Sri Lankans are voting for a new president in the first election since mass protests sparked by the country’s worst-ever economic crisis unseated the leader in 2022.

Saturday’s vote is widely regarded as a referendum on economic reforms meant to put the country on the road to recovery.

But many are still struggling to make ends meet because of tax hikes, and cuts to subsidies and welfare.

Multiple analysts predict that economic concerns will be front of mind for voters in what is shaping up to be a close race.

“The country’s soaring inflation, skyrocketing cost-of-living and poverty have left the electorate desperate for solutions to stabilise prices and improve livelihoods,” Soumya Bhowmick, an associate fellow at India-based think tank the Observer Research Foundation, told the BBC.

“With the country seeking to emerge from its economic collapse, this election serves as a crucial moment for shaping Sri Lanka’s recovery trajectory and restoring both domestic and international confidence in its governance.”

President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was charged with the monumental task of leading Sri Lanka out of its economic collapse, is seeking another term.

The 75-year-old was appointed by parliament a week after former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa was chased out of power.

Shortly after taking office, Wickremesinghe crushed what was left of the protest movement. He has also been accused of shielding the Rajapaksa family from prosecution and allowing them to regroup – allegations he has denied.

Another strong contender is leftist politician Anura Kumara Dissanayake, whose anti-corruption platform has seen him draw increasing public support.

More candidates are running in Saturday’s election than any other in Sri Lanka’s history. But of more than three dozen, four are dominating the limelight.

Other than Wickremesinghe and Dissanayake, there is also the leader of the opposition, Sajith Premadasa, and the 38-year-old nephew of the ousted president, Namal Rajapaksa.

Counting begins once polls close at 16:00 local time (10:30 GMT), but results are not expected to become clear until Sunday morning.

The “Aragalaya” (struggle) uprising that deposed former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa was sparked by an economic meltdown.

Years of under-taxation, weak exports and major policy errors, combined with the Covid-19 pandemic dried up the country’s foreign exchange reserves. Public debt reached more than $83 billion and inflation soared to 70%.

While the country’s social and political elite were largely insulated against the fallout, basics like food, cooking gas and medicine became scarce for ordinary people, fuelling resentment and unrest.

Then-president Rajapaksa and his government were blamed for the crisis, leading to months-long protests calling for his resignation.

On 13 July 2022, in dramatic scenes that were broadcast around the world, crowds overran the presidential palace, jumping into the swimming pool and ransacking the house.

In the wake of Rajapaksa’s flight from the country – an exile that lasted 50 days – the interim government of President Wickremesinghe imposed strict austerity measures to salvage the economy.

Although the economic reforms have successfully brought down inflation and strengthened the Sri Lankan rupee, everyday Sri Lankans continue to feel the pinch.

“Jobs are the hardest thing to find,” says 32-year-old Yeshan Jayalath. “Even with an accounting degree, I can’t find a permanent job.” Instead, he has been doing temporary or part-time jobs.

Many small businesses across the country are also still reeling from the crisis.

Norbet Fernando, who was forced to shut his roof tile factory north of Colombo in 2022, told the BBC that raw materials such as clay, wood and kerosene are three times more costly than they were two years ago. Very few people are building homes or buying roof tiles, he added.

“After 35 years, it hurts to see my factory in ruins,” Fernando told the BBC, adding that of the 800 tile factories in the area, only 42 have remained functional since 2022.

Central bank data on business sentiments shows depressed demand in 2022 and 2023 – and though the situation is improving in 2024, it’s still not back to pre-crisis levels.

“The Sri Lankan economy may for now have been put back on its feet, but many citizens still need to be convinced the price is worth paying,” Alan Keenan, the International Crisis Group’s (ICG) senior consultant on Sri Lanka, told the BBC.

Ranil Wickremesinghe: Having previously lost twice at the presidential polls, Saturday marks his third chance to be elected by the Sri Lankan people, rather than parliament

Anura Kumara Dissanayake: The candidate of the leftist National People’s Party alliance promises tough anti-corruption measures and good governance

Sajith Premadasa: The opposition leader is representing the Samagi Jana Balawegaya party – his father served as the second executive president of Sri Lanka before he was assassinated in 1993

Namal Rajapaksa: The son of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who led the country between 2005 and 2015, he hails from a powerful political lineage, but will need to win over voters who blame his family for the economic crisis

Voters in Sri Lanka elect a single winner by ranking up to three candidates in order of preference.

If a candidate receives an absolute majority, they will be declared the winner. If not, a second round of counting will commence, with second and third-choice votes then taken into account.

No election in Sri Lanka has ever progressed to the second round of counting, as single candidates have always emerged as clear winners based on first-preference votes.

This year could be different.

“Opinion polls and initial campaigning suggest the vote is likely, for the first time ever, to produce a winner who fails to gain a majority of votes,” said Mr Keenan, of ICG.

“Candidates, party leaders and election officials should be prepared to handle any possible disputes calmly and according to established procedures.”

A top Hezbollah military commander was killed in an Israeli air strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut on Friday, in a major escalation that has added to fears of an all-out war.

Hezbollah confirmed Ibrahim Aqil’s death after Israel said he was one of several senior Hezbollah figures killed in the strike.

Earlier, Lebanese officials said at least 14 people were killed and dozens injured in the strike that hit the densely populated Dahieh area, a stronghold of the Iran-backed group in the city’s southern suburbs.

A senior UN official has warned that the Middle East is at risk of a conflict that could “dwarf” the devastation witnessed in the region so far.

Political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo was speaking at a session of the Security Council following this week’s attacks which saw Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies explode, killing at least 37 people.

In Beirut, there were chaotic scenes as emergency teams rushed to the site of the attack, rescuing the wounded and searching for people believed to be trapped under the rubble. At least one residential building collapsed and others were heavily damaged.

Streets were closed by Hezbollah members, some looking incredulous as the attack represented another humiliating blow in a week which saw pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to the group explode.

Dozens were killed and thousands wounded in those attacks, widely believed to be orchestrated by Israel.

Friday’s strike was the first to hit Beirut since July, when Hezbollah’s military chief Fuad Shukr was killed.

In a statement, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Daniel Hagari said Aqil, a senior commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces, was killed alongside senior operatives in the group’s operations staff and other Radwan commanders.

Hagari said they “were gathered underground under a residential building in the heart of the Dahiyah neighbourhood [in southern Beirut], hiding among Lebanese civilians, using them as human shields”.

The IDF spokesman added that the individuals killed were “planning Hezbollah’s ‘Conquer the Galilee’ attack plan, in which Hezbollah intended to infiltrate Israeli communities and murder innocent civilians”.

The plan was first reported by the Israeli military in 2018, when the IDF said it was blocking tunnels dug by Hezbollah to penetrate Israeli territory and kidnap and murder civilians.

In April, Washington said it was searching for Aqil, also known as Tahsin, and offered financial rewards to anyone with “information leading to his identification, location, arrest and/or conviction”.

He was wanted by the US due to his links and seniority within Hezbollah, a group that has been proscribed a terrorist organisation by Israel, the UK, US and other countries.

In the 1980s, Aqil was a member of the group that orchestrated the bombings of the US embassy in Beirut and a marine barracks, killing hundreds of people.

Confirming Aqil’s death in a post on social media, Hezbollah described him as one of its “great jihadist leaders”.

The group was established in the early 1980s by the region’s most dominant Shia power, Iran, to oppose Israel. At the time, Israel’s forces had occupied southern Lebanon during the country’s civil war.

Earlier on Friday, Hezbollah said it had launched strikes on military sites in northern Israel. The IDF said 140 rockets were fired into the north of the country, while Israeli police issued warnings about damage to roads.

It came after Israel carried out extensive air strikes on southern Lebanon, saying its warplanes had hit more than 100 Hezbollah rocket launchers and other “terrorist sites” including a weapons storage facility.

The cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah 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, while tens of thousands have also been displaced on both sides of the border.

Israel recently added the return of people displaced from the north of the country to its list of war goals, and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that his country is entering a “new phase of the war”, concentrating more of its efforts on the north.

After the pager and walkie-talkie explosions across Lebanon earlier this week, there has been a deepened sense of unease in the Middle Eastern country.

It was an unprecedented security breach that indicated how deeply Israel had managed to penetrate the group’s communication system.

Many of the explosions occurred simultaneously, with walkie-talkie explosions on Wednesday occurring in the vicinity of a large crowd that had gathered for the funerals of four victims of Tuesday’s pager blasts.

Hezbollah and Lebanese authorities have blamed Israel for the explosions.

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

In a televised address on Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said: “The enemy crossed all rules, laws and red lines. It didn’t care about anything at all, not morally, not humanely, not legally.”

Nasrallah vowed a harsh punishment, but indicated his group was not interested in an escalation of its current conflict with Israel.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habbib told the UN Security Council on Friday that Israel had “deliberately undermined” diplomatic efforts for a ceasefire in Gaza and “all attempts of the Lebanese government to de-escalate and exercise self-restraint”.

Israel’s UN envoy Danny Danon said that while his country is not seeking a wider conflict, it “will not allow Hezbollah to continue its provocation”.

UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the Security Council: “We risk seeing a conflagration that could dwarf even the devastation and suffering witnessed so far,”

“I also strongly urge member states with influence over the parties to leverage it now,” she added.

US and UK authorities have urged their citizens not to travel to Lebanon. The White House said it was involved in intense diplomacy to prevent escalation of the conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Israel’s military has launched an investigation after its soldiers were filmed throwing the bodies of three dead Palestinians off a rooftop during a raid in the occupied West Bank.

Footage of the incident, filmed in the northern town of Qabatiya, near Jenin, then appears to show an Israeli military bulldozer picking up and removing the bodies.

The images have sparked widespread outrage. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Friday that it was “a serious incident” that did not “conform” to its values and what was expected of its forces.

Local Palestinian officials say at least seven people were killed by Israeli forces in Qabatiya on Thursday.

Under international law, soldiers are obliged to ensure that bodies, including those of enemy fighters, are treated with respect.

The IDF said it carried out a counterterrorism operation in Qabatiya, during which four militants were killed in an “exchange of fire” and three others were killed after a drone strike on a car.

A journalist in Qabatiya told the BBC that on Thursday morning Israeli troops had surrounded a building in town.

He described how four men who were in the house then escaped to the roof and were shot by snipers.

Fighting continued in the town and when it had subsided, he then said he saw Israeli troops go up to the roof and drop the bodies down over the side, where they were then loaded onto a bulldozer.

Asked about the incident shown in the footage, the IDF said: “This is a serious incident that does not conform with [our] values and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.”

The military said that one of those killed in Qabatiya was Shadi Zakarneh, who it identified as being “responsible for directing and carrying out attacks in the northern West Bank area”.

It said he was “the head of the terrorist organisation” in Qabatiya but did not specify which group he belonged to.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in the West Bank, described the incident on X, formerly known as Twitter, as a “crime” which exposed the “brutality” of the Israeli army.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby described the footage as “deeply disturbing”.

“If it’s proven to be authentic, it clearly would depict abhorrent and egregious behaviour by professional soldiers,” he told reporters.

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

More than 690 Palestinians have been killed there since then, the Palestinian health ministry says, as Israeli forces have intensified their nearly daily search and arrest raids.

Israel says it is trying to stem Palestinian attacks in the West Bank and Israel, in which at least 33 Israelis have been killed.

In Gaza, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli military action, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Police in southern Pakistan have shot dead a doctor accused of blasphemy, drawing condemnation from human rights groups.

Dr Shahnawaz Kanbhar was killed “just by chance” in shootout with officers who did not know it was him, according to a local police chief in Sindh province Niaz Khoso

Dr Kanbhar had gone into hiding on Tuesday after being accused of insulting Islam’s prophet Muhammad and sharing blasphemous content on social media.

