At least 20 people have been killed and more than 450 wounded by a second wave of explosions from wireless communication devices in Lebanon, the country’s health ministry says.

Walkie-talkies used by the armed group Hezbollah blew up in the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and southern Lebanon – areas seen as its strongholds.

Some of the blasts took place during funerals for some of the 12 people who the ministry said were killed when Hezbollah members’ pagers exploded on Tuesday. Hezbollah blamed Israel for that attack. Israel has not commented.

The attacks came as Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “new phase in the war” and as an Israeli army division was redeployed to the north.

UN Secretary General António Guterres warned of the “serious risk of a dramatic escalation” and called on all parties to “exercise maximum restraint”.

“Obviously the logic of making all these devices explode is to do it as a pre-emptive strike before a major military operation,” he told reporters.

There were already rising fears of an all-out conflict after 11 months of cross-border fighting sparked by the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Hours after Wednesday’s explosions, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to return the tens of thousands of displaced people from the north of the country “securely to their homes”.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant meanwhile said Israel was “opening a new phase in the war” and that the “centre of gravity is shifting to the north through the diversion of resources and forces”.

An army division recently engaged in Gaza has been redeployed to the north, the Israeli military confirmed.

Hezbollah says it is acting in support of Hamas – which is also backed by Iran and proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel and many Western countries – and will only stop its cross-border attacks once the fighting in Gaza ends.

An indication of what the group might be planning to do next could come on Thursday, when its powerful leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is due to give a speech.

Hezbollah’s media office on Wednesday announced the death of 13 of its fighters, including a 16-year-old boy, since the second wave of explosions.

It also said the group targeted Israeli forces near the border and in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights during the day, firing rockets at Israeli artillery positions.

The Israeli military said about 30 projectiles crossed from Lebanon on Wednesday, sparking a fire but causing no injuries.

It said Israeli aircraft struck Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon.

Wednesday’s deadly explosions represent another humiliation for Hezbollah and a possible indication that its entire communication network might have been infiltrated by Israel.

Many Lebanese are still shocked – and angered – by what happened on Tuesday, when thousands of pagers exploded at the same time, after people received a message they believed had come from the group.

Twelve people – including an eight-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy – were killed and 2,800 others were wounded by the blasts, according to the Lebanese health minister.

A BBC team was at a funeral for four of those killed in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiya on Wednesday when they heard a loud explosion around 17:00 local time (14:00 GMT).

There was chaos and confusion among the mourners, and then reports started to come in of explosions happening in other parts of the country as well.

One unconfirmed social media video showed a man falling to the ground following a small blast during what appeared to be a Hezbollah procession attended by large crowds.

The Lebanese Red Cross said more than 30 ambulances had responded to explosions in the capital’s southern suburbs, as well as in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

The health ministry said the deadly explosions “targeted walkie-talkies”. A source close to Hezbollah also told AFP news agency that walkie-talkies used by its members had blown up.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) said one man was killed when a walkie-talkie exploded inside a shop selling cellular devices in Chaat, in the northern Bekaa Valley.

It identified the device as an ICOM-V82 handheld VHF radio, which is a now-discontinued model made by the Japan-based electronics manufacturer ICOM.

NNA said another ICOM-V82 exploded at a house on the outskirts of the nearby town of Baalbek. Video footage showed fire damage to a table and wall, as well as damaged parts of what appeared to be a walkie-talkie bearing the label “ICOM”.

Photos on social media from two other locations appeared to show the same model.

Reuters news agency cited a Lebanese security source as saying the walkie-talkies were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago – around the same time as the pagers were bought.

The Axios news website cited two sources as saying that Israeli intelligence services had booby-trapped thousands of walkie-talkies before delivering them to Hezbollah as part of the group’s war-time emergency communications system.

The BBC asked ICOM’s UK arm to comment on the reports, but it referred all media requests to the company’s press office in Japan. The BBC has reached out to ICOM Japan.

US and Lebanese sources told the New York Times and Reuters that Israel had planted small amounts of explosives inside the pagers which blew up on Tuesday.

An ophthalmologist at one hospital in Beirut told the BBC that at least 60% of the people he had seen had lost at least one eye, with most also losing a hand.

“Probably this is the worst day of my life as a physician. I believe the number of casualties and the type of damage that has been done is humongous,” Dr Elias Warrak said.

“Unfortunately, we were not able to save a lot of eyes, and unfortunately the damage is not limited to the eyes – some of them have damage in the brain in addition to any facial damage.”

Just as crowds had gathered to mourn some of those killed in Tuesday’s wave of pager-bomb attacks, an explosion sparked chaos in Dahiyeh, Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut.

A video captured the blast, showing a man lying on the ground and panicked people, some screaming, running away.

All this, moments before funerals were due to start for an 11-year-old boy and three Hezbollah members killed the previous day.

In the surrounding area there was bedlam as the sound of the explosion echoed through the streets. The chants stopped. Those gathered looked at each other, some incredulous.

As reports spread that this was part of a second wave of explosions now targeting walkie-talkies, no electronic equipment was considered safe.

Hezbollah supporters stopped our team several times, demanding we did not use our phones or our camera.

Lebanese officials said at least 20 people were killed and 450 others wounded across the the country, with fires said to have broken out in dozens of homes, shops, and vehicles.

Already, the latest attacks are being seen as another humiliation for the Iranian-backed group, and a possible indication that its entire communication network may have been infiltrated by Israel.

Many people here are inevitably wondering what will come next.

This is a country still shocked and angered by what happened on Tuesday, when thousands of pagers exploded in that synchronised attack, after users received a message they believed had come from Hezbollah.

The devices detonated as people were in shops, or with their families at home, killing 12, including an eight-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, and injuring around 2,800.

Dr Elias Warrak told the BBC it was “the worst day of [his] life as a physician”. At least 60% of the people he had seen had lost at least one eye, he said, with many also losing a finger or a whole hand.

“I believe the number of casualties and the type of damage that has been done is humongous,” he said. “Unfortunately, we were not able to save a lot of eyes, and unfortunately the damage is not limited to the eyes – some of them have damage in the brain in addition to any facial damage.”

Reports suggest a shipment of pagers may have been rigged with explosives, before being detonated remotely.

Hezbollah had distributed the pagers amid concerns that smartphones were being used by the Israeli military and intelligence agencies to track down and kill its members. It was still not clear how Wednesday’s attacks might have been carried out.

But Hezbollah has vowed to respond, blaming Israel for the attacks. As usual, Israel has not commented.

Fears are, again, rising that the current violence between the two rivals, which has led to the displacement of tens of thousands of residents on both sides of the border, could escalate into an all-out war.

Hezbollah says its attacks on Israel, which started almost a year ago, are in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, and that they will only stop with a ceasefire, an elusive possibility for now.

Mourners who spoke to the BBC at the Dahiyeh funeral also struck a defiant tone.

One young man said: “The pain is huge, physical and in the heart. But this is something we are used to, and we will continue with our resistance.”

A 45-year-old woman told the BBC: “This will make us stronger, whoever has lost an eye will fight with the other eye and we are all standing together.”

Hours after the latest explosions, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said his country was “at the start of a new phase in the war”, as the 98th division of the Israeli army relocated from Gaza to the north of Israel.

Up until now, Hezbollah has indicated that it is not interested in another major war with Israel, as Lebanon struggles to recover from a years-long economic crisis. Many here say a conflict is not in the country’s interests.

But some will certainly demand a strong response. An indication of what Hezbollah might be planning to do could come on Thursday, in the first public reaction by its powerful leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

One of America’s most influential labour unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, has declined to issue a US presidential endorsement for the first time since 1996.

The union, which boasts some 1.3 million members across the US and Canada, said it had received “few commitments on top Teamsters issues” from either Democratic nominee Kamala Harris or Republican nominee Donald Trump.

It also claimed that polling of its rank-and-file members found “no definitive support” for either candidate, though two of its recent polls indicated lopsided support for Trump.

The move is a major blow to the Harris campaign’s efforts to win over working-class voters with less than 50 days before election night.

An endorsement had the potential to mobilise thousands of Teamsters who live, work and vote in the crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Shortly after the announcement, some Teamsters regional councils representing more than half a million members in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and California, said they would be endorsing Harris.

In a statement, the Harris campaign touted its support from “the overwhelming majority of organised labour” and noted that many Teamsters locals have gotten behind her candidacy.

“While Donald Trump says striking workers should be fired, Vice-President Harris has literally walked the picket line and stood strong with organized labour for her entire career,” campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said.

The union’s rank-and-file – a coalition of members that includes freight drivers, warehouse workers and airline pilots – has long been considered politically diverse.

General President Sean O’Brien has sought to build inroads with Republicans since he took over leadership of the executive board in 2022.

He has reached out to more populist figures within the party, such as US senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and JD Vance of Ohio, who is now Trump’s running mate.

Mr O’Brien also met privately with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in January, shortly before the former president attended a roundtable with the union’s board at its headquarters in Washington DC.

Following that meeting, Trump said he believed he had a “good shot” at receiving the union’s endorsement.

The board also met with President Joe Biden before he stepped aside as the Democratic nominee, as well as third-party candidates Robert F Kennedy Jr and Cornel West.

But the union alarmed Democrats when it made its first financial contribution to their opponents in years, donating $45,000 (£34,000) – the maximum allowed contribution – each to both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in February.

Mr O’Brien also became the first Teamsters boss ever to address the Republican National Convention (RNC).

Invited to deliver a prime-time address at the event in Milwaukee, the union head praised Trump as “one tough SOB” but declined to endorse him.

He also later criticised Trump and top campaign surrogate and billionaire businessman Elon Musk over comments in which the two discussed firing workers who threaten to go on strike.

After his decision to speak at the RNC, Mr O’Brien did not receive an invitation from Democrats to address their party convention last month.

The party instead invited rank-and-file members to represent the organisation and to speak from the convention stage.

Some members of the Teamsters have expressed anger with Mr O’Brien over his right-wing outreach.

Last month, the Teamsters National Black Caucus and six union locals defied national leadership by endorsing Harris on their own and urging members to get behind her.

On Monday, Harris met with the Teamsters board in a long-delayed roundtable that lasted an hour and a half.

A New York Times report described the sit-down as “sometimes tense”, but a Teamsters spokesperson disputed this characterisation when asked by the BBC.

During their meeting, the Times added, Harris told Teamsters leaders: “I’m confident I’m going to win this. I want your endorsement, but if I don’t get it, I will treat you exactly as if I had gotten your endorsement.”

Speaking to reporters after Harris had made her pitch, Mr O’Brien noted that “there wasn’t a whole lot of difference” between the answers she and her predecessor, Biden, had provided.

Biden has routinely touted himself as “the most pro-labour president ever”, pointing to policies that have made it easier for US workers to organise and that have prioritised union labour for federal government projects.

Last September, he made history as the first US president to walk a picket line, when he joined the United Autoworkers in Michigan in a strike against the Big Three US auto companies: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

The Biden administration also shored up the Teamsters pension fund to the tune of $36bn, which it says prevented cuts to the retirement incomes of over 600,000 members.

Mr O’Brien and other leaders have also acknowledged on several occasions that Biden has been “great for unions”.

But before he dropped out in July, some reports suggested that the Teamsters did not plan to endorse Biden’s bid for re-election.

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On Wednesday, ahead of its announcement that it would not endorse Harris or Trump, the union released polling data for its members.

In an electronic poll conducted after the RNC, rank-and-file Teamsters voted 59.6% for the union to endorse Trump compared to 34% for Harris.

A separate poll, commissioned in the past week, found Teamsters again backing Trump by a lopsided margin – 58% to 31%.

In spite of those results, the union said in a statement that its “extensive member polling showed no majority support for Vice President Harris and no universal support among the membership for President Trump”.

The Trump campaign quickly lauded the poll numbers on Wednesday.

“While the Teamsters Executive Board is making no formal endorsement, the hardworking members of the Teamsters have been loud and clear – they want President Trump back in the White House,” campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter.

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When Michael Sheen was trying to find a way into portraying the Duke of York, he came across a photo of Prince Andrew as a returning hero from the Falklands War – with a rose clamped between his teeth.

Grinning, self-satisfied, the apple of his mother’s eye, a slightly ridiculous royal Romeo, this was the actor’s starting point for depicting the prince in his interview with BBC Two’s Newsnight programme – and imagining the huge scale of his fall from grace.

Sheen’s remarkable performance dominates this compelling three-part Amazon film, A Very Royal Scandal, as he captures a prince angry and disbelieving at his collapsing status.

“I’m the son of the sovereign – if I want to go on telly and defend myself, I will,” he bellows, but with the addition of multiple strong swear words, in a way few royals have been portrayed before.

It is a no-holds-barred account that makes Netflix’s The Crown look like a rather timid costume drama.

Has a royal ever been depicted swearing so much – or palace life as so poisonous?

Sheen is famous for how he inhabits his characters – and his version of Prince Andrew is a volatile mix of vanity, vulnerability and a self-destructive lack of self-awareness, as his gilded royal life crumbles after the disastrous interview.

He is a sweary, pompous and then needy figure, unaware of how much he is being exposed by his TV interrogator, Emily Maitlis, played by Ruth Wilson.

The interview itself is often described as a “car crash” – but in this version, the prince’s reputation is more like roadkill.

Inevitably, there will be comparisons with the recent Netflix film Scoop, about the same 2019 interview.

Rufus Sewell said his interpretation of the prince owed something to David Brent, the deluded manager from BBC Two’s The Office sitcom.

In this Amazon Prime Video version, Sheen’s Prince Andrew is a more complex figure, self-seeking, emotionally deaf, ambitious, loyal to his own immediate family, distrustful of palace officials and with a desperate need for approval.

It is a performance where Richard III meets Alan Partridge.

When he hears sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has died in prison, the prince’s reaction is to ask: “Is this good for me or bad?”

And there’s a relentless tension between him and his brother, the then Prince of Wales.

“Calls me a mummy’s boy, he’s the mummy’s boy,” Prince Andrew screams, with plenty of very strong swearing added, after an angry phone call.

It is not at all flattering to the monarchy.

Prince Andrew is portrayed as casually rude to servants – and palace officials mull over the royals’ lack of empathy: “They’ve never been late for a train – because the train waits for them.”

Although the recreated Newsnight interview is the centrepiece of the film, perhaps the most pivotal moment is a scene in the first episode, where the prince meets Epstein in New York.

It is another excruciating interview, with an embarrassed Prince Andrew needing money and a tough, exploitative Epstein, played by John Hopkins, making him wriggle on his financial hook.

Sheen shows the prince as out of his depth in front of such malevolence.

And this terrible association with Epstein plays out through the film, with Prince Andrew protesting his innocence as the questions and accusations encircle him, until he is hiding from lawyers trying to serve court papers.

This is a much more textured and ultimately more engaging account of events than the Netflix film.

It shows the impact on those around Prince Andrew, including his ex-wife, the Duchess of York, and their daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie.

Their loyalty to him is depicted as being from a real family rather than the Royal Family.

Prince Andrew’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk, beautifully played by Joanna Scanlan, is still defending him even after she has lost her job in the wake of the Newsnight interview.

And their relationship, a mix of co-dependency and scapegoating, has echoes of Alan Partridge and his assistant, Lynn.

The prince’s downfall comes with his calamitous TV interview.

And this film suggests some of the most famous moments – such as his lines on not being able to sweat and going to a Pizza Express in Woking, Surrey, nearly ended up being cut in the editing.

But despite the awards and plaudits that follow, Maitlis is seen as having her own self-doubts.

She raises the question of what has happened to Epstein’s victims and points to the lack of resolution in any legal proceedings.

At the heart of this drama is an ambiguity.

The civil case in the US between Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre ended in an out-of-court settlement, with the prince strongly rejecting any accusations of wrongdoing.

But neither side had their day in court.

And the film shows Prince Andrew wanting to do the Newsnight interview because he thinks it might mean checking his claim the photograph of him and Ms Giuffre might have been faked.

The other big unknown for the viewer is how much is fact and how much fiction.

Did Prince Andrew really call his private secretary “Fatty” and race her across the garden?

Did Elizabeth II’s private secretary, the urbane Sir Edward Young, really say things such as: “We’ll be shovelling more shit than Dyno-Rod.”

The film comes with the disclaimer: “This drama is based on real events and individuals. Some scenes have been fictionalised and adapted for dramatic purposes.”

It is not a documentary and the storytelling and pace of a drama means changes to the sequence of events.

For instance, in the film, Prince Andrew is told Covid is to be used as a face-saving excuse for him not to be at the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

In reality, Covid was indeed given as an explanation for why he missed a Jubilee service.

But a month before, the Palace had been quite open in a press briefing that the prince would not be on the Buckingham Palace balcony as he was no longer a working royal.

The suggestion of surreptitiousness works as drama – but in reality, his exclusion was even more publicly brutal.

But such powerful dramas can have a habit of overwriting history – and Sheen’s performance could change forever how Prince Andrew will be remembered.

For the past 11 days, about 1,500 workers of South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics have been striking work in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, leading to major disruptions in production.

The plant in Chennai city, one of Samsung’s two factories in India, employs nearly 2,000 workers and produces home appliances, contributing about a third to the company’s annual $12bn (£9bn) revenue in India.

The striking workers gather at a plot of land near the 17-year-old factory daily, demanding that Samsung recognise their newly-formed labour union – the Samsung India Labour Welfare Union (SILWU). They say that only a union can help them negotiate better wages and working hours with the management.

The protest, one of the largest Samsung has seen in recent years, comes even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been courting foreign investment by positioning India as a viable alternative to China for manufacturing activities.

Samsung India has released a statement saying that the welfare of its workers was its top priority. “We have initiated discussions with our workers at the Chennai plant to resolve all issues at the earliest,” it said.

Hours earlier, the police had detained around 104 workers for undertaking a protest march without permission. The protesters were released in the evening.

“The workers have decided to strike work indefinitely till their demands are met,” said A Soundararajan, member of Centre of Indian Trade Unions (Citu), backed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Citu has backed the new union in the factory.

The workers have three key demands: Samsung must recognise the new union, allow collective bargaining, and reject competing unions as about 90% of the workforce belongs to SILWU, said Mr Soundararajan.

Workers, earning an average of 25,000 rupees ($298; £226) a month, are demanding staggered raises totalling a 50% increase over the next three years, according to Citu.

Citu also alleged that workers at the plant were being “pressurised to finish each product – like a refrigerator, washing machine, or TV – within 10-15 seconds”, work non-stop for four to five hours at a stretch, and do their jobs in unsafe conditions.

Mr Soundararajan also alleged that workers were pressurised by the management to leave the new union and that their families were threatened as well.

