Eight people have died overnight while trying to cross the Channel from France to England, French police say.

Rescue services were alerted after the boat got into difficulty in waters north of Boulogne-sur-mer in the northern Pas-de-Calais region after 01:00 local time (00:00 BST).

The rubber vessel had around 60 people on board, from countries including Eritrea, Sudan, Syria and Iran.

It comes less than two weeks after 12 people, including six children and a pregnant woman, died when a boat carrying dozens of migrants sank in what was the deadliest loss of life in the Channel this year.

The French coast guard said the boat in the incident reported on Sunday was seen heading towards a beach in the town of Ambleteuse but rescue teams could not offer assistance from the sea.

After getting into difficulty, it was driven onto rocks where it came apart.

On the beach, emergency services provided care to 53 people and confirmed eight had died, the coast guard said. Six people were taken to hospital including a baby with hypothermia.

No other people were found during sea searches.

An investigation has been opened by the Boulogne-sur-mer public prosecutor’s office.

A UK government spokesperson confirmed the latest incident and said French authorities were leading the response and investigation.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said it was “awful” to hear of a “further loss of life” in the Channel.

He told the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme that many people were “of course not able to make it” across the Channel, having seen the types of rubber dinghies people have been using.

He also reiterated the government’s plan to work with European partners to tackle the criminal people-smuggling gangs to deter small boat crossings.

There has been a spate of crossing attempts across the Channel in the last two days with the arrival of calmer weather.

Some 801 people crossed the Channel on Saturday – the second highest daily total so far this year, according to provisional Home Office figures. On 18 June, 882 people made the journey.

French maritime authorities said that 200 people were rescued in a 24-hour period over Friday and Saturday.

The French coast guard and other first responders rescued people onboard four separate boats – one with 61, another with 55, and two others with 48 and 36 each.

Eighteen attempted crossings were monitored by authorities over the course of the day.

Including the eight latest victims, a total of 45 people have died in the Channel this year – the highest reported number since 2021, according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration.

More than 23,000 people have crossed the Channel this year.

Amnesty International UK said the latest incident was “yet another appalling and avoidable tragedy”.

Enver Solomon, CEO of the Refugee Council, said the deaths were not “inevitable” and a comprehensive approach to reduce crossings was needed.

“Enforcement alone is not the solution,” he said, adding that there needed to be improved access to safe asylum routes.

Severe flooding has hit Myanmar after Typhoon Yagi, with more than 230,000 people forced to flee their homes, according to officials.

The country’s ruling junta has requested foreign aid to mitigate the impact, the state-run media report. The capital Naypyidaw is among the areas worst hit.

The floods have killed at least 33 people, the country’s military says. State-run daily New Light of Myanmar says some temporary relief camps have been set up for victims made homeless.

Asia’s most powerful storm this year, Typhoon Yagi, has already swept Vietnam, the Chinese island of Hainan and the Philippines.

Junta chief Gen Min Aung Hlaing and other Burmese officials have visited areas of heavy flooding and inspected the rescue and relief efforts, the state-run media say.

Reports by Radio Free Asia suggest the death toll is much higher, with the US-backed broadcaster saying at least 160 people were killed in floods and landslides.

A rescue worker in Taungoo told BBC Burmese on Saturday more than 300 people were trapped by flooding on the east bank of the Sittaung river.

“There aren’t enough boats to rescue us,” the rescue worker said.

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.

Much of Myanmar’s population has been suffering dislocation because of a three-year civil war that has killed thousands and displaced more than 2.6 million people, according to the UN.

According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), some 18.6 million people are now estimated to be in humanitarian need.

In an update on the ongoing humanitarian situation earlier this week, the International Red Cross (ICRC) said many families in Myanmar have limited access to clean water and sanitation, and are going without basic medicines and health care.

“They live with the fear of armed conflict and violence. The disruption of livelihoods is leaving countless people without the means to sustain themselves,” the ICRC’s president, Mirjana Spoljaric, said on Wednesday.

Sir Keir Starmer and his wife Lady Victoria accepted donations of clothing so they could “look their best” to represent the UK, David Lammy has said.

Asked about the donations, the foreign secretary suggested other countries had generous taxpayer-funded budgets for leaders’ clothing.

It came after reports Sir Keir may have broken parliamentary rules in failing to declare clothes bought for his wife by Labour donor Lord Waheed Alli.

Lammy told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “US presidents and first ladies have a huge budget, paid for by the taxpayer, so that they look their best on behalf of the US people.”

In fact, the US first lady does not have access to a specific clothing budget – and many have shared frustration at the cost of staying fashionable in the White House.

In some countries, taxpayers contribute to living expenses for their leaders – and this can include clothing.

US presidents have an expenses budget of some $50,000 (£38,000), which can be used to purchase clothing and other items, on top of an annual salary of $400,000.

But the US president’s spouse – historically, always a first lady – does not receive an annual salary or fixed expenses budget, though they have paid staff and an office.

That’s despite the US first lady’s fashion choices attracting immense scrutiny and attention.

Notable examples have included Melania Trump’s Zara jacket emblazoned with “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?”, on a visit to a migrant detention centre, and the striking scarlet Alexander McQueen dress worn by Michelle Obama while meeting former Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Some first ladies have said that, in general, they were expected to pay for their clothes themselves.

Mrs Bush, the wife of George W Bush, wrote in her 2010 memoir that she was “amazed by the sheer number of designer clothes that I was expected to buy… to meet the fashion expectations for a first lady”.

“After our first year in the White House, our accountant said to George, ‘It costs a lot to be president,’ and he was referring mainly to my clothes,” Mrs Bush wrote.

Michelle Obama’s press secretary, Joanna Rosholm, told CNBC in 2014: “Mrs Obama pays for her clothing.”

US first ladies can also accept clothes as gifts, often on behalf of the government.

Some designers welcome the publicity their clothes being worn by the first lady offers them.

With the price tags of designer dresses easily running into the tens of thousands, donations are the only way comparatively less wealthy occupants of the White House could afford to wear star designers.

“For official events of public or historic significance, such as a state visit, the first lady’s clothes may be given as a gift by a designer and accepted on behalf of the U.S. government,” Mrs Rosholm said.

The Smithsonian Museum lists the dress current first lady Jill Biden wore at her husband’s 2021 inauguration as a donation of designer Alexandria O’Neil “in honour of first lady Jill Biden” – an indication the designer lent her the dress.

By contrast, it appears that her predecessor Melania Trump, whose husband’s wealth made him the richest president in history, donated her inaugural dress, designed by Hervé Pierre, herself. That may be because she paid for it.

In the UK, Sarah Brown, wife of former prime minister Gordon Brown, has spoken of the difficulties around accepting gifts – including clothing – while in Downing Street.

“As I quickly discover,” she wrote in her book. Behind the Black Door, in 2011, “there is no shortage of designers and retailers who will offer you free clothes.

“However, there are many rules that govern what MPs (and spouses) can do with free gifts – not to mention the moral aspect of using your position to grab freebies.

She explained the solution: “No10 advisers and I figure out a way that works for everyone. Any clothes that I want to keep, I can buy.

“Any freely offered clothes or jewellery, I can effectively ‘rent’ for about 10 per cent of the retail value, then return.”

Spouses of world leaders elsewhere generally appear to rely on donations for their style choices.

France’s Brigitte Macron does not have a state-funded budget for clothes and is believed to be lent outfits by Parisian high fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton.

According to the 2019 book Madame La Présidente, her office keeps a record of which clothes have been donated to her and which are her own.

But her husband, President Emmanuel Macron, has been criticised for his own profligate spending. This year, it was revealed that his office reserved a business class seat on a flight from Paris to Brazil solely to transport two of his suits, at a cost of nearly €4,000 (£3,380).

In Germany, ministers were criticised for spending €450,000 on hairdressers, makeup artists and photographers in the first six months of 2023, though there does not appear to be a specific fund for clothing.

Asked about Lammy’s remarks, a Foreign Office spokesman declined to comment further.

Downing Street said of Sir Keir’s declaration of clothing donations: “We sought advice from the authorities on coming to office.

“We believed we had been compliant, however, following further interrogation this month, we have declared further items.”

For months, an unusual monument sat in an oak-lined square at the heart of Tasmania’s capital: a pair of severed bronze feet.

A statue of renowned surgeon-turned-premier William Crowther had loomed over the park in Hobart for more than a century. But one evening in May, it was chopped down at the ankles and the words “what goes around” graffitied on its sandstone base.

It was a throwback to another night more than 150 years ago, when Crowther allegedly broke into a morgue, sliced open an Aboriginal leader’s head and stole his skull – triggering a grim tussle over the remaining body parts.

Tasmania had become the centre of coloniser efforts to eradicate Aboriginal people in Australia. And the sailor on the slab – William Lanne – was touted as the last man on the island, making his remains a twisted trophy for white physicians.

Some see Crowther as an unfairly maligned man of his time, and his effigy as an important part of the state’s history, warts and all.

But for Lanne’s descendants, it represents colonial brutality, the dehumanising myth that Tasmanian Aboriginal people are extinct, and the whitewashing of the island’s past.

“You walk around the city anywhere and you’d never know Aborigines were here,” Aboriginal activist Nala Mansell says.

Now the dismembered statue has become a symbol of a city – and a nation – struggling to reckon with its darkest chapters.

Few places encapsulate the issue quite like Risdon Cove – called piyura kitina by the Palawa Aboriginal people.

Tucked beside a creek, a monument proudly marks it as the first British settlement on what was then called Van Diemen’s Land.

For Tasmanian Aboriginal people, though, this hillside on the outskirts of Hobart is “ground zero for invasion”.

“It’s the first landing and not coincidentally the first massacre [of our people],” Nunami Sculthorpe-Green tells the BBC one overcast afternoon.

Startled from their reverie, flurries of native hens – which piyura kitina is named after – scatter over the mossy grass as we arrive.

A wallaby hastily bounds towards sparse gum trees. It’s from that direction that Mumirimina men, women and children would have come down the slope on 3 May 1804, singing as they hunted kangaroos.

They were met with muskets and cannons.

The events of that day – and the death toll – are disputed. What is not contested is that this marked the start of a determined effort by British settlers to get rid of the original Tasmanians, nine nations of up to 15,000 people.

War broke out and Aboriginal people were hunted across the island, the survivors rounded up and sent to what have been described as death camps.

“If that happened anywhere in the world today, it would be referred to as ethnic cleansing,” says Greg Lehman, a Palawa professor of history.

Ripped from his homelands as a child, Lanne survived two of those camps before living out his final years as a shipmate and beloved advocate for his people.

Even before he died of disease in 1869, aged only 34, letters show that powerful men in Hobart had begun scheming.

“There’s no way that that young man was going to be allowed to lie in a grave. No way,” historian Cassandra Pybus tells the BBC.

The theft of Aboriginal remains had long been normalised, she says, but reached a fever pitch in Tasmania as the number of its original inhabitants dwindled.

Lanne’s skull was sought to prove since-discredited theories about Tasmanian Aboriginal people – that they were the missing link between humans and Neanderthals, a distinct race so primitive they didn’t even know how to make fire.

Before he was buried, his hands and feet would also be cut off and pocketed by physicians. Some historians say his grave was robbed as well, and every bone in his body taken.

Crowther always denied any involvement in stealing Lanne’s remains – his backers called the allegations a witch hunt – but the town was horrified, and he was suspended from his honorary position at the hospital.

For First Nations people, who believe their spirits can only rest once returned to their land, what happened was especially distressing.

But within two weeks, Crowther was elected to state parliament, and he’d soon rise to be Tasmania’s premier for an unremarkable six months.

By contrast, Lanne’s skull appears to have wound up on the other side of the globe at a UK university, and his people were soon declared extinct.

Except they were not.

Today’s Palawa people trace their ancestry to a dozen women who survived, while other groups – which some do not recognise as Aboriginal – also say they descend from a handful of people who managed to evade capture in the 1800s.

Yet, for the past 150 years, Tasmanian Aboriginal people say they have been fighting to be visible, in the history pages and in everyday life.

The lie that they were extinct is largely blamed on outdated views about ethnic identity. But others say it was also a strategic decision – to deny Tasmanian Aboriginal people rights, and to snuff out their culture.

The impact has been devastating. Many Palawa people speak of being persecuted for their Indigenous blood in one breath and denied their identity because of their white ancestry in the next.

Even now, many feel there are huge swathes of their history missing – or wilfully ignored.

Nala points out all she was taught about Tasmanian Aboriginal culture and history at her Hobart school was a brief lesson on boomerangs and didgeridoos – although her people used neither.

And aside from a walking track named after Truganini – Lanne’s wife and a leader in her own right – there are no sites celebrating Aboriginal people around the city.

“The way they tell stories about Aboriginal people… they want you to think that it’s somewhere really far away from where you are, and that it’s something that happened a really long time ago,” Nunami says.

Unimpressed, the 30-year-old history graduate started Black Led Tours to fill the gap.

“I realised that I was walking to work the exact same way Truganini used to walk her dogs. And I realised that my parents met at the pub where William Lanne died. I also realised that the Crowther statue was right next to my bus stop.

“And I thought: does everybody know that this is right here, where we live and where we work?”

When unveiling the effigy in 1889, the then-premier said Crowther was not “a perfect man”, but one who spent his time doing good.

His scandal overlooked, until recently he was remembered for offering free health care to the poor.

That rankles Tasmanian Aboriginal people like Nala: “It’s just a kick in the guts.”

As spokeswoman for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, she led a renewed campaign to take down the memorial.

“To us, it would be no different to having a statue of Martin Bryant,” she says, referring to the gunman who massacred 35 people at nearby Port Arthur in 1996.

But some, like Jeff Briscoe – who lost the legal case to prevent the statue’s removal – believe the sculpture has priceless heritage value as the only memorial in the state “funded totally by the public”.

“At the time, it was a significant memorial and everyone was proud of it. In 2024, should the perceptions of a few people override all that?

“It’s not as if he was going around shooting people… he maybe had been involved in the mutilation of a body, but they all were.

“They’re bringing the bar down so low that no memorial from colonial times will be safe in Australia.”

Cassandra Pybus says there is no doubt that Crowther did mutilate Lanne, citing letters he wrote. However, she had argued, like Mr Briscoe, that taking down the statue would set a dangerous precedent, because “everybody was racist”.

She had wanted it to remain so the site could be used to educate people about how the first Tasmanians were treated.

The statue’s fate divided even Crowther’s living descendants, with some publicly supporting the calls for removal, and others distressed by them.

Hobart Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds says the council voted to remove the statue in 2022 “as a commitment to telling the truth of our city’s history, and as an act of reconciliation with the Aboriginal community” – the first decision of its kind in Australia.

They did it after a rigorous consultation and with the support of the “silent majority”, she adds.

Ultimately, she says, the statue is a sign of how desperate Crowther was to repair his reputation, not his significance to the state: “[He’s] not that important.”

But while the council worked through red tape, some grew impatient and took it down themselves.

For Lanne’s descendants, their relief at the long-awaited fall of the statue is tinged with pain. They feel Lanne has been reduced to his death.

“He had a whole life… and just as he advocated for our people’s rights, we will advocate for his story to be remembered and him to be respected for who he was,” Nunami says.

The Crowther statue is not unique. Countless similar landmarks or monuments – which joke about massacres, include racial slurs or celebrate alleged killers – are still standing across Australia.

Many, like Greg, believe removing or renaming them could be a natural starting point for the “truth-telling” the country needs, to reconcile with its First Peoples, the oldest living culture on the planet.

“You’d think that it was just a bunch of happy free settlers and not-so-happy convicts who jumped off the First Fleet… and bingo, there you’ve got modern Australia,” he says.

“For Australia to have an honest and powerful relationship with itself, it must have an honest relationship with the past.”

But after a proposal for an Indigenous political advisory body was defeated at a referendum last year, any movement towards a national truth-telling inquiry has stalled – though many states are setting up their own.

There are still many, like Jeff Briscoe, who believe a “truth-telling” process would be a divisive and unnecessary rehashing of the past – views echoed by a bloc of conservative politicians who also oppose a treaty.

“Nowadays people want Aborigines to stand in front of them and say welcome to our country. They want us to dance for them. They want us to teach them our language. They don’t mind if we put some of our paintings in the mall,” Nala says.

“But if you talk about… any type of benefit for the Aboriginal community, or taking back anything that was stolen from us, it’s a completely different ballgame.”

However she is among those who feel like the tide is slowly turning.

“The Crowther statue… is the first time I’ve ever thought, ‘Wow, white people – they’re starting to get it’,” Nala says.

The council was still deciding what should replace the sculpture when it met its unexpected end.

But many wanted the severed feet to remain in the square – as is – arguing they made a wryly “funny” and “profound” statement.

However earlier this week, the council plucked the ankles from their perch, to reunite them with the rest of the effigy, citing heritage law requirements.