He is the second blasphemy suspect in Pakistan to be shot dead in the space of a week.

According to a police report, officers in the city of Mirpur Khas had tried to stop two men riding on a motorcycle on Wednesday, in order to search their vehicle.

Instead of complying, the report says, one of the men opened fire. A gun battle ensued, in which Dr Kanbhar was killed.

It was only after the shootout that officers learned that the man they had shot was Dr Kanbhar, according to Khoso, the local police chief. The second person on the motorcycle escaped.

Another police official, Khas Asad Chaudhry, told BBC Urdu that Dr Kanbhar was accidentally shot by his companion on the motorcycle.

However, a relative of Dr Kanbhar has told BBC Urdu that he was killed in a “fake encounter” – something which local police deny.

The Interior Minister for Sindh province Zia-ul-Hasan Linjar has ordered an independent inquiry into Dr Kanbhar’s death.

The killing of Dr Kanbhar comes a week after an officer opened fire inside a police station in the south-western city of Quetta, fatally wounding another suspect who was being held on accusations of blasphemy.

The deaths have drawn strong condemnation from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), which said it was “gravely concerned by the alleged extrajudicial killing of two people accused of blasphemy.”

“This pattern of violence in cases of blasphemy, in which law enforcement personnel are allegedly involved, is an alarming trend,” it said in a statement issued on Friday.

Dr Kanbhar was shot dead a day after Islamists in nearby Umerkot staged a protest demanding his arrest and burned down his clinic.

His relatives told BBC Urdu that they had to travel for miles to bury his body, after having been blocked by local people and officials.

The incident in Sindh province comes a week after an officer opened fire inside a police station in the south-western city of Quetta, fatally wounding another suspect held on accusations of blasphemy.

The man had been arrested last Wednesday after officers rescued him from an enraged mob that claimed he had insulted Muhammad.

However, the man’s family and tribe said they forgave the officer and that the man had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by insulting Muhammad, according to local media reports.

Though killings of blasphemy suspects by mobs are common, such killings by police are rare in Pakistan.

Accusations, or even simply rumours, of blasphemy spark rioting and rampage by mobs that can escalate into killings.

Under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death – though authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy.

Pakistan has witnessed a surge in attacks on blasphemy suspects in recent years.

In June, a mob broke into a police station in the north-western town of Madyan, snatched a detainee who was a tourist, and then killed him over allegations that he had desecrated Islam’s holy book.

Maria Ivashchenko’s husband Pavlo volunteered to fight the very same day Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Six months later, he was killed as Ukrainian forces went on a counter-offensive in the region of Kherson – making Maria one of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have lost loved ones in the war.

To cope with her grief, Maria has been attending therapy classes organised by a volunteer group called Alive. True Love Stories.

In the sessions, the widows and mothers of fallen fighters express their feelings, and seek solace and closure by painting. They then accompany their paintings with written stories of their love.

Maria says that painting helps externalise and process memories and moments that people can be afraid to re-live.

“There’s total trust. No one will judge you, whether you laugh or cry,” she adds. “They understand you unconditionally. There’s no need to explain anything.”

“There’s a reason why it’s called Alive. We came back to life. This project has pulled many of us out of the abyss.”

The founder of Alive, Olena Sokalska, says more than 250 women have become involved in her project so far, and there is a waiting list of about 3,000.

Olena says that the paintings generally depict scenes that remind the women of the times they spent with their loved ones or of dreams they had. Some paint themselves or their husbands, Olena adds.

“Very often they paint angels, their families or children are depicted as angels,” she says. “These paintings mark the end of the life they had and the beginning of a new life.”

In addition to the trauma of bereavement, the dangers and insecurities of war have affected millions of Ukrainians.

Anna Stativka, a Ukrainian psychotherapist, explains that when wars start people lose safety and stability – basic human needs.

“When these two basic resources are gone very suddenly, this creates a lot of stress.”

In situations where war is sustained, this can also turn chronic, with symptoms such as anxiety, depression, apathy, insomnia, lack of concentration and difficulties with memory.

“You can’t stay in this hyper alert state for so long,” Ms Stativka says, adding that this has consequences on people’s mental and physical health.

“So this is generally what is happening to Ukrainian society,” she says.

Research and statistics suggest that the share of Ukrainians who are experiencing mental health issues is huge, and it is growing.

According to the Ukrainian Health Ministry, the number of patients complaining of mental health problems this year has doubled since 2023, and market research data shows antidepressant sales have jumped by almost 50% since 2021.

A study published in the medical journal The Lancet suggests that 54% of Ukrainians (including refugees) have PTSD. Severe anxiety is prevalent among 21%, and high levels of stress among 18%.

Another study carried out in 2023 showed that 27% of Ukrainians felt depressed or very sad, up from 20% in 2021, the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that the majority of Ukraine’s population may be experiencing distress caused by war.

“It may have different symptoms. Some feel sadness, some feel anxiety, some have difficulties with sleep, some feel fatigue. Some are getting more angry. Some people have unexplained somatic syndromes, be it just pain or feeling bad,” the WHO representative in Ukraine, Jarno Habicht, told the BBC.

But, Mr Habicht says, Ukraine has made strides in dealing with the acute crisis and battling the Soviet-era stigma associated with mental health.

He says mental health was prioritised during the first months of the war. “Ukraine started to talk about mental health, and I think that’s something unique which we have not seen in many places,” Mr Habicht says.

Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska spearheads a mental health campaign called How are you? and she also held the Third Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen focusing on mental health in times of war. It was co-hosted by the British broadcaster, author and mental health campaigner Stephen Fry.

In an interview with the BBC’s Ukrainecast, Mr Fry described the mental health challenges facing Ukraine as an “urgent crisis”, but said he was also impressed by what Ukraine is doing to address it.

“It’s extraordinary to me that in Ukraine this is being talked about,” Mr Fry said. “It is certainly a strength of Ukraine. The day Russians start to talk about the mental health of their soldiers and the crises amongst them will be the day that it’s moved away from some of the totalitarian horror in which it seems to be mired at the moment.”

According to psychotherapist Anna Stativka, one of the ways in which Ukrainian society has responded to the trauma of war is by coming together.

She says that people have generally become much more ready to help to each other and are much more polite, even in public places. “People talk to neighbours more. So many are volunteering, donating, trying to help each other. This is a very stabilising factor. We see much more trust towards each other, much more empathy,” she says.

Maria Ivashchenko is now raising four children on her own. But she is smiling again, even if through tears sometimes. He message to those who are struggling with their loss is: “Don’t be afraid to talk to people. Get out of your bubble. Don’t be alone.”

“The most important thing is not to give up and not to think that you’re alone in this world, or that nobody cares. Oh yes, they do,” she says.

“Our husbands did not go to war so that we can sit around crying, but so that we keep moving on, so that we keep living.”

The impact of this war will be felt by generations to come, but Ukrainians are working hard to deal with the trauma now.

“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.”

The killing of a Japanese schoolboy in the Chinese city of Shenzhen has sparked worry among Japanese expats living in China, with top firms warning their workers to be vigilant.

Toshiba and Toyota have told their staff to take precautions against any possible violence, while Panasonic is offering its employees free flights home.

Japanese authorities have repeated their condemnation of the killing while urging the Chinese government to ensure the safety of their citizens.

The stabbing of the 10-year-old boy on Wednesday was the third high-profile attack on foreigners in China in recent months.

In a statement issued to the BBC, electronics giant Panasonic said it would “prioritise the safety and health of employees” in mainland China in the wake of the latest attack.

Panasonic is allowing employees and their families to temporarily return to Japan at company expense, and is offering a counselling service as well.

Toshiba, which has around 100 employees in China, has urged its workers “to be cautious of their safety”.

The world’s biggest car manufacturer Toyota, meanwhile, told the BBC it was “supporting Japanese expatriates” by providing them with any information they might need on the situation.

Japan’s ambassador to Beijing has also urged the Chinese government to “do its utmost” to ensure the safety of its citizens.

Meanwhile on Thursday, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called the attack “extremely despicable” and said Tokyo had “strongly urged” Beijing for an explanation “as soon as possible”.

Some Japanese schools in China have contacted parents, putting them on high alert in the wake of the stabbing.

The Guangzhou Japanese School cancelled some activities and warned against speaking Japanese loudly in public.

Some members of the Japanese expatriate community in China have told the BBC they are worried about their children’s safety.

One man, a 53-year-old businessman who has lived in Shenzhen for nearly a decade, said he would be sending his daughter back overseas to university earlier than usual.

“We always considered Shenzhen a safe place to live as it’s relatively open to foreigners, but now we are all more cautious about our safety,” he said.

“Many Japanese people are deeply concerned, and numerous relatives and friends have reached out to check on my safety.”

Chinese officials in Shenzhen said they were “deeply saddened” by the incident and had started installing security cameras near the school by Thursday morning.

“We will continue to take effective measures to protect the life, property, safety and legal rights of everyone in Shenzhen, including foreigners,” they were quoted as saying in the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily on Friday.

An editorial in the state-affiliated newspaper lambasted the suspected killer, saying “this violent behaviour does not represent the quality of ordinary Chinese people”.

On Friday, locals began laying flowers at the gate of the Japanese school in Shenzhen.

“It is really sad. It shouldn’t be like that,” a Shenzhen local told Singaporean news outlet The Straits Times.

Another, a retired teacher, said: “This child, no matter which country he is from, is the hope of a family, and of a nation.”

As Shenzhen reels from the killing, more details have emerged from various news reports and official sources.

The incident happened at around 08:00 local time (00:00 GMT) on Wednesday outside the boy’s school, the Shenzhen Japanese School.

The boy – who Chinese police named only as Shen – was stabbed in the abdomen. He later died from his injuries in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The assailant, a 44-year-old man surnamed Zhong, was arrested on the spot.

He had a criminal record, having been arrested for “damaging public infrastructure” in 2015 and “interfering with public order” in 2019, according to state-controlled media in Shenzhen.

An eyewitness said the suspect did not attempt to conceal his face when carrying out the attack.

“He didn’t run away, but just stood there and was apprehended by the local police guarding the school,” the witness told Japanese public broadcaster NHK.

Chinese authorities have not revealed the exact motive, but have repeatedly called the stabbing an “isolated incident”, as they did for two previous incidents this year.

In June, a man targeted a Japanese mother and her child in the eastern city of Suzhou. That attack was also near a Japanese school and led to the death of a Chinese national who had tried to protect the mother and son.

It prompted the Japanese government to request about $2.5m (£1.9m) to hire security guards for school buses in China.

Earlier in June, four American teachers were stabbed in the northern city of Jilin.

Eyes are now on the Chinese authorities and how they will assure Japanese communities that they are safe in China, while ensuring this does not turn into a major diplomatic crisis.

Ties between the two countries have long been acrimonious. For decades the two sides have clashed on a number of issues, ranging from historical grievances to territorial disputes.

Some have pointed out that the stabbing happened on the anniversary of the notorious Mukden Incident, when Japan faked an explosion to justify its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, triggering a 14-year war with China.

A former Japanese diplomat said Wednesday’s attack in Shenzhen was the “result of long years of anti-Japan education” in Chinese schools.

While diplomatic relations may often be strained, economic cooperation has always had a parallel steady existence, according to Japanese diplomats who have spoken to the BBC.

But the fact the attack took place in the cosmopolitan tech hub of Shenzhen may make both sides nervous.

Top Japanese firms in China warning their staff may raise questions about their presence there and what that might mean for economic relations between Tokyo and Beijing.