The BBC has sent Samsung India a detailed set of questions for a response.

Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu’s Labour Welfare Minister CV Ganesan said he had assured union officials that talks were under way to resolve their issues. “We will fulfil the demands of the workers,” he said.

Sijo*, a protester, said that he arrives at the protest site daily at 08:00 IST (02:30 GMT) and stays until 17:00, joining hundreds of workers in their blue Samsung India uniforms.

The union arranges for lunch and water for the protesters, while a makeshift cloth tent protects them from the elements. There are no washroom facilities, so the workers use the outdoors.

“Since the factory was set up, employees have been working without complaints or a union. But things have been getting bad over the past couple of years, and now, we need the support of a union,” Sijo said.

He added that his pay doesn’t keep pace with the cost of living and that this has put a strain of his family’s finances.

Up until 2020, the Samsung Group was known for not allowing unions to represent its workers. But things changed after the company came under intense public scrutiny after its chairman was prosecuted for market manipulation and bribery.

Millions of Indian workers join trade unions – often backed by leftist parties – who use their political clout to enforce labour laws and negotiate better conditions. “Foreign companies set up in India but resist following local laws on workers’ rights to association and collective bargaining,” alleged Mr Soundararajan.

Many prominent multinational companies, including Apple and Amazon, have set up factories in India. But labour rights activists allege that many of them underpay and overwork their Indian employees and collude with state governments to clamp down on workers’ rights.

Shyam Sundar, a labour economist, said multinational corporations use various “human resource strategies” to prevent workers from forming unions in developing countries like India.

For one, they fiercely oppose workers joining external, politically-backed unions and encourage them to form “worker-led” internal ones. “This ensures that the management has some control over the union’s activities,” Mr Sundar said.

Mr Soundararajan alleged that management at the Chennai plant had also approached workers with this solution, which they refused. The BBC has reached out to Samsung India for a response.

The second way, Mr Sundar said, is by hiring young, unskilled workers, especially from rural areas, by attracting them with a good starting salary. “These ‘trainees’ are promised to be made permanent employees after a couple of months, but this doesn’t happen. The salaries too stay stagnant or have very low increments.”

The rapid growth of “flexible workers” – employees hired on contract – has become a key strategy of multinational corporations to stop unionising by ensuring a pliant workforce, he added.

According to the latest government statistics, every two in five workers employed in factories in India in 2022 were contractual labourers, making up about 40% of the workforce in industrial establishments.

“Companies use the threat of re-location or non-expansion to discourage state governments from enforcing labour laws,” Mr Sundar said. “But workers can leverage global labour unions to pressure companies to abide by international labour laws,” he added.

The race to find the maker of the pagers that exploded in Lebanon has taken an unexpected turn – towards a Taiwanese company few had heard of until this morning.

At least 12 people were killed and nearly 3,000 injured in Tuesday’s explosions targeting members of the armed group Hezbollah, which set off a geopolitical storm in the Middle East.

Caught in the crisis, Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo’s founder Hsu Ching-Kuang flatly denied his company had anything to do with the attacks.

Instead, Mr Hsu has said he licensed his trade mark to a company in Hungary called BAC Consulting to use the Gold Apollo name on their own pagers. BBC attempts to contact BAC have so far been unsuccessful.

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“You look at the pictures from Lebanon,” Mr Hsu told reporters outside his firm’s offices on Wednesday. “They don’t have any mark saying Made in Taiwan on them, we did not make those pagers!”

The offices of Gold Apollo are in a large new business park in a non-descript suburb of Taiwan’s capital, Taipei.

They look the same as any of the thousands of small trading companies and manufacturers that make up a huge chunk of the island’s economy – except for the two police officers posted at the entrance, ready to fend off the large gaggle of reporters and TV crews squatting outside.

On the walls of Gold Apollo’s office are posters of the company’s products – a montage of small boxy plastic devices with little grey LCD screens. They are all pagers.

Until this morning the company’s website had a page devoted to each, extolling its virtues and practicalities. But as soon as news broke that Gold Apollo was the alleged source of the devices used in the attacks in Lebanon, the website went offline.

Mr Hsu said it was pagers made by BAC Consulting that were used in the Lebanon attacks. He told reporters that his company had signed an agreement with BAC Consulting three years ago.

The money transfers from BAC had been “very strange”, he added. There had been problems with the payments, which had come through the Middle East, he told reporters, but he did not go into detail.

Initially, he said, BAC wanted to buy pagers from Gold Apollo to sell in Europe. But after about a year they came up with a new plan to make their own pagers and licensed Gold Apollo’s name.

“We only provide brand trademark authorisation and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product,” a statement from Gold Apollo said.

But the fact there is now a team from the Taipei investigation bureau inside his office – with large numbers of cardboard boxes – suggests the Taiwanese authorities are not entirely reassured.

Nevertheless, Mr Hsu’s statement that his company didn’t make the devices is plausible.

Taiwan’s manufacturing system is a complex maze of small companies, many of which do not actually make the products they sell. They may own the brand name, the intellectual property and have research and design departments. But most of the actual manufacturing is farmed out to factories in China or Southeast Asia.

Pagers are also hardly cutting-edge technology – there are many companies across the world capable of making them.

They are small radio receivers with LED screens that can receive and display messages. In the 1980s and 1990s electronic pagers were considered to be the latest tech, used by tens of millions of people. Before mobile phones, companies used pagers to send short text messages to employees in the field.

But in the last two decades the rise of the smart phone has pushed pagers to the brink of extinction. They are now a niche device holding on in places like hospitals – where they remain a cheap and reliable method for messaging doctors and nurses, even when other communication lines are disrupted.

Starting in the late 2000s, Gold Apollo too started moving away from making electronic pagers and started manufacturing other short-range radio devices – particularly for restaurants. The company’s most successful product now is a round disc that is handed to customers in food courts and restaurants once they place an order – it lights up and vibrates when their order is ready.

It’s likely that Gold Apollo’s brand name – as a reliable pager manufacturer – was useful in selling the pagers that ended up with Hezbollah.

But there are still more questions than answers in this extraordinary story.

We know almost nothing about BAC Consulting – who is or was behind it?

If Gold Apollo did not make the pagers used in the attack in Lebanon, then who did and where?

The US central bank has lowered interest rates for the first time in more than four years with a bigger than usual cut.

The Federal Reserve reduced the target for its key lending rate by 0.5 percentage points, to the range of 4.75%-5%.

Jerome Powell, the head of the bank, said the move was “strong” but that it was needed as price rises ease and job market concerns grow.

It will be a relief to US borrowers, who have been dealing with the highest interest rates in more than two decades.

Wednesday’s cut was larger than many analysts had predicted just a week ago, and the bank’s forecast signalled that rates could fall another half percentage point by the end of the year.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said the aggressive action on Wednesday was intended to make sure that high borrowing costs, put in place to fight inflation, would not end up hurting the US economy.

“The labour market is in a strong place – we want to keep it there,” Mr Powell said. “That’s what we’re doing.”

The move by the Fed follows cuts by other central banks, including those in Europe, the UK, and Canada and a reduction was widely expected.

But ahead of the meeting there was unusual uncertainty about how large a cut officials would approve.

“Despite there being no significant economic woes on the radar, policy makers have decided to get ahead of the curve,” said Isaac Stell, investment manager at Wealth Club, a UK investment service.

“Many may be left wondering what the Fed sees on the horizon to prompt such a bold move.”

The Fed raised interest rates sharply starting in 2022, aiming to cool the economy and stabilise prices, which were then surging at the fastest pace since the 1980s.

The moves, which rippled out to the public in form of more expensive mortgages, car loans and other debt, were intended to ease price pressures by reducing spending.

But as inflation, the rate at which prices rise, has subsided, officials have become more concerned about risks to the wider economy from high rates.

The unemployment rate in the US has climbed to 4.2% from 3.7% at the start of the year as hiring slowed.

Projections released after the meeting showed officials now see inflation falling faster and unemployment rising higher than they did in June, with the jobless rate expected to hit 4.4% by the end of the 2024.

Mr Powell said the job market had been too hot last year, and he welcomed some cooling, but he denied that the Fed was worried about the start of a serious slowdown.

“I do not see anything in the economy right now that suggests that the likelihood… of a downturn is elevated,” he said.

Over the three months to June, the US economy grew at an annual rate of 3%, the most recent Commerce Department figures show. Retail spending has also remained resilient.

Inflation, meanwhile, dropped to 2.5% in August, moving closer to the Fed’s 2% target for the fifth month in a row.

One Fed governor – Michelle Bowman – voted against the move in the first such dissent since 2005.

Historically the bank has announced interest rate cuts of 0.5 percentage points at moments of crisis such as the onset of the coronavirus pandemic or the 2008 financial crash.

But economist Randall Kroszner, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and a former governor of the Fed, said Wednesday’s announcement was significant not because of the size of the cut but because it will kick off a new period of lower borrowing costs.

“One quarter of a percentage point one way or another – that’s not going to break the US economy,” he said.

“It’s really where they are headed both for the rest of the year, as well as in the intermediate and longer run.”

The Fed had held its key rate – which it charges banks to borrow – steady since July 2023.

Forecasts released by the Fed showed officials expect its key lending rate to drop to about 4.4% by the end of the year and 3.4% by the end of 2025. That is significantly lower than many were predicting as recently as June.

Jennifer Heasley, the owner of Sweet Mama’s Mambo Sauce in Pennsylvania, said she had been waiting anxiously for the Fed to act, after using credit cards to help pay for the expansion of business making barbecue-like sauce two years ago.

“My interest rates have gone up, so my monthly payments have increased tremendously,” she said, noting that one card is now charging her 21%.

“If you’re buying a piece of equipment for $1,500 and you’re putting that on a credit card – if you’re not paying that off, you’re accruing quite a bit of interest,” she said.

“For me, it is a big deal for them to start to come down.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq jumped after the initial announcement but ended the day modestly lower.

Last week, the Indian government announced that Russia had discharged dozens of the 91 Indians who were duped into fighting for Russian forces in the country’s war with Ukraine. Several of them have since returned home, while the process to bring others back is under way. The BBC’s Neyaz Farooquee spoke to some of the men about their struggles.

“I am in panic. I am not sure if I will return safely or in a box. Please save me.”

This is the message Urgen Tamang, a former Indian soldier, sent to the BBC from outside a southern Ukrainian city, a few days before he was discharged from the frontlines in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which entered its third year this February.

Mr Tamang is among the 91 Indians who were forced into fighting in the war. Most of them are from poor families and were lured by agents with the promise of money and jobs, sometimes as “helpers” in the Russian army.

Instead, they were sent to the war zone. Many of them said they were stationed in parts of Ukraine under Russian control, where they had to navigate landmines, drones, missiles and sniper attacks with little to no military training.

Nine Indians have died in the conflict so far and Indian authorities say they have arrested 19 people for human trafficking.

In July, Russia promised an early release of all Indians fighting in its army, following a visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Moscow, during which he raised the issue with President Vladimir Putin. The two countries have traditionally shared a warm relationship.

Forty-five of them have been discharged since then. Some have safely returned home, while others like Mr Tamang are on their way.

“I can’t believe I am out of there,” said Sunil Karwa, an electrician from Rajasthan who joined the Russian army in February. Posted near Bakhmut, an eastern Ukraine city that has seen intense fighting, he was at the Moscow airport waiting to board his flight when he spoke to the BBC.

Mr Karwa described scenes of deaths and destruction, a reality which hit him the hardest when a man from his neighbouring village was shot on the battlefield.

“They sent him back on the frontline 15 days after the injury and he fainted in the field. He is paralysed now,” he said.

Like him, most of the other recruits were also blue-collar workers aged between 19 and 35, who were hired by agents based in India, Dubai and Russia.

• Ukraine war: The Indian men traumatised by fighting for Russia
• Ukraine war: Indians ‘duped’ by agents into fighting for Russia

They say their contracts were in Russian, a language they didn’t understand. Yet they signed it in the hope of getting better opportunities.

“The process was so quick – just a few signatures and photos and we were in [the army],” Mr Karwa said.

Raja Pathan joined the army as a last resort in February, after an education consultant deceived him into enrolling in a non-existent college.

“When I got there, I saw banners advertising recruitments for the army. By then, I had spent so much time and money that I decided to join anyway,” he said.

It was the death of two friends, which eventually pushed Mr Pathan to leave. He was released in August with the help of a sympathetic Russian commander who facilitated his exit.

Now based in Moscow, he helps other Indians escape from there.

Mohammad Sufyan from the southern state of Telangana returned to India on 12 September with five other men.

Safe in his home, he carries the trauma of surviving on the frontline. “There was little rest there and in the beginning, I couldn’t speak to my family for 25 days,” he said.

The most scarring moment came in February when his friend Hemil Mangukiya – an Indian man from Gujarat state – was killed right before his eyes.

“He was merely 15 metres from me, digging a trench near Krynky [in Kherson], when a missile landed,” recalled Mr Sufyan. “I put his dead body in the truck with my own hands.”

“After seeing the dead body of my friend, I didn’t have the strength for anything,” he added.

After the death, Mr Sufyan and other Indians stuck there released a video pleading for help, which reached Indian MP Asaduddin Owaisi, who raised the matter with the foreign ministry. Families of the men had also appealed to the Indian government for help in bringing them back.

“It is a miracle I got back home,” said Azad Yusuf Kumar, a resident of Indian-administered Kashmir, who was part of Mr Sufyan’s group in the army.

“One minute you are digging a trench, and the next, an artillery falls and burns everything down. It was all a matter of luck if it fell on you or someone else.”

In February, Mr Kumar had told the BBC how he had shot his foot by mistake during training. “My commander kept saying, use your right hand to shoot, use your left hand to shoot, shoot above, shoot down,” he had said. “I had never touched a gun. It was extremely cold, and with the gun in my left hand, I ended up shooting my foot.”

Now back in Kashmir, he talks about how his commander had accused him of deliberately shooting himself to avoid going to the frontline.

“But I am lucky I did not go to fight. Four men from my camp died in an attack at that time. I could’ve been one of them,” he said.

Though recent discharges brought relief to many, those still in Russia face growing desperation as their release is delayed.

Mr Tamang, who joined the Russian army in January, had earlier told The Indian Express newspaper through his local councillor, Rabi Pradhan, that 13 out of 15 non-Russian members of his unit had died.

The fact that he was sent to the frontline at least twice after signing his discharge letter in August heightened his fears – and mistrust in the process.

On 15 September, he was on his way to Moscow but still doubtful if he was truly heading home. “I am out, but I will keep sending you my location,” he said.

When he last texted, he had left Ukraine, hoping to continue his journey home.

Some X users in Brazil have said they can once again access the social media platform, the BBC has learned.

This comes after the service, formerly known as Twitter, was banned in the country at the end of August.

The change was made possible after the firm, which is owned by technology billionaire Elon Musk, moved to servers hosted by Cloudflare, according to ABRINT, the country’s leading trade group for Internet Service Providers (ISP).

A spokesperson for X told the BBC that the restoration of the platform in Brazil was “inadvertent” and came after it changed its server provider.

“While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again in Brazil soon, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil,” the X spokesperson added.

Brazil’s telecom agency Anatel has not responded to a request for comment.

ABRINT said on Wednesday that the new system used dynamic internet protocols (IPs) that change constantly. By contrast, the previous system had relied on specific IPs that could be more easily blocked.

Basílio Rodriguez Pérez, ABRINT advisor, said those dynamic IPs could also be linked to critical services within Brazil.

“Many of these IPs are shared with other legitimate services, such as banks and large internet platforms, making it impossible to block an IP without affecting other services.”

That includes PIX, which millions of Brazilians depend on to make digital payments.

Some experts say Cloudflare is well-positioned to help Brazil reinforce the ban.

“Actually, I think the ban would be even more effective if Cloudflare really cooperates with the government,” said Felipe Autran, a constitutional lawyer in Brasilia, the country’s capital.

“I think they will, since they are such a huge provider for many Brazilian enterprises and also the government.”

Cloudflare declined to comment when contacted by the BBC.

The platform was banned in the country last month after failing to meet a court deadline to appoint a new legal representative in the country.

He added that individuals or businesses that are found to still be accessing X by using virtual private networks (VPNs) could be fined.

The Brazilian Supreme Court’s order, however, says only those accessing the platform through VPNs can be fined. “Today, no one is using any method to access Twitter other than typing the address in their computer or using the app” said Mr Autran, the Brazilian lawyer. “I don’t think that the Supreme Court can prosecute someone for this.”

It marked the most significant development in a feud between Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and Mr Musk that began in April, when the judge ordered the suspension of dozens of X accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation.

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

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

YouTuber MrBeast has been named in court documents which allege contestants were “shamelessly exploited” in his upcoming series Beast Games.

People who took part have sued the production companies involved in the show, which include MrB2024 and Amazon.

The series, first announced in March, offered 1,000 participants the chance to win a cash prize of $5m (£3.5m) and promised to be the biggest live game show in the world.

But in a case filed at a Los Angeles court on Monday, participants allege they weren’t paid, were subjected to unsafe conditions and experienced sexual harassment.

Documents say MrB2024 is “believed to be owned in whole or part, directly or indirectly”, by MrBeast – real name Jimmy Donaldson – who is the biggest YouTuber in the world with more than 300m subscribers.

BBC Newsbeat has contacted MrBeast and Amazon for comment.

In the legal papers, parts of which have been redacted, five anonymous contestants have brought claims on behalf of everyone who took part.

They claim the production team kept them under surveillance, controlled when they slept, what they wore and denied them privacy and access to the outside world.

They were “underfed and overtired”, it claims, with meals provided “sporadically and sparsely” which “endangered the health and welfare” of the contestants.

The 54-page document also details allegations of an unsafe environment with contestants being penned into small areas, dangerous sets and insufficient background checks allowing convicted criminals to participate.

Some, it claims, were physically injured and were not given adequate access to medical care.

The set was also said to have “fostered a culture of misogyny and sexism”, creating a “hostile environment” for women which included sexual harassment.

“This was not only noticed but allowed,” the document says. “And apparently this was allowed because of marching orders from the top.”

The contestants’ lawyers say they should be compensated for their time which they say was “essential labour” for the production, arguing they were “not working for free” and should have been classed as employees.

All the claimants are seeking thousands of dollars for everyone who took part to cover “unpaid wages”.

Two of the listed claimants who are women are also seeking further compensation for the allegations of a hostile workplace.

Earlier this year, MrBeast announced he had hired private investigators to look into allegations that a co-host on his channel had groomed a minor.

Ava Kris Tyson was accused by other YouTubers of sending inappropriate messages to the minor when she was 20. She denied accusations of grooming.