But Nunami says even the now empty plinth illustrates the story of Crowther and Lanne far better than the statue ever did.

“We get to say we, as the public, learnt, we grew, and we changed the narrative of this place… Look here, we cut that down.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Yemen’s Houthis will pay a “heavy price” after a missile fired by the group landed in central Israel.

The Israeli military said the missile landed in an uninhabited area early on Sunday, but that shrapnel indicated air defence systems had failed to destroy it before it entered Israeli airspace.

It added that it was investigating how the missile was able to reach so far into Israeli territory.

The strike marks the first time a missile fired by the group has reached central Israel, which is around 2,000km (1,240 miles) from Yemen.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said there had been repeated attempts to shoot the missile down on Sunday but that it most likely fragmented in mid-air.

The Houthis claimed the operation used a new type of hypersonic missile, which may help explain the failure of efforts to intercept it.

They are an armed group that seized much of Yemen in the country’s ongoing civil war and have declared themselves part of the Iran-led “axis of resistance” against Israel, the US, and the wider West.

The Houthis said in a statement that Sunday’s attack was carried out in solidarity with the Palestinians and that Israel should expect more ahead of the first anniversary of the 7 October attacks.

Missile fragments landed at a railway station in the city of Modiin, causing some damage, and in open ground near Israel’s main international airport on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

The damage is believed to have been caused by Israel’s own interceptor missiles.

Netanyahu said the strike showed that Israel was in a “multi-front battle against Iran’s axis of evil that strives to destroy us”.

“[The Houthis] should have known by now that we exact a heavy price for any attempt to harm us,” he said.

“Anyone who attacks us will not escape from our arms.

“Hamas is already learning this in our determined action that will lead to its destruction and the release of all of our hostages.”

Israeli forces launched a campaign to destroy Hamas following the 7 October attacks, which saw around 1,200 people killed and another 251 taken to Gaza as hostages.

More than 41,206 people have been killed in Gaza since the campaign began, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

This is not the first time the Houthis have attacked Israel.

In July, one man was killed and eight people were injured after a Houthi drone landed in Tel Aviv.

Previously, almost all Houthi missiles and drones fired towards Israel had been intercepted and none were known to have reached Tel Aviv.

In response, Israeli jets attacked the city of Hodeidah in Yemen, causing a huge fire which engulfed one of the country’s most important oil storage facilities.

More than 100 people have died in flooding and mudslides caused by the remnants of Typhoon Yagi in Myanmar.

Spokesman for the nation’s ruling junta, Zaw Min Tun, said in a statement on Sunday that 113 people had been confirmed dead, with a further 64 missing – though regional reports suggest the true death toll may be higher.

Meanwhile, over 320,000 people have been forced to evacuate to temporary shelters, according to the AFP news agency.

Yagi, Asia’s most powerful storm this year, has already proved devastating as it swept across Vietnam, Laos, the Chinese island of Hainan and the Philippines.

At least 287 people were thought to have died as a result of the storm before it reached Myanmar.

While the typhoon has been downgraded to a tropical depression since making landfall in northern Vietnam, it has continued to cause deadly landslides across south-east Asia.

In Myanmar, state media reports that nearly 66,000 houses had been destroyed as of Friday evening, along with 375 schools and a monastery. Several miles of road and other infrastructure have been washed away.

Also as of Friday, more than 236,000 people were being accommodated at 187 relief camps.

The impacts of heavy rainfall have centred on the Kayah, Kayin, Mandalay, Mon, and Shan states – which cover the central region of Myanmar.

Some say the number of deaths is already far higher than official estimates.

Radio Free Asia, a US-backed broadcaster, reported that at least 160 people had died in Myanmar – with social media accounts loyal to the ruling junta suggesting 230 people had died in the Mandalay region alone.

Japan’s state broadcaster, NHK, reported that more than 120 people had died as of Saturday.

In Kalaw, a hill town in the Shan state, at least 12 people had died as of Saturday, one of whom was eight years old, the privately-owned Eleven Myanmar news website reported.

One man told AFP how he had tried to rescue people with ropes, as floodwaters 4m (15 ft) high surged through the town on 10 September.

“I could see trapped families in the distance standing on the roofs of their houses,” he said.

“I heard there were 40 bodies in the hospital.”

A woman who runs a company in Kalaw claimed her staff had said 60 people had died in the town, AFP reported.

Myanmar has suffered a three-year civil war since a military junta seized power in 2021. The UN estimates that thousands have been killed and 2.6 million people have been displaced by the conflict.

The Shan state is also home to several armed insurgent groups, some of which have de facto control over some of its territory.

Myanmar’s information ministry says emergency and health workers have been deployed to areas affected by floods, and that it has provided funds for food and drinking water for evacuees.

Emergency responders have also begun repairing damaged roads and bridges, state media reports.

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

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

Yagi is expected to move away from Myanmar in the coming days. Another tropical depression is forecast to develop in the western Pacific in the coming week.

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawncrew has returned to Earth after five days in orbit, following a historic mission featuring the world’s first commercial spacewalk.

The Dragon capsule made splashdown off the coast of Florida shortly after 03:37 local time (07:37 GMT), in an event stream lived by SpaceX.

“Splashdown of Dragon confirmed! Welcome back to Earth,” SpaceX said on social media platform X.

The US space agency Nasa said the mission represented “a giant leap forward” for the commercial space industry.

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Re-entering earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft neared temperatures of 1,900C (3,500 degrees Fahrenheit), caused by the intense pressure and friction of pushing through the air at around 7,000mph (27,000kph).

The four-member civilian team, bankrolled and led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, travelled further into space than any humans for more than fifty years.

Scott Poteet, a retired US Air Force pilot, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon were also on the crew.

Mr Isaacman and Ms Gillis are the first non-professional crew to perform a spacewalk, a risky manoeuvre that involves depressurising the crew compartment and exiting the spacecraft.

Only astronauts from government-funded space agencies had attempted the feat, prior to this flight.

Images broadcast live showed the two crew members emerge from the white Dragon capsule to float 435 miles (700km) above the blue Earth below.

Speaking to mission control in Hawthorne, California during the spacewalk, Isaacman said “Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here — looks like a perfect world”.

As Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, the crew were exposed to the vacuum of space during the spacewalk.

This spacewalk, higher than any previously attempted, was made possible by innovative astronaut suits fitted with new technology.

During the five days, the crew conducted more than 40 experiments, including investigations into the impact of space missions on human health and testing intersatellite laser communication between the Dragon Spacecraft and Space X’s Starlink satellite.

Gillis, who is a trained violinist, brought her instrument and performed “Rey’s Theme” from “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” alongside orchestras on earth.

Her rendition was sent back to Earth using SpaceX’s Starlink as a test of the satellite network’s potential to provide in-space connectivity.

The video was created in partnership with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which the Polaris Program were fundraising for throughout the mission.

The crew were in orbit inside the Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, for a total of five days, launching early on Tuesday morning from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

The mission made history by reaching a maximum altitude of 1,400km (870miles), which is higher than any human has flown since the final Apollo Mission in 1972.

Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned Polaris missions, a collaboration between Mr Isaacman and SpaceX.

This includes the first manned flight of the new SpaceX rocket Starship, which is still under development.

The United States has dismissed claims made by Venezuela that the CIA plotted to assassinate President Maduro and other top officials.

Three US citizens, two Spaniards and one Czech national have been arrested on suspicion of plotting to destabilise the country, the Interior Minister said.

Calling the detainees “mercenaries”, Diosdado Cabello claimed that the CIA “is leading the operation” and that hundreds of weapons had been seized.

The US rejected the claims, which come after Washington placed 16 senior government officials under sanctions, as “categorically false”.

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A spokesperson for the State Department said a US military member was being held and noted “unconfirmed reports of two additional US citizens detained in Venezuela.”

Cabello responded by saying the detainees had contacted “French mercenaries” from Eastern Europe and were involved in “an operation to try to attack” Venezuela.

He added that “more than 400 rifles were seized” and accused the detainees of plotting “terrorist acts.”

The Venezuelan government said the Spaniards detained were linked to Madrid’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI).

Spanish government sources have told local media the pair do not belong to the intelligence organisation.

“Spain denies and categorically rejects any insinuation that it is involved in a political destabilisation operation in Venezuela,” a source told AFP.

The Czech Republic has yet to react the claims.

In a news conference on Saturday Cabello said: “The CIA is leading this operation, and that does not surprise us but they, the National Intelligence Centre of Spain, have always maintained a low profile knowing that the CIA operates in this area.

“These two detainees even tell us about a group of mercenaries they are looking for to bring to Venezuela with very clear objectives to assassinate President Nicolas Maduro, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, myself, and another group of comrades who are leading our party and our revolution.”

The allegations come amid a feud between the Maduro government and both the US and Spain stemming from Maduro’s disputed victory in July’s election.

Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE), which is closely aligned with the government, declared Maduro the winner of the vote, but has not published detailed voting tallies.

Data published by the opposition suggests its candidate, Edmundo González, was the true winner.

On Thursday, Washington announced sanctions targeting “key officials involved in Maduro’s fraudulent and illegitimate claims of victory and his brutal crackdown on free expression following the election”.

Following the detentions, a state department official said Washington “continues to support a democratic solution to the political crisis in Venezuela”.

On Friday, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil summoned the Spanish ambassador in Caracas after Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, described the Venezuelan government as a “dictatorship”.

Gil said the comments were “insolent, meddling and rude” and indicated a “deterioration of relations between the two countries”.

It came days after González arrived in Spain to claim political asylum, a step that the overall leader of the Venezuela’s opposition, María Corina Machado, said he had taken “to preserve his freedom, his integrity and his life”.

Spanish authorities have request more information about the detentions from Venezuela, and the Spanish embassy has requested access to the detainees.

Twenty-four people have been killed in Haiti after a fuel tanker exploded, according to local authorities.

Dozens more people have been left seriously injured – some suffering burns to 80% of their bodies, according to Haitian Prime Minister Garry Coville.

The incident happened on Saturday near the commune of Miragoane, about 100km (60 miles) west from the capital Port-au-Prince.

According to media reports, the tanker collided with another vehicle and began leaking fuel onto the road. The explosion happened as people were rushing to collect the spilt fuel.

“It’s a horrible scene we’ve just witnessed,” Mr Coville said at Port-au-Prince airport’s tarmac, where some of the injured were arriving.

He vowed to do everything in his power to ensure the victims received the medical care they needed.

Emmanuel Pierre, head of Haiti’s civil protection agency, told the AFP news agency that the original death toll of 16 was later revised up when more bodies were found near the explosion site.

It is not the first time there have been multiple fatalities in Haiti due to a gas tanker explosion.

More than 60 people died following a similar incident in 2021.

Haiti has been undergoing a period of severe violence and instability, as the government battles violent gangs that have taken control of parts of the country.

Earlier this month, the Haitian authorities expanded a state of emergency.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said he is “interested” in learning about Italy’s scheme to send migrants rescued at sea to Albania to process their asylum claims, ahead of his first official visit to Rome.

The British leader is set to meet Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Monday.

Top of the agenda will be migration and how the UK can learn from Italy – the European Union member receiving the highest number of migrant arrivals, but which has recently seen a dramatic fall.

Asked whether he would consider a similar agreement to the one Italy struck with Albania, Sir Keir said this weekend: “Let’s see. It’s in early days, I’m interested in how that works, I think everybody else is.”

• How many people cross the Channel in small boats and how many claim asylum?

Sir Keir and Meloni are prime ministers on opposite political sides. One started off in politics by joining the young socialists and now leads a Labour government in the UK, while the other began with young neo-facists and now helms a right-wing coalition in Italy. Both, however, are keen to build on a crucial European relationship.

At Monday’s meeting, the pair will discuss what is known as irregular migration, among other issues, as both countries aim to reduce arrivals by sea.

On the continent, Frontex, the EU’s border force, has calculated a 64% drop this year in those making the perilous crossing from north Africa to Italy.

Just over 43,000 have arrived so far this year, according to the United Nations, compared to a total of almost 158,000 in 2023. Some try to continue their route through France and up to Britain.

The UK is struggling to respond to the migrant crisis in the English Channel, with arrivals from France up on last year. Eight people died on Sunday when a boat capsized in the Channel.

Central to the fall in crossings to Italy are financial deals struck with Tunisia and Libya – where most people depart from for Europe.

The EU paid Tunisia €105m (£88m) in 2023 to boost border security and train up its coastguard. Italy supplied the country with patrol vessels and gave its government another €100m to support small companies and invest in education and renewable energy.

Meloni also signed a major gas deal with Libya and Italy is training and equipping the Libyan coastguard.

The agreements echo the EU’s strategy with Turkey at the height of the 2016 migration crisis, when the bloc gave Ankara €6bn to boost border patrols with Greece. It led to a dramatic fall in departures.

But the deals to keep migrants in north Africa carry huge controversy.

Human Rights Watch has accused Italy and the EU of being “complicit” in crimes carried out against migrants in Libya, reporting cases of “murder, enforced disappearance, torture, enslavement, sexual violence, rape, and other inhumane acts” in the north African country.

The EU’s outgoing foreign policy chief Josep Borrell reportedly wrote of the “incomprehension” of some member states over the deal struck by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen with Tunisia, due to a sharp deterioration in its democracy.

Tunisia’s President Kais Saied has suspended parliament, while opposition MPs, journalists and lawyers have been arrested.

Some members of the European Parliament have complained of “bankrolling dictators across the region”.

In Rome, Sir Keir is likely to hear about the range of measures Italy is taking to counter irregular migration, including reception centres it is building in neighbouring Albania, which are due to open later this year after some delays.

The two centres, funded and managed by Italy, could hold up to 36,000 migrants per year. While there, they will be able to apply for asylum in Italy. If refused, they will face deportation.

While the Albanian government has suggested that such a deal is only with Italy, its closest ally in Europe, Sir Keir has shown interest in the outsourcing model, holding talks with his Italian and Albanian counterparts at the European Political Community summit at Blenheim Palace in July.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the BBC on Sunday that the prime minister would discuss with Meloni the work Italy had done on migration, “particularly with Albania”.

Lammy said that because Italy’s arrival numbers had reduced, “we are interested” in discussing the country’s schemes, not just with Albania, but with Syria and Libya as well.

Alberto-Horst Neidhardt, a migration specialist at the European Policy Centre thinktank, said that “Britain is exposed to the consequences of decisions in the EU, without having a say – and that weakens its capacity to manage migration flows”.

“It was quite difficult for the previous British government to seek effective solutions with France – and so it makes sense to turn to Italy for this new prime minister.”

Meloni was probably Rishi Sunak’s closest ally in Europe. Both right-wingers, their political chemistry was clear, with Sunak calling her “a lovely person” after their last meeting at the G7 summit.

His successor may not be such a natural political fit for Meloni – but she is arguably the EU’s strongest right-wing leader and Starmer knows that to solve the migration challenge, all roads lead to Rome.

The foreign secretary has insisted no single weapon can win a war, as he said the UK was still discussing with allies whether to allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia.

David Lammy told the BBC it was important that countries supporting Ukraine had “a shared strategy to win”.

Ukraine already has supplies of long-range missiles from the UK, the United States and France but at the moment it is only allowed to fire them at targets within its own borders.

President Zelensky has been pleading for months for these restrictions to be lifted so Ukraine can use them against targets inside Russia.

There have been strong indications that the US and UK are poised to change their position.

However, no confirmation came after talks between Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and US President Joe Biden in Washington on Wednesday.

Pressed over whether the delay in lifting restrictions on the use of long-range missiles was emboldening Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mr Lammy told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “No war is won with any one weapon.”

He refused to confirm whether the UK and its allies were planning to allow missiles to be used against targets in Russia.

But he added: “This is under careful discussion with the Ukrainians, as we assess what they need as they head into the winter.”

Lammy said the UK and other allies would be meeting President Zelensky at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in less than 12 days’ times and suggested the issue would be discussed then.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said Ukraine should be allowed to use long-range missiles to attack military bases inside Russia, even if the UK had to act “unilaterally”.

Asked whether the UK would “go it alone” and lift restrictions without US support, Lammy told the BBC “it’s important that as allies supporting Ukraine we have a shared strategy to win going forward”.

Gen Sir John McColl, former deputy supreme allied commander Europe of Nato, said he believed Ukraine would eventually be allowed to use long-range missiles against targets in Russia.

But he told the programme Ukraine’s allies needed to be “firm” and “not signal this kind of dither and dilemma”.

“At the end of the weekend President Putin will be encouraged and emboldened and President Zelensky will be disappointed,” he said.

However, Sir John said the missiles would have only “a limited effect” on the war as a whole.

A number of former Conservative defence secretaries, including Ben Wallace, have urged the PM to lift restrictions.

On Saturday, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the delays and wrangling over the decision were only benefitting President Putin.

Earlier this week President Putin warned Western nations against allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia, saying this would represent “direct participation” by Nato in the war.