India has dismissed a news report claiming the government failed to prevent European buyers from transferring Indian-made artillery shells to Ukraine.

In a story published on Thursday, Reuters alleged that artillery shells sold by Indian arms makers had been diverted by European customers to Ukraine.

The report alleged that the transfer of ammunition has been ongoing for more than a year, with Delhi taking no action to stop it despite repeated protests from Moscow.

India’s foreign ministry has called the report “speculative” and “misleading”.

The report “implies violations by India, where none exist, and hence, is inaccurate and mischievous”, Randhir Jaiswal, the ministry’s spokesperson wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Mr Jaiswal added that India has an “impeccable track record compliance with international obligations” on non-proliferation of arms and has its own robust export rules.

Moscow is yet to react to the report or Delhi’s statement.

Indian arms export regulations restrict the use of weapons to the designated buyer, and any unauthorised transfers could jeopardise future sales. In May, India had announced further tightening of export rules, mandating that buyers ensure the arms are not sent to third countries.

Ukraine, which is battling a renewed offensive from Russia, reportedly grapples with a shortage of artillery ammunition.

Citing unnamed Indian and European government and defence industry officials along with customs data, the Reuters report said that India produced a small amount of the ammunition being used by Ukraine – which is estimated to be under 1% of the total arms imported by Kyiv since the war began in 2021.

Italy and the Czech Republic are among the European countries sending Indian ammunitions to Ukraine, it added.

The report said Moscow had raised the issue with Delhi on at least two occasions, including during a meeting between the foreign ministers of both countries in July.

India has refrained from directly criticising Russia over the war, which has drawn the annoyance of Western powers.

• Ukraine: Why India is not criticising Russia over invasion
• Diplomatic tightrope for Modi as he visits Kyiv after Moscow

Delhi, however, has often spoken about the importance of respecting territorial integrity and sovereignty of nations. It has continuously pushed for diplomacy and dialogue to end the war.

India and Russia have traditionally shared warm relations, and Moscow remains an important trade and defence partner for Delhi despite Western sanctions on Russia.

Last year, Russia was India’s biggest oil supplier. In the defence sector, it continues to be India’s biggest ally, supplying more than 60% of Delhi’s needs.

In July, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his first bilateral trip to Russia after being elected to his third term, where he referred to President Vladimir Putin as a “dear friend”.

But Modi’s Russia visit invited the ire of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said he was “disappointed to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy hug the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow”.

Weeks later, Modi visited Ukraine and held talks with Zelensky, which analysts said was in line with India’s famed non-alignment approach to geopolitics.

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.

Ukraine has banned the use of the Telegram messaging platform on official devices issued to government and military personnel, as well as defence sector and critical infrastructure employees.

The country’s powerful National Security and Defence Council (Rnbo) said this was done to “minimise” threats posed by Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Telegram is actively used by the enemy for cyber-attacks, the distribution of phishing and malicious software, user geolocation and missile strike correction,” the Rnbo said on Friday.

Telegram is widely used by the government and the military in both Ukraine and Russia.

In a statement, the Rnbo said the ban was agreed at a meeting of Ukraine’s top information security officials, the military as well as lawmakers.

It said military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov had presented credible evidence of Russian special services’ ability to access personal correspondence of Telegram users, even their deleted messages.

“I have always supported and continue to support freedom of speech, but the issue of Telegram is not a matter of freedom of speech, it is a matter of national security,” Budanov was quoted as saying.

The Rnbo said that those officials for whom the use of Telegram was part of their work duties would be exempt from the ban.

Separately, Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Rnbo’s centre on countering disinformation, stressed the ban only applied to official devices – not personal smartphones.

He added that government officials and military personnel would be able to continue to maintain and update their official Telegram pages.

Last year, a USAID-Internews survey found that Telegram was the top social platform in Ukraine for news consumption, with 72% of Ukrainians using it.

Telegram – which offers end-to-end encryption – was co-founded by Russian-born Pavel Durov and his brother in 2013.

A year later, Durov left Russia after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on the platform.

Last month, Durov, who is also a French national, was placed under formal investigation in France as part of a probe into organised crime.

His case has fuelled a debate about freedom of speech, accountability and how platforms moderate content.

In July, Durov claimed that Telegram reached 950 million monthly active users.

South Carolina has executed its first death row inmate in 13 years, administering a lethal injection to Freddie Owens.

Owens, 46, was found guilty by a jury of killing shop worker Irene Graves during an armed robbery in Greenville in 1997.

He was executed despite his co-defendant signing a sworn statement this week claiming Owens was not present at the time of the robbery and killing.

The South Carolina Supreme Court refused to halt Owens’ execution, saying the claims were inconsistent with testimony made at his trial.

Owens was executed at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, South Carolina, on Friday evening.

He was pronounced dead at 18:55 local time (22:55 GMT) after being injected with a drug called pentobarbital. He made no final statement.

His death followed a pause in executions in the state because prison officials were unable to procure the drug required for lethal injections.

Owens was sentenced to death in 1999, two years after killing Graves, after being convicted of murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy.

The day after he was found guilty, he killed his cellmate in jail, reports CNN affiliate WHNS.

According to reporting on his trial by South Carolina newspaper The State, Owens was 19 when he and Steve Golden, then 18, held Graves at gunpoint while attempting to rob the convenience store where she worked.

Owens shot and killed Graves after she failed to open a safe below the counter, according to testimony provided by Golden at Owens’s trial.

At the time of her death, Graves was a 41-year-old single mother of three.

Lawyers for Owens tried to halt his execution a few times, including twice in September. But the court denied each request.

In the latest attempt, lawyers pointed to an affidavit signed by Golden on Wednesday, which claimed Owens was innocent.

The court denied the request to halt the execution by saying that the new affidavit was “squarely inconsistent with Golden’s testimony at Owens’s 1999 trial” and the statement he gave to police right after their arrest.

Other witnesses testified that Owens had told them he shot Graves, prosecutors said.

Advocates against the death penalty and Owens’s mother also appealed to the state for clemency, which was denied by Governor Henry McMaster.

Hours before his execution, Owens’s mother said in a statement it was a “grave injustice that has been perpetrated against my son”.

“Freddie has maintained his innocence since day one,” his mother, Dora Mason, said, according to local news outlet the Greenville News.

Inmates in South Carolina are allowed to choose whether they want to die by lethal injection, electric chair or firing squad.

Owens deferred the decision to his lawyer, who chose the lethal injection option for him, according to the Greenville News.

Journalists who witnessed the execution said members of Graves’ family were also present.

The US Coast Guard has heard a week’s worth of testimony from people close to the Titan submersible that imploded last June, killing all five aboard.

Investigators are seeking to uncover the details of what led to the tragedy and find recommendations that could prevent future deadly voyages.

Titan, operated by OceanGate, imploded less than two hours into its descent during a dive to the wreckage of the Titanic.

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

Here are five takeaways from the first of the two-week set of hearings:

Investigators with the US Coast Guard revealed one of the crew’s final messages before it lost contact with a ship above water: “All good here.”

The hearing revealed other text messages between Titan and its mother ship as the deep-sea vessel began its trek to the sea floor to see the iconic British ocean liner that sank in 1912.

Support staff aboard the surface ship asked about the submersible’s depth and weight.

Communications were patchy throughout the descent, according to investigators.

About one hour into the dive, the Titan sent a message at a depth of 3,346m that would be its last. The crew communicated it had dropped two weights.

Then communication was lost.

Mission specialist Renata Rojas, who helped with the doomed trip as a volunteer, testified before the US Coast Guard on her interaction with the crew before the sub descended.

At one point, Ms Rojas teared up while remembering “five people smiling” before boarding the Titan and heading below the water.

“They were just happy to go, that’s the memory I have,” she said.

She remembered losing communication and asking colleagues: “We haven’t heard from them, where are they?”

Ms Rojas, who previously visited the Titanic wreckage with OceanGate, admitted that the Titan submersible was not classified or registered.

“I knew the Titanic dive was risky, but I never felt unsafe,” she said during the hearing.

OceanGate’s former operations director David Lochridge testified to US Coast Guard investigators that he warned of potential safety issues before he was fired in 2018.

He claimed he was ignored.

Mr Lochridge said he believed the deadly incident with the Titan was “inevitable” as the company “bypassed” standard rules.

He was fired and sued by OceanGate for revealing confidential information, and he countersued for wrongful dismissal.

US court documents show Mr Lochridge had significant concerns with the Titan’s design, including that it was made from carbon fibre which he warned would damage further with every dive.

He told US Coast Guard investigators the “whole idea” of OceanGate was “to make money”.

“There was very little in the way of science,” he said.

The US Coast Guard released new footage showing the wreckage of the Titan sub on the bottom of the sea floor.

The deep-sea vessel is seen with the “OceanGate” logo on its side as debris is scattered around it.

The vessel’s tail can also be spotted among the wreckage as well as the submersible’s wires, gauges and electronics.

A remotely operated vehicle obtained the footage.

Patrick Lahey, the co-founder and chief executive of leading submersible manufacturer Triton, told investigators he wasn’t impressed by the Titan submersible.

Mr Lahey’s company manufactures submersibles that descend to the deepest points of the ocean.

While not mandatory, he stressed the importance of certifying submersible vessels through a process that involves an extensive safety assessment carried out by independent marine organisations.

Mr Lahey told the panel there was no reason why the Titan submersible couldn’t have been certified.

He toured the Titan sub that later imploded while on vacation in the Bahamas and said he “wasn’t particularly impressed” by what he saw.

“It looked to me like a lot of the stuff was not quite ready for primetime,” he added, saying he expressed his concerns to OceanGate.

Mr Lahey added that the vessel did not seem “particular well thought out”.

“It just looked amateur-ish in its execution,” he said.

After thousands of pagers and radio devices exploded in two separate incidents in Lebanon – injuring thousands of people and killing at least 37 – details are still being pieced together as to how such an operation was carried out.

Lebanon and Hezbollah, whose members and communication systems were targeted, have blamed Israel – though Israel is yet to comment.

The BBC has followed a trail from Taiwan, to Japan, Hungary, Israel and back to Lebanon.

Here are the unanswered questions.

Some early speculation suggested that the pagers could have been targeted by a complex hack that caused them to explode. But that theory was quickly dismissed by experts.

To cause damage on the scale that they did, it is probable they were rigged with explosives before they entered Hezbollah’s possession, experts say.

Images of the broken remains of the pagers show the logo of a small Taiwanese electronics manufacturer: Gold Apollo.

The BBC visited the company’s offices, situated on a large business park in a nondescript suburb of Taipei.

The company’s founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, seemed shocked. He denied the business had anything to do with the operation.

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

Instead – he pointed to a Hungarian company: BAC Consulting.

Mr Hsu said that three years ago he had licensed Gold Apollo’s trademark to BAC, allowing them to use Gold Apollo’s name on their own pagers.

He said the money transfers from BAC had been “very strange” – and that there had been problems with the payments, which had come from the Middle East.

• Taiwan pager maker stunned by link to Lebanon attacks

The BBC went to the registered office of BAC Consulting, situated in a residential area of the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

The address appeared to be shared by 12 other companies – and no-one in the building could tell us anything about BAC Consulting at all.

Officials in Hungary say the firm, which was first incorporated in 2022, was merely a “trading intermediary with no manufacturing or operational site” in the country.

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

The UK Foreign Office – which has taken on DfID’s responsibilities – told the BBC it was in the process of investigating. But based on initial conversations, it said it did not have any involvement with BAC.

BAC’s website listed one person as its chief executive and founder – Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono.

The BBC made several attempts to contact Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono, but were unable to reach her.

However, she did reportedly speak to NBC News, saying: “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate.”

