debris on the kitchen floor.

Officers arrived, and moving further into the house, they discovered a second brutal scene.

The body of Griff’s sister Martha Mary – known as Patti – lay slumped on a magazine rack in the corner of the living room, with severe head injuries.

Chairs had been knocked over and an overturned television lay at Patti’s feet.

It was still switched on, with the sound of static filling the room.

Patti, who was 70, had been battered to death.

Ffynon Samson farmhouse, a half mile outside the village of Llangolman in eastern Pembrokeshire, was now a murder scene.

Just over a month later, detectives reached their conclusion – Griff had “probably” killed his sister in a fit of rage after arguing about money.

But nearly 50 years on, surviving family, friends and neighbours of the siblings still struggle to make sense of the police’s version of events.

“There’s no way Griff could have smashed the furniture,” said Huw Absalom, whose father was Griff and Patti’s cousin

“He would have been unable to cause that damage to Patti.

“Griff has gone to his grave branded the murderer of his own sister, the one person he lived with all his life, who’s been a part of his life through thick and thin.

“It’s not fair and it’s not right.”

After calls for the case to be re-opened, Dyfed-Powys Police announced in October 2022 that it would undertake a forensic review of material gathered by police at the time, to see if modern techniques could “shed further light” on what happened.

That review, dubbed Operation Hallam, is still ongoing and a new BBC podcast, called Death on the Farm, is now exploring the 50-year-old case.

Mr Absalom said he had asked the review team to consider exhuming the bodies, so they can be examined in light of modern forensic techniques.

“Forensics has moved on so much since the 70s, I’m sure they’d be able to look at them now in a new light,” he said.

In December 1976, as news of the tragedy spread around the close-knit community, Dyfed-Powys Police launched a double murder investigation and set up an incident room in the heart of the village.

The case was led by a celebrated detective who had solved the notorious Cannock Chase murders, Det Ch Supt Pat Molloy.

More than 1,200 people were spoken to, with police officers knocking on doors over a five-mile radius.

Over the coming weeks, 572 men provided alibis to police that ruled them out of the investigation.

But as Christmas came and went, and the new year arrived, no leads were emerging.

So the focus of the inquiry shifted.

By late January 1977, Det Ch Supt Molloy reached his conclusion.

He announced that Griff had “probably” killed his sister – possibly by hitting her over the head with a kitchen chair – before starting a fire in which he lay down and died.

For those who had known the siblings throughout their lives, this scenario was incomprehensible.

Mr Absalom, who grew up nearby and was 15 at the time, remembers their deaths sending a “shockwave” through the community.

“I never heard of any falling-out between them, not even a mild argument,” he said.

“These were God-fearing people, chapel was everything to them.”

The siblings were respected and liked in the community and were active members of nearby Rhydwilym Chapel.

Both had lived at Ffynon Samson with their elderly father until his death in 1967.

They continued running the farm into the 1970s before retiring and renting land out.

Anne Gibby, whose father Emlyn was also a cousin of the siblings and saw the gruesome scene, said: “From what my father said about the scene, he felt it was physically impossible that he had done it.

“It stayed with him all his life and he talked about it until his dying day, that there was no way Griff had done it.”

It is a view many in the community agree with.

They point to details about the case which many feel cast doubt on Det Ch Supt Molloy’s conclusions.

Griff was last seen at the local shop, Charing Cross, on the afternoon of Tuesday, 7 December, and it is believed that he and Patti died that evening.

Two half-drunk cups of tea, and a plate of bread and butter and crisps were found in the living-room – fuelling speculation that someone else had visited the house that evening.

The cheese and newspaper Griff bought at the shop were still in the pocket of the jacket he was wearing when he died.

A large quantity of Griff’s blood was found inside Patti’s sewing machine, with the cover replaced – part of a left thumbprint found in blood on the cover was never identified.

Their sheepdog, known to bark when anyone visited the farm, had disappeared and locals said it was found drowned in the farmyard well – though this is not referenced in the police report.

Perhaps most significantly, there was lingering doubt over whether frail, arthritic Griff, who used a stick around the farm, suffered with curvature of the spine and had “clawlike” hands affecting his dexterity, would have been physically capable of doing what he was accused of.

“Sitting next to Griff in chapel, he often wouldn’t be able to find the page in the hymnbook, because of his hands [so] I’d help him,” said Mr Absalom.

“One time he dropped his glasses and couldn’t grasp them to pick them up.

“The way she was killed, she was bludgeoned beyond recognition, there’s no way he could have done that, physically or mentally.

“Looking through the evidence, it just doesn’t add up.”

In his report, Det Ch Supt Molloy dismissed the likelihood of a third party killing the siblings as “so remote as to be discounted”.

But he acknowledged too that there was nothing in their backgrounds to make sense of such an act of violence.

Many believe that Griff disturbed an intruder attacking Patti when he arrived home from the shop – possibly someone they knew demanding money from them.

They were known to be comfortably off – more than £2,000 in cash was found in the farmhouse after their deaths and they left £35,000 in savings and investments.

On 17 February 1977, a jury inquest in Haverfordwest returned verdicts of unlawful killing for Patti Thomas, and an open verdict on Griff.

Just 10 weeks on from their deaths, the case was closed.

But over the decades, calls to clear Griff’s name have grown, including through a campaign run by community newspaper Clebran.

Its editor, Hefin Wyn, said: “Many were convinced someone else, a third party, was involved in the deaths but people had no influence or authority to challenge the police version of events.

“People were more accepting of authority back then.

“The Thomases were highly regarded in the community. Pat Molloy tried to suggest they were reclusive and constantly bickering, but that isn’t borne out by the facts.”

Denzil Davies, who sometimes worked at Ffynon Samson farm as a teenager, said: “Police said they’d interviewed everyone during their inquiry, but I wasn’t interviewed and nor were my friends.

“If this verdict was being judged today, the community would have stood up and said ‘no way, you need to look deeper’.

“But even though no-one agreed with them, we’d never have challenged them.”

Griff and Patti Thomas are laid to rest together in the graveyard at Rhydwilym Chapel, overlooking the lush valley and River Cleddau where they were baptised.

For Huw Absalom, the campaign to clear Griff’s name goes on.

But he accepts that chances of uncovering the truth of what happened at Ffynon Samson may be ebbing away.

“Time is not on our side. It’s coming up to 50 years since all this happened, and the number of people who knew them is dwindling every year,” he said.

“To walk up to my parents’ grave, I have to walk past Griff and Patti’s grave.

“Every time, I go over and speak to them and say that I’m still fighting the cause.”

Dyfed-Powys Police said in a statement that the forensic review of the case was looking at evidence gathered from the original inquiry in light of modern forensic techniques, to assess whether new evidence could be gathered.

A spokesperson said: “The timeframe for conclusion of the review is not known at this stage, however this work is very much ongoing.

“We are in close contact with the family and continue to update them on our progress.”

When Ross Main tracked down the abandoned beehives his grandfather had kept in a disused quarry, he was surprised to find that the bees were still there.

The fine art graduate now manages dozens of colonies and millions of bees across Fife – and they are all descended from his grandfather’s hive.

Ross grew up in Dunbar and was often taken to the East Lothian quarry near Innerwick during his childhood.

When he became a father for the first time in 2015, he was inspired to try and find the old hives.

He thought his family had sold them off several years earlier, so did not expect to find much.

Ross, 36, drove from his home in Fife and tracked down the location, hundreds of metres down an old track which was overgrown with gorse.

“I made my way through and there was still a hive there, ” he told BBC Scotland News.

“I couldn’t believe the bees had still survived.”

The hive had been untouched since his grandfather, William Main, died of cancer in 2007, aged 77.

It was dilapidated, so Ross got hold of a beekeeping suit and a beehive and learned how to transfer the colony to their new home.

Once the transfer was made, which takes about a month, he was able to move the colony in their new hive to a new home in Auchtermuchty, Fife.

The following year his colony started to multiply and just as half of it was swarming he managed to catch it in a second hive.

“They multiply each year. When they get too big they go and start a colony somewhere else,” the father-of-two said.

“But the original colony will stay within the hive.”

Now he has between 90 and 100 colonies all taken from splits from his late grandfather’s hive.

At the height of summer there are about 50,000 bees within one colony.

He has set up a business, Mains Aperies, and has five million bees on sites across Fife selling honey to local farm shops from three harvests a year.

But he said: “You can’t really have a business just selling honey because you can have bad years.”

So a couple of years ago he started up beekeeping experiences for locals to get an insight into honey production.

And he has sold some of the hives to businesses in Edinburgh and Fife so staff can learn how to become beekeepers.

One of the businesses, disability firm Motability Operations at the Gyle in Edinburgh, now has six hives for their staff.

Ross manages their 300,000 bees weekly and teaches them about beekeeping in their lunchbreaks.

Dorota Opara, workplace co-ordinator, said she picked up a fear of bees while growing up in Krakow in Poland.

“When my colleague suggested we have bees on site, I was very cautious and asked if we would have to touch them,” she said.

However, she was eventually persuaded to put on a suit to take a look at the hives.

The 42-year-old said: “The funny story is I had a dress on and flip flops. When we were at the beehives I could feel bees going between my toes and I was frightened and I said I don’t know if I can do it.

“But Ross told me they are honey bees they will not sting you until you do crazy movement and he was right and since then I’m so in love with the bees.

“Having bees in the garden is one thing but having that kind of connection with Ross who can come and explain to you how everything works is a different experience.

Dorota said: “How many offices can say they have beehives and learn how to become a beekeeper? It’s magical.”

She now visits the bees every couple of days to check on them.

Ross harvests the honey and gives the jars to the staff.

“The staff absolutely love having the bees,” she added.

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 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. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr said she would be flown back to the Philippines as early as Wednesday.