Ukraine’s allies have been reluctant to do anything which could drag them into direct conflict with Moscow.

Lammy accused the Russian president of “throwing dust up into the air” by making such threats.

“There’s a lot of bluster – that’s his modus operandi,” he said.

“We cannot be blown off course by an imperialist fascist.”

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian cities and front lines have been under regular bombardment.

Many of these missiles are launched by aircraft deep inside Russia and Kyiv says not being allowed to hit the bases from which these attacks are launched hinders its ability to defend itself.

On Sunday, President Zelensky posted a fresh plea on social media, writing: “This week, the Russians have launched around 30 missiles of various types, more than 800 guided aerial bombs, and nearly 300 strike drones against Ukraine.

“Ukraine needs strong support from our partners to defend lives against Russian terror – air defence, long-range capabilities, support for our warriors. Everything that will help force Russia to end this war.”

Ballerina Michaela Mabinty DePrince, who performed with Beyoncé and was seen by many as a trailblazer, has died at the age of 29.

A spokesperson announced her death on her personal Instagram page and in a statement her family said she was an “unforgettable inspiration to everyone who knew her or heard her story”.

The cause of death has not been given.

DePrince made a remarkable journey from suffering as an orphan in war-torn Sierra Leone to numerous accolades in the world of international dance.

Her family said her death had been “sudden”, adding: “Michaela touched so many lives across the world, including ours.”

DePrince’s sister, Mia Mabinty DePrince, described being “in a state of shock and deep sadness” as “my beautiful sister is no longer here”.

Tributes have been pouring in, including from others in the ballet community.

“Despite being told the ‘world wasn’t ready for black ballerinas’ or that ‘black ballerinas weren’t worth investing in,’ she remained determined, focused, and began making big strides,” American ballerina Misty Copeland wrote on social media.

• Michaela DePrince: The war orphan who became a ballerina

Born in Kenema, Sierra Leone, in 1995, DePrince was sent to an orphanage at the age of three after both of her parents died during the civil war.

She has spoken in the past about how she was seen as a “devil’s child” in the orphanage because she suffered from vitiligo, a condition in which patches of skin lose pigmentation.

But she was adopted aged four by an American couple and moved to New Jersey. Her adoptive mother quickly noticed her obsession with ballet and enrolled her in classes.

She rose to fame after graduating from high school and made history as the youngest principal dancer at the Dance Theatre of Harlem.

DePrince has performed across the world, including in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” music video album.

She joined the prestigious Boston Ballet as a second soloist in 2021 and starred in the TV show Dancing with the Stars when she was just 17.

A dedicated humanitarian, DePrince also advocated for children affected by conflict and violence.

Her spokesperson wrote that her artistry “touched countless hearts” and her spirit had “inspired many, leaving an indelible mark on the world of ballet, and beyond”.

They added: “Her life was one defined by grace, purpose, and strength. Her unwavering commitment to her art, her humanitarian efforts, and her courage in overcoming unimaginable challenges will forever inspire us.

“She stood as a beacon of hope for many, showing that no matter the obstacles, beauty and greatness can rise from the darkest of places.”

“From the very beginning of our story back in Africa, sleeping on a shared mat in the orphanage, Michaela (Mabinty) and I used to make up our own musical theatre plays and act them out,” Mia wrote in a statement.

DePrince’s sister said the pair used to create their own ballets as children, “she would choreograph, and I was the composer and conductor”.

She “left her footprints in the sand and on so many stages across the world. She will be truly missed,” Mia added.

The two girls, who were mat-mates at the orphanage, were adopted by an American woman, Elaine DePrince.

In an interview with the BBC’s Newshour programme, DePrince’s siblings – Eric and Mia – said the family was grieving two deaths this week: Michaela’s and that of their mother Elaine.

“I had just gotten off the phone with my mum’s doctor with her news when I was alerted about my sister, it just didn’t seem believable.

“It was really hard to hear because I normally pick up the phone to call my mum with anything, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t call her,” Mia told the BBC.

Elaine enrolled then five-year-old DePrince in the Rock School of Dance in Philadelphia, making the 45-minute drive from New Jersey every day.

DePrince was an ambassador for the charity War Child, and her siblings say they hope to continue on her legacy.

Her brother, Eric DePrince, told the BBC he hopes the world can remember his sister “as someone who worked hard to improve the lives of others”.

It was the submersible that promised passengers the trip of a lifetime. A chance to descend 3,800m (12,500ft) to the Atlantic depths to visit the wreck of the Titanic.

But last year, a dive by Oceangate’s Titan sub went tragically wrong. The vessel suffered a catastrophic failure as it neared the sea floor, killing all five people onboard.

The US Coast Guard is holding a public hearing on 16 September to examine why the disaster happened, from the sub’s unconventional design to ignored safety warnings and the lack of regulation in the deep.

Titan began its descent beneath the waves on the morning of 18 June 2023.

On board were Oceangate’s CEO Stockton Rush, British explorer Hamish Harding, veteran French diver Paul Henri Nargeolet, the British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman.

Later that day, after the craft failed to resurface, the US Coast Guard was notified, sparking a vast search and rescue operation.

The world watched and waited for news of the missing sub. But on 22 June, wreckage was discovered about 500m (1,600ft) from Titanic’s bow. Titan had imploded just one hour and 45 minutes into the dive.

These are five key questions that still need to be answered.

Those on Titan could stay in contact with the support ship, the Polar Prince, with text messages sent through its onboard communications system. The log of these exchanges could reveal if there were any indications that the sub was failing.

The vessel also had an acoustic monitoring device – essentially mics fixed to the sub listening for signs it was buckling or breaking.

“Stockton Rush was convinced that if there was an imminent failure of the submersible, they would get an audio warning on that system,” explains Victor Vescovo, a leading deep sea explorer.

But he said he was highly sceptical that this would have provided enough time for the sub to return to the surface. “The issue is how quickly would that warning happen?”

If there were no apparent problems during the descent and alarms failed to sound, those on board could have been unaware of their imminent fate.

The implosion itself was instantaneous, there would have been no time for the passengers to even register what was happening.

Forensic experts have been examining Titan’s wreckage to find the root of the failure.

There were several issues with its design.

The viewport window was only rated to a depth of 1,300m (4,300ft) by its manufacturer, but Titan was diving almost three times deeper.

Titan’s hull was also an unusual shape – cylindrical, rather than spherical. Most deep-sea subs have a spherical hull, so the effect of the crushing pressure of the deep is distributed equally.

The sub’s hull was also made out of carbon fibre, an unconventional material for a deep-sea vessel.

Metals such as titanium are most commonly used as they are reliable under immense pressures.

“Carbon fibre is considered to be a material that is unpredictable [in the deep ocean],” explains Patrick Lahey, CEO of Triton Submarines, a leading manufacturer.

Every time Titan went down to the Titanic – and it had made multiple dives – the carbon fibre was compressed and damaged.

“It was getting progressively weaker because the fibres were breaking,” he said.

The junctions between different materials also gave cause for concern. The carbon fibre was attached to two rings of titanium, creating weak points.

Patrick Lahey said the commercial sub industry had a longstanding, unblemished safety record.

“The Oceangate contraption was an aberration,” he told BBC News.

Ships, aircraft and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) were scrambled to the Atlantic to try to find Titan.

A couple of days into the search, there were reports of underwater noises picked up by a search plane’s sonar, raising the possibility they were coming from the sub.

ROVs were sent to locate the source but found nothing.

It is still not clear what the sounds were – the ocean is noisy and even more so during an operation like this.

A more pertinent subsea sound was detected by the US Navy’s sonar system at the time the sub went missing – an acoustic signal consistent with an implosion. The information was only made public on the day the remains of Titan were found.

It is not known when the US Coast Guard was told of the noise – or whether the families and friends waiting on the sub’s support ship were informed.

Eventually the deep-sea robots returned to where Titan had gone missing and the wreckage was found.

Rory Golden, who was on the Oceangate expedition when contact was lost, recently told the BBC those on board the surface vessel experienced four days of fear and “false hope”.

Many were concerned about Oceangate’s sub.

Victor Vescovo says he was so worried, he had urged several passengers against diving on Titan – including his friend Hamish Harding, one of the five who died.

“I told him, in no uncertain terms, that he should not get in the submersible,” he said.

Fears about safety were also brought directly to Oceangate – including by the company’s former director of marine operations, David Lochridge, who assessed the sub while it was being developed.

US court documents from 2018 show that Lochridge had identified numerous “serious safety concerns” and the lack of testing could “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible”.

Engineers from the Marine Technology Society also said that Oceangate’s experimental approach could result in “negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic)” in a letter shared with Stockton Rush.

In an email exchange shown to BBC News last year, deep-sea specialist Rob McCallum told Rush that the sub should not be used for commercial deep dive operations and was placing passengers in a “dangerous dynamic”.

In response, Rush said he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation” and dismissed warnings that he would kill someone as “baseless”.

With the death of Oceangate’s CEO, we will never be able to ask why he chose not to listen to these concerns. But the public hearings could reveal who else at the company knew about them – and why no action was taken.

Deep-sea submersibles can go through an extensive safety assessment carried out by independent, specialist, marine organisations such as the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) or DNV (a global accreditation organisation based in Norway).

Oceangate chose not to put Titan through this process.

The assessment would have confirmed whether the vessel – from its design through to construction, testing and operations – met certain standards.

Most operators opt to have their deep-sea subs certified – but it is not mandatory.

Rush described his sub as “experimental” and, in a blog post in 2019, he argued that certification “slowed down innovation”.

In an email exchange with Rob McCallum, he said he didn’t need a piece of paper to show Titan was safe, and that his own protocols and the “informed consent” of passengers were enough.

The passengers on Titan paid up to $250,000 (£191,135) for a place. They all had to sign a liability waiver.

Irish businessman Oisin Fanning made two dives in Titan in 2022 – the last before the sub’s fatal disaster.

He said the Oceangate team took safety seriously, with extensive briefings before each descent. But it wasn’t made clear to him that Titan had not been certified.

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t think there had been something like that done already – that it conformed with certain norms,” he said.

“We all knew that the Titan was experimental. We were very confident, because obviously there’d been a few dives before that, and it seemed to be working well.”

The public hearings will last for two weeks. The hope is the answers it provides could prevent a disaster like this from happening again.

In June two American astronauts left Earth expecting to spend eight days on the International Space Station (ISS).

But after fears that their Boeing Starliner spacecraft was unsafe to fly back on, Nasa delayed Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore’s return until 2025.

They are now sharing a space about the size of a six-bedroom house with nine other people.

Ms Williams calls it her “happy place” and Mr Wilmore says he is “grateful” to be there.

But how does it really feel to be 400km above Earth? How do you deal with tricky crewmates? How do you exercise and wash your clothes? What do you eat – and, importantly, what is the “space smell”?

Talking to BBC News, three former astronauts divulge the secrets to surviving in orbit.

Every five minutes of the astronauts’ day is divided up by mission control on Earth.

They wake early. At around 06:30 GMT, astronauts emerge from the phone-booth size sleeping quarter in the ISS module called Harmony.

“It has the best sleeping bag in the world,” says Nicole Stott, an American astronaut with Nasa who spent 104 days in space on two missions in 2009 and 2011.

The compartments have laptops so crew can stay in contact with family and a nook for personal belongings like photographs or books.

The astronauts might then use the bathroom, a small compartment with a suction system. Normally sweat and urine is recycled into drinking water but a fault on the ISS means the crew must currently store urine instead.

Then the astronauts get to work. Maintenance or scientific experiments take up most time on the ISS, which is about the size of Buckingham Palace – or an American football field.

“Inside it’s like many buses all bolted together. In half a day you might never see another person,” explains Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, commander on the Expedition 35 mission in 2012-13.

“People just don’t go zipping through the station. It’s big and it’s peaceful,” he says.

The ISS has six dedicated labs for experiments, and astronauts wear heart, brain or blood monitors to measure their responses to the challenging physical environment.

“We’re guinea pigs,” says Ms Stott, adding that “space puts your bones and muscles into an accelerated ageing process, and scientists can learn from that”.

If the astronauts can, they work faster than mission control predicts.

Mr Hadfield explains: “Your game is to find five free minutes. I would float to the window to watch something go by. Or write music, take photographs or write something for my children.”

A lucky few are asked to do a spacewalk, leaving the ISS for the space vacuum outside. Mr Hadfield has done two. “Those 15 hours outside, with nothing between me and the universe but my plastic visor, was as stimulating and otherworldly as any other 15 hours of my life.”

But that spacewalk can introduce something novel to the space station – the metallic “space smell”.

“On Earth we have lots of different smells, like washing machine laundry or fresh air. But in space there’s just one smell, and we get used to it quickly,” explains Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut, who spent eight days on the Soviet space station Mir in 1991.

• WATCH: ‘Space is my happy place,’ says stranded astronaut

Objects that go outside, like a suit or scientific kit, are affected by the strong radiation of space. “Radiation forms free radicals on the surface, and they react with oxygen inside the space station, creating a metallic smell,” she says.

When she returned to Earth, she valued sensory experiences much more. “There’s no weather in space – no rain on your face and or wind in your hair. I appreciate those so much more to this day now,” she says, 23 years later.

In between working, astronauts on long stays must do two hours of exercise daily. Three different machines help to counter the effect of living in zero gravity, which reduces bone density.

The Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED) is good for squats, deadlifts, and rows that work all the muscle groups, says Ms Stott.

Crew use two treadmills that they must strap into to stop themselves floating away, and a cycle ergometer for endurance training.

All that work creates a lot of sweat, Ms Stott says, leading to a very important issue – washing.

“We don’t have laundry – just water that forms into blobs and some soapy stuff,” she explains.

Without gravity pulling sweat off the body, the astronauts get covered in a coating of sweat – “way more than on Earth”, she says.

“I would feel the sweat growing on my scalp – I had to swab down my head. You wouldn’t want to shake it because it just would fly everywhere.”

Those clothes become so dirty that they are thrown out in a cargo vehicle that burns up in the atmosphere.

But their daily clothes stay clean, she says.

“In zero-gravity, clothes float on the body so oils and everything else don’t affect them. I had one pair of trousers for three months,” she explains.

Instead food was the biggest hazard. “Somebody would open up a can, for example, meats and gravy,” she says.

“Everybody was on alert because little balls of grease drifted out. People floated backwards, like in the Matrix film, to dodge the balls of meat juice.”

At some point another craft might arrive, bringing a new crew or supplies of food, clothes, and equipment. Nasa sends a few supply vehicles a year. Arriving at the space station from Earth is “amazing”, says Mr Hadfield.

“It’s a life-changing moment when you catch sight of the ISS there in the eternity of the universe – seeing this little bubble of life, a microcosm of human creativity in the blackness,” he says.

After a hard day’s work, it is time for dinner. Food is mostly reconstituted in packets, separated into different compartments by nation.

“It was like camping food or military rations. Good but it could be healthier,” Ms Stott says.

“My favourite was Japanese curries, or Russian cereal and soups,” she says.

Families send their loved ones bonus food packs. “My husband and son picked little treats, like chocolate-covered ginger,” she says.

The crew share their food most of the time.

Astronauts are pre-selected for personal attributes – tolerant, laid-back, calm – and trained to work as a team. That reduces the likelihood of conflict, explains Ms Sharman.

“It’s not just about putting up with somebody’s bad behaviour, but calling it out. And we always give each other metaphorical pats-on-the back to support each other,” she says.

And finally, bed again, and time to rest after a day in a noisy environment (fans run constantly to disperse pockets of carbon dioxide so the astronauts can breathe, making it about as loud as a very noisy office).

“We can have eight hours of sleep – but most people get stuck in the window looking at Earth,” Ms Stott says.

All three astronauts talked about the psychological impact of seeing their home planet from 400km in orbit.

“I felt very insignificant in that vastness of space,” Ms Sharman says. “Seeing Earth so clearly, the swirls of clouds and the oceans, made me think about the geopolitical boundaries that we construct and how actually we are completely interconnected.”

Ms Stott says she loved living with six people from different countries “doing this work on behalf of all life on Earth, working together, figuring out how to deal with problems”.

“Why can’t that be happening down on our planetary spaceship?” she asks.

Eventually all astronauts must leave the ISS – but these three say they would return in a heartbeat.

They don’t understand why people think the Nasa astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are “stranded”.

“We dreamed, worked and trained our entire lives hoping for an extended stay in space,” says Mr Hadfield. “The greatest gift you can give a professional astronaut is to let them stay longer.”

And Ms Stott says that as she left the ISS she thought: “You’re gonna have to pull my clawing hands off the hatch. I don’t know if I’m going to get to come back.”

For weeks, the roads around Islamabad have been lined by shipping containers; road blocks ready for immediate deployment in the event of any protest.

Pakistan’s capital has become used to entire areas being sealed off whenever the authorities get an inkling that unrest could be brewing. It is a constant reminder to the city’s residents that at any moment, everything could tip.

