The United Nations has called for a “full investigation” into the killing of a US-Turkish woman in the occupied West Bank during a protest on Friday.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was killed after Israeli forces opened fire.

The 26-year-old was taking part in a weekly protest against Jewish settlement expansion in the town of Beita near Nablus.

According to local media reports, Ms Eygi was shot by Israeli troops. Israel’s military said it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area”.

An eyewitness told the BBC World Service’s Newshour programme he had heard two shots fired at the protest.

Reacting to the killing, Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for the UN secretary general, said: “We would want to see a full investigation of the circumstances and that people should be held accountable.”

Civilians, he added, “must be protected at all times”.

The US also called for an investigation into the incident. Sean Savett, spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, said Washington was “deeply disturbed by the tragic death of an American citizen”.

“We have reached out to the government of Israel to ask for more information and request an investigation into the incident,” Mr Savett said.

Footage from the scene shortly after the shooting shows medics rushing Ms Eygi into an ambulance.

Jewish-Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak, who was at the protest, told BBC World Service’s Newshour programme he had seen “soldiers on the rooftop aiming”.

He said he had heard two separate shots, “with like a second or two distance between them”.

“I heard someone calling my name, saying in English, ‘Help us. We need help. We need help.” I ran towards them,” he said.

He said he had then seen Ms Eygi “lying on the ground underneath an olive tree, bleeding to death from her head”.

“I put my hand behind her back to try and stop the bleeding,” he said. “I looked up, there was a clear line of sight between the soldiers and where we were. I took her pulse, and it was very, very weak.”

He added that Friday’s demonstration had been Ms Eygi’s first time attending a protest with the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian group.

The dual-national was rushed to a hospital in Nablus and later pronounced dead.

Dr Fouad Nafaa, head of Rafidia Hospital where Ms Eygi was admitted, confirmed that a US citizen in her mid-20s had died from a “gunshot in the head”.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken deplored the “tragic loss”, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan branded the Israeli action “barbaric”.

Turkey’s foreign ministry said Ms Eygi had been “killed by Israeli occupation soldiers in the city of Nablus”.

Before travelling to the Middle East, Ms Eygi had recently graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle.

The school’s president, Ana Mari Cauce, described news of her death as “awful” while adding that Ms Eygi had had a “positive influence” on other students.

Ms Eygi was born in Antalya, as reported by Turkish media.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said: “During Israeli security forces activity adjacent to the area of Beita, the forces responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them.

“The IDF is looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area. The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review.”

In his interview with the BBC, Jonathan Pollak was asked about the IDF’s statement, where the Israeli military said security forces had responded to stone-throwing.

Mr Pollak said there had been clashes but he felt that soldiers had been “under no threat”.

There had been “no stone throwing” where she had been, he said.

Israeli forces withdrew from Jenin city and its refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Friday, following a major nine-day operation there.

The Palestinian health ministry says at least 36 Palestinians were killed – 21 from Jenin governorate – in that time. Most of the dead have been claimed by armed groups as members, but the ministry says children are also among those killed.

In the past 50 years, Israel has built settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where more than 700,000 Jews now live.

Settlements are held to be illegal under international law – that is the position of the UN Security Council and the UK government, among others – although Israel rejects this.

“Think of it as cricket cake, like fish cake,” the chef said as he urged the man in the buffet line to try the steaming, spicy laksa – a coconut noodle broth – full of “textured cricket protein”.

Next to it was a plate of chilli crickets, the bug version of a beloved Singaporean dish – stir-fried mud crabs doused in a rich, sweet chilli sauce.

It looked like any other buffet, except for the main ingredient in every dish: crickets.

The line included a woman who gingerly scooped stir-fried Korean glass noodles topped with minced crickets onto her plate, and a man who wouldn’t stop grilling the young chef.

You would have expected the diners to snap up the feast. After all, they were among more than 600 scientists, entrepreneurs and environmentalists from around the world who had descended on Singapore as part of a mission to make insects delicious. The name of the conference said it all – Insects to Feed the World.

And yet more of them were drawn to the buffet next to the insect-laden spread. It was the usual fare, some would have argued: wild-caught barramundi infused with lemongrass and lime, grilled sirloin steak with onion marmalade, a coconut vegetable curry.

Some two billion people, about a quarter of the world’s population, already eat insects as part of their everyday diet, according to the United Nations.

More people should join them, according to a growing tribe of bug advocates who champion insects as a healthy and green choice. But is the prospect of saving the planet enough to get people to sample their top creepy crawlies?

“We have to focus on making them delicious,” said New York-based chef Joseph Yoon, who designed the cricket-laced menu for the conference, along with Singaporean chef Nicholas Low. The event had permission to use only crickets.

“The idea that insects are sustainable, dense with nutrients, can address food security, and so on,” is not enough to make them palatable, let alone appetising, he added.

Studies have found that just six crickets met a person’s daily protein needs. And rearing them required less amount of water and land, compared with livestock.

Some countries have given insect diets a nudge, if not a push. Singapore recently approved 16 types of bugs, including crickets, silkworms, grasshoppers and honey bees, as food.

It is among a handful of countries, inlcuding the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Thailand, that are regulating what is still an incipient edible insects industry. Estimates vary from $400m to $1.4bn (£303m to £1.06bn).

Enter chefs like Nicholas Low who have had to find ways to “break down” insects to cook with them because people are not always up for trying them “in their original form”.

For the conference, Mr Low reinvented the popular laksa when he replaced the usual fishcake with patties made of minced cricket.

He said it also took some work to mask the earthy smell of the insects. Dishes with “strong flavours”, like laksa, were ideal because the delights of the original recipe distracted people from the crushed bugs.

Mr Low said crickets left little room for him to experiment. Usually deep-fried for a satisfying crunch, or ground to a fine powder, they were unlike meats, which made for versatile cooking, from braises to barbecue.

He could not imagine cooking with crickets every day: “I’m more likely to cook it as a special dish that is part of a larger menu.”

Since Singapore approved cooking with bugs, some restaurants have been trying their hand at it. A seafood spot has taken to sprinkling crickets on their satays and squid ink pastas, or serving them on the side of a fish head curry.

Of course there are others who have been more committed to the challenge. Tokyo-based Takeo Cafe has been serving customers insects for the past 10 years.

The menu includes a salad with twin Madagascar hissing cockroaches nestling on a bed of leaves and cherry tomatoes, a generous scoop of ice cream with three tiny grasshoppers perched on it and even a cocktail with spirits made from silkworm poo.

“What’s most important is [the customer’s] curiosity,” said Saeki Shinjiro, Takeo’s chief sustainability officer.

What about the environment? “Customers are not concerned so much,” he said.

Just to be on the safe side, Takeo also has a bug-free menu. “When designing the menu, we keep in mind not to discriminate against people who do not eat insects… Some customers are merely here to accompany their friends,” Mr Shinjiro said.

“We do not want such people to feel uncomfortable. There is no need to eat insects forcibly.”

It hasn’t always been this way, though. For centuries, insects have been a valued food source in different parts of the world.

In Japan grasshoppers, silkworms, and wasps were traditionally eaten in land-locked areas where meat and fish were scarce. The practice resurfaced during food shortages in World War Two, Takeo’s manager Michiko Miura said.

Today, crickets and silkworms are commonly sold as snacks at night markets in Thailand, while diners in Mexico City pay hundreds of dollars for ant larvae, a dish once considered a delicacy by the Aztecs, who ruled the region in the 15th and 16th Centuries.

But bug experts worry that these culinary traditions have been unravelling with globalisation, as people who eat insects now associate the diet with poverty.

There is a “growing sense of shame” in places with a long history of insect consumption, like Asia, Africa and South America, said Joseph Yoon, the New York-based chef.

“They now get glimpses of foreign cultures over the internet and they are embarrassed about eating insects because that is not the practice elsewhere.”

In her book Edible Insects and Human Evolution, anthropologist Julie Lesnik argued that colonialism deepened the stigma of eating insects. She wrote that Christopher Columbus and members of his expedition described the native Americans’ consumption of insects as “bestiality… greater than that of any beast upon the face of the earth”.

Of course, people’s attitudes could change. After all, gourmet treats such as sushi and lobster were once an alien concept to most people.

Sushi started out as a working-class dish found in street stalls. And lobsters, known as the “poor man’s chicken”, were once fed to prisoners and slaves in north-eastern America because of their abundance, said food researcher Keri Matiwck from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

But as transport networks made travel easier and food storage improved, more and more people were introduced to the crustacean. As demand increased, so did its price and status.

Foods once seen as “exotic”, or not even regarded as food, can gradually become mainstream, Dr Matwick said. “[But] cultural beliefs take time to change. It will take a while to change the perceptions of insects as disgusting and dirty.”

Some experts encourage people to raise their children to be more tolerant of unusual food, including insects, because future generations will face the full consequences of the climate crisis.

Insects may well become the “superfoods” of the future, as coveted as quinoa and berries. They may be grudginly eaten, rather than sought out for the joy that a buttery steak or a hearty bowl of ramen brings.

For now, Singapore chef Nicholas Low believes there is nothing pushing people to change their diets, especially in wealthy places where almost anything you want is a few clicks away.

Younger consumers may be willing to taste them out of curiosity, but the novelty will wear off, he said.

“We are spoilt for choice. We like our meat as meat, and our fish as fish.”

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has begun its journey back to Earth – but the astronauts it was supposed to be carrying are staying behind on the International Space Station.

The empty craft, which has been switched to autonomous mode, has undocked from the orbiting lab.

The capsule, which suffered technical problems after it launched with Nasa’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, has been deemed too risky to take them home.

They will instead return in a SpaceX Crew Dragon, but not until February – extending an eight-day stay on the ISS to eight months.

Starliner’s flight back will last six hours, and after it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere it will use parachutes to slow its descent to land at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico on Saturday.

Nasa said earlier that Butch and Suni were in good spirits and in regular contact with their families.

Steve Stich, Nasa’s commercial crew programme manager, told a media briefing that both astronauts were passionate about their jobs.

“They understand the importance now of moving on and… getting the vehicle back safely.”

This was the first test flight for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft with astronauts on board.

But it was plagued with problems soon after it blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 5 June.

The capsule experienced leaks of helium, which pushes fuel into the propulsion system, and several of its thrusters did not work properly.

Engineers at Boeing and Nasa spent months trying to understand these technical issues, but in late August the US space agency decided that Starliner was not safe enough to bring the astronauts home.

Steve Stich admitted there was “tension in the room” between Boeing and Nasa while the decision was being made, with Boeing arguing that their spacecraft could safely return with the pair on board.

“The Nasa team, due to the uncertainty and the modelling, could not get comfortable with that,” he said.

The plan to use rival company SpaceX has brought with it a significant delay to the astronauts’ return.

The extra time is to allow SpaceX to launch its next vehicle, with lift off scheduled for the end of September.

It was supposed to have four astronauts on board, but instead it will travel with two. This leaves room for Butch and Suni to join them in the vehicle to return to Earth at the end of its planned stay next February.

Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station, said that the astronauts were adapting well to their extended mission. Both have previously completed two long-duration stays in space.

She said the pair were undertaking the exercise programmes needed to stay healthy in the weightless environment.

And she added that they now had all of the gear they needed for their unplanned eight-month stay.

“When we first sent them up, they were borrowing a lot of our generic clothing that we have on board, and we have now switched some of those things out,” she said.

She explained that a resupply mission in July had delivered “specific crew preference items” that the pair had requested.

“So they actually have all of the standard expedition gear at this point that any other crew member would be able to select. And we’ve got another cargo vehicle coming up, so we’ll send up anything else that they need for the back-end half of their mission on that flight.”

The issues with Starliner have no doubt been a blow to Boeing, which is suffering from financial losses as it struggles to repair its reputation following recent in-flight incidents and two fatal accidents five years ago.

After so many problems, a trouble-free landing will be a much desired outcome for the company – and for Nasa.

”After we get the vehicle back, we’ll go through a couple months of post-flight analysis,” said Steve Stich.

“There are teams starting to look at what we do to get the vehicle fully certified in the future.”

The US space agency has emphasised its commitment to Boeing’s spacecraft – having two American companies to take astronauts to space has been a key goal for Nasa for some time.

When their space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, the US spent a decade relying solely on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to transport its crew and cargo – a situation Nasa admitted was far from ideal.

So in 2014, Boeing and SpaceX were awarded contracts to provide commercial space flights for Nasa astronauts – Boeing’s was worth $4.2bn (£3.2bn) while SpaceX received $2.6bn (£2bn).

So far SpaceX has sent nine crewed flights to space for Nasa, as well as some commercial missions, but this was Boeing’s first attempt at a crewed mission.

Boeing’s Starliner had already been delayed for several years because of setbacks in the spacecraft’s development and two previous uncrewed flights in 2019 and 2022 also suffered technical problems.

But Nasa administrator Bill Nelson says he is 100% certain it would fly with a crew onboard again.

In American politics it’s customary to suggest that most voters don’t start paying attention to the presidential election until after the Labor Day holiday weekend.

Well, that occasion – seen here as the unofficial end of summer – has now been and gone. And as a noticeable chill is felt in the air, many more voters will start to take note of politics. That includes the crucial swing voters in a handful of closely contested states who will ultimately decide the race for the White House.

Right on cue, as these eyes start to focus on the election, we have a presidential debate that will see Donald Trump and Kamala Harris go head-to-head for the first time. In fact, it will be the first time the two candidates have ever met in person. The high-stakes event in Philadelphia on Tuesday night is expected to draw in tens of millions of viewers.

Many of these viewers will be getting a first look at Ms Harris beyond the comfort of a rally stage. Before she dramatically replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July, Ms Harris’s national profile was unusually low despite her serving as vice-president for almost four years.

And make no mistake, her explosion on to the big stage so late in the election cycle is highly, highly unusual.

The normal rhythms of American politics allow candidates to introduce themselves to the country as they campaign for their party’s presidential nomination in primary contests held much earlier in the year. This process weeds out those who, while popular in their home states, are not ready or equipped to take the leap on to the national stage (see Ron DeSantis) and gives participants vital experience at campaigning and debating.

Ms Harris did none of that this year. When she ran for the Democratic nomination in 2019, she pulled out before a single primary vote was cast after a campaign dogged by poor messaging, in which she struggled to sell her own vision.

Yet, this time around, it appears that Ms Harris’s unusual anonymity may in fact be a secret superpower.

She has been able to present herself to America on her own terms, highlighting her relatively humble background, her record as a prosecutor and her promise to uphold what she sees as fundamental rights such as access to abortion.

Ms Harris has also positioned herself as the candidate of change – a fresh face for the future – even though she has been part of the current administration for almost four years.

Trump is attacking her as a dangerously radical liberal. But to do so he is relying on statements she made and policies she promoted when she was competing in Democratic primaries in 2019. That’s because, to win the Democratic nomination, candidates have to appeal to more liberal members of the party before then trying to move to the centre in the general election.

In this election, Ms Harris did not have to compete against members of her own party to win the nomination and so had no reason to adopt more liberal policy positions as she did in the past.

Just look at her failed bid in 2019, when she advocated for a ban on fracking and offshore drilling as well as universal free healthcare. Both ideas have been rapidly dropped this time around.

Of course, we don’t know what promises Ms Harris would have made in a 2024 primary process, but to win the support of progressives she may well have taken similar positions to the above that Trump would now be using to attack her. No primary contest means less ammunition for the former president. And relying on statements his opponent made five years ago, and policy positions she has since dropped, is blunting his attacks.

This week, Ms Harris announced tax proposals that differentiate her platform from what President Biden was promising. She is calling for a lower tax hike than Mr Biden proposed on the investment earnings of Americans making more than $1 million a year. That is not the sort of idea that would have won her support in any Democratic primary vote.

There are arguably downsides to entering the race at such a late stage, however. Competing for the nomination would have given Ms Harris more experience with unscripted appearances – press conferences, interviews and TV debates.

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So far, she has done only one broadcast interview since President Biden stepped aside and that was a joint appearance with her running mate Tim Walz. That encounter on CNN wasn’t exactly a tough interrogation, and she still struggled to answer what she would do on day one of the job if elected.

At her vast rallies and during her well-received speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, Ms Harris relied on a teleprompter and familiar lines. The 90-minute debate on Tuesday will be her longest unscripted appearance in this campaign.

Trump, who is far more experienced on the presidential debate stage, will try to knock her off her prepared talking points and do what has yet to happen in the race: press Ms Harris aggressively on policy and her changing positions.

