“One village, two countries” used to be the tagline for Yinjing on China’s south-western edge.

An old tourist sign boasts of a border with Myanmar made of just “bamboo fences, ditches and earth ridges” – a sign of the easy economic relationship Beijing had sought to build with its neighbour.

Now the border the BBC visited is marked by a high, metal fence running through the county of Ruili in Yunnan province. Topped by barbed wire and surveillance cameras in some places, it cuts through rice fields and carves up once-adjoined streets.

China’s tough pandemic lockdowns forced the separation initially. But it has since been cemented by the intractable civil war in Myanmar, triggered by a bloody coup in 2021. The military regime is now fighting for control in large swathes of the country, including Shan State along China’s border, where it has suffered some of its biggest losses.

The crisis at its doorstep – a nearly 2,000km (1,240-mile) border – is becoming costly for China, which has invested millions of dollars in Myanmar for a critical trade corridor.

The ambitious plan aims to connect China’s landlocked south-west to the Indian Ocean via Myanmar. But the corridor has become a battleground between Myanmar rebels and the country’s army.

Beijing has sway over both sides but the ceasefire it brokered in January fell apart. It has now turned to military exercises along the border and stern words. Foreign Minister Wang Yi was the latest diplomat to visit Myanmar’s capital Nay Pyi Taw and is thought to have delivered a warning to the country’s ruler Min Aung Hlaing.

Conflict is not new to impoverished Shan State. Myanmar’s biggest state is a major source of the world’s opium and and methamphetamine, and home to ethnic armies long opposed to centralised rule.

But the vibrant economic zones created by Chinese investment managed to thrive – until the civil war.

A loudspeaker now warns people in Ruili not to get too close to the fence – but that doesn’t stop a Chinese tourist from sticking his arm between the bars of a gate to take a selfie.

Two girls in Disney T-shirts shout through the bars – “hey grandpa, hello, look over here!” – as they lick pink scoops of ice cream. The elderly man shuffling barefoot on the other side barely looks up before he turns away.

“Burmese people live like dogs,” says Li Mianzhen. Her corner stall sells food and drinks from Myanmar – like milk tea – in a small market just steps from the border checkpoint in Ruili city.

Li, who looks to be in her 60s, used to sell Chinese clothes across the border in Muse, a major source of trade with China. But she says almost no-one in her town has enough money any more.

Myanmar’s military junta still controls the town, one of its last remaining holdouts in Shan State. But rebel forces have taken other border crossings and a key trading zone on the road to Muse.

The situation has made people desperate, Li says. She knows of some who have crossed the border to earn as little as 10 yuan – about one pound and not much more than a dollar – so that they can go back to Myanmar and “feed their families”.

The war has severely restricted travel in and out of Myanmar, and most accounts now come from those who have fled or have found ways to move across the borders, such as Li.

Unable to get the work passes that would allow them into China, Li’s family is stuck in Mandalay, as rebel forces edge closer to Myanmar’s second-largest city.

“I feel like I am dying from anxiety,” Li says. “This war has brought us so much misfortune. At what point will all of this end?”

Thirty-one-year-old Zin Aung (name changed) is among those who made it out. He works in an industrial park on the outskirts of Ruili, which produces clothes, electronics and vehicle parts that are shipped across the world.

Workers like him are recruited in large numbers from Myanmar and flown here by Chinese government-backed firms eager for cheap labour. Estimates suggest they earn about 2,400 yuan ($450; £340) a month, which is less than their Chinese colleagues.

“There is nothing for us to do in Myanmar because of the war,” Zin Aung says. “Everything is expensive. Rice, cooking oil. Intensive fighting is going on everywhere. Everyone has to run.”

His parents are too old to run, so he did. He sends home money whenever he can.

The men live and work on the few square kilometres of the government-run compound in Ruili. Zin Aung says it is a sanctuary, compared with what they left behind: “The situation in Myanmar is not good, so we are taking refuge here.”

He also escaped compulsory conscription, which the Myanmar army has been enforcing to make up for defections and battlefield losses.

As the sky turned scarlet one evening, Zin Aung ran barefoot through the cloying mud onto a monsoon-soaked pitch, ready for a different kind of battle – a fiercely fought game of football.

Burmese, Chinese and the local Yunnan dialect mingled as vocal spectators reacted to every pass, kick and shot. The agony over a missed goal was unmistakable. This is a daily affair in their new, temporary home, a release after a 12-hour shift on the assembly line.

Many of the workers are from Lashio, the largest town in Shan State, and Laukkaing, home to junta-backed crime families – Laukkaing fell to rebel forces in January and Lashio was encircled, in a campaign which has changed the course of the war and China’s stake in it.

Both towns lie along China’s prized trade corridor and the Beijing-brokered ceasefire left Lashio in the hands of the junta. But in recent weeks rebel forces have pushed into the town – their biggest victory to date. The military has responded with bombing raids and drone attacks, restricting internet and mobile phone networks.

“The fall of Lashio is one of the most humiliating defeats in the military’s history,” says Richard Horsey, Myanmar adviser to the International Crisis Group.

“The only reason the rebel groups didn’t push into Muse is they likely feared it would upset China,” Mr Horsey says. “Fighting there would have impacted investments China has hoped to restart for months. The regime has lost control of almost all northern Shan state – with the exception of Muse region, which is right next to Ruili.”

Ruili and Muse, both designated as special trade zones, are crucial to the Beijing-funded 1,700km trade route, known as the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. The route also supports Chinese investments in energy, infrastructure and rare earth mining critical for manufacturing electric vehicles.

But at its heart is a railway line that will connect Kunming – the capital of Yunnan province – to Kyaukphyu, a deep sea port the Chinese are building on Myanmar’s western coast.

The port, along the Bay of Bengal, would give industries in and beyond Ruili access to the Indian Ocean and then global markets. The port is also the starting point for oil and gas pipelines that will transport energy via Myanmar to Yunnan.

But these plans are now in jeopardy.

President Xi Jinping had spent years cultivating ties with his resource-rich neighbour when the country’s elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi was forced from power.

Mr Xi refused to condemn the coup and continued to sell the army weapons. But he also did not recognise Min Aung Hlaing as head of state, nor has he invited him to China.

Three years on, the war has killed thousands and displaced millions, but no end is in sight.

Forced to fight on new fronts, the army has since lost between half and two-thirds of Myanmar to a splintered opposition.

Beijing is at an impasse. It “doesn’t like this situation” and sees Myanmar’s military ruler Min Aung Hlaing as “incompetent”, Mr Horsey says. “They are pushing for elections, not because they necessarily want a return to democratic rule, but more because they think this is a way back.”

Myanmar’s regime suspects Beijing of playing both sides – keeping up the appearance of supporting the junta while continuing to maintain a relationship with ethnic armies in Shan State.

Analysts note that many of the rebel groups are using Chinese weapons. The latest battles are also a resurgence of last year’s campaign launched by three ethnic groups which called themselves the Brotherhood Alliance. It is thought that the alliance would not have made its move without Beijing’s tacit approval.

Its gains on the battlefield spelled the end for notorious mafia families whose scam centres had trapped thousands of Chinese workers. Long frustrated over the increasing lawlessness along its border, Beijing welcomed their downfall – and the tens of thousands of suspects who were handed over by the rebel forces.

For Beijing the worst-case scenario is the civil war dragging on for years. But it would also fear a collapse of the military regime, which might herald further chaos.

How China will react to either scenario is not yet clear – what is also unclear is what more Beijing can do beyond pressuring both sides to agree to peace talks.

That predicament is evident in Ruili with its miles of shuttered shops. A city that once benefited from its location along the border is now feeling the fallout from its proximity to Myanmar.

Battered by some of China’s strictest lockdowns, businesses here took another hit when cross-border traffic and trade did not revive.

They also rely on labour from the other side, which has stopped, according to several agents who help Burmese workers find jobs. They say China has tightened its restrictions on hiring workers from across the border, and has also sent back hundreds who were said to be working illegally.

The owner of a small factory, who did not want to be identified, told the BBC that the deportations meant “his business isn’t going anywhere… and there’s nothing I can change”.

The square next to the checkpoint is full of young workers, including mothers with their babies, waiting in the shade. They lay out their paperwork to make sure they have what they need to secure a job. The successful ones are given a pass which allows them to work for up to a week, or come and go between the two countries, like Li.

“I hope some good people can tell all sides to stop fighting,” Li says. “If there is no-one in the world speaking up for us, it is really tragic.”

She says she is often assured by those around her that fighting won’t break out too close to China. But she is unconvinced: “No-one can predict the future.”

For now, Ruili is a safer option for her and Zin Aung. They understand that their future is in Chinese hands, as do the Chinese.

“Your country is at war,” a Chinese tourist tells a Myanmar jade seller he is haggling with at the market. “You just take what I give you.”

Israel says its warplanes have hit more than 100 Hezbollah rocket launchers and other “terrorist sites” including a weapons storage facility in southern Lebanon.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the launchers were ready to be fired against Israel. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said Israel carried out at least 52 strikes in the south of the country on Thursday evening, and that Lebanon had also launched strikes on military sites in northern Israel.

Earlier, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said deadly explosions earlier in the week “crossed all red lines”, accusing Israel of what he said represented a declaration of war.

Israel has not said it was behind the attacks – which saw pagers and walkie-talkies explode simultaneously across the country – on Tuesday and Wednesday, and which Lebanese authorities said killed 37 people and wounded 3,000.

But Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said Israel is embarking on a “new phase of the war”, concentrating more of its efforts on the north.

The previously sporadic cross-border fighting escalated on 8 October 2023 – the day after the unprecedented attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen from Gaza – when Hezbollah fired at Israeli positions, in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Since then hundreds of people, most of them Hezbollah fighters, have been killed in the cross-border fighting, and tens of thousands have also been displaced on both sides of the border.

Hezbollah has said it is acting in support of the Palestinian armed group Hamas. Both are backed by Iran and proscribed as terrorist organisations by Israel, the UK and other countries.

In a statement late on Thursday, the IDF said its warplanes “struck approximately 100 launchers and additional terrorist infrastructure sites, consisting of approximately 1,000 barrels that were ready to be used in the immediate future to fire toward Israeli territory”.

“The IDF will continue to operate to degrade the Hezbollah terrorist organisation’s infrastructure and capabilities in order to defend the state of Israel”.

Lebanese security sources cited by Reuters news agency and the New York Times said the Israeli strikes were one of the most intense since the war in Gaza began in October last year.

The IDF also urged residents in northern Israel close to the Lebanese border to avoid large gatherings, guard their neighbourhoods and stay close to bomb shelters.

On Thursday morning, Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon fired two anti-tank missiles across the border, followed by drones.

The IDF said two Israeli soldiers were killed and a third seriously wounded.

In his televised address on Thursday, Hassan Nasrallah said of Tuesday and Wednesday’s attacks: “The enemy crossed all rules, laws and red lines. It didn’t care about anything at all, not morally, not humanely, not legally.”

“This is massacre, a major aggression against Lebanon, its people, its resistance, its sovereignty, and its security. It can be called war crimes or a declaration of war – whatever you choose to name it, it is deserving and fits the description. This was the enemy’s intention,” he added.

As Nasrallah spoke, Israeli warplanes caused sonic booms over Beirut, scaring an already-exhausted population, and others struck targets in southern Lebanon.

The Hezbollah leader acknowledged that this was a massive and unprecedented blow for his group, but he insisted that its ability to command and communicate remained intact.

Nasrallah’s tone was defiant and he vowed a harsh punishment. But, again, he indicated that Hezbollah was not interested in an escalation of its current conflict with Israel.

The group’s cross-border attacks, he said, were going to continue unless there was a ceasefire in Gaza, and that no killings or assassinations would return residents to northern Israel.

The IDF said on Thursday that its chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, had “recently completed approval of plans for the northern arena”.

Gallant later said that “in the new phase of the war there are significant opportunities but also significant risks”.

“Hezbollah feels that it is being persecuted and the sequence of military actions will continue,” he added.

“Our goal is to ensure the safe return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes. As time goes by, Hezbollah will pay an increasing price.”

It is not clear how Israel intends to achieve this goal. But reports earlier this week suggested that the general in charge of the IDF’s Northern Command favoured the creation of an Israeli-controlled buffer zone inside southern Lebanon.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for restraint on all sides.

“We don’t want to see any escalatory actions by any party” that would make the goal of achieving a ceasefire in Gaza more difficult, he said as he joined European foreign ministers in Paris to discuss the widening crisis.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also at the talks in Paris, called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.

“We are all very, very clear that we want to see a negotiated political settlement so that Israelis can return to their homes in northern Israel and indeed Lebanese to return to their homes,” he said.

More than 70,000 people fighting in Russia’s military have now died in Ukraine, according to data analysed by the BBC.

And for the first time, volunteers – civilians who joined the armed forces after the start of the war – now make up the highest number of people killed on the battlefield since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.

Every day, the names of those killed in Ukraine, their obituaries and photographs from their funerals are published across Russia in the media and on social networks.

BBC Russian and the independent website Mediazona have collated these names, along with names from other open sources, including official reports.

We checked that the information had been shared by authorities or relatives of the deceased – and that they had been identified as dying in the war.

New graves in cemeteries have also helped provide the names of soldiers killed in Ukraine – these are usually marked by flags and wreaths sent by the defence ministry.

We have identified the names of 70,112 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, but the actual number is believed to be considerably higher. Some families do not share details of their relatives’ deaths publicly – and our analysis does not include names we were unable to check, or the deaths of militia in Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

Among them, 13,781 were volunteers – about 20% – and fatalities among volunteers now exceed other categories. Former prisoners, who joined up in return for pardons for their crimes, were previously the highest but they now account for 19% of all confirmed deaths. Mobilised soldiers – citizens called up to fight – account for 13%.

Since October last year, weekly fatalities of volunteers have not dipped below 100 – and, in some weeks, we have recorded more than 310 volunteer deaths.

As for Ukraine – it rarely comments on the scale of its deaths on the battlefield. In February, its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, but estimates based on US intelligence suggest greater losses.

The story of Rinat Khusniyarov is typical of many of the volunteer soldiers who died. He was from Ufa in Bashkortostan and had been working two jobs to make ends meet – at a tram depot and a plywood factory. He was 62 years old when he signed his contract with the Russian army in November last year.

He survived less than three months of fighting and was killed on 27 February. His obituary, in a local online memorial website, simply called him “a hardworking, decent man”.

According to the data we analysed, most of the men signing up come from small towns in parts of Russia where stable, well-paid work is hard to find.

Most appear to have joined up willingly, although some in the republic of Chechnya have told human rights activists and lawyers of coercion and threats.

Some of the volunteers have said they did not understand the contracts they were signing had no end date, and have since approached pro-Kremlin journalists to, unsuccessfully, ask them for help ending their service.

Salaries in the military can be five to seven times higher than average wages in less affluent parts of the country, plus soldiers get social benefits, including free childcare and tax breaks. One-off payments for people who sign up have also repeatedly risen in value in many parts of Russia.

Most of the volunteers dying at the front are aged between 42 and 50. They number 4,100 men in our list of more than 13,000 volunteers. The oldest volunteer killed was 71 years old – a total of 250 volunteers above the age of 60 have died in the war.

Soldiers have told the BBC that rising casualties among volunteers are, in part, down to their deployment to the most operationally challenging areas on the front line, notably in the Donetsk region in the east, where they form the backbone of reinforcements for depleted units, Russian soldiers told the BBC.

Russia’s “meat grinder” strategy continues unabated, according to Russian soldiers we have spoken to. The term has been used to describe the way Moscow sends waves of soldiers forward relentlessly to try to wear down Ukrainian forces and expose their locations to Russian artillery. Drone footage shared online shows Russian forces attacking Ukrainian positions with little or no equipment or support from artillery or military vehicles.

Sometimes, hundreds of men have been killed on a single day. In recent weeks, the Russian military have made desperate, but unsuccessful, attempts to seize the eastern Ukrainian towns of Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk with such tactics.

An official study by the primary military medical directorate of the Russian defence ministry says that 39% of soldiers’ deaths are a result of limb injuries and that mortality rates would be significantly improved if first aid and subsequent medical care were better.

The Russian government’s actions suggests it is keen to avoid forcing people to fight through a new, official wave of mobilisation – instead, it is ramping up calls for service volunteers, along with the incentives to do so.

Remarks by regional officials in local parliaments suggest they have been tasked from the top with trying to recruit people from their local districts. They advertise on job vacancy websites, contact men who have debt and bailiff problems, and conduct recruitment campaigns in higher education establishments.

Since 2022, convicted prisoners have also been encouraged to join up in return for their release, but now a new policy means people facing criminal prosecution can accept a deal to go to war instead of facing trial in court. In return, their cases are frozen and potentially dropped altogether.

A small number of the volunteers killed have been from other countries. We have identified the names of 272 such men, many of whom were from Central Asia – 47 from Uzbekistan, 51 from Tajikistan, and 26 from Kyrgyzstan.

Last year saw reports of Russia recruiting people in Cuba, Iraq, Yemen and Serbia. Foreigners already living in Russia without valid work permits or visas, who agree to “work for the state”, are promised they will not be deported and are offered a simplified route to citizenship if they survive the war. Many have later complained that they did not understand the paperwork – as with Russian citizens, they have turned to the media for help.

The governments of India and Nepal have called on Moscow to stop sending their citizens to Ukraine and repatriate the bodies of the dead. So far, the calls have not been acted upon.