MrBeast removed her from the channel and said he did not “condone or support any of the inappropriate actions”.

Amazon have declined to comment, while representatives for MrBeast have not yet responded to Newsbeat’s request. Also named in the papers is a production company, Off One’s Base LLP, which BBC Newsbeat has been unable to contact.

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

Iranian hackers distributed hacked information about Donald Trump’s electoral campaign to people linked to the Biden campaign, according to the FBI and US intelligence agencies.

US officials now believe that information taken from the Trump campaign was sent in unsolicited emails to people linked to the campaign in late June and early July – before Biden dropped out of the race for president.

There is currently no evidence that the hackers received any reply from any recipients.

In August, officials warned that Iran hopes to “stoke discord” and undermine confidence in US institutions ahead of the November election.

US officials said that Iran had used “social engineering and other efforts” to seek out direct access to both the Democratic and Republican campaigns – a tactic they said had been used by both Iran and Russia in other countries around the world.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

In a statement released on Wednesday, the FBI said that “Iranian malicious actors have continued their efforts since June to send stolen, non-public material associated with former President Trump’s campaign to US media organisations”.

When contacted by the BBC, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that the hack is proof that Iran was “interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because they know President Trump will restore his tough sanctions and stand against their reign of terror”.

She said Biden and Harris should outline what happened to the material sent to Biden associates. “What did they know and when did they know it?” Ms Leavitt questioned.

The former president also commented on the hacking on Wednesday, telling supporters that “they [Iran] gave them all the materials because Biden is working with Iran”.

Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said that the campaign has cooperated with authorities since it was made aware of the hacks.

“We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign,” Ms Finkelstein added. “A few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt.”

Ms Finkelstein added that it condemns “in the strongest terms” any foreign election interference efforts.

The BBC has also contacted the White House for comment.

The FBI statement added that officials have been in contact with the victims of the hack and will continue to investigate in hopes of stopping and disrupting “the threat actors responsible”.

A spokesperson for Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations told CBS – the BBC’s US partner – that “Iran neither has any motive nor intent to interfere in the US election; and, it therefore categorically repudiates such accusations”.

The announcement comes amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s security, just days after a second apparent assassination attempt was made against him at his golf course in Florida.

Speaking to reporters earlier, Trump addressed the attempt, saying that “I just have to lead my life”.

“You don’t want to ever be curtailed because of the crazy people out there,” he added.

After Trump was wounded by a gunman during a 13 July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, US officials said that an Iranian threat on Trump’s life had prompted additional security measures.

At a packed rally in Long Island in New York on Wednesday – just a few miles away from where he grew up in Queens – Trump said that “God spared my life”.

“Not once, but twice,” he said to raucous applause from the crowd. “There are those that say he [God] did it because Trump is going to turn this state around. He’s going to turn this country around.”

Supporters at the rally told the BBC they were angry after learning about the second possible attempt after authorities say gunman was found with a rifle at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida as the former president was golfing.

One supporter at the rally, Dina Glazer, said she blamed Democrats and their rhetoric about Trump for the incidents.

The former president “needs more security, which they haven’t done”, she said.

Another supporter, Michelle Christ, said she feared Trump was in “constant danger”.

“Some people think their opinion is the most important,” she said. “But you don’t act on those thoughts” violently, she said.

The crowd at the rally booed as Trump mentioned Springfield, Ohio, which has been rocked by unfounded claims about its Haitian immigrant community. Trump faced criticism for repeating them during the presidential debates.

“Send them back!” One member of the crowd shouted from the back of the arena.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election
• FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger under Biden or Trump?
• POLICIES: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to committing a criminal sexual act in a New York court.

The 72-year-old is facing a new charge over the alleged sexual assault of a woman in a Manhattan hotel in 2006, according to District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg.

“Not guilty,” Weinstein said emphatically when asked for his plea on Wednesday.

Appearing in court in a wheelchair, Weinstein wore a dark suit and a blue tie, and with a large bandage on his right hand.

“Thanks to this survivor who bravely came forward, Harvey Weinstein now stands indicted for an additional alleged violent sexual assault,” Mr Bragg said in a statement.

Separately, Weinstein is awaiting retrial after New York’s top appeals court threw out his rape conviction and 23-year-sentence in April.

The conviction was dismissed on the basis he did not get a fair trial because the judge allowed testimony from women who he was not charged with assaulting.

Weinstein has denied having non consensual sexual encounters with anyone.

• Ashley Judd leads backlash against quashed rape conviction
• How the Harvey Weinstein scandal has unfolded

He remains in custody serving a 16-year-sentence over the 2013 rape of an actress in LA.

In July he was moved to a New York prison hospital with multiple health problems including Covid and double pneumonia.

Last week he underwent emergency heart surgery, according to his lawyers.

Prosecutors have filed a motion to consolidate the new charge and the pending retrial in the 2020 overturned rape conviction.

A judge is set to rule on that on 2 October.

Hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs was denied bail again on Wednesday after his lawyers argued for the second time that he should be released from “horrific” jail conditions while awaiting trial in a sex-trafficking case.

A New York federal judge remanded the musician into custody on Tuesday after prosecutors argued he was a “serious flight risk”.

Mr Combs, 54, was arrested this week, accused of running a criminal enterprise from at least 2008 that relied on drugs and violence to force women to “fulfil his sexual desires”, according to prosecutors.

He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Instead of jail, Mr Combs’s lawyers were proposing a bail package that included a $50 million bond co-signed by Mr Combs, his mother and other family members, as well as home detention, surrender of his passport, weekly drug test and a visitor log that would be submitted to pre-trial services each night.

But the judge hearing Wednesday’s arguments did not agree to the proposal.

“My bigger concern deals with the danger of obstruction of justice and the danger of witness tampering,” Judge Andrew Carter said. “That is a real concern that I have here.”

After the ruling, Mr Combs’s lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, told reporters the ruling “did not go our way,” adding “the fight continues”.

A 14-page indictment charges Mr Combs with racketeering, sex trafficking by force and transportation to engage in prostitution.

If convicted on all three counts, the rapper and record producer faces a sentence of 15 years up to life in prison.

Asked by US Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky on Tuesday how he wished to plead, Mr Combs stood up and said: “not guilty”.

Mr Agnifilo said afterwards that the musician’s defence team already had launched an appeal of the judge’s bail decision.

“We believe him wholeheartedly,” Mr Agnifilo told reporters outside the Manhattan court of his client. “He didn’t do these things.”

According to court documents, Mr Combs “wielded the power” of his status to “lure female victims… to engage in extended sex acts” called “Freak Offs”.

“During Freak Offs, Combs distributed a variety of controlled substances to victims, in part to keep the victims obedient and compliant,” the indictment said.

In a news briefing, US prosecutor Damian Williams said officials found firearms, ammunition and more than 1,000 bottles of lubricant during raids on Mr Combs’s homes in Miami and Los Angeles, about six months ago.

Mr Williams said federal agents also found three semi-automatic rifles with defaced serial numbers and a drum magazine.

He told reporters that further charges were possible, without offering details.

Mr Agnifilo, the musician’s lawyer, maintained, “there’s no coercion and no crime.”

“He’s not afraid of the charges,” he said, adding that he believed Mr Combs was the target of “an unjust prosecution”.

In court documents, federal prosecutors said that Mr Combs had “abused, threatened, and coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct”.

Prosecutors accuse Mr Combs of “creating a criminal enterprise” whose members – under his direction – engaged in sex trafficking, forced labour, kidnapping, arson and bribery.

“On numerous occasions”, the documents said, Mr Combs assaulted women by “striking, punching, dragging, throwing objects at, and kicking them”.

The indictment did not specify how many women were alleged victims. It also does not accuse Mr Combs himself of engaging directly in unwanted sexual acts with women.

The Bad Boy records founder, who was also known during his career as P. Diddy and Puff Daddy, has faced many of the accusations before.

Last November, his ex-girlfriend, singer Casandra Elizabeth Ventura, filed a civil lawsuit against him that included graphic descriptions of violent abuse. He denied the accusations, but settled the case a day after it was filed.

In May, Mr Combs released a public apology after video footage from a Los Angeles hotel appeared to show him beating Ms Ventura in a hallway.

• Lawyers for Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs try again to get him freed on bail
• Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs: What we know about the accusations against him

Tuesday’s indictment against Mr Combs accuses him of similar violence.

Ms Ventura’s lawyer, Douglas Wigdor​​​​, declined to comment on Mr Combs’s arrest.

The indictment follows a string of sexual assault allegations against Mr Combs, one of the most successful music moguls in the history of rap.

Four women, including Ms Ventura, have filed lawsuits accusing him of sexual and physical abuse.

In a statement issued last December, Mr Combs defended himself against what he described as “sickening allegations” made by “individuals looking for a quick payday”.

In June, he returned a ceremonial “Key to the City of New York” following a request from Mayor Eric Adams, who had bestowed the honour on him just nine months earlier.

Days later, Howard University announced it was revoking Mr Combs’s 2014 honorary degree.

The musician is credited with helping turn rappers and R&B singers such as Usher, Mary J Blige and The Notorious B.I.G. into stars in the 1990s and 2000s.

It has been the deadliest year in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians since 1948, when Israel fought and won its war for independence – and this is one of the most dangerous moments since Hamas attacked Israel on 7th October last year.

Attacking Hezbollah’s communications network has delivered a tactical victory to Israel – the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller.

However there is a potentially serious strategic downside for Israel, because while this humiliates the powerful Lebanese militia and political movement, it doesn’t deter them.

And it doesn’t get closer to Israel’s strategic aim of stopping Hezbollah’s attacks and allowing the more than 60,000 Israelis on the northern border who haven’t been in their houses for nearly a year to return home.

• LIVE: Latest updates on the Hezbollah pager explosions
• What we know about the attack in Lebanon
• Watch: Video appears to show explosion at supermarket
• What is Hezbollah in Lebanon and why is it fighting with Israel?

The Israelis have used important, audacious weapons, which are clearly very effective in their terms.

But reports in Al Monitor, a respected Middle East newsletter, say that they were not able to use them in the way they hoped.

The original plan, it says, was for Israel to follow up with devastating attacks while Hezbollah was still reeling. The pager attack, the reports say, was to be the opening salvo in a big escalation – as part of an offensive or perhaps an invasion of southern Lebanon.

But these same reports say that Hezbollah was getting suspicious – forcing Israel to trigger these attacks early. So the Israelis have shown they can get into Hezbollah’s communications and shown they can humiliate them, but these attacks do not take the region one inch further back from all out war. Instead they push it closer.

Everything at the moment in terms of de-escalation in the Middle East depends on Gaza.

While that war continues, whether it’s conflict with Lebanon, whether it’s attacks in the Red Sea from the Houthis, whether it’s tensions with Iraq; nothing is going to de-escalate.

The US envoy to Lebanon Amos Hochstein has been working assiduously for months now – talking to the Lebanese, and indirectly to Hezbollah and to the Israelis, about trying to find a way to deescalate this diplomatically. And reportedly, the Israelis didn’t tell the US about what they were doing with this plan until last moments – so this won’t help his efforts either.

American predictions that a ceasefire in Gaza is close have come up again against two seemingly immovable objects.

One is the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, who wants Israel out of the Gaza Strip permanently, as well as a big release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza.

The other is Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has stuck to his insistence that Israel can and will win a total victory over Hamas.

The consensus in Israel is that he benefits from prolonging the war, despite pressure from hostage families and their supporters for a deal to get their people home.

The prime minister’s ultranationalist allies in his coalition have also threatened to bring down the government if he makes a deal.

Israel and its allies insist that taking the war to its old enemies in Lebanese Hezbollah is an entirely legitimate act of self-defence.

But there is fury and alarm in Lebanon and the wider region that Israel’s attacks appear to have been launched with little concern for bystanders and family members who have been wounded and killed alongside Hezbollah fighters.

CCTV footage showed a pager exploding in a crowded market as its owner shopped for food. Reports in Lebanon say a young girl was killed when her father’s pager exploded.

Hezbollah will be reeling from the attacks, but it will rapidly compose itself as an organisation and will find other ways to communicate. Lebanon is a small country and messages can easily be carried by hand.

Undoubtedly Hezbollah and its allies in Iran, whose ambassador to Beirut was wounded in the attack, will be licking their wounds at the moment.

But once again the region has been pushed right to the brink of an all-out war.

Sooner or later, if this continues, they will fall over the cliff.

The Lebanese government says 12 people, including two children, were killed after thousands of pagers used by the armed group Hezbollah exploded.

BBC Verify has been looking into a firm called BAC Consulting, which has been linked to the production of the pagers – despite the devices bearing a different manufacturer’s name.

A short while after the explosions took place on Tuesday, unverified images of two damaged pagers surfaced on social media. In the photos, the word “Gold” and a serial number starting either “AP” or “AR” was visible. This indicated that a Taiwanese company – Gold Apollo – could have been involved in the pagers’ manufacture.

However, the firm put out a strongly worded statement denying any involvement, saying: “This model is produced and sold by BAC.”

BAC Consulting is a Hungarian-based company which Gold Apollo says had permission to use its brand through a licensing agreement.

BBC Verify has accessed BAC’s company records, which reveal it was first incorporated in 2022 and has a single shareholder. It is registered to a building in Budapest’s 14th district.

As well as BAC, a further 13 companies and one person are registered at the same building.

However, our search of a financial information database does not reveal that BAC has any connections to other companies or people.

The same database shows no trading information about BAC. For example, there are no records of any shipments between it and any other firms.

However, BAC’s website, which is now inaccessible, previously said it was scaling up its business in Asia, and had a goal to “develop international technology co-operation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products”.

According to records, BAC had a net turnover of 256,996,000 Hungarian Forint ($725,000; £549,000) in 2022, and 210,307,000 Hungarian Forint ($593,000; £449,000) in 2023.

A company brochure, published on LinkedIn, lists eight organisations BAC claims to have worked with – including the European Commission and the UK Department for International Development (DfID).

BBC Verify has approached all the listed organisations for comment. The UK Foreign Office – which has taken on DfID’s responsibilities – told us it was in the process of investigating. But based on initial conversations, it said it did not have any involvement with BAC, despite the firm’s claim.

BAC’s website listed one person as its chief executive and founder – Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono – and does not appear to mention other employees.

BBC Verify has learned she graduated from the University of Catania with a physics degree in 2001. According to her LinkedIn profile, she also holds PhDs from two London universities.

We have made several attempts to contact her, but have been unable to reach her.

NBC has reported it had spoken to Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono, who confirmed her company worked with Gold Apollo. However, when asked about the pagers and the explosions, she said: “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong.”

The BBC has called BAC a number of times, but there is no answer.

A spokesperson for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said the exploding pagers were “never” in Hungary.

“Authorities have confirmed that the company in question is a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary,” government spokesperson Zoltán Kovács said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

If we assume, as virtually all observers do, that Israel was behind Tuesday’s astonishing mass pager attack on the ranks of Hezbollah, what does it tell us about what Israel is thinking?

In the absence of any official Israeli comment, a certain amount of reading between the lines is needed.

One former Israeli intelligence official I contacted explained his reluctance to comment with a saying from the Talmud: “And at this very time the smart ones keep silent.”

Given the astonishingly audacious scope of yesterday’s attack, it seems it was designed to cause massive physical, psychological and technical damage to one of Israel’s most formidable opponents.

But reports from Lebanon suggest that Israel may not have intended to use this doomsday weapon just now.

The “shock and awe” engendered by such an attack was probably being held in reserve for a moment of maximum need: either when Israel was about to launch a major assault on Lebanon or when it felt Hezbollah might be about to act first.

Neither of these appear to be the case, lending credence to reports that Israel triggered the explosive pagers because it believed its plot had been, or was in the process of being uncovered.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the episode comes at a time when Israel is taking action, overt and covert, to address the threat posed by Hezbollah and its reputed arsenal of 150,000 precision-guided missiles and rockets.

Away from the daily air-strikes on Hezbollah targets, each documented for the media by the Israeli military, a murky shadow war is raging.

Ten days ago, Israeli special forces mounted an audacious raid against an Iranian-built military facility in Syria, where it’s believed ballistic missiles were being developed.

Commandos rappelled from helicopters, planted explosives inside the underground facility and removed sensitive information.

Some reports suggested they even captured individuals, possibly Iranian, working there.

Six weeks earlier, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, one of Hezbollah’s top military commanders.

A report in the Wall Street Journal said that just before the attack, Shukr received a message asking him to go to his seventh floor apartment, where he was easier to hit.

Hezbollah furiously denied the report, but as yesterday’s dramatic events proved, Hezbollah’s networks – their supply chains and communications – appear to be badly compromised.

The Iranian-backed group is, of course, doing its utmost to fight back, firing rockets across Israel’s northern border and, occasionally, trying its own covert operations.

On Tuesday morning, Israel said it had foiled an attempt to assassinate a former Israeli security official using a remotely-activated explosive device.

Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate for Tuesday’s mass attack. Given the physical mutilation wrought on huge numbers of its members and the militia’s urgent need to identify and deal with this catastrophic security breach, revenge may have to wait – but it is surely bound to come.

Which brings us to a fundamental question: what, if anything, has really changed? Israel’s war with Hezbollah, overt and covert, goes on.

Israel’s newly declared war aim – bringing displaced citizens back to evacuated communities along the northern border – has not been advanced.

Despite a lot of heated speculation here in Israel, the military does not appear to be poised to invade southern Lebanon.

That may eventually happen. Israelis are thoroughly fed up with almost a year of insecurity in the north.

But Israel is still fighting in Gaza – the death of four more soldiers was announced on Tuesday – and the prospect of another major ground operation is not universally welcome.

An opinion poll by Channel 13 News found that 52% of Israelis favoured a “broad scale war in Lebanon,” with 30% against and 18% undecided.

For all Israel’s displays of tactical ingenuity, when it comes to dealing with Hezbollah, it’s hard to see exactly where this simmering conflict is heading next.

At least 26 people including two children were killed and thousands more injured, many seriously, after communication devices, some used by the armed group Hezbollah, dramatically exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday.

In the latest round of blasts, exploding walkie-talkies killed 14 and injured at least 450 people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

The explosions occurred in the vicinity of a large crowd that had gathered for the funerals of four victims of Tuesday’s blasts.

BBC teams in the city reported chaotic scenes in which ambulances struggled to reach the injured, and locals became suspicious of anyone using a phone.

The explosions deepened unease in Lebanese society, coming a day after an apparently similar, and highly sophisticated attack targeting pagers used by Hezbollah members.

The militant group blamed its adversary Israel. Israeli officials have so far declined to comment.

Two firms based in Taiwan and Hungary accused in media reports of manufacturing the pagers have both denied responsibility.