So who is really behind BAC Consulting?

The New York Times has reported that the company was in fact a front for Israeli intelligence.

The newspaper, citing three Israeli officials, said that two other shell companies were created to help hide the identities of the people who were really producing the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify these reports – but we do know that Bulgarian authorities have now begun investigating another company linked to BAC.

Bulgarian broadcaster bTV reported on Thursday that 1.6 million euros ($1.8m; £1.3m) connected to the device attacks in Lebanon passed through Bulgaria and was later sent to Hungary.

• What we know about firm linked to Lebanon pagers

The origins of the radio devices, which exploded in the second wave of attacks, are less clear.

We know that at least some of those that exploded were the IC-V82 model produced by the Japanese company, ICOM.

Those devices were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, according to a security source speaking to Reuters news agency.

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.

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

ICOM said in a statement it had stopped manufacturing and selling the model almost a decade ago, in October 2014 – and said it had also discontinued production of the batteries needed to operate it.

The company said it does not outsource manufacturing overseas – and all its radios are produced at a factory in Western Japan.

According to Kyodo news agency, Icom director Yoshiki Enomoyo suggested that photos of the damage around the battery compartment of the exploded walkie-talkies suggest they may have been retrofitted with explosives.

• Japan firm says it stopped making walkie-talkies used in Lebanon blasts

Videos show victims reaching into their pockets in the seconds before the devices detonated, causing chaos in streets, shops and homes across the country.

Lebanese authorities have concluded that the devices were detonated by “electronic messages” sent to them, according to a letter by the Lebanese mission to the UN, seen by Reuters news agency.

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

We do not yet know what kind of message was sent to the radio devices.

This is the question many in Lebanon are now asking – paranoid that other devices, cameras, phones or laptops could have also been rigged with explosives.

The Lebanese Army has been on the streets of Beirut using a remote-controlled bomb disposal robot to carry out controlled explosions.

BBC crews in Lebanon have been stopped and told not to use their phones or cameras.

“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, told a BBC correspondent.

• ‘We don’t know if our phones are safe’: Lebanon on edge after exploding device attacks

There are several theories as to why the devices were triggered to explode this week.

One is that Israel chose this moment to send a devastating message to Hezbollah, following almost a year of escalating cross-border hostilities after Hezbollah fired rockets at or around northern Israel a day after the Hamas attack of 7 October.

The other is that Israel did not intend to put its plan in motion at this moment, but was forced to after fearing the plot was about to be exposed.

According to US outlet Axios, the original plan was for the pager attack to be the opening salvo of an all-out war as a way to try to cripple Hezbollah’s fighters.

But, it says, after Israel learned that Hezbollah had become suspicious, it chose to carry out the attack early.

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.”

The Taiwanese government has said none of the components in thousands of pagers used by the armed group Hezbollah that exploded in Lebanon earlier this week were made on the island.

Fragments of the pagers that blew up had labels which pointed to Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo. But the firm denied making the devices used in the attack.

The Lebanese government says 12 people, including two children, were killed and nearly 3,000 injured in the explosions on Tuesday.

The incident, along with another attack involving exploding walkie-talkies, was blamed on Israel and marked a major escalation in the conflict between the two sides.

“The components for Hezbollah’s pagers were not produced by us,” Taiwan’s economy minister Kuo Jyh-huei told reporters on Friday.

He added that a judicial investigation is already under way.

“I want to unearth the truth, because Taiwan has never exported this particular pager model,” Taiwan foreign minister, Lin Chia-lung said.

Earlier this week, Gold Apollo boss Hsu Ching-Kuang denied his business had anything to do with the attacks.

He said he licensed his trade mark to a company in Hungary called BAC Consulting to use the Gold Apollo name on their own pagers.

The BBC’s attempts to contact BAC have so far been unsuccessful. Its CEO Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono told the US news outlet NBC that she knew nothing and denied her company made the pagers.

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

But a New York Times report said that BAC was a shell company that acted as a front for Israel, citing Israeli intelligence officers.

In another round of blasts on Wednesday, exploding walkie-talkies killed 20 people and injured at least 450, Lebanon’s health ministry said.

Japanese handheld radio manufacturer Icom has distanced itself from the walkie-talkies that bear its logo, saying it discontinued production of the devices a decade ago.

Iran-backed Hezbollah has blamed Israel for what it called “this criminal aggression” and vowed that it would get “just retribution”.

The Israeli military has declined to comment.

The two sides have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.

The difficulty in identifying the makers of the devices has highlighted how complicated the global electronics supply chain has become.

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.

In just eight months, Chappell Roan has gone from being a relative unknown to suddenly topping charts as one of the biggest new pop stars on the planet.

But as the Missouri-born 26-year-old concludes a sold-out UK tour, the dark matter of mega-fame, and its invasive superfandom, threatens to cast a shadow over her success.

In August, she posted two TikToks, now collectively viewed over 30 million times, calling out the “creepy behaviour” she’s experienced and telling fans to respect her boundaries.

And on Instagram, she wrote “women don’t owe” anything, after one fan grabbed and kissed her in a bar. Elsewhere, police had to intervene when an autograph hunter wouldn’t take no for an answer.

This week, she went a step further, telling The Face magazine she “might quit” the music industry if the harassment towards her and those closest doesn’t subside.

Fame, she concluded, has the “vibe of an abusive ex-husband”.

Chappell Roan is the drag alter ego of Kayleigh Amstutz, and she has tried to keep the two identities separate.

Even with the stage persona, her authenticity is key to her appeal. But being relatable has drawbacks for a modern-day pop star.

“It’s such an interesting world we live in where everyone wants to see who you really are on social media. But there’s this delusion that they know you and that they can tell you anything,” she told Glamour magazine last year.

At meet-and-greets, LGBT fans dump their difficult coming-out experiences on her. “My music has helped a lot of people through that trauma, and I love that,” she added.

“But personally, as Kayleigh, I can’t handle that responsibility.”

Roan’s attempts to set boundaries and redefine modern-day fan-artist relationships have, unsurprisingly, led to a backlash.

On their podcast, Perez Hilton and Charlie Booker supported Roan’s calls for more healthy fan relationships, but warned that her repetitive criticisms of fame – all while courting media attention – left her open to accusations of being a “sourpuss”.

Online critics see Roan’s remarks as entitled, saying any negative sides to the attention are part and parcel of fame and fortune.

However, most fans support Roan. Lily Waite, a trans woman aged 29, tells BBC News she found the star’s openness groundbreaking and empowering, but understands her request for more considerate reactions.

“The majority of fans are wonderful and earnest and respectful, but those aren’t the fans she’s addressing or referring to in her videos asserting boundaries,” says Waite, who feels misogyny lies behind much of the backlash.

Rebecca Clark, 35, who identifies as queer, suggests Roan’s background in the drag/queer scene – which Clark argues is more understanding of mental health – has left her more “exposed on the worldwide stage”.

Still, Clark backs her, particularly as she challenges the superficiality of those only supporting star authenticity when it is positive. “She is self-aware enough to have seen what’s happened in the past to other pop stars and actively set a boundary for her fans.

“As the first massively out female pop star since Lady Gaga, she’s amazing. But again, that doesn’t mean she’s owes fans a personal one-on-one. She’s just a person too.”

If Roan is making the most high-profile and perhaps intense attempt to impose boundaries, she is certainly not alone in speaking up.

Paramore singer Hayley Williams publicly backed the remarks. “This happens to every woman I know from this business, myself included,” she wrote. “Social media has made this worse. I’m really thankful Chappell is willing to address it in a real way, in real time. It’s brave and unfortunately necessary.”

Mitski welcomed her to “the club where strangers think you belong to them and they find and harass your family members”.

Indie band Muna also chastised “toxic” elements of their own fanbase, and Billie Eilish’s song The Diner similarly discussed being stalked.

For Sarah Ditum, author of Toxic, a book exploring female superstardom over recent decades, this year has marked “a tipping point” in celebs openly saying fans are crossing a line.

She believes it’s easier for this generation of stars to talk about because they’ve grown up with the language of mental health and boundaries as “pop culture has been reassessing the treatment of stars in the noughties” – in particular Britney Spears.

As the millennial pop princess, Spears’ arc serves as a warning to all who follow. She symbolises both the era’s exploitation – marketed to the masses as a teen sex kitten aged just 16 – and the shift in the pressures of fame brought about by a changing media.

Experiencing the height of fame in the pre-social media age, Spears’ tightly controlled career saw her suffocated by the paparazzi and male executives until a very public breakdown.

For Roan, the attention now comes from fans who, thanks to social media, can form parasocial relationships – the psychological term to describe the illusion of a friendship or bond with a star they’ve never met.

This makes fame particularly intense for this generation, says Ditum.

“In one sense, social media is an incredible power in their hands. They don’t have to go through a potentially hostile press and can speak direct to their audience on their own terms.

“But it also gives incredible power to the audience.”

Controversy swirling around a North Carolina Republican candidate for governor is causing political turbulence in a must-win swing state for Donald Trump. The BBC asked conservatives there what they make of the alleged scandal.

It was during a regular meeting of the Johnston County Republican Women’s committee that they heard the news.

All around North Carolina on Thursday, Republicans and Democrats alike had been waiting for what was billed as a bombshell exposé about Republican Lt Gov Mark Robinson.

The furniture maker-turned-politician, who is running to be the state’s first black governor, had called himself a “black Nazi” on a porn website more than a decade ago, according to a report by CNN.

Robinson, who identifies as an evangelical Christian, branded the report “tabloid lies”. The BBC has not independently verified CNN’s claims.

But when the news finally did break, it barely caused a stir, at least not among this polite gathering of women in Johnston County.

“If the accusations are accurate, it’s something for him and his wife to deal with. It’s not my business. It’s a marital issue,” said Adele Walker, 52.

Soon afterwards, the group discussed their planned $200 donation to his campaign, in which he is already trailing the Democratic candidate Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general.

“What we decided is that we’re going to donate even more money to Mr Robinson,” she said.

The opinions of conservative women like Walker are being closely watched this election, not just in North Carolina, but across the US. The Tar Heel State has one of the closest races in the country with November’s election looming.

Trump had previously offered a glowing endorsement of Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids”.

Even before the CNN exposé was published, Robinson was under scrutiny.

He has faced backlash over 2019 comments in a Facebook video about abortion on demand, when he said women should be “responsible enough to keep your skirt down”.

In 2021, he said children in schools should not be learning about “transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth”, and later rejected calls to apologise.

“I think it’s fair to call the Robinson campaign a dumpster fire at this point,” said North Carolina State University political scientist Steven Greene.

There are fears among some Republicans that Robinson could be a political albatross, causing their voters to stay home, or driving Democratic turnout.

North Carolina has remained “stubbornly Republican”, said Greene. Barack Obama was the only Democrat to win the state in 44 years, and he could only succeed once, in 2008.

But the state’s growing urban centres have tilted the political scales towards Democrats, who hope this is the year they can turn North Carolina blue.

An Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey released on Thursday, before the CNN report about Robinson was published, showed Harris leading Trump by one percentage point.

That is still well within the margin of error, which means the race is very much up in the air.

This state is essential for the Republican White House candidate, Greene said.

“It’s a lot harder to see Donald Trump getting to 270 without North Carolina than Kamala Harris,” he said, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to clinch the US presidency.

Scott Lassiter, a Republican running for state Senate, expressed disappointment that Robinson did not drop out before a state deadline on Thursday, allowing another candidate from the party to take his place.

Lassiter said Robinson is a gift to Democrats, who “would love for every race on the ballot to be about Mark Robinson at this point”.

Once a regular at Trump’s campaign events in the state, Robinson will not attend the former president’s rally in Wilmington on Saturday, according to reports.