Many new recruits who have joined the military have criticised the training they have received. A man who signed a contract with the Russian army in November last year told the BBC he had been promised two weeks of training at a shooting range before deployment to the front.

“In reality, people were just thrown out onto the parade ground, and dished out some gear,” he said, adding the equipment was poorly made.

“We were loaded on to trains, then trucks, and sent to the front. About half of us were thrown into battle straight from the road. As a result, some people went from the recruitment office to the front line in just a week,” he said.

Samuel Cranny-Evans, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in the UK says: “Basic understanding of things like camouflage and concealment or how to move quietly at night, how to move without creating a profile for yourself during the day,” should be taught as basic infantry skills.

Another soldier also told the BBC that equipment is a problem, saying it “varies, but most often it’s some random set of uniforms, standard boots that wear out within a day, and a kit bag with a label showing it was made in the mid-20th Century”.

“A random bulletproof vest and a cheap helmet. It’s impossible to fight in this. If you want to survive, you have to buy your own equipment.”

A team of scientists say it is “beyond reasonable doubt” the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.

They were analysing hundreds of samples collected from Wuhan, China, in January 2020.

The results identify a shortlist of animals – including racoon dogs, civets and bamboo rats – as potential sources of the pandemic.

Despite even highlighting one market stall as a hotspot of both animals and coronavirus, the study cannot provide definitive proof.

The samples were collected by Chinese officials in the early stages of Covid and are one of the most scientifically valuable sources of information on the origins of the pandemic.

An early link with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was established when patients appeared in hospitals in Wuhan with a mystery pneumonia.

The market was closed and teams swabbed locations including stalls, the inside of animal cages and equipment used to strip fur and feathers from slaughtered animals.

Their analysis was published last year and the raw data made available to other scientists. Now a team in the US and France says they have performed even more advanced genetic analyses to peer deeper into Covid’s early days.

It involved analysing millions of short fragments of genetic code – both DNA and RNA – to establish what animals and viruses were in the market in January 2020.

“We are seeing the DNA and RNA ghosts of these animals in the environmental samples, and some are in stalls where [the Covid virus] was found too,” says Prof Florence Débarre, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

The results, published in the journal Cell, highlight a series of findings that come together to make their case.

It shows Covid virus and susceptible animals were detected in the same location, with some individual swabs collecting both animal and coronavirus genetic code. This is not evenly distributed across the market and points to very specific hotspots.

“We find a very consistent story in terms of this pointing – even at the level of a single stall – to the market as being the very likely origin of this particular pandemic,” says Prof Kristian Andersen, from the Scripps Institute in the US.

However, being in the same place at the same time is not proof any animals were infected.

The animal which came up most frequently in the samples was the common raccoon dog. This has been shown to both catch and transmit Covid in experiments.

Other animals identified as a potential source of the pandemic were the masked palm civet, which was also associated with the Sars outbreak in 2003, as well as hoary bamboo rats and Malayan porcupines. The experiments have not been done to see if they can spread the virus.

The depth of the genetic analysis was able to identify the specific types of raccoon dogs being sold. They were those more commonly found in the wild in South China rather than those farmed for their fur. This gives scientists clues about where to look next.

The research teams also analysed the genetic code of the viral samples found in the market, and compared them to samples from patients in the early days of the pandemic. Looking at the variety of different mutations in the viral samples also provides clues.

The samples suggest, but do not prove, that Covid started more than once in the market with potentially two spillover events from animals to humans. The researchers say this supports the idea of the market as the origin, rather than the pandemic starting elsewhere with the market adding fuel to the fire in a superspreading event.

The scientists also used the mutations to build the virus’s family tree and peer into its past.

“If we estimate when do we believe most likely the pandemic started versus when do we believe most likely the outbreak at the market started, these two overlap, they’re one and the same,” says Prof Andersen.

In their scientific publication, the full genetic diversity of coronavirus seen in the early days of the pandemic was found at the market.

Prof Michael Worobey, of the University of Arizona, said: “Rather than being one small branch on this big bushy evolutionary tree, the market sequences are across all the branches of the tree, in a way that is consistent with the genetic diversity actually beginning at the market.”

He said this study, combined with other data – such as early cases and hospitalisations being linked to the market – all pointed to an animal origin of Covid.

Prof Worobey said: “It’s far beyond reasonable doubt that that this is how it happened”, and that other explanations for the data required “really quite fanciful absurd scenarios”.

“I think there’s been a lack of appreciation even up until now about how strong the evidence is.”

The lab-leak theory argues that instead of the virus spilling over from wildlife, it instead came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which has long studied coronaviruses.

It is located a 40-minute drive away from the market. The US intelligence community was asked to weigh up the likelihood of a leak – either accidental or deliberate.

In June 2023, all the agencies involved said either a leak or animal origins were plausible scenarios.

The National Intelligence Council and four other agencies said animals were the likely source. The FBI and the Department of Energy thought it was more likely to be a laboratory incident.

Prof Andersen said: “To many this seems like the most likely scenario – ‘the lab is right there, of course it was the lab, are you stupid?’. I totally get that argument.”

However, he says there is now plenty of data that “really points to the market as the true early epicentre” and “even locations within that market”.

Identifying the animals that could have been the source of the pandemic does provide clues to where scientists could look for further evidence of an animal origin.

However, because farms destroyed their animals in the early days of Covid it means there may no longer be any evidence left to find.

“In all likelihood, we missed our chance,” says Prof Worobey.

Prof Alice Hughes, from the University of Hong Kong, who was not involved in the analysis, said it was a “good study”.

“[But] without swabs from the actual animals in the market, which were not collected, we cannot obtain any higher certainty.”

Prof James Wood, the co-director of Cambridge Infectious Diseases, said the study provided “very strong evidence” of the pandemic starting in wildlife stalls at the market. However, he said it could not be definitive because the samples were collected after the market closed, and the pandemic probably started weeks earlier.

And he warned “little or nothing” was being done to limit the live trade in wildlife, and “uncontrolled transmission of animal infections poses a major risk of future pandemics”.

A Lebanese surgeon has described how the sheer volume of severe wounds from two days of exploding device attacks forced him to act “robotic” just to be able to keep working.

Surgeon Elias Jaradeh said he treated women and children but most of the patients he saw were young men. The surgeon said a large proportion were “severely injured” and many had lost the sight in both eyes.

The dead and injured in Lebanon include fighters from Hezbollah – the Iranian backed armed group which has been trading cross-border fire with Israel for months and is classed as a terrorist organisation by the UK and the US.

But members of their families have also been killed or wounded, along with innocent bystanders. Elias Jaradeh described the wounded he treated as looking “mostly civilian”.

The bomb attacks – which killed 37 people including two children – have been widely blamed on Israel, which has not claimed responsibility.

Dr Jaradeh, who is also an MP for the Change parliamentary bloc, was working at a specialist eye and ear hospital where some of the most severely wounded people were sent. He said it had taken a toll on the medical teams, himself included.

“And, yes, it’s very hard,” the surgeon said. “You have to dissociate yourself. More or less, you are robotic. This is the way you have to behave, but inside, you are deeply injured. You are seeing the nation injured.”

Surgeons like Dr Jaradeh worked for almost 24 hours continuously on the wounded, many of whom have lost their eyesight or the use of their hands, the country’s health minister told the BBC.

Eye specialist Prof Elias Warrak told BBC Arabic that in one night he extracted more damaged eyes than he had previously in his entire career.

“It was very hard,” he said. “Most of the patients were young men in their twenties and in some cases I had to remove both eyes. In my whole life I had not seen scenes similar to what I saw yesterday.”

Health Minister Firass Abiad told the BBC the victims’ injuries would prove life-changing.

“This is something that unfortunately will require a lot of rehabilitation,” he said.

About 3,200 people were injured, most of them in Tuesday’s attack which saw thousands of pagers detonated.

Wednesday’s attack, which detonated two-way radio devices, wounded about 450 people but was responsible for 25 deaths, twice as many as in Tuesday’s blasts.

Abiad told the BBC the attacks constituted a war crime.

“The whole world could see that these attacks occurred in markets,” he said.

“These were not people who were at the battleground fighting. They were in civilian areas with their families.”

Witnesses described seeing people with severe wounds to their faces and hands after the attacks.

Journalist Sally Abou al-Joud says she saw patients “covered in blood” at hospitals, where ambulances were arriving “one after the other within the minute”. Most injuries she saw were “in the faces and the eyes”.

“We’re talking about hands injured, severely injured fingers torn, I’ve heard some doctors say we need to perform amputation surgeries to remove hands… they need to perform surgeries for eyes to remove them,” she said.

One woman told BBC Arabic on Thursday that what they had seen was a “massacre in every sense of the world”.

“Young men were walking in the street with injuries to their hands, waist and eyes… they were unable to see anything,” she said.

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s blasts, writer and politician Tracy Chamoun said she saw one man with his eye blown out and another “had half of his face ripped off”. She had been driving in southern Beirut – a Hezbollah stronghold – at the time.

Many Lebanese in Beirut say the device attacks have reignited their trauma from the Beirut port explosion four years ago.

At least 200 people were killed and 5,000 injured when thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored unsafely at a warehouse in the port blew up, sending a mushroom cloud into the air and a supersonic blastwave tearing through the city.

“We remembered such painful scenes… it is something truly terrifying,” one woman told BBC Arabic. “A state of confusion, discomfort and anxiety is dominating all Lebanon… what happened to us four years ago is being repeated now.”

In the aftermath of the exploding pagers and radio devices the Lebanese army has been destroying suspicious devices with controlled detonations, while walkie-talkies and pagers have now been banned onboard all flights operating at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri Airport – the only operational commercial airport in Lebanon.

More than 90 of those injured are now in Iran receiving further treatment, according to Tehran’s embassy in Lebanon.

That includes Iran’s ambassador, Mojtaba Amani, whose condition has been described as “very good” by the embassy in its statement.

Officials didn’t elaborate on how serious the injuries suffered by the other transferees were.

Abiad said the “weaponisation of technology” was something very serious, he said, not only for Lebanon but also for the rest of the world, and for other conflicts.

“Now we have to think twice before using technology,” he said.

On Thursday Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah described the device attacks as a “massacre” and a “declaration of war” as Israel carried out air strikes on southern Lebanon and jets flew over the capital at low altitude, creating a deafening noise.

The Shia Muslim organisation is a major political presence and controls the most powerful armed force in Lebanon.

It has been trading near-daily cross border fire with Israel since Israel began its retaliation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip after the Palestinian group attacked southern Israel last October. Hezbollah says it is acting in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Israel has said it is changing its military focus to its border with Lebanon, with the aim of returning tens of thousands of displaced residents to their homes. Hezbollah has previously said it would stop firing if there is a ceasefire in Gaza.

Both Dr Jaradeh and Health Minister Abiad are pessimistic about the chances of peace any time soon. Dr Jaradeh described the escalation in Lebanon as a “rebound effect”.

“I think whatever happens, it doesn’t matter how you end up the world, but if you don’t reach a peace, permanent peace process, that protecting everyone and giving the right to everyone, so we are preparing to another war,” he said.

Abiad said Lebanon needed to prepare for the “worst-case scenario”.

“The two attacks in the last day, show that their intent (Israel) is not towards a diplomatic solution,” he said.

“What I know is the position of my government is clear. From day one, we believe that Lebanon does not want war.”

A recent report, which details poor working conditions and rampant sexual harassment faced by women in Malayalam-language cinema, is causing seismic upheavals in the entertainment industry in India.

But the messages of solidarity and support have come largely from women – and critics say the silence of powerful men, including India’s biggest and most loved stars, is deafening.

Based on testimonies from 51 people from the Kerala-based film industry, the Hema Committee report lays bare decades of exploitation and says that “women have been asked to make themselves available for sex on demand” and that they were constantly told to make “compromise and adjustments” if they wanted work.

The panel was set up in 2017 after Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), formed by a group of women working in the Malayalam cinema, petitioned the government after a top actress was sexually assaulted by a group of men allegedly at the behest of a top male actor.

Their 290-page report was released last month, with chunks redacted to hide the identities of the survivors and those accused of harassment.

But since its release on 19 August, several women have publicly spoken up about their ordeal and more than a dozen police complaints have been lodged against male stars, producers, directors and other influential men.

The state government has set up a special investigation team (SIT) to look into the allegations and the Kerala high court has asked the SIT to investigate the instances mentioned in the report, raising hopes that the survivors may after all get justice.

Women in all Indian film industries, including in the biggest and hugely popular Bollywood, have repeatedly spoken about the casting couch – the practice of men asking for sexual favours in return for roles – and rampant sexual harassment they face.

“The rot is as deep as the ocean across all Indian film industries,” film critic and author Shubhra Gupta told the BBC. “We won’t find a single female performer anywhere in the country who has not suffered. If everyone came out to complain, it will take us many decades to deal with all those complaints.”

The sordid revelations about the extent of the rot in Malayalam cinema have made headlines and the findings have been debated on primetime TV. Deedi Damodaran, a WCC member, told the BBC that the response has been “overwhelming”.

“Some women have now talked about how they had to flee the industry because of the terrible things that happened to them. They have no evidence, but they’ve got some sort of closure by talking about their experiences.”

Many of them, she says, have spoken out despite being trolled and abused on social media.

The report has also created ripples in other film industries, with calls for reform being heard in regional industries based in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka.

In Telangana, pressure has grown on the government to publish a report on the Telugu film industry that’s been waiting to see the light of the day for two years. An inquiry was instituted after an upcoming actress, Sri Reddy, protested by stripping down to her undergarments in public in 2018 “to draw attention to the sexual exploitation of women in the industry”.

West Bengal has set up a committee to investigate allegations of sexual abuse in the Bengali film industry, actress Ritabhari Chakraborty has said. This, she added, would “cleanse the industry from predators”.

Women in Tamil and Kannada cinema have also petitioned their state governments to improve working conditions for them.

Veteran Tamil actress Radhika Sarathkumar told the BBC that the Hema committee report has created a lot of awareness and that “men will be scared now”.

“It’s time women in cinema get together and speak up and stop this nonsense,” she said.

But the lack of support from the men in the industry, says Damodaran, has been disappointing.

Malayalam superstars Mohanlal and Mammootty have welcomed the report but said that nothing should be done to hurt the industry.

“These heroes are worshipped as larger than life beings, but we’re waiting for them to take a heroic stand,” Damodaran told the BBC.

In Tamil Nadu, actor-politicians Kamal Haasan and Vijay’s silence has been noted, while Rajinikanth faced criticism for claiming ignorance of the report 10 days after its release.

“The harassment happens to each of us, how come men don’t know about it? Maybe the male actors compartmentalise, maybe they choose not to see it,” Sarathkumar told the BBC. “It’s very sad that every time the onus in on the women to protect themselves.”

Some have also pointed out that the biggest names in Bollywood – Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan and Akshay Kumar – have chosen to remain silent.

Gupta says their silence may be deafening, but it’s not unexpected. “I would’ve been very surprised if there had been a reaction. We saw what happened in 2018 after the #MeToo movement first started in Bollywood after actress Tanushree Dutta accused an actor of behaving inappropriately towards her on a film set in 2008.”

“For a while, there was a groundswell of support and it seemed that Bollywood would step up and do something about it. But then things were contained. None of the men suffered any consequences, they are all back to doing what they did. In fact, the women who complained didn’t get work.”

A key criticism of Bollywood is that, unlike other industries, none of its leading actresses have addressed gender issues.

Dutta, who received little support from her A-lister peers and has since claimed that she has been denied work, has described the Hema committee report as “useless”, adding that earlier reports about making workplaces safer for women had not helped.

Gupta says one of the reasons why stars don’t speak out could be to avoid trouble for themselves.

“ I think they keep quiet because they know the stakes are high, they are fearful of not getting work in the industry. Remember the time when Aamir Khan or Shahrukh Khan spoke about intolerance? They got trolled heavily and lost out on work.”

Damodaran, however, says the response to the report has given her cause for optimism.

“Film industries in India are deeply patriarchal and misogynistic. But we can’t continue with the kind of sexism and misogyny that women have to face in their workplace. Things are bound to change – and they must.”

Popstar Kylie Minogue has announced her biggest world tour in more than a decade, and a sequel to her comeback album Tension.

The 13 tracks on Tension II will be released on 18 October, with the global tour kicking off in her home country Australia in February, before swinging through Asia and the UK.

In a statement, the pop icon said she is “beyond excited” to be “celebrating the Tension era and more” with fans.

“There will be a whole lot of Padaming,” she said, a reference to her viral, Grammy-winning 2023 single Padam Padam.

Twenty dates have been announced so far, but Minogue said more are coming.

The 56-year-old is in the middle of a career renaissance, off the back of Tension and Padam Padam.

In February she picked up her second Grammy – 20 years after her first – and the following month received the Brits’ Global Icon Award.

Since popping up as plucky car mechanic Charlene on soap opera Neighbours in 1986, she’s racked up dozens of hit singles and a trophy cabinet full of awards.

She’s also performed at the Sydney Olympics, been made an OBE, and starred in several films.

The tour and album has been met with excitement – and some stress.

The concert dates in Newcastle clash with Eurovision which is being held in Switzerland in May.

Meanwhile, her shows in Sydney are happening at the same time as the annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade – prompting many of her Australian fans to weigh up a difficult dilemma. Minogue has a large following in the LGBT community.

“What should we do… On a Night Like This?!” one online commenter said.

A woman has told the BBC she was subjected to a “sickening” sexual assault by former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed after being invited to his London flat for a work meeting.

The woman, who the BBC is calling Melanie, believes police were close to arresting him over her allegations just days before he died in August 2023.