Here is what we know so far.

The first round of blasts began in Lebanon’s capital Beirut and several other areas of the country at about 15:45 local time (13:45 BST) on Tuesday.

Witnesses reported seeing smoke coming from people’s pockets, before seeing small explosions that sounded like fireworks and gunshots.

Citing US officials, the New York Times said that the pagers received messages that appeared to be coming from Hezbollah’s leadership before detonating. The messages instead appeared to trigger the devices, the outlet reported.

Explosions continued for around an hour after the initial blasts, the Reuters news agency reported.

Soon after, scores of people began arriving at hospitals across Lebanon, with witnesses reporting mass confusion in emergency departments.

Similar scenes played out across the country in another round of blasts Wednesday, at around 17:00 local time (15:00 BST).

Reports suggest it was walkie-talkies that were blown up, devices that were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, according to a security source speaking to Reuters.

At least one explosion was close to a funeral being held in Beirut for some of the victims of Tuesday’s attack, creating panic among those near the procession.

Nine people have been killed and hundreds more injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

• LIVE: Latest updates on the Hezbollah walkie-talkie explosions
• Watch: Video appears to show pager explosion at supermarket
• Bowen: Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred
• What is Hezbollah in Lebanon and why is it fighting with Israel?

Details about the walkie-talkies detonated in Wednesday’s explosions are still coming to light.

Footage shot in the aftermath showed destroyed devices bearing the brand Icom, a Japanese company. The BBC reached out to Icom Japan via a contact form on their website but has not receive a reply.

The pagers that exploded on Tuesday were a new brand that the group had not used before, one Hezbollah operative told the AP news agency. A Lebanese security official told the Reuters news agency that around 5,000 pagers were brought into the country about five months ago.

Labels seen on fragments of exploded pagers point to a pager model called the Rugged Pager AR-924. But its Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo has denied any involvement with the explosions. When the BBC visited Gold Apollo on Wednesday local police were swarming the company’s offices, inspecting documents and questioning staff.

• Taiwan pager maker stunned by link to Lebanon attacks

The founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, said his company had signed an agreement with a Hungarian-based company – BAC – to manufacture the devices and use his company’s name. He added that money transfers from them had been “very strange”, without elaborating.

BBC Verify has accessed BAC’s company records, which reveal it was first incorporated in 2022.

Its CEO Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono told NBC that she knew nothing about the explosions. “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong,” she said.

The Hungarian government said the company had “no manufacturing or operational site” in the country.

Unnamed US and Israeli officials told Axios that detonating the pagers all at once was initially planned as the opening move in an “all-out” offensive against Hezbollah. But in recent days Israel became concerned Hezbollah had become aware of the plan – so they were set off early.

Israeli officials have not commented on the allegations, but most analysts agree that it seems likely it is behind the attack.

Prof Simon Mabon, chair in International Relations at Lancaster University, told the BBC: “We know that Israel has a precedent of using technology to track its target” – but he called the scale of this attack “unprecedented”.

Lina Khatib, from the UK-based Chatham House, said the attack suggested that Israel has “deeply” infiltrated Hezbollah’s “communications network”.

In its statement accusing Israel of being behind the attacks, Hezbollah said it held the country “fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians”.

Hezbollah has not yet attributed blame for Wednesday’s attack.

Hezbollah has relied heavily on pagers as a low-tech means of communications to try to evade location-tracking by Israel. Pagers are wireless telecommunications devices that receive and display alphanumeric or voice messages.

They are much harder to track than mobile phones, which have long since been abandoned as simply too vulnerable, as Israel’s assassination of the Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash demonstrated as long ago as 1996, when his phone exploded in his hand.

In February, Hassan Nasrallah directed Hezbollah fighters to get rid of their phones, saying they had been infiltrated by Israeli intelligence. He told his forces to break, bury or lock their phones in an iron box.

Experts now say the directive, issued during a live televised address, may have forewarned Israeli intelligence operatives that the group would be seeking a new – likely lower tech – method of communications.

A source close to Hezbollah told AFP that two of those killed in Tuesday’s attack were the sons of two Hezbollah MPs. They also said the daughter of a Hezbollah member was killed.

Among the injured was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani. Reports in Iranian media said his injuries were minor.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was not hurt in the explosions, Reuters reported quoting a source.

Lebanese Public Health Minister Firass Abiad said damage to the hands and face made up the majority of injuries.

The victims presenting to emergency rooms were a variety of ages, from the old to the very young, some wearing civilian clothes, he told the BBC’s Newshour programme.

Outside of Lebanon, 14 people were injured in similar blasts in neighbouring Syria, according to UK-based campaign group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Hezbollah is allied with Israel’s arch-nemesis in the region, Iran. The group is part of Tehran’s Axis of Resistance and has been engaged in a low-level war with Israel for months, frequently exchanging rocket and missile fire across Israel’s northern border. Entire communities have been displaced from both sides.

The blasts came just hours after Israel’s security cabinet made the safe return of residents to the north of the country an official war goal.

While visiting an Israeli airbase on Wednesday, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the country was “opening a new phase in the war” and and the “centre of gravity is shifting to the north through the diversion of resources and forces”.

Despite the ongoing tensions, observers say that until now both sides have aimed to contain hostilities without crossing the line into full-scale war. But there are fears that the situation could spiral out of control.

“I thought I’d spend my whole life here, fighting a corrupt government – but the younger generation did something.”

Samadhi Paramitha Brahmananayake is looking at the field where she spent months camped out with thousands of other demonstrators in Sri Lanka’s capital in 2022.

She can’t quite believe that luscious green grass has replaced the hundreds of protester tents that filled the field opposite the presidential secretariat.

“I feel we’re now more energetic, more powerful,” says Ms Brahmananayake, a 33-year-old banker based in Colombo.

Two years ago, huge crowds forced the country’s deeply unpopular leader from office – now voters are just days away from choosing who they want for president.

It’s the first election since the mass protests – called the “aragalaya”, Sinhalese for struggle – which were sparked by Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis. Inflation was at 70%. Basics like food, cooking gas and medicine were scarce.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president at the time, and his government were blamed for the mess. He fled the country just before crowds stormed his residence. Euphoric protesters leapt into the presidential pool, taking victory laps.

Mithun Jayawardana, 28, was one of those swimmers. “It was awesome,” he said thinking back. Jobless, with no gas or electricity at home, he says he joined the aragalaya for a lark.

Today, he recognises how crucial the elections on Saturday are: “We need a president who is elected by the people. The people didn’t elect the current president.”

Ranil Wickremesinghe, the man who currently holds the job, was appointed to the position after Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned. Mr Wickremesinghe, who’s been tasked with steering Sri Lanka through a period of painful economic reform, is running for re-election as an independent.

He’s stood for president twice before but never succeeded, and his political future appears uncertain.

Many associate Wickremesinghe with the Rajapaksas, a political dynasty who have dominated Sri Lankan politics for decades. Many blame them for the years of financial mismanagement that led to Sri Lanka’s economic woes.

Even the country’s top court ruled that Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother Mahinda, another former president, were among 13 former leaders responsible for the financial crisis.

Despite the political baggage that comes with the name, a Rajapaksa has entered the political fray in these elections – there are still places the family enjoys a lot of support.

One such district is just over an hour outside Colombo. Music, fireworks and the cheers of supporters greeted Namal Rajapaksa as he approached the podium to address the hundreds that had come to hear him speak on Monday in the town of Minuwangoda. Even his father, Mahinda joined him on stage.

Namal Rajapaksa denied his family’s role in Sri Lanka’s economic collapse.

“We know our hands are clean, we know we have not done anything wrong to the people or this country,” he told the BBC.

“We are willing to face the people, let the public decide what they want and who to vote for.”

In all, a record 38 candidates are contesting the 21 September election, none of them women. In 2019, Sajid Premadasa, leader of the country’s main opposition party, won 42% of the popular vote, losing to Gotabaya Rajapaksa. This time around he is thought to be in with a chance too.

For people looking for change, many are looking to Anura Kumara Dissanayake. The candidate of the leftist National People’s Party alliance has emerged as an unlikely frontrunner.

Thousands of people flocked to a field in the small town of Mirigama, two hours north-west from Colombo, to hear Mr Dissanayake speak last Saturday, many wearing bright pink hats or T-shirts with his face.

“Yes 100% sure, okay,” he tells the BBC, when asked if he can win. Campaigning as the voice of the working class, he is hoping to disrupt Sri Lanka’s political establishment.

Unlike past elections in Sri Lanka, the economy is front and centre in this one.

Holding her four-year-old son Nehan, Rangika Munasinghe laments the higher taxes she now pays.

“It’s very difficult. Salaries are being reduced, taxes on products and food are high. Kids meals, milk powder, all more expensive. Taxes are so high, we can’t manage it,” the 35-year-old told the BBC at a busy market in Colombo.

Sri Lanka was able to stave off bankruptcy in 2022 thanks to loans from the International Monetary Fund, and countries like China and India. But now everyone is feeling the pressure from the country’s enormous $92bn (£69bn) debt burden, which includes both foreign and national debt.

“I’m doing two jobs,” says Mohamed Rajabdeen, who’s in his 70s. He is selling spoons from a stall off a busy street. Once this is done, he will travel to his second job, working in security.

“We should get good salaries, university students should get jobs, and people should be able to live in peace and harmony. We expect our government to fulfil all of that.”

Being that vocal about their expectations from elected officials is something new for many people in Sri Lanka. That change has been brought about by the protest movement, says Buwanaka Perera, a youth political activist.

“People are more gutsy in confronting the state or in confronting what’s wrong,” the 28-year-old said. “It’s not just the state, it’s trickled down to everyday things – it can be in your household, it can be in your streets. To make a stand to voice out and to look out for one another.”

Ms Brahmananayake agrees, calling it a lasting impact of her efforts and the thousands of others who participated in the uprising two years ago.

“People are talking about politics now. They are asking questions. I think people have the power in their hands. They can vote.”

Like her, climate and political activist Melani Gunathilaka, 37, knows the path forward will not be easy for Sri Lanka, but they have hope.

“There hasn’t been a change in the political and economic culture – but there has been a massive change in terms of society,” she says.

“For the first time people took charge, people exercised their democratic rights to do what’s right for the country.”

Ranil Wickremesinghe, a six-time former prime minister, was appointed president after Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ousted in 2022.

The 75-year-old, who faced the monumental task of trying to lead Sri Lanka out of economic collapse, has been accused of protecting the Rajapaksa family, allowing them to regroup, while shielding them from prosecution – allegations he has denied.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake is the candidate of the leftist National People’s Party alliance.

His promises of tough anti-corruption measures and good governance have boosted his candidacy, positioning the 55-year-old as a serious contender.

Sajith Premadasa, the runner-up last time, is the leader of the country’s main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB).

Earlier this week, he told news agency AP that he would ensure that the rich would pay more taxes and the poor would see their conditions improve if he won.

Namal Rajapaksa comes from a powerful political clan that produced two presidents.

The 38-year-old’s campaign has centred around the legacy of his father, who is still seen as a hero by some Sri Lankans for presiding over the bloody end to the civil war against Tamil Tiger rebels. But he needs to win over voters who blame the Rajapaksas for the economic crisis.

The murder of Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei by her former partner has reignited calls for stronger action against femicide in Kenya.

The 33-year-old Ugandan died days after being doused in petrol and set alight by her ex-boyfriend at her home in Trans Nzoia county in western Kenya.

This is not an isolated incident. Kenya has one of the highest rates of violence against women in Africa.

Media reports say that in January alone more than 10 women in the country were victims of femicide, defined by the UN as the killing of women because of their gender.

Jane, not her real name, tells the BBC she has been in hiding for the better part of the year.

She says she is unable to go back to work due to life-changing injuries inflicted by her ex-partner during a brutal stabbing.

“His intention was to kill me. He stabbed me and left me for dead. Were it not for the neighbours, I would be dead,” Jane recalls.

She says she endured decades of worsening abuse before she left. Her breaking-point was when he started his aggression towards the children, she says.

“It was hell living with him. I don’t know how I persevered for those many years,” Jane adds.

Her estranged husband continues to harass her.

“I live in fear. He says he wants to finish me off. I can’t sleep at night. I’m now on medication to help with my mental health. I’m not the perpetrator but I’m living like I’m in jail.”

A 2018 World Health Organization (WHO) report suggested that 38% of women in Kenya aged between 15 and 49 had experienced violence from an intimate partner.

Groups that offer support to survivors of gender-based violence say there has been a year-on-year increase in the number of cases.

“On average, we receive up to 50 calls and sometimes 20 walk-ins in a day,” Njeri Migwi tells the BBC.

She is the head of Usikimye – Swahili for “don’t be silent”.

In 2021, then President Uhuru Kenyatta declared gender-based violence “a national crisis”.

A year later, a government report found 41% of married women had experienced physical violence.

A survey by Africa Data Hub found that between 2016 and 2023, there were more than 500 reported cases of women being killed in Kenya.

“In 75% of cases, killings were committed by a person who knew the murdered woman – an intimate partner, relative or friend,” the report says.

Sunita Caminha, UN Women specialist on ending violence against women and girls in East and southern Africa, says that women and girls of diverse backgrounds have been victims of femicide in a world marred by widespread gender discrimination and inequality.

In the latest UN report on violence against women and girls, Africa accounts for the largest share, with 20,000 women murdered.

Long-distance runner Joan Chelimo says the killing of Cheptegei has left her traumatised.

“I can’t sleep, imagining that someone was just burnt alive,” she adds.

Cheptegei’s ex-partner subsequently also died of burn wounds that he sustained in the attack on her.

Ms Chelimo is a co-founder of Tirop’s Angels, an organisation formed after the killing of another athlete, Agnes Tirop.

She says that Cheptegei reported the abuse she faced to police, but “nothing happened”.

“So the perpetrators are not held accountable,” Ms Chelimo adds.

Police have denied claims that Cheptegei reported her life was in danger.

Kenya has passed laws to address gender-based violence, but critics say few concrete measures are in place to tackle the scourge.

Judy Gitau, the Africa regional director for campaign group Equality Now, says that “unfortunately, governments often feel that once they have a law, that’s it – not understanding that laws don’t execute themselves and they don’t enforce themselves”.

Jane says that over the years her reports of abuse were dismissed.

“Many times, the police say these are domestic quarrels. In fact, one policewoman I spoke to said: ‘We cannot arrest him until he does something.’ I asked her: ‘Do you want him to kill me?’

“The next day is when he stabbed me,” Jane recalls.

In 2004, police gender desks were introduced in Kenya to make it easier for women to report cases of gender-based violence, and for investigations to be sped up.

However, only half of police stations have them. Police say this is because of a lack of resources.

In Trans Nzoia, where Cheptegei lived, there are five police stations, but none has gender desks – the only one is at the county headquarters, says Kennedy Apindi, the head of criminal investigations in the county.

“So reporting of these cases is a problem. They are reported late, or they are unreported until you hear about them in the media and that’s when the police come into action,” he adds.

Cheptegei was the third female athlete to die in Kenya allegedly at the hands of an intimate partner in the last three years.

In 2021, merely five weeks after Agnes Tirop broke a 10km road-running world record in Germany, she was found killed in her home.

The 25-year-old had multiple stab wounds on her neck and abdomen.

Her partner Ibrahim Rotich was arrested by police 640km (400 miles) away in Changamwe, on Kenya’s coast.

Three years after she was killed, the case is still in court, with Mr Rotich out on bond. He has pleaded not guilty to a charge of murder.

Other cases also run for years.

Ms Gitau, who sits on a judiciary committee set up to review the timelines for cases involving gender-based violence, says the delays are unacceptable.

“There must be prioritisation of GBV [gender-based violence],” she says.

Just six months after Tirop’s killing, Kenyan-born Bahrain runner Damaris Muthee Mutua was found dead in her home in Iten, a running hub in Kenya’s Rift Valley.

A police autopsy revealed that the 28-year-old had been strangled.

Nobody has been convicted of her killing.

Police said they were looking for her boyfriend in connection with the death.

Just like Cheptegei, both athletes allegedly reported quarrels over money and property with their partners before meeting their deaths.

In many East African communities, gender-based violence is driven by patriarchal beliefs, placing women in subordinate roles. Their independence is limited, and violence is normalised as a form of control.

Ms Gitau is calling for more safe houses for survivors.

“Deep down, our attitudes, the norms that we hold as a country, still view women in a certain light,” she says.

Expressing a similar view, Ms Chelimo says the substantial amount of money that female athletes make, or stand to earn, leaves them vulnerable.

“They go against traditional gender norms… Female athletes are now becoming more independent, financially independent, and the other gender is really upset about it,” Ms Chelimo adds.

The government says it is running sensitisation programmes, while reviewing legislation to tackle gender-based violence.

“We don’t want this to happen to any other woman, whether an athlete, or from the village, or a young girl. We need to make sure that the gender police officers are doing their work,” Rachel Kamweru from Kenya’s State Gender Department tells the BBC.

Jane says her life rests in the government’s hands, and she hopes that it will do more to protect women like her from their ex-partners.

“As long as he is free, I’ll never have peace,” she says.

• ‘Running for her family’ – Olympian mourned after vicious attack
• Kenya femicide: Why men fail to condemn deadly misogyny
• A woman’s murder exposes Kenya’s toxic online misogyny

Wendy McLean was due to start her seventh round of IVF when her doctor said she needed a hysteroscopy – a procedure to examine the inside of her uterus.

“It was sold to me as a smear test, basically. A thin narrow camera up through your cervix.

“It’ll take minutes. You won’t need pain relief. You’ll be absolutely fine,” she said.

Wendy, 38, took over-the-counter pain killers before the outpatient procedure at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in case it was uncomfortable, but this did not prepare her for what happened.

“It felt like getting a hot poker, like getting my insides ripped out. I think I described it to somebody before as like being clawed, like sharp nails, just ripping at my insides.”

Wendy said she lost consciousness twice, vomited and asked for the procedure to be stopped.

It was only when searching online she discovered thousands of other women had had similar experiences of painful hysteroscopies without anaesthetic.

NHS Grampian said they were sorry to hear about Wendy’s experience and encouraged her to get in touch with their feedback team.

“It shouldn’t be happening,” Ms McLean said. “I never realised it was happening to so many people. I thought I was a rarity, I thought I was different and awkward and I was embarrassed.”

A hysteroscopy is a procedure to examine the inside of the uterus by passing a thin telescope-like device through the cervix.

It’s described as the “gold standard” in diagnosing gynaecological conditions – including cancer.

It is used to investigate problems like heavy periods and post-menopausal bleeding. Doctors can also perform biopsies and remove fibroids or polyps.