Last Sunday, the containers were out in force, blocking 29 routes around the city.

In a much-publicised and anticipated political rally, Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) supporters made their way in their thousands towards Islamabad. The crowd waved flags and banners while a poster of the former prime minister suspended by balloons gently floated overhead. Others wore eerie masks of Imran Khan’s face. Chants of “Imran Khan Zindabad” (long live Imran Khan) echoed around the venue.

The containers did not contain them; video on social media shows lines of supporters shoving the corrugated metal aside and surging through to reach the rally’s venue.

The man whose face was everywhere was not in attendance. Imran Khan has been behind bars for more than a year, having been convicted of corruption and charged with leaking state secrets.

Mr Khan has called all the charges against him politically motivated. But despite seeing his sentences overturned and a UN working group declaring that he had been “arbitrarily detained”, there seems little movement toward his release. Most analysts say that without the explicit say-so from Pakistan’s politically powerful military, Mr Khan will not be let out.

That didn’t stop the political promises from PTI leaders on Sunday.

“Listen Pakistanis, if in one to two weeks Imran will not be released legally, then I swear to God we will release Imran Khan ourselves,” the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Ali Amin Gandapur, bellowed from the stage. “Are you ready?”

The reaction came quickly.

On the following evening, word began to spread on social media and TV news channels that the crackdown had begun. Footage from Pakistan’s parliament showed the party’s chairman and MP Gohar Ali Khan being marched out of the building, his arms held firmly by police, cameras and mobile phones hovering in a swarm around him.

CCTV footage reportedly filmed inside the office of Shoaib Shaheen, another National Assembly member, showed him being quickly bustled out of the room as men streamed through several doors.

Confusion about exactly who had been arrested pinged around WhatsApp groups. Even by the morning after, the police had only confirmed three arrests to the BBC, while the PTI said the number was higher than 10. Mr Gohar was later released, but several others remained in police custody.

The assumption from the start was that these arrests had been made under a new law, introduced only last week and labelled by Amnesty International’s spokesperson as “another attack on the right to freedom of peaceful assembly”. The Peaceful Assembly and Public Order Act 2024 act restricts public gatherings and proposes three-year jail terms for participants of “illegal” assemblies, with 10-year imprisonment for repeat offenders.

While the PTI had received permission to hold their rally, the police had already complained that it had run past the designated cut-off time and therefore caused a “serious law and order situation”.

The crackdowns mark the latest phase in a long game of cat and mouse between Imran Khan’s PTI and the authorities. So what does this power struggle mean for Pakistan?

“At best this is a dangerous distraction,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Centre think tank in Washington. “But at worst, it could be something that destabilises the country even more. It makes it all the more difficult to address Pakistan’s economic and security challenges.”

Pakistan is still trying to stabilise its economy and has seen an increasing number of militant attacks.

Mr Kugelman argues that Pakistan’s military, thought to be the driving force behind the crackdown on PTI, are trying to contend with a changing world.

“For many years the army has had its way with dissent. It’s been able to snuff it out through crackdowns,” he said. “But what’s different with Pakistan and the world [now] is that this is the social media era. The PTI has been able to master the art of social media to advance political goals.”

Mr Kugelman described this as a “very concerning” development from the military’s perspective, and said it’s not surprising that it would resort to methods which “might seem like overkill and certainly are, not to mention wholly undemocratic.”

“This is a military reacting to a political threat it’s not used to,” he said.

Beyond the introduction of the illegal assembly law and the arrests of lawmakers from parliament, the Pakistani government has also been criticised by digital rights campaigners for limiting online activities.

Since the February elections, social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has not worked in Pakistan without a VPN. The military has repeatedly talked about the dangers of “cyber terrorism”, and the government recently said that it was creating an online firewall. When questioned about how the firewall might limit freedom of speech, a minister said “it would not curb anything”.

Many see this as an attempt to try to limit PTI’s social media machine, including the reach of the party’s supporters based outside the country who regularly criticise the military online.

The longer these clashes continue, the worse some fear it could be for Pakistan. As Mehmal Sarfraz, a Lahore-based political commentator and journalist, puts it: “When political parties fight, a third force takes advantage.”

For many analysts, that third force is Pakistan’s military which has long been closely tied to the country’s politics. The degree to which the military has allowed civilian governments to make decisions has waxed and waned. Today many analysts see the military’s hand in many political decisions and restrictions.

“Unless political parties talk to one another, this hybrid regime will continue to gain strength,” says Ms Safraz. “The hybrid could then become more permanent.”

Imran Khan has made it clear, however, that he and his party have no interest in speaking to the other political parties.

The PTI is consistently popular and able to mobilise, and seems unbowed by the pressure. But despite party members’ success keeping their leader’s name in the headlines, they can’t get him out from behind bars.

Rather than coming to a compromise, the recent rally and heated speeches suggest that they remain confrontational. And that could have ramifications for both their political and legal positions; Imran Khan is still fighting to avoid being tried in a military court.

The military remain resolute, too. The more the PTI seems to push, the more barriers the military seems to find to put in its way.

The fear for some, however, is that once these new measures are rolled out it will be hard to roll them back.

“The danger is that we become less of a democracy, more of a hybrid with every passing day,” says Ms Sarfraz.

For now, the shipping containers still sit on the sides of Islamabad’s streets.

It is a hot night and thousands of fans have packed into Rongjiang’s football ground for the final of the Guizhou Village Super League.

Dongmen village is up against Dangxiang village in the climax of this hyper rowdy, very local competition.

This small, weekly, village football festival has become a viral sensation in China, as images have spread across social media of fans dressed in traditional ethnic costume, banging drums and cheering on the players who might be farmers, students or shopkeepers.

And these videos have inspired tens of thousands of people from across the country to experience it for themselves on any given weekend.

Watching the matches in the village league is free but it is quite a hike to get here, a three-hour drive into the mountains from the provincial capital Guiyang.

Yet millions of Chinese tourists have made the trek over the last 12 months, to soak up the atmosphere, boosting tourist industry revenue by nearly 75%, according to official figures quoted by state-run media.

The accommodation available is basically small hotels which are often fully booked when the big games are on.

It’s the ultimate underdog story.

This is an area which was one of the last parts of China to be officially declared free of “extreme poverty”.

Five years ago its average annual disposable income was just $1,350 in rural areas. Now, this newly organised league – only in its second year – has attracted so much fame it is transforming the place.

The players can’t quite believe it.

“We’re not professional footballers. We just love footy,” says Shen Yang.

“Even if there was no Village Super League, we’d play every week. Without football, I’d feel like life had lost its colour.”

Shen is a 32-year-old hospital maintenance worker who’s just come off an all-night shift, but, on the field, he is one of the main attacking weapons for Dongmen village.

He says his parents hated him playing football when he was a kid but now they’re total converts.

“They didn’t let me play. They threw away my trainers. But now they’ve set up a stall at the gate to the stadium selling ice creams,” he laughs.

Shen’s parents are not the only small business owners who have benefited from the economic boost this competition has brought to the area.

It is not as if everyone has suddenly become rich, but this sporting carnival has definitely brought earning opportunities for those running little family hotels, restaurants and street stalls.

Dong Yongheng, a player whose Zhongcheng village was in the final last year, is among those who have benefited from the tournament way beyond his experience on the pitch.

The former construction worker has turned footballing limelight into family business success.

The 35-year-old once worked in his auntie’s modest shop preparing rice rolls, a famous Rongjiang street snack.

Now he has opened his own, multi-story restaurant. It even has a shop attached to it selling his team’s football jerseys and other memorabilia.

“I think people like the authenticity of the village league,” he tells the BBC.

“It is really not because of our sporting skills. They like seeing a genuine performance, whether it is by our cheerleading ethnic singers or our players. Tourists love real and original things.”

The government says that more than 4,000 new businesses have registered in the region since the competition started last year, creating thousands of new jobs in the poor farming community.

That some fans dress up in traditional clothing to cheer on their village team has definitely given this tournament a unique flavour.

In the hours before the final, Pan Wenge’s silver headdress jingles and jangles as she speaks enthusiastically, preparing to cheer on Dongmen village.

“When we watch the game, it’s so exciting. We’re really nervous, you feel your heart pumping. And, when we win, we’re so happy. We sing and dance.”

But standing in Dongmen’s way is the younger, faster Dangxiang village team.

Their star striker, Lu Jinfu, the son of itinerant labourers, has just finished high school. With a shy smile he acknowledges the attention of local kids wanting to take selfies with him.

“When I started playing I didn’t expect it to be like this. I didn’t expect us to have such an amazing football atmosphere,” he says.

On the night, his team are indeed too good for Dongmen. Lu scores twice and, after the full-time whistle, the winning team spray each other with soft drinks in celebration.

But the losers don’t go home empty-handed.

“We won two pigs. That’s not bad,” Shen Yang says with a cheeky smile.

And, at their party afterwards, you would not think they were the runners-up.

There is much eating and drinking in an outdoor banquet down the main street of Dongmen village.

The players get hugs and kisses from their neighbours they refer to as “aunties”. Win, lose, or draw, they’re still seen as heroes.

And, after all, there is always next year.

Stars of Baby Reindeer, The Bear and The Crown are among those gearing up for the Emmys, the television industry’s most prestigious awards ceremony.

Ripley, Shogun, Abbott Elementary, Slow Horses, 3 Body Problem and Only Murders in the Building are among the other shows competing for the top prizes in Los Angeles.

Big names in the running for acting honours include Idris Elba, Jennifer Aniston, Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster and Robert Downey Jr.

Sunday’s event comes just eight months after the last Emmys ceremony, which was delayed from its usual September slot to this January because of the Hollywood strikes.

This year’s hosts are Canadian father-and-son duo Eugene Levy and Dan Levy.

The pair are best known for starring together in and creating Schitt’s Creek, the sitcom that blew up during the first Covid lockdown and dominated the 2020 Emmy Awards.

Before that, dad Eugene, 77, had a long and successful career in film and television, with roles in American Pie and For Your Consideration, while Dan, 41, has appeared in Sex Education, Modern Family and Netflix film Good Grief.

“For two Canadians who won our Emmys in a literal quarantine tent, the idea of being asked to host this year in an actual theatre was incentive enough,” the pair said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to be able to raise a glass to this extraordinary season of television.”

Elsewhere, Selena Gomez, Billy Crystal, Viola Davis, Jimmy Kimmel, Christine Baranski, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph and Steve Martin will all present individual awards.

It looks like some kind of West Wing reunion could be on the cards too, as Martin Sheen, Allison Janney, Richard Schiff, Jimmy Smits, Dulé Hill and Janel Moloney are all listed on the category presenters’ list.

A Happy Days reunion is also likely, with Ron Howard and Henry Winkler both set to appear as the show celebrates its 50th anniversary.

The Emmys split their nominations into three categories – comedy, drama and limited series.

Traditionally, the most prestigious category of the night is best drama series – and the same shows often win year after year.

Seven of the last nine years have seen either Succession or Game of Thrones take the top Emmy. But now both have ended, the field is open for a potential newcomer to take their place.

This year’s best drama nominees are 3 Body Problem, The Morning Show, Fallout, Shogun, The Gilded Age, Slow Horses and Mr and Mrs Smith, alongside another previous winner, The Crown.

Arguably the most interesting category this year is best limited series, where Baby Reindeer leads the field.

Scottish comedian Richard Gadd’s account of being stalked by a woman for several years, and being sexually abused by a male TV industry figure, has been the most talked about show of the year.

But the real-life woman who allegedly inspired the stalker character is suing Netflix for defamation, negligence and privacy violations. Could that take some of the shine off the show and cost it votes at the Emmys?

Baby Reindeer’s competitors for best limited series are Fargo, Lessons in Chemistry, Ripley and True Detective: Night Country.

Meanwhile, nominees in the comedy categories include Hacks, Reservation Dogs, Abbott Elementary, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Palm Royale, What We Do in the Shadows and Only Murders in the Building.

However, the comedy categories are likely to be dominated by The Bear, something which is in itself controversial because many people think the show isn’t a comedy and shouldn’t be competing there.

Far be it from us to speculate about why this show is submitted as a comedy – but some people might wonder if it’s because this category is a little easier to win, with less serious competition than in drama.

Having said that, the third season of The Bear has not been as acclaimed by critics or loved by fans as the first two, so there’s no guarantee it will score as many wins as its earlier seasons did.

Read more about the Emmy-nominated shows:

• Woman sues Netflix over Baby Reindeer character
• Shogun: A guide to the hit Japanese samurai epic as its finale cuts deep
• The Bear star on her first time directing the show
• Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry David comedy concludes after 12 series
• Gary Oldman wants to star in Slow Horses ‘for the long run’
• 3 Body Problem: Game of Thrones creators swap dragons for aliens
• The Crown star on her shock when the Queen died

As usual, the main ceremony is taking place a week after the Creative Arts Emmys, which saw Dick Van Dyke and Jamie Lee Curtis among the winners.

The ceremony will begin at the Peacock Theatre in LA at 20:00 ET/17:00 PT on Sunday.

US viewers can watch it live on ABC, or on streaming service Hulu the next day.

In the UK, it will start at 01:00 BST on Monday morning. But no UK broadcaster is scheduled to show it.

Outstanding drama series

• The Crown
• Fallout
• The Gilded Age
• The Morning Show
• Mr & Mrs Smith
• Shogun
• Slow Horses
• 3 Body Problem

Outstanding comedy series

• Abbott Elementary
• The Bear
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Hacks
• Only Murders in the Building
• Palm Royale
• Reservation Dogs
• What We Do in the Shadows

Outstanding limited or anthology series

• Baby Reindeer
• Fargo
• Lessons in Chemistry
• Ripley
• True Detective: Night Country

Outstanding lead actor in a drama series

• Idris Elba – Hijack
• Donald Glover – Mr & Mrs Smith
• Walton Goggins – Fallout
• Gary Oldman – Slow Horses
• Hiroyuki Sanada – Shogun
• Dominic West – The Crown

Outstanding lead actress in a drama series

• Jennifer Aniston – The Morning Show
• Carrie Coon – The Gilded Age
• Maya Erskine – Mr & Mrs Smith
• Anna Sawai – Shogun
• Imelda Staunton – The Crown
• Reese Witherspoon – The Morning Show

Outstanding lead actor in a comedy series

• Matt Berry – What We Do in the Shadows
• Larry David – Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Steve Martin – Only Murders in the Building
• Martin Short – Only Murders in the Building
• Jeremy Allen White – The Bear
• D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai – Reservation Dogs

Outstanding lead actress in a comedy series

• Quinta Brunson – Abbott Elementary
• Ayo Edebiri – The Bear
• Selena Gomez – Only Murders in the Building
• Maya Rudolph – Loot
• Jean Smart – Hacks
• Kristen Wiig – Palm Royale

Outstanding lead actor in a limited or anthology series or movie

• Matt Bomer – Fellow Travelers
• Richard Gadd – Baby Reindeer
• Jon Hamm – Fargo
• Tom Hollander – Feud: Capote vs The Swans
• Andrew Scott – Ripley

Outstanding lead actress in a limited or anthology series or movie

• Jodie Foster – True Detective: Night Country
• Brie Larson – Lessons in Chemistry
• Juno Temple – Fargo
• Sofía Vergara – Griselda
• Naomi Watts – Feud: Capote vs The Swans

For 40-year-old farmer Ali Ibrahim, the nightmare began in the late afternoon on 5 June, with the sound of heavy weapons.

“We had never seen such shelling since we were young,” he recalls. “The bombardment lasted for four hours, with houses destroyed, screaming children – women and the elderly were helpless to escape.”

At least 100 civilians were killed that day in the attack on the Sudanese village of Wad al-Nourah, according to estimates by volunteers of the local resistance committee.

Mr Ibrahim says the villagers were unarmed: ”We are simple farmers. We’ve never carried weapons. We have no enemies. We are just citizens trying to protect our lives.”

The BBC has heard testimonies from several survivors who accuse armed men from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – the paramilitary group fighting the Sudanese army – of opening fire and storming the village in two successive attacks, using heavy weaponry. Dozens of residents were killed or injured.

The alleged number of deaths in this incident would make it one of the deadliest incidents involving civilians since the war between the army and the RSF began in April 2023.

The BBC managed to speak to several survivors of the Wad al-Nourah attack, who are currently receiving treatment at the Al Managil government hospital where they were transferred for treatment.

Reporters were also able to analyse the videos they shared.

The hospital is located about 80km (50 miles) from the village, and many survivors arrived there hours after the attack. According to their testimonies, the RSF forces also tried to prevent them leaving the village, and looted most of their vehicles.

After enduring “hours of terror” during the bombardment, followed by frantic attempts to find a way to transport the wounded and bury those killed by the shelling, the residents were “shocked” by a second massive RSF attack on their village early the next morning, one of the survivors at the hospital told the BBC.