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

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

Ms Guo’s case has played out as the Philippines and China continue to spar over reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea.

China has not commented on the allegations against her.

Authorities believe that Ms 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.

Mr Marcos said her arrest is “a warning to those who attempt to evade justice”.

“Such is an exercise in futility. The arm of the law is long and it will reach you,” he wrote on Facebook.

Photos showed Ms Guo wearing light pink pyjamas and a white coat when she was arrested.

Ms Guo was thrust under the national spotlight after authorities in March uncovered a sprawling scam centre in Bamban that were hiding under online casinos, known locally as Philippine Online Gaming Operations (Pogo).

Pogos cater to clients in the Chinese mainland, where gambling is illegal.

Ms Guo’s case confirmed suspicions that Pogos were being used as a front for organised crime and led to Mr Marcos outlawing them in response to public anger.

Pogos flourished under his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, whose presidency was marked by close ties with China.

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

During the raid in Ms Guo’s town, police rescued close to 700 scam centre workers, including 202 Chinese nationals and 73 other foreigners who were forced to pose as online lovers.

A Senate investigation that followed centred on her inability to detect the eight-hectare scam centre despite its location near her office.

Senators also grilled her on her parentage. A relative unknown in local politics, she was elected mayor on her first run for public office, which is rare in areas ruled by political families.

Ms Guo’s opaque answers on questions regarding her roots, led some senators to accuse her of being a Chinese “asset” or spy.

She gave a television interview where she attributed her low profile to being her father’s illegitimate child with her mum, who is also his maid. She said this forced her to lead a sheltered life in the family farm, until she was elected mayor of Bamban.

But the controversy did not subside and after she refused to appear in subsequent hearings, senators in July ordered her arrest. By that time, however, she had fallen from public view.

Soon after, an anti-graft body removed her from office.

In August, Filipino authorities said she had fled the country undetected and passed through Singapore and Malaysia on her way to Indonesia.

One official said she could be headed for the Golden Triangle, a border region in mainland South East Asia that is a known hideout of organised crime groups.

A furious Mr Marcos then ordered her Philippine passport cancelled and warned then that “heads will roll”.

He said Ms Guo’s escape “laid bare the corruption that undermines our justice system and erodes the people’s trust”.

The French rescue workers packed up their gear with well-practised efficiency. The medical tents. The stretchers. The security cordons.

Shortly after the last bodies had been driven away from the quayside in Boulogne, the remaining ambulances and red emergency vehicles drove off too, leaving only a handful of officials standing in the fading light beside a few frayed fishing nets near the harbour wall.

“It’s so upsetting,” said Frederic Cuvillier, Boulogne’s mayor, reflecting on the way this long, constantly evolving migrant crisis has reshaped – and traumatised – France’s northern coastline.

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

“These people flee death and end up dying here. Mothers, children… convinced they will find a better life across the Channel,” said Cuvillier, gesturing west, towards a grey sea.

In the immediate aftermath of such incidents there is – I have noticed, after witnessing several already this year – a widening gap between the way the French and British react.

In the UK, officials have been quick to focus on – and to condemn – the smuggling gangs. Each incident, each death, is seen as the result of cynical criminal activity. Which, of course, it is.

Once again, the smugglers crammed far too many of their paying clients into what appear to be increasingly flimsy boats, with nowhere near enough life jackets.

Here in northern France, the police have a similar focus. They are preoccupied with the task of trying to patrol ever larger stretches of their increasingly militarised coastline. They now have more manpower, buggies, night-vision equipment, and special drones that can detect groups of migrants hiding in the dunes.

But the police are aware that, as they expand their operations – much of it now funded by British taxpayers – the smuggling gangs are responding, finding new ways to cross, and often putting the migrants themselves at ever greater risk as a result.

The gangs now launch their boats inland, from canals, or way down the French coast, meaning far longer journeys to cross a busy stretch of water crowded with commercial shipping and tugged at by powerful tides.

The gangs pack more people inside inflatable boats of ever more dubious quality – sometimes 90 people in a boat designed, or barely designed, to hold 40. It’s a problem exacerbated as the authorities succeed in disrupting the supply of boats brought to the coastline from deep within Europe.

And, increasingly, the smugglers use violence too. Stones hurled at police on the beaches. Sometimes knives brandished too.

I was recently shown footage by police at a local gendarmerie of what looked like another pitched battle on a beach at dawn, with riot-shielded police defending themselves against a hail of rocks. I witnessed a separate battle myself in April.

The smugglers’ aim is to buy themselves a few precious seconds to get their boats and their passengers into the water, after which the police – concerned they may be blamed for putting people at even greater risk – rarely intervene.

But while the police have their duties and dangers to face, for French politicians and civilians in resort towns scattered along this coastline, the reaction to yet another deadly incident is not to focus on the criminality of the smugglers, but on the motives of the migrants, on what still drives so many of them to attempt this dangerous crossing.

And the blunt conclusion, repeated to me so often – by local mayors, by pensioners, by couples out walking their dogs on beaches where they now fear they may come across bodies washed ashore – is that this is Britain’s fault.

Having watched this crisis evolve over decades, from the camps around the Channel tunnel and the ferry ports, to this more recent phenomenon of small boats, many French people deeply resent the way their own lives and communities have been transformed by a crisis they see as British-made.

France’s interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, spoke of it on Tuesday at the harbour in Boulogne.

He did condemn the smugglers, but most of his comments focused on the lure of what he views as Britain’s loosely regulated job market, that acts like a magnet, drawing young Eritreans, determined Sudanese, Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis to this coastline, convinced that they if they can just make it across this last, short stretch of water – or even half way across – they’ll end up in a country where they can find work, even without the right paperwork.

Darmanin called, as he has done many times, for a new migrant treaty between Britain and the European Union.

In doing so, he touched on a widely-held belief here in France, which is that however much effort is put into tackling the smuggling gangs it will never be enough. That this is a crisis fuelled by the demands of tens of thousands of determined migrants, rather than by the profit-seeking motives of a loose network of criminals.

And there is another difference between the way Britain and France react to such moments. You can see it in the newspaper and television headlines.

The small boat crisis may be big news in the UK, but in France – a country currently preoccupied by its own political turmoil and, frankly, tired of the situation on its northern coastline – even twelve deaths in the Channel barely make headlines.

A student nurse cleared of plotting to kidnap a baby from a neonatal ward said her experience of the justice system had left her “smashed”.

Safia Ahmadei was accused of “scouting” New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton for a baby she could pass off as her own.

But following an 11-day trial a jury found her not guilty of attempted kidnap in just 48 minutes.

Ms Ahmadei, who has maintained her innocence since her arrest in February, told the BBC: “My reputation, my dignity, my career is gone, all because of a wrong allegation.”

The mother of two was on remand in prison for six months awaiting trial where she said she was attacked three times by other inmates.

Ms Ahmadei was unable to speak to family members while behind bars because it took four months to get phone calls approved.

“Prison made me broken – behind the door, in the dark, thinking about my two flowers… my children,” she said.

Ms Ahmadei, who came to England from Afghanistan in 2011, enrolled on a nursing course at the University of Wolverhampton in 2022.

She was in her second year and training at the city’s hospital when she said her life was turned upside down.

Ms Ahmadei maintains an innocent encounter with a distressed new mum on the neonatal ward led to her being arrested, charged and facing trial accused of trying to steal her baby.

She said she approached the woman, who was concerned her baby had been placed by an air conditioning unit.

Able to communicate in Urdu, Ms Ahmadei said she comforted her and sympathised with her raising a family without female relatives in the country.

She also maintains the women realised they had mutual acquaintances and that later that day she returned to the ward to give the baby a blanket.

Dressed in her nurse’s uniform but not on duty, she was informed by a member of staff she should not be wearing it if not working.

Ms Ahmadei said she returned to her car, put on an overall to cover herself and took the blanket to the ward.

The following day, she received a call from the university to say she had been suspended from her course.

“I was really shocked. I couldn’t take it in” she said.

“It was my dream to put on that uniform. I was wondering what I had done wrong… I knew in my heart I was doing my best at the hospital.”

Despite being told to stay away, the nurse said she returned to the hospital the next day because she feared she had unintentionally offended the woman.

She also took baby clothes, which she said were an apology gift.

When she arrived, she was surrounded by hospital staff and police were called.

“They weren’t letting me speak. I didn’t know what had gone on or what I’d done wrong,” she said.

“My arrest was the black day in my life. I felt totally smashed,” she said.

During her trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court, the prosecution argued she was planning to kidnap a baby to pass off as her own after lying to her second husband about being pregnant with twin boys.

She admitted being untruthful but said she had found herself in an impossible situation.

“I was scared if I told him that maybe he would be angry and leave me,” she said.

Her repeated appearances in the neonatal ward, changing of clothes and purchasing of baby outfits were part of the the prosecution’s case against her.

But she repeatedly insisted she had no intention of taking a child to pretend it was her own.

“I’m a mother. How could I hurt another mother?” she said.

On 16 August, the jury delivered its not guilty verdict in less than an hour.

Ms Ahmadei said she wept with joy but that her ordeal was far from over.

“I close my eyes and I still hear the noise of the keys, the chain,” she said.

Rumours and misinformation about her online had been devastating, she said.

“My family are not letting me see social media, or the news reports, because they know if I see something it will make me more upset.”

She said she believed she faced prejudice within the Afghan community after separating from her first husband and pursuing an education and career.

“In my mind, it was a plan to put me in trouble,” she told the BBC.

Despite her experience, Ms Ahmadei is still pursuing a career in nursing and hopes to be re-enrolled on a course.

“I’m a strong mother. I will get my degree but I worry that there could be another Safia in the future,” she said.

West Midlands Police said it accepted the court’s decision and that “our thoughts remain firmly with everyone that has been involved in this case”.

A Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson said it reviewed the evidence in the case “carefully before making a charging decision”.

They added: “The CPS doesn’t decide whether or not a person is guilty – we make independent decisions about when it’s appropriate to bring a case to court.

“The defendant has been acquitted and we respect the jury’s decision.”

The University of Wolverhampton said an internal investigation was ongoing and that Ms Ahmadei would remain suspended until its conclusion.

New Cross Hospital did not want to comment.

It’s the perennial “cocktail party problem” – standing in a room full of people, drink in hand, trying to hear what your fellow guest is saying.

In fact, human beings are remarkably adept at holding a conversation with one person while filtering out competing voices.

However, perhaps surprisingly, it’s a skill that technology has until recently been unable to replicate.

And that matters when it comes to using audio evidence in court cases. Voices in the background can make it hard to be certain who’s speaking and what’s being said, potentially making recordings useless.

Electrical engineer Keith McElveen, founder and chief technology officer of Wave Sciences, became interested in the problem when he was working for the US government on a war crimes case.

“What we were trying to figure out was who ordered the massacre of civilians. Some of the evidence included recordings with a bunch of voices all talking at once – and that’s when I learned what the “cocktail party problem” was,” he says.

“I had been successful in removing noise like automobile sounds or air conditioners or fans from speech, but when I started trying to remove speech from speech, it turned out not only to be a very difficult problem, it was one of the classic hard problems in acoustics.

“Sounds are bouncing round a room, and it is mathematically horrible to solve.”

The answer, he says, was to use AI to try to pinpoint and screen out all competing sounds based on where they originally came from in a room.

This doesn’t just mean other people who may be speaking – there’s also a significant amount of interference from the way sounds are reflected around a room, with the target speaker’s voice being heard both directly and indirectly.

In a perfect anechoic chamber – one totally free from echoes – one microphone per speaker would be enough to pick up what everyone was saying; but in a real room, the problem requires a microphone for every reflected sound too.

Mr McElveen founded Wave Sciences in 2009, hoping to develop a technology which could separate overlapping voices. Initially the firm used large numbers of microphones in what’s known as array beamforming.

However, feedback from potential commercial partners was that the system required too many microphones for the cost involved to give good results in many situations – and wouldn’t perform at all in many others.

“The common refrain was that if we could come up with a solution that addressed those concerns, they’d be very interested,” says Mr McElveen.

And, he adds: “We knew there had to be a solution, because you can do it with just two ears.”

The company finally solved the problem after 10 years of internally funded research and filed a patent application in September 2019.

What they had come up with was an AI that can analyse how sound bounces around a room before reaching the microphone or ear.

“We catch the sound as it arrives at each microphone, backtrack to figure out where it came from, and then, in essence, we suppress any sound that couldn’t have come from where the person is sitting,” says Mr McElveen.

The effect is comparable in certain respects to when a camera focusses on one subject and blurs out the foreground and background.

“The results don’t sound crystal clear when you can only use a very noisy recording to learn from, but they’re still stunning.”

The technology had its first real-world forensic use in a US murder case, where the evidence it was able to provide proved central to the convictions.

After two hitmen were arrested for killing a man, the FBI wanted to prove that they’d been hired by a family going through a child custody dispute. The FBI arranged to trick the family into believing that they were being blackmailed for their involvement – and then sat back to see the reaction.

While texts and phone calls were reasonably easy for the FBI to access, in-person meetings in two restaurants were a different matter. But the court authorised the use of Wave Sciences’ algorithm, meaning that the audio went from being inadmissible to a pivotal piece of evidence.

Since then, other government laboratories, including in the UK, have put it through a battery of tests. The company is now marketing the technology to the US military, which has used it to analyse sonar signals.

It could also have applications in hostage negotiations and suicide scenarios, says Mr McElveen, to make sure both sides of a conversation can be heard – not just the negotiator with a megaphone.

Late last year, the company released a software application using its learning algorithm for use by government labs performing audio forensics and acoustic analysis.

Eventually it aims to introduce tailored versions of its product for use in audio recording kit, voice interfaces for cars, smart speakers, augmented and virtual reality, sonar and hearing aid devices.

So, for example, if you speak to your car or smart speaker it wouldn’t matter if there was a lot of noise going on around you, the device would still be able to make out what you were saying.

AI is already being used in other areas of forensics too, according to forensic educator Terri Armenta of the Forensic Science Academy.

“ML [machine learning] models analyse voice patterns to determine the identity of speakers, a process particularly useful in criminal investigations where voice evidence needs to be authenticated,” she says.

“Additionally, AI tools can detect manipulations or alterations in audio recordings, ensuring the integrity of evidence presented in court.”

And AI has also been making its way into other aspects of audio analysis too.

Bosch has a technology called SoundSee, that uses audio signal processing algorithms to analyse, for instance, a motor’s sound to predict a malfunction before it happens.

“Traditional audio signal processing capabilities lack the ability to understand sound the way we humans do,” says Dr Samarjit Das, director of research and technology at Bosch USA.

“Audio AI enables deeper understanding and semantic interpretation of the sound of things around us better than ever before – for example, environmental sounds or sound cues emanating from machines.”

More recent tests of the Wave Sciences algorithm have shown that, even with just two microphones, the technology can perform as well as the human ear – better, when more microphones are added.

And they also revealed something else.

“The math in all our tests shows remarkable similarities with human hearing. There’s little oddities about what our algorithm can do, and how accurately it can do it, that are astonishingly similar to some of the oddities that exist in human hearing,” says McElveen.

“We suspect that the human brain may be using the same math – that in solving the cocktail party problem, we may have stumbled upon what’s really happening in the brain.”

The 21-year-old daughter of South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma is marrying the Eswatini king for love, a spokesman for Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy has told the BBC.

Nomcebo Zuma’s engagement to King Mswati III was made official earlier this week at the end of the eight-day reed dance ceremony – a traditional rite of passage for young women and girls held every year.

The 56-year-old monarch is currently in a polygamous arrangement with 11 wives – and has been married 15 times in total.

Eswatini spokesman Alpheous Nxumalo dismissed outright the suggestion that the marriage would be a political alliance.

“Love has no eyes to see or count age. Love happens between two people. It can happen between a person who is 100 years old and a person who is above the average of what is permitted constitutionally,” he told the BBC’s Newsday programme.

Mr Zuma, who was president of South Africa from 2009 until 2018, and King Mswati are already relatives through marriage.

Critics accuse King Mswati, who rules by decree and has been on the throne for 38 years, of living in luxury with his polygamous household – while most of his people languish in poverty.

Eswatini, previously known as Swaziland, has a population of 1.1 million and one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/Aids infection.

The heavy-handed treatment of the king’s opponents in Eswatini, which is almost entirely surrounded by South Africa, has also come in for criticism.

There are strong traditional ties between Eswatini and South Africa’s Zulu monarchy – the current Zulu king, Misuzulu ka Zwelithini, is Mswati III’s nephew.

Mr Zuma, who resigned in disgrace over corruption allegations during his presidency and still faces a court case over a 1999 arms deal (he denies any wrong-doing), is currently enjoying a political renaissance.

His newly formed party uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) came third in South Africa’s general election this year.

The 82-year-old is also greatly respected by his supporters for upholding his cultural and traditional Zulu beliefs – and has several wives and is thought to have 20 children.

Nomcebo, whose mother is his long-standing fiancée Nonkululeko Mhlongo, was dressed in the bright colours of the Eswatini kingdom on the last day of the reed dance ceremony at the Ludzidzini Royal Palace on Monday.

Known as the Umhlanga ceremony, it is intended to discourage those taking part from becoming sexually active at a young age.

The king is allowed to choose a bride from the participants – and on this occasion Ms Zuma was presented as the “liphovela”, which means royal fiancée in Swati.

He has faced scrutiny in the past over the age of his brides. In 2005, he chose 17-year-old Phindile Nkambule for a wife – a few days after he had rescinded a ban on sexual relations for girls younger than 18.

Just two months after it had originally been imposed in 2001 – to help fight HIV/Aids – he had fined himself a cow for breaking the ban as he had married a 17-year-old as his ninth wife.

• The vote in a kingdom where parties are banned
• A simple guide to Eswatini
• Eswatini: A kingdom in crisis
• Why did Swaziland take 50 years to change its name?

Donald Trump’s media company was hit by a fresh round of selling on Wednesday, wiping out gains the share price had enjoyed this year alongside the rising political fortunes of its namesake.

Shares fell more than 6% to less than $17, which is less than what they were worth at the start of 2024.

The share price, which hit a peak in April during the former president’s criminal trial, has fallen more than 70% from its high.

The firm, operator of the social media platform Truth Social, still boasts a market value of more than $3.3bn – a hefty sum for a small company with shrinking revenue and growing losses.

Mr Trump’s victory in the January Republican primary had helped to stoke interest in the Trump Media at the start of the year.

Buyers snapped up shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp., a publicly-traded shell company, which was created to buy Trump Media and was seen on Wall Street as a proxy for the firm.

Demand jumped farther around the time the merger was formally completed in March.

The price has swung wildly in the months since.

Its most recent high came in July, after Trump survived an assassination attempt and before President Joe Biden bowed out of the race, but the price has slid lower in recent weeks.

The falls come as the company approaches the date at which Trump and other early investors will be free to start selling their shares.

Mr Trump’s stake is currently worth about $2bn, down from more than $6bn a few months ago.

Analysts had warned investors to expect big swings in value, describing it as a “meme stock”, propelled by sentiment rather than its financial characteristics.

A US mother accused of shooting two of her children at their home in Colorado was “begged” by her third child not to kill her, a UK court has heard.