A BBC investigation published on Thursday revealed that more than 20 women said they were sexually assaulted by the billionaire. Five said they were raped.

Melanie is one of a growing number of additional ex-Harrods employees to tell the BBC they were attacked since the documentary and podcast Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods was released.

The BBC investigation gathered evidence that during Fayed’s ownership, Harrods not only failed to intervene, but helped cover up abuse allegations.

Melanie’s testimony comes as new details emerge of failed efforts by police and prosecutors to hold Fayed to account during his life, and a legal team representing many of the women the BBC has spoken to will set out their next steps on Friday.

Melanie worked at Harrods for a few years prior to 2010. She described being hired there as a 21-year-old as a “dream job”.

She met Fayed – who was in his late seventies at the time – at work meetings on two occasions, before being summoned to his apartment on London’s Park Lane in late 2007.

Melanie says she went to the evening meeting despite the invitation “ringing the alarm bells”.

She was shown into sitting room by a housekeeper.

Melanie continued: “He sat down next to me, talking to me for a few minutes, not very long… He had asked that I return a couple of weeks later to stay at the apartments the night before the Harrods sale, and I could go to the Harrods sale with him, and I could meet the celebrity that was opening it.

“And he would not really let me leave until I agreed to that, so I said yes to be able to leave. I did not go back.

“As I stood to leave, that’s when he put his hands on my breast and said some pretty disgusting things. And I was in complete shock. I just turned around and walked out.”

Melanie told the BBC she did not share the full details of the “sickening” experience with loved ones, and for years “felt it was my fault” because she was “naive enough to have gone”. She described Fayed as a “sleazebag” and “slimy”.

In January 2023 Melanie decided to go to the police. The BBC has seen emails showing the case was passed to the Met’s CID department, which investigates serious allegations.

Melanie says she was later told the Met planned to arrest Fayed that year, and officers tried to arrest him on two occasions.

But he was too unwell to be questioned, and he died age 94 in August 2023.

Like other women the BBC has spoken to, Melanie said there were “rumours swirling” about Fayed, and described his private office as being like a “modelling agency” full of young women.

She continued: “There was definitely a knowledge, like a secret knowledge, within the company that Fayed likes to have pretty girls in his chairman’s office. And you do wonder what that means.”

Other women who worked at Harrods have painted a picture of Fayed as a predator who abused his position to prey on staff, and used his power to deter them from speaking out.

Some former employees recounted how he would tour his department store and identify young female assistants he found attractive, before promoting them to work his private office.

Ex-staff told the BBC this abuse was an open secret at the store. One said: “We all watched each other walk through that door thinking, ‘you poor girl, it’s you today’ and feeling utterly powerless to stop it.”

As well as inside Harrods itself and his Mayfair home, women have described incidents involving Fayed on trips to Paris, St Tropez and Abu Dhabi.

One woman described him as a “monster” who “cultivated fear” among his staff, while the store’s ex-deputy director of security revealed Fayed had phones tapped and secret cameras installed to monitor his employees’ discussions.

Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods

A BBC investigation into allegations of rape and attempted rape by Mohamed Al Fayed, the former owner of Harrods. Did the luxury store protect a billionaire predator?

Watch Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods on BBC iPlayer now.

Melanie was not the only woman who tried to bring Fayed to justice.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed it was “aware of various allegations of sexual offences made over a number of years” against Fayed.

It said each of the allegations reported to the force had been “investigated and, where appropriate, advice from the Crown Prosecution Service was sought”.

But Fayed was never charged with a crime.

The closest he came to being uncovered appears to have been in October 2008, when he was questioned over allegations made by a girl who he first met when she was 14.

Ellie – not her real name – told the BBC that Fayed personally offered to secure her a job despite her still being a teenager, and she started working at Harrods when she had just turned 15.

She recounted how in May 2008 she was told to go to the Harrods boardroom, where she said she was attacked by Fayed.

“He started…hugging me and [getting] touchy feely, and rubbing himself against me, and then he just grabbed my face and tried to… put his tongue in my mouth.

“I mentioned that I was 15, and [said] ‘what are you doing?’, and he said I was turning into a beautiful woman and grabbed my chest.”

She said Fayed flew into a rage and started screaming at her when she pushed him off.

Ellie went to the police and Fayed was questioned by detectives – news which became public in October 2008.

On Thursday, the Met confirmed it had spoken to more than one witness and analysed telephone data in Ellie’s case. The force said it handed a file of evidence to the CPS – but prosecutors decided no further action should be taken.

The Met has declined to say whether Ellie’s case was the only one where Fayed was formally questioned, though the BBC has seen no evidence he was ever quizzed over any other allegation.

The BBC understands Ellie’s case was the only time when a file of evidence was handed to the CPS, a step which has to be taken before an individual can be charged.

On four occasions, police investigations into Fayed were advanced enough for police to consult prosecutors for legal advice.

The CPS advised the Met in 2018, 2021, and 2023 – but in those instances, police did not provide prosecutors with a full file of evidence. It is also not clear if all of those investigations relate to separate women.

It means Fayed was never forced to answer claims against him in court during his lifetime.

Melanie described the feeling of discovering Fayed had died and would never be taken in for questioning over her 2023 report as “gutting”.

But asked what she would say to Fayed if he were still alive today, Melanie told the BBC: “That you didn’t get away with it. That everybody out there knows what you’ve done… and money can’t get you out of this.”

The claims against Fayed have not come out of the blue.

The Egypt-born businessman owned Harrods between 1985 and 2010 and became a well-known figure through other high-profile acquisitions, such as the Ritz hotel in Paris and Fulham Football Club.

He came to further public prominence when his son Dodi died alongside Diana, Princess of Wales – with whom Dodi was romantically involved – in a Paris car crash.

Despite chat show appearances and his associations with celebrities and public figures, suspicions about Fayed’s predatory behaviour were investigated during his life – including by Vanity Fair in 1995, ITV in 1997 and Channel 4 in 2017.

It was only when Fayed died that many of his victims felt able to come forward.

On Friday, details of new claims are expected to emerge.

Members of the UK legal team representing many of the women featured in the BBC documentary “Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods” are to hold a news conference on Friday morning.

The legal team will outline the case against Harrods. They will be joined by the US women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred, who has represented victims of high-profile offenders in the past.

Fourteen of the women the BBC has spoken to have brought civil claims against Harrods’ current owners for damages.

Harrods said it has a process available to women who say they were attacked by Fayed, adding “it has been our priority to settle claims in the quickest way possible, avoiding lengthy legal proceedings for the women involved”.

Harrods reiterated its apology to its former staff after the BBC investigation was published. A spokesperson said: “We have now had the opportunity to watch the programme and once again express our sympathy to the victims featured.”

The Met said it was committed to investigating sexual offences and encouraged victims to speak to police.

It also said any new information about Fayed would be “assessed and investigated accordingly”.

Fayed’s family did not provide a statement when asked for comment.

Listen to World of Secrets, Season 4: Al Fayed, Predator at Harrods on BBC Sounds. If you’re outside the UK, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you look at the possibility of political turbulence ahead of November’s US presidential election and think: democracy could be in trouble? So does a group of tech entrepreneurs backed by big Silicon Valley money. And they love it.

Imagine if you could choose your citizenship the same way you choose your gym membership. That’s a vision of the not-too-distant future put forward by Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji – who, like Madonna, is mostly just known by his first name – is a rockstar in the world of crypto. A serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who believes that pretty much everything governments currently do, tech can do better.

I watched Balaji outline his idea last autumn, at a vast conference hall on the outskirts of Amsterdam. “We start new companies like Google; we start new communities like Facebook; we start new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum; can we start new countries?” he asked, as he ambled on stage, dressed in a slightly baggy grey suit and loose tie. He looked less like a rockstar, more like a middle manager in a corporate accounts department. But don’t be fooled. Balaji is a former partner at the giant Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He has backers with deep pockets.

Silicon Valley loves “disruption”. Tech startups have been disrupting traditional media for years; now they are making inroads into other areas too: education, finance, space travel. “Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Balaji told the audience. “They exist alongside the establishment in parallel, they’re pulling away users, they’re gaining strength, until they become the new thing.”

If startups could replace all these different institutions, Balaji reasoned, they could replace countries too. He calls his idea the “network state”: startup nations. Here’s how it would work: communities form – on the internet initially – around a set of shared interests or values. Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether.

You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. You would become a citizen of the franchised cyber statelet of your choice.

There is nothing new about corporations having undue influence in the affairs of nation states. The term “banana republic” derives from the fact that a US company, United Fruit, effectively ruled Guatemala for decades beginning in the 1930s. Apart from owning the majority of the land, they ran the railways, the postal service, the telegraph. When the Guatemalan government tried to push back, the CIA helped United Fruit out by instigating a coup.

But the network state movement appears to have greater ambitions still. It doesn’t just want pliant existing governments so that companies can run their own affairs. It wants to governments with companies.

The Coming Storm

As the US heads into a presidential election, Gabriel Gatehouse dives back into the labyrinthine rabbit warren of American conspiracy culture. Whilst liberals across the world worry about a possible return of Donald Trump, millions of Americans are convinced that their democracy has already been hijacked – by a sinister Deep State cabal. How did this happen? And who is behind it? That’s the story that Gabriel Gatehouse is investigating in this series of The Coming Storm.

There are those who view the network state idea as a neo-colonial project that would replace elected leaders with corporate dictators acting in the interests of their shareholders. But others think it’s a way of cutting through what they see as the regulation-infested state of Western democracies today. Sounds like a tech bro fantasy? Elements of the network state already exist.

The conference in Amsterdam included tech entrepreneurs showcasing some of these “startup societies”. There was Cabin, a “network city of modern villages” that has branches in the US, Portugal and elsewhere; and Culdesac, an Arizona-based community designed for remote working.

Balaji’s concept of the network state builds on the idea of “charter cities”, urban areas that constitute a special economic zone, similar to free ports. There are several such projects under construction around the world, including in Nigeria and Zambia. At a recent rally in Las Vegas, Donald Trump promised that, if elected in November, he would free up federal land in Nevada to “create special new zones with ultra-low taxes and ultra-low regulation”, to attract new industries, build affordable housing and create jobs. The plan would, he said, revive “the frontier spirit and the American dream”.

Culdesac and Cabin look more like online communities that have established territorial bases. Próspera is different. Located on an island off the coast of Honduras, it describes itself as a “private city” catering to entrepreneurs. It promotes longevity science – offering unregulated experimental gene therapies to slow the ageing process.

Run by a for-profit company based in Delaware in the United States, Próspera was granted special status under a previous Honduran government to make its own laws. The current president, Xiomara Castro, wants it gone, and has begun stripping it of some of the special privileges it was granted. Próspera is suing the government of Honduras for $10.8 billion.

At some point during the day-long pitching session in Amsterdam, a young man in a grey hoodie slouched on stage. His name was Dryden Brown. He said he wanted to build a new city-state, somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. It would be governed not by a giant state bureaucracy, but on the blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrency. Its founding principles would be ideas of “vitality” and “heroic virtue”. He called it Praxis, the Ancient Greek word for “action”. The first citizens of this new nation, he said, would be able to move in in 2026.

He was a little hazy on the details. Move in where exactly? Who would build the infrastructure? Who would run it? Dryden Brown fumbled with a remote and pulled up a slide, suggesting Praxis was backed by funds with access to hundreds of billions of dollars of capital.

For now, though, the “Praxis community” exists mainly on the internet. There is a website where you can apply for citizenship. Who, exactly, these citizens are, is unclear. Dryden flashed up another slide with his remote. It was a Pepe meme: the sad-looking cartoon frog that became an “alt-right” mascot during the Trump campaign in 2016.

In this niche world of startup nations, Praxis had a reputation for edginess. They hosted legendary parties: people spoke of candle-lit soirees in giant Manhattan loft spaces, where awkward computer coders mixed with hipster models and figures from the “Dark Enlightenment” – people like the blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates a totalitarian future in which the world is ruled by corporate “monarchs”. His ideas are sometimes described as fascist, something he denies. Attendees would be made to sign an NDA. Journalists were generally not welcome.

After his presentation, I went to talk to Dryden Brown. He seemed suspicious and a little cold, but he gave me his phone number. I messaged him a few times, trying to engage him in conversation. To no avail.

But then, about six months later, I spotted an intriguing notice on X. “Praxis magazine launch. Tomorrow night. Photocopy your favourite pages.” There was no time given, no location. Just a link where you could apply to attend. I applied. No answer. So, next morning, I texted Dryden Brown again. And to my surprise, he replied right away: “Ella Funt at 10pm.”

Ella Funt turned out to be a bar and nightclub in Manhattan. Formerly known as Club 82, it had once been a legendary spot on the New York gay scene; in the 1950s, writers and artists would go there to drink cocktails served by women in tuxedos and watch drag acts in the basement. Now it was hosting an exclusive party for people who wanted to start a new country. And I had somehow got myself an invite. But I was 2000 miles away in Utah. If I was going to make it in time, I had to get on a flight right away.

I was actually one of the first to arrive. The place was almost empty, with a few Praxis people laying out copies of their magazine around the bar. I flicked through it: expensive, heavy paper; lots of advertisements for seemingly random things: perfume; 3D-printed guns; one for just… milk. Like Pepe the Frog, milk is an internet meme. In “alt-right” circles, posting an icon of a white milk bottle signals white supremacy.

The magazine urged readers to “photocopy pages and paste them around your town” – a kind of analogue memetics. A Xerox machine had been wheeled into the bar for that very purpose.

A group of young men walked in, some wearing cowboy boots. They didn’t look like outdoor types though. I got talking to one of them. He introduced himself as Zac, a “crypto cowboy” from Milton Keynes (he was wearing a leather Stetson.)

“I kind of represent the American Wild West,” he said. “I feel as though we are at the frontier.”

Plenty of people associate cryptocurrencies with scams: highly volatile internet money, the value of which could disappear overnight. But in the world of the “network state”, they love crypto. They see it as the future of money – money that governments cannot control.

The next person I got talking to called himself Azi. I asked for his surname. “Mandias,” he replied with a smile. It was a reference to a sonnet by Percy Bysse Shelley: Ozymandias, King of Kings. Anonymity is an important part of the crypto ethos. I got the feeling no one at this party was giving me their real names.

Mr Mandias was from Bangladesh originally, but had grown up in Queens, New York. He was the founder of a tech startup. He believed that, just as the printing press had contributed to the collapse of the feudal order in Europe 500 years ago, today new tech – crypto, the blockchain, AI – would bring about the collapse of the democratic nation state.

“Obviously, democracy is great,” he said. “But the best ruler is a moral dictator. Some people call [that] the philosopher king.”

Azi said he was excited to be “on the precipice of what I think is the next renaissance”. But before this renaissance, he predicted a “Luddite movement” against new technology that would destroy millions of jobs and monopolise the global economy. The Luddites would fail, Azi said. Yet he predicted that the transition period to what he called the “next stage” of human societal evolution – the “network state” stage – would be violent and “Darwinistic”.

Far from being perturbed by this prospect, Azi seemed excited at the thought that out of the smouldering ashes of democracy, new kings would emerge: corporate dictators ruling over their networked empires.

I wandered over to the bar and got myself a drink. There I got talking to two young women who did not look like they were part of the crypto crowd. Ezra was the manager of another nightclub nearby, her friend Dylan was a student. It looked like they’d been invited to add a bit of glamour to what was – essentially – a party of crypto-bros and computer geeks. But they had some thoughts about the whole network state idea.

“What happens if you don’t have enough employees in the hospital or at the school for the kids?” Dylan asked. “It is unrealistic to start an entire city without any government.” To Ezra, the whole idea seemed dystopian. “We wanted to see what a ‘real’ cult meeting was like,” she said, I think in jest.

Just then, Dryden Brown appeared, the co-founder of Praxis. When he went outside for a cigarette, I followed him. The Praxis Magazine was a way to showcase the new culture he was hoping to build, he told me. Praxis, he said, was about “the pursuit of the frontier” and of “heroic virtue”.

I doubted Dryden would last very long in a covered wagon out on the prairie. He looked exhausted by it all. I wanted to ask him some pointed questions about the network state project: who would be the citizens of this brave new world? Who would govern it? What was with all the alt-right memes? And – Dylan’s question – who was going to staff the hospitals?

But we kept getting interrupted by more guests arriving. Dryden Brown invited me to visit the “Praxis Embassy” the following day. We said our see-you-tomorrows and went inside. The party was getting wilder. Ezra and Dylan and some friends who looked like models were climbing up on top of the Xerox machine. They were busy photocopying – not pages from the magazine, but bits of their bodies. I grabbed a copy of the magazine and left.

Back at my tiny Airbnb above a Chinese supermarket, I leafed through it. Alongside the white supremacist memes and ads for guns, there was a QR code. It linked to a short film: a 20-minute polemic against the emptiness of modern life, a lament for a vanished world of hierarchies and heroism.

“You are entertained and satiated,” the narrator intones, “you are seemingly productive. But you are not great.” The voice talks about the “algorithms making you hate yourself and your own civilisation”.

At this point in the film, the screen shows an animated figure pointing a pistol straight at the viewer.

“Contemporary media proclaims that having any ideals is fascist,” the voice continues. “Everything of conviction is fascist.”

Was it an invitation to embrace the label of fascism? This movement seemed to yearn for a specific conception of Western culture – a Nietzschean world in which the fittest survive, where disruption and chaos give birth to greatness.