According to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), a third of those undergoing a hysteroscopy report pain levels of seven or above out of 10.

It says patients should be offered local or general anaesthesia for the procedure and their medical history should be taken into account, including trauma or difficulty with smear tests.

But despite RCOG producing new clinical guidelines promoting pain relief and choice, many women say they are not being offered it.

May Hooper was scheduled to have an ultrasound to investigate post-menopausal bleeding at Stobhill hospital in Glasgow in July 2022.

During the procedure she was told further investigations were needed, but she said she was not told she was having a hysteroscopy or offered pain relief.

“It’s indescribable,” she said. “I really felt as though I was in a medieval torture chamber. That’s how it felt. It’s just that, I can’t believe you’re doing that to women. I had every indication under the sun for them not to do that.”

Ms Hooper asked for the procedure to be stopped and it was rescheduled – this time under general anaesthetic. The 73-year-old has complained to her health board, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC).

She is now fighting for women to be given more information about the risk of pain and pain relief options – including general anaesthetic.

“It is a very important diagnostic procedure, absolutely, but it does not have to be painful. This is 2024 – we’re not living in the 1600s.”

NHSGGC told BBC Scotland News it would not comment on an individual case but said it followed all appropriate national guidelines while striving to ensure patients’ needs were met as treatments progress, with alternative pathways available if required.

Dr Lucky Saraswat is a consultant gynaecologist in Aberdeen, who trains doctors on how to perform hysteroscopies. She says the procedure is not painful for the vast majority of women but it’s important for patients to know they are in control.

She said: “We just have to help people make an informed choice of how they want to do it.

“Some people wouldn’t want to have an anaesthetic, as the anaesthetic is not without risks either. So, a lot of people choose to have it done in outpatient settings. Some will make a choice of having an anaesthetic.”

Campaigners claim the new clinical Green Top Guidelines minimise the risk of pain that patients may experience.

Dr Geeta Kumar, consultant gynaecologist and vice president of RCOG, said they had listened to patients’ concerns.

“Clear accurate written and verbal information must be provided, both at the time of referral, and at the procedure appointment,” she said.

“This will support a woman to make an informed choice, including whether they want to proceed with the procedure and if so, their preferences for treatment setting and pain relief options.”

Katharine Tylko, from the Campaign Against Painful Hysteroscopy, said: “It will have no impact whatsoever, apart from a few very conscientious and compassionate fighting-types of gynaecologist – young women who will say – ‘We want decent care for our patients.’

“These guidelines are not mandatory.”

Two years ago, rap musician and mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs threw a lavish 53rd birthday party at his $61m mansion in Beverly Hills.

A host of stars lined up to toast his career, with a guest list that included Jay-Z, Travis Scott, Mary J Blige, Kehlani, Tinashe, Chris Brown and Machine Gun Kelly.

The party coincided with his 30th year in the music industry – three decades in which he formed his own entertainment empire and changed the sound of hip-hop, both as an artist and a producer for the likes of Mariah Carey, Jennifer Lopez and The Notorious B.I.G.

Fast-forward to 2024, and his career is on the ropes.

In a case filed in New York, the star has been accused of kidnapping, drugging and coercing women into sexual activities, sometimes through the use of firearms and threats of violence.

The same Los Angeles mansion that hosted his birthday party was raided by police in March. There, officers seized supplies that they say were intended for use in orgies known as “freak offs”, including drugs and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil.

Mr Combs has denied all the charges, entering a not guilty plea on Tuesday, 17 September.

The court case comes after a year in which the musician has faced lawsuits from a number of women.

Here is how the allegations against Mr Combs have stacked up.

Casandra Ventura, a singer and model known as Cassie, was signed to Mr Combs’ record label and dated him for more than a decade.

But in a civil lawsuit, she said the mogul had used his position of power to “set the groundwork” for a “manipulative and coercive romantic and sexual relationship”.

Her lawsuit included graphic descriptions of violent abuse, alleging that Mr Combs “regularly beat and kicked Ms Ventura, leaving black eyes, bruises, and blood”.

She described parties known as “freak offs” – drug-fuelled, days-long sexual performances – which Mr Combs allegedly coerced women into, and filmed for his own pleasure.

Ms Ventura also accused the musician of sexual abuse and rape, and claimed that many of these incidents were witnessed by his “tremendously loyal network” who “were not willing to do anything meaningful” to stop the violence.

The lawsuit also alleged that Mr Combs destroyed a car belonging to US rapper Kid Cudi, to dissuade him from dating her.

Mr Combs strenuously denied the allegations and accused Ms Ventura of extortion.

They settled the case for an undisclosed amount a day after it was filed in New York, with Mr Combs maintaining his innocence.

In the weeks after settling Cassie’s lawsuit, Mr Combs was accused of sexual assault dating back to 1991 by multiple women.

One lawsuit was filed anonymously by a woman who claimed Mr Combs and another man had coerced her into sex.

In a second, Joi Dickerson-Neal accused the star of drugging and sexually assaulting her when she was a college student in 1991. She also claimed he filmed the attack and showed it to other people without her consent.

A third woman, Liza Gardner, filed court papers accusing Mr Combs and another man of raping her and her friend more than 30 years ago, when she was 16.

Ms Gardner also alleged that Mr Combs had turned violent days after the attack, choking her so hard that she passed out.

In the lawsuit, she said Mr Combs had become irate while trying to track down her friend, because he was worried she would inform “the girl he was with at the time”.

The lawsuits all came shortly before the expiration of the New York Adult Survivors Act, which temporarily allowed people who said they had been sexually abused to file claims, even after the statute of limitations had expired.

Mr Combs denied all the allegations, and his spokesperson called the lawsuits a “money grab”.

Another woman sued in December, claiming she was “sex trafficked” and “gang raped” by Mr Combs, former Bad Boy Records president Harve Pierre and another man in 2003, when she was 17.

In court papers, the woman, known only as Jane Doe, alleged she was given “copious amounts of drugs and alcohol” before the attack and was left in so much pain that she could barely stand or remember how she got home.

In response, Mr Combs said he “did not do any of the awful things being alleged”, while Mr Pierre said the “disgusting allegations” were “false and a desperate attempt for financial gain”.

On 6 December, Mr Combs responded to the flurry of lawsuits with a statement on his Instagram page.

“ENOUGH IS ENOUGH,” he wrote. “For the last couple of weeks, I have sat silently and watched people try to assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy.

“Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”

Music producer Rodney Jones Jr, who produced nine tracks on 2023’s The Love Album, sued Mr Combs in February 2024, accusing the star of making unwanted sexual contact and forcing him to hire prostitutes and participate in sex acts with them.

In court papers filed in New York, Mr Jones also claimed that Mr Combs tried to “groom” him into having sex with another man, telling him it was “a normal practice in the music industry”.

Mr Combs’ lawyer, Shawn Holley, called Mr Jones “nothing more than a liar” and described his claims as “pure fiction” that could be discredited by “overwhelming, indisputable proof”.

CCTV footage emerged showing Mr Combs assaulting Cassie Ventura in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.

The pictures, broadcast by CNN, showed a man pushing Ms Ventura to the floor and kicking her while she was on the ground. He later attempted to drag her by her shirt and throw an object at her.

A day later, Mr Combs apologised, saying: “I take full responsibility for my actions in that video. I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now.”

Ms Ventura later posted a statement highlighting the lifelong impact of domestic violence. “It broke me down to someone I never thought I would become,” she wrote.

Model and actress Crystal McKinney accused Mr Combs of drugging her and forcing her to perform oral sex in the bathroom of a New York City recording studio in 2003.

Two days later, Mr Combs was sued again by April Lampros, who alleged four instances of sexual assault between 1995 and about 2000.

Ms Lampros claimed she met the musician in 1994 while a student at the Fashion Institute of Tecnhology, and that an initially romantic relationship “quickly turned into an aggressive, coercive, and abusive relationship based on sex”.

In one incident, she claimed the star forced her to take ecstasy and have sex with his then-girlfriend.

Former adult film star Adria English claimed she was “groomed into sex trafficking over time” in a number of events between 2004 and 2009 at Mr Combs’s star-studded parties.

His lawyer Jonathan Davis responded: “No matter how many lawsuits are filed it won’t change the fact that Mr Combs has never sexually assaulted or sex trafficked anyone.”

Mr Combs failed to attend a virtual hearing for a lawsuit filed against him by Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith, a Michigan inmate who claimed the star drugged and sexually assaulted him at a party in Detroit in 1997.

The no-show led to a default judgment against Mr Combs, who was ordered to pay Mr Caredello-Smith $100m (£75m).

The musician’s lawyers later filed an emergency motion to overturn the ruling.

Dawn Richard, a former singer in Mr Combs’ girl group project Danity Kane, filed a suit against the star.

The singer, who later joined Mr Combs in the band Diddy Dirty Money, alleged that the musician sexually assaulted her on multiple occasions by touching her body, as well as verbally abusing and overworking her.

The star was arrested in a Manhattan hotel room after a grand jury indictment.

His lawyer said the star had co-operated with authorities, and voluntarily relocated to New York in anticipation of the charges.

“These are the acts of an innocent man with nothing to hide, and he looks forward to clearing his name in court,” he added.

In an appearance at the US District Court in New York, Mr Combs was charged with sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution.

In an indictment that was unsealed at the same time, prosecutors alleged that he also engaged in kidnapping, forced labour, bribery and other crimes.

They described him as the head of a criminal enterprise that abused women, using threats of violence to force them into participating in drug-fuelled orgies with male prostitutes.

These “freak offs” were “elaborate and produced sex performances” and were highly organised parties, prosecutors said.

Mr Combs’ associates allegedly booked hotel suites, recruited sex workers and distributed drugs including cocaine, methamphetamine and oxycodone to coerce partygoers into sex and keep them “obedient”.

His staff allegedly arranged travel for the victims and organised the supply of intravenous fluids to help them recover from the parties, which sometimes lasted for days.

Prosecutors also alleged that Mr Combs taped the “freak offs” and would use the footage to pressure his victims into silence.

Mr Combs’ lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, declared his client’s innocence, and described the “freak offs” as consensual.

“Is it sex trafficking?” he asked. “Not if everybody wants to be there.”

Mr Combs pleaded not guilty to the charges.

But he was denied bail after prosecutors argued that he posed “a significant risk of obstructing justice”, reporting that he had “already tried to obstruct the government’s investigation of this case, repeatedly contacting victims and witnesses and feeding them false narratives of events”.

The judge cited the star’s anger issues and history of substance abuse as reasons for keeping him detained until the trial.

“My concern is that this is a crime that happens behind closed doors,” he said.

Demi Moore’s new film, The Substance, begins normally enough.

Set in Los Angeles, it opens with an aerial view of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where a new star is being installed. Builders are seen taking great care as they lay it, and there is great fanfare when it opens to the public.

But over time, the star honouring Moore’s character Elisabeth Sparkle becomes cracked and damaged. It gets trampled on and ignored. One passing man drops his burger, leaving it smeared with ketchup.

The whole sequence lasts only a minute or two, and although the metaphor is unsubtle, it perfectly sets the tone for the film that follows; its themes of youth, beauty and relevance, and how far people will go to achieve them.

Then the movie takes a very dark turn.

Fired from a TV show due to falling ratings, Sparkle goes to extreme lengths to create a perfect version of herself. The Substance ultimately becomes a straight-up body horror, packed full of blood and gore, which has prompted both controversy and acclaim.

“It was a completely unique, out-of-the-box script, you could tell it was visually stimulating,” Moore tells BBC News, “and at the same time, we had no idea how it would end up, which made it even more risky and juicy.”

The role required the 61-year-old to embrace being unglamorous, to put it mildly, highlighting her ageing character’s own fading beauty.

“I felt like that was why I wanted to do it, in a way,” Moore reflects. “Part of what made it interesting was going to such a raw, vulnerable place, to really kind of peel away. And it was quite liberating in many respects.”

A feminist film about ageism and unrealistic beauty standards is not unusual, but what makes the film so gruesome is the titular substance used by the main character.

The movie sees Sparkle use the black-market drug to – quite literally – split herself in two, creating a younger, more beautiful version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley).

Initially, living as her alter-ego brings her everything she ever wanted. But it doesn’t take long for the wheels to come off as Sparkle moves back and forth from body to body.

Director Coralie Fargeat says the casting process was a “big challenge”, but adds Moore “really understood the part”.

“I knew from the start that with that kind of story, casting an actress to confront those very intense themes, which are resonating very closely, was going to be really difficult,” she tells BBC News.

The director, who made her feature debut in 2017 with Revenge, says she was looking for an actress who would “represent the scale of the role I wanted, together with someone who would take the risk to jump in this”.

“And when the idea of Demi came on the table I was really sure she wouldn’t want to do it, I thought it would be too scary. And when I heard she reacted positively to the script, it was like, ‘Oh my god! I was very surprised.”

The Substance will likely leave you conflicted. The first hour or so is exactly what cinema should be – daring, original, engaging.

The second half of the film isn’t necessarily worse, but your opinion of it will depend on your tolerance for gore.

Qualley herself highlights that, in an age where many acclaimed directors are making “quiet, intimate films”, she likes how this one “smashes you over the head”.

Some reviews have awarded the film five stars, including the Telegraph’s Tim Robey, who wrote: “The Substance is a humdinger of a satirical horror-thriller, by turns hilarious, affecting and jaw-droppingly grotesque.”

“The Substance will get you thinking, talking and squirming,” added Rolling Stone’s Anna Smith. “Body horror [is pushed] to the limit, daring the viewer to keep looking rather than hide, wretch or even vomit – all reactions are entirely feasible.”

Not everybody was a fan. Kevin Maher of the Times called the film “puerile, pointless and intellectually specious”, noting that some audience members walked out of the Cannes Film Festival screening.

Issues of taste aside, Moore and Qualley turn in arguably the best performances of their respective careers, with Moore especially impressive as Sparkle descends into madness.

Fargeat says that, when she met Moore: “I got to know a lot more of who she was as a person, what she had overcome in her own life to get to a place where she felt strong enough and good enough with herself to confront all this vulnerability.

“I felt she really understood what I was going to request from her. The filmmaking, the level of risk-taking, nudity, and she was ready to take those risks.”

Moore’s is the more wide-ranging role, but Qualley had a different kind of challenge, having to portray someone who is supposed to be the embodiment of perfection.

“I’ve never felt so defensive of my own body,” she says, “so I think it taught me to appreciate what I have, and gave me a closeness to myself that I really value.”

Defensive in what way? “When you’re meant to be playing perfect, and you’ve got close-up shots of your butt, and you’ve got fake boobs on, and you’re wrapping yourself up like a piece of candy, the whole goal is to create this character that looks perfect,” she explains.

“And in doing so we’re changing all the little pieces of me that are not perfect, hiding what’s not perfect about Margaret in order to make me Sue, and so I was really excited to go back to being me.”

Moore picks up: “I feel in a lot of ways like Margaret had a more pressured situation [than me] with it having to be more perfect. I felt great that I could show up and look like [rubbish]!”

Awards pundits have been debating whether the film could have an impact on the Oscars race. The quality is certainly there in the screenplay, directing, make-up, special effects, soundtrack and acting.

Many feel Moore in particular is overdue some Academy recognition, following a long career with film credits including Ghost and A Few Good Men.

But The Substance may be a bit too much to stomach for some voters. It will be fascinating to see whether or not the Oscars go for it.

Moore chooses her words carefully when asked about the possible awards the film might bring, as is often the case for actors who don’t wish to jinx any potential Oscars.

“Always when you do something, you hope that it resonates, and hope that it has an impact, and I certainly appreciate things that are thought-provoking,” she says.

“More than anything, I hope there is a real cultural shift, that this can open the pathway for. So where that goes, I don’t know.”

The film has been seen by many as a comment on Hollywood’s absurd beauty standards.

Fargeat reflects: “It’s about what women look like, and how everything that is projected on them, from a young age, shapes their state of mind.

“From the self-hatred and feeling that they’re never good enough, beautiful enough, thin enough, young enough. At each age, there is something that can make you feel like you’re not right.”

Conversations about beauty standards within Hollywood specifically have become more enlightened in recent years, with Moore acknowledging “we’ve definitely made progress”.

“Do we have steps to take to go further? Most definitely,” she reflects. “But I think there is already so much more diversity and representation of women in various forms of beauty, whether it’s ageing, race, size. And from where I started, that’s come a long way.”

Radio waves from Elon Musk’s growing network of satellites are blocking scientists’ ability to peer into the universe, according to researchers in the Netherlands.

The new generation of Starlink satellites, which provide fast internet around the world, are interfering more with radio telescopes than earlier versions, they say.

The thousands of orbiting satellites are “blinding” radio telescopes and may be hindering astronomical research, according to Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON).

SpaceX, which owns Starlink, has not replied to a request from BBC News for comment.

The satellites provide broadband internet around the world, often to remote places, including challenging environments like Ukraine and Yemen.

They are also used to connect remote areas of the UK to fast internet. In 2022 tests showed that Starlink could deliver internet speeds four times faster than the average, according to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

But astronomers say this comes at a cost.

“Every time more of these are launched with these kinds of emission levels, we see less and less of the sky,” Professor Jessica Dempsey, director of ASTRON, told BBC News.

“We’re trying to look at things like the jets, which are emitted from black holes in the centre of galaxies. We also look at some of the earliest galaxies, millions and millions of light years away, as well as exoplanets,” she said, highlighting the areas the satellite radiation is affecting.

Interference from the second generation, or V2, satellites was found by ASTRON to be 32 times stronger than the first generation.

The amount of radiation emitted exceeds regulations set by the industry body the International Telecommunications Union, Prof Dempsey added.

One estimate suggests there are 6,402 Starlink satellites currently in orbit at around 342 miles (550km) above Earth, making it the largest provider by far.

The satellites are relatively large – with 3m flat panels and an 8m solar array for power.

SpaceX’s main competitor, OneWeb, has fewer than 1,000. But it is a growing business area. Amazon is developing its own network and hopes to launch at least 3,000 in the next few years.

By 2030 the number of satellites in orbit is expected to surpass 100,000.

The study was done using the LOFAR radio telescope in the Netherlands on a single day in July earlier this year.

Many objects in space, including distant galaxies and planets, emit light on the electromagnetic spectrum.

This radiation travels like waves and radio telescopes can pick up on those waves, allowing us to get a picture of things we can’t see with our eyes.

But those waves are being disturbed by satellites.

The scientists found unintended electromagnetic radiation from almost all the V2 Starlink satellites observed.

It was about 10 million times brighter than from the weakest sources of light identified, they say.

Lead author Cees Bassa said it was like comparing the “faintest stars visible to the naked eye and the brightness of the full Moon.”