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But those close to Robinson are sticking by him.

Guilford County chairman Chris Meadows, a Republican, said he’s known Robinson, who’s from the area, for years.

“Our position is that these are unsubstantiated allegations, accusations,” he said.

“In the age of the improvement of AI, I really don’t put any credibility in any of this until he admits it.

“CNN has a great deal of credibility problems and they have for several years.”

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In the end, Greene said the presidential race will all come down to voter turnout, and it’s unclear how Robinson will affect that.

He was already known for outlandish statements. People’s minds are probably largely made up, he said.

It certainly seemed that way in Johnston County.

One Republican voter, who did not want to be named, said he would not vote for Robinson, who he said “had a loud mouth”.

But he has no problem voting for Trump.

“I don’t know what Trump knew about Robinson. The news of Robinson has no effect on me,” he said.

Evelyn Costelloe, 66, who has voted for Republicans in the past but not recently, said she will back the Democrats because of their stance on abortion. And Robinson’s comments didn’t help either, she said.

“I don’t know about all these accusations, but I do know the stuff he’s said. Stuff like that makes me want to vote for sure,” she told the BBC.

Given that Trump only won North Carolina by about 75,000 votes in 2020, even a little bit of political damage spilling over from Robinson could make a difference.

For now, however, North Carolina remains a deep shade of purple.

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

Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

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

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.

The al-Qaeda flag flutters from an airport building. A jihadist places a burning rag in the engine of the presidential jet, others explore the VIP terminal or fire shots as they approach planes belonging to the UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) – a familiar survival lifeline for so many countries in crisis around the world.

The social media images broadcast by the jihadists who on Tuesday morning attacked the international airport complex outside Mali’s capital, Bamako, and then roamed around the site, graphically demonstrate the fragile security of what should have been one of the most protected locations in the West African country.

A training centre for the gendarmerie (paramilitary police) in the Faladié suburb was also targeted. Residents filmed smoke rising above the skyline as explosions and gunshots shattered the dawn calm.

Just as shocking is another militant video – of fighters, their soft teenage faces a stark contrast with their weapons and combat uniforms – preparing themselves before launching the assault.

Mali’s military rulers have not said how many people died, except that some trainee gendarmes had lost their lives, but it seems that at least 60 and perhaps as many as 80 or even 100 people were killed, with a further 200 or more wounded.

Those figures may or may not include the militants killed as government forces recovered control of the airport at Senou and the Faladié barracks.

Of course, these are far from the first images of conflict in Mali.

The country has been deep in crisis since at least late 2011, when northern ethnic Tuareg separatists and radical Islamist factions allied to them, took over Timbuktu, Gao and other towns across the north.

Bamako has suffered attacks before. In 2015 an assault on the upmarket Radisson Blu hotel claimed 20 lives and five more died in a shooting at a restaurant in the buzzy Hippodrome district.

In 2017, an attack on a tourism complex on the outskirts of the city killed at least four people.

In 2020 Col Assimi Goïta, an experienced combat commander, staged a coup criticising the elected government’s failure to effectively tackle the security crisis.

A civilian-led transition was soon established, but in May 2021 Col Goïta staged a second coup, to put himself and fellow officers firmly back in control.

But despite a reinforced focus on security, and the hiring of Russian mercenary outfit Wagner to provide extra military support – provoking a row with France that led eventually to the withdrawal of the several thousand strong French anti-terror force Barkhane – the new regime proved no more effective than its civilian predecessor in ending the violence.

Open conflict was mainly confined to the desert in the north and the more fertile central regions, where tensions were fuelled by competition between farming villagers from the Dogon ethnic group and livestock herders from the Peul (Fulani) community over precious land and water resources.

But there were occasional reminders of the jihadists’ capacity to range further south in this vast country, to Bamako and its environs.

In July 2022 militants staged two small attacks near the city and then attempted a big raid – trying to ram their way into the Kati barracks complex, the junta’s base just 15km (9.3 miles) north of the capital.

This showed the insurgents’ ability to stage high-profile raids far beyond the more northerly regions, where their presence is an influential fact of everyday life.

However, the army managed to contain this assault, reporting two dead militants as the only casualties. And ultimately the Goïta regime was able to shrug off any wider impact from the incident.

Although the attack was attributed to Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the al-Qaeda affiliated coalition of armed groups that is Mali’s largest jihadist force, it did not substantially weaken the junta’s self-confidence and capacity to set the domestic political and diplomatic agenda.

Just weeks later, the French completed the withdrawal of their troops, having been driven out by the regime’s political hostility and the ever-tightening rules through which it stifled the operational capacity of the Barkhane force.

And the next year the junta felt sufficiently emboldened to demand the winding up of the United Nations 14,000-strong peacekeeping force, known by the acronym Minusma.

So will Col Goïta’s junta be able to brush off the highly publicised attacks of this week with the same self-confident control of the agenda that it managed after the July 2022 incidents?

Just as then, in a huge country whose territory could never be absolutely controlled by the official security forces, even backed up by Wagner – now renamed Corps Africa – it is not really surprising that a number of jihadist fighters managed to stage raids on locations on the outskirts of Bamako.

And such attention-grabbing forays still fall well short of the militant control over the large tracts of countryside and numerous villages that characterise parts of central and northern Mali.

However, the security picture in West Africa today is much more fragile than it was in 2022.

Across the central Sahel, JNIM and the other main jihadist faction, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), have been probing ever further south.

The military regime in neighbouring Burkina Faso – allied with the Malian and Nigérien juntas in the Alliance of Sahelian States (AES) – has lost control of large tracts of terrain, and quite possibly even the majority of rural areas.

And in Niger jihadists stage regular attacks all over the west, and even within an hour of the capital, Niamey.

Moreover, the militants now routinely range into the northern areas of coastal countries, particularly Benin and Togo. In Ivory Coast they have only been pushed back through a sustained military effort, backed up with a “hearts and minds” programme of development spending.

So the overall regional security picture is as difficult as it has ever been.

But in Mali itself, the mood has felt rather different.

Government forces last year mounted a highly successful campaign to seize back northern towns previously controlled by the Tuareg former separatist movement that had signed a peace agreement with the civilian government back in 2015, but which the junta has cancelled.

Although those northern groups inflicted a costly defeat on the army and its Russian allies at Tinzaouaten, in the Sahara Desert, in late July, the regime’s hold on the north’s key urban centres seems well established for now.

This campaign against the former separatists, and the army’s reoccupation of their Saharan headquarters, Kidal, has proved highly popular among southern public opinion on the streets of Bamako.

And Col Goïta and his fellow junta leaders have so far felt no need to make concessions to the West African bloc, Ecowas, as it proffers goodwill in the hope of persuading them to abandon their declaration of withdrawal from the community.

It seems unlikely that this week’s shocking attacks on the outskirts of Bamako will alter this dynamic, despite the humiliation of seeing JNIM fighters wander freely around the international airport site, where flights have now resumed.

Instead, there is a risk that, in the short term at least, the Malian regime will oversee a reassertion of nationalistic feelings – and with that, the risk of a deepening of inter-ethnic distrust, with the fingers of populist accusation all too often pointing at those groups regularly accused of jihadist sympathy or activism.

Among the flurry of social media videos to emerge from Bamako this week have been scenes not only of arrests by the authorities, but also what appear to be images of citizens’ “detention” of presumed suspects, and at least one lynching, with a man burned alive in the street.

So, as so often, it is members of the Peul community who find themselves the prime targets for such brutal reprisal in a nation desperately in need of peace and stability.

• UN translators in Mali fear Taliban-style fate
• Was Ukraine’s role in big Wagner defeat an own goal in Africa?
• Boost for Wagner as Mali shuns UN troops

Tamagotchi is having a moment – again.

The egg-shaped toy housing a virtual pet was one of the biggest crazes of the 1990s.

And several attempts to reignite the brand over the years appears to have now paid off for owner Bandai Namco.

Global sales more than doubled between 2022 and 2023, it tells the BBC, and Tamagotchi has now opened its first shop in the UK – something it didn’t even do when it was 1996’s hottest gadget.

Unsurprisingly, the modern Tamagotchi isn’t the same thing you would have bought in the 1990s.

It still looks the same – a garishly coloured egg with a small digital screen and buttons – but the actual toy has much more functionality.

“Now you can connect with friends, you can play on Wi-Fi and download different items, and that’s really combating that sense of fatigue that you might have gotten with some earlier models,” Tamagotchi brand manager Priya Jadeja told the BBC.

The virtual pet officially relaunched in the UK in 2019 and has been growing since – with a perhaps surprising mix of players young and old.

“When we relaunched, we thought it would be a very millennial-focused relaunch,” Ms Jadeja says.

“But it’s being introduced to kids who’ve never had this sort of device before – it’s really exciting to see them embracing it.”

Unlike in 1996, now there are many other virtual pets on the market.

For example Bitzee, made by Hatchimals, uses a flexible display that responds to your touch, and reacts to tilt-based movement.

Meanwhile Punirunes has a popular feature where you can place your finger inside the toy to “stroke” the virtual pet on the screen.

And there’s also Digimon virtual pets – another 1990s throwback – though these are also owned by Bandai Namco, and were originally designed as Tamagotchi for boys.

Despite those gender-based lines being drawn back in the day, Jadeja says there doesn’t seem to be any real difference in who buys the toys now.

For the Tamagotchi fans we spoke to, nostalgia is playing a big role.

“I got my first Tamagotchi back in primary school, my best friend had one back then and I have fond memories of playing with them together,” says Emma, known on YouTube as Emmalution. She says she “started craving some of that nostalgia”.

She didn’t keep her old Tamagotchi and picked up a modern one last year, she says.

“This kickstarted an obsession, absorbing loads of information about all of the releases that had come out after my first ever Tamagotchi,” she said.

“I started a collection, curious to know what I’d been missing out on whilst I was too busy growing up.”

Koby, known to his fans on YouTube as Lost in Translationmon, agreed.

“When I’m playing with my Digimon or Tamagotchi virtual pets, I get a small snapshot of what it was like when I first played with my virtual pets as a kid.

“There’s also a fantastic sense of community from sharing photos and stories online with other people.”

And for Emma, there is one other big factor – escapism.

“With how the world is at the moment, and how it has been for the past few years, it’s nice to just look down at your little pixel pet every now and again, forget it all for a moment to feed it a little snack or play a little game, and remember a much simpler time.”

In the past, speaking about your own mental health and addiction problems in public was seen as a taboo.

But now, in an industry where these issues are often rife, musicians, including Billie Eilish, Demi Lovato and Lewis Capaldi, are digging deep and sharing their most personal experiences, helping many fans “feel seen”.

Following their lead, an increasing number of artists are speaking up to get the message out that it is ok to talk.

lleo, who makes what she calls “bipolar pop”, said the reaction from her fans had been “crazy” since she starting singing about her mental health experiences.

The singer from Cheltenham, who is bipolar herself, said: “People reach out and say ‘this song helps me so much’.”

Swindon-born singer-songwriter Athena Aperta, 26, also hopes her “honest lyrics” will give listeners “hope”.

She has been sober for two years but said her struggles with mental health, alcohol and drugs all intensified after becoming involved in the London music scene where substance abuse was “very common”.

She said finding a job back near her hometown in 2022 was actually “a blessing in disguise”, helping her to overcome her addiction.

“There are drugs still, there’s people drinking alcohol,” she said, but added she is now able to “regulate herself more” if she is around that environment.

Athena recently received funding from the Youth Music: Next Generation award to release two singles, including , which “is about living with anxiety, depression, CPTSD [Complex post-traumatic stress disorder] and being a recovering people-pleaser”.