Kimberlee Singler has attended the start of her extradition hearing in London after being accused of murdering her daughter Elianna, 9, and son Aden, 7, who were found dead in their bedroom in Colorado Springs on 19 December last year.

The eldest child, aged 11 at the time, survived being stabbed in the neck but needed emergency surgery, Westminster Magistrates’ Court heard.

Through her defence barrister Ms Singler, 36, denied responsibility for the deaths and the attack on the third child.

It will not ultimately be for the London court to carry out a criminal trial.

Ms Singler is wanted in Colorado to face a seven-count indictment, comprising two counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder, two counts of class-two felony child abuse, one count of class-three felony child abuse, and one count of assault.

The court was told in the days that followed the attack, Ms Singler “fled” the US and was arrested 11 days later in London.

Ms Singler’s hearing, before District Judge John Zani, is expected to last three days. The final decision on whether Ms Singler should be extradited to the US will be made by the UK home secretary.

On Wednesday, prosecutor Joel Smith KC told the court Ms Singler’s alleged crimes were “committed against the backdrop of acrimonious court proceedings” concerning the custody of her children with her ex-husband Kevin Wentz.

Mr Smith said she shot and stabbed the first two children and attacked the third with a knife, causing “serious lacerations”.

“She initially blamed an unknown male, and cast suspicion on her former partner.”

The court heard that on 19 December the Colorado Springs Police Department responded to a 911 call reporting a burglary at a Colorado residence at 00:29 local time (06:29 GMT).

When officers arrived at the defendant’s address, they found two dead children and a third with a serious injury to her neck. She was taken to hospital.

Live rounds and spent cartridges were found in a closet and a “blood-stained handgun” was discovered on the floor of the bedroom, the prosecutor added.

A blood-stained knife was also found in the living room of the property, Mr Smith added.

The court heard that DNA tests were carried out on the knife and the gun and revealed the presence of mixed profiles matching the children and Ms Singler.

Mr Smith added: “Two empty bottles of sleeping tablets were also found and there were no signs of a break-in.”

The court heard the third child required emergency surgery, but survived.

Mr Smith said Ms Singler blamed her husband for the attack, but it was found he had been driving a “GPS-tracked truck” in Denver, giving what the prosecutor described as a “complete and verifiable alibi”.

In the days that followed, the third child, who was not named in court, was moved into foster care after her emergency surgery.

On Christmas Day, she told her foster carer that Ms Singler had been responsible for the attack and had asked her to lie to police, Mr Smith said.

The prosecutor said the girl was interviewed by police on 26 December, during which time she recounted how the attack had unfolded after the defendant guided all three children into their bedroom.

“The defendant told her that God was telling her to do it, and that the children’s father would take them away,” Mr Smith said.

The police investigation then led to a warrant being issued by Fourth Judicial District Court in El Paso County, Colorado, for Ms Singler’s arrest.

Mr Smith said Ms Singler was arrested in the Chelsea area of west London on 30 December.

Ms Singler’s defence barrister Edward Fitzgerald told the court she “denies she is responsible for the death of her two young children and the attempted murder of her third child”.

“She is innocent,” he said.

Members of Ms Singler’s family joined via a video link, as did the Colorado State prosecutor and officials from the US Department of Justice (DoJ).

The extradition hearing continues.

A web series about the 1999 hijacking of an Indian passenger plane has sparked a controversy in the country over the portrayal of some of the characters.

Directed by Anubhav Sinha for Netflix, IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack recounts the events surrounding the hijacking of a Kathmandu-Delhi flight which was taken to Taliban-ruled Kandahar to demand the release of militants jailed in India.

The controversy over the show, sparked by social media viewers, centred on the hijackers’ names in the film.

Reports suggest Netflix was summoned by the federal government regarding the issue. The streaming platform has also changed the disclaimer at the beginning of the show.

The eight-day hijack ended after a deal between the Indian government and the hijackers, with India releasing three militants, including Masood Azhar, in exchange for the passengers.

India has blamed Azhar, who founded the Jaish-e-Mohammad group after his release, for several attacks in the country. He has also been designated as a terrorist by the United Nations.

The decision to release Azhar and others remains controversial in India, with the opposition often criticising the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was also in power in 1999, for the move.

The six-episode mini-series is based on Flight Into Fear: The Captain’s Story, a book by Devi Sharan, who captained the hijacked plane, and journalist Srinjoy Chowdhury.

The series, which was released last week, begins with the hijackers making their way into the flight at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu.

Within minutes of take-off, the militants announce the flight – carrying 179 passengers including the five hijackers and 11 crew members – has been hijacked.

The series focuses on the interactions between the hijackers, the crew and the passengers, and it also shows Indian government officials working to resolve the crisis.

The row began after some social media users criticised the filmmakers for depicting the hijackers calling each other common Hindu names such as Bhola and Shankar, even though their names were Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim and Shakir. All of them were from Pakistan.

BJP leader Amit Malviya said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that by using the hijackers’ “non-Muslim” aliases in the series, the filmmakers had ensured that people would “think Hindus hijacked IC-814”.

A Hindu right-wing organisation has filed a case in a Delhi court seeking a ban on the series. PTI news agency reported that the petition has accused the filmmaker of distorting crucial facts and misrepresenting historical events.

Several Indian media outlets, citing sources, reported that the federal government held a meeting with a senior Netflix executive regarding the issue.

Netflix and India’s information and broadcasting ministry have not responded to the BBC’s request for comment.

Many have also defended the series, saying that it is factually accurate.

A statement issued by India’s home ministry in 2000 confirms that the hijackers used such names as aliases to communicate inside and outside the aircraft.

“To the passengers of the hijacked place these hijackers came to be known respectively as (1) Chief, (2) Doctor, (3) Burger, (4) Bhola, and (5) Shankar, the names by which the hijackers invariably addressed one another,” the statement said.

Witnesses and journalists who reported on the incident have also corroborated this in the past.

Kollattu Ravikumar, a survivor of the hijacking who worked as a merchant navy captain for a US-based firm, confirmed the aliases in an article on Rediff news portal in 2000.

“The four hijackers who were watching over us also had a leader called Berger. It was Berger who used to often shout. As Berger called them, I caught the names of the others – Bola, Shankar and Doctor,” he said.

After the row, Netflix issued a statement saying it had updated the disclaimer which appears on screen before the episodes begin.

“For the benefit of audiences unfamiliar with the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814, the opening disclaimer has been updated to include the real and code names of the hijackers,” it said.

This isn’t the first time that international streaming platforms have received backlash over content on their platforms in India.

In January, Netflix removed a Tamil-language film after members of hard-line Hindu organisations objected to several scenes. In 2021, the cast and crew of an Amazon Prime show, Tandav, apologised after being accused of mocking Hindu gods.

A beluga whale suspected of being a Russian spy found dead off the Norwegian coast was shot, animal rights activists have claimed.

The body of the otherwise healthy and relatively young animal – nicknamed Hvaldimir – was found floating in a bay off the country’s south-western coast.

Animal rights groups said the whale was found with bullet wounds and had been shot in a “heinous crime”.

“We will pursue justice for Hvaldimir,” One Whale founder Regina Haug vowed in a statement on social media.

• Seeking sanctuary for whale dubbed a Russian spy

One Whale was founded to track the beluga, which rose to fame after being spotted in Norwegian waters five years ago.

The pale whale was seen with a GoPro camera attached to a harness that read “Equipment of St Petersburg” – sparking speculation that the curious mammal could be engaged in espionage.

It became known locally as Hvaldimir, a pun on the Norwegian word for whale, “hval,” and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first name.

The Arctic mammal’s body was found floating off the south-western town of Risavika on 1 September and taken to the nearest port for examination.

Noah and One Whale said they had filed a complaint with Norwegian police asking them to open a criminal investigation.

“He had multiple bullet wounds around his body,” Ms Haug from One Whale said via its official Instagram account after viewing the body on Monday.

Photographs published by One Whale on social media appear to show what they say are bullet wounds in Hvaldimir’s bloodied body.

“The injuries on the whale are alarming and of a nature that cannot rule out a criminal act – it is shocking,” said Noah director, Siri Martinsen.

But Marine Mind, the organisation that discovered the body, said there was “nothing to immediately reveal the cause of death”.

“We saw markings but it’s too early to say what the cause of death was,” director Sebastian Strand told reporters.

The body was transported to a nearby branch of the Norwegian Veterinary Institute on Monday for an autopsy.

The report is expected “within three weeks”, a spokeswoman for the institute said.

With an estimated age of about 15, Hvaldimir was not old for a Beluga whale, which can live to 60.

Police told local media they would look into the matter “to determine whether there are reasonable motives to launch an investigation”

Marine Mind and One Whale had been at odds over how to protect Hvaldimir from the perils he faced.

One Whale had called for him to be transferred to the Barents Sea in northern Norway – a more natural habitat for belugas – which would reduce the risk of ship collisions.

But Marine Mind were against the idea, arguing that moving him could pose a danger to his life.

Hvaldimir first approached Norwegian boats in April 2019 near the island of Ingoya, about 415km (260 miles) from Murmansk, where Russia’s Northern Fleet is based.

The sighting attracted attention because belugas are rarely seen that far south of the high Arctic.

Russia has a history of training marine mammals such as dolphins for military purposes, and the Barents Observer website has identified whale pens near naval bases in the north-west area of Murmansk.

Australian Olympian Rachael Gunn has apologised to the nation’s breakdancing community for the “backlash” they have experienced following her controversial routine in Paris, which made headlines globally.

Gunn, who competes as Raygun, was eliminated from the B-Girls competition with a score of zero, prompting ridicule and praise for her unorthodox style by users across social media.

In her first sit-down interview since taking part in the Games – and amid questions over her qualification and performance – Gunn was asked if she genuinely thought she was Australia’s best female breakdancer.