“Since SpaceX is launching about 40 second-generation Starlink satellites every week, this problem is becoming increasingly worse,” he added.

Robert Massey, Deputy Executive Director of the Royal Astronomical Society in the UK, said: “it’s very clear that if you have something this bright that is compromising a major radio observatory this much, then we need to do something and we need to do it quickly.”

Asked about the value of the astronomy research, he said: “it’s wrong to say that there is some science that you can simply dismiss. The applications may be decades or even longer in the future but they can be very fundamental and very important.”

Scientists are also worried about light pollution from the satellites, and fear it is also interfering with optical telescopes.

Astronomers say they talked to SpaceX about radiation from the first generation of satellites and the company listened to their concerns.

But ASTRON now say the V2 have been found to be even more powerful.

“Turning LOFAR back up and seeing these booming signals from these new generation of V2 Mini SpaceX satellites was a bit shocking,” says Prof Dempsey.

“This is actually threatening the entirety of ground based astronomy in every wavelength and in different ways. If it continues, without the sort of mitigation to make these satellites quiet, then it does become an existential threat for the kinds of astronomy we do,” Prof Dempsey added.

The researchers stress that more regulation of space and how satellites operate is needed to avoid scientific work being compromised.

They said that as the largest provider of satellites, SpaceX could set a standard for limiting pollution.

Prof Dempsey said that simple actions like shielding the battery on the satellite could make a big difference and reduce the radiation emitted.

Some interference comes from faulty electronics, so this could prevent that happening.

But without action, “very soon the only constellations we will see will be human-made,” she added.

The findings are published in the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

A week after Donald Trump’s comments at a presidential debate thrust this city in south-west Ohio into the national spotlight, community members are still struggling at times to separate fact from fiction.

The cameras have mostly been put away, the Proud Boys have gone home, and the town of Springfield, Ohio seems to have reached a shaky, temporary peace.

The only sign of the chaos of this past week is state troopers guarding local schools, called in by Ohio Gov Mike DeWine after nearly 30 bomb threats against schools and government buildings. State authorities say the threats have mostly come from outside the US, but their exact origin – and who’s behind them – is still a mystery.

If there’s one thing that most people are certain about here, it’s that the rumour that kicked everything off – that Haitians are regularly capturing and eating pet cats and dogs – is false.

At first glance Springfield looks like a typical small midwestern city.

Its virtues include stately homes from the city’s heyday, a few busy downtown blocks, an art museum, a leafy campus and a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house. But not far away are areas full of decaying strip malls backed by blocks of boarded-up houses and threaded through with chewed-up, potholed streets.

Springfield’s population had been declining for decades before a few years ago, when Haitians were drawn here by the relatively low cost of living and the promise of work in local factories. City estimates of the number of Haitians here range from 12,000 to 20,000, in a city previously home to about 60,000, according to the 2020 census.

Business owners and some residents have welcomed the newcomers, but some have complained about rent increases, strains on local schools and hospitals and dangerous drivers.

Tensions were amplified last year when a car driven by a Haitian immigrant hit a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy.

And then in recent weeks came the cat rumours. They began with a YouTube clip containing a second-hand account and a Facebook post attributed to the friend of the daughter of a neighbour. The woman behind the post recently retracted her account, saying she looked further into the story and determined it wasn’t true.

But the idea that Haitian immigrants were eating pets – allegations that have long been lobbed at a variety of immigrant groups in many countries – had already gone viral. They spread to right-wing accounts with big followings, until they were repeated online by Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, and by Trump during last Wednesday’s debate.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats.”

Following the debate, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, told BBC Newsnight people need to better understand “the weight of their words and how it can negatively affect communities”.

It’s unclear why Trump mentioned dogs – the online rumours focused on cats and also on wild ducks and geese. Local police have not recorded any cases of pets being devoured.

Independent, right-wing and pro-Trump news sources searched for evidence, in some cases offering rewards for proof of cat abduction. So far no evidence of pet eating has come to light.

Despite the false claims, Trump’s comments put Springfield in the national spotlight, increasing tensions between the Haitian community and local residents.

Haitians here talk of a sense of fear created by the misinformation.

Laura Koveleski, 26, grew up in the city and along with her Haitian mother runs a business providing translation and other services to the immigrants. She recounted a number of incidents of harassment – beyond the bomb threats – which she says have created a climate of fear and paranoia.

“Haitians, who have just been minding their business, going to work and coming home, are now terrified to walk on the streets or to gather together,” she said.

She also said the immigrant community has been unfairly portrayed as “illegal”.

The city says most of the recent immigrants are legal asylum seekers who have been granted Temporary Protected Status, which gives them permission to work and receive social benefits.

At the same time, many long-term residents fear their concerns are being dismissed out of hand because of the cat-eating falsehoods.

One resident who did not want to give his name told the BBC that the Haitians were being taken advantage of, being charged high rent and offered lower wages – with corresponding knock-on economic effects for the existing population.

“They’re being used,” he said. “They’re not getting treated good at all.”

But “everybody’s cats are safe, dogs are safe,” he added.

He suggested that Haitians, who have been encouraged to move here by some local businesses to help with post-pandemic labour shortages, are being exploited by businesses and government officials.

Rumours that white vans have been transporting more migrants here continued to worry some residents.

In reality, the vans are factory transportation vehicles taking workers to jobs.

At Haitian restaurant Rose Goute in the south of Springfield, businessman Jacob Payen says life for Haitians like him has become “complicated” in the last week.

“A lot of people are living in fear they don’t even want to go out to the grocery stores, and that bothers me, because it wasn’t like that before,” he said.

Mr Payen, 46, who runs a religious and spiritual goods store and helps out at Rose Goute, first emigrated to Florida where he lived for two decades before moving to Springfield three years ago.

“The whole place was looking like a ghost town. It was abandoned,” he recalls.

When he first heard the rumours, he says, he thought “maybe somebody’s joking, or maybe somebody is doing a prank on the community”.

“But then we hear it from the former president and his Vice-President (nominee). Then it becomes serious,” he said.

Mr Vance, in an interview with CNN, said: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

He then clarified that he based his statements about pet-eating on “firsthand accounts from my constituents”.

The Ohio senator, who grew up about 50 miles (80km) away from Springfield, has not given further details. His office did not respond to requests for comment.

Vance and Trump’s comments have brought a flurry of attention on this city that has only just started to let up.

Dozens of bomb threats, many against schools, have set many Springfield families on edge.

“I think they need to leave the schools out of it,” said one mother outside of Spring Hill Elementary School on Tuesday.

A local cultural fest, which was supposed to celebrate diversity, has also been cancelled.

Several far-right groups appeared here, including a weekend rally by the Proud Boys, but those groups seem to have moved on.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, said he may return for a campaign rally, and some residents say they’re worried that if that happens, it will start things up again.

But while these outside forces have been felt in the town, it’s local conflicts that are on everyone’s mind.

Driving through town, I witnessed a car crash involving a Haitian woman and an elderly local. The Haitian woman’s car flipped over. She and her small baby were taken to hospital for evaluation, but nobody involved was seriously injured.

It was unclear who exactly was at fault but one of the women in the local’s car was adamant that the Haitian driver had run a red light.

Shaken from the car crash, she said: “Haitians, they need to go back, all of them.”

Ms Koveleski, who runs the translation and advice service with her Haitian mother, said she understands the concerns of long-time locals – she is one herself. But she recounted a number of stories of harassment and assaults against of Haitian immigrants since last Wednesday’s debate.

“There’s a woman who came into my office with her small son, who’s probably around four years old, and she just wanted a one way ticket (away from Springfield) because she’s terrified of someone killing her son,” she said. “She says in the area that she lives in she gets people yelling at her. She knows it’s hateful, but she doesn’t understand what they’re saying.”

One possible positive outcome of the focus on Springfield, she said, is that it might prompt state and federal authorities to deliver funds to support projects, such as a youth center, that would benefit all residents.

“Haitians are terrified and locals are angry, but now that we have national attention, we can seek federal help, and this can do big things for the town,” she said.

And Mr Payen said he feels heartened by the response from many non-Haitians. He’s kept a careful eye on Rose Goute’s clientele over the past week and says more than 90% have been non-Haitians.

“They trying to see what the food tastes like,” he says. “But they’re also coming to support us as a community.”

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Google has won its challenge against a €1.49bn (£1.26bn) fine from the EU for blocking rival online search advertisers.

The bloc accused Google of abusing its market dominance by restricting third-party rivals from displaying search ads between 2006 and 2016.

Europe’s second-top court ruled the European Commission – which levied the fine – “committed errors in its assessment”.

The Commission said it would “reflect on possible next steps”, which could include an appeal to the EU’s top court.

Google welcomed the ruling: “We are pleased that the court has recognised errors in the original decision and annulled the fine,” it said in a statement.

“We will review the full decision closely,” it added.

It is a rare win for the tech giant, which was hit with fines worth a total of 8.2 billion euros between 2017 and 2019 over antitrust violations.

It failed in its attempt to have one of those fines overturned last week.

It is not just in under Europe where it is under pressure over its highly lucrative ad tech business.

Earlier this month, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally found it used anti-competitive practices to dominate the market.

The US government is also taking the tech giant to court over the same issue, with prosecutors alleging its parent company, Alphabet, illegally operates a monopoly in the market.

Alphabet has argued its market dominance is due to the effectiveness of its products.

This case revolved around Google’s AdSense product, which delivers adverts to websites – making Google almost like a broker for ads.

The Commission concluded Google had abused its dominance to prevent websites from using brokers other than AdSense when they were seeking adverts for their web pages.

It said the firm then added other “restrictive” clauses to its contracts to reinforce its market dominance – and levied a €1.49bn fine as a penalty.

In its ruling, the EU’s General Court upheld the majority of the Commission’s findings – but annulled the decision by which the Commission imposed the fine

It said the Commission had not considered “all the relevant circumstances” concerning the contract clauses and how it defined the market.

Because of this, it ruled the Commission did not establish “an abuse of dominant position.”

A capybara missing from a Shropshire zoo has been spotted, but remains on the run in the wild.

Cinnamon managed to escape from her enclosure at Hoo Zoo in Telford on Friday when the gates were opened for grass cutting.

Will Dorrell from the zoo said she was not far away, and was spotted overnight by a drone in a field about 200m (650ft) away from her home.

However, he said locating her and catching her were “two very different things”.

“Last night we went out with a search party and put a drone up and we actually got a very good image of her fortunately in a field only about 200 metres from her home so we are very optimistic now we can hopefully entice her back or catch her,” he said.

“Obviously locating her and catching her are two very different things, but we are feeling a lot more optimistic.”

The team attempted to recapture her on Tuesday evening but said she managed to hide in dense thicket and a decision was made to place live traps rather than attempt to catch her by hand and cause her further stress.

The traps were cages with an automatic door that cause no harm to the animal, the zoo said.

The rescue attempt has prompted huge interest as keepers plan a way of recapturing her.

Cinnamon was born at the zoo alongside brother Churro, and is now around one year old.

Mr Dorrell has said she made it to the Humber Brook river, near the attraction’s northern boundary, which was “a capybara’s paradise” due to the vegetation and nearby water.

“She can move up to 20mph if she really gets going and the undergrowth she can move through is a lot, lot thicker than what we can move through so we have got that issue as well.

“And she’s a fantastic swimmer so really she beats us on all counts,” he added.

“I’d love in an ideal world to say we’d have her back tonight or in 48 hours but the actual truth of the matter is, where she is is a capybara’s paradise.

“There’s loads of water over there, there’s loads of ponds, loads of streams, loads of food.”

He said they had seen her “munching on grass quite happily”.

“We watched her on the drone, sat there munching on grass quite happily so realistically, getting her back is going to be a challenge.”

He said they would continue to monitor the situation while carrying out further searches and thanked everyone for their help so far.

The animals are native to South America and are the largest living rodents in the world.

A shy yellow-eyed penguin has come out on top of one of New Zealand’s most contested competitions to win Bird of the Year.

More than 50,000 people voted in the competition – which has in the past seen its fair share of scandal – including claims of foreign interference and allegations of cheating.

Last year, the pūteketeke won the competition after comedian John Oliver threw his weight behind it, launching a campaign that involved him dressing up as the bird, complete with a striking burnt-orange mullet.

Thought to be one of the world’s rarest penguin species, the hoiho can be found only in New Zealand.

According to Forest & Bird, the organisation that runs the competition, the hoiho secured a victory with 6,328 votes – ahead of the Karure Chatham Island black robin with more than 5,000 votes.

This is the second time the hoiho has swooped in to win the competition, having also come in first in 2019 – the same year where allegations arose that the hoiho had only won after Russian interference.

Hundreds of votes for the bird were found to have come from Russia, though Forest & Bird said these were likely not fradulent votes, but those from Russian ornithologists.

In 2018, there were also claims that Australians tried to rig the contest in favour of the shag – a species of cormorant.

The hoiho, whose Maori name means “noise shouter”, is notoriously shy despite its loud, shrill call, says the organisation, who said the win would raise conservation efforts for the species.

It is an endangered species or three steps away from extinction and its numbers are decreasing, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

“This spotlight couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Forest & Bird’s chief executive Nicola Toki. “This iconic penguin is disappearing from mainland Aotearoa (New Zealand) before our eyes.”

Conservation efforts are taking place on land but Ms Toki says they are also needed at sea.

“They’re drowning in set nets and can’t find enough food,” she said. “Our hoiho urgently need marine protected areas to give them a shot at survival.”

At least 20 people have been killed and more than 450 wounded by a second wave of explosions from wireless communication devices in Lebanon, the country’s health ministry says.

Walkie-talkies used by the armed group Hezbollah blew up in the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and southern Lebanon – areas seen as its strongholds.

Some of the blasts took place during funerals for some of the 12 people who the ministry said were killed when Hezbollah members’ pagers exploded on Tuesday. Hezbollah blamed Israel for that attack. Israel has not commented.

The attacks came as Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “new phase in the war” and as an Israeli army division was redeployed to the north.

UN Secretary General António Guterres warned of the “serious risk of a dramatic escalation” and called on all parties to “exercise maximum restraint”.

“Obviously the logic of making all these devices explode is to do it as a pre-emptive strike before a major military operation,” he told reporters.

There were already rising fears of an all-out conflict after 11 months of cross-border fighting sparked by the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Hours after Wednesday’s explosions, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to return the tens of thousands of displaced people from the north of the country “securely to their homes”.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant meanwhile said Israel was “opening a new phase in the war” and that the “centre of gravity is shifting to the north through the diversion of resources and forces”.

An army division recently engaged in Gaza has been redeployed to the north, the Israeli military confirmed.

Hezbollah says it is acting in support of Hamas – which is also backed by Iran and proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel and many Western countries – and will only stop its cross-border attacks once the fighting in Gaza ends.

An indication of what the group might be planning to do next could come on Thursday, when its powerful leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is due to give a speech.

Hezbollah’s media office on Wednesday announced the death of 13 of its fighters, including a 16-year-old boy, since the second wave of explosions.

It also said the group targeted Israeli forces near the border and in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights during the day, firing rockets at Israeli artillery positions.

The Israeli military said about 30 projectiles crossed from Lebanon on Wednesday, sparking a fire but causing no injuries.

It said Israeli aircraft struck Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon.

Wednesday’s deadly explosions represent another humiliation for Hezbollah and a possible indication that its entire communication network might have been infiltrated by Israel.

Many Lebanese are still shocked – and angered – by what happened on Tuesday, when thousands of pagers exploded at the same time, after people received a message they believed had come from the group.

Twelve people – including an eight-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy – were killed and 2,800 others were wounded by the blasts, according to the Lebanese health minister.

A BBC team was at a funeral for four of those killed in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiya on Wednesday when they heard a loud explosion around 17:00 local time (14:00 GMT).

There was chaos and confusion among the mourners, and then reports started to come in of explosions happening in other parts of the country as well.

One unconfirmed social media video showed a man falling to the ground following a small blast during what appeared to be a Hezbollah procession attended by large crowds.

The Lebanese Red Cross said more than 30 ambulances had responded to explosions in the capital’s southern suburbs, as well as in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

The health ministry said the deadly explosions “targeted walkie-talkies”. A source close to Hezbollah also told AFP news agency that walkie-talkies used by its members had blown up.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) said one man was killed when a walkie-talkie exploded inside a shop selling cellular devices in Chaat, in the northern Bekaa Valley.

It identified the device as an ICOM-V82 handheld VHF radio, which is a now-discontinued model made by the Japan-based electronics manufacturer ICOM.

NNA said another ICOM-V82 exploded at a house on the outskirts of the nearby town of Baalbek. Video footage showed fire damage to a table and wall, as well as damaged parts of what appeared to be a walkie-talkie bearing the label “ICOM”.

Photos on social media from two other locations appeared to show the same model.

Reuters news agency cited a Lebanese security source as saying the walkie-talkies were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago – around the same time as the pagers were bought.

The Axios news website cited two sources as saying that Israeli intelligence services had booby-trapped thousands of walkie-talkies before delivering them to Hezbollah as part of the group’s war-time emergency communications system.

The BBC asked ICOM’s UK arm to comment on the reports, but it referred all media requests to the company’s press office in Japan. The BBC has reached out to ICOM Japan.

US and Lebanese sources told the New York Times and Reuters that Israel had planted small amounts of explosives inside the pagers which blew up on Tuesday.

An ophthalmologist at one hospital in Beirut told the BBC that at least 60% of the people he had seen had lost at least one eye, with most also losing a hand.

“Probably this is the worst day of my life as a physician. I believe the number of casualties and the type of damage that has been done is humongous,” Dr Elias Warrak said.

“Unfortunately, we were not able to save a lot of eyes, and unfortunately the damage is not limited to the eyes – some of them have damage in the brain in addition to any facial damage.”

At least 26 people including two children were killed and thousands more injured, many seriously, after communication devices, some used by the armed group Hezbollah, dramatically exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday.

In the latest round of blasts, exploding walkie-talkies killed 14 and injured at least 450 people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

The explosions occurred in the vicinity of a large crowd that had gathered for the funerals of four victims of Tuesday’s blasts.

BBC teams in the city reported chaotic scenes in which ambulances struggled to reach the injured, and locals became suspicious of anyone using a phone.

The explosions deepened unease in Lebanese society, coming a day after an apparently similar, and highly sophisticated attack targeting pagers used by Hezbollah members.

The militant group blamed its adversary Israel. Israeli officials have so far declined to comment.

Two firms based in Taiwan and Hungary accused in media reports of manufacturing the pagers have both denied responsibility.

Here is what we know so far.

The first round of blasts began in Lebanon’s capital Beirut and several other areas of the country at about 15:45 local time (13:45 BST) on Tuesday.