The next day, I stopped by the “Praxis Embassy” – a giant loft space on Broadway. The bookshelves were indeed filled with copies of Nietzsche, biographies of Napoleon and a volume entitled The Dictator’s Handbook. I hung around for a bit, but Dryden Brown never turned up.

I left wondering what exactly it was I had witnessed the previous night: was it a glimpse of the future, in which countries like the United States and the UK would collapse into a spider’s web of corporate societies, a world in which you could choose to become a citizen of a cyber statelet? Or were Dryden Brown and his friends just “trolling”, a bunch of tech bros roleplaying as alt-right revolutionaries in order to have a laugh at the expense of the establishment, and enjoy a good party?

Might Dryden Brown one day become a CEO-king, ruler of an alt-right franchised empire with outposts dotted around the Mediterranean? I doubt it. But there are moves to promote more autonomous zones, free ports and charter cities. And if democracy is in trouble, the network state movement looks like it is waiting in the wings.

A sub that imploded on a deadly voyage to the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five people aboard, had malfunctioned days before its final dive last year, a public inquiry has heard.

The former scientific director of OceanGate, the company behind the Titan sub, said the incident had caused passengers to “tumble about” and the craft to crash into bulkheading, leaving one passenger “hanging upside down” and others clinging on.

Steven Ross added that he did not know whether the Titan’s hull was inspected for damage after the episode.

A US Coast Guard inquiry is hearing two weeks of evidence into the deadly implosion of the experimental submersible in June 2023.

Mr Ross said it took a support crew more than an hour to get the sub out of the water after the malfunction, days before its final trip.

Earlier on Thursday, a mission member aboard the sub’s support vessel described watching the crew and passengers depart for the Titanic wreck last June, saying: “I saw five people smiling on the way to their journey.”

“They were just happy to go, that’s the memory I have,” Renata Rojas, who had joined the expedition as a volunteer, testified.

Ms Rojas, who was on a surface support vessel, said everything was “working very smoothly” before the sub began its descent.

But she told the probe that she remembered losing communications, asking colleagues: “We haven’t heard from them, where are they?”

Ms Rojas told the inquiry that she was the “platform assistant” on the day of the dive, “mostly standing around until somebody needed help”.

The Titan’s implosion led to questions over the submersible’s safety and design, and the materials used in its construction.

The inquiry earlier this week was told of the last messages sent from the sub as it descended towards the Titanic, with the crew stating “all good here” minutes before the implosion.

Ms Rojas said she was on the bridge of her own vessel as communications were lost, and that rescue protocol advised waiting an hour as the passengers might have been spending extra time exploring their destination.

The conversation then turned as the sub failed to resurface. Ms Rojas said she recalled conversations on the bridge about calling the Coast Guard.

“We went into ‘go mode’,” she said.

She said there were a number of rescue options available if the sub had been stuck on the ocean floor, including initiating a release manoeuvre or waiting for the tide to change. The Titan had 96 hours of life support onboard, she added.

However, she said there was nothing anyone in the sub could have done if the hull had failed.

Ms Rojas described a 2021 expedition in which she recalled how the dome fell off the submersible as it was being retrieved from the water.

She said when the submersible was being pulled back on to the main ship, the crew lost hold of it.

Ms Rojas said the dome vacuum of the sub broke.

“There was only, I think, two bolts or four bolts on the dome,” she said.

“It started dripping, falling off,” she added.

The incident led to crews installing 18 bolts on the dome for subsequent expeditions.

Ms Rojas, a self-described Titanic obsessive, told the inquiry she had never felt unsafe during her own dives.

“I found them to be very transparent about everything,” she said about OceanGate staff briefings.

“I knew the risk and still decided to go.”

The inquiry will continue into next week.

A Kentucky sheriff has been arrested after fatally shooting a judge in his chambers, police say.

District Judge Kevin Mullins died at the scene after being shot multiple times in the Letcher County Courthouse, Kentucky State Police said.

Letcher County Sheriff Shawn Stines, 43, has been charged with one count of first-degree murder.

The shooting happened on Thursday after an argument inside the court, police said, but they have not yet revealed a motive.

Officials said Mullins, 54, was shot multiple times at around 14:00 local time on Thursday at the court in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a small rural town about 150 miles (240km) south-east of Lexington.

Sheriff Stines was arrested at the scene without incident, Kentucky State Police said. They did not reveal the nature of the argument before the shooting.

According to local newspaper the Mountain Eagle, Sheriff Stines walked into the judge’s outer office and told court employees that he needed to speak alone with Mullins.

The two entered the judge’s chambers, closing the door behind them. Those outside heard gun shots, the newspaper reported.

Sheriff Stines reportedly walked out with his hands up and surrendered to police. He was handcuffed in the courthouse foyer.

The state attorney general, Russell Coleman, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that his office “will fully investigate and pursue justice”.

Kentucky State Police spokesman Matt Gayheart told a news conference that the town was shocked by the incident

“This community is small in nature, and we’re all shook,” he said.

Mr Gayheart said that 50 employees were inside the court building when the shooting occurred.

No-one else was hurt. A school in the area was briefly placed on lockdown.

Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice Laurance B VanMeter said he was “shocked by this act of violence”.

Announcing Judge Mullins’ death on social media, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said: “There is far too much violence in this world, and I pray there is a path to a better tomorrow.”

The boss of Nike will step down next month, making way for a company veteran to take his place as the leader of the world’s biggest sportswear company amid tough competition in the retail sector.

In a statement, Nike said John Donahoe will retire on 13 October, staying on in an advisory role until early next year to “ensure a smooth transition”.

Demand for the company’s trainers has been faltering in international markets like China and the company’s stock price had slumped.

Shares rose more than 9% in after-hours trading, however, following the announcement that Elliott Hill would return to the firm.

Mr Donahoe was responsible for boosting Nike’s online presence, as well as driving more sales directly from customers instead of partnering with other shops on High Streets or in shopping centres.

He joined the company’s board in 2014 before taking on the role of chief executive in 2020.

His tenure has been challenging with huge shifts in the retail landscape during the pandemic and as inflation spiked in the following years.

The footwear firm has also faced tough competition from the likes of newer rivals like On and Hoka, which some analysts have described as being more innovative and on-top of current trends.

Nike had been hoping that new products and a marketing campaign around the Olympic Games in Paris would help bring shoppers back to the brand.

But in the announcement on Thursday, it said that the board and Mr Donahoe had “decided he will retire from his role”.

“It became clear now was the time to make a leadership change,” Mr Donahoe said, adding that Elliott Hill is the right person for the job and he was looking forward to seeing his future success.

His successor, Mr Hill, retired from the company just four years ago after serving in a number of senior leadership roles in Europe and the US.

He said he was “eager to reconnect” with employees he had worked with in the past.

“Together with our talented teams, I look forward to delivering bold, innovative products, that set us apart in the marketplace and captivate consumers for years to come,” he added.

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.

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.

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

One of our producers received a message from a friend, who said she had changed her Lebanese SIM card to an international number, concerned that her phone could explode, too.

Many people here, and across the country, are inevitably wondering what will come next. Some even say they do not know if it is safe to walk next to other people, and are changing their plans.

“Everyone is just panicking… We don’t know if we can stay next to our laptops, our phones. Everything seems like a danger at this point, and no one knows what to do,” one woman, Ghida, said.

The confusion was made worse by rumours that spread on social media. One of them suggested that even solar panels were blowing up. “A state of panic overwhelmed people,” another woman said. “And frankly, this situation is very frightening”.

Wednesday’s attack, which killed 25 people, came as the country was still shocked and angered by what happened the day before, when thousands of pagers exploded in a 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 who went to pick up the pager for her father, and an 11-year-old boy. Around 2,800 others were wounded, with hundreds needing surgery.

Treating some of the injured, Dr Elias Warrak said at least 60% of the people he had seen after Tuesday’s blasts had lost at least one eye, with many also losing a finger or a whole hand. He described it as “the worst day of [his] life as a physician”.

“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.”

The attacks are a humiliation for the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, and a possible indication that its entire communication network may have been infiltrated by Israel, the worst security breach in the group’s history.

Reports suggest a shipment of pagers may have been rigged with explosives, before being detonated remotely. Hezbollah had distributed the devices 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.

“The pain is huge, physical and in the heart. But this is something we are used to, and we will continue with our resistance,” said a young man in Dahiyeh. A woman said: “This will make us stronger, whoever has lost an eye will fight with the other eye and we are all standing together.”

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.

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. A damaged Hezbollah is not in Iran’s interests either, as the group acts as part of the country’s deterrence against Israel.

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.

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.

• Follow live updates on this story
• What we know about the explosions
• Video captures Beirut skyline as devices explode across city
• No electronic equipment considered safe after Lebanon device attacks
• Hezbollah and its conflict with Israel explained

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.

Her professional profile also states she was a board member of the Earth Child Institute (ECI) – an international non-profit organisation. However, it told us that Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono “is not and never has been an official member of the Earth Child Institute board of directors”.

The ECI said that she was introduced to them in 2017-18 and there was an exchange of emails “to explore if and how she could support ECI”. However, “no one at ECI has not been in contact with this person in the years since 2018 and there is no current connection with her”.

Elsewhere, Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono was listed as chief sustainability officer on the website of an organisation called Eden Global Climate Impact Group. However, this section of the website has now been removed.

We have made several attempts to contact Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono, 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).

Separately, Bulgaria’s national security agency has said it is investigating the links of another company to the sale of the pagers.

While the agency has not named the company, Bulgaria’s main TV channels were told that only money – rather than goods – was transferred. The value of the transactions was reported to be worth €1.6m (£1.3m), with the most recent one going to Hungary.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

A Japanese handheld radio manufacturer has distanced itself from walkie-talkies bearing its logo that exploded in Lebanon, saying it discontinued production of the devices a decade ago.

At least 20 people were killed and 450 injured after hundreds of walkie-talkies, some reportedly used by the armed group Hezbollah, exploded across Lebanon on Wednesday.

The devices, according to photos and video of the aftermath of the attack, appear to be IC-V82 transceivers made by Icom, an Osaka-based telecommunications manufacturer.

But Icom says it hasn’t produced or exported IC-V82s, nor the batteries needed to operate them, for 10 years.

It is the second Asian company to be embroiled in bombing incidents in Lebanon this week, after thousands of exploding pagers seemingly linked to Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo killed at least 12 people and injured more than 2,000.

Gold Apollo’s founder Hsu Ching-Kuang flatly denied his company had anything to do with the attacks, saying he licensed his trade mark to a company in Hungary called BAC Consulting, whom the BBC has been unable to contact.

• Follow live updates on this story
• What we know about the explosions
• Video captures Beirut skyline as devices explode across city
• From Taiwan to Hungary, a complex picture emerges of the pagers’ origins
• Hezbollah and its conflict with Israel explained

Icom told the BBC it was aware of reports that two-way radio devices bearing its logo had exploded in Lebanon, and said it was investigating the matter.

“The IC-V82 is a handheld radio that was produced and exported, including to the Middle East, from 2004 to October 2014. It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company,” Icom said in a statement.

“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company.”

Icom further added that all its radios are manufactured at the same factory in Japan, and that it only sells products for overseas markets via authorised distributors.

Earlier, a sales executive at the US subsidiary of Icom told The Associated Press news agency that the exploded radio devices in Lebanon appeared to be knockoff products that were not made by the company – adding that it was easy to find counterfeit versions online.

The device is favoured by amateur radio operators and for use in social or emergency communications, including by people tracking tornadoes or hurricanes, he said.

It took the BBC a matter of seconds to find Icom IC-V82s listed for sale in online marketplaces.

It is unclear at which point in the supply chain these devices were compromised and how. It is also unclear if some of them were merely old Icom IC-V82s, or counterfeits as Mr Novak claimed.

Lebanon’s Annahar newspaper on Wednesday said the Icom walkie-talkies were old handsets.

Reports suggest the walkie-talkies that exploded were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, according to a security source speaking to Reuters news agency.

Icom produces walkie-talkies and radio devices for marine, aviation and land users, and considers itself a “world leader in the amateur radio market”, according to its website.

Asia is considered a global hub for telecoms and electronics, with countries like Japan, Taiwan and China being home to major tech producers that are often favoured as a benchmark of quality.

BBC Verify investigated BAC Consulting, the company linked to the pagers involved in Tuesday’s explosions, and found that the firm has a single shareholder and is registered to a building in the Hungarian capital Budapest’s 14th district.

As well as BAC, a further 13 companies and one person are registered at the same building. BBC Verify’s search of a financial information database, however, does not reveal that BAC has any connections to other companies or people.

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

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.

“We categorically deny that workers are made to work for four hours at a stretch. All workers get suitable breaks in between,” Samsung India said in an official statement.

“Also, employees work on their given task of the manufacturing process as products are passed through the conveyor line. They are not required to ‘finish’ a product in such a time frame, which is not realistic. We reiterate that we are in compliance with all laws and regulations,” the statement added.

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

Samsung India said the firm “categorically denies all the allegations and that it maintains absolute compliance with all the existing labour laws”.

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. A source in Samsung India told the BBC that the organisation “fully supports unions but not ones backed by a third-party”.

Later the company said in an official statement that it “is ready to communicate with the work council comprised of a majority of employees on matters including wages, benefits and working conditions”.

Mr Sundar said firms also hire 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.

Happy new smartphone season to all who celebrate. It’s that time of year again, when the tech giants pull out all the stops to persuade you to upgrade your gadgets.

Recently we’ve seen Google launch the latest Pixel 9 handsets, followed by Apple unveiling the iPhone 16.

In July, Samsung released the latest versions of its foldable phones, the Z Flip6 and Z Fold6, and Huawei has just upped the ante in that department by unveiling a handset called the Mate XT, in China, which contains two folds, folding the screen into thirds.

With smartphone sales slowing worldwide, the marketing messages getting pushed out are increasingly dazzling.

Apple boss Tim Cook promised that the iPhone16 would “redefine what a smartphone would do”, whatever that means. Google product management vice president Brian Rakowski waxed lyrical about the “stunning” design of the “gorgeous” Pixel 9 (whisper it: it still looks a lot like a black rectangle to me).

Huawei now has its own consumer brand song, it says in its press material, which “powerfully expresses the pursuit of dreams, highlighting that every breakthrough and success the company has achieved stems from a belief in dreams”.

Yes, we are still talking about phones.

Both Apple and Google have gone big on baked-in AI features. Google’s new Magic Editor can add AI generated content into existing photos, as well as remove the bits you don’t want (with varying degrees of success, in my experience).

Apple Intelligence on the iPhone16 includes ChatGPT-maker OpenAI’s tech being embedded into the digital assistant Siri – which many argue has long been in need of an update.

But has anyone actually said that they want all of this stuff?

Mobile phone expert Ben Wood, from research firm CCS Insight, said that while AI features aim to make digital life easier, they’re not necessarily on top of everybody’s wish list.

“I think that most people now know what they want from a phone, with one of the most important things being the camera,” he says.

The phone designers also know this. The tech spec of every new handset camera is usually an improvement on the previous generation. But even this isn’t a guaranteed sales generator any more.

“What is definitely happening is that people are holding on to their phones for longer. Back in 2013 there were 30 million phones sold annually,” adds Mr Wood. “This year it will be around 13.5 million.”

There is of course an ongoing cost of living crisis affecting people’s spending decisions. And there’s also an environmental price tag attached to every handset, all of which contain rare elements and precious metals.

In addition, there is a growing trend, especially among parents and young people, to try to step away from smartphones entirely.

A number of UK schools are reviewing their smartphone policies, and a few have already opted for an outright ban. Pupils starting at the public school Eton this term were issued feature phones (sometimes, rather unpopularly known as dumb phones), and I have heard of several other institutions, both in the private and state sectors, which are considering following suit.

The mobile phone network EE recommends that children below the age of 11 shouldn’t have smartphones at all.

Nova East leads the north and west London branch of the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign, which urges parents and schools to collaborate to delay the age at which children are given the devices.

“We are not anti-tech, we are just pro-childhood,” she says. “We would like to see tech companies develop a child friendly phone, offering only essential features such as calls, messaging, music, and maps, without any additional functionalities.”

Dr Sasha Luccioni, a research scientist at the AI firm Hugging Face, says that so far, this message does not seem to be getting through.

“There’s increased talk of ‘digital sobriety’ in the way we build and use technology – but it sounds like smartphone designers are going in the exact opposite direction,” she says.

I put this to Apple, Google and Samsung. The latter said: “Samsung users can choose how they use their Galaxy phones that best fits their needs. For example, digital wellbeing features allow users to select what features they use, when they use them and for how long, such as setting a screen time limit on specific apps they want to restrict.”

One company that is listening to the growing calls for reduced phone functionality is the Finnish firm HMD – which still makes basic Nokia handsets. Last month it launched a Barbie-themed phone in collaboration with toymaker Mattel, and I tried it out. The two words I would use to describe it are: functional. And pink.

Like most feature phones, it has no apps, no app store, no selfie camera, and only one game. If you want to listen to music there’s an FM radio.

CCS Insight forecasts that around 400,000 feature phones are likely to be sold in the UK this year – nowhere near enough to knock the iPhone off the top of the list of the world’s most-sold handsets any time soon, but not a bad market space.

I just checked my own screentime over the past seven days, and I averaged around five hours per day, This is admittedly a sobering statistic – but it wasn’t all doomscrolling (honest). My phone is a work tool, it’s also what I use for banking, shopping, directions, health tracking and keeping track of family plans, as well as, yes, gaming and social media.