“I think my record speaks to that,” she told Network 10’s The Project.

“It is really sad to hear those criticisms and I am very sorry for the backlash that the community has experienced, but I can’t control how people react,” she continued, addressing the flood of critiques her routine has garnered online.

The 36-year-old university lecturer lost all three of her Olympic battles, with her green tracksuit and eccentric performance – which included the sprinkler move and kangaroo-inspired hopping – generating a sea of memes.

In the aftermath of her performance, Gunn faced accusations that she had manipulated the selection process, including allegations that she had set up her own governing body and that her husband had judged her qualification trial.

These claims have since been denounced as false by several organisations, including the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) and the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF).

“The conspiracy theories were just awful,” Gunn told Network 10.

“I was the top-ranked Australian B-girl in 2020 and 2022 and 2023. I have been invited to represent at how many World Championships… So, the record is there. But anything can happen in a battle,” she added.

Gunn, who has a background as a jazz, tap and ballroom dancer, had publicly defended her routine as “artistic and creative”.

“I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently,” she said last month.

The top judge who oversaw the B-Girls competition has also thrown his weight behind Gunn, as have team officials and the broader Olympic breakdancing community.

But the fallout has divided and disappointed those involved in the sport in Australia.

“It made a mockery of the Australian scene and I think that’s why a lot of us are hurting,” Australian hip-hop pioneer Spice previously told the BBC.

A hip-hop inspired dance born in the boroughs of New York in the 1970s, breaking was introduced into this year’s Olympic schedule to attract a younger audience to the Games.

But some critics say it should never have been included, due to the organic nature of the genre, which doesn’t necessarily suit organised competition.

After her performance in Paris, Gunn appealed to the media directly in a video posted on her Instagram to stop “harassing” her family and friends.

In her interview with Network 10, she described being chased by reporters in the aftermath of the fallout as “really wild”.

“That really did put me in a state of panic… Dancing was my medicine, and then it turned into my source of stress,” she said.

Gunn admitted that she is “not in a place yet” to watch her performance back, but was touched by the support she has received from her fellow Olympians at the Closing Ceremony as well as from some of the general public.

“It so warmed my heart,” she said. “I would rather much focus on the positives out of this and the joy that I’ve brought people.”

Telegram has apologised to South Korean authorities for its handling of deepfake pornographic material shared via its messaging app, amid a digital sex crime epidemic in the country.

It comes days after South Korean police said they had launched an investigation into Telegram, accusing it of “abetting” the distribution of such images.

In recent weeks, a large number of Telegram chatrooms – many of them run by teenagers – were found to have been creating sexually explicit “deepfakes” using doctored photographs of young women.

Authorities say Telegram has since removed such videos from its platform.

In a statement to South Korea’s Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), Telegram said the situation was “unfortunate”, adding that it “apologised if there had been an element of misunderstanding”.

It also confirmed that it had taken down 25 such videos as requested by KCSC.

In its latest statement to KCSC, Telegram also proposed an email address dedicated to future communication with the regulator.

KCSC described the company’s approach as “very forward-looking” and said Telegram has “acknowledged the seriousness” of the situation.

Deepfakes are generated using artificial intelligence, and often combine the face of a real person with a fake body.

The recent deepfake crisis has been met with outrage in South Korea, after journalists discovered police were investigating deepfake porn rings at two of the country’s major universities.

It later emerged that police received 118 reports of such videos in the last five days. Seven suspects, six of whom are teenagers, have been questioned by the police in the past week.

The chat groups were linked to individual schools and universities across the country. Many of their victims were students and teachers known to the perpetrators.

In South Korea, those found guilty of creating sexually explicit deepfakes can be jailed for up to five years and fined up to 50 million won ($37,500; £28,300).

These discoveries in South Korea follow the arrest of the Russian-born founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, in France, on allegations that child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud were taking place on the messaging app.

Mr Durov has since been charged.

Last Tuesday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol had instructed authorities to “thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them”.

Women’s rights activists have accused South Korean authorities of allowing sexual abuse to take place on Telegram.

In 2019, it was discovered that a sex ring had used the app to blackmail dozens of women and children to film pornographic content. The ring leader Cho Ju-bin, who was then 20, was sentenced to 42 years in jail.

A boy accused of killing four people at his high school in Georgia was interviewed last year by police about anonymous online threats, the FBI has said.

Colt Gray, 14, denied to police in May 2023 he was behind internet posts that contained images of guns, warning of a school shooting.

The suspect opened fire on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in the city of Winder, killing two teachers and two pupils, investigators say. Eight students and one teacher were injured.

He was arrested on campus and will be prosecuted as an adult.

Police have identified the victims as teachers Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall and 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo.

In a news conference, Georgia Bureau of Investigation director Chris Hosey said the gun used was an “AR-platform style weapon”.

In a statement, the FBI said its National Threat Operations Center had alerted local law enforcement in May 2023 after receiving anonymous tips about “online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time”.

The agency said that within 24 hours investigators had determined that the threats originated in Georgia.

Sheriff’s deputies interviewed the boy and his father, who “stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them”, the FBI said.

The suspect, who was 13 years old at the time, denied making the online threats and officials “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject”.

“At the time, there was no probable cause for an arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels,” added the FBI statement.

Sheriff Jud Smith described the attack as “pure evil” and said officers were on scene within minutes of receiving 911 calls at 10:20 local time (14:20 GMT).

Two officers assigned to the school “immediately encountered the subject”, the sheriff said, adding that the boy “immediately surrendered”.

The boy has been interviewed and spoke with investigators once while in custody, Sheriff Smith said.

The sheriff added that no motive had been identified and that law enforcement did not know of “any targets at this point”.

Students described chaotic scenes as alerts went out that an attacker was on campus. Classes at Apalachee began last month, but many students across the US are returning to schools this week.

Lyela Sayarath, who was in the alleged attacker’s class, told CNN that the suspect left the room at the beginning of an algebra lesson.

She said he came back and knocked on the door, which had locked automatically, but another student refused to let him in after noticing he had a gun.

Lyela told CNN the attacker then went to the classroom next door, where he began shooting.

Marques Coleman, 14, said he saw the attacker holding a “big gun” just before the shooting began.

“I got up, I started running, he started shooting like, like 10 times. He shot at least 10 times,” he told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

“My teacher started barricading the door with desks,” he said.

After standing up, the pupil said he saw “one of my classmates on the ground bleeding so bad”, another girl shot in the leg and a friend shot in the stomach.

A vigil was held on Wednesday evening in the city of 18,000 residents about 50 miles (80km) from Atlanta.

This was the 23rd US school shooting of 2024, according a database maintained by magazine Education Week, which counts 11 dead and 38 injured in such attacks so far this year.

David Riedman, who runs the K-12 School Shooting Database, told Reuters news agency that the shooting in Georgia was the first “planned attack” at a school during this autumn term.

A new queen was crowned as the eighth Māori monarch in New Zealand as her father, King Tuheitia Pōtatau Te Wherowhero VII, was laid to rest.

Twenty-seven-year-old Ngā Wai hono i te pō was chosen as Kuini by a council of New Zealand’s indigenous Māori chiefs during an elaborate ceremony in the country’s North Island.

She is only the second Māori queen, the first being her grandmother, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu.

Ngā Wai hono i te pō is the youngest child of King Tuheitia, who died last Friday at the age of 69.

Sitting on a carved wooden throne, the new queen was announced at a gathering at Tûrangawaewae Marae, which is the seat of the Kiingitanga or Māori king movement.

She sat in front of her father’s coffin, wearing a wreath and a cloak as prayers and chants were performed ahead of his burial.

A flotilla of war canoes then transported the king – who laid in state for six days before his burial – to his final resting place on Mount Taupiri, sacred to the Māori people.

The king had been recovering from heart surgery in hospital when he died, just days after celebrating the 18th anniversary of his coronation.

“The death of Kiingi Tuheitia is a moment of great sadness for followers of Te Kiingitanga, Maaoridom and the entire nation,” Rahui Papa, spokesman for the Kiingitanga or Māori king movement said at the time. “A chief who has passed to the great beyond. Rest in love.”

“Our country will be in mourning,” said Chris Hipkins, leader of New Zealand’s opposition Labour party, shortly after the king’s death. “He was a fantastic king with a wicked sense of humour, but also a very good man… with a real focus on bringing New Zealanders together.”

New Zealand’s prime minister Christoper Luxon praised King Tuheitia as a leader “whose commitment to Māori and all New Zealanders has been felt right across the country”.

However, Mr Luxon – whose policies have been accused by some indigenous New Zealanders of being anti-Māori – is on an official trip to South Korea and has not attended the funeral.

Last year thousands of protesters across New Zealand rallied against the government’s plans to reverse policies which boosted Indigenous rights, including plans to close the Māori Health Authority, Te Aka Whai Ora, set up during Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government and to switch the names of some departments from Māori to English.

King Tuheitia’s official period of mourning was extended from the usual three days to seven days, in order to accommodate the huge delegations that came to pay tribute to the king.

“I have never experienced anything like this,” Mereana Hond, a Māori journalist told BBC Newsday.

“It is no small thing to lose a king, but he was just really starting to rise to prominence, leading all tribes of Altara and New Zealand at a time when we’re under a lot of political and social pressure under this coalition.”

The king was born Tūheitia Paki in 1955. He was crowned in 2006 following the death of his mother, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu.

Like his mother, King Tuheitia was seen as a great unifying figure – recently calling on Māori to stand together in the face of policies targeting them.

The Māori monarchy dates back to 1858, when the Māori people decided to create a unifying figure similar to that of a European monarch in order to try and prevent the widespread loss of land to New Zealand’s British colonisers and to preserve Māori culture. The role is largely ceremonial.