“They entered our house, beat me and my siblings, and asked, ‘where is the gold?’. My little sister was scared and told my mother to give them the gold.”

This account is consistent with those of other survivors, all of whom confirmed RSF forces had “attacked the village from three directions, entered homes, killed civilians, and looted valuables, including gold, cars, and stored agricultural products”.

Hamad Suleiman, a 42-year-old retail trader, said armed RSF fighters entered his brother’s house and began shooting without warning.

“I went to my brother’s house and found them there… They shot my brother and nephew dead, and another nephew was injured and is here with me in the hospital.”

He says he tried to reason with the RSF fighters and asked why they had killed his family.

“I tried to talk to them, and they told me to recite the Shahada [The Islamic profession of faith that is recited when the feeling of death is near]. They shot me in the hand and fled… they looted all the cars.

“I was wounded and couldn’t find a way out for hours.”

The BBC contacted the RSF for their response to the survivors’ testimonies, and the accusations of attacks, killings, looting and intimidation. We had received no reply by the time of this report’s publication.

RSF spokesperson Al-Fateh Qurashi issued a video statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, a day after the incident – denying their forces had targeted civilians.

He stated that the forces had engaged with elements of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Intelligence – also known as ‘Al Mustanfaron’ – a militia carrying small weapons and aligned with the SAF, who were in the village at the time of the attack.

The BBC’s fact-finding team analysed videos provided by the RSF, which they claimed depicted locations and trenches used by Al Mustanfaron in Wad al-Nourah. The analysis revealed these locations were all situated outside the village, not within it.

The analysis also showed that members of the RSF opened fire towards the village, using heavy weapons from about a mile away.

Wad al-Nourah is similar to hundreds of villages scattered across Gezira state. Most of its residents work in agriculture and trade, and it has a small weekly market where traders from neighbouring villages come to buy and sell livestock and crops.

The RSF took control of Gezira state, to the south of the capital, Khartoum, in December 2023, and has been accused of carrying out numerous abuses against civilians there – which it repeatedly denies.

Gezira state is one of the regions most affected by the war, with the fighting spreading there early on in the conflict. It also became a refuge for thousands of displaced people fleeing Khartoum and Darfur.

Since the RSF took control of the area at the end of last year, one village after another has suffered acts of violence.

The RSF continue to deny accusations of war crimes such as killing, looting, rape and burning villages – instead pointing the finger at what they call “unruly” people.

Thousands of people have died and 10 million have been forced to flee their homes since April last year, when Sudan was thrown into disarray after its army and a powerful paramilitary group began a vicious struggle for power.

The UN Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, has called for a comprehensive and transparent investigation to uncover the circumstances of the Wad al-Nourah attack.

The villagers, who lost dozens of loved ones, hope an investigation committee will be established, and that the perpetrators will be held accountable – rather than escaping punishment as has happened in the past in Sudan.

The relationship between neighbours India and Bangladesh continues to remain frosty more than a month after former prime minister Sheikh Hasina was ousted from power. While Hasina’s stay in India remains an irritant, a recent interview by Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus also took India by surprise. The BBC’s Anbarasan Ethirajan examines where ties stand now.

Sheikh Hasina was seen as pro-India and the two countries enjoyed close strategic and economic ties during her 15-year rule. Her time in power was also beneficial for India’s security, as she cracked down on some anti-India insurgent groups operating from her country and settled some border disputes.

But her presence in India, with no clarity on how long she will stay, complicates the two countries’ efforts to maintain a strong relationship.

That was made clearer last week when, in an interview with news agency Press Trust of India, Yunus urged India to stop Hasina from making any political statements while staying in Delhi.

“If India wants to keep her until the time Bangladesh wants her back, the condition would be that she has to keep quiet,” said Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is currently leading an interim administration after Hasina’s exit.

Yunus may have been referring to a statement released days after Hasina’s arrival which had stoked anger in Bangladesh. She has not issued any public communication since then.

There have been calls within Bangladesh to bring Hasina back to stand trial for killings of people during the anti-government protests in July and August.

• India’s Bangladesh dilemma: What to do about Sheikh Hasina?

Yunus also said in the interview that both countries need to work together to improve their bilateral relationships, which he described as being “at a low”.

India’s foreign ministry has not formally reacted yet to the remarks, but officials are reportedly “upset”.

“India is waiting and watching developments in Bangladesh, taking note of statements emanating from Dhaka representing both official views and views expressed by prominent individuals,” an Indian official told the BBC on condition of anonymity.

Former Indian diplomats say they are taken aback by what has been described as “megaphone diplomacy” by Yunus – trying to discuss contentious bilateral issues through the media.

“India has indicated its readiness to talk to the interim government, and to discuss all concerns, those of Bangladesh and those of India,” Veena Sikri, a former Indian high commissioner in Dhaka, said.

The retired diplomat says the issues merit quiet discussions and it’s not clear “on what basis [Yunus] has described the bilateral relationship as low”.

But Bangladesh’s foreign ministry rejects the criticism.

“Don’t Indian leaders talk to any media? If Dr Yunus is asked about specific issues, he can of course express his views. If you want to criticise, you can criticise about anything,” Touhid Hossain, adviser to the Bangladesh foreign ministry, told the BBC.

Though Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Yunus spoke on the telephone some weeks ago, there have been no ministerial level meetings so far.

There seems to be a broad consensus in India that Hasina can stay until another country agrees to let her in.

However, the newly appointed chief prosecutor of Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal, Mohammad Tajul Islam, has said they are taking steps to extradite her to face charges in connection with the killings during the protests.

“As she has been made the main accused of the massacres in Bangladesh, we will try to legally bring her back to Bangladesh to face trial,” Islam told reporters.

But experts say it’s unlikely that Hasina will be extradited even if Bangladesh makes a formal request.

“She is staying here as a guest of India. If we don’t extend basic courtesy to our long-time friend, then why would anyone take us seriously as a friend in future?” says Riva Ganguly Das, who is also a former Indian high commissioner to Dhaka.

In his interview, Yunus also criticised Delhi for not reaching out to Bangladeshi opposition parties.

“The narrative is that everybody is Islamist, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is Islamist, and everyone else is Islamist and will make this country into Afghanistan. And Bangladesh is in safe hands with Sheikh Hasina at the helm only. India is captivated by this narrative,” he said.

But Indian analysts differ.

“I absolutely do not agree with that statement. In Bangladesh, our high commissioners talk to all political parties without ascribing any labels,” says Ms Sikri.

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

But many in Bangladesh point out that India should be reaching out to the BNP, which is confident of winning the election whenever it is held.

“No Indian official has met us since 5 August [when Hasina’s government fell]. I don’t know the reason,” says Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, secretary general of the BNP.

On the contrary, the Chinese ambassador in Dhaka and envoys from European countries have been holding regular meetings with the BNP.

The lack of security in the days after the fall of Hasina has also given rise to attacks on religious minorities by suspected Islamists. India has already expressed concern several times over reports of attacks on Hindus.

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

In the past few weeks, several Sufi shrines, locally known as mazars, have also been vandalised by Islamist hardliners. Sunni Muslims are the majority in Bangladesh, and radicals consider shrines and tombs of revered figures un-Islamic.

“A group of people came and vandalised my father-in-law’s tomb a few days ago and warned us not to perform any un-Islamic rituals,” said Tamanna Akhtar, wife of the caretaker of the shrine of Ali Khawaja Ali Pagla Pir in Sirajganj district.

The adviser to the Bangladeshi religious affairs ministry, AFM Khalid Hossain, has said that action would be taken against those who target religious sites.

But experts say that if Islamist hardliners re-establish an assertive presence, however small it may be, in Bangladesh, it will set off alarm bells for Delhi.

In the past few weeks, a convicted Islamist militant has been released. Nine suspected radicals escaped during a jail break last month – four of them were arrested later.

Jashimuddin Rahmani, chief of the Ansarullah Bangla Team, which was designated as a terror outfit by Hasina’s government in 2016, walked out of prison last month.

He was sentenced to five years in prison in 2015 in connection with the murder of an atheist blogger. He had been in jail even after his prison term ended because of other pending cases.

“Several militants have been freed in the past month. Some of them are known to India,” former diplomat Ms Das said, terming it a “serious matter”.

Jane’s Addiction have apologised after they cancelled an upcoming show following an on-stage brawl in Boston.

On Friday night, the American band cut short their gig after frontman Perry Farrell threw a punch at guitarist David Navarro.

They were due to play in Bridgeport, Connecticut on Sunday as part of their reunion tour but this has now been pulled.

“We want to extend a heartfelt apology to our fans for the events that unfolded last night,” the band wrote on Instagram on Saturday.

“As a result we will be cancelling tomorrow night’s show in Bridgeport.”

The band insisted that fans would be reimbursed.

Footage on social media showed Farrell shouting at Navarro, 57, and punching him.

The 65-year-old rocker was then restrained by staff and taken off stage at Boston’s Leader Bank Pavilion.

Jane’s Addiction formed in Los Angeles in 1985. The band consists of Farrell, Navarro, drummer Stephen Perkins and bassist Eric Avery.

They have reunited after more than a decade, and are due to play a string of dates in the coming months throughout the US and Canada.

There has been no confirmation as to whether those shows will still go ahead.

The band released four albums together: Nothing’s Shocking (1988), Ritual De Lo Habitual (1990), Strays (2003), and The Great Escape Artist (2011).

Their hits include Been Caught Stealing, Strays and The Great Escape Artist.

The rockers were honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013.

BBC News has approached Jane’s Addiction for a comment.

Former US President Donald Trump has been found liable to pay damages to London singer and songwriter Eddy Grant for using his song Electric Avenue without permission.

It has taken Mr Grant, 76, more than four years to sue the Republican candidate in this year’s presidential election in the US courts, over his 2020 campaign video that used a 40-second clip of the song.

The video was viewed 13.7 million times before Twitter, now known as X, took it down.

A federal judge in Manhattan ruled Mr Trump breached Mr Grant’s copyright for his 1983 hit, and is now liable for damages as well as paying for the singer’s legal fees.

Mr Grant’s battle with the former President began in August 2020, when he was seeking re-election to the White House. The songwriter’s counsel, Wallace E.J. Collins, issued a cease and desist letter to Donald Trump’s campaign team.

On Friday, Judge John G. Koeltl rejected arguments from Mr Trump’s lawyers that the Twitter video was shielded under copyright’s fair use doctrine, which allows for the use of protected works in certain situations.

Brian D. Caplan, Mr Grant’s attorney, told Business Insider: “As a staunch believer of artist’s rights and the ability to control their creative output, Mr. Grant believes that the decision will help others in their fight against the unauthorized use of sound recordings and musical compositions.

“Politicians are not above the law and the court reaffirmed that.”

Earlier this month a US judge has ordered the Trump campaign to stop using the song Hold On, I’m Coming at his rallies, in response to a lawsuit from the family of the song’s co-writer, Isaac Hayes.

Dozens of other artists have objected to the use of their songs at Trump rallies in recent months including Abba, Foo Fighters, Celine Dion and Johnny Marr.

Electric Avenue takes its name from the south London road in Brixton, the first market street in the capital to be lit by electricity. It still forms part of Brixton Market today.

It inspired the title of Mr Grant’s song, written as a response to the 1981 Brixton riots, which reached number two in the charts in both the UK and the US.

Mr Trump’s team has been approached for comment about the Electric Avenue court case.

A selection of striking news photographs taken around the world this week.

One day when struggling to get to grips with a spreadsheet to calculate his annual budget for art supplies, an idea popped into the mind of Ghanaian visual artist Joseph Awuah-Darko.

He could use the database to track his bipolar disorder, a mental illness that causes huge swings in a person’s moods, energy and concentration levels.

“I’m a visual learner and I thought: ‘Why don’t I use colour as a language?’” Awuah-Darko told the BBC.

“Colour allows me to express things that I can’t really capture in words.”

The 28-year-old started allocating to every hour a colour that represented how he was feeling at that point in time – with red being the most depressive state, and pastel blue the most positive.

“It became something that became addictive – and cathartic. And an interesting way of monitoring my life.”

Out of those meticulous digital records, the artist has also created a series of abstract oil paintings – portraits of his days.

His first UK solo exhibition, How’s Your Day Going?, “makes exterior” his struggles with bipolar disorder, with which he was diagnosed at the age of 16 when he had a breakdown at school.

Some days are better than others, as the blocks of colour in his worksheets show.

He uses oil sticks to create vertical linear stripes on the canvas – in blacks, browns, reds, oranges, yellows, blues and greens.

Some paintings are almost as neat and precise as the coloured spreadsheet cells – others are less ordered.

The artist does not wait for one paint to dry before he applies the next colour – and as the wet paints run into each other, new colours are created.

This mixing, says Awuah-Darko, reflects the nuances and complexities of his own emotions.

“It’s beautiful to see how, even though I have given these strict schematic colour assignments to my moods, emotions aren’t sanitised,” he says.

“They are messy, and they flow into each other,“ he says.

Awuah-Darko was born in London to Ghanaian parents, but he grew up in Ghana, has travelled a lot and now lives in the Belgian capital, Brussels.

The colours he uses to capture his emotions depend on where he is in the world – and partly reflects “the nature of what I feel about the environment I’m in”.

The deep, warm blue-green of teal is a colour that he most associates with Brussels.

Teal covers a whole range of emotions and energies that he feels – somewhere in the middle between the deep, disruptive depression of red and the positivity of lighter blues.

He often paints while in “a state of teal”.

“I’m deep in thought and lost in the void of my own imaginations,” he says.

“I’m not exactly bursting with joy,” he laughs,” but I am engaging my mind and my hands in a way that I feel is productive.”

Yellow is what Awuah-Darko describes as “a nuanced state of anxiety”. It could be a moment of disappointment or rejection.

“It’s not an absolute negative,” he says, “but it is something that could break you down – if you chose to allow it to.”

The first painting Awuah-Darko created in the How’s Your Day Going? series is entitled June 15 PM.

The date is the day recorded in the spreadsheet – and “PM” reflects that he finished the painting at night.

The image holds particular “emotional gravitas” for the artist because he says it is when he accepted that his life was going to be based for the foreseeable future in Brussels – not Accra, Ghana’s capital.

Awuah-Darko left Ghana because he wanted to live openly as a gay man – and he felt he could not do that because of restrictive legislation passed by Ghana’s parliament in February 2024.

The bill – which is yet to be signed into law by the president – imposes heavy sentences on gay, lesbian and bisexual people, anyone who identifies as transgender, as well as those seen as allies.

“I created June 15th at a time when I was really reconciling with what it meant to be an immigrant. That was daunting, heavy, beautiful and exciting.”

Awuah-Darko was inspired to transform the “spreadsheet diaries” into paintings by a two-month artist residency he attended earlier this year at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in the US.

The late German-born American artist Josef Albers put colour at the centre of his work and has inspired generations of artists.

“At the residency, I learned about the power of colour as language, as vocabulary, and it really enhanced my ability to capture that in my abstract painting.”

Awuah-Darko also pays homage in his art to the bold and colourful work of Atta Kwami – one of Ghana’s most respected artists who came from Kumasi but spent many years in the UK where he died in 2021.

“There’s such an honesty about his painting and such a reverence for the colours he uses, which are so linked to his upbringing in Ghana and to how he viewed the world through lines and spaces.”

Another influence is Anni Albers, one of the world’s leading textile designers and printmakers, and wife of Josef Albers, who blurred the lines between the ancient craft of hand-weaving and modern art.

Awuah-Darko drew on Albers’ work for his most recent paintings – and also his own heritage.

He comes from an influential family of financiers and chiefs in the south-central Ashanti region of Ghana.

The ancestral home is very close to Bonwire, the birthplace of the world-famous kente fabric, and the artist grew up wearing the traditional multi-coloured cloth.

He also learned how to weave it using a hand loom, stripe by stripe, colour by colour – a process that he finds “cathartic and meditative”.

His paintings are reminiscent of kente cloth, and the process has, he says, been “almost like weaving with paint”.

“It’s super interesting to see how my heritage has manifested itself in my work – beyond the way in which it obviously addresses my battle with depression.”

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Russia and Ukraine have exchanged 206 prisoners of war in a deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Russia’s ministry of defence said its 103 released servicemen came from among those captured during the Kursk incursion.

Posting pictures of some of those released on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “Our people are home”.

Last month, Ukrainian forces launched a surprise attack across the Russian border, advancing up to 30km (18 miles) into the Kursk region.

Zelensky said those Ukrainians released included 82 privates and sergeants and 21 officers from the armed forces, national guard, border guards, and police.

He said they had been captured defending the regions of Kyiv, Donetsk, Mariupol, Azovstal, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv.

Russia said its released soldiers were in Belarus and would be given the “necessary psychological and medical assistance” and would be allowed to contact their relatives before being returned to Russia.

The UAE, which has remained broadly neutral in the conflict, has acted as a mediator for previous prisoner swaps.

In August, following the Kursk incursion, an initial exchange was completed involving 230 prisoners in total.

Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk was in part intended to draw troops away from Russia’s operations in eastern Ukraine.

The latest swap comes as Russia said it had recaptured a village in eastern Ukraine, where it has made a number of advances over recent weeks.

On Saturday, the ministry of defence said its forces had taken the village of Zhelanne Pershe in the Pokrovsk district.

It is less than 30km (19 miles) from the town of Pokrovsk, which is home to a key railway station and sits at the intersections of several important roads.

The town plays a crucial role as a logistics hub for Ukrainian forces in the eastern region of Donbas, and has for months been a key target for Russian forces.

Marieha Hussain had marched for three hours with her family, and the children with them were getting tired.

“We opened some snacks to keep them going,” she said. They were part of a 300,000-strong group at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in central London on 11 November 2023.

“Then, somebody from my side of the street where I was standing called out and asked: ‘Can I take a picture of your placard?’”

This wasn’t the first time she’d been asked for a picture. Her family’s placards, she said, had drawn a lot of attention.

On one side of the placard was a cartoon of Suella Braverman, then the Home Secretary, dressed like Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians. Ms Hussain held up the sign and posed.

“The voice called out, ‘no, not that one, can you turn it around please?’ – and I did.

“And that was it.”

Her account was told to Westminster Magistrates Court this week during her two-day trial on a charge of a racially aggravated public order offence.

She was accused of this offence – of which she was found not guilty on Friday – because of what was on the other side of that placard.

It was a drawing of a palm tree with coconuts falling off it; pasted over two of those coconuts were the faces of Ms Braverman and of the then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

At the heart of this case was the word “coconut” – and whether it could be considered racially abusive.

Ms Hussain told the court that on the drive home from the demonstration, a family friend messaged to tell her that her photo had been posted by an anonymous right-wing blog called Harry’s Place and that it was going viral on X (it has since been viewed more than four million times).

“It doesn’t get more racist than this,” the post said. “Among anti-racists you get the worst racists of them all.”

Underneath she then saw a reply from the Metropolitan Police, saying that they were “actively looking for” her.

Chris Humphreys, a member of Metropolitan Police staff working in the force’s communications team that day, saw the post after the Met was tagged in it. “The account that posted it typically generates a significant response,” Mr Humphreys told the court. He was called to give evidence on behalf of the Crown Prosecution Service.

In the 10 months since that day, anonymous accounts on social media called her a racist while tabloid newspapers published details of her family and the cost of her parents’ home. Ms Hussain, 37, also lost her job as a secondary school teacher.

After the Metropolitan Police posted that they wished to identify Ms Hussain, she consulted with solicitors and voluntarily attended a police station three days later, on 14 November, she told the court.

There, she gave them a prepared statement outlining who she was, what had happened that day, and her reasons for making the sign.

“I am a teacher of almost 10 years standing with an academic background in psychology,” she wrote in the statement. “It is exceptionally difficult to convey complex, serious political statements in a nutshell, and we did our best.”

She was not formally charged until six months later, in May this year. She found out she was charged from a journalist working for Al Jazeera, she told the court.

At this point, the support for Ms Hussain from activists and campaigners grew increasingly vocal. When she first appeared at the magistrates court in June – visibly pregnant – to enter her not guilty plea, protesters stood outside the court held copycat “coconut” placards.

The term “coconut” is instantly recognisable to many people from black and Asian communities in the UK.

It is a word with a generally negative meaning and can range from light-hearted banter to more severe criticism or insults.

What the court had to contend with was whether, on Ms Hussain’s placard, it could be considered racially abusive.

Prosecutor Jonathan Bryan argued coconut was a well-known racial slur. “[It has] a very clear meaning – you may be brown on the outside, but you are white on the inside,” Mr Bryan told the court.

“In other words, you’re a ‘race traitor’ – you’re less brown or black than you should be.”

Mr Bryan said that Ms Hussain had crossed the line from legitimate political expression to racial insult.

This was not the first time the term “coconut” has come before the courts: in 2009 Shirley Brown, the first black Liberal Democrat elected to Bristol City Council, used the term to describe Conservative councillor Jay Jethwa during a heated debate about funding for the council’s Legacy Commission.

The following year, in 2010, Ms Brown was convicted of racial harassment for the comment. She was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £620 in costs. Mr Bryan referenced Ms Brown’s case during this week’s trial.

For Ms Hussain, one of those who’s been particularly fervent in his support is the writer and anti-racism campaigner Nels Abbey.

“The word ‘coconut’ didn’t fall out of a coconut tree, to quote Kamala Harris’s mum,” Mr Abbey told me after the trial’s first day, adding that the word “fell out of our experience as former colonised people”.

The term emerged as a way of critiquing those who “collaborated with our oppressors”, he said.

“This is our language,” he said. “We share this language because we share a history, we share origins and share a community… You cannot criminalise people’s history, and the language that emerged from that.”

In court, this was echoed by two academic experts in racism who gave evidence in support of Ms Hussain – Prof Gus John and Prof Gargi Bhattacharyya.

They quoted postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, Black liberation activist Marcus Garvey, the late poet Benjamin Zephaniah, and comedian Romesh Ranganathan, who has frequently joked that his mum calls him a coconut for not speaking Tamil.

These were citations more commonly heard in a university lecture hall than a courtroom.

The court heard that the investigating team had also contacted three experts in racism to give evidence for the prosecution, but they had all refused. One of those, Black Studies specialist Prof Kehinde Andrews, sent “quite a lengthy response” saying the word was not a racial slur, and asked that this be shared with the CPS.

Prof John told the court he was “disappointed” that the CPS hadn’t called any experts to support their case.

“I’d have wanted to be informed and educated on when coconut is a racist slur,” he said. “I would have loved to see the evidence of that. I’m not aware of that at all.”

Ms Hussain wrote in her statement that “coconut” was “common language, particularly in our culture”.

Asked by her barrister Mr Menon what she meant by that, she answered that she had grown up hearing the word used among South Asians.

“If I’m truly honest, sometimes, when I was younger, my own dad called me a coconut,” she said, prompting laughter from the public gallery.

Ms Hussain also argued that her use of the term was a form of political critique against what she said were “politicians in high office who perpetuate and push racist policies”.

On Friday afternoon, District Judge Vanessa Lloyd ruled that the placard was “part of the genre of political satire”, and that the prosecution had “not proved to a criminal standard that it was abusive”.

As the verdict was read out, cheers and whooping erupted from the public gallery while Ms Hussain burst into tears.

Outside the court she said: “The damage done to my reputation and image can never be undone.

“The laws on hate speech must serve to protect us more, but this trial shows that these rules are being weaponised to target ethnic minorities.

“It goes without saying that this ordeal has been agonising for my family and I. Instead of enjoying my pregnancy I’ve been vilified by the media, I’ve lost my career, I’ve been dragged through the court system.”

But, she said, “I’m more determined than ever to continue using my voice” for Palestinians.

The presence of hard-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer alongside Donald Trump on the campaign trail in recent days has raised questions, including from some Republicans, about the influence the controversial former congressional candidate may have on him.

Ms Loomer is well-known for her anti-Muslim rhetoric and for spreading conspiracy theories, including that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” carried out by the US government.

She joined Trump at an event on Wednesday commemorating the attacks, raising eyebrows and prompting outrage in some US media outlets.

And on Tuesday, the 31-year-old travelled to Philadelphia on board Trump’s plane for the presidential debate in the city.

Perhaps the most memorable moment of that debate came when Trump repeated a baseless claim that illegal immigrants from Haiti have been eating domestic pets in a small Ohio city. “They are eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said.

City officials later told BBC Verify that there have been “no credible reports” this has actually happened.

Trump said he was repeating claims he had heard on television, but the theory was aired by Ms Loomer just a day before the debate. On Monday, the fringe pundit and social media influencer repeated the claims to her 1.2m followers on X.

While the level of access Ms Loomer has to Trump is unclear, and his running mate JD Vance has also spread the baseless theory, Ms Loomer’s post and her presence in Philadelphia has led some Republicans to blame her for the former president making the unfounded claim on stage.

An anonymous source close to the Trump campaign told US news outlet Semafor that they were “100%” concerned about Ms Loomer’s proximity to Trump.

“Regardless of any guardrails the Trump campaign has put on her, I don’t think it’s working,” the source was quoted as saying.

A number of senior Republican politicians have also publicly criticised Ms Loomer and cautioned against Trump bringing her into his inner circle.

“Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans,” North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

“A DNC [Democratic National Committee] plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election,” Mr Tillis added.

Speaking at a news conference in California on 13 September, Trump said only that Ms Loomer is “a supporter” and that he was unaware of recent comments she made about Harris, or her comments about 9/11.

“I don’t control Laura. Laura has to say what she wants. She’s a free spirit,” he added

Ms Loomer did not respond to several requests for comment from the BBC.

But on Twitter/X, she said that she operates “independently” to help Trump, who she referred to as “truly our nation’s last hope”.

“To the many reporters who are calling me and obsessively asking me to talk to them today, the answer is no,” she wrote. “I am very busy working on my stories and investigations and don’t have time to entertain your conspiracy theories.”

Born in Arizona in 1993, the self-styled investigative journalist has worked as an activist and commentator for organisations including Project Veritas and Alex Jones’s Infowars.

In 2020, she ran – with Trump’s support – as a Republican candidate for the US House of Representatives in Florida, but lost to Democrat Lois Frankel.

She tried again two years later, when she unsuccessfully ran to unseat Representative Daniel Webster in a Republican primary in a different Florida district.

Now, she is known for her vocal support of Trump and for promoting a long string of conspiracy theories including claims that Kamala Harris is not black, and that the son of billionaire George Soros was sending cryptic messages calling for Trump’s assassination.

These posts led her to be banned from a number of platforms including Facebook, Instagram and even, according to her, Uber and Lyft for making offensive comments about Muslim drivers. She once described herself as a “proud Islamophobe”.

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Ms Loomer frequently attends events in support of Trump and has been seen previously at his Florida residence Mar-a-Lago.

Earlier this year, she travelled on his plane to Iowa where she was given a shout-out by him on stage at an event. “You want her on your side,” Trump said. The former president has also shared several of her videos on Truth Social.

And last year, the New York Times reported that Trump had expressed an interest in hiring her for his campaign, relenting only after top aides expressed concern that she could damage his electoral efforts.

“Everyone who works for him thinks she’s a liability,” one Trump aide said of Ms Loomer in a report in NBC News in January.

Another outspoken Trump supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, took issue with Ms Loomer this week over her comments questioning Harris’s race and a post in which she said the White House “will smell like curry” if Harris – who is partly of Indian descent – is elected.

Greene said Ms Loomer’s comments were “appalling and extremely racist” and did “not represent who we are as Republicans or MAGA” – prompting a flurry of furious messages in her direction.

This feud in Trump’s orbit played out just a day after Ms Loomer appeared at events with Trump commemorating the anniversary of 9/11 in New York and Pennsylvania.

Asked about her attendance there by the Associated Press, she said she did not work for the campaign and was “invited as a guest”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Yemen’s Houthis will pay a “heavy price” after a missile fired by the group landed in central Israel.

The Israeli military said the missile landed in an uninhabited area early on Sunday, but that shrapnel indicated air defence systems had failed to destroy it before it entered Israeli airspace.

It added that it was investigating how the missile was able to reach so far into Israeli territory.

The strike marks the first time a missile fired by the group has reached central Israel, which is around 2,000km (1,240 miles) from Yemen.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said there had been repeated attempts to shoot the missile down on Sunday but that it most likely fragmented in mid-air.

The Houthis claimed the operation used a new type of hypersonic missile, which may help explain the failure of efforts to intercept it.

They are an armed group that seized much of Yemen in the country’s ongoing civil war and have declared themselves part of the Iran-led “axis of resistance” against Israel, the US, and the wider West.

The Houthis said in a statement that Sunday’s attack was carried out in solidarity with the Palestinians and that Israel should expect more ahead of the first anniversary of the 7 October attacks.

Missile fragments landed at a railway station in the city of Modiin, causing some damage, and in open ground near Israel’s main international airport on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

The damage is believed to have been caused by Israel’s own interceptor missiles.

Netanyahu said the strike showed that Israel was in a “multi-front battle against Iran’s axis of evil that strives to destroy us”.

“[The Houthis] should have known by now that we exact a heavy price for any attempt to harm us,” he said.

“Anyone who attacks us will not escape from our arms.

“Hamas is already learning this in our determined action that will lead to its destruction and the release of all of our hostages.”

Israeli forces launched a campaign to destroy Hamas following the 7 October attacks, which saw around 1,200 people killed and another 251 taken to Gaza as hostages.

More than 41,206 people have been killed in Gaza since the campaign began, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

This is not the first time the Houthis have attacked Israel.

In July, one man was killed and eight people were injured after a Houthi drone landed in Tel Aviv.

Previously, almost all Houthi missiles and drones fired towards Israel had been intercepted and none were known to have reached Tel Aviv.

In response, Israeli jets attacked the city of Hodeidah in Yemen, causing a huge fire which engulfed one of the country’s most important oil storage facilities.

Among the more than 67 million people who tuned in to the first US presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris was Lila Rose.

The young and charismatic founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action had hoped for big things from the Republican candidate: a bold display of anti-abortion beliefs and a promise to turn those beliefs into law.

She was quickly disappointed. While Trump criticised Democrats’ “extreme” abortion policies, he refused to take a position on a national ban, saying instead that the issue should be left to the states.

And he called himself a “leader” on IVF, putting himself at odds with Ms Rose and many in her movement, who oppose the procedure because it often involves destroying embryos.

“It was painful to watch,” Ms Rose said of Trump’s performance.

Ms Rose, 36, had always had reservations about Trump’s anti-abortion bona fides, after years of shifting positions (including previously declaring himself pro-choice) and his openness to what she called “concerning compromises”. But she, like most in her movement, had been encouraged by his first term and the three Trump-appointed Supreme Court nominees who went on to overturn Roe v Wade and end the nationwide right to abortion.

Then Trump changed course, and her disillusionment with the former president swelled. Now on his third White House run, Trump seems to be working to appeal to all sides.

He hinted he would sign federal abortion legislation, before later walking it back. He called the state-wide restrictions that came into place after Roe v Wade fell “a beautiful thing”. But later, he said abortion bans early in pregnancy went too far, suggesting Republican candidates needed to be moderate enough on the issue to “win elections”.

This summer, during the Democratic National Convention, the former president posted a statement online saying his future administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights” – language typically used by pro-choice activists.

By late August, Ms Rose had had enough, telling her more than one million followers that Trump was “making it impossible” to vote for him.

“It’s very clear that Trump is less pro-abortion than Kamala Harris,” she told the BBC on Thursday. “But our movement’s goal is not just to accept whatever the least worst candidate is and show up for them. Our goal is to help candidates who are going to be fighters for the pre-born.”

One of the most prominent leaders in the anti-abortion movement, Ms Rose’s defection signals a potential problem with Trump’s new strategy. As Trump attempts to moderate on abortion, he risks alienating some within his socially conservative base. And in an election that may be decided by a razor-thin margin, if those voters stay home in November it could cost Trump the White House.

“When a strategy like that works, you can kind of be anything to everyone,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and expert on the US abortion debate. “And when it stops working you wind up being nothing to everyone.”

His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump in 2016, and again in 2020, had held social conservatives close. He embraced anti-abortion activists and championed their movement, becoming the first sitting president to attend the March for Life, the country’s largest annual anti-abortion demonstration.

He delivered for social conservatives in a way that few Republican presidents ever had, Ms Ziegler said.

“Trump, I think, always understood with his first two races that he would be politically dead in the water without the movement,” she said. “So there was much more catering to them.”

In return, these voters turned out overwhelmingly for Trump. In 2020, the former president claimed 84% of white evangelical Christians – some of the most socially conservative voters in the country – up from the already high 77% in 2016.

But Trump was reportedly spooked by his party’s underperformance in the 2022 midterm elections – which he and many analysts attributed to the fall of Roe v Wade – and aware of the broad public support for abortion access. So, this time around, Trump has seemed to soften on the issue.

By the time the Republican primary elections began at the start of the year, he had started to criticise six-week abortion bans, promising to find a national standard that would please everyone. “Both sides are going to like me,” he said last year.

And over the summer, confronted with more questions about what his White House would do on abortion, Trump could not settle on an answer.

He indicated he wanted a national “standard” for abortion but has since backed away from any commitment. He said he believed in states’ authority over abortion policy but intervened in several state battles over abortion, often in opposition to social conservatives.

He came out against Florida’s six-week abortion ban, saying you “need more than six weeks” and appeared to signal he would vote for a November referendum that would protect abortion in the state. A day later, after intense pressure from anti-abortion activists, he said he would vote against it.

These contortions have strained relationships with key anti-abortion allies.