And Ms Harris knows better than anyone that the last time Trump took to the debate stage his opponent ended up leaving the race. For America’s surprise presidential candidate, who has completely avoided the challenges and scrutiny of a Democratic primary, this debate represents a sterner test than anything she has faced so far in this pain-free campaign.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

The killing of a 15-year-old boy by a classmate last month has fuelled religious tensions in an Indian city, leaving one family grieving and the other shattered by the crime.

On 16 August, Heena* learned her teenage son Zakir*, 15, had been accused of stabbing a classmate at their school in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

Zakir allegedly pulled a knife from his backpack and attacked Devraj, a Hindu boy, who died in the hospital three days later.

The incident sparked a stream of grief and anger as well as a conversation on how to deal with violence in classrooms.

The state police denied any religious angle to the incident. “The students had an argument over notebooks which turned ugly,” investigating officer Chhagan Purohit told the BBC.

But the incident set off a wave of religious violence.

False rumours that Zakir, a Muslim, planned the killing went viral on WhatsApp, sparking protests in Udaipur with right-wing Hindu groups torching vehicles and chanting anti-Muslim slogans, leading to a curfew and internet shutdown.

Zakir was taken into custody and sent to a juvenile home, while his father was arrested on the charges of abetment to murder, Mr Purohit said.

The next day, following a familiar pattern in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled (BJP-ruled) states, bulldozers demolished Heena’s rented home, leaving her and her four daughters homeless.

“My son deserves punishment and I hope he learns to be a better human being,” Heena said. “Why did they have to punish his entire family?”

Though the violence has subsided, Udaipur residents are shaken by how a simple fight escalated. Many now fear their once-integrated Hindu-Muslim neighbourhoods are being torn apart along religious lines.

“Things are getting worse and we can feel it,” one of Heena’s neighbours said on condition of anonymity.

For Devraj’s family, everything else pales in comparison to the pain of losing their son.

“This is the news every parent dreads,” his father Pappu Lal told the BBC.

A cobbler in Kuwait, he found out about the incident while he was thousands of miles away from home. By the time he got home, his son was unconscious. He died without getting a chance to see or speak to his father.

The trauma, Mr Lal said, catapulted his wife and him into debilitating sadness and sparked fury inside him.

“Their house was demolished but we lost our son,” Mr Lal said. “The house can be built again but our child? He will never come back.”

The incident has become a political sore point for the BJP, which governs India and Rajasthan, after some opposition leaders accused the party of fuelling religious tensions for political gains.

Authorities claim that the house where Heena lived was demolished because it was illegally built on forest land. A notice was sent to Heena a day before the action.

But her brother Mukhtar Alam*, who owns the house, questioned how the demolition could take place when only the tenants were alerted. “It was my house and I built it with a lot of hard work. How can they just come and raze it without even telling me?”

He also asked why the other houses in the area were still standing if they were all built on forest land.

Mukesh Saini, an official in Udaipur’s forest department, told the BBC that action would be taken against those structures “at an appropriate time”.

“Right now the atmosphere is not right for that,” he said.

Critics have questioned the timing of the act and say that punishing someone for an alleged crime using laws meant for another makes no sense.

In BJP-governed states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Assam, bulldozers often swiftly demolish the homes of crime suspects, with officials touting this as evidence of their tough stance on law and order. While victims include Hindu families, opposition leaders and activists argue that these demolitions disproportionately target Muslims, especially following religious violence or protests.

“There is no logic to it except the communal logic of collective punishment and the authority acting as the populist dispenser of tough vigilante justice,” said Asim Ali, a political scientist.

India’s Supreme Court recently criticised the demolition of properties linked to people accused of crimes and said it would issue guidelines around this.

Manna Lal Rawat, the BJP’s Udaipur MP, told BBC Hindi that the demolition was not connected to the stabbing. He also alleged that the stabbing occurred because the accused student “was influenced by extremists” and said he had urged the police to ensure the killing was not a part of a “larger pattern”.

An uneasy calm has prevailed in Udaipur since 2022, when two Muslim men beheaded a Hindu man, filmed the assault and posted it online. They said the act was in response to his support for a politician’s divisive remarks about the Prophet Muhammad.

The killing had sparked massive protests and violence in the city for days.

“The memories of that murder are still alive in the minds of people,” a senior Rajasthan police official, who wanted to stay anonymous, told the BBC. “That’s why a fight between two children turned into riots. Due to politics, the peace of the city has been damaged.”

But Mr Lal cannot understand what prompted the fight in the first place.

He says his son was a good boy – as mischievous as a 15-year-old could be, but also sweet and innocent.

“He never fought with anyone in school. He wanted to become a policeman when he grew up, become the voice of justice,” he said, his eyes on Devraj’s picture in the corner of the living room.

Since Devraj’s death, hundreds of people have been visiting the family’s small house, located in a bustling neighbourhood where Hindus and Muslims have lived peacefully together for years.

But for Mr Lal and his grieving wife, all condolences feel meaningless.

He refuses to talk about the violence or what may have caused it, saying that’s for the administration to answer. “I just want justice for my son”.

Questions have also been raised about the school’s handling of the case.

Mr Lal alleges that no teacher accompanied Devraj to the hospital and that he was taken there on a motorbike by two of his classmates.

The school’s principal, Isha Dharmawat, who has since been suspended for negligence of duty, denied the allegation.

She said she had asked the students to take Devraj on her motorbike to avoid any delay in treatment and that she and four other teachers had also gone to the hospital immediately.

As the city limps back to normalcy, the effects of the incident are most starkly visible at the school where the children studied.

After the stabbing, the school closed for a week and reopened with only one student attending.

The two students who accompanied Devraj to the hospital were questioned by police and soon left the city, citing safety concerns. Parents still sending their children to school are worried about their safety.

“Children should be kept out of politics till they are ready to face the world. This has shaken us all up,” a parent who wanted to remain unnamed said.

Meanwhile, Heena is desperately trying to piece her life back together.

“Half of my belongings are still buried [under the debris of the demolished house]. After the demolition, no one wants to rent me a house,” she said.

Even now, she wonders how her son got the knife or why he allegedly used it on his friend. Was it collapsing mental health, a childish rivalry or something else? She does not know.

But she does know that she will forever be seen as an enabler of the violence and its resulting hatred, and as a terrible parent.

“Everything of mine has been taken away. Now if people want to hang my child, then hang him, what else can I say?”

For many people in the UK this week, school has started again.

But for women and girls in Afghanistan, there is still a ban from secondary school classrooms, and much of public life, by the Taliban.

Mah, 22, fled from the country in August 2021 when the group swept into the capital Kabul.

She is now getting an education in the UK, starting a GCSE in English this week and she tells BBC Newsbeat: “I am happy for myself. I am safe. I have freedom. I am free.”

“But at the same time, my friends in Afghanistan can’t do anything,” she adds.

In the three years since the Taliban took control, restrictions on women’s lives have increased.

Women and girls over 12 are banned from schools, and prevented from sitting most university entrance exams. There are also restrictions in the work they can do, with beauty salons being closed, as well as being not being able to go to parks, gyms and sport clubs.

“I don’t put my picture on [Whatsapp or Instagram] stories when I’m happy, when I go out with friends or when I’m in college,” Mah says.

“Because I don’t want my friends [back home] to feel like: ‘Oh she’s in the UK now – she has freedom’.”

Mah, who is in Cardiff, hopes a GCSE in English is the start to eventually becoming a midwife in Wales.

“It’s hard for me because I can go to college here and I can go to work.

“But at the same time, back home, my friends who are the same age, can’t leave the house.”

The Taliban has said its ban is down to religious issues.

They have repeatedly promised women would be readmitted once the issues were sorted – including making sure the curriculum was “Islamic”.

But, there has since been no movement on the ban, and Afghanistan is the only country with such restrictions.

Mah’s journey to education in Cardiff was far from easy.

During the Taliban takeover, she says she fled from Helmand Province to Kandahar and then to Kabul. She woke up in the middle of the night, three days after arriving in the capital city, to find the Taliban on her street.

“If I stayed in Afghanistan, maybe they would kill me, maybe they would marry me.

“I called my mum and said ‘Mum, I’m going.’ She said, ‘where are you going?’

“I said, ‘I don’t know’.”

Mah eventually arrived in the UK, along with other refugees who were being welcomed into the country.

“We came without anything. I didn’t say [a proper] goodbye to my mum. I didn’t even hug her. I will never forget this.

“It’s not safe now, but Afghanistan is the place I grew up and, went to school. I can’t forget the country, and I miss everything about it.”

Mah received support from one of the largest youth organisations, the Urdd, who were providing help in the Welsh capital.

Its chief executive, Sian Lewis, says some people who fled to Wales and received an education are bilingual in Welsh now.

“They were educated here in the Urdd to start off with and a number went to live in different parts of Wales.

“It’s opened so many doors for them,” she says.

When Mah came to the UK, she wasn’t able to speak English.

“It was so hard. I didn’t know anybody. Everything was new.”

But three years on, Mah has spoken to BBC Newsbeat in an English interview which lasted over 20 minutes, and is also learning Welsh.

“People here should say ‘thank God’ everyday.

“Women have rights. People here have whatever they want open to them, and they are safe. They should be happy. They are so lucky.”

Another person who has left Afghanistan is 17-year-old Aqdas.

She’s now in the US with a fully funded scholarship to a college in New Mexico, more than 12,000 miles away from her home.

She recalls the day the Taliban took Kabul.

“I remember that I did not know what to do any more.

“Will they take my rights away? Will I experience violence just like my mother did 20 years ago?

“I noticed that my mum was crying and she placed her hand on my shoulder, telling me that, she couldn’t continue her education because of the Taliban.”

But she told Aqdas that she shouldn’t “let the Taliban or your limitations write the scripts for your life”.

After that, Aqdas continued education online, in secret, with the help of the Herat online school.

“I never gave up on my studying. Whether it was online or finding another way to continue.”

It was a long, and often chaotic, journey for her as well. When she got her scholarship to the USA, she had to get a visa but the embassy was shut in Afghanistan.

She says she then went to Pakistan with her father, using a medical visa because as a female, she did not have permission to leave the country.

Aqdas has now started classes but says there are other things that are often overlooked in Afghanistan.

“Lots of people think the only problem in Afghanistan is just the girls’ education. There are other issues like mental health.

“Girls in Afghanistan are going through depression and anxiety every day and there is no help.”

The UK Government has told BBC Newsbeat that it strongly condemns the ban on women heading to the classroom and university, and that it urgently calls on the Taliban to “reverse these decisions and to protect Afghan girls’ rights”.

Newsbeat has approached the Taliban to comment on concerns that women and girls are banned from education – but have received nothing back.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

Pulling power. That is what China still has across Africa.

While the influence of others on the continent is questioned – for instance, France and the rest of the EU are being shunned by the Sahelian military juntas, and Russia’s mercenary-security “offer” is regarded with deep mistrust by pro-Western African governments – China has navigated a middle way.

Delegations from more than 50 states from across the African continent decided it was worth making the trip to Beijing for the latest China-Africa summit – known as the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation (Focac) – this week.

Dozens of leaders turned up – as well as UN chief António Guterres.

Alongside veterans such as Congo-Brazzaville strongman Denis Sassou-Nguesso, this was a first such gathering for the new Senegalese head of state Bassirou Diomaye Faye – rewarded with a front-row place next to President Xi Jinping in a family photo of leaders and their spouses.

For African governments resentful of the pressure to take sides in international disputes, China now appears as a refreshingly reliable partner, ready to collaborate without discrimination both with the allies of Moscow and with civilian-ruled states that are closer to Europe and the US.

Beijing certainly strikes a hard bargain in pursuit of its economic self-interest and need for natural raw materials, in return for development support, especially the construction of heavy infrastructure.

It is regularly accused of inducing African countries to take on too much debt, and was initially slow to join the international effort to alleviate the crushing repayment burden weighing upon some countries.

Even now, it refuses to grant outright debt cancellations.

Complaints that China reserves too many skilled construction roles for its own workers, at the expense of training Africans, are commonplace. The growing presence of Chinese traders has triggered resentments among some traditionally predominant commercial communities.

But for many African governments these are quibbles.

What they appreciate in an increasingly polarised world is Beijing’s non-partisan readiness to remain strongly engaged pretty much everywhere, without political strings.

Of course, it is the Chinese construction of big-ticket transport projects, which international development institutions and Western commercial investors so often treat with caution, that attracts the most attention.

The July 2023 coup in Niger has not dissuaded the Chinese from completing a 2,000km (1,200-mile) pipeline to deliver the country’s growing oil output to an export terminal in Benin.

In Guinea, also under military rule, the China-based Winning Consortium is well advanced in the construction of a 600km railway to the coast. This will run from one of the world’s largest iron ore deposits at Simandou, a scheme for which successive Guinean governments had struggled to secure international donor support.

And this week’s Focac summit brought a continuation of this strategy, with the announcement of a further 360bn yuan ($50.7bn; £36.6bn) in funding, for the next three years.

But this time there is a difference, with a heavy summit focus on the green energy transition, including investment in manufacturing in Africa, particularly electric vehicles.

That is important in both practical and symbolic terms for a continent that has famously lagged far behind Asia in developing sophisticated industries.

But the summit also brought promises of support for other types of green projects, with Mr Xi declaring a readiness to launch 30 clean energy projects and to co-operate in the nuclear sector.

That latter hint touches on a sore point for African commentators resentful of the fact that France has for decades mined Niger’s uranium to supply its own nuclear power sector without proposing generation projects for West Africa.

China is also active in the Nigerien uranium mining sector.

But amid the intensely complex technical and security challenges of the nuclear sector, it remains to be seen whether the Chinese president’s promise will really amount to more than comforting warm words.

Moreover, the Focac summit skated around some of the more sensitive and contentious environmental issues – such as the regular accusations that big Chinese vessels engage in over-fishing, leaving little for the local artisanal boats to catch.

Tactfully, Sierra Leone’s Fisheries Minister Princess Dugba preferred to focus on praising the government there for its construction of a new fishing port.

Meanwhile Mr Xi sought to perpetuate China’s self-presentation as a fellow member of the “global south”, pointing out that his country and Africa together account for a third of the world’s population.

The summit adopted a Beijing Declaration on building “a shared future in the new era” and the Beijing Action Plan for 2025-2027.

Calling on Chinese contractors to return to Africa now that disruptive Covid-era curbs were gone, Mr Xi talked of a tripling of infrastructure schemes, the creation of one million jobs and co-operation across a range of sectors.

But it is not entirely clear what the promised 360bn yuan in financing – an apparent bid to promote the international profile of the Chinese currency – will amount to in concrete terms.

The president said that 210bn yuan ($29.6bn) would be provided through credit lines, while there would be 70bn yuan ($9.9bn) in business investments.

He also announced $280m in military and food aid – but for an entire continent that is a marginal sum, in contrast to the big-budget economic funding.

It remains to be seen how that new financing is distributed – and whether it is managed in a way that avoids pushing some countries back into unsustainable debt.

Over the past 10-15 years Chinese lending to African countries desperate to press forward with the construction of infrastructure was widely blamed for helping to push them back into a debt crisis barely two decades after they benefitted from international debt-forgiveness schemes.

In 2016, the peak year, $30bn in Chinese lending to Africa was announced.

Projects were often financed by China Eximbank on terms that were usually kept confidential but were almost certainly much more expensive than funding from the soft credit windows of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank, or the grant aid provided by many Western government donors.

However, defenders of China’s approach could quite reasonably point out that it was frequently willing to finance and build projects, and accept levels of risk, in circumstances where other partners were not willing to tread or commit resources on the necessary scale.

And to some extent, a natural division of labour evolved, where China funded and built heavy infrastructure, while Western donors and the big development institutions financed the equally essential “soft” investments – in health and education, skills training, government systems, food security, rural resilience and so on.

As the scale of the new financial pressures weighing upon many countries became clear, particularly amid the global economic slowdown caused by the pandemic, the G20 countries set up the Common Framework, to get indebted countries back on to a sustainable track.

China did join in the effort to restructure developing countries’ repayment burdens. But critics accused it of not doing enough.

Now, several years on, this week’s Focac summit suggests the picture may be poised for a further evolution.

Just as, two decades ago, China began to fill a role in infrastructure development that Africa’s traditional donors could no longer adequately fill, Beijing now has ambitions to become a key partner for the continent in new hi-tech industry and green technology on a scale that many European and North American companies are unwilling or unable to contemplate.