“I think the thing we always forget is that there’s a tremendous amount of benefits from using smartphones,” says Pete Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa university, who has written extensively about the issue of screen time.

“We tend to focus a lot more on the negatives. It’s always worth bearing in mind that these are technologies of convenience. They help us. There are some good aspects to them as well.”

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

American astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore have been stuck in space for 107 days and the earliest they can return to Earth is in February. People in Williams’ ancestral village in India have been praying for her safe return. BBC Gujarati’s Roxy Gagdekar Chhara reports.

Residents of Jhulasan in the western Indian state of Gujarat take pride in the fact that Williams has a connection with their village.

The village was once home to Williams’ father and grandparents. The astronaut visited the village three times – 1972, 2007 and 2013 – after successful space missions.

Wilmore, 61, and Williams, 58, took off for an eight-day mission on 5 June but got stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) after their Boeing Starliner spacecraft experienced problems. They will now return to Earth in February 2025 with SpaceX.

In Jhulasan, locals hold daily prayers for Williams’ safe return, keeping an oil lamp burning as a symbol of their hopes. For her 59th birthday on Thursday, they’ve organised a space-themed exhibition, hoping she’ll visit again after another successful mission.

Jhulasan, a village of 7,000, is filled with memories of Williams’ ties. A library named after her grandparents still stands, though in poor condition, as is her father Deepak Pandya’s ancestral home. Pandya, a neuroscientist, died in 2020.

A school, which Williams’ had donated funds to during one of her visits, has a picture of her grandparents in the prayer hall. When Williams was felicitated at the school in 2007, her relative Kishore Pandya got a chance to meet her.

“I went to her and said with my limited knowledge of English, ‘I am your brother’. She shook hands with me and said, ‘Oh! My brother!’ I still cherish that moment,” he said.

Williams’ father moved to the US to pursue higher studies in 1957. There, he met and married Ursuline Bonnie, and they had Williams in 1965.

Seven years later, the family visited Jhulasan for the first time since Deepak Pandya had left. It was a moment of celebration for the village and they gave a warm welcome to the family by taking them around in a procession.

Bharat Gajjar, 68, who used to work as a carpenter back then, recalled the event fondly. “I still remember a young Sunita and others riding on camels as they toured the village,” he said.

Madhu Patel is among a group of women who offer daily prayers at a local temple for Williams.

“We are proud of her achievements. Nasa and the government should do whatever they can to bring our daughter back safely,” Ms Patel said.

While they wait for her return, her work and words continue to be a source of inspiration to many. Manthan Leuva, who is studying for a banking exam, recalls one of Williams’ speeches.

“She said ‘love what you do and you will get success’. I find that thought deeply inspiring,” he said.

More than 30,000 Boeing workers are on strike after their union rejected a deal that would have raised pay in exchange for the loss of bonuses and pensions.

The employees are now in their second week of striking with no sign of any deal with Boeing management on the horizon.

We asked workers on the picket line outside a Boeing factory in Auburn, Washington, why they feel they have no choice but to strike.

Many of the strikers the BBC spoke to cited the loss of their bonuses and pensions, as well as inflation and the cost of living, as their reasons for walking out.

Davon Smith, 37, earns under $28 (£21) an hour attaching the wings to Boeing 777X planes, which sell for over $400m (£300m) each. He also works as a security guard at a bar to make ends meet.

“That kind of keeps me afloat, a little bit,” he says about the part-time security job.

His fiancée, who works as a secretary for Seattle schools, earns more than him.

Smith, who has worked at Boeing for only a year, says his pay rate doesn’t compensate him for the level of safety that goes into ensuring that the planes don’t fail.

He says he’s concerned he could be held criminally liable if his work isn’t done correctly.

“Every time we make a plane to their spec, we pretty much put our life on the line. Because if anything goes wrong – like if it’s a torque’s out of spec or something like that – and potentially the plane goes down, we obviously get [jail] time for that,” he says.

The deal that union representatives and Boeing had tentatively agreed would have seen workers get a 25% pay rise over four years.

It also offered improved healthcare and retirement benefits, 12 weeks of paid parental leave, and would have given union members more say on safety and quality issues.

However, the union had initially targeted a 40% pay rise, and almost 95% of union members who voted rejected the deal.

Many remain angry about benefits lost during contract negotiations years ago – especially the pension, which guaranteed certain payouts in retirement.

Now, the firm contributes to worker investment accounts known as 401(k)s, making their values subject to the strength of the stock market.

“They just took everything away. They took away our pensions, they took away our bonuses that people rely on,” says Mari Baker, 61, who started at Boeing in 1996 and currently works as a kitter, overseeing the tools used at factories.

She calls the rejected deal “a slap in the face”, but says she is worried about losing her health insurance at the end of the month, if the strike continues and whether she’ll be able to afford her prescription medication.

Boeing declined to comment for this story, pointing to earlier comments by executives pledging to reset the relationship with workers and work towards a deal as soon as possible.

Before the stoppage, the company was already facing deepening financial losses and struggling to repair its reputation after a series of safety issues.

New chief executive Kelly Ortberg, who was appointed to turn the business around, had urged workers not to strike as it would put the company’s “recovery in jeopardy”.

On Wednesday, the firm announced it was suspending the jobs of tens of thousands of staff in the US as a way of saving money in response to the strike.

Patrick Anderson, chief executive of the Anderson Economic Group, a research and consulting firm, says Boeing is a company “on the precipice”.

His firm estimates that the strike, just in its first week, has already cost workers at the firm and its suppliers more than $100m in lost wages and shareholders more than $440m, among other economic losses.

“This strike doesn’t just threaten earnings, it threatens the reputation of the company at a time when that reputation has suffered hugely,” he says.

Workers on the picket line dismiss the threat to the firm, saying they have little to lose.

“This past year working here I couldn’t afford to pay my mortgage,” says Kerri Foster, 47, who joined Boeing last year after leaving her previous career as a nurse and now works as an aerospace mechanic.

Foster says that she has not been “making enough to pay basic bills”. Meanwhile, the cost of living is increasing, along with her mortgage payments and property taxes.

She’s willing to keep striking until her pay is increased and pension restored, despite the loss of income while the strike continues.

“I’m hungry already. I mean, if you can’t pay your bills when you’re going to work, what’s the difference?” she says.

Ryan Roberson, 38, works in the final assembly division at Boeing. He brought two of his six children to the picket line with him on Wednesday.

As an employee at Boeing for less than a year, the plan that the union rejected would not have had any impact on his wages. Increases would have only gone to those working for more than a year.

He says he plans to keep striking until workers at “that entry level can have a liveable wage”.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, which represents the strikers, has issued debit cards to members.

After the strike goes into its third week, workers will receive $250 each week, which will be deposited on to the card.

That $250 “will buy a lot of Top Ramen”, says Roberson, referring to the ultra-cheap instant noodles.

Marc Cisneros, 29, says he is striking “because for the amount of work I do and the quality that I produce, it seems unfair that I’m unable to afford my rent”.

He says Boeing is “putting me in essential poverty even though I’m working 40, 50, 60 hours per week”.

Cisneros has worked at Boeing for four years. His girlfriend works there as well. His mother also worked there, “making a decent amount of money” which supported him and his sibling.

He says he’s proud to work at Boeing and is disappointed by his lack of compensation from a company he hopes to work for until he retires.

“I mean this is dangerous. It’s big hunks of metal flying through the sky,” he says.

“You gotta take pride in the quality [and] in everything that you do here. Our names are on every single thing that we produce.”

For the past 20 years, self-declared “cyborg artist” Neil Harbisson has provoked debate with his “eyeborg” – a surgically attached antenna.

Harbisson, who grew up in Barcelona, is colour blind, having been born with the rare condition achromatopsia, which affects one in 33,000 people.

This means he sees in what he calls “greyscale” – only black, white and shades of grey.

But he decided to have surgery in 2004 which changed his life – and his senses – attaching an antennae to the back of his head, which transforms light waves into sounds.

When film director Carey Born came across Harbisson, classed by Guinness World Records as “the first officially recognised ‘cyborg’,” she was “gobsmacked and astonished”.

Her next move was to meet him, and then make a film about him – Cyborg: A Documentary.

It explores how he navigates his life, along with effects and implications of his unusual surgical procedure.

“The reason he did it was not to substitute the sense that he was lacking – it was in order to create an enhancement,” Born tells the BBC.

“So that was really the main hook that I thought was fascinating.”

As a student, Harbisson had met Plymouth University cybernetics expert Adam Montandon, who enabled him to “hear” colour using headphones, a webcam and laptop – transforming light waves into sounds.

Harbisson seized on this experience, but wanted more, by merging the technology with his own body – something Spain’s bioethical committees repeatedly rejected.

He eventually persuaded anonymous doctors to operate, removing part of the back of his skull so the antennae could be implanted and the bone could then grow over it.

Harbisson, who describes himself as a “cyborg artist”, has said: “I don’t feel like I’m using technology, I feel like I am technology.”

The term cyborg refers to a being with human and machine elements, giving them enhanced abilities.

Cyborgs are already a feature of popular culture and sci-fi, appearing in TV series like Doctor Who, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, and films including Terminator and Robocop.

The chip in the back of Harbisson’s head allows him to hear the colours not through his ears, but through the bone of his skull. It also connects to nearby devices as well as the internet.

His partner, Moon Ribas, says in the film: “He is brave, he likes to do things differently”, while he says his antennae “allows me to extend my perception of reality”.

Harbisson explains in the film that post-surgery, he had five weeks of headaches, and it took him about five months to get used to the antennae.

Born says after the procedure he got “depression, because like when they did trepanning [a surgical intervention where a hole is drilled into the skull] in the 60s and 70s.

“People got really big side effects – he had that as well.”

She admits she was unsure what to expect when they first met, but found “Neil and Moon were very personable… I thought they would make an accessible way into the subject”.

The film shows how people respond to him, asking about his appearance, and we see him producing artworks based on his perception of colour.

But life post-antennae has not been straightforward – the film also reveals he’s received death threats, from people who object to how he has modified his body.

Harbisson touches on this in the film.

“For many years we’ve had different types of death threats, from people who really hate what we’re doing, because they think it’s anti-natural or anti-God,” he says.

“So they think we should be stopped.”

The threats caused the couple to relocate their home to somewhere new, its precise location a closely guarded detail.

Born says: “It’s such a shame… they’re very gentle people”.

But she adds that her film injects possible notes of caution into the issue of body augmentation.

Harbisson’s credo, which includes his own business interests, is: “Design Yourself.”

But Born wants to get people thinking about “security – and the hacking potential all of these things could result in”.

“There’s a safety issue in terms of who is doing it, what are the circumstances that they’re doing it under, and what are the possible outcomes or consequences?” she adds.

A 2022 survey by US think tank the Pew Research Centre, into AI and human enhancement, suggests the US public may have some reservations.

Those surveyed were “generally more excited than concerned about the idea of several potential changes to human abilities”.

But many were “hesitant or undecided” about the virtues of biomedical interventions to “change cognitive abilities or the course of human health”.

The film also highlights that three years earlier, BBC News presenter Stephen Sackur highlighted possible ethical concerns about body augmentation.

He challenged Harbisson during an interview at Swiss debating conference, the St Gallen Symposium.

“There are all sorts of ways in which this is worrying and alarming… not least because you call yourself transpecies, but you’re acquiring abilities that are beyond the capacity of other human beings,” he said.

He also queried enhancements “only available to those who have the means to undertake this sort of thing, creating possibly an uber-species”.

But Harbisson said his not-for-profit Cyborg Foundation tries to make such augmentations “as available as possible”.

“It’s not expensive to create a new sense, but we are giving all these senses to machines,” he said, such as cars or hand dryers.

“You can just add them to your body – it’s just people who wish to extend their perception.”

Body modification artist Jenova Rain worked with Harbisson in 2018 during Manchester Science Festival, and sees his work as “amazing and very important”.

“He’s pushing the boundaries of what we’re trying to achieve as a species,” she tells the BBC.

“I think we need more people to be as brave and bold as he is.”

Her job also includes combining technology and the human body – she implants microchips into people’s hands, carrying out about 100 per year.

The microchip would open a door, for example, much like an electronic key for a car.

“Primarily we were looking at doing this as access for people with disabilities, or mobility and dexterity issues, who struggle using keys specifically,” she tells the BBC.

Dani Clode, an augmentation designer for Cambridge University’s neuroscience plasticity lab, finds Harbisson “fascinating” but says she and her colleagues are still working out if augmentation is “a good thing, or is it a bad thing?”

“I’m choosing my words carefully here because it is an exciting and interesting area. We just want to make sure it’s done safely,” she tells the BBC.

Her work includes creating a removable extra thumb and a tentacle arm.

Clode demonstrates the thumb, operated by a pressure pad under the wearer’s big toe.

“I make the devices, and the lab uses them to understand the future brain,” she explains, adding they study the impact on the brain when the body is augmented.

“After five days of training with this device [we learned] we could alter the brain,” she says.

“We fundamentally changed how they used their hand for that for that week, which then showed up in their brain.”

Born adds a final note of caution.

“Cybernetics will happen – it is happening,” she says.

“I think often the politicians and the regulatory bodies or those parts of government are very slow, and that technology is not allowing for that.

“The technology is accelerating so fast, but we plod along.”

She’s concerned about who ends up holding the keys to cybernetic technology.

“If it’s all in the hands of a particular few individuals, or a few very elite, very rich influential organisations, that is not a democratic process, and it’s going to affect all of us.

“So I’m just alerting people, in a nice, accessible way.”

Nintendo and its partner The Pokémon Company have filed a legal case against the maker of the hit survival adventure game Palworld over alleged patent infringement.

Palworld quickly earned the nickname “Pokémon with guns” when its first trailer was unveiled in 2021.

Just days after the game’s release in January this year, The Pokémon Company said it would investigate the copycat claims.

Palworld’s developer, Pocketpair Inc, acknowledged the lawsuit in a statement on Thursday and apologised to fans for “any worry or discomfort” caused.

Pocketpair’s boss previously said the game had passed legal checks.

But Nintendo is known for fiercely protecting its intellectual property and brand.

Pokémon said in statements posted on their websites that Palworld “infringes multiple patent rights”.

“This lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages”.

Palworld has become a major hit, with more than 25 million players within a month of its release.

Like the popular franchise of Pokémon video games, it also centres around collecting strange creatures with different powers.

Pocketpair’s website describes the game as seamlessly integrating “elements of battle, monster-capturing, training, and base building.”

Players, known as “pal-tamers”, travel around a large map battling human foes and creatures known as “pals” which can be captured and recruited.

The monsters can either fight alongside the player in battles, or be put to work at a base, crafting supplies and items for use in the field.

In January, The Pokémon Company said it planned to investigate claims that Palworld had copied its games, after fans pointed out similarities.

The Pokémon Company said at the time it would take “appropriate action” if it found its copyright had been breached.

Pocketpair said in response to the lawsuit on Thursday it would begin taking action on and investigating The Pokémon Company’s claims.

But it added that it was “unaware” of the specific patents that it had been accused of infringing.

“We have not been notified of such details,” it said.

A Nintendo spokesperson told the BBC it would “refrain from commenting on topics that relate to the content of the lawsuit”.

The company “has a track record of suing organisations and individuals which it feels has infringed upon its IP,” said gaming industry analyst Piers Harding Rolls.

He told the BBC its latest lawsuit “continues this trend” – and reflects the importance of the Pokémon franchise to the gaming giant.

“Nintendo is part owner of The Pokémon Company and the Pokémon franchise, and the series of games are inextricably linked to Nintendo’s console business,” he said.

Earlier this week, Pokémon reportedly won a $15m legal fight against several Chinese game developers it accused of infringing its copyright.

Pocketpair, meanwhile, said it was “truly unfortunate” that, as a smaller, independent game developer, it would now have to allocate time and resources to the lawsuit, rather than to Palworld.

“However, we will do our utmost for our fans, and to ensure that indie game developers are not hindered or discouraged from pursuing their creative ideas,” it added.

An engine fire on a Cathay Pacific Airbus A350 earlier this month was the result of a fuel leak and could have caused extensive damage to the plane, according to investigators.

Hong Kong’s flagship airline grounded planes after being forced to turn a flight around a couple of weeks ago because of an “engine component failure”.

The Trent XWB-97 engine was made by British engineering giant Rolls-Royce.

A preliminary report by Hong Kong’s Air Accident Investigation Authority (AAIA) said the incident was caused by a broken fuel hose – one of a number that had been damaged.

Rolls-Royce and Cathay Pacific both said they were continuing to support the investigation.

The incident occurred shortly after the plane had taken off from Hong Kong en route to Zurich in early September. The pilots received a fire warning in the cockpit, shut down the engine and deployed fire extinguishers.

The aircraft, which was carrying 348 passengers and crew, landed safely back in Hong Kong.

But the incident raised concerns over the safety of the engines used across Cathay Pacific’s A350 fleet, particularly after checks revealed issues on another 15 aircraft.

The preliminary report found that the protective surround of a fuel hose had ruptured, leaving “a discernible hole in the hose”. There were signs of a fire in parts of the engine, including soot and burn marks.

Further checks revealed another five fuel hoses in the same engine were also defective.

If not promptly detected and addressed, the report said, this situation could have escalated “into a more serious engine fire, potentially causing extensive damage to the aircraft.”

To address the problem, the AAIA recommended that the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) require Rolls-Royce to develop new inspection requirements for the relevant engines.

EASA responded in the days after the incident by requiring operators using the same type of engine to carry out inspections of fuel pipes, and remove any that were ‘potentially compromised’.