“It’s disconcerting for our students and for our movement,” said Kristan Hawkins, head of Students for Life, one of the largest anti-abortion organisations in the country. “And what I’ve conveyed to the campaign personally is that this strategy is not a winning strategy.”

A growing number of voices within the social conservative movement have started to say the same: that by playing to the middle on abortion, Trump may lose must-win voters, without actually attracting anyone new.

“The frustration for pro-lifers is that Trump is saying things he thinks might ultimately reach more moderate voters, which frankly is not going to work,” said Matt Staver, founder and chairman of the Florida-based anti-abortion group Liberty Counsel. “And in doing that you’re causing consternation among other voters who are otherwise with you. There’s no point for him engaging in this.”

There is no indication that Trump is facing any wide-scale exodus of social conservatives from his party, and both Mr Staver and Ms Hawkins said they would still be casting their ballots for Trump.

But in an election that could hinge on a narrow slice of voters, in just a handful of states, some experts say Trump’s abortion wavering could still cost him the election.

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, estimated that some 80% of white evangelical Christians – who make up about 14% of the American electorate – need to turn out for Trump to deliver him a win.

“I don’t think there’s a danger of white evangelicals voting for Harris, I think there’s a real danger of them not voting,” Mr Feehery said, adding that “10,000 votes” could be enough to tip the scales.

That risk could explain the reticence of most anti-abortion leaders to talk publicly about abandoning the Republican candidate.

Indeed, some in the movement have expressed frustration with Ms Rose’s position, saying that while Trump is not the ideal candidate, he is still better for their cause than any Democratic opponent.

Ms Hawkins of Students for Life has begun to focus her messaging, increasingly, on Harris, telling followers that the harm her administration could do – in the number of abortions alone – would eclipse any missteps by Trump.

“I know we’ll be able to work with his administration,” she said. “When you believe, as pro-life activists do, that babies are dying that have a right to be born, I don’t feel I can morally take a position of sitting this out.”

But Ms Rose has shrugged off any criticism that her position may inadvertently assist Harris, and her decidedly pro-choice agenda. For her, good enough is not good enough when it comes to abortion, and to Donald Trump.

“I know it’s painful for a lot of you guys to hear this, people that want to go out and vote cheerfully for Trump because Kamala Harris is such a disaster… but we have to tell the truth,” she told followers the morning after the debate.

“Abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent child,” she said. “We need to oppose it loudly.”

How much is too much for a caffeine fix?

Prices like £5 in London or $7 in New York for a cup of coffee may be unthinkable for some – but could soon be a reality thanks to a “perfect storm” of economic and environmental factors in the world’s top coffee-producing regions.

The cost of unroasted beans traded in global markets is now at a “historically high level”, says analyst Judy Ganes.

Experts blame a mix of troubled crops, market forces, depleted stockpiles – and the world’s smelliest fruit.

So how did we get here, and just how much will it impact your morning latte?

In 2021, a freak frost wiped out coffee crops in Brazil, the world’s largest producer of Arabica beans – those commonly used in barista-made coffee.

This bean shortfall meant buyers turned to countries like Vietnam, the primary producer of Robusta beans, that are typically used in instant blends.

But farmers there faced the region’s worst drought in nearly a decade.

Climate change has been affecting the development of coffee plants, according to Will Frith, a coffee consultant based in Ho Chi Minh City, in turn impacting bean yields.

And then Vietnamese farmers pivoted to a smelly, yellow fruit – the durian.

The fruit – which is banned on public transport in Thailand, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong because of its odour – is proving popular in China.

And Vietnamese farmers are replacing their coffee crops with durian to cash in on this emerging market.

Vietnam’s durian market share in China almost doubled between 2023 and 2024, and some estimate the crop is five times more lucrative than coffee.

“There’s a history of growers in Vietnam being fickle in response to market price fluctuations, overcommitting, and then flooding the market with quantities of their new crop,” Mr Frith says.

As they flooded China with durian, Robusta coffee exports were down 50% in June compared to the previous June, and stocks were now “near depleted”, according to the International Coffee Organisation.

Exporters in Colombia, Ethiopia, Peru and Uganda have stepped up, but have not produced enough to ease a tight market.

“Right at [the] time when things started to rev up for demand of Robusta, is right when the world was scrambling for more supply,” explains Ms Ganes.

This means Robusta and Arabica beans are now trading at near-record highs on commodity markets.

Is the shifting global coffee economy actually impacting the price of your coffee on a high street? The short answer: potentially.

Wholesaler Paul Armstrong believes coffee drinkers may soon face the “crazy” prospect of paying more than £5 in the UK for their caffeine fix.

“It’s a perfect storm at the minute.”

Mr Armstrong, who runs Carrara Coffee Roasters based in the East Midlands, imports beans from South America and Asia, which are then roasted and sent to cafés around the UK.

He tells the BBC he recently increased his prices, hoping it would account for the higher asking prices – but says costs have “only intensified” since.

He adds that with some of his contracts ending in the coming months, cafés he serves will soon have to decide whether to pass the higher costs on to their customers.

Mr Frith says some segments of the industry will be more exposed than others, though.

“It’s really the commercial quantity coffee that will experience the most disuption. Instant coffee, supermarket coffee, stuff at the gas station – that’s all going up.”

Industry figures caution that a high market price for coffee may not necessarily translate into higher retail prices.

Felipe Barretto Croce, CEO of FAFCoffees in Brazil, agrees that consumers are “feeling the pinch” as consumer prices have risen.

But he argues that is “mostly due to inflationary costs in general”, such as rent and labour, rather than the cost of beans. Consultancy Allegra Strategies estimates beans contribute less than 10% of the price of a cup of coffee.

“Coffee is still very cheap, as a luxury good, if you make it at home.”

He also says that the cost of lower-quality beans rising means high-quality coffee may now be seen as better value.

“If you go into a speciality coffee shop in London and get a coffee, versus a coffee in Costa Coffee, the difference [in price] between that cup and the speciality coffee is much smaller than it used to be.”

But there is hope of price relief on the horizon.

The upcoming spring crop in Brazil, which produces a third of the world’s coffee, is now “crucial”, according to Mr Croce.

“What everyone is looking at is when the rains will return,” he says.

“If they return early, the plants should be healthy enough and the flowering should be good.”

But if the rains come as late as October, he adds, yield predictions for next year’s crop will fall and market stress will continue.

In the long term, climate change poses serious challenges for the global coffee industry.

A study from 2022 concluded that even if we drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the area most highly suited for growing coffee could decline by 50% by 2050.

One measure to future-proof the industry that has the support of Mr Croce is a “green premium” – a small tax levied on coffee given to farmers to invest in regenerative agricultural practices, which help protect and sustain the viability of farmlands.

So while smelly fruit is partly responsible for price rises now – a changing climate may ultimately strain the affordability of coffee in the years to come.

Sir Keir Starmer and his wife Lady Victoria accepted donations of clothing so they could “look their best” to represent the UK, David Lammy has said.

Asked about the donations, the foreign secretary suggested other countries had generous taxpayer-funded budgets for leaders’ clothing.

It came after reports Sir Keir may have broken parliamentary rules in failing to declare clothes bought for his wife by Labour donor Lord Waheed Alli.

Lammy told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “US presidents and first ladies have a huge budget, paid for by the taxpayer, so that they look their best on behalf of the US people.”

In fact, the US first lady does not have access to a specific clothing budget – and many have shared frustration at the cost of staying fashionable in the White House.

In some countries, taxpayers contribute to living expenses for their leaders – and this can include clothing.

US presidents have an expenses budget of some $50,000 (£38,000), which can be used to purchase clothing and other items, on top of an annual salary of $400,000.

But the US president’s spouse – historically, always a first lady – does not receive an annual salary or fixed expenses budget, though they have paid staff and an office.

That’s despite the US first lady’s fashion choices attracting immense scrutiny and attention.

Notable examples have included Melania Trump’s Zara jacket emblazoned with “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?”, on a visit to a migrant detention centre, and the striking scarlet Alexander McQueen dress worn by Michelle Obama while meeting former Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Some first ladies have said that, in general, they were expected to pay for their clothes themselves.

Mrs Bush, the wife of George W Bush, wrote in her 2010 memoir that she was “amazed by the sheer number of designer clothes that I was expected to buy… to meet the fashion expectations for a first lady”.

“After our first year in the White House, our accountant said to George, ‘It costs a lot to be president,’ and he was referring mainly to my clothes,” Mrs Bush wrote.

Michelle Obama’s press secretary, Joanna Rosholm, told CNBC in 2014: “Mrs Obama pays for her clothing.”

US first ladies can also accept clothes as gifts, often on behalf of the government.

Some designers welcome the publicity their clothes being worn by the first lady offers them.

With the price tags of designer dresses easily running into the tens of thousands, donations are the only way comparatively less wealthy occupants of the White House could afford to wear star designers.

“For official events of public or historic significance, such as a state visit, the first lady’s clothes may be given as a gift by a designer and accepted on behalf of the U.S. government,” Mrs Rosholm said.

The Smithsonian Museum lists the dress current first lady Jill Biden wore at her husband’s 2021 inauguration as a donation of designer Alexandria O’Neil “in honour of first lady Jill Biden” – an indication the designer lent her the dress.

By contrast, it appears that her predecessor Melania Trump, whose husband’s wealth made him the richest president in history, donated her inaugural dress, designed by Hervé Pierre, herself. That may be because she paid for it.

In the UK, Sarah Brown, wife of former prime minister Gordon Brown, has spoken of the difficulties around accepting gifts – including clothing – while in Downing Street.

“As I quickly discover,” she wrote in her book. Behind the Black Door, in 2011, “there is no shortage of designers and retailers who will offer you free clothes.

“However, there are many rules that govern what MPs (and spouses) can do with free gifts – not to mention the moral aspect of using your position to grab freebies.

She explained the solution: “No10 advisers and I figure out a way that works for everyone. Any clothes that I want to keep, I can buy.

“Any freely offered clothes or jewellery, I can effectively ‘rent’ for about 10 per cent of the retail value, then return.”

Spouses of world leaders elsewhere generally appear to rely on donations for their style choices.

France’s Brigitte Macron does not have a state-funded budget for clothes and is believed to be lent outfits by Parisian high fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton.

According to the 2019 book Madame La Présidente, her office keeps a record of which clothes have been donated to her and which are her own.

But her husband, President Emmanuel Macron, has been criticised for his own profligate spending. This year, it was revealed that his office reserved a business class seat on a flight from Paris to Brazil solely to transport two of his suits, at a cost of nearly €4,000 (£3,380).

In Germany, ministers were criticised for spending €450,000 on hairdressers, makeup artists and photographers in the first six months of 2023, though there does not appear to be a specific fund for clothing.

Asked about Lammy’s remarks, a Foreign Office spokesman declined to comment further.

Downing Street said of Sir Keir’s declaration of clothing donations: “We sought advice from the authorities on coming to office.

“We believed we had been compliant, however, following further interrogation this month, we have declared further items.”

Eight people have died overnight while trying to cross the Channel from France to England, French police say.

Rescue services were alerted after the boat got into difficulty in waters north of Boulogne-sur-mer in the northern Pas-de-Calais region after 01:00 local time (00:00 BST).

The rubber vessel had around 60 people on board, from countries including Eritrea, Sudan, Syria and Iran.

It comes less than two weeks after 12 people, including six children and a pregnant woman, died when a boat carrying dozens of migrants sank in what was the deadliest loss of life in the Channel this year.

The French coast guard said the boat in the incident reported on Sunday was seen heading towards a beach in the town of Ambleteuse but rescue teams could not offer assistance from the sea.

After getting into difficulty, it was driven onto rocks where it came apart.

On the beach, emergency services provided care to 53 people and confirmed eight had died, the coast guard said. Six people were taken to hospital including a baby with hypothermia.

No other people were found during sea searches.

An investigation has been opened by the Boulogne-sur-mer public prosecutor’s office.

A UK government spokesperson confirmed the latest incident and said French authorities were leading the response and investigation.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said it was “awful” to hear of a “further loss of life” in the Channel.

He told the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme that many people were “of course not able to make it” across the Channel, having seen the types of rubber dinghies people have been using.

He also reiterated the government’s plan to work with European partners to tackle the criminal people-smuggling gangs to deter small boat crossings.

There has been a spate of crossing attempts across the Channel in the last two days with the arrival of calmer weather.

Some 801 people crossed the Channel on Saturday – the second highest daily total so far this year, according to provisional Home Office figures. On 18 June, 882 people made the journey.

French maritime authorities said that 200 people were rescued in a 24-hour period over Friday and Saturday.

The French coast guard and other first responders rescued people onboard four separate boats – one with 61, another with 55, and two others with 48 and 36 each.

Eighteen attempted crossings were monitored by authorities over the course of the day.

Including the eight latest victims, a total of 45 people have died in the Channel this year – the highest reported number since 2021, according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration.

More than 23,000 people have crossed the Channel this year.

Amnesty International UK said the latest incident was “yet another appalling and avoidable tragedy”.

Enver Solomon, CEO of the Refugee Council, said the deaths were not “inevitable” and a comprehensive approach to reduce crossings was needed.

“Enforcement alone is not the solution,” he said, adding that there needed to be improved access to safe asylum routes.

Jane’s Addiction have apologised after they cancelled an upcoming show following an on-stage brawl in Boston.

On Friday night, the American band cut short their gig after frontman Perry Farrell threw a punch at guitarist David Navarro.

They were due to play in Bridgeport, Connecticut on Sunday as part of their reunion tour but this has now been pulled.

“We want to extend a heartfelt apology to our fans for the events that unfolded last night,” the band wrote on Instagram on Saturday.

“As a result we will be cancelling tomorrow night’s show in Bridgeport.”

The band insisted that fans would be reimbursed.

Footage on social media showed Farrell shouting at Navarro, 57, and punching him.

The 65-year-old rocker was then restrained by staff and taken off stage at Boston’s Leader Bank Pavilion.

Jane’s Addiction formed in Los Angeles in 1985. The band consists of Farrell, Navarro, drummer Stephen Perkins and bassist Eric Avery.

They have reunited after more than a decade, and are due to play a string of dates in the coming months throughout the US and Canada.

There has been no confirmation as to whether those shows will still go ahead.

The band released four albums together: Nothing’s Shocking (1988), Ritual De Lo Habitual (1990), Strays (2003), and The Great Escape Artist (2011).

Their hits include Been Caught Stealing, Strays and The Great Escape Artist.

The rockers were honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013.

BBC News has approached Jane’s Addiction for a comment.

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawncrew has returned to Earth after five days in orbit, following a historic mission featuring the world’s first commercial spacewalk.

The Dragon capsule made splashdown off the coast of Florida shortly after 03:37 local time (07:37 GMT), in an event stream lived by SpaceX.

“Splashdown of Dragon confirmed! Welcome back to Earth,” SpaceX said on social media platform X.

The US space agency Nasa said the mission represented “a giant leap forward” for the commercial space industry.

• Billionaire completes first private spacewalk
• Jared Isaacman, the high-school dropout behind historic spacewalk
• Astronauts reveal what life is like in orbit – and how they deal with ‘space smell’

Re-entering earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft neared temperatures of 1,900C (3,500 degrees Fahrenheit), caused by the intense pressure and friction of pushing through the air at around 7,000mph (27,000kph).

The four-member civilian team, bankrolled and led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, travelled further into space than any humans for more than fifty years.

Scott Poteet, a retired US Air Force pilot, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon were also on the crew.

Mr Isaacman and Ms Gillis are the first non-professional crew to perform a spacewalk, a risky manoeuvre that involves depressurising the crew compartment and exiting the spacecraft.

Only astronauts from government-funded space agencies had attempted the feat, prior to this flight.

Images broadcast live showed the two crew members emerge from the white Dragon capsule to float 435 miles (700km) above the blue Earth below.

Speaking to mission control in Hawthorne, California during the spacewalk, Isaacman said “Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here — looks like a perfect world”.

As Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, the crew were exposed to the vacuum of space during the spacewalk.

This spacewalk, higher than any previously attempted, was made possible by innovative astronaut suits fitted with new technology.

During the five days, the crew conducted more than 40 experiments, including investigations into the impact of space missions on human health and testing intersatellite laser communication between the Dragon Spacecraft and Space X’s Starlink satellite.

Gillis, who is a trained violinist, brought her instrument and performed “Rey’s Theme” from “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” alongside orchestras on earth.

Her rendition was sent back to Earth using SpaceX’s Starlink as a test of the satellite network’s potential to provide in-space connectivity.

The video was created in partnership with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which the Polaris Program were fundraising for throughout the mission.

The crew were in orbit inside the Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, for a total of five days, launching early on Tuesday morning from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

The mission made history by reaching a maximum altitude of 1,400km (870miles), which is higher than any human has flown since the final Apollo Mission in 1972.

Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned Polaris missions, a collaboration between Mr Isaacman and SpaceX.

This includes the first manned flight of the new SpaceX rocket Starship, which is still under development.