While Western investment in Africa, particularly in sub-Saharan countries, continues to be dominated largely by mining, oil, gas and agriculture, and Russia focuses on security services for favoured regimes, Beijing talks of a broader economic vision.

However, the question is whether, beyond Mr Xi’s rhetoric, this will amount to a real diversification into new sectors such as green industry.

Beyond a few niche prestige projects – will the traditional focus on big infrastructure continue to predominate?

It is not yet clear if the China-Africa relationship is poised for a fundamental change.

• ‘No preaching’ and other tactics as China woos African leaders
• China’s mission to win African hearts with satellite TV
• Kenya, China and a railway to nowhere
• The fishy business of a Chinese factory in The Gambia

Early on a Saturday morning in April, Akara Etteh was checking his phone as he came out of Holborn tube station, in central London.

A moment later, it was in the hand of a thief on the back of an electric bike – Akara gave chase, but they got away.

He is just one victim of an estimated 78,000 “snatch thefts” in England and Wales in the year to March, a big increase on the previous 12 months.

The prosecution rate for this offence is very low – the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

Victims of the crime have been telling the BBC of the impact it has had on them – ranging from losing irreplaceable photos to having tens of thousands of pounds stolen.

And for Akara, like many other people who have their phone taken, there was another frustration: he was able to track where his device went, but was powerless to get it back.

He put his iPhone 13 into lost mode when he got home an hour or so later – meaning the thieves couldn’t access its contents – and turned on the Find My iPhone feature using his laptop.

This allowed Akara to track his phone’s rough location and almost immediately he received a notification to say it was in Islington. Eight days later, the phone was pinging in different locations around north London again.

In a move says he “wouldn’t recommend” with hindsight, he went to two of the locations his phone had been in to “look around”.

“It was pretty risky,” he said. “I was fuelled by adrenaline and anger.”

He didn’t speak to anyone, but he felt he was being watched and went home.

“I am really angry,” he said. “The phone is expensive. We work hard to earn that money, to be able to buy the handset, and someone else says ‘screw that’.”

Then, in May, just over a month after the theft, Akara checked Find My iPhone again – his prized possession was now on the other side of the world – in Shenzhen, China.

Akara gave up.

It is not uncommon for stolen phones to end up in Shenzhen – where if devices can’t be unlocked and used again, they are disassembled for parts.

The city is home to 17.6 million people and is a big tech hub, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley.

In the moments after Akara’s phone was stolen, he saw police officers on the street and he told them what had happened. Officers, he said, were aware of thieves doing a “loop of the area” to steal phones, and he was encouraged to report the offence online, which he did.

A few days later, he was told by the Metropolitan Police via email the case was closed as “it is unlikely that we will be able to identify those responsible”.

Akara subsequently submitted the pictures and information he had gathered from the locations where his stolen phone had been. The police acknowledged receipt but took no further action.

The Metropolitan Police had no comment to make on Akara’s specific case, but said it was “targeting resources to hotspot areas, such as Westminster, Lambeth and Newham, with increased patrols and plain clothes officers which deter criminals and make officers more visibly available to members of the community”.

Many other people have contacted the BBC with their experiences of having their phones taken. One, James O’Sullivan, 44, from Surrey, says he lost more than £25,000 when thieves used his stolen device’s Apple Pay service.

Meanwhile, Katie Ashworth, from Newcastle, explained her phone was snatched in a park along with her watch, and a debit card in the phone case.

“The saddest thing was that the phone contained the last photos I had of my mum on a walk before she got too unwell to really do anything – I would do anything to get those photos back,” the 36-year-old says.

Again, she says, there was a lack of action from the police.

“The police never even followed it up with me, despite my bank transactions showing exactly where the thieves went,” she said.

“The police just told me to check Facebook Marketplace and local second-hand shops like Cex.”

So why are the police seemingly unable to combat this offence – or recover stolen devices?

PC Mat Evans, who has led a team working on this kind of crime for over a decade within West Midlands Police, admitted that only “quite a low number” of phones that are stolen actually get recovered.

He says the problem is the speed with which criminals move.

“Phones will be offloaded to known fences within a couple of hours,” he said.

“It’s always a battle against the clock immediately following any of these crimes, but people should always report these things to the police, because if we don’t know that these crimes are taking place, we can’t investigate them.”

And sometimes just one arrest can make a difference.

“When we do catch these criminals, either in the act or after the fact, our crime rates tank,” he said.

“Quite often that individual has been responsible for a huge swathe of crime.”

But the problem is not just about policing.

In a statement, Commander Richard Smith from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which brings together senior officers to help develop policing strategy, said it would “continue to target” the most prolific criminals.

“We know that we cannot arrest our way out of this problem,” he said.

“Manufacturers and the tech industry have an important role in reducing opportunities for criminals to benefit from the resale of stolen handsets.”

Stolen phones can already be tracked and have their data erased through services such as “Find My iPhone” and “Find My Device”, from Android.

But policing minister Dame Diana Johnson said this week the government wanted manufacturers to ensure that any stolen phone could be permanently disabled to prevent it being sold second-hand.

Police chiefs will also be tasked with gathering more intelligence on who is stealing phones and where stolen devices end up.

A growing demand for second-hand phones, both in the UK and abroad, is believed to be a major driver behind the recent rise in thefts, the government said.

The Home Office is to host a summit at which tech companies and phone manufacturers will be asked to consider innovations that could help stop phones being traded illegally.

PC Evans said there was “no magic bullet”, but he said there was one thing manufacturers could do which would be “enormously helpful” to the police – more accurate tracking.

“At this moment in time, phone tracking is okay,” he said.

“But it’s not that scene in Total Recall yet, where you’re able to run around with a tracking device in your hand, sprinting down the road after a little bleeping dot.

“I appreciate it’s a big ask from the phone companies to make that a thing, but that would be enormously helpful from a policing perspective.”

Apple and Android did not provide the BBC with a statement, but Samsung said it was “working closely with key stakeholders and authorities on the issue of mobile phone theft and related crimes”.

Parents have been waiting anxiously to find out if their missing children are still alive after a boarding school in central Kenya caught fire.

Seventeen pupils were confirmed dead by the Ministry of Education on Friday morning, while the deputy president said 70 children were unaccounted for, so the death toll could not be verified.

It is thought some of these children may have run into the local community to escape the fire, or were picked up by their parents without the school knowing.

The blaze took place in a dormitory at Hillside Endarasha Academy, in Nyeri county, and its cause is currently unknown.

More than 150 pupils were in the dormitory when it caught fire at around midnight local time. The average age of the victims was about nine years old, according to the police.

The bodies were still in the ruined building when parents were taken to see them later in the day, many burnt beyond recognition.

The sight of the charred remains deepened the horror that they felt. One man had to be supported as he slowly walked back, while a number of women covered their eyes with their shawls and sobbed.

Another woman flailed around wildly, almost as if possessed by grief.

“I want to go where my child is,” she cried. “The bodies I have seen are of big children, my child has died!”

The school is in a remote area. Firefighters were delayed by bad roads, but people living nearby rushed to try and rescue the boys. In the chaos, some went missing.

• Kenya school fire fallout – as it happened
• The terrors of Kenya’s school fire epidemic

Angela Kimani told us she couldn’t find her 11-year-old nephew.

She’d been in church attending a late-night vigil when the congregation heard the screams from the school and ran to find it burning.

“When the dormitory was broken, there were some who were rescued, some were unconscious and some were dead,” she said. “We haven’t found him in hospitals, we are wondering if he could be among those who have been burned beyond recognition. It’s such heavy grief for our family.”

John Githogo, the uncle of a missing schoolboy, told journalists that waiting for news was “torture”.

“We are being told some are dead, some ran away, some were picked up by their parents,” he said. “But we didn’t pick our boy.

“We don’t know if he’s among the dead, among the people who ran away.”

In an effort to pin down the children who are still unaccounted for, Kenya’s Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua urged “each and every parent” who had collected their child from the school to report to the authorities, given that 70 pupils were missing.

“We are praying and hoping for the best,” he said.

Fourteen children have been taken to hospital with injuries.

President William Ruto called the fire “horrific” and “devastating”, and has ordered an investigation.

“Those responsible will be held to account,” Mr Ruto wrote on social media.

A team of investigators, including forensics experts, were deployed to the school, police said.

“More bodies are likely to be recovered once [the] scene is fully processed,” police spokesperson Resila Onyango said.

The blaze spread very fast as most of the buildings in the school were made of timber, according to a journalist from Citizen TV, a local TV station.

Local official Samson Mwangi Mwema told the BBC the rescue operation was difficult, saying: “We found the dormitory had caught fire, we tried to rescue – we found some children under the bed and we were able to rescue them.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told the BBC it was operating a temporary trauma centre at the school and giving counselling to 59 children.

Hillside Endarasha Academy is a private primary school near Nyeri town – 150km (93 miles) north of the capital, Nairobi.

The Kenyan Ministry of Education said the school had 824 pupils – 402 boys and 422 girls. Of the total, 316 were boarders.

The government would assist families with burials and help with hospital bills, Mr Gachagua said.

He added that a report into the causes of the fire would be made public once completed.

School fires are relatively common in Kenyan boarding schools, where concerns have been raised about safety standards.

In 2022, a dormitory in western Kenya burnt down, with several students later arrested on suspicion of arson. The year before, there was a spike in the number of arson attacks on boarding schools.

In 2017, 10 students died in an arson attack at Moi Girls High School in the capital Nairobi.

At least 67 students died in Machakos County, south-east of Nairobi, in the deadliest Kenyan school arson that took place more than 20 years ago.

• ‘Running for her family’ – Olympian mourned after vicious attack
• Despair as the sea slowly swallows a Kenyan beauty spot
• Kenya rolls out poison in bid to cull a million crows

A popular tourist island south of mainland China has been hit by the most powerful typhoon in a decade, leaving the area facing potentially catastrophic winds and torrential rain.

Super typhoon Yagi slammed into Wenchang city in the north-east of Hainan island with winds of 223 km/h (138 mph) at 16:00 local time (09:00 BST) on Friday, according to state media.

Yagi is the strongest to hit Hainan since Rammasun in 2014, which left 46 people dead. China’s weather agency said it is the strongest typhoon to make landfall in the autumn.

Some 400,000 people in Hainan island were evacuated to safe ground ahead of Yagi’s arrival. Trains, boats and flights were suspended, while schools were shut.

Yagi – which has doubled in strength after wreaking havoc in northern Philippines early this week – is the second strongest typhoon so far this year.

Meteorologists say Yagi may cause “catastrophic” damage in Hainan and neighbouring Guangdong, which is also China’s most populous province.

Yagi is an “extremely dangerous and powerful” super typhoon which could make a “potentially catastrophic” landfall, the Indo-Pacific Tropical Cyclone Warning Center warned in an advisory on Thursday.

A super typhoon is equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane.

Shortly after it made landfall, Hainan saw widespread power outages, local media reported, with about 830,000 households affected. Emergency teams, consisting of about 7,000 people, said power was restored to 260,000 homes by Friday evening.

All tourist attractions have been shut since Wednesday by order of authorities. who warned of “massive and destructive winds”.

With white sand beaches, luxury hotels and duty-free shops, Hainan has been dubbed “China’s Hawaii”.

The world’s longest sea crossing, the main bridge linking Hong Kong with Macau and Zhuhai in Guangdong, was also closed. The storm made landfall for a second time in Guangdong on Friday evening, with winds exceeding 200km/h.

Parts of the region have been experiencing heavy rainfall and strong gales since Thursday. China’s weather authority expects rainfall to reach up to 500mm.

Hainan is no stranger to typhoons. But just nine of the106 typhoons which have landed in Hainan since 1949 were classified as super typhoons, news agency Reuters reported.

Chinese authorities believe Yagi will be the strongest typhoon to hit its southern coast in a decade.

Elsewhere, in Hong Kong, trading at the city’s stock exchange was suspended and schools were closed. While five people were injured by extreme weather in the city, authorities said overall damage was limited.

After hitting China, Yagi is also expected to make landfall in northern Vietnam late on Saturday in a weakened state.

Tens of thousands in the provinces of Hai Phong and Thai Binh will be evacuated to safer ground by the end of Friday, AFP news agency reported, citing local authorities.

The military has mobilised some 460,000 officers to help manage the storm’s impact, Vietnamese media reported.

Vietnam’s deputy agriculture minister has warned that it could hit regions “crucial to the socio-economic development” of the region.

“Carelessness could result in catastrophic damage,” Nguyen Hoang Hiep said.

Four airports in the country’s north, including Hanoi’s Noi Bai International Airport, will be shut on Saturday in anticipation of the storm, Vietnam’s civil aviation authority said.

Earlier this week, floods and landslides brought by Yagi killed at least 13 people in northern Philippines, with thousands of people forced to evacuate to safer ground.

Scientists say typhoons and hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent with climate change. Warmer ocean waters mean storms pick up more energy, which leads to higher wind speeds.

A warmer atmosphere also holds more moisture, which can lead to more intense rainfall.

Yagi comes a week after typhoon Shanshan hit Japan, killing at least six people and injuring hundreds.

Like many charming, clever people, Emmanuel Macron is used to getting his own way.

Still only 46 years old, France’s suave leader can already point back to a glittering career path strewn with obstacles avoided or overcome.

A meteoric rise, the transformation of France’s political landscape, the formation of his own triumphant party, securing the presidency twice, subduing the (yellow-jacket)protests, pension reform, and this summer’s glorious Paris Olympics.

“He’s incredibly smart, a very hard worker, dynamic and creative,” conceded a former minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, in a recent French newspaper interview, despite falling out with the president.

So how do you persuade a man like Emmanuel Macron to accept that he may, at last, have messed up badly?

The short answer, judging from the past few weeks, appears to be that you cannot.

Ever since Macron took what is widely considered to have been a rash, poorly timed, and profoundly counter-productive decision to dissolve France’s parliament and call early elections in June, France’s president has been struggling to find a way to frame the outcome as anything but a humiliating personal defeat.

It’s true that France’s National Assembly, jolted by the rise of the far-right National Rally (RN) party and by the arrival of Macron’s own disruptive political project, was already straying towards swamp-like territory after many decades switching comfortably between centre-left and centre-right parties.

But the sudden summer elections, meant to provide greater “clarification,” instead left the seats in the chamber’s famous semi-circle split evenly between three blocs, all furiously at odds with each other: the left and hard left, a newly muddled centre, and the populist right.

“It’s a crappy situation,” the constitutional expert Benjamin Morel told the BBC, at a loss for a more erudite phrase to sum things up.

“It’s a mess. Macron has lost his touch. He’s not in sync with the country as he once was,” agreed journalist Isabelle Lasserre, author of a recent book about the president.

Ever since the elections, he has sought to present the new parliamentary arithmetic as an almost deliberate, almost welcome message from the French electorate to politicians of all stripes, encouraging them to compromise and to embrace the sort of coalition-building so commonplace in other European countries.

But many French voters and politicians are unconvinced.

They see the president’s framing as arrogant spin – an attempt to avoid blame for a mess of his own making and to continue with business as usual.

Which helps explain why, this weekend, parties on the left are planning street demonstrations across France. It could be the start of a long autumn of discontent.

The left, which came together to form a new NFP alliance against the far right for these elections, is beyond furious that Macron has ignored the fact that their bloc won the largest share of seats in parliament.

Instead, the president has veered to the centre right, by picking Michel Barnier as his new prime minister.

Will that be enough to steady the ship? Macron aides are indicating that Mr Barnier will have total freedom – with no red lines – to direct domestic policy and to seek enough support in parliament to avoid a no-confidence vote.

“Picking Barnier was a cunning move. The best choice,” said Lasserre, arguing that the former EU commissioner was an experienced hand, who might buy Mr Macron some time.

But how much time, and to what end?

The president has recently sought to present himself as an aloof, almost regal figure, merely interested in safeguarding national stability.

But he continues to wade into parliamentary politics, insisting, high-handedly, that neither the far left nor far right can have any role or influence whatsoever in government.

Emmanuel Macron still has two and a half more years in office.

Will he be forced out before then by street protests? Will he see his hard-won pension reforms overturned?

Will another “clarifying” parliamentary election be required next year? Could the Fifth Republic’s constitution require amending, or even replacing altogether?

Or might France’s leader, a former banker with an appetite for the high-wire act, find a way, once again, to outsmart his rivals and to win back the support of an increasingly sceptical public?