Witnesses reported seeing smoke coming from people’s pockets, before seeing small explosions that sounded like fireworks and gunshots.

Citing US officials, the New York Times said that the pagers received messages that appeared to be coming from Hezbollah’s leadership before detonating. The messages instead appeared to trigger the devices, the outlet reported.

Explosions continued for around an hour after the initial blasts, the Reuters news agency reported.

Soon after, scores of people began arriving at hospitals across Lebanon, with witnesses reporting mass confusion in emergency departments.

Similar scenes played out across the country in another round of blasts Wednesday, at around 17:00 local time (15:00 BST).

Reports suggest it was walkie-talkies that were blown up, devices that were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, according to a security source speaking to Reuters.

At least one explosion was close to a funeral being held in Beirut for some of the victims of Tuesday’s attack, creating panic among those near the procession.

Nine people have been killed and hundreds more injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

• LIVE: Latest updates on the Hezbollah walkie-talkie explosions
• Watch: Video appears to show pager explosion at supermarket
• Bowen: Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred
• What is Hezbollah in Lebanon and why is it fighting with Israel?

Details about the walkie-talkies detonated in Wednesday’s explosions are still coming to light.

Footage shot in the aftermath showed destroyed devices bearing the brand Icom, a Japanese company. The BBC reached out to Icom Japan via a contact form on their website but has not receive a reply.

The pagers that exploded on Tuesday were a new brand that the group had not used before, one Hezbollah operative told the AP news agency. A Lebanese security official told the Reuters news agency that around 5,000 pagers were brought into the country about five months ago.

Labels seen on fragments of exploded pagers point to a pager model called the Rugged Pager AR-924. But its Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo has denied any involvement with the explosions. When the BBC visited Gold Apollo on Wednesday local police were swarming the company’s offices, inspecting documents and questioning staff.

• Taiwan pager maker stunned by link to Lebanon attacks

The founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, said his company had signed an agreement with a Hungarian-based company – BAC – to manufacture the devices and use his company’s name. He added that money transfers from them had been “very strange”, without elaborating.

BBC Verify has accessed BAC’s company records, which reveal it was first incorporated in 2022.

Its CEO Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono told NBC that she knew nothing about the explosions. “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong,” she said.

The Hungarian government said the company had “no manufacturing or operational site” in the country.

Unnamed US and Israeli officials told Axios that detonating the pagers all at once was initially planned as the opening move in an “all-out” offensive against Hezbollah. But in recent days Israel became concerned Hezbollah had become aware of the plan – so they were set off early.

Israeli officials have not commented on the allegations, but most analysts agree that it seems likely it is behind the attack.

Prof Simon Mabon, chair in International Relations at Lancaster University, told the BBC: “We know that Israel has a precedent of using technology to track its target” – but he called the scale of this attack “unprecedented”.

Lina Khatib, from the UK-based Chatham House, said the attack suggested that Israel has “deeply” infiltrated Hezbollah’s “communications network”.

In its statement accusing Israel of being behind the attacks, Hezbollah said it held the country “fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians”.

Hezbollah has not yet attributed blame for Wednesday’s attack.

Hezbollah has relied heavily on pagers as a low-tech means of communications to try to evade location-tracking by Israel. Pagers are wireless telecommunications devices that receive and display alphanumeric or voice messages.

They are much harder to track than mobile phones, which have long since been abandoned as simply too vulnerable, as Israel’s assassination of the Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash demonstrated as long ago as 1996, when his phone exploded in his hand.

In February, Hassan Nasrallah directed Hezbollah fighters to get rid of their phones, saying they had been infiltrated by Israeli intelligence. He told his forces to break, bury or lock their phones in an iron box.

Experts now say the directive, issued during a live televised address, may have forewarned Israeli intelligence operatives that the group would be seeking a new – likely lower tech – method of communications.

A source close to Hezbollah told AFP that two of those killed in Tuesday’s attack were the sons of two Hezbollah MPs. They also said the daughter of a Hezbollah member was killed.

Among the injured was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani. Reports in Iranian media said his injuries were minor.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was not hurt in the explosions, Reuters reported quoting a source.

Lebanese Public Health Minister Firass Abiad said damage to the hands and face made up the majority of injuries.

The victims presenting to emergency rooms were a variety of ages, from the old to the very young, some wearing civilian clothes, he told the BBC’s Newshour programme.

Outside of Lebanon, 14 people were injured in similar blasts in neighbouring Syria, according to UK-based campaign group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Hezbollah is allied with Israel’s arch-nemesis in the region, Iran. The group is part of Tehran’s Axis of Resistance and has been engaged in a low-level war with Israel for months, frequently exchanging rocket and missile fire across Israel’s northern border. Entire communities have been displaced from both sides.

The blasts came just hours after Israel’s security cabinet made the safe return of residents to the north of the country an official war goal.

While visiting an Israeli airbase on Wednesday, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the country was “opening a new phase in the war” and and the “centre of gravity is shifting to the north through the diversion of resources and forces”.

Despite the ongoing tensions, observers say that until now both sides have aimed to contain hostilities without crossing the line into full-scale war. But there are fears that the situation could spiral out of control.

The US central bank has lowered interest rates for the first time in more than four years with a bigger than usual cut.

The Federal Reserve reduced the target for its key lending rate by 0.5 percentage points, to the range of 4.75%-5%.

Jerome Powell, the head of the bank, said the move was “strong” but that it was needed as price rises ease and job market concerns grow.

It will be a relief to US borrowers, who have been dealing with the highest interest rates in more than two decades.

Wednesday’s cut was larger than many analysts had predicted just a week ago, and the bank’s forecast signalled that rates could fall another half percentage point by the end of the year.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said the aggressive action on Wednesday was intended to make sure that high borrowing costs, put in place to fight inflation, would not end up hurting the US economy.

“The labour market is in a strong place – we want to keep it there,” Mr Powell said. “That’s what we’re doing.”

The move by the Fed follows cuts by other central banks, including those in Europe, the UK, and Canada and a reduction was widely expected.

But ahead of the meeting there was unusual uncertainty about how large a cut officials would approve.

“Despite there being no significant economic woes on the radar, policy makers have decided to get ahead of the curve,” said Isaac Stell, investment manager at Wealth Club, a UK investment service.

“Many may be left wondering what the Fed sees on the horizon to prompt such a bold move.”

The Fed raised interest rates sharply starting in 2022, aiming to cool the economy and stabilise prices, which were then surging at the fastest pace since the 1980s.

The moves, which rippled out to the public in form of more expensive mortgages, car loans and other debt, were intended to ease price pressures by reducing spending.

But as inflation, the rate at which prices rise, has subsided, officials have become more concerned about risks to the wider economy from high rates.

The unemployment rate in the US has climbed to 4.2% from 3.7% at the start of the year as hiring slowed.

Projections released after the meeting showed officials now see inflation falling faster and unemployment rising higher than they did in June, with the jobless rate expected to hit 4.4% by the end of the 2024.

Mr Powell said the job market had been too hot last year, and he welcomed some cooling, but he denied that the Fed was worried about the start of a serious slowdown.

“I do not see anything in the economy right now that suggests that the likelihood… of a downturn is elevated,” he said.

Over the three months to June, the US economy grew at an annual rate of 3%, the most recent Commerce Department figures show. Retail spending has also remained resilient.

Inflation, meanwhile, dropped to 2.5% in August, moving closer to the Fed’s 2% target for the fifth month in a row.

One Fed governor – Michelle Bowman – voted against the move in the first such dissent since 2005.

Historically the bank has announced interest rate cuts of 0.5 percentage points at moments of crisis such as the onset of the coronavirus pandemic or the 2008 financial crash.

But economist Randall Kroszner, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and a former governor of the Fed, said Wednesday’s announcement was significant not because of the size of the cut but because it will kick off a new period of lower borrowing costs.

“One quarter of a percentage point one way or another – that’s not going to break the US economy,” he said.

“It’s really where they are headed both for the rest of the year, as well as in the intermediate and longer run.”

The Fed had held its key rate – which it charges banks to borrow – steady since July 2023.

Forecasts released by the Fed showed officials expect its key lending rate to drop to about 4.4% by the end of the year and 3.4% by the end of 2025. That is significantly lower than many were predicting as recently as June.

Jennifer Heasley, the owner of Sweet Mama’s Mambo Sauce in Pennsylvania, said she had been waiting anxiously for the Fed to act, after using credit cards to help pay for the expansion of business making barbecue-like sauce two years ago.

“My interest rates have gone up, so my monthly payments have increased tremendously,” she said, noting that one card is now charging her 21%.

“If you’re buying a piece of equipment for $1,500 and you’re putting that on a credit card – if you’re not paying that off, you’re accruing quite a bit of interest,” she said.

“For me, it is a big deal for them to start to come down.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq jumped after the initial announcement but ended the day modestly lower.

When Michael Sheen was trying to find a way into portraying the Duke of York, he came across a photo of Prince Andrew as a returning hero from the Falklands War – with a rose clamped between his teeth.

Grinning, self-satisfied, the apple of his mother’s eye, a slightly ridiculous royal Romeo, this was the actor’s starting point for depicting the prince in his interview with BBC Two’s Newsnight programme – and imagining the huge scale of his fall from grace.

Sheen’s remarkable performance dominates this compelling three-part Amazon film, A Very Royal Scandal, as he captures a prince angry and disbelieving at his collapsing status.

“I’m the son of the sovereign – if I want to go on telly and defend myself, I will,” he bellows, but with the addition of multiple strong swear words, in a way few royals have been portrayed before.

It is a no-holds-barred account that makes Netflix’s The Crown look like a rather timid costume drama.

Has a royal ever been depicted swearing so much – or palace life as so poisonous?

Sheen is famous for how he inhabits his characters – and his version of Prince Andrew is a volatile mix of vanity, vulnerability and a self-destructive lack of self-awareness, as his gilded royal life crumbles after the disastrous interview.

He is a sweary, pompous and then needy figure, unaware of how much he is being exposed by his TV interrogator, Emily Maitlis, played by Ruth Wilson.

The interview itself is often described as a “car crash” – but in this version, the prince’s reputation is more like roadkill.

Inevitably, there will be comparisons with the recent Netflix film Scoop, about the same 2019 interview.

Rufus Sewell said his interpretation of the prince owed something to David Brent, the deluded manager from BBC Two’s The Office sitcom.

In this Amazon Prime Video version, Sheen’s Prince Andrew is a more complex figure, self-seeking, emotionally deaf, ambitious, loyal to his own immediate family, distrustful of palace officials and with a desperate need for approval.

It is a performance where Richard III meets Alan Partridge.

When he hears sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has died in prison, the prince’s reaction is to ask: “Is this good for me or bad?”

And there’s a relentless tension between him and his brother, the then Prince of Wales.

“Calls me a mummy’s boy, he’s the mummy’s boy,” Prince Andrew screams, with plenty of very strong swearing added, after an angry phone call.

It is not at all flattering to the monarchy.

Prince Andrew is portrayed as casually rude to servants – and palace officials mull over the royals’ lack of empathy: “They’ve never been late for a train – because the train waits for them.”

Although the recreated Newsnight interview is the centrepiece of the film, perhaps the most pivotal moment is a scene in the first episode, where the prince meets Epstein in New York.

It is another excruciating interview, with an embarrassed Prince Andrew needing money and a tough, exploitative Epstein, played by John Hopkins, making him wriggle on his financial hook.

Sheen shows the prince as out of his depth in front of such malevolence.

And this terrible association with Epstein plays out through the film, with Prince Andrew protesting his innocence as the questions and accusations encircle him, until he is hiding from lawyers trying to serve court papers.

This is a much more textured and ultimately more engaging account of events than the Netflix film.

It shows the impact on those around Prince Andrew, including his ex-wife, the Duchess of York, and their daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie.

Their loyalty to him is depicted as being from a real family rather than the Royal Family.

Prince Andrew’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk, beautifully played by Joanna Scanlan, is still defending him even after she has lost her job in the wake of the Newsnight interview.

And their relationship, a mix of co-dependency and scapegoating, has echoes of Alan Partridge and his assistant, Lynn.

The prince’s downfall comes with his calamitous TV interview.

And this film suggests some of the most famous moments – such as his lines on not being able to sweat and going to a Pizza Express in Woking, Surrey, nearly ended up being cut in the editing.

But despite the awards and plaudits that follow, Maitlis is seen as having her own self-doubts.

She raises the question of what has happened to Epstein’s victims and points to the lack of resolution in any legal proceedings.

At the heart of this drama is an ambiguity.

The civil case in the US between Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre ended in an out-of-court settlement, with the prince strongly rejecting any accusations of wrongdoing.

But neither side had their day in court.

And the film shows Prince Andrew wanting to do the Newsnight interview because he thinks it might mean checking his claim the photograph of him and Ms Giuffre might have been faked.

The other big unknown for the viewer is how much is fact and how much fiction.

Did Prince Andrew really call his private secretary “Fatty” and race her across the garden?

Did Elizabeth II’s private secretary, the urbane Sir Edward Young, really say things such as: “We’ll be shovelling more shit than Dyno-Rod.”

The film comes with the disclaimer: “This drama is based on real events and individuals. Some scenes have been fictionalised and adapted for dramatic purposes.”

It is not a documentary and the storytelling and pace of a drama means changes to the sequence of events.

For instance, in the film, Prince Andrew is told Covid is to be used as a face-saving excuse for him not to be at the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

In reality, Covid was indeed given as an explanation for why he missed a Jubilee service.

But a month before, the Palace had been quite open in a press briefing that the prince would not be on the Buckingham Palace balcony as he was no longer a working royal.

The suggestion of surreptitiousness works as drama – but in reality, his exclusion was even more publicly brutal.

But such powerful dramas can have a habit of overwriting history – and Sheen’s performance could change forever how Prince Andrew will be remembered.

Just as crowds had gathered to mourn some of those killed in Tuesday’s wave of pager-bomb attacks, an explosion sparked chaos in Dahiyeh, Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut.

A video captured the blast, showing a man lying on the ground and panicked people, some screaming, running away.

All this, moments before funerals were due to start for an 11-year-old boy and three Hezbollah members killed the previous day.

In the surrounding area there was bedlam as the sound of the explosion echoed through the streets. The chants stopped. Those gathered looked at each other, some incredulous.

As reports spread that this was part of a second wave of explosions now targeting walkie-talkies, no electronic equipment was considered safe.

Hezbollah supporters stopped our team several times, demanding we did not use our phones or our camera.

Lebanese officials said at least 20 people were killed and 450 others wounded across the the country, with fires said to have broken out in dozens of homes, shops, and vehicles.

Already, the latest attacks are being seen as another humiliation for the Iranian-backed group, and a possible indication that its entire communication network may have been infiltrated by Israel.

Many people here are inevitably wondering what will come next.

This is a country still shocked and angered by what happened on Tuesday, when thousands of pagers exploded in that synchronised attack, after users received a message they believed had come from Hezbollah.

The devices detonated as people were in shops, or with their families at home, killing 12, including an eight-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, and injuring around 2,800.

Dr Elias Warrak told the BBC it was “the worst day of [his] life as a physician”. At least 60% of the people he had seen had lost at least one eye, he said, with many also losing a finger or a whole hand.

“I believe the number of casualties and the type of damage that has been done is humongous,” he said. “Unfortunately, we were not able to save a lot of eyes, and unfortunately the damage is not limited to the eyes – some of them have damage in the brain in addition to any facial damage.”

Reports suggest a shipment of pagers may have been rigged with explosives, before being detonated remotely.

Hezbollah had distributed the pagers amid concerns that smartphones were being used by the Israeli military and intelligence agencies to track down and kill its members. It was still not clear how Wednesday’s attacks might have been carried out.

But Hezbollah has vowed to respond, blaming Israel for the attacks. As usual, Israel has not commented.

Fears are, again, rising that the current violence between the two rivals, which has led to the displacement of tens of thousands of residents on both sides of the border, could escalate into an all-out war.

Hezbollah says its attacks on Israel, which started almost a year ago, are in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, and that they will only stop with a ceasefire, an elusive possibility for now.

Mourners who spoke to the BBC at the Dahiyeh funeral also struck a defiant tone.

One young man said: “The pain is huge, physical and in the heart. But this is something we are used to, and we will continue with our resistance.”

A 45-year-old woman told the BBC: “This will make us stronger, whoever has lost an eye will fight with the other eye and we are all standing together.”

Hours after the latest explosions, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said his country was “at the start of a new phase in the war”, as the 98th division of the Israeli army relocated from Gaza to the north of Israel.

Up until now, Hezbollah has indicated that it is not interested in another major war with Israel, as Lebanon struggles to recover from a years-long economic crisis. Many here say a conflict is not in the country’s interests.

But some will certainly demand a strong response. An indication of what Hezbollah might be planning to do could come on Thursday, in the first public reaction by its powerful leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

For the past 11 days, about 1,500 workers of South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics have been striking work in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, leading to major disruptions in production.

The plant in Chennai city, one of Samsung’s two factories in India, employs nearly 2,000 workers and produces home appliances, contributing about a third to the company’s annual $12bn (£9bn) revenue in India.

The striking workers gather at a plot of land near the 17-year-old factory daily, demanding that Samsung recognise their newly-formed labour union – the Samsung India Labour Welfare Union (SILWU). They say that only a union can help them negotiate better wages and working hours with the management.

The protest, one of the largest Samsung has seen in recent years, comes even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been courting foreign investment by positioning India as a viable alternative to China for manufacturing activities.

Samsung India has released a statement saying that the welfare of its workers was its top priority. “We have initiated discussions with our workers at the Chennai plant to resolve all issues at the earliest,” it said.

Hours earlier, the police had detained around 104 workers for undertaking a protest march without permission. The protesters were released in the evening.

“The workers have decided to strike work indefinitely till their demands are met,” said A Soundararajan, member of Centre of Indian Trade Unions (Citu), backed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Citu has backed the new union in the factory.

The workers have three key demands: Samsung must recognise the new union, allow collective bargaining, and reject competing unions as about 90% of the workforce belongs to SILWU, said Mr Soundararajan.

Workers, earning an average of 25,000 rupees ($298; £226) a month, are demanding staggered raises totalling a 50% increase over the next three years, according to Citu.

Citu also alleged that workers at the plant were being “pressurised to finish each product – like a refrigerator, washing machine, or TV – within 10-15 seconds”, work non-stop for four to five hours at a stretch, and do their jobs in unsafe conditions.

Mr Soundararajan also alleged that workers were pressurised by the management to leave the new union and that their families were threatened as well.

The BBC has sent Samsung India a detailed set of questions for a response.

Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu’s Labour Welfare Minister CV Ganesan said he had assured union officials that talks were under way to resolve their issues. “We will fulfil the demands of the workers,” he said.

Sijo*, a protester, said that he arrives at the protest site daily at 08:00 IST (02:30 GMT) and stays until 17:00, joining hundreds of workers in their blue Samsung India uniforms.

The union arranges for lunch and water for the protesters, while a makeshift cloth tent protects them from the elements. There are no washroom facilities, so the workers use the outdoors.

“Since the factory was set up, employees have been working without complaints or a union. But things have been getting bad over the past couple of years, and now, we need the support of a union,” Sijo said.

He added that his pay doesn’t keep pace with the cost of living and that this has put a strain of his family’s finances.

Up until 2020, the Samsung Group was known for not allowing unions to represent its workers. But things changed after the company came under intense public scrutiny after its chairman was prosecuted for market manipulation and bribery.

Millions of Indian workers join trade unions – often backed by leftist parties – who use their political clout to enforce labour laws and negotiate better conditions. “Foreign companies set up in India but resist following local laws on workers’ rights to association and collective bargaining,” alleged Mr Soundararajan.

Many prominent multinational companies, including Apple and Amazon, have set up factories in India. But labour rights activists allege that many of them underpay and overwork their Indian employees and collude with state governments to clamp down on workers’ rights.

Shyam Sundar, a labour economist, said multinational corporations use various “human resource strategies” to prevent workers from forming unions in developing countries like India.

For one, they fiercely oppose workers joining external, politically-backed unions and encourage them to form “worker-led” internal ones. “This ensures that the management has some control over the union’s activities,” Mr Sundar said.

Mr Soundararajan alleged that management at the Chennai plant had also approached workers with this solution, which they refused. The BBC has reached out to Samsung India for a response.

The second way, Mr Sundar said, is by hiring young, unskilled workers, especially from rural areas, by attracting them with a good starting salary. “These ‘trainees’ are promised to be made permanent employees after a couple of months, but this doesn’t happen. The salaries too stay stagnant or have very low increments.”

The rapid growth of “flexible workers” – employees hired on contract – has become a key strategy of multinational corporations to stop unionising by ensuring a pliant workforce, he added.

According to the latest government statistics, every two in five workers employed in factories in India in 2022 were contractual labourers, making up about 40% of the workforce in industrial establishments.

“Companies use the threat of re-location or non-expansion to discourage state governments from enforcing labour laws,” Mr Sundar said. “But workers can leverage global labour unions to pressure companies to abide by international labour laws,” he added.

The race to find the maker of the pagers that exploded in Lebanon has taken an unexpected turn – towards a Taiwanese company few had heard of until this morning.

At least 12 people were killed and nearly 3,000 injured in Tuesday’s explosions targeting members of the armed group Hezbollah, which set off a geopolitical storm in the Middle East.

Caught in the crisis, Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo’s founder Hsu Ching-Kuang flatly denied his company had anything to do with the attacks.

Instead, Mr Hsu has said he licensed his trade mark to a company in Hungary called BAC Consulting to use the Gold Apollo name on their own pagers. BBC attempts to contact BAC have so far been unsuccessful.

• LIVE: Latest updates on the Hezbollah pager explosions
• What we know about the attack in Lebanon
• Watch: Video appears to show explosion at supermarket
• Bowen: Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred
• What is Hezbollah in Lebanon and why is it fighting with Israel?

“You look at the pictures from Lebanon,” Mr Hsu told reporters outside his firm’s offices on Wednesday. “They don’t have any mark saying Made in Taiwan on them, we did not make those pagers!”

The offices of Gold Apollo are in a large new business park in a non-descript suburb of Taiwan’s capital, Taipei.

They look the same as any of the thousands of small trading companies and manufacturers that make up a huge chunk of the island’s economy – except for the two police officers posted at the entrance, ready to fend off the large gaggle of reporters and TV crews squatting outside.

On the walls of Gold Apollo’s office are posters of the company’s products – a montage of small boxy plastic devices with little grey LCD screens. They are all pagers.

Until this morning the company’s website had a page devoted to each, extolling its virtues and practicalities. But as soon as news broke that Gold Apollo was the alleged source of the devices used in the attacks in Lebanon, the website went offline.

Mr Hsu said it was pagers made by BAC Consulting that were used in the Lebanon attacks. He told reporters that his company had signed an agreement with BAC Consulting three years ago.

The money transfers from BAC had been “very strange”, he added. There had been problems with the payments, which had come through the Middle East, he told reporters, but he did not go into detail.

Initially, he said, BAC wanted to buy pagers from Gold Apollo to sell in Europe. But after about a year they came up with a new plan to make their own pagers and licensed Gold Apollo’s name.

“We only provide brand trademark authorisation and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product,” a statement from Gold Apollo said.

But the fact there is now a team from the Taipei investigation bureau inside his office – with large numbers of cardboard boxes – suggests the Taiwanese authorities are not entirely reassured.

Nevertheless, Mr Hsu’s statement that his company didn’t make the devices is plausible.

Taiwan’s manufacturing system is a complex maze of small companies, many of which do not actually make the products they sell. They may own the brand name, the intellectual property and have research and design departments. But most of the actual manufacturing is farmed out to factories in China or Southeast Asia.

Pagers are also hardly cutting-edge technology – there are many companies across the world capable of making them.

They are small radio receivers with LED screens that can receive and display messages. In the 1980s and 1990s electronic pagers were considered to be the latest tech, used by tens of millions of people. Before mobile phones, companies used pagers to send short text messages to employees in the field.

But in the last two decades the rise of the smart phone has pushed pagers to the brink of extinction. They are now a niche device holding on in places like hospitals – where they remain a cheap and reliable method for messaging doctors and nurses, even when other communication lines are disrupted.

Starting in the late 2000s, Gold Apollo too started moving away from making electronic pagers and started manufacturing other short-range radio devices – particularly for restaurants. The company’s most successful product now is a round disc that is handed to customers in food courts and restaurants once they place an order – it lights up and vibrates when their order is ready.

It’s likely that Gold Apollo’s brand name – as a reliable pager manufacturer – was useful in selling the pagers that ended up with Hezbollah.

But there are still more questions than answers in this extraordinary story.

We know almost nothing about BAC Consulting – who is or was behind it?

If Gold Apollo did not make the pagers used in the attack in Lebanon, then who did and where?

One of America’s most influential labour unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, has declined to issue a US presidential endorsement for the first time since 1996.

The union, which boasts some 1.3 million members across the US and Canada, said it had received “few commitments on top Teamsters issues” from either Democratic nominee Kamala Harris or Republican nominee Donald Trump.

It also claimed that polling of its rank-and-file members found “no definitive support” for either candidate, though two of its recent polls indicated lopsided support for Trump.

The move is a major blow to the Harris campaign’s efforts to win over working-class voters with less than 50 days before election night.

An endorsement had the potential to mobilise thousands of Teamsters who live, work and vote in the crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Shortly after the announcement, some Teamsters regional councils representing more than half a million members in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and California, said they would be endorsing Harris.

In a statement, the Harris campaign touted its support from “the overwhelming majority of organised labour” and noted that many Teamsters locals have gotten behind her candidacy.

“While Donald Trump says striking workers should be fired, Vice-President Harris has literally walked the picket line and stood strong with organized labour for her entire career,” campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said.

The union’s rank-and-file – a coalition of members that includes freight drivers, warehouse workers and airline pilots – has long been considered politically diverse.

General President Sean O’Brien has sought to build inroads with Republicans since he took over leadership of the executive board in 2022.

He has reached out to more populist figures within the party, such as US senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and JD Vance of Ohio, who is now Trump’s running mate.

Mr O’Brien also met privately with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in January, shortly before the former president attended a roundtable with the union’s board at its headquarters in Washington DC.

Following that meeting, Trump said he believed he had a “good shot” at receiving the union’s endorsement.

The board also met with President Joe Biden before he stepped aside as the Democratic nominee, as well as third-party candidates Robert F Kennedy Jr and Cornel West.

But the union alarmed Democrats when it made its first financial contribution to their opponents in years, donating $45,000 (£34,000) – the maximum allowed contribution – each to both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in February.

Mr O’Brien also became the first Teamsters boss ever to address the Republican National Convention (RNC).

Invited to deliver a prime-time address at the event in Milwaukee, the union head praised Trump as “one tough SOB” but declined to endorse him.

He also later criticised Trump and top campaign surrogate and billionaire businessman Elon Musk over comments in which the two discussed firing workers who threaten to go on strike.

After his decision to speak at the RNC, Mr O’Brien did not receive an invitation from Democrats to address their party convention last month.

The party instead invited rank-and-file members to represent the organisation and to speak from the convention stage.

Some members of the Teamsters have expressed anger with Mr O’Brien over his right-wing outreach.

Last month, the Teamsters National Black Caucus and six union locals defied national leadership by endorsing Harris on their own and urging members to get behind her.

On Monday, Harris met with the Teamsters board in a long-delayed roundtable that lasted an hour and a half.

A New York Times report described the sit-down as “sometimes tense”, but a Teamsters spokesperson disputed this characterisation when asked by the BBC.

During their meeting, the Times added, Harris told Teamsters leaders: “I’m confident I’m going to win this. I want your endorsement, but if I don’t get it, I will treat you exactly as if I had gotten your endorsement.”

Speaking to reporters after Harris had made her pitch, Mr O’Brien noted that “there wasn’t a whole lot of difference” between the answers she and her predecessor, Biden, had provided.

Biden has routinely touted himself as “the most pro-labour president ever”, pointing to policies that have made it easier for US workers to organise and that have prioritised union labour for federal government projects.

Last September, he made history as the first US president to walk a picket line, when he joined the United Autoworkers in Michigan in a strike against the Big Three US auto companies: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

The Biden administration also shored up the Teamsters pension fund to the tune of $36bn, which it says prevented cuts to the retirement incomes of over 600,000 members.

Mr O’Brien and other leaders have also acknowledged on several occasions that Biden has been “great for unions”.

But before he dropped out in July, some reports suggested that the Teamsters did not plan to endorse Biden’s bid for re-election.

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On Wednesday, ahead of its announcement that it would not endorse Harris or Trump, the union released polling data for its members.

In an electronic poll conducted after the RNC, rank-and-file Teamsters voted 59.6% for the union to endorse Trump compared to 34% for Harris.

A separate poll, commissioned in the past week, found Teamsters again backing Trump by a lopsided margin – 58% to 31%.

In spite of those results, the union said in a statement that its “extensive member polling showed no majority support for Vice President Harris and no universal support among the membership for President Trump”.

The Trump campaign quickly lauded the poll numbers on Wednesday.

“While the Teamsters Executive Board is making no formal endorsement, the hardworking members of the Teamsters have been loud and clear – they want President Trump back in the White House,” campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter.

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Last week, the Indian government announced that Russia had discharged dozens of the 91 Indians who were duped into fighting for Russian forces in the country’s war with Ukraine. Several of them have since returned home, while the process to bring others back is under way. The BBC’s Neyaz Farooquee spoke to some of the men about their struggles.

“I am in panic. I am not sure if I will return safely or in a box. Please save me.”

This is the message Urgen Tamang, a former Indian soldier, sent to the BBC from outside a southern Ukrainian city, a few days before he was discharged from the frontlines in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which entered its third year this February.

Mr Tamang is among the 91 Indians who were forced into fighting in the war. Most of them are from poor families and were lured by agents with the promise of money and jobs, sometimes as “helpers” in the Russian army.

Instead, they were sent to the war zone. Many of them said they were stationed in parts of Ukraine under Russian control, where they had to navigate landmines, drones, missiles and sniper attacks with little to no military training.

Nine Indians have died in the conflict so far and Indian authorities say they have arrested 19 people for human trafficking.

In July, Russia promised an early release of all Indians fighting in its army, following a visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Moscow, during which he raised the issue with President Vladimir Putin. The two countries have traditionally shared a warm relationship.

Forty-five of them have been discharged since then. Some have safely returned home, while others like Mr Tamang are on their way.

“I can’t believe I am out of there,” said Sunil Karwa, an electrician from Rajasthan who joined the Russian army in February. Posted near Bakhmut, an eastern Ukraine city that has seen intense fighting, he was at the Moscow airport waiting to board his flight when he spoke to the BBC.

Mr Karwa described scenes of deaths and destruction, a reality which hit him the hardest when a man from his neighbouring village was shot on the battlefield.

“They sent him back on the frontline 15 days after the injury and he fainted in the field. He is paralysed now,” he said.

Like him, most of the other recruits were also blue-collar workers aged between 19 and 35, who were hired by agents based in India, Dubai and Russia.

• Ukraine war: The Indian men traumatised by fighting for Russia
• Ukraine war: Indians ‘duped’ by agents into fighting for Russia

They say their contracts were in Russian, a language they didn’t understand. Yet they signed it in the hope of getting better opportunities.

“The process was so quick – just a few signatures and photos and we were in [the army],” Mr Karwa said.

Raja Pathan joined the army as a last resort in February, after an education consultant deceived him into enrolling in a non-existent college.

“When I got there, I saw banners advertising recruitments for the army. By then, I had spent so much time and money that I decided to join anyway,” he said.

It was the death of two friends, which eventually pushed Mr Pathan to leave. He was released in August with the help of a sympathetic Russian commander who facilitated his exit.

Now based in Moscow, he helps other Indians escape from there.

Mohammad Sufyan from the southern state of Telangana returned to India on 12 September with five other men.

Safe in his home, he carries the trauma of surviving on the frontline. “There was little rest there and in the beginning, I couldn’t speak to my family for 25 days,” he said.

The most scarring moment came in February when his friend Hemil Mangukiya – an Indian man from Gujarat state – was killed right before his eyes.

“He was merely 15 metres from me, digging a trench near Krynky [in Kherson], when a missile landed,” recalled Mr Sufyan. “I put his dead body in the truck with my own hands.”

“After seeing the dead body of my friend, I didn’t have the strength for anything,” he added.

After the death, Mr Sufyan and other Indians stuck there released a video pleading for help, which reached Indian MP Asaduddin Owaisi, who raised the matter with the foreign ministry. Families of the men had also appealed to the Indian government for help in bringing them back.

“It is a miracle I got back home,” said Azad Yusuf Kumar, a resident of Indian-administered Kashmir, who was part of Mr Sufyan’s group in the army.

“One minute you are digging a trench, and the next, an artillery falls and burns everything down. It was all a matter of luck if it fell on you or someone else.”

In February, Mr Kumar had told the BBC how he had shot his foot by mistake during training. “My commander kept saying, use your right hand to shoot, use your left hand to shoot, shoot above, shoot down,” he had said. “I had never touched a gun. It was extremely cold, and with the gun in my left hand, I ended up shooting my foot.”

Now back in Kashmir, he talks about how his commander had accused him of deliberately shooting himself to avoid going to the frontline.

“But I am lucky I did not go to fight. Four men from my camp died in an attack at that time. I could’ve been one of them,” he said.

Though recent discharges brought relief to many, those still in Russia face growing desperation as their release is delayed.

Mr Tamang, who joined the Russian army in January, had earlier told The Indian Express newspaper through his local councillor, Rabi Pradhan, that 13 out of 15 non-Russian members of his unit had died.

The fact that he was sent to the frontline at least twice after signing his discharge letter in August heightened his fears – and mistrust in the process.

On 15 September, he was on his way to Moscow but still doubtful if he was truly heading home. “I am out, but I will keep sending you my location,” he said.

When he last texted, he had left Ukraine, hoping to continue his journey home.

Iranian hackers distributed hacked information about Donald Trump’s electoral campaign to people linked to the Biden campaign, according to the FBI and US intelligence agencies.

US officials now believe that information taken from the Trump campaign was sent in unsolicited emails to people linked to the campaign in late June and early July – before Biden dropped out of the race for president.

There is currently no evidence that the hackers received any reply from any recipients.

In August, officials warned that Iran hopes to “stoke discord” and undermine confidence in US institutions ahead of the November election.

US officials said that Iran had used “social engineering and other efforts” to seek out direct access to both the Democratic and Republican campaigns – a tactic they said had been used by both Iran and Russia in other countries around the world.

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In a statement released on Wednesday, the FBI said that “Iranian malicious actors have continued their efforts since June to send stolen, non-public material associated with former President Trump’s campaign to US media organisations”.

When contacted by the BBC, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that the hack is proof that Iran was “interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because they know President Trump will restore his tough sanctions and stand against their reign of terror”.

She said Biden and Harris should outline what happened to the material sent to Biden associates. “What did they know and when did they know it?” Ms Leavitt questioned.

The former president also commented on the hacking on Wednesday, telling supporters that “they [Iran] gave them all the materials because Biden is working with Iran”.

Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said that the campaign has cooperated with authorities since it was made aware of the hacks.

“We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign,” Ms Finkelstein added. “A few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt.”

Ms Finkelstein added that it condemns “in the strongest terms” any foreign election interference efforts.

The BBC has also contacted the White House for comment.

The FBI statement added that officials have been in contact with the victims of the hack and will continue to investigate in hopes of stopping and disrupting “the threat actors responsible”.

A spokesperson for Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations told CBS – the BBC’s US partner – that “Iran neither has any motive nor intent to interfere in the US election; and, it therefore categorically repudiates such accusations”.

The announcement comes amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s security, just days after a second apparent assassination attempt was made against him at his golf course in Florida.

Speaking to reporters earlier, Trump addressed the attempt, saying that “I just have to lead my life”.

“You don’t want to ever be curtailed because of the crazy people out there,” he added.

After Trump was wounded by a gunman during a 13 July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, US officials said that an Iranian threat on Trump’s life had prompted additional security measures.

At a packed rally in Long Island in New York on Wednesday – just a few miles away from where he grew up in Queens – Trump said that “God spared my life”.

“Not once, but twice,” he said to raucous applause from the crowd. “There are those that say he [God] did it because Trump is going to turn this state around. He’s going to turn this country around.”

Supporters at the rally told the BBC they were angry after learning about the second possible attempt after authorities say gunman was found with a rifle at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida as the former president was golfing.

One supporter at the rally, Dina Glazer, said she blamed Democrats and their rhetoric about Trump for the incidents.

The former president “needs more security, which they haven’t done”, she said.

Another supporter, Michelle Christ, said she feared Trump was in “constant danger”.

“Some people think their opinion is the most important,” she said. “But you don’t act on those thoughts” violently, she said.

The crowd at the rally booed as Trump mentioned Springfield, Ohio, which has been rocked by unfounded claims about its Haitian immigrant community. Trump faced criticism for repeating them during the presidential debates.

“Send them back!” One member of the crowd shouted from the back of the arena.

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