Former US President Donald Trump has been found liable to pay damages to London singer and songwriter Eddy Grant for using his song Electric Avenue without permission.

It has taken Mr Grant, 76, more than four years to sue the Republican candidate in this year’s presidential election in the US courts, over his 2020 campaign video that used a 40-second clip of the song.

The video was viewed 13.7 million times before Twitter, now known as X, took it down.

A federal judge in Manhattan ruled Mr Trump breached Mr Grant’s copyright for his 1983 hit, and is now liable for damages as well as paying for the singer’s legal fees.

Mr Grant’s battle with the former President began in August 2020, when he was seeking re-election to the White House. The songwriter’s counsel, Wallace E.J. Collins, issued a cease and desist letter to Donald Trump’s campaign team.

On Friday, Judge John G. Koeltl rejected arguments from Mr Trump’s lawyers that the Twitter video was shielded under copyright’s fair use doctrine, which allows for the use of protected works in certain situations.

Brian D. Caplan, Mr Grant’s attorney, told Business Insider: “As a staunch believer of artist’s rights and the ability to control their creative output, Mr. Grant believes that the decision will help others in their fight against the unauthorized use of sound recordings and musical compositions.

“Politicians are not above the law and the court reaffirmed that.”

Earlier this month a US judge has ordered the Trump campaign to stop using the song Hold On, I’m Coming at his rallies, in response to a lawsuit from the family of the song’s co-writer, Isaac Hayes.

Dozens of other artists have objected to the use of their songs at Trump rallies in recent months including Abba, Foo Fighters, Celine Dion and Johnny Marr.

Electric Avenue takes its name from the south London road in Brixton, the first market street in the capital to be lit by electricity. It still forms part of Brixton Market today.

It inspired the title of Mr Grant’s song, written as a response to the 1981 Brixton riots, which reached number two in the charts in both the UK and the US.

Mr Trump’s team has been approached for comment about the Electric Avenue court case.

It was the submersible that promised passengers the trip of a lifetime. A chance to descend 3,800m (12,500ft) to the Atlantic depths to visit the wreck of the Titanic.

But last year, a dive by Oceangate’s Titan sub went tragically wrong. The vessel suffered a catastrophic failure as it neared the sea floor, killing all five people onboard.

The US Coast Guard is holding a public hearing on 16 September to examine why the disaster happened, from the sub’s unconventional design to ignored safety warnings and the lack of regulation in the deep.

Titan began its descent beneath the waves on the morning of 18 June 2023.

On board were Oceangate’s CEO Stockton Rush, British explorer Hamish Harding, veteran French diver Paul Henri Nargeolet, the British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman.

Later that day, after the craft failed to resurface, the US Coast Guard was notified, sparking a vast search and rescue operation.

The world watched and waited for news of the missing sub. But on 22 June, wreckage was discovered about 500m (1,600ft) from Titanic’s bow. Titan had imploded just one hour and 45 minutes into the dive.

These are five key questions that still need to be answered.

Those on Titan could stay in contact with the support ship, the Polar Prince, with text messages sent through its onboard communications system. The log of these exchanges could reveal if there were any indications that the sub was failing.

The vessel also had an acoustic monitoring device – essentially mics fixed to the sub listening for signs it was buckling or breaking.

“Stockton Rush was convinced that if there was an imminent failure of the submersible, they would get an audio warning on that system,” explains Victor Vescovo, a leading deep sea explorer.

But he said he was highly sceptical that this would have provided enough time for the sub to return to the surface. “The issue is how quickly would that warning happen?”

If there were no apparent problems during the descent and alarms failed to sound, those on board could have been unaware of their imminent fate.

The implosion itself was instantaneous, there would have been no time for the passengers to even register what was happening.

Forensic experts have been examining Titan’s wreckage to find the root of the failure.

There were several issues with its design.

The viewport window was only rated to a depth of 1,300m (4,300ft) by its manufacturer, but Titan was diving almost three times deeper.

Titan’s hull was also an unusual shape – cylindrical, rather than spherical. Most deep-sea subs have a spherical hull, so the effect of the crushing pressure of the deep is distributed equally.

The sub’s hull was also made out of carbon fibre, an unconventional material for a deep-sea vessel.

Metals such as titanium are most commonly used as they are reliable under immense pressures.

“Carbon fibre is considered to be a material that is unpredictable [in the deep ocean],” explains Patrick Lahey, CEO of Triton Submarines, a leading manufacturer.

Every time Titan went down to the Titanic – and it had made multiple dives – the carbon fibre was compressed and damaged.

“It was getting progressively weaker because the fibres were breaking,” he said.

The junctions between different materials also gave cause for concern. The carbon fibre was attached to two rings of titanium, creating weak points.

Patrick Lahey said the commercial sub industry had a longstanding, unblemished safety record.

“The Oceangate contraption was an aberration,” he told BBC News.

Ships, aircraft and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) were scrambled to the Atlantic to try to find Titan.

A couple of days into the search, there were reports of underwater noises picked up by a search plane’s sonar, raising the possibility they were coming from the sub.

ROVs were sent to locate the source but found nothing.

It is still not clear what the sounds were – the ocean is noisy and even more so during an operation like this.

A more pertinent subsea sound was detected by the US Navy’s sonar system at the time the sub went missing – an acoustic signal consistent with an implosion. The information was only made public on the day the remains of Titan were found.

It is not known when the US Coast Guard was told of the noise – or whether the families and friends waiting on the sub’s support ship were informed.

Eventually the deep-sea robots returned to where Titan had gone missing and the wreckage was found.

Rory Golden, who was on the Oceangate expedition when contact was lost, recently told the BBC those on board the surface vessel experienced four days of fear and “false hope”.

Many were concerned about Oceangate’s sub.

Victor Vescovo says he was so worried, he had urged several passengers against diving on Titan – including his friend Hamish Harding, one of the five who died.

“I told him, in no uncertain terms, that he should not get in the submersible,” he said.

Fears about safety were also brought directly to Oceangate – including by the company’s former director of marine operations, David Lochridge, who assessed the sub while it was being developed.

US court documents from 2018 show that Lochridge had identified numerous “serious safety concerns” and the lack of testing could “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible”.

Engineers from the Marine Technology Society also said that Oceangate’s experimental approach could result in “negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic)” in a letter shared with Stockton Rush.

In an email exchange shown to BBC News last year, deep-sea specialist Rob McCallum told Rush that the sub should not be used for commercial deep dive operations and was placing passengers in a “dangerous dynamic”.

In response, Rush said he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation” and dismissed warnings that he would kill someone as “baseless”.

With the death of Oceangate’s CEO, we will never be able to ask why he chose not to listen to these concerns. But the public hearings could reveal who else at the company knew about them – and why no action was taken.

Deep-sea submersibles can go through an extensive safety assessment carried out by independent, specialist, marine organisations such as the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) or DNV (a global accreditation organisation based in Norway).

Oceangate chose not to put Titan through this process.

The assessment would have confirmed whether the vessel – from its design through to construction, testing and operations – met certain standards.

Most operators opt to have their deep-sea subs certified – but it is not mandatory.

Rush described his sub as “experimental” and, in a blog post in 2019, he argued that certification “slowed down innovation”.

In an email exchange with Rob McCallum, he said he didn’t need a piece of paper to show Titan was safe, and that his own protocols and the “informed consent” of passengers were enough.

The passengers on Titan paid up to $250,000 (£191,135) for a place. They all had to sign a liability waiver.

Irish businessman Oisin Fanning made two dives in Titan in 2022 – the last before the sub’s fatal disaster.

He said the Oceangate team took safety seriously, with extensive briefings before each descent. But it wasn’t made clear to him that Titan had not been certified.

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t think there had been something like that done already – that it conformed with certain norms,” he said.

“We all knew that the Titan was experimental. We were very confident, because obviously there’d been a few dives before that, and it seemed to be working well.”

The public hearings will last for two weeks. The hope is the answers it provides could prevent a disaster like this from happening again.

For months, an unusual monument sat in an oak-lined square at the heart of Tasmania’s capital: a pair of severed bronze feet.

A statue of renowned surgeon-turned-premier William Crowther had loomed over the park in Hobart for more than a century. But one evening in May, it was chopped down at the ankles and the words “what goes around” graffitied on its sandstone base.

It was a throwback to another night more than 150 years ago, when Crowther allegedly broke into a morgue, sliced open an Aboriginal leader’s head and stole his skull – triggering a grim tussle over the remaining body parts.

Tasmania had become the centre of coloniser efforts to eradicate Aboriginal people in Australia. And the sailor on the slab – William Lanne – was touted as the last man on the island, making his remains a twisted trophy for white physicians.

Some see Crowther as an unfairly maligned man of his time, and his effigy as an important part of the state’s history, warts and all.

But for Lanne’s descendants, it represents colonial brutality, the dehumanising myth that Tasmanian Aboriginal people are extinct, and the whitewashing of the island’s past.

“You walk around the city anywhere and you’d never know Aborigines were here,” Aboriginal activist Nala Mansell says.

Now the dismembered statue has become a symbol of a city – and a nation – struggling to reckon with its darkest chapters.

Few places encapsulate the issue quite like Risdon Cove – called piyura kitina by the Palawa Aboriginal people.

Tucked beside a creek, a monument proudly marks it as the first British settlement on what was then called Van Diemen’s Land.

For Tasmanian Aboriginal people, though, this hillside on the outskirts of Hobart is “ground zero for invasion”.

“It’s the first landing and not coincidentally the first massacre [of our people],” Nunami Sculthorpe-Green tells the BBC one overcast afternoon.

Startled from their reverie, flurries of native hens – which piyura kitina is named after – scatter over the mossy grass as we arrive.

A wallaby hastily bounds towards sparse gum trees. It’s from that direction that Mumirimina men, women and children would have come down the slope on 3 May 1804, singing as they hunted kangaroos.

They were met with muskets and cannons.

The events of that day – and the death toll – are disputed. What is not contested is that this marked the start of a determined effort by British settlers to get rid of the original Tasmanians, nine nations of up to 15,000 people.

War broke out and Aboriginal people were hunted across the island, the survivors rounded up and sent to what have been described as death camps.

“If that happened anywhere in the world today, it would be referred to as ethnic cleansing,” says Greg Lehman, a Palawa professor of history.

Ripped from his homelands as a child, Lanne survived two of those camps before living out his final years as a shipmate and beloved advocate for his people.

Even before he died of disease in 1869, aged only 34, letters show that powerful men in Hobart had begun scheming.

“There’s no way that that young man was going to be allowed to lie in a grave. No way,” historian Cassandra Pybus tells the BBC.

The theft of Aboriginal remains had long been normalised, she says, but reached a fever pitch in Tasmania as the number of its original inhabitants dwindled.

Lanne’s skull was sought to prove since-discredited theories about Tasmanian Aboriginal people – that they were the missing link between humans and Neanderthals, a distinct race so primitive they didn’t even know how to make fire.

Before he was buried, his hands and feet would also be cut off and pocketed by physicians. Some historians say his grave was robbed as well, and every bone in his body taken.

Crowther always denied any involvement in stealing Lanne’s remains – his backers called the allegations a witch hunt – but the town was horrified, and he was suspended from his honorary position at the hospital.

For First Nations people, who believe their spirits can only rest once returned to their land, what happened was especially distressing.

But within two weeks, Crowther was elected to state parliament, and he’d soon rise to be Tasmania’s premier for an unremarkable six months.

By contrast, Lanne’s skull appears to have wound up on the other side of the globe at a UK university, and his people were soon declared extinct.

Except they were not.

Today’s Palawa people trace their ancestry to a dozen women who survived, while other groups – which some do not recognise as Aboriginal – also say they descend from a handful of people who managed to evade capture in the 1800s.

Yet, for the past 150 years, Tasmanian Aboriginal people say they have been fighting to be visible, in the history pages and in everyday life.

The lie that they were extinct is largely blamed on outdated views about ethnic identity. But others say it was also a strategic decision – to deny Tasmanian Aboriginal people rights, and to snuff out their culture.

The impact has been devastating. Many Palawa people speak of being persecuted for their Indigenous blood in one breath and denied their identity because of their white ancestry in the next.

Even now, many feel there are huge swathes of their history missing – or wilfully ignored.

Nala points out all she was taught about Tasmanian Aboriginal culture and history at her Hobart school was a brief lesson on boomerangs and didgeridoos – although her people used neither.

And aside from a walking track named after Truganini – Lanne’s wife and a leader in her own right – there are no sites celebrating Aboriginal people around the city.

“The way they tell stories about Aboriginal people… they want you to think that it’s somewhere really far away from where you are, and that it’s something that happened a really long time ago,” Nunami says.

Unimpressed, the 30-year-old history graduate started Black Led Tours to fill the gap.

“I realised that I was walking to work the exact same way Truganini used to walk her dogs. And I realised that my parents met at the pub where William Lanne died. I also realised that the Crowther statue was right next to my bus stop.

“And I thought: does everybody know that this is right here, where we live and where we work?”

When unveiling the effigy in 1889, the then-premier said Crowther was not “a perfect man”, but one who spent his time doing good.

His scandal overlooked, until recently he was remembered for offering free health care to the poor.

That rankles Tasmanian Aboriginal people like Nala: “It’s just a kick in the guts.”

As spokeswoman for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, she led a renewed campaign to take down the memorial.

“To us, it would be no different to having a statue of Martin Bryant,” she says, referring to the gunman who massacred 35 people at nearby Port Arthur in 1996.

But some, like Jeff Briscoe – who lost the legal case to prevent the statue’s removal – believe the sculpture has priceless heritage value as the only memorial in the state “funded totally by the public”.

“At the time, it was a significant memorial and everyone was proud of it. In 2024, should the perceptions of a few people override all that?

“It’s not as if he was going around shooting people… he maybe had been involved in the mutilation of a body, but they all were.

“They’re bringing the bar down so low that no memorial from colonial times will be safe in Australia.”

Cassandra Pybus says there is no doubt that Crowther did mutilate Lanne, citing letters he wrote. However, she had argued, like Mr Briscoe, that taking down the statue would set a dangerous precedent, because “everybody was racist”.

She had wanted it to remain so the site could be used to educate people about how the first Tasmanians were treated.

The statue’s fate divided even Crowther’s living descendants, with some publicly supporting the calls for removal, and others distressed by them.

Hobart Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds says the council voted to remove the statue in 2022 “as a commitment to telling the truth of our city’s history, and as an act of reconciliation with the Aboriginal community” – the first decision of its kind in Australia.

They did it after a rigorous consultation and with the support of the “silent majority”, she adds.

Ultimately, she says, the statue is a sign of how desperate Crowther was to repair his reputation, not his significance to the state: “[He’s] not that important.”

But while the council worked through red tape, some grew impatient and took it down themselves.

For Lanne’s descendants, their relief at the long-awaited fall of the statue is tinged with pain. They feel Lanne has been reduced to his death.

“He had a whole life… and just as he advocated for our people’s rights, we will advocate for his story to be remembered and him to be respected for who he was,” Nunami says.

The Crowther statue is not unique. Countless similar landmarks or monuments – which joke about massacres, include racial slurs or celebrate alleged killers – are still standing across Australia.

Many, like Greg, believe removing or renaming them could be a natural starting point for the “truth-telling” the country needs, to reconcile with its First Peoples, the oldest living culture on the planet.

“You’d think that it was just a bunch of happy free settlers and not-so-happy convicts who jumped off the First Fleet… and bingo, there you’ve got modern Australia,” he says.

“For Australia to have an honest and powerful relationship with itself, it must have an honest relationship with the past.”

But after a proposal for an Indigenous political advisory body was defeated at a referendum last year, any movement towards a national truth-telling inquiry has stalled – though many states are setting up their own.

There are still many, like Jeff Briscoe, who believe a “truth-telling” process would be a divisive and unnecessary rehashing of the past – views echoed by a bloc of conservative politicians who also oppose a treaty.

“Nowadays people want Aborigines to stand in front of them and say welcome to our country. They want us to dance for them. They want us to teach them our language. They don’t mind if we put some of our paintings in the mall,” Nala says.

“But if you talk about… any type of benefit for the Aboriginal community, or taking back anything that was stolen from us, it’s a completely different ballgame.”

However she is among those who feel like the tide is slowly turning.

“The Crowther statue… is the first time I’ve ever thought, ‘Wow, white people – they’re starting to get it’,” Nala says.

The council was still deciding what should replace the sculpture when it met its unexpected end.

But many wanted the severed feet to remain in the square – as is – arguing they made a wryly “funny” and “profound” statement.

However earlier this week, the council plucked the ankles from their perch, to reunite them with the rest of the effigy, citing heritage law requirements.

But Nunami says even the now empty plinth illustrates the story of Crowther and Lanne far better than the statue ever did.

“We get to say we, as the public, learnt, we grew, and we changed the narrative of this place… Look here, we cut that down.”