“There’s a lack of hope in the world at the moment. I just really want to give that to people,” she said.

A 2023 census by Help Musicians found almost a third of musicians had experienced negative mental wellbeing.

The head of Help Musicians’ dedicated mental health sister charity, Music Minds Matter, Grace Meadows, said: “Not knowing that support is available or who to turn to for support can lead to behaviours, such as substance abuse, that compound rather than alleviate mental health issues.”

She explained the “normalisation of drugs and alcohol across the industry” can further exacerbate this.

“Doing music is so rough,” said lleo, who has dealt with serious mental health issues for several years.

“There have been so many points where I’ve thought, ‘I wish I could just do something else’.”

But the artist said she “needs an outlet and music is the way to do that”.

Following the release of her track , which talks frankly about a bipolar medicine that in her words “really messed me up”, she said the response was “really overwhelming and amazing”, with fans getting in touch and sharing similar stories.

“It was really crazy for people to want to open up about such a private thing,” she said.

“It makes me feel very emotional.”

Athena, who has performed at festivals including Boomtown Fair and London Pride, experienced anxiety and depression from the age of 13 and later went on to develop alcohol and drug issues.

She said this was exacerbated while working in a late night venue and gigging around London.

“There was one day where I was offered drugs at 1pm on a Tuesday,” she said.

“That’s when I thought, ‘oh I’m really in it’.”

She explained that she suddenly found herself “in connection” with “probably quite dangerous” people.

She said that the pressure that musicians put on themselves as creatives, linked in with an all too often “lack of self-worth” can add to feelings of depression and anxiety, with many turning to alcohol or drugs as “a form of escape”.

Music Minds Matter said the causes of mental health challenges for people in the music industry can also include “the precarity around job security, pressures of the role, performance anxiety and unstable working patterns”.

Ms Meadows said that in recent times this has been added to with Brexit regulations, the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, which she said have “created significant pressures for everyone working in music”.

“More does need to be done to help musicians with their mental health,” said lleo, whose music is supported by BBC Radio 1.

She added that she would especially like to hear more men speaking up about it in their music.

lleo said, despite this, music was “the most important tool” for her to share her feelings and had helped the artist to express things even to her parents that she could not say out loud because “it’s too painful, too uncomfortable”.

Ms Meadows advised anyone in the industry who might be suffering with mental health or substance issues to get in touch with Music Minds Matter via their website or their free and confidential 24/7 support line.

BBC’s Action Line.

Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has said one of its flights had to make an emergency landing after a mouse scurried out of a passenger’s in-flight meal on Wednesday.

The aircraft was flying from Norway’s capital Oslo to Malaga in Spain and was forced to make an emergency landing in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The diversion was in line with company procedures as the furry stowaway posed a safety risk, airline spokesperson Oystein Schmidt told the AFP news agency.

Passengers on the flight were later flown to Malaga on a different aircraft.

Airlines usually have strict restrictions involving rodents on board planes in order to prevent electrical wiring being chewed through.

“This is something that happens extremely rarely,” Mr Schmidt said.

“We have established procedures for such situations, which also include a review with our suppliers to ensure this does not happen again.”

Jarle Borrestad experienced the incident first-hand, telling the BBC News Channel in a recorded video that the mouse escaped from the box of food that the woman sat next to him on the flight was opening.

Mr Borrestad said the situation was very calm and that people “were not stressed at all”.

However, he admitted that he did put his socks over his trousers so the mouse did not crawl up his legs.

Mr Borrestad said that while the flight was diverted, it only added a few extra hours to the journey.

It is the second rodent-related travel incident in a week.

A train service in southern England had to be terminated mid-journey after two squirrels boarded a carriage and one refused to get off.

Women’s rights advocates are demanding the immediate implementation of a nearly 30-year-old gender equity bill which Ghana’s president signed into law on Thursday.

This ends a process which began in 1998, with the bill shuffling between parliaments until the legislature passed it in July this year. Many campaigners faulted Ghana’s law-making body for the long delay.

Ghana now joins Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Mozambique and others in Africa that have working affirmative action laws.

These countries have a 30% quota for women in decision-making bodies, in parliament and other state agencies.

Ghana’s Affirmative Action (Gender Equality) Act 2024 is expected to ensure a critical number of women hold key positions in government, security, commerce and other decision-making spaces.

The law promotes the progressive and active participation of women in public life from a minimum of 30% to 50% by 2030, in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal of achieving gender equality by 2030.

The country’s trade unions are mandated by this law to ensure gender balanced representation on their executive boards, while private industries which enforce provisions of this law to employ women would benefit from tax incentives.

After the law passed in July, Speaker of Parliament Alban Bagbin said he hoped lawmakers would commit to the reforms and “do more to create a free and just society to liberate more women to support us develop mother Ghana”.

Subjecting an employee to gender-specific verbal attacks, stereotyping, hate speech or harsh rhetoric as well as discriminating against, intimidating or seeking to disqualify a candidate on grounds of gender are all banned under this law.

Penalties include fines, and jail terms of between six and 12 months.

Any act that victimizes, obstructs or exerts “undue influence on a person” in a way that undermines the new law is deemed an offence.

Trade unions who fail to comply could lose their registered status.

Female lawmakers have described the law as a strong statement for the empowerment drive.

Abla Dzifa Gomashie MP, whose constituency is in south-east Ghana, told the BBC she hoped it would “cure the cultural, political and economic discrimination against women and minority groups – especially that of the disability community.”

“We must kick in the advocacy as soon as possible to ensure that state agencies and institutions get on board and educate the populace on the expectation that this law carries,” she added.

But some advocates and activist groups who welcome the law worry that it will not be properly enforced.

“In the midst of the joy, there are fears – we fear that for example where political parties are required to play a role, they may not necessarily do what they have to do,” Dinah Adiko, a technical consultant who previously worked with Ghana’s gender ministry, told the BBC.

“We fear that the supervision of it, regulation… What are the biting powers to actively implement this law? Those are some of the reservations. But for the moment we are excited to see this come to light.”

There has been little public criticism of the law.

At a recent press conference, a journalist asked if “pursuing equality by discriminating in favour of women” was the wrong thing to do.

But a senior minister dismissed that as a “misconception about the bill fuelling tokenism”.

“Ghanaian women are qualified to hold positions of authority and influence,” Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection Dakoa Newman told reporters.

Many blamed both of Ghana’s two main political parties – the NDC and the NPP – for failing to ensure passage of the law, despite repeatedly using it as a campaign promise.

It was final re-introduced to parliament by current Gender Minister Newman earlier this year.

Last year Ghana’s parliamentary speaker said he wanted the bill to be passed but said it was not ready in its current form, and needed “critical stakeholder consultation for a well-defined and crafted law.”

Recalling her stint as a technical advisor at the gender ministry in 2014, Ms Adiko said: “We saw the bill all the way through to cabinet, got the approval until elections and the change in government in 2016 meant it went back several steps again.”

With the Ghana’s general elections approaching in December, there are expectations that it could encourage more women to apply for political office.

At present, two women have successfully submitted nomination forms for the presidency. One less than in the 2020 vote.

With this new law, the electoral commission is mandated to ensure political parties comply with quotas for women at various levels.

The commission is also expected to “put measures in place to increase participation of women in the electoral process as candidates and voters”.

Gomashie MP said she expected “political parties to engage vigorously in ensuring that they create spaces for our women to participate in electoral processes and also be able to contest in a free and fair environment”.

• Ghana opposition demands voter roll audit
• ‘Bipolar, colour and me’ – an artist’s spreadsheet of emotion
• ‘Why I’m taking part in a beauty pageant’
• The Ghanaian royals taking over US reality TV

The first in-person votes have been cast in the US presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, a milestone moment that comes six weeks before election day on 5 November.

Virginia became the first state in the country to allow in-person voting on Friday, and early polling sites will remain open there until 2 November. Some long queues were seen as voters cast ballots on national, state and local levels.

The situation in two other states, Minnesota and South Dakota, is different as voters there can only hand in absentee ballots in person instead of mailing them.

“Why not try to be first? That’s kind of fun, right?” one voter in Minnesota, Jason Miller, told the Associated Press.

Some 69% of votes cast during the 2020 election were done through early in-person voting or through mail-in ballots, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data science lab found.

Some in a queue in Fairfax, Virginia, told the BBC they felt it was their civic duty to vote early.

“You never know if you’ll be hit by a bus,” one voter said on Friday, adding that they wanted to be “safe not sorry”. Another said the good weather – and a day working from home – had prompted them to cast their early ballot.

Virginia has been a reliably Democratic state in the last few elections, but some Republicans have been bullish about trying to flip it in November. Voters there will also be casting votes for the state’s eleven members of congress and one of its two senators.

Early and mail-in voting has been a hot-button issue since the 2020 election, with just 37% of Republicans saying people should have the option to vote early, according to polling from the Pew Research Center. That sharply contrasts with 82% support from Democrats.

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

The latest polling suggests the presidential race is extremely tight, with Harris holding a slight national lead.

In the months leading up to President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, polls consistently indicated he was trailing Trump. But the race tightened when Harris became the Democratic candidate.

Along with the presidential race, millions of voters in 41 states will also have the chance to voice their opinion on a specific policy position by voting on ballot initiatives on 5 November.

Ten states are asking voters to decide whether they want to enshrine abortion access in their states’ constitutions, voters in West Virginia will be asked vote on whether or not medically assisted suicide should be prohibited, and voters in three states will be asked whether recreational marijuana usage for adults should be legal.

There are more than 140 measures on the ballot across the US, according to a count from the Associated Press.

The US state of Georgia has ordered a hand count of ballots cast in November’s election, potentially creating further delays in a system that took days to deliver a definitive result four years ago.

Georgia’s elections board voted 3-2 to require the hand count, despite the objections of state officials and poll workers.

Around five million votes for president were cast in Georgia in 2020, with Joe Biden beating Donald Trump in the key battleground state state by a margin of around 12,000.

While hand counting of ballots is common in many countries, including the UK, it is extremely rare in US elections.

The rule passed on Friday requires three poll workers in each of the state’s 6,500 voting precincts to begin counting ballots on election night.

The move was opposed by the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, who warned that a hand count would introduce the possibility of “error, lost or stolen ballots, and fraud”.

In a phone call following the 2020 election, Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” – a move which along with other alleged efforts to overturn the result led to criminal charges against Trump and some of his allies.

• Election polls: Who is ahead, Harris or Trump?

Raffensperger publicly tussled with Trump but also ordered a hand recount of the state’s ballots, which slightly changed vote totals but confirmed the overall result.

Trump’s supporters on the Georgia elections board argued that hand counting will make the forthcoming election more secure.

“What I don’t want to do is set a precedent that we are OK with speed over accuracy,” said board member Janelle King.

Opponents of the move included county elections supervisors, poll workers and voting rights organisations, several of whom testified at a hearing on Friday.

They warned of delays and possible chaos caused by changing the rules so close to the election. Early voting in Georgia starts on 15 October. Election day is on 5 November.

Ethan Compton, the election supervisor for Irwin County, said that ballots had already been sent to members of the military posted overseas.

“The election has begun,” Mr Compton said. “This is not the time to change the rules. That will only lower the integrity of our elections.”

The board’s chair, John Fervier, a Republican, voted against the rule for that reason.

“I do think it’s too close to the election,” he said.

Fervier warned that the board may not have the legal authority to require hand counting, and the change is almost certain to face legal challenges.

Voting rights organisations say hand counting would complicate the voting system and is less accurate than machine counting.

Many Republicans, meanwhile, believe Trump’s oft-repeated but false claims that the voting system is riddled with fraud and has been “rigged” by Democrats.