Gillian Anderson tells me she is “very comfortable” talking about sex. The clues were obvious even before we met to talk about her new book, Want, a collection of women’s sexual fantasies.

The actor – once deemed the sexiest woman in the world by FHM magazine – wore a dress covered in vulvas to an awards ceremony and has a soft drinks brand called the G Spot.

She’ll forever be associated with frank discussions about intimate activities, after her role as a sex therapist in the hit Netflix show Sex Education.

But Anderson says even she “struggled” to express her own sexual fantasy in words for the book, as requested by her publishers.

“Suddenly describing the imagery that’s been in my head for a while and the action of doing that, added a level of intimacy that I wouldn’t have expected, and I wouldn’t have expected myself to be so shy around it.”

Anderson’s fantasy is hidden amongst 174 in a book she curated that is not for the prudish.

The actor, who first made her mark as Dana Scully in the TV show The X Files, and her publishers received 1,800 anonymous submissions from women around the world.

The letters were whittled down and collated into 13 chapters with titles including “To Be Worshipped”, “Exploration”, “Power and Submission” and “The Watchers and the Watched”.

The contributors were self-selecting and anonymous detailing only sexual identity, age, income, relationship status.

Clinical psychologist Professor Susan Young, who’s read the book, tells me “sexual fantasies are a healthy and normal aspect of sexual expression, provided they do not cause distress and harm”.

They allow people to explore “in a safe, private and controlled environment – their minds”.

Some of the fantasies in Want are moving – the bereaved woman who craves touch and mourns the secondary loss of sexual relations. “I do wish there were more discussion of grief and spouse loss and sexuality,” she writes.

Others are almost pastiches – a fantasy about “very hot, sensual, passionate sex” with Harry Styles.

One contributor, whose orthodox religion forbids women from stepping up to the altar, fantasises about getting intimate on an altar in an abandoned church.

Anderson describes the stories as “honest and raw and intimate and beautiful”, adding: “We’ve got letters fantasising about having sex with strangers and talking about being turned on by the idea of voyeurism.”

“What I was most interested in was the joy and the enjoyment that the women had clearly in writing, how much it opened them up to understanding themselves more, it seemed. Ultimately, this is not my book. This is the book of every woman who contributed.”

Want is a 21st Century take on another collection of women’s fantasies, My Secret Garden, published in 1973. The journalist Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking book became a global bestseller, the first time female desires had been made so public.

Fifty-one years after My Secret Garden, Anderson says she was “surprised” how much shame there still is around talking about sex and sharing sexual fantasies with friends or partners.

“I would have thought there would be less of it today” and it was “quite an eye opener.”

Her book is an attempt to get us all to be more upfront about our desires.

“Sex and sexual fantasy are still very much taboo, even though we have shows like Sex Education and Euphoria and Fifty Shades of Grey,” Anderson says. And then there’s “the multi-billion dollar porn industry,” which she describes as being “in our faces, on our screens, on our phones all the time”.

One of the contributions in Want begins: “I found it so difficult to understand what truly my own fantasies are. So much of what is played out in porn is geared towards men, and so many expectations set on us as women, that I have a very difficult time navigating what really turns me on versus how I feel I should perform.”

Anderson would encourage young people to read her book “because there are so many different versions of how sex can be that is outside what is handed to them by the porn industry”.

“There’s a lot of tenderness and women really wanting to be seen for themselves and who they are and be cared for – and there’s a lot of romance in it as well.”

Prof Young highlights a difference between male and female desire. “Women’s fantasies often include an emotional or narrative context that is likely to differ from the more visual, and sexually explicit content reported by men.”

Porn is “typically less attractive to women as pornography is typically generated and focused on men’s desires”, she adds.

In 1973, My Secret Garden contained explicit chapters about fantasies of non-consensual and illegal sex, including a chapter of rape fantasies.

We live in more sensitive times and in 2024, Anderson wanted to create “a safe space for women to share and for women to read and not feel like they have to be wary or afraid of what they’re going to find from one page to the next”.

It was “the right call” to refuse “letters that bordered on illegality or bestiality or incest”, she says.

Despite that choice, a short chapter The Captive contains material Anderson says strays into “dangerous topics and it almost felt disingenuous for us not to include them because they are fantasies that women have”.

Prof Young says these types of fantasy “about intense domination, submission, violent and/or even non-consensual acts are not intended to be acted upon”.

“They provide a safe place to explore interests and desires that are considered taboo, dangerous or socially unacceptable.”

Crucially, for Anderson, in fantasy the woman “is in charge, she can decide with whom, when, where, how much, how often, when to stop, when to continue”.

“So it feels like an empowering admission and revelation rather than something that is under somebody else’s control.”

The 56-year-old star, very much in her prime, recalls “a fair few” of the characters she has played have taught her about sex and sexuality. It’s “vital” for her to understand the inner lives, desires and fantasies of these women, in order to understand “what makes them tick”.

We don’t have time to get into what that meant for her preparation for roles including Miss Havisham in Great Expectations or Emily Maitlis in Emmy-nominated Scoop, a dramatisation of Newsnight’s car-crash interview with Prince Andrew.

But she tells me firmly, when it came to her role in The Crown, she “did not think about Margaret Thatcher’s sexual fantasies”.

In person, Anderson is every inch the star; glowing, smooth-skinned, petite. Some of the anonymous women in her book struggle with body image and don’t feel desirable.

Even Anderson admits to having “gone through periods where it’s struck me quite harshly that I too am ageing”.

She continues: “Being on camera, there are certainly times… when I’m seeing the final product and thinking, ‘Oh my God, is that really what I look like?’”

Her philosophy is to remember “that’s going to be the youngest that I look from here on out, so I better embrace it”.

Some of her peers resort to plastic surgery. “I haven’t reached for that yet,” she notes. “But at some point, who knows?”

She’s recently finished shooting a female-led period western for Netflix called The Abandons. Anderson plays a silver baron, one of a pair of “duelling matriarchs” opposite Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey.

“I own the town… This is my town. I say that a lot as I’m walking down the middle of the town,” she smiles.

When we met, Anderson sounded British, but often, in interviews and on her Instagram feed, her accent is American.

She was born in the US but has lived permanently in Britain for decades.

“My cells are American, but my soul is British,” she tells me.

Her next role is a Channel 4 drama that she’s about to start filming in Belfast. Her Northern Irish accent is also “not bad, actually”, she says.

But before that, there’s a round of book publicity to get through. And the obvious question, asked not just by me I assume: can she offer up any clues which fantasy is hers?

“No way,” she laughs. Like the others “mine will stay anonymous”.

A story posted on a mysterious website has been widely circulated on social media after it made a baseless claim that Kamala Harris – the Democratic presidential nominee – was involved in an alleged hit-and-run incident.

It claims, without providing evidence, that a 13-year-old girl was left paralysed by the crash, which it says took place in San Francisco in 2011.

The story, which was published on 2 September by a website purporting to be a media organisation called KBSF-San Francisco News, has been widely shared online. Some online posts by right-leaning users citing the story have been viewed millions of times.

BBC Verify has found numerous false details indicating it is fake and the website has now been taken down.

The online article – accompanied by a five-minute video – contains an interview with a woman who it identifies as 26-year-old Alicia Brown and who it claims is paralysed.

There is no evidence to confirm her identity or whether she is paralysed (she is filmed sitting down and from the waist up in an undisclosed location).

The article refers to her as both Alisha and Alicia, without explanation.

In the video, she claims she was hit by a car while crossing the road in June 2011 with her mother in San Francisco and later claims, again without providing any evidence, that the person who hit her was Kamala Harris.

A narrator in the video then say this woman has undergone 11 surgeries and two X-rays are shown.

No evidence of the incident occurring nor the involvement of Ms Harris are provided.

BBC Verify ran a search for the website’s registration details, which revealed the domain was set up within the last few weeks – on 20 August 2024.

There is also no public record of a KBSF news outlet in San Francisco.

The website has now been taken offline and is no longer accessible.

The top image in the story, which also features in the video, shows a close up of a smashed car windscreen with what looks like a police officer and a number of fire crew standing by the side of the road next to it.

BBC Verify downloaded the image and searched for previous versions of it online – using a reverse image search tool – and found that it was originally posted in a news story about a crash in Mangilao, Guam, in 2018.

Next, we examined the X-rays shown in the video.

Using reverse image search again, it is clear that these images have been lifted from medical research articles posted in 2010 and 2017.

According to the articles, the first X-ray belongs to a 58-year-old patient admitted to a hospital in China.

The second X-ray belongs to a 12-year-old girl admitted to the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

On the video interview itself, we approached several experts to see whether it had been generated by AI.

Professor Hany Farid, an expert in digitally manipulated images, analysed the video and found no evidence of digital manipulation or AI-generation in either the audio or visuals.

“I think it is most likely that this is an old-fashioned (and not particularly well executed) cheap fake that is simply staged,” he said.

Prof Farid explained that unlike “deepfakes” which are typically created or edited by using artificial intelligence tools, a “cheap fake” can be created by using lower-tech software that is cheaper and more accessible.

A cheap fake, he said, encompasses everything from slowing down an audio to make someone sound drunk to cropping an image.

“It is a good reminder that we don’t need a lot of technology to perpetrate lies,” Prof Farid added.

We looked for any press reports from 2011 about a hit and run incident in San Francisco allegedly involving Ms Harris – who was then Attorney General of California – but could find none.

We have also contacted the San Francisco police department and the Harris campaign.

The story and the website it originally appeared on share striking similarities with a network of fake news websites that masquerade as US local news outlets, which BBC Verify has previously extensively reported on.

John Mark Dougan, a former Florida police officer who relocated to Moscow is one of the key figures behind the network.

Approached by BBC Verify to comment on the hit-and-run story, Mr Dougan denied any involvement, saying: “Do I ever admit to anything? Of course it’s not one of mine.”