It has since replaced those emergency measures with a wider regime of inspections covering several variants of the Trent XWB engine. The agency said inspections had shown that “a specific cleaning process available during engine refurbishment” could lead to degradation of the fuel hoses.

In a statement, Cathay Pacific said that following the incident it had “proactively initiated a fleet-wide inspection of its Airbus A350 aircraft that cleared the aircraft for operation.” It added it was in full compliance with EASA’s directive, and continued to “work closely with the airframe and engine manufacturers and regulator”.

Cathay Pacific took delivery of its first Airbus A350 in 2016. The aircraft is rapidly becoming a mainstay of airlines’ long-haul fleets around the world. Its main selling point is its high efficiency and low running costs.

A key part of that efficiency is the engine. The Trent XWB was developed by Rolls-Royce specifically for the A350. The incident initially raised concerns that there could be a serious problem affecting the global A350 fleet. That would have been a major setback for the British manufacturer.

However, it rapidly became apparent that the issue did not affect the running parts within the engine itself, but rather fuel lines on the outside. That meant the problem could be rectified relatively quickly, without an expensive redesign.

It was initially thought the problem was confined to the XWB-97, a high power variant of the engine that was fitted to a relatively limited number of long-range aircraft. However, EASA has now demanded checks on other versions as well.

Responding to the investigators’ report, Rolls-Royce said “We are continuing to work closely with the regulators to support the ongoing investigation by the authorities into Cathay Pacific flight CX383”

It went on to emphasise that “the engine and aircraft system promptly detected and addressed the issue, as expected with such an incident”, with the crew being alerted and able to deploy the fire extinguisher.

This year, Rolls-Royce announced plans to invest heavily to improve its range of engines, including the Trent XWB-97.

In 2023, Tim Clark, the boss of gulf carrier Emirates, voiced concerns about the durability of the engine and the prices Rolls-Royce charged for maintenance.

A team of student volunteers on an archaeological dig in northern France has had a surprise communication from the past.

Sifting through the remains of a Gaulish village on cliff-tops near Dieppe on Monday, they uncovered an earthenware pot containing a small glass flask.

“It was the kind of vial that women used to wear round their necks containing smelling-salts,” said team-leader Guillaume Blondel, who heads the archaeological service for the town of Eu.

Inside the bottle was a message on paper, rolled up and tied with string.

On Tuesday evening, Mr Blondel opened the paper – which read as follows:

“P.J Féret, a native of Dieppe, member of various intellectual societies, carried out excavations here in January 1825. He continues his investigations in this vast area known as the or .”

Féret was a local notable, and municipal records confirm that he conducted a first dig at the site 200 years ago.

“It was an absolutely magic moment,” said Mr Blondel. “We knew there had been excavations here in the past, but to find this message from 200 years ago… it was a total surprise.

“Sometimes you see these time capsules left behind by carpenters when they build houses. But it’s very rare in archaeology. Most archaeologists prefer to think that there won’t be anyone coming after them because they’ve done all the work!”

The emergency dig was ordered because of cliff erosion at the spot just north of Dieppe. Already, a substantial part of the oppidum – or fortified village – has disappeared.

Mr Blondel said: “We knew it was a Gaulish village. What we don’t know is what went on inside the village. Was it a place of importance?”

In the week since the dig began, several artefacts dating from the Gaulish period – mostly pieces of pottery from around 2,000 years ago – have been uncovered.

A 12-year-old boy fatally shot a black bear as it was mauling his father in the US state of Wisconsin, say wildlife officials.

Owen Beierman, 12, took aim at the bear as it pinned down his dad while they were on a legal hunting trip.

“Owen was a hero,” Ryan Beierman, 43, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “He shot that bear and killed it on top of me.”

The attack happened in Siren, Burnett County, on 6 September, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The pair were hunting for black bear near the family’s cabin when they spotted the 200lb (91kg) bruin.

Owen shot and injured the animal, which ran off into dense forest.

They gave chase, and as they entered a glade the animal charged at Mr Beierman from about 6ft (1.8m) away.

He said he fired eight shots at the bruin with his pistol, but missed.

The bear bit him in the abdomen, arm and leg.

“I started pistol-whipping him and it felt like I was striking a brick wall,” he told the newspaper.

He described seeing the flash from the muzzle of the boy’s rifle.

“I was flat on my back and could feel the bullet going through the bear,” Mr Beierman said.

He required stitches to reattach a flap of skin to his cheek, and had puncture wounds to his arm and legs.

Officials say bear attacks are very rare.

Nine such incidents were reported in the state between 2013-22, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

A Hong Kong man has been sentenced to 14 months in jail after pleading guilty to sedition for wearing a T-shirt with a protest slogan on it.

The jail term is the first handed down by the city’s court under a new local national security law that was passed in March.

The law, also called Article 23, expands on the national security law that was imposed by Beijing in 2020.

Critics feared the law could further erode civil liberties in the city, while Beijing and Hong Kong defended it, saying it was necessary for stability.

Chu Kai-pong, 27, was arrested at a subway station in June wearing a T-shirt sporting the phrase “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times”. He was also wearing a mask that read “FDNOL” – initials for another slogan, “Five demands, not one less”.

Both slogans were frequently heard in large-scale protests in Hong Kong during the months-long anti-government demonstrations in 2019. Local media reported he was also carrying a box containing his excrement to use against people opposing his views.

Chu was arrested on 12 June, the anniversary of a key date of the 2019 protests when particularly large crowds took to the city’s streets.

The court heard Chu told police he wore the T-shirt to remind people of the protests, according to Reuters. He was previously jailed for three months in a separate incident for wearing a T-shirt with the same slogan, as well as possession of other offensive items.

Chu has been remanded in custody since 14 June. On Monday, he pleaded guilty to one count of doing an act with a seditious intention”.

In his judgement read out on Thursday, chief magistrate Victor So, who was handpicked by the government to hear national security cases, said Chu intended to “reignite the ideas behind” the 2019 protests.

He said Chu “showed no remorse” after his previous conviction, and that the sentence reflected the “seriousness” of the sedition charge.

The conviction and sentencing have been criticised by human rights groups. Amnesty International’s China director Sarah Brooks described it as “a blatant attack on the right to freedom of expression”, and called for the repealing of Article 23 in a statement.

The sentencing comes after a landmark ruling of another case last month, when two journalists who led the pro-democracy newspaper Stand News were found guilty of sedition. That marked the first sedition case against the city’s journalists since Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China in 1997.

Israel says its warplanes have hit more than 100 Hezbollah rocket launchers and other “terrorist sites” including a weapons storage facility in southern Lebanon.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the launchers were ready to be fired against Israel. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said Israel carried out at least 52 strikes in the south of the country on Thursday evening, and that Lebanon had also launched strikes on military sites in northern Israel.

Earlier, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said deadly explosions earlier in the week “crossed all red lines”, accusing Israel of what he said represented a declaration of war.

Israel has not said it was behind the attacks – which saw pagers and walkie-talkies explode simultaneously across the country – on Tuesday and Wednesday, and which Lebanese authorities said killed 37 people and wounded 3,000.

But Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said Israel is embarking on a “new phase of the war”, concentrating more of its efforts on the north.

The previously sporadic cross-border fighting escalated on 8 October 2023 – the day after the unprecedented attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen from Gaza – when Hezbollah fired at Israeli positions, in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Since then hundreds of people, most of them Hezbollah fighters, have been killed in the cross-border fighting, and tens of thousands have also been displaced on both sides of the border.

Hezbollah has said it is acting in support of the Palestinian armed group Hamas. Both are backed by Iran and proscribed as terrorist organisations by Israel, the UK and other countries.

In a statement late on Thursday, the IDF said its warplanes “struck approximately 100 launchers and additional terrorist infrastructure sites, consisting of approximately 1,000 barrels that were ready to be used in the immediate future to fire toward Israeli territory”.

“The IDF will continue to operate to degrade the Hezbollah terrorist organisation’s infrastructure and capabilities in order to defend the state of Israel”.

Lebanese security sources cited by Reuters news agency and the New York Times said the Israeli strikes were one of the most intense since the war in Gaza began in October last year.

The IDF also urged residents in northern Israel close to the Lebanese border to avoid large gatherings, guard their neighbourhoods and stay close to bomb shelters.

On Thursday morning, Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon fired two anti-tank missiles across the border, followed by drones.

The IDF said two Israeli soldiers were killed and a third seriously wounded.

In his televised address on Thursday, Hassan Nasrallah said of Tuesday and Wednesday’s attacks: “The enemy crossed all rules, laws and red lines. It didn’t care about anything at all, not morally, not humanely, not legally.”

“This is massacre, a major aggression against Lebanon, its people, its resistance, its sovereignty, and its security. It can be called war crimes or a declaration of war – whatever you choose to name it, it is deserving and fits the description. This was the enemy’s intention,” he added.

As Nasrallah spoke, Israeli warplanes caused sonic booms over Beirut, scaring an already-exhausted population, and others struck targets in southern Lebanon.

The Hezbollah leader acknowledged that this was a massive and unprecedented blow for his group, but he insisted that its ability to command and communicate remained intact.

Nasrallah’s tone was defiant and he vowed a harsh punishment. But, again, he indicated that Hezbollah was not interested in an escalation of its current conflict with Israel.

The group’s cross-border attacks, he said, were going to continue unless there was a ceasefire in Gaza, and that no killings or assassinations would return residents to northern Israel.

The IDF said on Thursday that its chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, had “recently completed approval of plans for the northern arena”.

Gallant later said that “in the new phase of the war there are significant opportunities but also significant risks”.

“Hezbollah feels that it is being persecuted and the sequence of military actions will continue,” he added.

“Our goal is to ensure the safe return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes. As time goes by, Hezbollah will pay an increasing price.”

It is not clear how Israel intends to achieve this goal. But reports earlier this week suggested that the general in charge of the IDF’s Northern Command favoured the creation of an Israeli-controlled buffer zone inside southern Lebanon.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for restraint on all sides.

“We don’t want to see any escalatory actions by any party” that would make the goal of achieving a ceasefire in Gaza more difficult, he said as he joined European foreign ministers in Paris to discuss the widening crisis.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also at the talks in Paris, called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.

“We are all very, very clear that we want to see a negotiated political settlement so that Israelis can return to their homes in northern Israel and indeed Lebanese to return to their homes,” he said.

“One village, two countries” used to be the tagline for Yinjing on China’s south-western edge.

An old tourist sign boasts of a border with Myanmar made of just “bamboo fences, ditches and earth ridges” – a sign of the easy economic relationship Beijing had sought to build with its neighbour.

Now the border the BBC visited is marked by a high, metal fence running through the county of Ruili in Yunnan province. Topped by barbed wire and surveillance cameras in some places, it cuts through rice fields and carves up once-adjoined streets.

China’s tough pandemic lockdowns forced the separation initially. But it has since been cemented by the intractable civil war in Myanmar, triggered by a bloody coup in 2021. The military regime is now fighting for control in large swathes of the country, including Shan State along China’s border, where it has suffered some of its biggest losses.

The crisis at its doorstep – a nearly 2,000km (1,240-mile) border – is becoming costly for China, which has invested millions of dollars in Myanmar for a critical trade corridor.

The ambitious plan aims to connect China’s landlocked south-west to the Indian Ocean via Myanmar. But the corridor has become a battleground between Myanmar rebels and the country’s army.

Beijing has sway over both sides but the ceasefire it brokered in January fell apart. It has now turned to military exercises along the border and stern words. Foreign Minister Wang Yi was the latest diplomat to visit Myanmar’s capital Nay Pyi Taw and is thought to have delivered a warning to the country’s ruler Min Aung Hlaing.

Conflict is not new to impoverished Shan State. Myanmar’s biggest state is a major source of the world’s opium and and methamphetamine, and home to ethnic armies long opposed to centralised rule.

But the vibrant economic zones created by Chinese investment managed to thrive – until the civil war.

A loudspeaker now warns people in Ruili not to get too close to the fence – but that doesn’t stop a Chinese tourist from sticking his arm between the bars of a gate to take a selfie.

Two girls in Disney T-shirts shout through the bars – “hey grandpa, hello, look over here!” – as they lick pink scoops of ice cream. The elderly man shuffling barefoot on the other side barely looks up before he turns away.

“Burmese people live like dogs,” says Li Mianzhen. Her corner stall sells food and drinks from Myanmar – like milk tea – in a small market just steps from the border checkpoint in Ruili city.

Li, who looks to be in her 60s, used to sell Chinese clothes across the border in Muse, a major source of trade with China. But she says almost no-one in her town has enough money any more.

Myanmar’s military junta still controls the town, one of its last remaining holdouts in Shan State. But rebel forces have taken other border crossings and a key trading zone on the road to Muse.

The situation has made people desperate, Li says. She knows of some who have crossed the border to earn as little as 10 yuan – about one pound and not much more than a dollar – so that they can go back to Myanmar and “feed their families”.

The war has severely restricted travel in and out of Myanmar, and most accounts now come from those who have fled or have found ways to move across the borders, such as Li.

Unable to get the work passes that would allow them into China, Li’s family is stuck in Mandalay, as rebel forces edge closer to Myanmar’s second-largest city.

“I feel like I am dying from anxiety,” Li says. “This war has brought us so much misfortune. At what point will all of this end?”

Thirty-one-year-old Zin Aung (name changed) is among those who made it out. He works in an industrial park on the outskirts of Ruili, which produces clothes, electronics and vehicle parts that are shipped across the world.

Workers like him are recruited in large numbers from Myanmar and flown here by Chinese government-backed firms eager for cheap labour. Estimates suggest they earn about 2,400 yuan ($450; £340) a month, which is less than their Chinese colleagues.

“There is nothing for us to do in Myanmar because of the war,” Zin Aung says. “Everything is expensive. Rice, cooking oil. Intensive fighting is going on everywhere. Everyone has to run.”

His parents are too old to run, so he did. He sends home money whenever he can.

The men live and work on the few square kilometres of the government-run compound in Ruili. Zin Aung says it is a sanctuary, compared with what they left behind: “The situation in Myanmar is not good, so we are taking refuge here.”

He also escaped compulsory conscription, which the Myanmar army has been enforcing to make up for defections and battlefield losses.

As the sky turned scarlet one evening, Zin Aung ran barefoot through the cloying mud onto a monsoon-soaked pitch, ready for a different kind of battle – a fiercely fought game of football.

Burmese, Chinese and the local Yunnan dialect mingled as vocal spectators reacted to every pass, kick and shot. The agony over a missed goal was unmistakable. This is a daily affair in their new, temporary home, a release after a 12-hour shift on the assembly line.

Many of the workers are from Lashio, the largest town in Shan State, and Laukkaing, home to junta-backed crime families – Laukkaing fell to rebel forces in January and Lashio was encircled, in a campaign which has changed the course of the war and China’s stake in it.

Both towns lie along China’s prized trade corridor and the Beijing-brokered ceasefire left Lashio in the hands of the junta. But in recent weeks rebel forces have pushed into the town – their biggest victory to date. The military has responded with bombing raids and drone attacks, restricting internet and mobile phone networks.

“The fall of Lashio is one of the most humiliating defeats in the military’s history,” says Richard Horsey, Myanmar adviser to the International Crisis Group.

“The only reason the rebel groups didn’t push into Muse is they likely feared it would upset China,” Mr Horsey says. “Fighting there would have impacted investments China has hoped to restart for months. The regime has lost control of almost all northern Shan state – with the exception of Muse region, which is right next to Ruili.”

Ruili and Muse, both designated as special trade zones, are crucial to the Beijing-funded 1,700km trade route, known as the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. The route also supports Chinese investments in energy, infrastructure and rare earth mining critical for manufacturing electric vehicles.

But at its heart is a railway line that will connect Kunming – the capital of Yunnan province – to Kyaukphyu, a deep sea port the Chinese are building on Myanmar’s western coast.

The port, along the Bay of Bengal, would give industries in and beyond Ruili access to the Indian Ocean and then global markets. The port is also the starting point for oil and gas pipelines that will transport energy via Myanmar to Yunnan.

But these plans are now in jeopardy.

President Xi Jinping had spent years cultivating ties with his resource-rich neighbour when the country’s elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi was forced from power.

Mr Xi refused to condemn the coup and continued to sell the army weapons. But he also did not recognise Min Aung Hlaing as head of state, nor has he invited him to China.

Three years on, the war has killed thousands and displaced millions, but no end is in sight.

Forced to fight on new fronts, the army has since lost between half and two-thirds of Myanmar to a splintered opposition.

Beijing is at an impasse. It “doesn’t like this situation” and sees Myanmar’s military ruler Min Aung Hlaing as “incompetent”, Mr Horsey says. “They are pushing for elections, not because they necessarily want a return to democratic rule, but more because they think this is a way back.”

Myanmar’s regime suspects Beijing of playing both sides – keeping up the appearance of supporting the junta while continuing to maintain a relationship with ethnic armies in Shan State.

Analysts note that many of the rebel groups are using Chinese weapons. The latest battles are also a resurgence of last year’s campaign launched by three ethnic groups which called themselves the Brotherhood Alliance. It is thought that the alliance would not have made its move without Beijing’s tacit approval.

Its gains on the battlefield spelled the end for notorious mafia families whose scam centres had trapped thousands of Chinese workers. Long frustrated over the increasing lawlessness along its border, Beijing welcomed their downfall – and the tens of thousands of suspects who were handed over by the rebel forces.