“I doubt it. He may steady things, but no more than that,” concluded Isabelle Lasserre.

Significantly, the main beneficiary of this current crisis is, almost certainly, the one person President Macron has sought most to thwart.

He has spent years trying to ensure that Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right, anti-immigrant National Rally, now the country’s largest single party, never gets close to real power.

“For now, she is the biggest winner from this crisis. She lost the elections, but she increased the size of her (parliamentary) group by 1.5 times. She has more money. She has everything to set up the next generation of her party,” concluded Benjamin Morel.

He predicted, if Emmanuel Macron’s true legacy proved to be a future electoral victory for National Rally, that chaos would follow.

“We can find temporary solutions (today)… But if the RN wins an absolute majority, we will enter into a conflict that will no longer be in parliament, but on the streets.”

Senior Filipino officials have sparked outrage for posing for photos with a former smalltown mayor accused of spying for China, as they escorted her home from Indonesia.

Alice Guo is seen flashing a wide smile and the peace sign with the smiling interior minister and chief of the Philippine National Police. The photo was allegedly taken before they boarded a Manila-bound private jet in Jakarta late on Thursday.

Ms Guo’s story which has involved illegal scam centres, questions over her citizenship and a dubious account of her childhood, has gripped the Philippines for months.

She was arrested just outside Jakarta on Wednesday, after a weeks-long chase.

Authorities accuse Ms Guo of protecting scam centres and human trafficking syndicates that had used online casinos or Pogos (Philippine Online Gaming Operations) for cover while she was the mayor of Bamban.

Her case has exposed how online casinos with mainland Chinese clients have long been used as a front for organised crime.

Lawmakers have also accused Ms Guo of forging her Filipino citizenship and being a Chinese national, allowing her to run for public office and win on her first try, despite being a political novice.

Her case has gripped the public imagination at a time when Manila continues to spar with Beijing over reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea.

Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos, who fetched Ms Guo from Jakarta, said he had the photo taken with her for “documentation”.

Mr Abalos said he was unaware that Ms Guo had posed with a wide smile and flashed the peace sign.

“She requested to speak with me and the [national police] chief because she had been receiving death threats. I told her she had nothing to fear because the police will protect her,” he said in a press conference in Manila.

“We wanted to document it so that everything is clear. I couldn’t see what she was doing because I was looking at the camera,” he said.

Ms Guo, who was in the same press conference, was asked about the photo. She said she had indeed told Mr Abalos and the PNP chief, Gen. Rommel Marbil, about the threats to her life.

“I asked for their help. I was also happy that I saw them. I feel safe,” Ms Guo said.

By that time, Ms Guo had changed into an orange police detainee shirt. At the airport in Jakarta, she was casually dressed in a white striped t-shirt and jeans. She was also not in handcuffs.

Another handout photo from the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation showed Ms Guo smiling with the authorities in the backseat of a vehicle.

The criticism on social media was swift.

“We want answers, NOT a photoshoot. Alice Guo, the fake Filipino, has a lot of explaining to do,” said Sen Risa Hontioveros, who is leading an inquiry in parliament on Ms Guo’s case.

“The Philippine justice system is a circus,” one X user said.

“Probably one of the most disturbing clips in the news right now. How can Alice Guo manage to still smile and wink like a movie star?” another X user said.

Another X user said the interior secretary and the police chief had posed for a photo with someone that is “symbolic of their own failure”.

Imagine binge-watching The Bear, Succession, Deadpool and reality show Bigg Boss all on one platform – an entertainment bonanza could be just around the corner for Indians if a blockbuster streaming merger goes through as expected.

The deal, which brings together the media assets of India’s largest conglomerate Reliance Industries and entertainment giant Walt Disney, has sparked both excitement and concerns over potential monopolistic dominance in the Indian entertainment and advertising industries.

The $8.5bn (£6.5bn) merger aims to create India’s largest entertainment company, potentially capturing 40% of the TV market, reaching 750 million viewers across 120 channels, and dominating the advertising sector.

This gives Disney a stronger foothold in the challenging Indian market while supporting Reliance’s expansion efforts. It also pits the new entertainment behemoth against popular rivals such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Sony and 50-odd other streaming platforms.

Consider the reach of this new entertainment giant: Disney’s Star India operates more than 70 TV channels in eight languages, while Reliance’s Viacom18 runs 38 channels in eight languages. Both own major streaming platforms – Jio Cinema and Hotstar – and film studios.

• India approves $8.5bn Reliance-Disney entertainment mega-merger

Their influence is further amplified by owning the broadcasting rights to a significant number of India’s sports events, including the hugely popular Indian Premier League cricket tournament.

In a cricket-obsessed nation, this is a prime business position. The merged entity is estimated to control 75-80% of the Indian sports streaming market across both linear TV and digital platforms, according to Elara Capital, a global investment and advisory firm.

Their dominance in this sector, especially cricket, means that Reliance and Disney will command a substantial share of the overall advertisement market. It showcases “strong growth in an industry where sports is a key driver of viewership on both TV and digital platforms”, says Karan Taurani, an analyst at Elara Capital, who calls it a “large media juggernaut”.

Though the merger promises to offer consumers diverse content, critics wonder if it puts too much power in the hands of one player.

“The emergence of a giant in the market… with the next competitor struggling with market share in a single digit, would make any competition agency sit up and take notice,” says KK Sharma, who formerly headed the merger control division of the Competition Commission of India (CCI).

This is why, analysts say, India’s competition watchdog scrutinised the agreement before approving the deal with a caveat that makes it “subject to the compliance of voluntary modifications”.

The companies have not made these “voluntary modifications” public yet, but reports say that the two companies have pledged to not raise advertising rates excessively while streaming cricket matches.

The deal hinges on these assurances, Mr Sharma adds, because the CCI “retains its authority to even divide the enterprise – if the dominant enterprise becomes a threat to competition in the market”.

In an increasingly competitive but expanding Indian streaming market, both Disney and Reliance have a lot to gain from the deal, which allows them a chance to consolidate their pole position.

But experts warn that it may also mean a potential drop in the business earnings of smaller players.

“The Indian market values bundling and is price-sensitive. [Subscribing to] this combined entity can offer a comprehensive package including [access to] web series, movies, sports, original content, and a global catalogue,” says Mr Taurani.

And if the combined company can also leverage the large telecom subscriber base of Reliance Jio, other streaming companies may find it hard to raise prices, he adds.

The Reliance Group has a tried-and-tested business strategy that has allowed it to thrive in the price-sensitive Indian market: it offered cheap mobile data when it launched Jio in 2016, and its JioCinema streaming subscription is available for as little as 29 rupees ($0.35; $0.26) a month.

From this deal too, Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani has promised “unparalleled content at affordable prices”.

• Netflix: How did the streaming service turn its fortunes around?

“Other streaming platforms will be worried about the cost of content and the cost of programming. Will they be forced to drop prices?” says media and entertainment industry specialist Vanita Kohli-Khandekar. She says that the Reliance strategy of offering things at throwaway prices usually “destroys value” for competitors.

Streaming competitors might be easier to handle but the new company will also face stiff challenge from other rivals with deep pockets, such as Google, Meta and Amazon, who have been trying to expand in India.

These global tech giants have “played a pivotal role in expanding India’s video market, now estimated to be worth $8.8bn in revenue for content owners”, according to a report by research firm Media Partners Asia. In 2022-23, Google’s YouTube alone had an 88% share in India’s premium video-on-demand (VOD) market.

So the new Reliance-Disney behemoth will hope to dominate not just news, movies and sports, but also redirect digital advertising revenues from these big firms to its own coffers.

“Now, it’s an even fight,” says Ms Kohli-Khandekar. “Some 80% of digital revenues go to Google and Meta, so you have to have scale, and finally, you have a company that can take on some of the large global majors operating in India.”

But she warns that while the new entity might have scale and heft, it will also need to deliver quality with quantity – if, for instance, the streaming market becomes more dependent on views rather than subscriptions, “programming quality will be good only on one or two apps”, she says.

“That is something I would watch out for.”

Surfing was first introduced to Australia more than a century ago.

Since then the sport has blossomed into a cultural phenomenon and a commercial juggernaut.

Research from the Australian National University (ANU) estimates surfing injects at least A$3bn ($2bn; £1.5bn) into the national economy each year.

The study, however, comes with a stark warning that surf breaks – areas where the waves start to collapse or plunge – should not be taken for granted and need more legal protection.

“Unfortunately because of climate change, coastal erosion and competition for coastal spaces, the elements that make these high quality waves possible are on many occasions in danger,” explained Dr Ana Manero, an expert in water economics and governance at the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy.

“I don’t think the lack of protection right now is deliberate. It is just surf breaks currently they just fall in a blind spot for policy makers.”

Global warming and poor water quality are surfers’ main concerns, according to the report published in the journal, Marine Policy.

About a dozen surf breaks in the state of New South Wales and Bells Beach in Victoria have formal protection but researchers want much more.

“What I am more worried about is those waves that may not feature on a world-class map but they do provide value for people like you and I,” Dr Manero told the BBC from her office in Perth, Western Australia.

“Those waves that do not attract global attention… are the waves we need to focus our attention on.”

A previous ANU study found waves off the town of Mundaka in northern Spain vanished because of changes to a sand bar after dredging in a nearby river.

Research also found that expansion to a marina in Perth caused the disappearance of three surf breaks in 2022 and an artificial reef has now been proposed.

Some answers for Australia might be found far away in South America or much closer to home.

“In Peru they established what they call La Ley de Rompientes, which means the law of surf breaks, that protects these assets,” added Dr Manero.

In New Zealand, safeguards are provided by an existing act of parliament and a separate, complementary policy that recognises the importance of national, regional and local surf spots. The level of protection they receive is commensurate to their level of significance to surfers.

Using data from the Australian Sports Commission, a government agency, the ANU study estimates there are more than 720,000 active adult surfers in the country. On average they spend about A$3,700 each year.

It is, though, likely to be a conservative figure because it does not consider children, overseas tourists or money generated through professional surfing.

“It is like this cool economy; cafes, restaurants, surf shops, accommodation. Yeah, it’s good. Love it,” said Matt Grainger, who runs the Manly Surf School in Sydney.

“I’ve had the business for 30 years. Just looking forward, I pretty much see it [with] just a slow growth. So, we try not to grow too fast here like with the surf school because you don’t want to crowd out the actual ocean with too many surfers.”

“Once you’ve got your board, it’s free and it’s always different; the tide, the wind, the swell,” he told the BBC.

On a bright and breezy winter’s morning on Australia’s Pacific coast, Mika Flower, an instructor, is preparing to take charge of another lesson.

The work to conquer, or attempt to master, a wave begins with repetitive drills on the sand.

“I have surfed my whole life. It’s super fun,” Ms Flower explains.

“I thought I would love to be able to teach people and share the joy of surfing, and it is nice to not be working in an office. It is nice to be working at the beach getting sunshine and being in the water every day. Australia is, sort of, seen as the country to surf. Everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon.”

For those chasing the perfect wave, surfing is about embracing the power of nature. For them, it’s a gift that should be protected.

Israeli forces have been laying tarmac on a key road in Gaza along its southern border – in what some commentators see as a signal that they’re not prepared to fully withdraw from the territory any time soon.

The road has become a major sticking point in the negotiations for a new ceasefire and hostage release deal.

BBC Verify has analysed satellite imagery, photos and video that show the surfacing of a road along the narrow but strategically important strip of land running the length of Gaza’s border with Egypt, long known by its Israeli military codename: the Philadelphi Corridor.

Between 26 August and 5 September, satellite imagery captured at regular intervals shows fresh paving along a section of road extending 6.4km inland from the coast along the border fence.

A video posted online on 4 September which shows construction work, reportedly that evening, along a stretch of the border fence.

Heavy machinery can be seen laying fresh tarmac wide enough for two large vehicles to pass.

We’ve also compared two images below which show the laying of tarmac before and after. BBC Verify has confirmed the location and that they show the same stretch along the border fence.

The corridor includes the Rafah crossing with Egypt – which has been Gaza’s only crossing not directly controlled by Israel and key for aid deliveries.

At 12.6 km (7.8 miles) long, it runs adjacent to the Egyptian border from the Kerem Shalom crossing to the Mediterranean Sea.

While the Israeli military calls it the Philadelphi Route or Axis, Palestinians often refer to it as the Salah al-Din Axis.

“It’s not a specific, demarcated area,” says Dr Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. “It’s a conceptual line. It’s understood as land adjacent to the border.”

Israel previously pulled out of the area in 2005, when it withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza.

But it re-entered the Philadelphi Corridor on 7 May this year with tanks and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) – months before starting to pave the road.

Troops seized control of the Rafah crossing and then began advancing north-west both along the corridor and into the nearby southern city of Rafah.

In the past four months, the IDF has destroyed hundreds of buildings near the corridor with air and artillery strikes, as well through controlled demolitions with explosives and bulldozers.

One village – Al Qarya as Suwaydiya – at the Mediterranean end of the border – has been flattened and now appears to be operating as an Israeli base.

“Paving the road puts pressure on negotiators and mediators. The Israelis are trying to create a fait accompli,” says Dr Krieg.

“It also suggests that Israel is not going to withdraw entirely from the Gaza strip any time soon,” he says.

He cites a road built earlier this year by Israeli forces across northern Gaza – known as the Netzarim Corridor.

“If you look at the investments made in the Netzarim Corridor, it’s clear they have no intention of withdrawing anytime soon, they’ve got concrete barriers, forward operating bases with towers and walls – you don’t build those if you’re planning on withdrawing.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the Philadelphi Corridor as a “lifeline” for Hamas, and is adamant that Israel maintains a military presence there as a condition of any agreement.

At a press conference on Wednesday, he added: “You want to destroy Hamas’ military and governance capabilities, you can’t let Hamas rearm. So you have to control the corridor.”

The IDF’s chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, said on 14 August that “the Philadelphi Corridor is important because it deals with strengthening our position. We are preparing for all scenarios that the political level may decide.”

Retired Egyptian Major General Dr Samir Faraj, now a commentator on military strategy, said Israel’s aim was “psychological warfare… paving the road is a media war, a war in which Israel sends a message to different parties that they will not leave.“

We have asked the Israeli military why it is surfacing the road now but have not received a response.

Mr Netanyahu says Hamas has used tunnels underneath the corridor to smuggle weapons and people via Egypt before the 7 October attack on Israel, which triggered the war in Gaza.

He believes Israeli forces deployed there will prevent the group rearming and ensure it never again poses a threat.

In a visit to the corridor last month, Mr Gallant was quoted as saying: “We have destroyed 150 tunnels on the Philadelphi Corridor, stretching across the Gaza-Egypt border.”

BBC Verify has located detonations in videos, shared by the IDF, to the Philadelphi Corridor – including one which it says shows “destruction of underground infrastructure” – but we are unable to confirm what is being destroyed.

We have also seen photos and video – again, shared by the IDF – of one substantial tunnel in the corridor.

All of these locations, as well as others along the border, show signs of major disturbances of the surface soil on satellite imagery.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Pulling power. That is what China still has across Africa.

While the influence of others on the continent is questioned – for instance, France and the rest of the EU are being shunned by the Sahelian military juntas, and Russia’s mercenary-security “offer” is regarded with deep mistrust by pro-Western African governments – China has navigated a middle way.

Delegations from more than 50 states from across the African continent decided it was worth making the trip to Beijing for the latest China-Africa summit – known as the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation (Focac) – this week.

Dozens of leaders turned up – as well as UN chief António Guterres.

Alongside veterans such as Congo-Brazzaville strongman Denis Sassou-Nguesso, this was a first such gathering for the new Senegalese head of state Bassirou Diomaye Faye – rewarded with a front-row place next to President Xi Jinping in a family photo of leaders and their spouses.

For African governments resentful of the pressure to take sides in international disputes, China now appears as a refreshingly reliable partner, ready to collaborate without discrimination both with the allies of Moscow and with civilian-ruled states that are closer to Europe and the US.

Beijing certainly strikes a hard bargain in pursuit of its economic self-interest and need for natural raw materials, in return for development support, especially the construction of heavy infrastructure.

It is regularly accused of inducing African countries to take on too much debt, and was initially slow to join the international effort to alleviate the crushing repayment burden weighing upon some countries.

Even now, it refuses to grant outright debt cancellations.