The websites mix dozens of genuine news stories taken from real news outlets with what is essentially the real meat of the operation – totally fabricated stories that often include misinformation about Ukraine or target US audiences.

The websites are often set up shortly before the fake stories appear on them, and then go offline after they serve their purpose.

These fabricated stories often include videos featuring people who claim to be “whistleblowers” or “independent journalists”. In some cases the videos are narrated by actors – in others it appears they are AI-generated voices.

Examples of the fake stories include a rare Bugatti car purchased by Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska, an expensive UK mansion purchased by President Zelensky, and a secret wiretapping operation at Donald Tump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

A 14-year-old boy will be charged with murder after four people were killed and nine injured in a shooting at a Georgia high school.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said two pupils and two teachers died in Wednesday’s attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Barrow County.

Colt Gray, a student at the school, was arrested by two officers on campus, an official said. He will be tried as an adult.

It has emerged that the FBI interviewed him last year after receiving anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting, but agents did not arrest him at the time.

Officers first received reports of a shooting at the school of around 1,900 pupils at around 10:20 local time (14:20 GMT).

Local sheriff Jud Smith described the attack as “pure evil”.

“Within minutes law enforcement was on scene, as well as two school resource officers assigned to the school who immediately encountered the subject,” the sheriff said in a news conference.

“The subject immediately surrendered. He gave up, got on the ground. And the officers took him into custody.”

Officials said no motive had been identified and that law enforcement did not know of “any targets at this point”.

According to the FBI, investigators had visited the suspect in May 2023 and interviewed him and his father about threats posted online which included pictures of guns.

“The father stated that he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them,” the FBI said in a statement.

The suspect, who was 13-years-old at the time, denied making the online threats and officials “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject”.

“At the time, there was no probable cause for an arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels.”

One of those killed on Wednesday was 14-year-old Mason Schermerhorn, who was autistic, according to local outlet WSB-TV.

Family members had posted Mason’s photo on social media after they couldn’t find him and later reportedly confirmed he did not survive the shooting.

Teacher and coach David Phenix was injured after being shot in the foot and hip, shattering his hip bone, according to his family’s social media posts.

He had surgery but was in a stable condition, someone who identified herself as his daughter said on Facebook.

Law enforcement have not said what type of weapon was used, or how many bullets were fired.

The suspect was interviewed and spoke with investigators once in custody, Sheriff Smith said.

“This is going to take multiple days for us to get answers as to what happened and why this happened,” he told reporters.

Dozens of police officers swiftly responded to the shooting at the school, which was placed on lockdown and cleared, with pupils taken to a nearby football stadium before being released to their families.

Lyela Sayarath, who was in the alleged attacker’s class, told CNN that the suspect left the room at the beginning of their algebra lesson.

She said he came back and knocked on the door, which had locked automatically, but another student refused to let him in after noticing he had a gun.

Ms Sayarath told CNN the attacker then went to the classroom next door, where he began shooting.

Alexsandra Romero, a second-year pupil, said she was sitting in class when someone came barging in and shouted at students, warning them to get down.

“I can just remember my hands were shaking,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I felt bad because everybody was crying, everybody was trying to find their siblings.

“I can still picture everything, like the blood, the shouting.”

Marques Coleman, 14, said he saw the attacker holding a “big gun” just before the shooting began.

“I got up, I started running, he started shooting like, like 10 times. He shot at least 10 times,” he told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

“My teacher started barricading the door with desks,” he said.

After standing up, the pupil said he saw “one of my classmates on the ground bleeding so bad”, another girl shot in the leg and a friend shot in the stomach.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said on X, formerly Twitter, that he was “praying for the safety of those in our classrooms” and that he was directing “all available state resources” to assist.

Speaking at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, Democratic White House candidate Vice-President Kamala Harris called the shooting “a senseless tragedy”.

“It’s just outrageous that every day in our country… that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether their child will come home alive.

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Republican White House candidate Donald Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: “These cherished children were taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland, the top law enforcement official in the US, said federal agents were helping the investigation.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has again insisted that Israeli forces will not leave the Philadelphi Corridor – a strategically important strip of land in southern Gaza along the border with Egypt.

He told foreign media in Jerusalem that he is “open” to considering alternatives to the presence of Israeli troops along the Gaza-Egypt border, as part of any future permanent ceasefire deal – but that he did not see it happening.

Mr Netanyahu argued that Israeli troops must remain in this buffer zone to prevent weapons and possibly Israeli hostages being smuggled across the border.

Hamas said in a statement cited by Reuters news agency that Mr Netanyahu’s decision not to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor is an attempt to thwart the ceasefire agreement, adding that it was time to put pressure on Israel.

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Earlier on Wednesday, Mr Netanyahu said conditions for any permanent ceasefire must include “a situation where the Philadelphi corridor cannot be perforated.”

He said if someone could show, “not on paper, not in words, not in a slide, but on the ground, day after day, week after week, month after month that they can actually prevent the recurrence of what happened there before we’re open to consider it.”

But, he continued, “I don’t see that happening […] And until that happens, we are there.”

His comments open a miniscule crack in his repeated insistence that Israeli forces would not leave Gaza’s southern border.

But he also doubled-down on his insistence that Israel needed to keep troops there for its security, describing it as a “red line”.

“People said: this will kill the deal,” he continued. “And I say: such a deal will kill us.”

Making more concessions after Hamas killed six hostages last week would be “illogical”, “immoral” and “insane,” he insisted.

“We have red lines. They haven’t changed. We’ll hold to them.”

His security chiefs, including his defence minister, are widely reported to have backed alternatives to a military presence along the border, such as technological solutions to monitor activity there, or the presence of allied forces.

Leaks to Israeli media have described shouting matches between the prime minister and his defence chiefs in meetings, with Mr Netanyahu reportedly accused of not wanting a deal at all.

A growing number of people here appear to believe that the prime minister is playing for time, and that his real goal is to find and kill the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, before ending the war.

Mr Netanyahu says he is safeguarding Israel’s security in the face of extraordinary international pressure. And that it is Hamas who is blocking a deal.

Talks on a permanent ceasefire would only take place once Israel and Hamas agree to begin the first phase of a three-step plan, which is being pushed heavily by US President Joe Biden.

Israel’s national public radio quoted an unnamed senior official who said that the chief negotiator, Mossad head David Barnea, had conveyed to mediators Israel’s agreement to withdraw troops from the border at a later stage in the ceasefire process.

But even getting agreement on the first stage is proving tricky, with many issues still unresolved.

Australian Olympian Rachael Gunn has apologised to the nation’s breakdancing community for the “backlash” they have experienced following her controversial routine in Paris, which made headlines globally.

Gunn, who competes as Raygun, was eliminated from the B-Girls competition with a score of zero, prompting ridicule and praise for her unorthodox style by users across social media.

In her first sit-down interview since taking part in the Games – and amid questions over her qualification and performance – Gunn was asked if she genuinely thought she was Australia’s best female breakdancer.

“I think my record speaks to that,” she told Network 10’s The Project.

“It is really sad to hear those criticisms and I am very sorry for the backlash that the community has experienced, but I can’t control how people react,” she continued, addressing the flood of critiques her routine has garnered online.

The 36-year-old university lecturer lost all three of her Olympic battles, with her green tracksuit and eccentric performance – which included the sprinkler move and kangaroo-inspired hopping – generating a sea of memes.

In the aftermath of her performance, Gunn faced accusations that she had manipulated the selection process, including allegations that she had set up her own governing body and that her husband had judged her qualification trial.

These claims have since been denounced as false by several organisations, including the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) and the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF).

“The conspiracy theories were just awful,” Gunn told Network 10.

“I was the top-ranked Australian B-girl in 2020 and 2022 and 2023. I have been invited to represent at how many World Championships… So, the record is there. But anything can happen in a battle,” she added.

Gunn, who has a background as a jazz, tap and ballroom dancer, had publicly defended her routine as “artistic and creative”.

“I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently,” she said last month.

The top judge who oversaw the B-Girls competition has also thrown his weight behind Gunn, as have team officials and the broader Olympic breakdancing community.

But the fallout has divided and disappointed those involved in the sport in Australia.

“It made a mockery of the Australian scene and I think that’s why a lot of us are hurting,” Australian hip-hop pioneer Spice previously told the BBC.

A hip-hop inspired dance born in the boroughs of New York in the 1970s, breaking was introduced into this year’s Olympic schedule to attract a younger audience to the Games.

But some critics say it should never have been included, due to the organic nature of the genre, which doesn’t necessarily suit organised competition.

After her performance in Paris, Gunn appealed to the media directly in a video posted on her Instagram to stop “harassing” her family and friends.

In her interview with Network 10, she described being chased by reporters in the aftermath of the fallout as “really wild”.

“That really did put me in a state of panic… Dancing was my medicine, and then it turned into my source of stress,” she said.

Gunn admitted that she is “not in a place yet” to watch her performance back, but was touched by the support she has received from her fellow Olympians at the Closing Ceremony as well as from some of the general public.

“It so warmed my heart,” she said. “I would rather much focus on the positives out of this and the joy that I’ve brought people.”

Tuesday’s deaths in the English Channel have, as usual, done nothing to deter the smuggling gangs from launching more flimsy, overcrowded boats from the French coastline.

A BBC team watched a packed inflatable craft heading north, close to shore, early on Wednesday morning.

An hour later, a similar boat – very possibly the same one – was seen veering towards a French beach favoured by smugglers near the town of Wimereux to pick up even more paying customers.

French police rushed to intercept the group before they could clamber on board, but arrived moments too late. The boat set off with well over 40 people on it, some standing or clinging to the sides.