For Beijing the worst-case scenario is the civil war dragging on for years. But it would also fear a collapse of the military regime, which might herald further chaos.

How China will react to either scenario is not yet clear – what is also unclear is what more Beijing can do beyond pressuring both sides to agree to peace talks.

That predicament is evident in Ruili with its miles of shuttered shops. A city that once benefited from its location along the border is now feeling the fallout from its proximity to Myanmar.

Battered by some of China’s strictest lockdowns, businesses here took another hit when cross-border traffic and trade did not revive.

They also rely on labour from the other side, which has stopped, according to several agents who help Burmese workers find jobs. They say China has tightened its restrictions on hiring workers from across the border, and has also sent back hundreds who were said to be working illegally.

The owner of a small factory, who did not want to be identified, told the BBC that the deportations meant “his business isn’t going anywhere… and there’s nothing I can change”.

The square next to the checkpoint is full of young workers, including mothers with their babies, waiting in the shade. They lay out their paperwork to make sure they have what they need to secure a job. The successful ones are given a pass which allows them to work for up to a week, or come and go between the two countries, like Li.

“I hope some good people can tell all sides to stop fighting,” Li says. “If there is no-one in the world speaking up for us, it is really tragic.”

She says she is often assured by those around her that fighting won’t break out too close to China. But she is unconvinced: “No-one can predict the future.”

For now, Ruili is a safer option for her and Zin Aung. They understand that their future is in Chinese hands, as do the Chinese.

“Your country is at war,” a Chinese tourist tells a Myanmar jade seller he is haggling with at the market. “You just take what I give you.”

More than 70,000 people fighting in Russia’s military have now died in Ukraine, according to data analysed by the BBC.

And for the first time, volunteers – civilians who joined the armed forces after the start of the war – now make up the highest number of people killed on the battlefield since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.

Every day, the names of those killed in Ukraine, their obituaries and photographs from their funerals are published across Russia in the media and on social networks.

BBC Russian and the independent website Mediazona have collated these names, along with names from other open sources, including official reports.

We checked that the information had been shared by authorities or relatives of the deceased – and that they had been identified as dying in the war.

New graves in cemeteries have also helped provide the names of soldiers killed in Ukraine – these are usually marked by flags and wreaths sent by the defence ministry.

We have identified the names of 70,112 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, but the actual number is believed to be considerably higher. Some families do not share details of their relatives’ deaths publicly – and our analysis does not include names we were unable to check, or the deaths of militia in Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

Among them, 13,781 were volunteers – about 20% – and fatalities among volunteers now exceed other categories. Former prisoners, who joined up in return for pardons for their crimes, were previously the highest but they now account for 19% of all confirmed deaths. Mobilised soldiers – citizens called up to fight – account for 13%.

Since October last year, weekly fatalities of volunteers have not dipped below 100 – and, in some weeks, we have recorded more than 310 volunteer deaths.

As for Ukraine – it rarely comments on the scale of its deaths on the battlefield. In February, its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, but estimates based on US intelligence suggest greater losses.

The story of Rinat Khusniyarov is typical of many of the volunteer soldiers who died. He was from Ufa in Bashkortostan and had been working two jobs to make ends meet – at a tram depot and a plywood factory. He was 62 years old when he signed his contract with the Russian army in November last year.

He survived less than three months of fighting and was killed on 27 February. His obituary, in a local online memorial website, simply called him “a hardworking, decent man”.

According to the data we analysed, most of the men signing up come from small towns in parts of Russia where stable, well-paid work is hard to find.

Most appear to have joined up willingly, although some in the republic of Chechnya have told human rights activists and lawyers of coercion and threats.

Some of the volunteers have said they did not understand the contracts they were signing had no end date, and have since approached pro-Kremlin journalists to, unsuccessfully, ask them for help ending their service.

Salaries in the military can be five to seven times higher than average wages in less affluent parts of the country, plus soldiers get social benefits, including free childcare and tax breaks. One-off payments for people who sign up have also repeatedly risen in value in many parts of Russia.

Most of the volunteers dying at the front are aged between 42 and 50. They number 4,100 men in our list of more than 13,000 volunteers. The oldest volunteer killed was 71 years old – a total of 250 volunteers above the age of 60 have died in the war.

Soldiers have told the BBC that rising casualties among volunteers are, in part, down to their deployment to the most operationally challenging areas on the front line, notably in the Donetsk region in the east, where they form the backbone of reinforcements for depleted units, Russian soldiers told the BBC.

Russia’s “meat grinder” strategy continues unabated, according to Russian soldiers we have spoken to. The term has been used to describe the way Moscow sends waves of soldiers forward relentlessly to try to wear down Ukrainian forces and expose their locations to Russian artillery. Drone footage shared online shows Russian forces attacking Ukrainian positions with little or no equipment or support from artillery or military vehicles.

Sometimes, hundreds of men have been killed on a single day. In recent weeks, the Russian military have made desperate, but unsuccessful, attempts to seize the eastern Ukrainian towns of Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk with such tactics.

An official study by the primary military medical directorate of the Russian defence ministry says that 39% of soldiers’ deaths are a result of limb injuries and that mortality rates would be significantly improved if first aid and subsequent medical care were better.

The Russian government’s actions suggests it is keen to avoid forcing people to fight through a new, official wave of mobilisation – instead, it is ramping up calls for service volunteers, along with the incentives to do so.

Remarks by regional officials in local parliaments suggest they have been tasked from the top with trying to recruit people from their local districts. They advertise on job vacancy websites, contact men who have debt and bailiff problems, and conduct recruitment campaigns in higher education establishments.

Since 2022, convicted prisoners have also been encouraged to join up in return for their release, but now a new policy means people facing criminal prosecution can accept a deal to go to war instead of facing trial in court. In return, their cases are frozen and potentially dropped altogether.

A small number of the volunteers killed have been from other countries. We have identified the names of 272 such men, many of whom were from Central Asia – 47 from Uzbekistan, 51 from Tajikistan, and 26 from Kyrgyzstan.

Last year saw reports of Russia recruiting people in Cuba, Iraq, Yemen and Serbia. Foreigners already living in Russia without valid work permits or visas, who agree to “work for the state”, are promised they will not be deported and are offered a simplified route to citizenship if they survive the war. Many have later complained that they did not understand the paperwork – as with Russian citizens, they have turned to the media for help.

The governments of India and Nepal have called on Moscow to stop sending their citizens to Ukraine and repatriate the bodies of the dead. So far, the calls have not been acted upon.

Many new recruits who have joined the military have criticised the training they have received. A man who signed a contract with the Russian army in November last year told the BBC he had been promised two weeks of training at a shooting range before deployment to the front.

“In reality, people were just thrown out onto the parade ground, and dished out some gear,” he said, adding the equipment was poorly made.

“We were loaded on to trains, then trucks, and sent to the front. About half of us were thrown into battle straight from the road. As a result, some people went from the recruitment office to the front line in just a week,” he said.

Samuel Cranny-Evans, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in the UK says: “Basic understanding of things like camouflage and concealment or how to move quietly at night, how to move without creating a profile for yourself during the day,” should be taught as basic infantry skills.

Another soldier also told the BBC that equipment is a problem, saying it “varies, but most often it’s some random set of uniforms, standard boots that wear out within a day, and a kit bag with a label showing it was made in the mid-20th Century”.

“A random bulletproof vest and a cheap helmet. It’s impossible to fight in this. If you want to survive, you have to buy your own equipment.”

A sub that imploded on a deadly voyage to the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five people aboard, had malfunctioned days before its final dive last year, a public inquiry has heard.

The former scientific director of OceanGate, the company behind the Titan sub, said the incident had caused passengers to “tumble about” and the craft to crash into bulkheading, leaving one passenger “hanging upside down” and others clinging on.

Steven Ross added that he did not know whether the Titan’s hull was inspected for damage after the episode.

A US Coast Guard inquiry is hearing two weeks of evidence into the deadly implosion of the experimental submersible in June 2023.

Mr Ross said it took a support crew more than an hour to get the sub out of the water after the malfunction, days before its final trip.

Earlier on Thursday, a mission member aboard the sub’s support vessel described watching the crew and passengers depart for the Titanic wreck last June, saying: “I saw five people smiling on the way to their journey.”

“They were just happy to go, that’s the memory I have,” Renata Rojas, who had joined the expedition as a volunteer, testified.

Ms Rojas, who was on a surface support vessel, said everything was “working very smoothly” before the sub began its descent.

But she told the probe that she remembered losing communications, asking colleagues: “We haven’t heard from them, where are they?”

Ms Rojas told the inquiry that she was the “platform assistant” on the day of the dive, “mostly standing around until somebody needed help”.

The Titan’s implosion led to questions over the submersible’s safety and design, and the materials used in its construction.

The inquiry earlier this week was told of the last messages sent from the sub as it descended towards the Titanic, with the crew stating “all good here” minutes before the implosion.

Ms Rojas said she was on the bridge of her own vessel as communications were lost, and that rescue protocol advised waiting an hour as the passengers might have been spending extra time exploring their destination.

The conversation then turned as the sub failed to resurface. Ms Rojas said she recalled conversations on the bridge about calling the Coast Guard.

“We went into ‘go mode’,” she said.

She said there were a number of rescue options available if the sub had been stuck on the ocean floor, including initiating a release manoeuvre or waiting for the tide to change. The Titan had 96 hours of life support onboard, she added.

However, she said there was nothing anyone in the sub could have done if the hull had failed.

Ms Rojas described a 2021 expedition in which she recalled how the dome fell off the submersible as it was being retrieved from the water.

She said when the submersible was being pulled back on to the main ship, the crew lost hold of it.

Ms Rojas said the dome vacuum of the sub broke.

“There was only, I think, two bolts or four bolts on the dome,” she said.

“It started dripping, falling off,” she added.

The incident led to crews installing 18 bolts on the dome for subsequent expeditions.

Ms Rojas, a self-described Titanic obsessive, told the inquiry she had never felt unsafe during her own dives.

“I found them to be very transparent about everything,” she said about OceanGate staff briefings.

“I knew the risk and still decided to go.”

The inquiry will continue into next week.

A woman has told the BBC she was subjected to a “sickening” sexual assault by former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed after being invited to his London flat for a work meeting.

The woman, who the BBC is calling Melanie, believes police were close to arresting him over her allegations just days before he died in August 2023.

A BBC investigation published on Thursday revealed that more than 20 women said they were sexually assaulted by the billionaire. Five said they were raped.

Melanie is one of a growing number of additional ex-Harrods employees to tell the BBC they were attacked since the documentary and podcast Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods was released.

The BBC investigation gathered evidence that during Fayed’s ownership, Harrods not only failed to intervene, but helped cover up abuse allegations.

Melanie’s testimony comes as new details emerge of failed efforts by police and prosecutors to hold Fayed to account during his life, and a legal team representing many of the women the BBC has spoken to will set out their next steps on Friday.

Melanie worked at Harrods for a few years prior to 2010. She described being hired there as a 21-year-old as a “dream job”.

She met Fayed – who was in his late seventies at the time – at work meetings on two occasions, before being summoned to his apartment on London’s Park Lane in late 2007.

Melanie says she went to the evening meeting despite the invitation “ringing the alarm bells”.

She was shown into sitting room by a housekeeper.

Melanie continued: “He sat down next to me, talking to me for a few minutes, not very long… He had asked that I return a couple of weeks later to stay at the apartments the night before the Harrods sale, and I could go to the Harrods sale with him, and I could meet the celebrity that was opening it.

“And he would not really let me leave until I agreed to that, so I said yes to be able to leave. I did not go back.

“As I stood to leave, that’s when he put his hands on my breast and said some pretty disgusting things. And I was in complete shock. I just turned around and walked out.”

Melanie told the BBC she did not share the full details of the “sickening” experience with loved ones, and for years “felt it was my fault” because she was “naive enough to have gone”. She described Fayed as a “sleazebag” and “slimy”.

In January 2023 Melanie decided to go to the police. The BBC has seen emails showing the case was passed to the Met’s CID department, which investigates serious allegations.

Melanie says she was later told the Met planned to arrest Fayed that year, and officers tried to arrest him on two occasions.

But he was too unwell to be questioned, and he died age 94 in August 2023.

Like other women the BBC has spoken to, Melanie said there were “rumours swirling” about Fayed, and described his private office as being like a “modelling agency” full of young women.

She continued: “There was definitely a knowledge, like a secret knowledge, within the company that Fayed likes to have pretty girls in his chairman’s office. And you do wonder what that means.”

Other women who worked at Harrods have painted a picture of Fayed as a predator who abused his position to prey on staff, and used his power to deter them from speaking out.

Some former employees recounted how he would tour his department store and identify young female assistants he found attractive, before promoting them to work his private office.

Ex-staff told the BBC this abuse was an open secret at the store. One said: “We all watched each other walk through that door thinking, ‘you poor girl, it’s you today’ and feeling utterly powerless to stop it.”

As well as inside Harrods itself and his Mayfair home, women have described incidents involving Fayed on trips to Paris, St Tropez and Abu Dhabi.

One woman described him as a “monster” who “cultivated fear” among his staff, while the store’s ex-deputy director of security revealed Fayed had phones tapped and secret cameras installed to monitor his employees’ discussions.

Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods

A BBC investigation into allegations of rape and attempted rape by Mohamed Al Fayed, the former owner of Harrods. Did the luxury store protect a billionaire predator?

Watch Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods on BBC iPlayer now.

Melanie was not the only woman who tried to bring Fayed to justice.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed it was “aware of various allegations of sexual offences made over a number of years” against Fayed.

It said each of the allegations reported to the force had been “investigated and, where appropriate, advice from the Crown Prosecution Service was sought”.

But Fayed was never charged with a crime.

The closest he came to being uncovered appears to have been in October 2008, when he was questioned over allegations made by a girl who he first met when she was 14.

Ellie – not her real name – told the BBC that Fayed personally offered to secure her a job despite her still being a teenager, and she started working at Harrods when she had just turned 15.

She recounted how in May 2008 she was told to go to the Harrods boardroom, where she said she was attacked by Fayed.

“He started…hugging me and [getting] touchy feely, and rubbing himself against me, and then he just grabbed my face and tried to… put his tongue in my mouth.

“I mentioned that I was 15, and [said] ‘what are you doing?’, and he said I was turning into a beautiful woman and grabbed my chest.”

She said Fayed flew into a rage and started screaming at her when she pushed him off.

Ellie went to the police and Fayed was questioned by detectives – news which became public in October 2008.

On Thursday, the Met confirmed it had spoken to more than one witness and analysed telephone data in Ellie’s case. The force said it handed a file of evidence to the CPS – but prosecutors decided no further action should be taken.

The Met has declined to say whether Ellie’s case was the only one where Fayed was formally questioned, though the BBC has seen no evidence he was ever quizzed over any other allegation.

The BBC understands Ellie’s case was the only time when a file of evidence was handed to the CPS, a step which has to be taken before an individual can be charged.

On four occasions, police investigations into Fayed were advanced enough for police to consult prosecutors for legal advice.

The CPS advised the Met in 2018, 2021, and 2023 – but in those instances, police did not provide prosecutors with a full file of evidence. It is also not clear if all of those investigations relate to separate women.

It means Fayed was never forced to answer claims against him in court during his lifetime.

Melanie described the feeling of discovering Fayed had died and would never be taken in for questioning over her 2023 report as “gutting”.

But asked what she would say to Fayed if he were still alive today, Melanie told the BBC: “That you didn’t get away with it. That everybody out there knows what you’ve done… and money can’t get you out of this.”

The claims against Fayed have not come out of the blue.

The Egypt-born businessman owned Harrods between 1985 and 2010 and became a well-known figure through other high-profile acquisitions, such as the Ritz hotel in Paris and Fulham Football Club.

He came to further public prominence when his son Dodi died alongside Diana, Princess of Wales – with whom Dodi was romantically involved – in a Paris car crash.

Despite chat show appearances and his associations with celebrities and public figures, suspicions about Fayed’s predatory behaviour were investigated during his life – including by Vanity Fair in 1995, ITV in 1997 and Channel 4 in 2017.

It was only when Fayed died that many of his victims felt able to come forward.

On Friday, details of new claims are expected to emerge.

Members of the UK legal team representing many of the women featured in the BBC documentary “Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods” are to hold a news conference on Friday morning.

The legal team will outline the case against Harrods. They will be joined by the US women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred, who has represented victims of high-profile offenders in the past.

Fourteen of the women the BBC has spoken to have brought civil claims against Harrods’ current owners for damages.

Harrods said it has a process available to women who say they were attacked by Fayed, adding “it has been our priority to settle claims in the quickest way possible, avoiding lengthy legal proceedings for the women involved”.

Harrods reiterated its apology to its former staff after the BBC investigation was published. A spokesperson said: “We have now had the opportunity to watch the programme and once again express our sympathy to the victims featured.”

The Met said it was committed to investigating sexual offences and encouraged victims to speak to police.

It also said any new information about Fayed would be “assessed and investigated accordingly”.

Fayed’s family did not provide a statement when asked for comment.

Listen to World of Secrets, Season 4: Al Fayed, Predator at Harrods on BBC Sounds. If you’re outside the UK, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

A Kentucky sheriff has been arrested after fatally shooting a judge in his chambers, police say.

District Judge Kevin Mullins died at the scene after being shot multiple times in the Letcher County Courthouse, Kentucky State Police said.

Letcher County Sheriff Shawn Stines, 43, has been charged with one count of first-degree murder.

The shooting happened on Thursday after an argument inside the court, police said, but they have not yet revealed a motive.