Complaints that China reserves too many skilled construction roles for its own workers, at the expense of training Africans, are commonplace. The growing presence of Chinese traders has triggered resentments among some traditionally predominant commercial communities.

But for many African governments these are quibbles.

What they appreciate in an increasingly polarised world is Beijing’s non-partisan readiness to remain strongly engaged pretty much everywhere, without political strings.

Of course, it is the Chinese construction of big-ticket transport projects, which international development institutions and Western commercial investors so often treat with caution, that attracts the most attention.

The July 2023 coup in Niger has not dissuaded the Chinese from completing a 2,000km (1,200-mile) pipeline to deliver the country’s growing oil output to an export terminal in Benin.

In Guinea, also under military rule, the China-based Winning Consortium is well advanced in the construction of a 600km railway to the coast. This will run from one of the world’s largest iron ore deposits at Simandou, a scheme for which successive Guinean governments had struggled to secure international donor support.

And this week’s Focac summit brought a continuation of this strategy, with the announcement of a further 360bn yuan ($50.7bn; £36.6bn) in funding, for the next three years.

But this time there is a difference, with a heavy summit focus on the green energy transition, including investment in manufacturing in Africa, particularly electric vehicles.

That is important in both practical and symbolic terms for a continent that has famously lagged far behind Asia in developing sophisticated industries.

But the summit also brought promises of support for other types of green projects, with Mr Xi declaring a readiness to launch 30 clean energy projects and to co-operate in the nuclear sector.

That latter hint touches on a sore point for African commentators resentful of the fact that France has for decades mined Niger’s uranium to supply its own nuclear power sector without proposing generation projects for West Africa.

China is also active in the Nigerien uranium mining sector.

But amid the intensely complex technical and security challenges of the nuclear sector, it remains to be seen whether the Chinese president’s promise will really amount to more than comforting warm words.

Moreover, the Focac summit skated around some of the more sensitive and contentious environmental issues – such as the regular accusations that big Chinese vessels engage in over-fishing, leaving little for the local artisanal boats to catch.

Tactfully, Sierra Leone’s Fisheries Minister Princess Dugba preferred to focus on praising the government there for its construction of a new fishing port.

Meanwhile Mr Xi sought to perpetuate China’s self-presentation as a fellow member of the “global south”, pointing out that his country and Africa together account for a third of the world’s population.

The summit adopted a Beijing Declaration on building “a shared future in the new era” and the Beijing Action Plan for 2025-2027.

Calling on Chinese contractors to return to Africa now that disruptive Covid-era curbs were gone, Mr Xi talked of a tripling of infrastructure schemes, the creation of one million jobs and co-operation across a range of sectors.

But it is not entirely clear what the promised 360bn yuan in financing – an apparent bid to promote the international profile of the Chinese currency – will amount to in concrete terms.

The president said that 210bn yuan ($29.6bn) would be provided through credit lines, while there would be 70bn yuan ($9.9bn) in business investments.

He also announced $280m in military and food aid – but for an entire continent that is a marginal sum, in contrast to the big-budget economic funding.

It remains to be seen how that new financing is distributed – and whether it is managed in a way that avoids pushing some countries back into unsustainable debt.

Over the past 10-15 years Chinese lending to African countries desperate to press forward with the construction of infrastructure was widely blamed for helping to push them back into a debt crisis barely two decades after they benefitted from international debt-forgiveness schemes.

In 2016, the peak year, $30bn in Chinese lending to Africa was announced.

Projects were often financed by China Eximbank on terms that were usually kept confidential but were almost certainly much more expensive than funding from the soft credit windows of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank, or the grant aid provided by many Western government donors.

However, defenders of China’s approach could quite reasonably point out that it was frequently willing to finance and build projects, and accept levels of risk, in circumstances where other partners were not willing to tread or commit resources on the necessary scale.

And to some extent, a natural division of labour evolved, where China funded and built heavy infrastructure, while Western donors and the big development institutions financed the equally essential “soft” investments – in health and education, skills training, government systems, food security, rural resilience and so on.

As the scale of the new financial pressures weighing upon many countries became clear, particularly amid the global economic slowdown caused by the pandemic, the G20 countries set up the Common Framework, to get indebted countries back on to a sustainable track.

China did join in the effort to restructure developing countries’ repayment burdens. But critics accused it of not doing enough.

Now, several years on, this week’s Focac summit suggests the picture may be poised for a further evolution.

Just as, two decades ago, China began to fill a role in infrastructure development that Africa’s traditional donors could no longer adequately fill, Beijing now has ambitions to become a key partner for the continent in new hi-tech industry and green technology on a scale that many European and North American companies are unwilling or unable to contemplate.

While Western investment in Africa, particularly in sub-Saharan countries, continues to be dominated largely by mining, oil, gas and agriculture, and Russia focuses on security services for favoured regimes, Beijing talks of a broader economic vision.

However, the question is whether, beyond Mr Xi’s rhetoric, this will amount to a real diversification into new sectors such as green industry.

Beyond a few niche prestige projects – will the traditional focus on big infrastructure continue to predominate?

It is not yet clear if the China-Africa relationship is poised for a fundamental change.

• ‘No preaching’ and other tactics as China woos African leaders
• China’s mission to win African hearts with satellite TV
• Kenya, China and a railway to nowhere
• The fishy business of a Chinese factory in The Gambia

Kim’s Convenience, a heart-warming comedy-drama play about a Korean immigrant family running a corner shop in Toronto, inspired a hit sitcom and is now on stage in London.

“This is a love letter to my parents and all first-generation immigrants who have made the country they have settled in their home,” says the show’s creator, Ins Choi.

He wrote the play, which revolves around the everyday life of a family-run Korean store, and starred as the son when it was first staged in Toronto in 2011.

He then co-wrote the TV series, which became a hit in Canada from 2016 and found a worldwide audience after being picked up by Netflix two years later.

Choi is now back on stage – this time in the lead role of Appa (Dad in Korean).

In the play, the family’s proud, hard-working patriarch grapples with the changing neighbourhood and the growing divide between his first-generation immigrant values and those of his children.

For instance, Appa tries to convince daughter Janet (Jennifer Kim) to take over the shop, instead of pursuing her dream of becoming a photographer.

He also warns that her “expiration date is over”, as she shows no intention to marry as a 30-year-old single woman.

• Listen on BBC Sounds: Kim’s Convenience cast talks about ‘immigrant life’

While this all-Asian lead cast gives an opportunity to look into one East Asian family’s life, it also resonates with different cultures and ages, says Choi.

“In the end, it’s a comedy. It’s a story about a family.

“Regardless of your background, I think everyone can relate to parents who they feel they disappointed. Or if you’re a parent, kids who don’t appreciate you.

“So it’s both sides of that dynamic.”

When it was first on stage, a show with an all-Asian lead cast was rare.

“When I played [son] Jung 14 years ago, there weren’t many Asian actors,” Choi says.

“But now, when we do a casting call, there are many Janets that we can choose from. I was so pleasantly surprised that we now have options.”

In fact, the genesis of Kim’s Convenience stems from the lack of opportunities Choi had as a young actor.

After graduating from drama school, he auditioned for many roles but kept getting rejected. Eventually, he decided to write his own story, which became his debut play – and later a Netflix hit.

While he understands that directors today are looking for new Asian voices, he feels some theatre companies have quite a “white programme”, which still makes plays like Kim’s Convenience stand out.

“I think it’s still kind of a rare thing in an English-speaking city to have an Asian-led play on stage,” he says. “So that’s unfortunately always been one reason for interest because it’s still the unique thing to watch.

“It’s a little different, not a white family’s living room. How often do you get that?”

Throughout the play, Appa and Umma (Mum, played by Namju Go) speak in a fairly strong Korean accent. This was also the case with the TV series, and some have argued that heavy accents perpetuate stereotypes.

Choi vehemently disagrees. “Maybe producers don’t want people speaking accents because they don’t want to be seen as offensive. But then they’re just dismissing and erasing [it], which, in my opinion, is more offensive.”

He has put both charaters centre stage, celebrating their three-dimensional personalities.

“Whether people want to admit it or not, there’s a whole part of society that is unrepresented in media. For fear of backlash, they are not seen and heard,” adds Choi.

He says he is doing his best job imitating his own parents and what he grew up hearing. And he says he is, in fact, pulling back from the accent, so a “Western ear” can understand him better.

“When my kids watched the play, they couldn’t stop laughing. They loved it. They said I was just like Halabeoji [Grandad]. And I was like, ‘Thank you.'”

The play’s UK staging precedes a triumphant homecoming to Toronto’s acclaimed Soulpepper Theatre in January 2025. That will be 14 years since it won the Patron’s Pick award at the Toronto Fringe Festival, where it premiered.

Choi originally played estranged son Jung, but it has now been so long since the original run that he has been playing Appa since last year.

“Going back to Soulpepper Theatre will feel almost like a physical, geographic full circle, in terms of the son becoming the parent,” he says.

He acknowledges that it was a “strange but normal feeling” when he first played Appa, adding that he has been “rehearsing for the last 10 years” to play the father, as his real-life children have grown up and he has grown into the role.

“I love the sound of Appa – it’s so warm and conjures great feelings,” he says.

“So now, when I get called Appa by Janet and Jung, I already respond to that name.”

So what does he hope the audience will take from the play, other than laughter and tears?

“This is me being idealistic but I hope a play like this brings communities together, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, my family’s just like your family, guys. My dad is just like your dad.’

“It can actually build bridges and people realise we’re all dysfunctional. Yeah, I think it has that power – art, in general.”

And having helped out at his uncle’s corner shop as a child, he has one more wish.

“I hope that when people come and see the show, they meet this family who owns this store.

“And that the next time they walk into an off-licence, they have an inkling of the person having a whole life behind the counter. And hopefully treat them with more understanding or compassion.”

“Think of it as cricket cake, like fish cake,” the chef said as he urged the man in the buffet line to try the steaming, spicy laksa – a coconut noodle broth – full of “textured cricket protein”.

Next to it was a plate of chilli crickets, the bug version of a beloved Singaporean dish – stir-fried mud crabs doused in a rich, sweet chilli sauce.

It looked like any other buffet, except for the main ingredient in every dish: crickets.

The line included a woman who gingerly scooped stir-fried Korean glass noodles topped with minced crickets onto her plate, and a man who wouldn’t stop grilling the young chef.

You would have expected the diners to snap up the feast. After all, they were among more than 600 scientists, entrepreneurs and environmentalists from around the world who had descended on Singapore as part of a mission to make insects delicious. The name of the conference said it all – Insects to Feed the World.

And yet more of them were drawn to the buffet next to the insect-laden spread. It was the usual fare, some would have argued: wild-caught barramundi infused with lemongrass and lime, grilled sirloin steak with onion marmalade, a coconut vegetable curry.

Some two billion people, about a quarter of the world’s population, already eat insects as part of their everyday diet, according to the United Nations.

More people should join them, according to a growing tribe of bug advocates who champion insects as a healthy and green choice. But is the prospect of saving the planet enough to get people to sample their top creepy crawlies?

“We have to focus on making them delicious,” said New York-based chef Joseph Yoon, who designed the cricket-laced menu for the conference, along with Singaporean chef Nicholas Low. The event had permission to use only crickets.

“The idea that insects are sustainable, dense with nutrients, can address food security, and so on,” is not enough to make them palatable, let alone appetising, he added.

Studies have found that just six crickets met a person’s daily protein needs. And rearing them required less amount of water and land, compared with livestock.

Some countries have given insect diets a nudge, if not a push. Singapore recently approved 16 types of bugs, including crickets, silkworms, grasshoppers and honey bees, as food.

It is among a handful of countries, inlcuding the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Thailand, that are regulating what is still an incipient edible insects industry. Estimates vary from $400m to $1.4bn (£303m to £1.06bn).

Enter chefs like Nicholas Low who have had to find ways to “break down” insects to cook with them because people are not always up for trying them “in their original form”.

For the conference, Mr Low reinvented the popular laksa when he replaced the usual fishcake with patties made of minced cricket.

He said it also took some work to mask the earthy smell of the insects. Dishes with “strong flavours”, like laksa, were ideal because the delights of the original recipe distracted people from the crushed bugs.

Mr Low said crickets left little room for him to experiment. Usually deep-fried for a satisfying crunch, or ground to a fine powder, they were unlike meats, which made for versatile cooking, from braises to barbecue.

He could not imagine cooking with crickets every day: “I’m more likely to cook it as a special dish that is part of a larger menu.”

Since Singapore approved cooking with bugs, some restaurants have been trying their hand at it. A seafood spot has taken to sprinkling crickets on their satays and squid ink pastas, or serving them on the side of a fish head curry.

Of course there are others who have been more committed to the challenge. Tokyo-based Takeo Cafe has been serving customers insects for the past 10 years.

The menu includes a salad with twin Madagascar hissing cockroaches nestling on a bed of leaves and cherry tomatoes, a generous scoop of ice cream with three tiny grasshoppers perched on it and even a cocktail with spirits made from silkworm poo.

“What’s most important is [the customer’s] curiosity,” said Saeki Shinjiro, Takeo’s chief sustainability officer.

What about the environment? “Customers are not concerned so much,” he said.

Just to be on the safe side, Takeo also has a bug-free menu. “When designing the menu, we keep in mind not to discriminate against people who do not eat insects… Some customers are merely here to accompany their friends,” Mr Shinjiro said.

“We do not want such people to feel uncomfortable. There is no need to eat insects forcibly.”

It hasn’t always been this way, though. For centuries, insects have been a valued food source in different parts of the world.

In Japan grasshoppers, silkworms, and wasps were traditionally eaten in land-locked areas where meat and fish were scarce. The practice resurfaced during food shortages in World War Two, Takeo’s manager Michiko Miura said.

Today, crickets and silkworms are commonly sold as snacks at night markets in Thailand, while diners in Mexico City pay hundreds of dollars for ant larvae, a dish once considered a delicacy by the Aztecs, who ruled the region in the 15th and 16th Centuries.

But bug experts worry that these culinary traditions have been unravelling with globalisation, as people who eat insects now associate the diet with poverty.

There is a “growing sense of shame” in places with a long history of insect consumption, like Asia, Africa and South America, said Joseph Yoon, the New York-based chef.

“They now get glimpses of foreign cultures over the internet and they are embarrassed about eating insects because that is not the practice elsewhere.”

In her book Edible Insects and Human Evolution, anthropologist Julie Lesnik argued that colonialism deepened the stigma of eating insects. She wrote that Christopher Columbus and members of his expedition described the native Americans’ consumption of insects as “bestiality… greater than that of any beast upon the face of the earth”.

Of course, people’s attitudes could change. After all, gourmet treats such as sushi and lobster were once an alien concept to most people.

Sushi started out as a working-class dish found in street stalls. And lobsters, known as the “poor man’s chicken”, were once fed to prisoners and slaves in north-eastern America because of their abundance, said food researcher Keri Matiwck from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

But as transport networks made travel easier and food storage improved, more and more people were introduced to the crustacean. As demand increased, so did its price and status.

Foods once seen as “exotic”, or not even regarded as food, can gradually become mainstream, Dr Matwick said. “[But] cultural beliefs take time to change. It will take a while to change the perceptions of insects as disgusting and dirty.”

Some experts encourage people to raise their children to be more tolerant of unusual food, including insects, because future generations will face the full consequences of the climate crisis.

Insects may well become the “superfoods” of the future, as coveted as quinoa and berries. They may be grudginly eaten, rather than sought out for the joy that a buttery steak or a hearty bowl of ramen brings.

For now, Singapore chef Nicholas Low believes there is nothing pushing people to change their diets, especially in wealthy places where almost anything you want is a few clicks away.

Younger consumers may be willing to taste them out of curiosity, but the novelty will wear off, he said.

“We are spoilt for choice. We like our meat as meat, and our fish as fish.”

A selection of the week’s best photos from across the African continent and beyond:

• ‘No preaching’ and other tactics as China woos African leaders
• Why Nigeria’s ‘Mr Flag Man’ has waited a year to be buried
• China’s mission to win African hearts with satellite TV

China has announced that it is ending the practice of allowing children to be adopted overseas, bringing uncertainty to families currently going through the process.

A spokeswoman said that the rule change was in line with the spirit of international agreements.

At least 150,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad in the last three decades.

More than 82,000 have gone to the US, a greater number than anywhere else in the world.

At a daily briefing Thursday, foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in the future Beijing would only allow foreign nationals who are relatives to adopt Chinese children.