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While investigations into Tuesday’s disaster continue, local authorities chose to send bulldozers and teams of cleaners to dismantle the makeshift migrant camp outside Calais that was used by many of those who were on the boat that capsized.

“I’m stressed. I knew some of the [dead]. The police have now taken my tent and all my things,” said a 23-year-old Eritrean man who asked us to hide his identity.

French officials have suggested that most – if not all – of those who died were from the troubled east African nation of Eritrea. Many young men have abandoned the country in order to avoid military service.

“I’ve been waiting here a year. I don’t have money [to pay the smugglers]. It happens all the time – the drownings,” said the Eritrean, who remains determined to cross to the UK, believing he can find work there.

Further south, French fishermen who had been involved in Tuesday’s rescue operation, returned to the port of Boulogne with another day’s catch.

Several men told us they had helped to haul bodies from the water, having arrived at the scene less than half an hour after the boat had disintegrated, leaving all those onboard struggling in choppy, cold waters.

“The less we have to talk about that, the less we have to think about it,” said Bruno Hecquet sombrely, as he unloaded boxes of fresh whelks on the quayside.

“It’s sad. It shouldn’t be happening,” said captain Gaetan Baillet, but he shrugged when asked who was to blame for the rising death toll.

Dany Patoux, from a local migrant charity, Osmos 62, said the smuggling gangs were obviously responsible, but added that the growing militarisation of the French coast was driving those gangs to take ever greater risks – or rather to put their paying passengers at ever greater risk.

“All this extra security forces active on our coastline… the buggies and drones and helicopters… this is achieving nothing but to provoke more deaths. Those migrants who want to cross take ever greater risks,” said Patoux, arguing that more people were forced to cram on to each boat because so many of the inflatables were being destroyed by the police.

While the general mood regarding the migrant crisis here appears to be sombre, and largely sympathetic to those attempting to make the Channel crossing in small boats, some warn that frustration with the rising death toll is starting to reshape public opinion.

The UK must completely close its border or do something to make the crossing safer, said Olivier Barbarin, mayor of Le Portel.

“We can’t keep exposing to such risk all these freedom-loving men and women, who’ve fled war and whose one desire is to reach England.”

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 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. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr said she would be flown back to the Philippines as early as Wednesday.

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

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

Ms Guo’s case has played out as the Philippines and China continue to spar over reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea.

China has not commented on the allegations against her.

Authorities believe that Ms 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.

Mr Marcos said her arrest is “a warning to those who attempt to evade justice”.

“Such is an exercise in futility. The arm of the law is long and it will reach you,” he wrote on Facebook.

Photos showed Ms Guo wearing light pink pyjamas and a white coat when she was arrested.

Ms Guo was thrust under the national spotlight after authorities in March uncovered a sprawling scam centre in Bamban that were hiding under online casinos, known locally as Philippine Online Gaming Operations (Pogo).

Pogos cater to clients in the Chinese mainland, where gambling is illegal.

Ms Guo’s case confirmed suspicions that Pogos were being used as a front for organised crime and led to Mr Marcos outlawing them in response to public anger.

Pogos flourished under his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, whose presidency was marked by close ties with China.

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

During the raid in Ms Guo’s town, police rescued close to 700 scam centre workers, including 202 Chinese nationals and 73 other foreigners who were forced to pose as online lovers.

A Senate investigation that followed centred on her inability to detect the eight-hectare scam centre despite its location near her office.

Senators also grilled her on her parentage. A relative unknown in local politics, she was elected mayor on her first run for public office, which is rare in areas ruled by political families.

Ms Guo’s opaque answers on questions regarding her roots, led some senators to accuse her of being a Chinese “asset” or spy.

She gave a television interview where she attributed her low profile to being her father’s illegitimate child with her mum, who is also his maid. She said this forced her to lead a sheltered life in the family farm, until she was elected mayor of Bamban.

But the controversy did not subside and after she refused to appear in subsequent hearings, senators in July ordered her arrest. By that time, however, she had fallen from public view.

Soon after, an anti-graft body removed her from office.

In August, Filipino authorities said she had fled the country undetected and passed through Singapore and Malaysia on her way to Indonesia.

One official said she could be headed for the Golden Triangle, a border region in mainland South East Asia that is a known hideout of organised crime groups.

A furious Mr Marcos then ordered her Philippine passport cancelled and warned then that “heads will roll”.

He said Ms Guo’s escape “laid bare the corruption that undermines our justice system and erodes the people’s trust”.

Four-year-old Sandhya was sleeping outside her mud hut in India’s Uttar Pradesh state on the night of 17 August when a power cut plunged the village into darkness.

“The wolves attacked within two minutes of the lights going out. By the time we realised what was happening, they had taken her away,” recalls her mother, Sunita.

Sandhya’s body was found lying next day in the sugarcane farms, some 500 metres from her home.

Earlier in the month, in a neighbouring village, eight-year-old Utkarsh was sleeping under a mosquito net when his mother spotted a wolf creeping into their hut.

“The animal lunged from the shadows. I screamed, ‘Leave my son alone!’ My neighbours rushed in, and the wolf fled,” she recounts.

Since mid-April, a wave of wolf attacks has terrorised around 30 villages in Bahraich district, near the border with Nepal. Nine children and an adult have been carried off and killed by the wolves. The youngest victim was a one-year-old boy, and the oldest was a 45-year-old woman. At least 34 others have been injured.

Fear and hysteria have gripped the affected villages. With many village homes lacking locks, children are being kept indoors, and men are patrolling the darkly lit streets at night. Authorities have deployed drones and cameras, set traps and used firecrackers to scare away the wolves. So far, three wolves have been captured and relocated to zoos.

Such attacks on humans are extremely rare and most involve wolves infected with rabies, a viral disease that affects the central nervous system. A rabid wolf will typically make multiple assaults without consuming the victims.

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A report by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research reported 489 “relatively reliable cases” of wolf attacks in 21 countries – including India – between 2002 and 2020. Only 26 of them were fatal. Around 380 people were victims of “rabid attacks”.

There have been only two confirmed cases of wolf-related fatalities in North America over the past 50 years, Dave Mech, a renowned American biologist who specialises in wolf behaviour, told the BBC. This is despite a population of approximately 70,000 wolves spread across North America.

So why are wolves attacking humans in Bahraich?

Nestled between a river and forests, parts of Bahraich have long been a traditional wolf habitat. Located in the floodplain of the Ghaghara river, the district, home to 3.5 million people, is prone to seasonal flooding.

Heavy rains and flooding during the monsoons have drastically altered the landscape. The swollen river has inundated the forests, potentially driving the wolves out in search of food and water. Indian wolves prey on black buck, chinkara (Indian gazelle) and hare.

“Climate change is a gradual process but flooding can lead to habitat disruptions for the wolves, forcing them into human settlements in search of food,” says Amita Kanaujia of the Institute of Wildlife Sciences in Lucknow University.

Why would children be a target of the wolves in search of food?

During an investigation into killings of a large number of children in wolf attacks in Uttar Pradesh villages in 1996, wildlife experts found there was minimal supervision of children because most victims came from impoverished single-parent households, usually led by mothers.

In these poor Indian villages, livestock is often better protected than children. When a hungry wolf, facing a depleted prey habitat and limited access to livestock, encounters such vulnerable children, they become more likely targets. “Nowhere else in the world have we witnessed surges of wolf attacks on children,” Yadvendradev Jhala, a leading Indian scientist and conservationist, told me.

The current wolf attacks in Uttar Pradesh are possibly the fourth such wave in four decades. In 1981-82, wolf attacks in Bihar claimed the lives of at least 13 children. Between 1993 and 1995, another 80 children were attacked, this time by what were believed to be five wolf packs in the region’s Hazaribagh district.

The deadliest episode occurred over eight months in 1996, when at least 76 children from more than 50 villages in Uttar Pradesh were attacked, resulting in 38 deaths. The killings stopped after authorities killed 11 wolves. The media described them as “man-eating” wolves.

Mr Jhala and his colleague Dinesh Kumar Sharma conducted a meticulous investigation into the 1996 killings, examining body remains, wolf hair, village hutments, population density, livestock and autopsy reports. The current attacks in Uttar Pradesh bear an eerie resemblance to their findings from nearly 30 years ago.

In both instances, children were killed and partially consumed, showing bite marks on their throats and puncture wounds on various parts of their bodies. Most attacks occurred at night, with children sleeping outdoors in the heart of villages being taken away. Victims were frequently discovered in open areas, such as farms or meadows.

Like Bahraich today, the 1996 wolf attacks took place in villages near riverbanks, surrounded by rice and sugarcane farms and swampy groves. Both cases involved crowded villages and a large number of vulnerable children from poor farming families, which increased the risk.

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It is unclear whether the ongoing attacks are by a lone wolf or a pack. Based on his 30 years of studying wolves, Mr Jhala believes that a single wolf – like in 1996 – is probably responsible for the recent killings. Villagers have reported seeing a group of five to six wolves in their fields during the day, while the mother of eight-year-old Utkarsh, who survived, saw a single wolf entering her home and attacking her son.

For centuries, humans and wolves in India co-existed peacefully, thanks to the traditional tolerance of pastoralist communities, say wildlife experts. This long-standing co-existence has allowed wolves to persist despite frequent conflicts, particularly over livestock. However, times have changed, and the recent surge in attacks has raised new concerns.

Wildlife experts like Mr Jhala advise that children in the affected villages should stay indoors, sleep between adults if housing is inadequate, and be accompanied by an adult to the toilet at night. Villagers should avoid letting children roam unsupervised in areas where wolves might be hiding and appoint night watchmen to patrol the streets.

“Until we determine the exact reasons behind these attacks, these precautions are crucial to keep people safe,” Mr Jhala says. Meanwhile, people in Bahraich remain on edge every night.