During an rally in Atlanta in August, Trump called the board members “pit bulls fighting for victory”.

Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, said of the election board prior to the vote: “They are fully trying to set up a scenario in which they could refuse to certify an election whose results they don’t like.”

The rule change came as early voting got under way on Friday in other states including Virginia, Minnesota and South Dakota.

• 3 November: US presidential election

• 11 November: Georgia orders hand recount of votes as the race is so close

• 13 November: Cable networks project Biden wins Georgia

• 20 November: Georgia hand recount confirms Biden won by just over 12,000 votes

• 21 November: Trump requests recount, as allowed under Georgia law

• 7 December: The recount again confirms Biden won

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

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

Schools in Niger will start the new academic year almost a month late because of heavy rainfall and flooding, says the military government.

“Several schools have been affected, and others are being occupied by those impacted,” a government spokesperson said on the state-run broadcaster.

Authorities have pushed the start date from 2 to 28 October.

Over the last few weeks, the West African country has been battered by relentless downpours, resulting in over 300 deaths either due to drowning or buildings collapsing, according to the interior ministry.

In the central-southern city of Maradi, one of the worst hit areas, around 100 tents have been erected to accommodate people in schools.

The International Rescue Committee reported that over 800,000 people have been affected by the floods.

The organisation says countries like Niger, Mali, and Nigeria are dealing with some of the “worst floods in 30 years”.

Like other countries in the semi-arid Sahel region of West Africa, Niger is suffering from the impact of climate change. As well as floods, it has also experienced droughts and crop failures in recent years.

Scientists say many extreme weather events, including floods and drought, are becoming more frequent and intense as a result of climate change.

The military government says 9,700 tonnes of grain has been made available to those in need and that the “situation is under control”.

There is also growing concern around the damage and destruction of buildings with cultural significance.

A few weeks ago, a 19th Century mosque made from wood and straw collapsed in Zinder, the country’s second-biggest city.

There is also fear around how much damage a historic centre in the northern city of Agadez, known as the gateway to the desert, has endured. The site is a Unesco World Heritage Site.

• ‘I thought I would die with my six children’ – survivor of Nigeria dam collapse
• Kenya floods: What a deluge reveals about Nairobi’s vulnerability
• ‘What do I do now that my sons have been swept away?’

A top Hezbollah military commander was killed in an Israeli air strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut on Friday, in a major escalation that has added to fears of an all-out war.

Hezbollah confirmed Ibrahim Aqil’s death after Israel said he was one of several senior Hezbollah figures killed in the strike.

Earlier, Lebanese officials said at least 14 people were killed and dozens injured in the strike that hit the densely populated Dahieh area, a stronghold of the Iran-backed group in the city’s southern suburbs.

A senior UN official has warned that the Middle East is at risk of a conflict that could “dwarf” the devastation witnessed in the region so far.

Political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo was speaking at a session of the Security Council following this week’s attacks which saw Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies explode, killing at least 37 people.

In Beirut, there were chaotic scenes as emergency teams rushed to the site of the attack, rescuing the wounded and searching for people believed to be trapped under the rubble. At least one residential building collapsed and others were heavily damaged.

Streets were closed by Hezbollah members, some looking incredulous as the attack represented another humiliating blow in a week which saw pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to the group explode.

Dozens were killed and thousands wounded in those attacks, widely believed to be orchestrated by Israel.

Friday’s strike was the first to hit Beirut since July, when Hezbollah’s military chief Fuad Shukr was killed.

In a statement, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Daniel Hagari said Aqil, a senior commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces, was killed alongside senior operatives in the group’s operations staff and other Radwan commanders.

Hagari said they “were gathered underground under a residential building in the heart of the Dahiyah neighbourhood [in southern Beirut], hiding among Lebanese civilians, using them as human shields”.

The IDF spokesman added that the individuals killed were “planning Hezbollah’s ‘Conquer the Galilee’ attack plan, in which Hezbollah intended to infiltrate Israeli communities and murder innocent civilians”.

The plan was first reported by the Israeli military in 2018, when the IDF said it was blocking tunnels dug by Hezbollah to penetrate Israeli territory and kidnap and murder civilians.

In April, Washington said it was searching for Aqil, also known as Tahsin, and offered financial rewards to anyone with “information leading to his identification, location, arrest and/or conviction”.

He was wanted by the US due to his links and seniority within Hezbollah, a group that has been proscribed a terrorist organisation by Israel, the UK, US and other countries.

In the 1980s, Aqil was a member of the group that orchestrated the bombings of the US embassy in Beirut and a marine barracks, killing hundreds of people.

Confirming Aqil’s death in a post on social media, Hezbollah described him as one of its “great jihadist leaders”.

The group was established in the early 1980s by the region’s most dominant Shia power, Iran, to oppose Israel. At the time, Israel’s forces had occupied southern Lebanon during the country’s civil war.

Earlier on Friday, Hezbollah said it had launched strikes on military sites in northern Israel. The IDF said 140 rockets were fired into the north of the country, while Israeli police issued warnings about damage to roads.

It came after Israel carried out extensive air strikes on southern Lebanon, saying its warplanes had hit more than 100 Hezbollah rocket launchers and other “terrorist sites” including a weapons storage facility.

The cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah 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, while tens of thousands have also been displaced on both sides of the border.

Israel recently added the return of people displaced from the north of the country to its list of war goals, and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that his country is entering a “new phase of the war”, concentrating more of its efforts on the north.

After the pager and walkie-talkie explosions across Lebanon earlier this week, there has been a deepened sense of unease in the Middle Eastern country.

It was an unprecedented security breach that indicated how deeply Israel had managed to penetrate the group’s communication system.

Many of the explosions occurred simultaneously, with walkie-talkie explosions on Wednesday occurring in the vicinity of a large crowd that had gathered for the funerals of four victims of Tuesday’s pager blasts.

Hezbollah and Lebanese authorities have blamed Israel for the explosions.

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

In a televised address on Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said: “The enemy crossed all rules, laws and red lines. It didn’t care about anything at all, not morally, not humanely, not legally.”

Nasrallah vowed a harsh punishment, but indicated his group was not interested in an escalation of its current conflict with Israel.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habbib told the UN Security Council on Friday that Israel had “deliberately undermined” diplomatic efforts for a ceasefire in Gaza and “all attempts of the Lebanese government to de-escalate and exercise self-restraint”.

Israel’s UN envoy Danny Danon said that while his country is not seeking a wider conflict, it “will not allow Hezbollah to continue its provocation”.

UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the Security Council: “We risk seeing a conflagration that could dwarf even the devastation and suffering witnessed so far,”

“I also strongly urge member states with influence over the parties to leverage it now,” she added.

US and UK authorities have urged their citizens not to travel to Lebanon. The White House said it was involved in intense diplomacy to prevent escalation of the conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Controversy swirling around a North Carolina Republican candidate for governor is causing political turbulence in a must-win swing state for Donald Trump. The BBC asked conservatives there what they make of the alleged scandal.

It was during a regular meeting of the Johnston County Republican Women’s committee that they heard the news.

All around North Carolina on Thursday, Republicans and Democrats alike had been waiting for what was billed as a bombshell exposé about Republican Lt Gov Mark Robinson.

The furniture maker-turned-politician, who is running to be the state’s first black governor, had called himself a “black Nazi” on a porn website more than a decade ago, according to a report by CNN.

Robinson, who identifies as an evangelical Christian, branded the report “tabloid lies”. The BBC has not independently verified CNN’s claims.

But when the news finally did break, it barely caused a stir, at least not among this polite gathering of women in Johnston County.

“If the accusations are accurate, it’s something for him and his wife to deal with. It’s not my business. It’s a marital issue,” said Adele Walker, 52.

Soon afterwards, the group discussed their planned $200 donation to his campaign, in which he is already trailing the Democratic candidate Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general.

“What we decided is that we’re going to donate even more money to Mr Robinson,” she said.

The opinions of conservative women like Walker are being closely watched this election, not just in North Carolina, but across the US. The Tar Heel State has one of the closest races in the country with November’s election looming.

Trump had previously offered a glowing endorsement of Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids”.

Even before the CNN exposé was published, Robinson was under scrutiny.

He has faced backlash over 2019 comments in a Facebook video about abortion on demand, when he said women should be “responsible enough to keep your skirt down”.

In 2021, he said children in schools should not be learning about “transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth”, and later rejected calls to apologise.

“I think it’s fair to call the Robinson campaign a dumpster fire at this point,” said North Carolina State University political scientist Steven Greene.

There are fears among some Republicans that Robinson could be a political albatross, causing their voters to stay home, or driving Democratic turnout.

North Carolina has remained “stubbornly Republican”, said Greene. Barack Obama was the only Democrat to win the state in 44 years, and he could only succeed once, in 2008.

But the state’s growing urban centres have tilted the political scales towards Democrats, who hope this is the year they can turn North Carolina blue.

An Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey released on Thursday, before the CNN report about Robinson was published, showed Harris leading Trump by one percentage point.

That is still well within the margin of error, which means the race is very much up in the air.

This state is essential for the Republican White House candidate, Greene said.

“It’s a lot harder to see Donald Trump getting to 270 without North Carolina than Kamala Harris,” he said, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to clinch the US presidency.

Scott Lassiter, a Republican running for state Senate, expressed disappointment that Robinson did not drop out before a state deadline on Thursday, allowing another candidate from the party to take his place.

Lassiter said Robinson is a gift to Democrats, who “would love for every race on the ballot to be about Mark Robinson at this point”.

Once a regular at Trump’s campaign events in the state, Robinson will not attend the former president’s rally in Wilmington on Saturday, according to reports.

• US election polls: Who is ahead – Harris or Trump?
• Seven swing states set to decide the 2024 US election

But those close to Robinson are sticking by him.

Guilford County chairman Chris Meadows, a Republican, said he’s known Robinson, who’s from the area, for years.

“Our position is that these are unsubstantiated allegations, accusations,” he said.

“In the age of the improvement of AI, I really don’t put any credibility in any of this until he admits it.

“CNN has a great deal of credibility problems and they have for several years.”

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: What are Harris and Trump’s policies?
• FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger under Biden or Trump?

In the end, Greene said the presidential race will all come down to voter turnout, and it’s unclear how Robinson will affect that.

He was already known for outlandish statements. People’s minds are probably largely made up, he said.

It certainly seemed that way in Johnston County.

One Republican voter, who did not want to be named, said he would not vote for Robinson, who he said “had a loud mouth”.

But he has no problem voting for Trump.

“I don’t know what Trump knew about Robinson. The news of Robinson has no effect on me,” he said.

Evelyn Costelloe, 66, who has voted for Republicans in the past but not recently, said she will back the Democrats because of their stance on abortion. And Robinson’s comments didn’t help either, she said.

“I don’t know about all these accusations, but I do know the stuff he’s said. Stuff like that makes me want to vote for sure,” she told the BBC.

Given that Trump only won North Carolina by about 75,000 votes in 2020, even a little bit of political damage spilling over from Robinson could make a difference.

For now, however, North Carolina remains a deep shade of purple.

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

Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

At the Sahara Restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan, four Arabic language TV news channels are beaming in images of the war in Gaza and the aftermath of the recent pager and radio devices explosions in Lebanon.

The smell of cardamom-infused coffee and shawarma and falafel, and hum of friends catching up, stand in stark contrast to the images on the television screens.

Dearborn is the first Arab-majority city in the US, and it has served as a key centre for the “uncommitted” movement that is opposed to the Biden administration’s policy toward the Middle East.

Because they are in Michigan – a key Midwestern swing state that Joe Biden won by fewer than three points in 2020 – Dearborn voters, like those who frequent the Sahara Restaurant, could decide Kamala Harris’s political future.