She did not explain the reason for the decision, other than saying it was in line with international agreements.

Ms Mao thanked families “for their desire and love in adopting children from China”.

The ban on foreign adoptions has created uncertainty for hundreds of families in the US currently going through the process of adopting children from China.

In a call with US diplomats in China, Beijing said it would “not continue to process cases at any stage” other than those cases covered by an exception clause. This position was confirmed by spokeswoman Ms Mao.

Washington is seeking clarification from China’s civic ministry.

China’s controversial one-child policy, introduced in 1979 when the country was worried about a surging population, forced many families to abandon their children.

Families that violated the rules were fined and, in some cases, lost jobs. In a culture that historically favours boys over girls, it often meant that female babies were given up.

International adoption was formalised in the 1990s, and since then tens of thousands of children have been adopted, with about half going to parents in the US – including celebrities like Meg Ryan and Woody Allen.

However, the international adoption programme has at various times come under criticism. In 2013, Chinese police rescued 92 abducted children and arrested suspected members of a trafficking network.

Critics at the time pointed to China’s one-child policy and adoption laws, which they said had created a thriving underground market for buying children.

A number of countries have expressed concerns about international adoptions.

Denmark has closed its only overseas adoption agency, over concerns about fabricated documents. The Netherlands has also said it will no longer allow its citizens to adopt children from abroad.

But Beijing has also altered the way it views children. In stark contrast to the position taken by officials at end of the 1970s, the country’s leaders now worry there are not enough babies being born to sustain the population.

In 2016 China scrapped the one-child policy and in 2021 Beijing formally revised its laws to allow married couples to have up to three children.

In recent years, the Chinese government also offered tax breaks and better maternal healthcare, among other incentives, in an attempt to reverse, or at least slow, the falling birth rate.

But these polices have not lead to a sustained increase in births, and in 2023 the country’s total population fell for the first time in 60 years.

Two brothers from Nigeria who targeted a 17-year-old in a sextortion scam have been sentenced to 17 years and six months in jail in the US.

The Ogoshi brothers, from Lagos, lured Jordan DeMay into sending them explicit images by pretending to be a girl his age – then blackmailed him.

He killed himself less than six hours after they started talking on Instagram.

It is the first successful prosecution of Nigerians for sextortion in the US, where it is a rapidly growing cyber-crime, often linked to Nigeria.

Jordan’s mother, Jenn Buta, held pictures of her son in court and wept as she read a victim impact statement. “I am shattered to my core,” she said.

She welcomed the ending of the trial, but said there was no good outcome from the tragic case.

Jordan DeMay was a popular schoolboy from Michigan.

Samuel Ogoshi, 24, and Samson Ogoshi, 21, sent him a friend request on Instagram pretending to be a pretty girl his age and then flirted with him.

Once they received explicit images from the teenager, they blackmailed him for hundreds of dollars, threatening to share the pictures online with his friends if he did not comply.

Jordan sent as much money as he could and warned the scammers that he would kill himself if they spread the images.

The criminals replied: “Good… Do that fast – or I’ll make you do it.”

John DeMay told Marquette federal court in Michigan he still has nightmares after finding his son dead in his bedroom. He said his family was forced to move home to escape the memory.

The brothers pleaded guilty in April to conspiring to sexually exploit teenage boys in Michigan and across the US.

Thirty-eight other US victims were also identified as being targeted by the men. 13 of them were minors.

The brothers sat in court in orange jumpsuits with handcuffs.

Their defence attorneys said the brothers’ crimes were fuelled by drug abuse and the sextortion scam culture in Nigeria.

The judge said the crimes showed a “callous disregard for life”, especially given they continued targeting other victims after learning that Jordan has died.

Both brothers apologised to Jordan’s family.

“I’m sorry to the family. We made a bad decision to make money and I wish I could change that,” Samson Ogoshi said.

In the first case of its kind, US police tracked the criminals to Lagos last summer and successfully extradited them for trial.

Another Nigerian man linked to Jordan’s death and other cases is fighting extradition.

Speaking to the BBC in May from Jordan’s family home in the city of Marquette, Jordan’s mother praised the police for their work tracking the sextortionists down.

But she said she had mixed feelings about the Ogoshis being behind bars.

“It’s a relief that someone is being held accountable, but there’s no good that’s coming out of this situation for my family or for the individuals responsible’s family,” she said.

“I miss my son more than I can describe to you, but the mother of those men is probably missing her two sons as well now. She too is really just an innocent bystander of sextortion crime,” said Jenn Buta.

Researchers and law enforcement agencies point to Nigeria as a hotspot for this type of crime.

In April, two Nigerian men were arrested after a schoolboy from Australia killed himself. Two other men are on trial in Lagos after the suicides of a 15-year-old boy in the US and a 14-year-old in Canada.

Nigerian authorities are also working with police in Scotland to investigate the case of 16-year-old Murray Dowey, who killed himself in December.

In January, US cyber-company Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) highlighted a web of Nigerian TikTok, YouTube and Scribd accounts sharing tips and scripts for sextortion. Many of the discussions and videos are in Nigerian Pidgin dialect.

Nigeria cyber-security professor Adedeji Oyenuga from Lagos State University says he hopes the news of Nigerians being sentenced will filter through to criminals and put them off.

“The Ogoshis case has already sent a bad signal. I am hearing from street level that it is having an effect and it might not stop criminals turning to these crimes, but it will likely reduce the numbers,” he said.

There had been an increase in the number of local victims too and Professor Oyenuga says Nigerian police have had some success in tackling the criminals.

It is not the first time that some of Nigeria’s young, tech-savvy population has embraced a new wave of cyber-crime.

The term “Yahoo Boys” is used to describe a portion of the population that use cyber-crime to earn a living. It comes from the early 2000s wave of Nigerian Prince scam emails which spread through the Yahoo email service.

Dr Tombari Sibe, from cyber-security firm Digital Footprints Nigeria, says cyber-fraud such as sextortion has become normalised among young people in the country, but he hopes that news of the Ogoshis’ sentencing spreads fast.

“They see cybercrime as a bloodless crime, with potentially lucrative financial rewards. This case needs to be given sufficient coverage to show these young people that sextortion can lead to loss of life and long prison sentences,” he said.

US rock band Linkin Park have announced a new singer, Emily Armstrong, will join them for their new album and tour.

The group’s former lead singer, Chester Bennington, took his own life in 2017.

Armstrong will join returning members Mike Shinoda, Brad Delson, Phoenix and Joe Hahn for the band’s forthcoming projects.

Armstrong will share vocals with Shinoda, while Colin Brittain will also join as the group’s new drummer.

The band announced their new line-up ahead of the launch of their forthcoming album From Zero and a new world tour.

Armstrong grew up in Los Angeles and is best known as the singer in alt-rock band Dead Sara, which she co-founded with guitarist Siouxsie Medley in 2005.

In an interview with Billboard, Amstrong recalled the impact Linkin Park’s 2000 album Hybrid Theory had on her.

“I was in a band when it came out,” she recalled. “One Step Closer was the song for me, and I was just like, ‘that’s what I want to do. As a singer, I want to be able to scream’.

“That album was everything – I’ve listened to it a trillion times. I would skate to it. I would mosh to it.”

In an era dominated by solo artists, Linkin Park are one of the most successful bands of the streaming age.

They are the only band to feature in Spotify’s top 10 most-streamed albums of all time, with their greatest hits collection Papercuts attracting more than 9m streams per day.

Linkin Park are not the first band to appoint a new lead singer following the death of a frontman – Alice in Chains and Sublime have previously done the same.

Most notably, Queen have regularly toured with singer Adam Lambert in recent years, following Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991.

Meanwhile, Brittain will replace the band’s previous drummer, Rob Bourdon.

Speaking to Billboard, Shinoda explained: “Rob had said to us at a point, I guess it was a few years ago now, that he wanted to put some distance between himself and the band.

“And we understood that – it was already apparent. He was starting to just show up less, be in less contact, and I know the fans noticed it too.

“So for me, as a friend, that was sad, but at the same time, I want him to do whatever makes him happy, and obviously everybody wishes him the best.”

Brittain has previously worked with rock bands Papa Roach and All Time Low.

The band’s new world tour will visit Los Angeles, New York, Hamburg, Seoul and London this month, and Bogotá in November.

The tour will be their first run of live performance since Bennington’s death in 2017, aged 41.

Their new album will be preceded by a single, titled The Emptiness Machine, the group’s first new music since Bennington’s death.

The band performed the song as part of an hour-long concert, broadcast on the band’s social platforms on Thursday, to officially launch their new line-up.

Job growth in the US was weaker than expected last month, raising concern that the world’s largest economy is starting to stumble under the weight of higher interest rates.

Employers added 142,000 jobs in August, less than the roughly 160,000 analysts had forecast, the Labor Department said. It also said job gains in the previous two months were lower than initially estimated.

However, the unemployment rate fell back, dropping to 4.2% from 4.3% in July.

The report is one of the most important gauges of the US economy and comes at a critical time, as voters weigh presidential candidates for the November election and the US central bank debates its first cut to interest rates in four years.

Analysts said the latest figures kept the Federal Reserve on track for a rate cut at its meeting this month, but would do little to resolve questions about the direction of the US economy or how big a cut it should make.

“Rarely has there been such a make or break number – unfortunately, today’s jobs report doesn’t entirely resolve the recession debate,” said Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management.

Soaring prices in 2022 prompted the Federal Reserve to raise its key lending rate to 5.3%, a roughly 20-year high.

Faced with higher borrowing costs for homes, cars and other debt, the economy has slowed, helping to ease pressures that were fuelling inflation, but adding to market jitters.

As inflation has subsided, falling to 2.9% in July, the Fed is now under pressure to cut rates and ward off further economic slowing.

The job gains in August, although below estimates, were higher than July, when a slowdown sparked fears and prompted several days of stock market turmoil.

Construction and health care firms led the hiring last month, while manufacturers and retailers got rid of roles.

Ms Shah said the data in Friday’s report was mixed, but contained enough worrying signs that the Fed should make a bigger cut.

“On balance, with inflation pressures subdued, there is no reason for the Fed not to err on the side of caution and frontload rate cuts,” she said.

But others said the gains were just steady enough to warrant a 0.25 percentage point cut, as markets have long predicted – though it might be a sign of more cuts than expected in the months ahead.

The Fed’s decision would be “close run”, said Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist for Capital Economics.

“The labour market is clearly experiencing a marked slowdown,” he said, adding that the latest figures were “overall still consistent with an economy experiencing a soft landing rather than plummeting into recession”.

The concerns about the economy are a key issue in the US election.

Polls suggest that a majority of Americans already believe the US is experiencing a recession, despite solid 2.5% growth last year.

Donald Trump has claimed that the economy is headed for a “crash” and his campaign quickly seized on the latest figures to attack vice president Kamala Harris, issuing a press release titled “warning lights flash as Kamala’s economy keeps weakening”.

Democrats have defended their record, arguing that the US weathered the pandemic and inflation better than many other countries.

They say that the slowdown is a sign of an economy returning to a more sustainable pace of growth after the post-pandemic boom.

“Although hiring has slowed, the US job market continues to generate solid job gains and wage growth that is consistently beating inflation,” the White House Council of Economic Advisors said in a blog.

Tributes have poured in for US rapper Rich Homie Quan, after his death was confirmed by authorities on Thursday.

The artist, who was in his early 30s, passed away in Atlanta, Georgia, Fulton County Medical Examiner said.

The cause of his death is not known, with local medical authorities saying an autopsy is scheduled for Friday.

Rich Homie Quan, whose legal name was Dequantes Devontay Lamar, was one of Atlanta’s best known modern rappers.

He became a huge name in the rap scene in the mid 2010s, finding mainstream success with the 2013 hit Type of Way, which he followed up with the popular Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh) in 2015.

He was nominated for multiple BET and BET Hip Hop Awards, such as best new artist and the people’s champ award.

He also collaborated with several big names in the industry, including 2 Chainz, Young Thug, Gucci Mane and Trinidad James.

Born in October 1989, Rich Homie Quan was the oldest of three siblings, and was raised in a single-parent home, according to Atlanta gig venue, Masquerade. He originally dreamt of becoming a baseball player, but eventually turned to music.

He spoke frankly about his early life in various interviews, and spent 15 months in jail in 2011 for his involvement in a series of burglaries.

Once out of jail, he threw himself into his music and went on to become a huge name in the rap scene in the mid 2010s.

Since his death was announced, tributes have poured in for the artist from across the rap world.

Singer Jacquees was one of the first to pay his respects. “Rest in Peace my brother Rich Homie Quan”, he said on X. “I love you for Life,” he added, calling the rapper a “legend” in a subsequent post.

2 Chainz posted a tribute on Instagram, saying: “Dam lil brother, we just spoke about shooting a video, special prayer for you and your family, and pray for any and everybody that’s dealing with something my condolences bru”.

Rapper Quavo also posted on Instagram, writing above an image of himself, Rich Homie Quan, and several other artists: “May God be with us, never saw this being apart of our journey”.

Engineer Alex Tumay, who worked Rich Homie Quan over the years, said the artist was “[o]ne of the nicest people I ever worked with and a true artist. Absolutely crushing news. RIP”.

Early on a Saturday morning in April, Akara Etteh was checking his phone as he came out of Holborn tube station, in central London.

A moment later, it was in the hand of a thief on the back of an electric bike – Akara gave chase, but they got away.

He is just one victim of an estimated 78,000 “snatch thefts” in England and Wales in the year to March, a big increase on the previous 12 months.

The prosecution rate for this offence is very low – the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

Victims of the crime have been telling the BBC of the impact it has had on them – ranging from losing irreplaceable photos to having tens of thousands of pounds stolen.

And for Akara, like many other people who have their phone taken, there was another frustration: he was able to track where his device went, but was powerless to get it back.

He put his iPhone 13 into lost mode when he got home an hour or so later – meaning the thieves couldn’t access its contents – and turned on the Find My iPhone feature using his laptop.

This allowed Akara to track his phone’s rough location and almost immediately he received a notification to say it was in Islington. Eight days later, the phone was pinging in different locations around north London again.

In a move says he “wouldn’t recommend” with hindsight, he went to two of the locations his phone had been in to “look around”.

“It was pretty risky,” he said. “I was fuelled by adrenaline and anger.”

He didn’t speak to anyone, but he felt he was being watched and went home.

“I am really angry,” he said. “The phone is expensive. We work hard to earn that money, to be able to buy the handset, and someone else says ‘screw that’.”

Then, in May, just over a month after the theft, Akara checked Find My iPhone again – his prized possession was now on the other side of the world – in Shenzhen, China.

Akara gave up.

It is not uncommon for stolen phones to end up in Shenzhen – where if devices can’t be unlocked and used again, they are disassembled for parts.

The city is home to 17.6 million people and is a big tech hub, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley.

In the moments after Akara’s phone was stolen, he saw police officers on the street and he told them what had happened. Officers, he said, were aware of thieves doing a “loop of the area” to steal phones, and he was encouraged to report the offence online, which he did.

A few days later, he was told by the Metropolitan Police via email the case was closed as “it is unlikely that we will be able to identify those responsible”.

Akara subsequently submitted the pictures and information he had gathered from the locations where his stolen phone had been. The police acknowledged receipt but took no further action.

The Metropolitan Police had no comment to make on Akara’s specific case, but said it was “targeting resources to hotspot areas, such as Westminster, Lambeth and Newham, with increased patrols and plain clothes officers which deter criminals and make officers more visibly available to members of the community”.

Many other people have contacted the BBC with their experiences of having their phones taken. One, James O’Sullivan, 44, from Surrey, says he lost more than £25,000 when thieves used his stolen device’s Apple Pay service.

Meanwhile, Katie Ashworth, from Newcastle, explained her phone was snatched in a park along with her watch, and a debit card in the phone case.

“The saddest thing was that the phone contained the last photos I had of my mum on a walk before she got too unwell to really do anything – I would do anything to get those photos back,” the 36-year-old says.

Again, she says, there was a lack of action from the police.

“The police never even followed it up with me, despite my bank transactions showing exactly where the thieves went,” she said.

“The police just told me to check Facebook Marketplace and local second-hand shops like Cex.”

So why are the police seemingly unable to combat this offence – or recover stolen devices?

PC Mat Evans, who has led a team working on this kind of crime for over a decade within West Midlands Police, admitted that only “quite a low number” of phones that are stolen actually get recovered.

He says the problem is the speed with which criminals move.