Officials said Mullins, 54, was shot multiple times at around 14:00 local time on Thursday at the court in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a small rural town about 150 miles (240km) south-east of Lexington.

Sheriff Stines was arrested at the scene without incident, Kentucky State Police said. They did not reveal the nature of the argument before the shooting.

According to local newspaper the Mountain Eagle, Sheriff Stines walked into the judge’s outer office and told court employees that he needed to speak alone with Mullins.

The two entered the judge’s chambers, closing the door behind them. Those outside heard gun shots, the newspaper reported.

Sheriff Stines reportedly walked out with his hands up and surrendered to police. He was handcuffed in the courthouse foyer.

The state attorney general, Russell Coleman, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that his office “will fully investigate and pursue justice”.

Kentucky State Police spokesman Matt Gayheart told a news conference that the town was shocked by the incident

“This community is small in nature, and we’re all shook,” he said.

Mr Gayheart said that 50 employees were inside the court building when the shooting occurred.

No-one else was hurt. A school in the area was briefly placed on lockdown.

Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice Laurance B VanMeter said he was “shocked by this act of violence”.

Announcing Judge Mullins’ death on social media, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said: “There is far too much violence in this world, and I pray there is a path to a better tomorrow.”

A recent report, which details poor working conditions and rampant sexual harassment faced by women in Malayalam-language cinema, is causing seismic upheavals in the entertainment industry in India.

But the messages of solidarity and support have come largely from women – and critics say the silence of powerful men, including India’s biggest and most loved stars, is deafening.

Based on testimonies from 51 people from the Kerala-based film industry, the Hema Committee report lays bare decades of exploitation and says that “women have been asked to make themselves available for sex on demand” and that they were constantly told to make “compromise and adjustments” if they wanted work.

The panel was set up in 2017 after Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), formed by a group of women working in the Malayalam cinema, petitioned the government after a top actress was sexually assaulted by a group of men allegedly at the behest of a top male actor.

Their 290-page report was released last month, with chunks redacted to hide the identities of the survivors and those accused of harassment.

But since its release on 19 August, several women have publicly spoken up about their ordeal and more than a dozen police complaints have been lodged against male stars, producers, directors and other influential men.

The state government has set up a special investigation team (SIT) to look into the allegations and the Kerala high court has asked the SIT to investigate the instances mentioned in the report, raising hopes that the survivors may after all get justice.

Women in all Indian film industries, including in the biggest and hugely popular Bollywood, have repeatedly spoken about the casting couch – the practice of men asking for sexual favours in return for roles – and rampant sexual harassment they face.

“The rot is as deep as the ocean across all Indian film industries,” film critic and author Shubhra Gupta told the BBC. “We won’t find a single female performer anywhere in the country who has not suffered. If everyone came out to complain, it will take us many decades to deal with all those complaints.”

The sordid revelations about the extent of the rot in Malayalam cinema have made headlines and the findings have been debated on primetime TV. Deedi Damodaran, a WCC member, told the BBC that the response has been “overwhelming”.

“Some women have now talked about how they had to flee the industry because of the terrible things that happened to them. They have no evidence, but they’ve got some sort of closure by talking about their experiences.”

Many of them, she says, have spoken out despite being trolled and abused on social media.

The report has also created ripples in other film industries, with calls for reform being heard in regional industries based in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka.

In Telangana, pressure has grown on the government to publish a report on the Telugu film industry that’s been waiting to see the light of the day for two years. An inquiry was instituted after an upcoming actress, Sri Reddy, protested by stripping down to her undergarments in public in 2018 “to draw attention to the sexual exploitation of women in the industry”.

West Bengal has set up a committee to investigate allegations of sexual abuse in the Bengali film industry, actress Ritabhari Chakraborty has said. This, she added, would “cleanse the industry from predators”.

Women in Tamil and Kannada cinema have also petitioned their state governments to improve working conditions for them.

Veteran Tamil actress Radhika Sarathkumar told the BBC that the Hema committee report has created a lot of awareness and that “men will be scared now”.

“It’s time women in cinema get together and speak up and stop this nonsense,” she said.

But the lack of support from the men in the industry, says Damodaran, has been disappointing.

Malayalam superstars Mohanlal and Mammootty have welcomed the report but said that nothing should be done to hurt the industry.

“These heroes are worshipped as larger than life beings, but we’re waiting for them to take a heroic stand,” Damodaran told the BBC.

In Tamil Nadu, actor-politicians Kamal Haasan and Vijay’s silence has been noted, while Rajinikanth faced criticism for claiming ignorance of the report 10 days after its release.

“The harassment happens to each of us, how come men don’t know about it? Maybe the male actors compartmentalise, maybe they choose not to see it,” Sarathkumar told the BBC. “It’s very sad that every time the onus in on the women to protect themselves.”

Some have also pointed out that the biggest names in Bollywood – Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan and Akshay Kumar – have chosen to remain silent.

Gupta says their silence may be deafening, but it’s not unexpected. “I would’ve been very surprised if there had been a reaction. We saw what happened in 2018 after the #MeToo movement first started in Bollywood after actress Tanushree Dutta accused an actor of behaving inappropriately towards her on a film set in 2008.”

“For a while, there was a groundswell of support and it seemed that Bollywood would step up and do something about it. But then things were contained. None of the men suffered any consequences, they are all back to doing what they did. In fact, the women who complained didn’t get work.”

A key criticism of Bollywood is that, unlike other industries, none of its leading actresses have addressed gender issues.

Dutta, who received little support from her A-lister peers and has since claimed that she has been denied work, has described the Hema committee report as “useless”, adding that earlier reports about making workplaces safer for women had not helped.

Gupta says one of the reasons why stars don’t speak out could be to avoid trouble for themselves.

“ I think they keep quiet because they know the stakes are high, they are fearful of not getting work in the industry. Remember the time when Aamir Khan or Shahrukh Khan spoke about intolerance? They got trolled heavily and lost out on work.”

Damodaran, however, says the response to the report has given her cause for optimism.

“Film industries in India are deeply patriarchal and misogynistic. But we can’t continue with the kind of sexism and misogyny that women have to face in their workplace. Things are bound to change – and they must.”

A Lebanese surgeon has described how the sheer volume of severe wounds from two days of exploding device attacks forced him to act “robotic” just to be able to keep working.

Surgeon Elias Jaradeh said he treated women and children but most of the patients he saw were young men. The surgeon said a large proportion were “severely injured” and many had lost the sight in both eyes.

The dead and injured in Lebanon include fighters from Hezbollah – the Iranian backed armed group which has been trading cross-border fire with Israel for months and is classed as a terrorist organisation by the UK and the US.

But members of their families have also been killed or wounded, along with innocent bystanders. Elias Jaradeh described the wounded he treated as looking “mostly civilian”.

The bomb attacks – which killed 37 people including two children – have been widely blamed on Israel, which has not claimed responsibility.

Dr Jaradeh, who is also an MP for the Change parliamentary bloc, was working at a specialist eye and ear hospital where some of the most severely wounded people were sent. He said it had taken a toll on the medical teams, himself included.

“And, yes, it’s very hard,” the surgeon said. “You have to dissociate yourself. More or less, you are robotic. This is the way you have to behave, but inside, you are deeply injured. You are seeing the nation injured.”

Surgeons like Dr Jaradeh worked for almost 24 hours continuously on the wounded, many of whom have lost their eyesight or the use of their hands, the country’s health minister told the BBC.

Eye specialist Prof Elias Warrak told BBC Arabic that in one night he extracted more damaged eyes than he had previously in his entire career.

“It was very hard,” he said. “Most of the patients were young men in their twenties and in some cases I had to remove both eyes. In my whole life I had not seen scenes similar to what I saw yesterday.”

Health Minister Firass Abiad told the BBC the victims’ injuries would prove life-changing.

“This is something that unfortunately will require a lot of rehabilitation,” he said.

About 3,200 people were injured, most of them in Tuesday’s attack which saw thousands of pagers detonated.

Wednesday’s attack, which detonated two-way radio devices, wounded about 450 people but was responsible for 25 deaths, twice as many as in Tuesday’s blasts.

Abiad told the BBC the attacks constituted a war crime.

“The whole world could see that these attacks occurred in markets,” he said.

“These were not people who were at the battleground fighting. They were in civilian areas with their families.”

Witnesses described seeing people with severe wounds to their faces and hands after the attacks.

Journalist Sally Abou al-Joud says she saw patients “covered in blood” at hospitals, where ambulances were arriving “one after the other within the minute”. Most injuries she saw were “in the faces and the eyes”.

“We’re talking about hands injured, severely injured fingers torn, I’ve heard some doctors say we need to perform amputation surgeries to remove hands… they need to perform surgeries for eyes to remove them,” she said.

One woman told BBC Arabic on Thursday that what they had seen was a “massacre in every sense of the world”.

“Young men were walking in the street with injuries to their hands, waist and eyes… they were unable to see anything,” she said.

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s blasts, writer and politician Tracy Chamoun said she saw one man with his eye blown out and another “had half of his face ripped off”. She had been driving in southern Beirut – a Hezbollah stronghold – at the time.

Many Lebanese in Beirut say the device attacks have reignited their trauma from the Beirut port explosion four years ago.

At least 200 people were killed and 5,000 injured when thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored unsafely at a warehouse in the port blew up, sending a mushroom cloud into the air and a supersonic blastwave tearing through the city.

“We remembered such painful scenes… it is something truly terrifying,” one woman told BBC Arabic. “A state of confusion, discomfort and anxiety is dominating all Lebanon… what happened to us four years ago is being repeated now.”

In the aftermath of the exploding pagers and radio devices the Lebanese army has been destroying suspicious devices with controlled detonations, while walkie-talkies and pagers have now been banned onboard all flights operating at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri Airport – the only operational commercial airport in Lebanon.

More than 90 of those injured are now in Iran receiving further treatment, according to Tehran’s embassy in Lebanon.

That includes Iran’s ambassador, Mojtaba Amani, whose condition has been described as “very good” by the embassy in its statement.

Officials didn’t elaborate on how serious the injuries suffered by the other transferees were.

Abiad said the “weaponisation of technology” was something very serious, he said, not only for Lebanon but also for the rest of the world, and for other conflicts.

“Now we have to think twice before using technology,” he said.

On Thursday Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah described the device attacks as a “massacre” and a “declaration of war” as Israel carried out air strikes on southern Lebanon and jets flew over the capital at low altitude, creating a deafening noise.

The Shia Muslim organisation is a major political presence and controls the most powerful armed force in Lebanon.

It has been trading near-daily cross border fire with Israel since Israel began its retaliation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip after the Palestinian group attacked southern Israel last October. Hezbollah says it is acting in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Israel has said it is changing its military focus to its border with Lebanon, with the aim of returning tens of thousands of displaced residents to their homes. Hezbollah has previously said it would stop firing if there is a ceasefire in Gaza.

Both Dr Jaradeh and Health Minister Abiad are pessimistic about the chances of peace any time soon. Dr Jaradeh described the escalation in Lebanon as a “rebound effect”.

“I think whatever happens, it doesn’t matter how you end up the world, but if you don’t reach a peace, permanent peace process, that protecting everyone and giving the right to everyone, so we are preparing to another war,” he said.

Abiad said Lebanon needed to prepare for the “worst-case scenario”.

“The two attacks in the last day, show that their intent (Israel) is not towards a diplomatic solution,” he said.

“What I know is the position of my government is clear. From day one, we believe that Lebanon does not want war.”

A team of scientists say it is “beyond reasonable doubt” the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.

They were analysing hundreds of samples collected from Wuhan, China, in January 2020.

The results identify a shortlist of animals – including racoon dogs, civets and bamboo rats – as potential sources of the pandemic.

Despite even highlighting one market stall as a hotspot of both animals and coronavirus, the study cannot provide definitive proof.

The samples were collected by Chinese officials in the early stages of Covid and are one of the most scientifically valuable sources of information on the origins of the pandemic.

An early link with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was established when patients appeared in hospitals in Wuhan with a mystery pneumonia.

The market was closed and teams swabbed locations including stalls, the inside of animal cages and equipment used to strip fur and feathers from slaughtered animals.

Their analysis was published last year and the raw data made available to other scientists. Now a team in the US and France says they have performed even more advanced genetic analyses to peer deeper into Covid’s early days.

It involved analysing millions of short fragments of genetic code – both DNA and RNA – to establish what animals and viruses were in the market in January 2020.

“We are seeing the DNA and RNA ghosts of these animals in the environmental samples, and some are in stalls where [the Covid virus] was found too,” says Prof Florence Débarre, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

The results, published in the journal Cell, highlight a series of findings that come together to make their case.

It shows Covid virus and susceptible animals were detected in the same location, with some individual swabs collecting both animal and coronavirus genetic code. This is not evenly distributed across the market and points to very specific hotspots.

“We find a very consistent story in terms of this pointing – even at the level of a single stall – to the market as being the very likely origin of this particular pandemic,” says Prof Kristian Andersen, from the Scripps Institute in the US.

However, being in the same place at the same time is not proof any animals were infected.

The animal which came up most frequently in the samples was the common raccoon dog. This has been shown to both catch and transmit Covid in experiments.

Other animals identified as a potential source of the pandemic were the masked palm civet, which was also associated with the Sars outbreak in 2003, as well as hoary bamboo rats and Malayan porcupines. The experiments have not been done to see if they can spread the virus.

The depth of the genetic analysis was able to identify the specific types of raccoon dogs being sold. They were those more commonly found in the wild in South China rather than those farmed for their fur. This gives scientists clues about where to look next.

The research teams also analysed the genetic code of the viral samples found in the market, and compared them to samples from patients in the early days of the pandemic. Looking at the variety of different mutations in the viral samples also provides clues.

The samples suggest, but do not prove, that Covid started more than once in the market with potentially two spillover events from animals to humans. The researchers say this supports the idea of the market as the origin, rather than the pandemic starting elsewhere with the market adding fuel to the fire in a superspreading event.

The scientists also used the mutations to build the virus’s family tree and peer into its past.

“If we estimate when do we believe most likely the pandemic started versus when do we believe most likely the outbreak at the market started, these two overlap, they’re one and the same,” says Prof Andersen.

In their scientific publication, the full genetic diversity of coronavirus seen in the early days of the pandemic was found at the market.

Prof Michael Worobey, of the University of Arizona, said: “Rather than being one small branch on this big bushy evolutionary tree, the market sequences are across all the branches of the tree, in a way that is consistent with the genetic diversity actually beginning at the market.”

He said this study, combined with other data – such as early cases and hospitalisations being linked to the market – all pointed to an animal origin of Covid.

Prof Worobey said: “It’s far beyond reasonable doubt that that this is how it happened”, and that other explanations for the data required “really quite fanciful absurd scenarios”.

“I think there’s been a lack of appreciation even up until now about how strong the evidence is.”

The lab-leak theory argues that instead of the virus spilling over from wildlife, it instead came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which has long studied coronaviruses.

It is located a 40-minute drive away from the market. The US intelligence community was asked to weigh up the likelihood of a leak – either accidental or deliberate.

In June 2023, all the agencies involved said either a leak or animal origins were plausible scenarios.

The National Intelligence Council and four other agencies said animals were the likely source. The FBI and the Department of Energy thought it was more likely to be a laboratory incident.

Prof Andersen said: “To many this seems like the most likely scenario – ‘the lab is right there, of course it was the lab, are you stupid?’. I totally get that argument.”

However, he says there is now plenty of data that “really points to the market as the true early epicentre” and “even locations within that market”.

Identifying the animals that could have been the source of the pandemic does provide clues to where scientists could look for further evidence of an animal origin.

However, because farms destroyed their animals in the early days of Covid it means there may no longer be any evidence left to find.

“In all likelihood, we missed our chance,” says Prof Worobey.

Prof Alice Hughes, from the University of Hong Kong, who was not involved in the analysis, said it was a “good study”.

“[But] without swabs from the actual animals in the market, which were not collected, we cannot obtain any higher certainty.”

Prof James Wood, the co-director of Cambridge Infectious Diseases, said the study provided “very strong evidence” of the pandemic starting in wildlife stalls at the market. However, he said it could not be definitive because the samples were collected after the market closed, and the pandemic probably started weeks earlier.

And he warned “little or nothing” was being done to limit the live trade in wildlife, and “uncontrolled transmission of animal infections poses a major risk of future pandemics”.

A 12-year-old boy fatally shot a black bear as it was mauling his father in the US state of Wisconsin, say wildlife officials.

Owen Beierman, 12, took aim at the bear as it pinned down his dad while they were on a legal hunting trip.

“Owen was a hero,” Ryan Beierman, 43, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “He shot that bear and killed it on top of me.”

The attack happened in Siren, Burnett County, on 6 September, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The pair were hunting for black bear near the family’s cabin when they spotted the 200lb (91kg) bruin.

Owen shot and injured the animal, which ran off into dense forest.

They gave chase, and as they entered a glade the animal charged at Mr Beierman from about 6ft (1.8m) away.

He said he fired eight shots at the bruin with his pistol, but missed.

The bear bit him in the abdomen, arm and leg.

“I started pistol-whipping him and it felt like I was striking a brick wall,” he told the newspaper.

He described seeing the flash from the muzzle of the boy’s rifle.

“I was flat on my back and could feel the bullet going through the bear,” Mr Beierman said.

He required stitches to reattach a flap of skin to his cheek, and had puncture wounds to his arm and legs.

Officials say bear attacks are very rare.

Nine such incidents were reported in the state between 2013-22, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.