“Phones will be offloaded to known fences within a couple of hours,” he said.

“It’s always a battle against the clock immediately following any of these crimes, but people should always report these things to the police, because if we don’t know that these crimes are taking place, we can’t investigate them.”

And sometimes just one arrest can make a difference.

“When we do catch these criminals, either in the act or after the fact, our crime rates tank,” he said.

“Quite often that individual has been responsible for a huge swathe of crime.”

But the problem is not just about policing.

In a statement, Commander Richard Smith from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which brings together senior officers to help develop policing strategy, said it would “continue to target” the most prolific criminals.

“We know that we cannot arrest our way out of this problem,” he said.

“Manufacturers and the tech industry have an important role in reducing opportunities for criminals to benefit from the resale of stolen handsets.”

Stolen phones can already be tracked and have their data erased through services such as “Find My iPhone” and “Find My Device”, from Android.

But policing minister Dame Diana Johnson said this week the government wanted manufacturers to ensure that any stolen phone could be permanently disabled to prevent it being sold second-hand.

Police chiefs will also be tasked with gathering more intelligence on who is stealing phones and where stolen devices end up.

A growing demand for second-hand phones, both in the UK and abroad, is believed to be a major driver behind the recent rise in thefts, the government said.

The Home Office is to host a summit at which tech companies and phone manufacturers will be asked to consider innovations that could help stop phones being traded illegally.

PC Evans said there was “no magic bullet”, but he said there was one thing manufacturers could do which would be “enormously helpful” to the police – more accurate tracking.

“At this moment in time, phone tracking is okay,” he said.

“But it’s not that scene in Total Recall yet, where you’re able to run around with a tracking device in your hand, sprinting down the road after a little bleeping dot.

“I appreciate it’s a big ask from the phone companies to make that a thing, but that would be enormously helpful from a policing perspective.”

Apple and Android did not provide the BBC with a statement, but Samsung said it was “working closely with key stakeholders and authorities on the issue of mobile phone theft and related crimes”.

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has begun its journey back to Earth – but the astronauts it was supposed to be carrying are staying behind on the International Space Station.

The empty craft, which has been switched to autonomous mode, has undocked from the orbiting lab.

The capsule, which suffered technical problems after it launched with Nasa’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, has been deemed too risky to take them home.

They will instead return in a SpaceX Crew Dragon, but not until February – extending an eight-day stay on the ISS to eight months.

Starliner’s flight back will last six hours, and after it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere it will use parachutes to slow its descent to land at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico on Saturday.

Nasa said earlier that Butch and Suni were in good spirits and in regular contact with their families.

Steve Stich, Nasa’s commercial crew programme manager, told a media briefing that both astronauts were passionate about their jobs.

“They understand the importance now of moving on and… getting the vehicle back safely.”

This was the first test flight for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft with astronauts on board.

But it was plagued with problems soon after it blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 5 June.

The capsule experienced leaks of helium, which pushes fuel into the propulsion system, and several of its thrusters did not work properly.

Engineers at Boeing and Nasa spent months trying to understand these technical issues, but in late August the US space agency decided that Starliner was not safe enough to bring the astronauts home.

Steve Stich admitted there was “tension in the room” between Boeing and Nasa while the decision was being made, with Boeing arguing that their spacecraft could safely return with the pair on board.

“The Nasa team, due to the uncertainty and the modelling, could not get comfortable with that,” he said.

The plan to use rival company SpaceX has brought with it a significant delay to the astronauts’ return.

The extra time is to allow SpaceX to launch its next vehicle, with lift off scheduled for the end of September.

It was supposed to have four astronauts on board, but instead it will travel with two. This leaves room for Butch and Suni to join them in the vehicle to return to Earth at the end of its planned stay next February.

Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station, said that the astronauts were adapting well to their extended mission. Both have previously completed two long-duration stays in space.

She said the pair were undertaking the exercise programmes needed to stay healthy in the weightless environment.

And she added that they now had all of the gear they needed for their unplanned eight-month stay.

“When we first sent them up, they were borrowing a lot of our generic clothing that we have on board, and we have now switched some of those things out,” she said.

She explained that a resupply mission in July had delivered “specific crew preference items” that the pair had requested.

“So they actually have all of the standard expedition gear at this point that any other crew member would be able to select. And we’ve got another cargo vehicle coming up, so we’ll send up anything else that they need for the back-end half of their mission on that flight.”

The issues with Starliner have no doubt been a blow to Boeing, which is suffering from financial losses as it struggles to repair its reputation following recent in-flight incidents and two fatal accidents five years ago.

After so many problems, a trouble-free landing will be a much desired outcome for the company – and for Nasa.

”After we get the vehicle back, we’ll go through a couple months of post-flight analysis,” said Steve Stich.

“There are teams starting to look at what we do to get the vehicle fully certified in the future.”

The US space agency has emphasised its commitment to Boeing’s spacecraft – having two American companies to take astronauts to space has been a key goal for Nasa for some time.

When their space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, the US spent a decade relying solely on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to transport its crew and cargo – a situation Nasa admitted was far from ideal.

So in 2014, Boeing and SpaceX were awarded contracts to provide commercial space flights for Nasa astronauts – Boeing’s was worth $4.2bn (£3.2bn) while SpaceX received $2.6bn (£2bn).

So far SpaceX has sent nine crewed flights to space for Nasa, as well as some commercial missions, but this was Boeing’s first attempt at a crewed mission.

Boeing’s Starliner had already been delayed for several years because of setbacks in the spacecraft’s development and two previous uncrewed flights in 2019 and 2022 also suffered technical problems.

But Nasa administrator Bill Nelson says he is 100% certain it would fly with a crew onboard again.

In American politics it’s customary to suggest that most voters don’t start paying attention to the presidential election until after the Labor Day holiday weekend.

Well, that occasion – seen here as the unofficial end of summer – has now been and gone. And as a noticeable chill is felt in the air, many more voters will start to take note of politics. That includes the crucial swing voters in a handful of closely contested states who will ultimately decide the race for the White House.

Right on cue, as these eyes start to focus on the election, we have a presidential debate that will see Donald Trump and Kamala Harris go head-to-head for the first time. In fact, it will be the first time the two candidates have ever met in person. The high-stakes event in Philadelphia on Tuesday night is expected to draw in tens of millions of viewers.

Many of these viewers will be getting a first look at Ms Harris beyond the comfort of a rally stage. Before she dramatically replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July, Ms Harris’s national profile was unusually low despite her serving as vice-president for almost four years.

And make no mistake, her explosion on to the big stage so late in the election cycle is highly, highly unusual.

The normal rhythms of American politics allow candidates to introduce themselves to the country as they campaign for their party’s presidential nomination in primary contests held much earlier in the year. This process weeds out those who, while popular in their home states, are not ready or equipped to take the leap on to the national stage (see Ron DeSantis) and gives participants vital experience at campaigning and debating.

Ms Harris did none of that this year. When she ran for the Democratic nomination in 2019, she pulled out before a single primary vote was cast after a campaign dogged by poor messaging, in which she struggled to sell her own vision.

Yet, this time around, it appears that Ms Harris’s unusual anonymity may in fact be a secret superpower.

She has been able to present herself to America on her own terms, highlighting her relatively humble background, her record as a prosecutor and her promise to uphold what she sees as fundamental rights such as access to abortion.

Ms Harris has also positioned herself as the candidate of change – a fresh face for the future – even though she has been part of the current administration for almost four years.

Trump is attacking her as a dangerously radical liberal. But to do so he is relying on statements she made and policies she promoted when she was competing in Democratic primaries in 2019. That’s because, to win the Democratic nomination, candidates have to appeal to more liberal members of the party before then trying to move to the centre in the general election.

In this election, Ms Harris did not have to compete against members of her own party to win the nomination and so had no reason to adopt more liberal policy positions as she did in the past.

Just look at her failed bid in 2019, when she advocated for a ban on fracking and offshore drilling as well as universal free healthcare. Both ideas have been rapidly dropped this time around.

Of course, we don’t know what promises Ms Harris would have made in a 2024 primary process, but to win the support of progressives she may well have taken similar positions to the above that Trump would now be using to attack her. No primary contest means less ammunition for the former president. And relying on statements his opponent made five years ago, and policy positions she has since dropped, is blunting his attacks.

This week, Ms Harris announced tax proposals that differentiate her platform from what President Biden was promising. She is calling for a lower tax hike than Mr Biden proposed on the investment earnings of Americans making more than $1 million a year. That is not the sort of idea that would have won her support in any Democratic primary vote.

There are arguably downsides to entering the race at such a late stage, however. Competing for the nomination would have given Ms Harris more experience with unscripted appearances – press conferences, interviews and TV debates.

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So far, she has done only one broadcast interview since President Biden stepped aside and that was a joint appearance with her running mate Tim Walz. That encounter on CNN wasn’t exactly a tough interrogation, and she still struggled to answer what she would do on day one of the job if elected.

At her vast rallies and during her well-received speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, Ms Harris relied on a teleprompter and familiar lines. The 90-minute debate on Tuesday will be her longest unscripted appearance in this campaign.

Trump, who is far more experienced on the presidential debate stage, will try to knock her off her prepared talking points and do what has yet to happen in the race: press Ms Harris aggressively on policy and her changing positions.

And Ms Harris knows better than anyone that the last time Trump took to the debate stage his opponent ended up leaving the race. For America’s surprise presidential candidate, who has completely avoided the challenges and scrutiny of a Democratic primary, this debate represents a sterner test than anything she has faced so far in this pain-free campaign.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

The killing of a 15-year-old boy by a classmate last month has fuelled religious tensions in an Indian city, leaving one family grieving and the other shattered by the crime.

On 16 August, Heena* learned her teenage son Zakir*, 15, had been accused of stabbing a classmate at their school in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

Zakir allegedly pulled a knife from his backpack and attacked Devraj, a Hindu boy, who died in the hospital three days later.

The incident sparked a stream of grief and anger as well as a conversation on how to deal with violence in classrooms.

The state police denied any religious angle to the incident. “The students had an argument over notebooks which turned ugly,” investigating officer Chhagan Purohit told the BBC.

But the incident set off a wave of religious violence.

False rumours that Zakir, a Muslim, planned the killing went viral on WhatsApp, sparking protests in Udaipur with right-wing Hindu groups torching vehicles and chanting anti-Muslim slogans, leading to a curfew and internet shutdown.

Zakir was taken into custody and sent to a juvenile home, while his father was arrested on the charges of abetment to murder, Mr Purohit said.

The next day, following a familiar pattern in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled (BJP-ruled) states, bulldozers demolished Heena’s rented home, leaving her and her four daughters homeless.

“My son deserves punishment and I hope he learns to be a better human being,” Heena said. “Why did they have to punish his entire family?”

Though the violence has subsided, Udaipur residents are shaken by how a simple fight escalated. Many now fear their once-integrated Hindu-Muslim neighbourhoods are being torn apart along religious lines.

“Things are getting worse and we can feel it,” one of Heena’s neighbours said on condition of anonymity.

For Devraj’s family, everything else pales in comparison to the pain of losing their son.

“This is the news every parent dreads,” his father Pappu Lal told the BBC.

A cobbler in Kuwait, he found out about the incident while he was thousands of miles away from home. By the time he got home, his son was unconscious. He died without getting a chance to see or speak to his father.

The trauma, Mr Lal said, catapulted his wife and him into debilitating sadness and sparked fury inside him.

“Their house was demolished but we lost our son,” Mr Lal said. “The house can be built again but our child? He will never come back.”

The incident has become a political sore point for the BJP, which governs India and Rajasthan, after some opposition leaders accused the party of fuelling religious tensions for political gains.

Authorities claim that the house where Heena lived was demolished because it was illegally built on forest land. A notice was sent to Heena a day before the action.

But her brother Mukhtar Alam*, who owns the house, questioned how the demolition could take place when only the tenants were alerted. “It was my house and I built it with a lot of hard work. How can they just come and raze it without even telling me?”

He also asked why the other houses in the area were still standing if they were all built on forest land.

Mukesh Saini, an official in Udaipur’s forest department, told the BBC that action would be taken against those structures “at an appropriate time”.

“Right now the atmosphere is not right for that,” he said.

Critics have questioned the timing of the act and say that punishing someone for an alleged crime using laws meant for another makes no sense.

In BJP-governed states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Assam, bulldozers often swiftly demolish the homes of crime suspects, with officials touting this as evidence of their tough stance on law and order. While victims include Hindu families, opposition leaders and activists argue that these demolitions disproportionately target Muslims, especially following religious violence or protests.

“There is no logic to it except the communal logic of collective punishment and the authority acting as the populist dispenser of tough vigilante justice,” said Asim Ali, a political scientist.

India’s Supreme Court recently criticised the demolition of properties linked to people accused of crimes and said it would issue guidelines around this.

Manna Lal Rawat, the BJP’s Udaipur MP, told BBC Hindi that the demolition was not connected to the stabbing. He also alleged that the stabbing occurred because the accused student “was influenced by extremists” and said he had urged the police to ensure the killing was not a part of a “larger pattern”.

An uneasy calm has prevailed in Udaipur since 2022, when two Muslim men beheaded a Hindu man, filmed the assault and posted it online. They said the act was in response to his support for a politician’s divisive remarks about the Prophet Muhammad.

The killing had sparked massive protests and violence in the city for days.

“The memories of that murder are still alive in the minds of people,” a senior Rajasthan police official, who wanted to stay anonymous, told the BBC. “That’s why a fight between two children turned into riots. Due to politics, the peace of the city has been damaged.”

But Mr Lal cannot understand what prompted the fight in the first place.

He says his son was a good boy – as mischievous as a 15-year-old could be, but also sweet and innocent.

“He never fought with anyone in school. He wanted to become a policeman when he grew up, become the voice of justice,” he said, his eyes on Devraj’s picture in the corner of the living room.

Since Devraj’s death, hundreds of people have been visiting the family’s small house, located in a bustling neighbourhood where Hindus and Muslims have lived peacefully together for years.

But for Mr Lal and his grieving wife, all condolences feel meaningless.

He refuses to talk about the violence or what may have caused it, saying that’s for the administration to answer. “I just want justice for my son”.

Questions have also been raised about the school’s handling of the case.

Mr Lal alleges that no teacher accompanied Devraj to the hospital and that he was taken there on a motorbike by two of his classmates.

The school’s principal, Isha Dharmawat, who has since been suspended for negligence of duty, denied the allegation.

She said she had asked the students to take Devraj on her motorbike to avoid any delay in treatment and that she and four other teachers had also gone to the hospital immediately.

As the city limps back to normalcy, the effects of the incident are most starkly visible at the school where the children studied.

After the stabbing, the school closed for a week and reopened with only one student attending.

The two students who accompanied Devraj to the hospital were questioned by police and soon left the city, citing safety concerns. Parents still sending their children to school are worried about their safety.

“Children should be kept out of politics till they are ready to face the world. This has shaken us all up,” a parent who wanted to remain unnamed said.

Meanwhile, Heena is desperately trying to piece her life back together.

“Half of my belongings are still buried [under the debris of the demolished house]. After the demolition, no one wants to rent me a house,” she said.

Even now, she wonders how her son got the knife or why he allegedly used it on his friend. Was it collapsing mental health, a childish rivalry or something else? She does not know.

But she does know that she will forever be seen as an enabler of the violence and its resulting hatred, and as a terrible parent.

“Everything of mine has been taken away. Now if people want to hang my child, then hang him, what else can I say?”

The United Nations has called for a “full investigation” into the killing of a US-Turkish woman in the occupied West Bank during a protest on Friday.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was killed after Israeli forces opened fire.

The 26-year-old was taking part in a weekly protest against Jewish settlement expansion in the town of Beita near Nablus.

According to local media reports, Ms Eygi was shot by Israeli troops. Israel’s military said it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area”.

An eyewitness told the BBC World Service’s Newshour programme he had heard two shots fired at the protest.

Reacting to the killing, Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for the UN secretary general, said: “We would want to see a full investigation of the circumstances and that people should be held accountable.”

Civilians, he added, “must be protected at all times”.

The US also called for an investigation into the incident. Sean Savett, spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, said Washington was “deeply disturbed by the tragic death of an American citizen”.

“We have reached out to the government of Israel to ask for more information and request an investigation into the incident,” Mr Savett said.

Footage from the scene shortly after the shooting shows medics rushing Ms Eygi into an ambulance.

Jewish-Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak, who was at the protest, told BBC World Service’s Newshour programme he had seen “soldiers on the rooftop aiming”.

He said he had heard two separate shots, “with like a second or two distance between them”.

“I heard someone calling my name, saying in English, ‘Help us. We need help. We need help.” I ran towards them,” he said.

He said he had then seen Ms Eygi “lying on the ground underneath an olive tree, bleeding to death from her head”.

“I put my hand behind her back to try and stop the bleeding,” he said. “I looked up, there was a clear line of sight between the soldiers and where we were. I took her pulse, and it was very, very weak.”

He added that Friday’s demonstration had been Ms Eygi’s first time attending a protest with the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian group.

The dual-national was rushed to a hospital in Nablus and later pronounced dead.

Dr Fouad Nafaa, head of Rafidia Hospital where Ms Eygi was admitted, confirmed that a US citizen in her mid-20s had died from a “gunshot in the head”.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken deplored the “tragic loss”, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan branded the Israeli action “barbaric”.

Turkey’s foreign ministry said Ms Eygi had been “killed by Israeli occupation soldiers in the city of Nablus”.

Before travelling to the Middle East, Ms Eygi had recently graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle.

The school’s president, Ana Mari Cauce, described news of her death as “awful” while adding that Ms Eygi had had a “positive influence” on other students.

Ms Eygi was born in Antalya, as reported by Turkish media.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said: “During Israeli security forces activity adjacent to the area of Beita, the forces responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them.

“The IDF is looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area. The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review.”

In his interview with the BBC, Jonathan Pollak was asked about the IDF’s statement, where the Israeli military said security forces had responded to stone-throwing.

Mr Pollak said there had been clashes but he felt that soldiers had been “under no threat”.

There had been “no stone throwing” where she had been, he said.

Israeli forces withdrew from Jenin city and its refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Friday, following a major nine-day operation there.

The Palestinian health ministry says at least 36 Palestinians were killed – 21 from Jenin governorate – in that time. Most of the dead have been claimed by armed groups as members, but the ministry says children are also among those killed.

In the past 50 years, Israel has built settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where more than 700,000 Jews now live.

Settlements are held to be illegal under international law – that is the position of the UN Security Council and the UK government, among others – although Israel rejects this.

A Belfast man has pleaded guilty to trying to blackmail 16 women into sending him sexual videos and images.

Christopher Morrow, 27, of Rochester Road in east Belfast, appeared at Belfast Crown Court on Thursday to be re-arraigned on 17 charges.

Morrow entered guilty pleas to all 16 counts of blackmail.

The defendant admitted making unwarranted demands with menaces for sexual videos and images from 16 individual women.

The charges span a four-month period between 14 January and 10 April 2023.

He also pleaded guilty to possessing an extreme pornographic image on 10 April, 2023.

A prosecution lawyer told the court the pleas were acceptable to the Crown and that a separate charge of harassment was to be “left on the books”.

Morrow, who was granted continuing bail, is due to be sentenced on 24 October.

Donald Trump’s sentencing in his Manhattan hush money criminal trial has been postponed until after the November election.

Judge Juan Merchan on Friday delayed the sentencing to 26 November, citing “the unique time frame this matter currently finds itself in” among his reasons.

Lawyers for Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, have used several legal manoeuvres to delay the sentencing, which had been scheduled for 18 September.

A New York jury in May convicted Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, the first time a sitting or former president has been convicted of a crime.

In his decision, Judge Merchan wrote that the case demands “a sentencing hearing that is entirely focused on the verdict of the jury”.

“Their verdict must be respected and addressed in a manner that is not diluted by the enormity of the upcoming presidential election,” he said, setting sentencing to exactly three weeks after the 5 November election.

He said the delay was necessary “to avoid any appearance – however unwarranted – that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate”.

“The Court is a fair, impartial and apolitical institution,” the judge continued.

Trump could face a sentence of up to four years in prison, but Judge Merchan also has the discretion to impose a punishment of a fine, probation or a shorter jail term.

Prosecutors in the case accused the former president of concealing a payment to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels, a former adult-film star, in the final days of his 2016 election campaign.

Ms Daniels testified that she and Trump had sex, and that she accepted $130,000 (£99,000) from his former lawyer before the 2016 election in exchange to keep quiet about the encounter.

Prosecutors argued that, by approving a scheme to disguise the money as legal expenses, Trump broke election law.

Trump’s original sentencing date was in July. His lawyers delayed that after a US Supreme Court ruling that granted presidents some immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts”.

Judge Merchan granted a delay so that the parties could prepare arguments on the effects of the Supreme Court ruling on his case.

A decision on the implications will come on 12 November.

Judge Merchan has already dismissed some arguments made by Trump’s lawyers to delay as “unsubstantiated grievances… that do not merit this Court’s attention”.

But he wrote that sentencing hearings are routinely delayed in other cases for reasons like personal circumstances or scheduling conflicts.

“Given the unique facts and circumstances of this case, there is no reason why this Defendant should be treated differently than any other,” Judge Merchan said.

He added that his decision to delay “should dispel any suggestion” that the court would have made a decision that would be seen in support of “any political party or any candidate for any office”.

Trump has maintained that he did nothing wrong. He told Fox News after the ruling that the “case should be dead”.

On his social media platform Truth Social, the former president re-iterated his claims of innocence, dismissing the case as a “witch hunt” and a “political attack”.

“This case should be rightfully terminated, as we prepare for the Most Important Election in the History of our Country,” he wrote.

A spokesperson for Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney whose office brought the charges, said his team was “ready for sentencing on the new date set by the court”.

If Trump returns to the White House he will have the power to pardon himself of any federal crimes he may have been convicted of.

However, the case in New York – as well as the election interference case in Georgia – are state charges, and presidents do not have the ability to pardon those convicted in state courts.

Israeli forces have been laying tarmac on a key road in Gaza along its southern border – in what some commentators see as a signal that they’re not prepared to fully withdraw from the territory any time soon.

The road has become a major sticking point in the negotiations for a new ceasefire and hostage release deal.

BBC Verify has analysed satellite imagery, photos and video that show the surfacing of a road along the narrow but strategically important strip of land running the length of Gaza’s border with Egypt, long known by its Israeli military codename: the Philadelphi Corridor.

Between 26 August and 5 September, satellite imagery captured at regular intervals shows fresh paving along a section of road extending 6.4km inland from the coast along the border fence.

A video posted online on 4 September which shows construction work, reportedly that evening, along a stretch of the border fence.

Heavy machinery can be seen laying fresh tarmac wide enough for two large vehicles to pass.

We’ve also compared two images below which show the laying of tarmac before and after. BBC Verify has confirmed the location and that they show the same stretch along the border fence.

The corridor includes the Rafah crossing with Egypt – which has been Gaza’s only crossing not directly controlled by Israel and key for aid deliveries.

At 12.6 km (7.8 miles) long, it runs adjacent to the Egyptian border from the Kerem Shalom crossing to the Mediterranean Sea.

While the Israeli military calls it the Philadelphi Route or Axis, Palestinians often refer to it as the Salah al-Din Axis.

“It’s not a specific, demarcated area,” says Dr Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. “It’s a conceptual line. It’s understood as land adjacent to the border.”

Israel previously pulled out of the area in 2005, when it withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza.

But it re-entered the Philadelphi Corridor on 7 May this year with tanks and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) – months before starting to pave the road.

Troops seized control of the Rafah crossing and then began advancing north-west both along the corridor and into the nearby southern city of Rafah.

In the past four months, the IDF has destroyed hundreds of buildings near the corridor with air and artillery strikes, as well through controlled demolitions with explosives and bulldozers.

One village – Al Qarya as Suwaydiya – at the Mediterranean end of the border – has been flattened and now appears to be operating as an Israeli base.

“Paving the road puts pressure on negotiators and mediators. The Israelis are trying to create a fait accompli,” says Dr Krieg.

“It also suggests that Israel is not going to withdraw entirely from the Gaza strip any time soon,” he says.

He cites a road built earlier this year by Israeli forces across northern Gaza – known as the Netzarim Corridor.

“If you look at the investments made in the Netzarim Corridor, it’s clear they have no intention of withdrawing anytime soon, they’ve got concrete barriers, forward operating bases with towers and walls – you don’t build those if you’re planning on withdrawing.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the Philadelphi Corridor as a “lifeline” for Hamas, and is adamant that Israel maintains a military presence there as a condition of any agreement.

At a press conference on Wednesday, he added: “You want to destroy Hamas’ military and governance capabilities, you can’t let Hamas rearm. So you have to control the corridor.”

The IDF’s chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, said on 14 August that “the Philadelphi Corridor is important because it deals with strengthening our position. We are preparing for all scenarios that the political level may decide.”

Retired Egyptian Major General Dr Samir Faraj, now a commentator on military strategy, said Israel’s aim was “psychological warfare… paving the road is a media war, a war in which Israel sends a message to different parties that they will not leave.“

We have asked the Israeli military why it is surfacing the road now but have not received a response.

Mr Netanyahu says Hamas has used tunnels underneath the corridor to smuggle weapons and people via Egypt before the 7 October attack on Israel, which triggered the war in Gaza.

He believes Israeli forces deployed there will prevent the group rearming and ensure it never again poses a threat.

In a visit to the corridor last month, Mr Gallant was quoted as saying: “We have destroyed 150 tunnels on the Philadelphi Corridor, stretching across the Gaza-Egypt border.”

BBC Verify has located detonations in videos, shared by the IDF, to the Philadelphi Corridor – including one which it says shows “destruction of underground infrastructure” – but we are unable to confirm what is being destroyed.

We have also seen photos and video – again, shared by the IDF – of one substantial tunnel in the corridor.

All of these locations, as well as others along the border, show signs of major disturbances of the surface soil on satellite imagery.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

A 26-year-old US-Turkish woman has been shot dead in the occupied West Bank during a protest on Friday, where Israeli forces opened fire.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, who had joint nationality, was taking part in a protest against Jewish settlement expansion in the town of Beita near Nablus.

According to local media reports, Ms Eygi was shot by Israeli troops.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area”.

A fellow protester told the BBC Friday’s demonstration was Ms Eygi’s first time attending a protest with the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian group.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken deplored the “tragic loss”, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan branded the Israeli action “barbaric”.

Turkey’s foreign ministry said Ms Eygi was “killed by Israeli occupation soldiers in the city of Nablus”.

The White House did not ascribe blame, but called on Israel to investigate.

Earlier, US state department spokesman Matthew Miller said Washington was “urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death”.

Ms Eygi was born in Antalya, as reported by Turkish media.

The dual-national was rushed to a hospital in Nablus and later pronounced dead.

Dr Fouad Nafaa, head of Rafidia Hospital where Ms Eygi was admitted, confirmed that a US citizen in her mid-20s had died from a “gunshot in the head”.

In a statement, the IDF said: “Today (Friday), during Israeli security forces activity adjacent to the area of Beita, the forces responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them.

“The IDF is looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area. The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review.”

Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli activist who was at the same protest as Ms Eygi, said he had heard “two separate shots of live ammunition, shot one after the other… and then I heard another shot”.

“I found her lying on the ground, beside the tree, bleeding from her head,” Mr Pollak told AFP news agency, as he showed blood on the hand he used to stop Ms Eygi’s head from bleeding.

“I took her pulse, she had a very weak pulse, we called the ambulance.

“From there we evacuated her to the village’s medical centre, where the doctor came into the ambulance and continued into the hospital, where they tried to resuscitate her but failed.”

Mr Pollak said the killing was “now receiving the light of day because she is an American citizen”.

In an interview with the BBC’s Newshour programme, Mr Pollak was asked about the IDF’s statement, where the Israeli military said security forces had been responding to “a main instigator who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them”. Mr Pollak said there had been clashes but he felt that soldiers had been “under no threat”.

He also said that where Ms Eygi was shot had been a “separate incident at a separate place”, adding that there had been “no stone throwing” where she had been.

Israeli forces withdrew from Jenin city and its refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Friday, following a major nine-day operation there.

The Palestinian health ministry says at least 36 Palestinians were killed – 21 from Jenin governorate – in that time. Most of the dead have been claimed by armed groups as members, but the ministry says children are also among those killed.

In the past 50 years, Israel has built settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where more than 700,000 Jews now live.

Settlements are held to be illegal under international law – that is the position of the UN Security Council and the UK government, among others – although Israel rejects this.

A French woman who was raped by unknown men over 10 years after being drugged to sleep by her husband told a court of her horror at learning how she had been abused.

Gisèle Pélicot, who is 72, was giving evidence on day three of the trial in Avignon, south-east France, of 51 men – including her husband of 50 years, Dominique. All are accused of rape.

Documents before court indicate that Dominique Pélicot, 71, admitted to police that he got satisfaction from watching other men have sex with his unconscious wife.

Many defendants in the case contest the rape charge against them, claiming that they thought they were taking part in a consensual sex game.

But Gisèle Pélicot told the court she was “never complicit” in the sexual acts and had never pretended to be asleep.

This is a case that has shocked France, all the more so because the trial is being held in public.

Gisèle waived her right to anonymity to shift the “shame” back onto the accused, her legal team has previously said.

Taking the stand on Thursday, she said she was speaking for “every woman who’s been drugged without knowing it… so that no woman has to suffer.”

She recalled the moment in November 2020 when she was asked by police to attend an interview alongside her husband.

He had recently been caught taking under-skirt photographs of women at a supermarket, and Gisèle told the court she believed the meeting with police was a formality related to that incident.

“The police officer asked me about my sex life,” she told the court. “I told him I had never practised partner-swapping or threesomes. I said I was a one-man woman. I couldn’t bear any man’s hands on me other than my husband’s.

“But after an hour the officer said, ‘I am going to show you some things which you will not find pleasant’. He opened a folder and he showed me a photograph.

“I did not recognise either the man or the woman asleep on the bed. The officer asked: ‘Madame, is this your bed and bedside table?’

“It was hard to recognise myself dressed up in a way that was unfamiliar. Then he showed me a second photo and a third.

“I asked him to stop. It was unbearable. I was inert, in my bed, and a man was raping me. My world fell apart.”

Gisèle said that up until then their marriage had been generally happy, and she and her husband had overcome a number of financial and health-related difficulties. She said she had forgiven the upskirting after he promised her that it had been a one-off incident.

“All that we had built together had gone. Our three children, seven grandchildren. We used to be an ideal couple.

“I just wanted to disappear. But I had to tell my children their father was under arrest. I asked my son-in-law to stay next to my daughter when I told her that her father had raped me, and had me raped by others.

“She let out a howl, whose sound is still etched on my mind.”

In the coming days, the court will hear more evidence from the investigation, about how Dominique allegedly contacted men via sex-chat websites and invited them to his suburban home in Mazan, a town north-east of Avignon.

Police claim the men were given strict instructions. They had to park at some distance from the house so as to not attract attention, and to wait for up to an hour so that the sleeping drugs which he had given Gisèle could take effect.

They further claim that, once in the home, the men were told to undress in the kitchen, and then to warm their hands with hot water or on a radiator. Tobacco and perfume were not allowed in case they awoke Gisèle. Condoms were not required.

No money changed hands.

According to the investigation, Dominique watched and filmed the proceedings, eventually creating a hard-drive file with some 4,000 photos and videos on it. It was as a result of the upskirting episode that police found the files on his computer.

Police say they have evidence of around 200 rapes carried out between 2011 and 2020, initially at their home outside Paris, but mainly in Mazan, where they moved in 2013.

Investigators allege that just over half the rapes were carried out by her husband. Most of the other men lived only a few kilometres away.

Asked Thursday by the judge if she knew any of the accused, Gisèle said she recognised only one.

“He was our neighbour. He came over to check our bikes. I used to see him at the bakery. He was always polite. I had no idea he was coming to rape me.”

Gisèle was then reminded by the judge that in order to respect the presumption of innocence, it had been agreed in court not to use the word rape but “sex scene”.

She replied: “I just think they should recognise the facts. When I think of what they have done I am overcome with disgust. They should at least have the responsibility to recognise what they did.”

After the truth emerged, Gisèle found that she was carrying four sexually-transmitted diseases.

“I have had no sympathy from any of the accused. One who was HIV-positive came six times. Not once did my husband express any concern about my health,” she said.

She is now in the process of divorcing him.

After speaking for two hours in front of Dominique and the other accused, she said: “Inside me, it is a scene of devastation. The façade may look solid… but behind it…”