Sam Hammoud, whose family has run the Sahara Restaurant in Dearborn for the past 30 years, said that taxes and inflation have negatively affected his business – but it’s not what is motivating his vote. He is currently an undecided voter.

“It’s about the situation in our homelands,” he said.

“We need a ceasefire. There is no ceasefire. We have no more words,” he added.

Mr Hammoud’s feelings are shared by many here, and the Arab-American community has been sounding the alarm bell to Democrats for months, warning the party that its loyal support could not be automatically counted on this election.

In a statement this week, the Uncommitted Movement – which is made up of traditionally Democratic members – said it could not endorse Harris because of her “unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law”.

• US election polls: Who is ahead – Harris or Trump?

Soujoud Hamade is a lawyer in the Detroit suburb and president of the Michigan Chapter of the Arab American Bar Association.

She canvassed for the Democratic Party in past elections, and feels her work helped get President Biden elected in 2020. He won Michigan with a margin of just 2.78%.

This time around, Ms Hamade is voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

She is not alone. An August poll from the Council on American-Islamic Relations indicates that in Michigan, 40% of Muslim voters back Stein, 18% preferred Republican Donald Trump – and only 12% supported Harris – suggesting a significant shift from past strong support for Democrats.

Ms Hamade said the “traditionally” Democratic Arab-American voters in Michigan “cannot stomach the thought of voting for someone who’s directly contributing to the death and destruction of our home country and of our relatives overseas”.

Harris welcoming the endorsement of former Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney was particularly troubling for the Michigan lawyer.

She said Cheney’s involvement in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 makes him an unwanted bedfellow for her community.

“It’s baffling to me as an American, to now see the direction that the party is going, it’s disheartening,” she said.

“These aren’t the values that we as Democrats stood for. We were not the party of war.”

Packed full of cafes, restaurants and independently owned stores, Dearborn enjoys a thriving small-business economy – as well as a strong community that is deeply affected by the conflict in the Middle East.

• Dearborn, Michigan: A visit to the first Arab-majority city in the US

Dr Maisa Hider-Beidoun, who owns a chain of pharmacies and medical centres in the region, said she is a lifelong Democrat who does not know if she can support Harris.

Her community has been placed in “a moral dilemma”, she said.

“We are good Americas, we are good tax-paying, law-abiding citizens, but our money is being funnelled overseas and killing people that are actually physically related to us.”

In February’s Democratic primary in Michigan, part of the process of choosing the party’s presidential candidate, over 100,000 people in this community declared themselves “uncommitted” in protest at the Biden-Harris administration policy towards Gaza.

The community says it has sought meetings with the White House and asked the vice-president to outline how her approach to Israel might differ from Biden’s.

While the Uncommitted Movement criticised Harris, it also opposes Trump, whose “agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organising”, it says.

The organisation did not recommend its members vote for a third-party candidate like Stein.

Dr Mona Mawari, a pharmacist and a community organiser who worked on the uncommitted campaign, told the BBC she is still struggling to decide how to vote in November – “a really hard decision”.

Harris is “maybe a little more empathetic with her words” than Biden regarding what Dr Mawari describes as “genocide” in Gaza, but she finds it hard to support her.

Harris has said she is aligned with Biden on US support for Israel though she has spoken more about the scale of the human suffering in Gaza.

Said Dr Mawari: “The community is really upset, and they’re very hyper-aware that lip service is just lip service, and without any actions they can’t vote for her.”

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

The situation in Lebanon has also sharpened fears about an escalation in the regional conflict and, for this Arab-American community, what it means for their families there.

Faye Nemer came to the US when she was 10, fleeing Lebanon because of the political instability and violence, and she is now the CEO of the Middle East North American Arab Chamber of Commerce.

Before her family left Lebanon, she says they were “living as refugees” in their own country, moving between “abandoned office buildings”.

So she looks at the situation in Gaza – where more than a million people have been displaced – through a different lens, particularly the experience of children.

Her sister and much of her extended family are still in Lebanon.

“It’s difficult to conduct your day-to-day without that being top of mind,” she said.

A lifelong Democrat, she has also not made up her mind on how – or if – she will vote, and is also weighing voting for a third-party candidate.

Some 3.5 million Americans claimed Middle Eastern descent in the 2020 Census -around 1% of the population, though many are concentrated in battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin.

Dr Mawari said the uncommitted movement doesn’t want people to feel apathetic and not cast a ballot, but to use their vote in whichever way they believe is right.

“Sitting this one out is not an option. It’s not an answer to what’s going on,” she said.

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

Travis King, the US soldier who fled from South to North Korea last year before being returned home, has been sentenced to one year of confinement and dishonourably discharged from the military.

He faced charges including desertion in July 2023 and assault of a non-commissioned officer.

But with time already served and credit for good behaviour, the 24-year-old Army private walked free, his legal team told the BBC.

At Friday’s hearing at Fort Bliss, Texas, he pleaded guilty to five of the original 14 military charges that had been filed against him. The other counts were dismissed.

King joined the army in January 2021 and was in South Korea as part of a unit rotation when he crossed into North Korea.

At the hearing, King told military judge Lt Col Rick Mathew that he had decided to flee the US Army because he was “dissatisfied” with work and had been thinking about leaving for about a year before he bolted into North Korea.

“I wanted to desert from the US Army and never come back,” King said, according to reporters inside the courtroom.

He also said he had been diagnosed with mental health conditions, though he maintained he was fit to stand trial and understood the charges.

King’s lawyer, Franklin Rosenblatt, said in a statement that his client accepts full responsibility for what happened and added that King “faced significant challenges in his life, including a difficult upbringing, exposure to criminal environments, and struggles with mental health”.

“All these factors have compounded the hardships he faced in the military,” Mr Rosenblatt said.

King illegally crossed into North Korea while on a civilian tour of the village of Panmunjom, located on the heavily guarded Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea.

He joined the civilian tour after he was released from a South Korean prison where he had served nearly two months on charges that he assaulted two people and kicked a police car.

After his release, he was taken to the airport so he could return to the Fort Bliss base to face disciplinary action. But instead of getting on the plane, King joined the civilian tour and ultimately bolted into North Korea, where he was detained by local authorities.

At the time, North Korean media reported that he had fled because of “inhuman treatment” and racism within the US military.

He became the first American to be detained in North Korea in nearly five years.

King was released two months later after “intense diplomacy”, US officials said at the time. He was taken by a state department aircraft to a US airbase in South Korea.

On 28 September 2023, he was flown back to Texas and had been in custody there since.

The following month, he was charged by the US military with desertion, kicking and punching other officers, unlawfully possessing alcohol, making a false statement and possessing a video of a child engaged in sexual activity.

King pleaded guilty to charges including desertion, three counts of disobeying an officer and assault on a non-commissioned officer.

The other charges, however, were dismissed after the government made a motion to do so, which was granted by the judge.

The Associated Press reported in July that King’s lawyers were in talks with military prosecutors to work out a plea deal. A preliminary hearing was scheduled that month, but was postponed so both sides could negotiate.

In his statement, Mr Rosenblatt said he believes that despite his client walking away free on Friday, “the negative public perception” and the time King has spent in custody “represents an ongoing punishment that he will endure for the rest of his life”.

Israel’s military has launched an investigation after its soldiers were filmed throwing the bodies of three dead Palestinians off a rooftop during a raid in the occupied West Bank.

Footage of the incident, filmed in the northern town of Qabatiya, near Jenin, then appears to show an Israeli military bulldozer picking up and removing the bodies.

The images have sparked widespread outrage. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Friday that it was “a serious incident” that did not “conform” to its values and what was expected of its forces.

Local Palestinian officials say at least seven people were killed by Israeli forces in Qabatiya on Thursday.

Under international law, soldiers are obliged to ensure that bodies, including those of enemy fighters, are treated with respect.

The IDF said it carried out a counterterrorism operation in Qabatiya, during which four militants were killed in an “exchange of fire” and three others were killed after a drone strike on a car.

A journalist in Qabatiya told the BBC that on Thursday morning Israeli troops had surrounded a building in town.

He described how four men who were in the house then escaped to the roof and were shot by snipers.

Fighting continued in the town and when it had subsided, he then said he saw Israeli troops go up to the roof and drop the bodies down over the side, where they were then loaded onto a bulldozer.

Asked about the incident shown in the footage, the IDF said: “This is a serious incident that does not conform with [our] values and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.”

The military said that one of those killed in Qabatiya was Shadi Zakarneh, who it identified as being “responsible for directing and carrying out attacks in the northern West Bank area”.

It said he was “the head of the terrorist organisation” in Qabatiya but did not specify which group he belonged to.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in the West Bank, described the incident on X, formerly known as Twitter, as a “crime” which exposed the “brutality” of the Israeli army.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby described the footage as “deeply disturbing”.

“If it’s proven to be authentic, it clearly would depict abhorrent and egregious behaviour by professional soldiers,” he told reporters.

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

More than 690 Palestinians have been killed there since then, the Palestinian health ministry says, as Israeli forces have intensified their nearly daily search and arrest raids.

Israel says it is trying to stem Palestinian attacks in the West Bank and Israel, in which at least 33 Israelis have been killed.

In Gaza, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli military action, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

After thousands of pagers and radio devices exploded in two separate incidents in Lebanon – injuring thousands of people and killing at least 37 – details are still being pieced together as to how such an operation was carried out.

Lebanon and Hezbollah, whose members and communication systems were targeted, have blamed Israel – though Israel is yet to comment.

The BBC has followed a trail from Taiwan, to Japan, Hungary, Israel and back to Lebanon.

Here are the unanswered questions.

Some early speculation suggested that the pagers could have been targeted by a complex hack that caused them to explode. But that theory was quickly dismissed by experts.

To cause damage on the scale that they did, it is probable they were rigged with explosives before they entered Hezbollah’s possession, experts say.

Images of the broken remains of the pagers show the logo of a small Taiwanese electronics manufacturer: Gold Apollo.

The BBC visited the company’s offices, situated on a large business park in a nondescript suburb of Taipei.

The company’s founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, seemed shocked. He denied the business had anything to do with the operation.

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

Instead – he pointed to a Hungarian company: BAC Consulting.

Mr Hsu said that three years ago he had licensed Gold Apollo’s trademark to BAC, allowing them to use Gold Apollo’s name on their own pagers.

He said the money transfers from BAC had been “very strange” – and that there had been problems with the payments, which had come from the Middle East.

• Taiwan pager maker stunned by link to Lebanon attacks

The BBC went to the registered office of BAC Consulting, situated in a residential area of the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

The address appeared to be shared by 12 other companies – and no-one in the building could tell us anything about BAC Consulting at all.

Officials in Hungary say the firm, which was first incorporated in 2022, was merely a “trading intermediary with no manufacturing or operational site” in the country.

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

The UK Foreign Office – which has taken on DfID’s responsibilities – told the BBC it was in the process of investigating. But based on initial conversations, it said it did not have any involvement with BAC.

BAC’s website listed one person as its chief executive and founder – Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono.

The BBC made several attempts to contact Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono, but were unable to reach her.

However, she did reportedly speak to NBC News, saying: “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate.”

So who is really behind BAC Consulting?

The New York Times has reported that the company was in fact a front for Israeli intelligence.

The newspaper, citing three Israeli officials, said that two other shell companies were created to help hide the identities of the people who were really producing the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify these reports – but we do know that Bulgarian authorities have now begun investigating another company linked to BAC.

Bulgarian broadcaster bTV reported on Thursday that 1.6 million euros ($1.8m; £1.3m) connected to the device attacks in Lebanon passed through Bulgaria and was later sent to Hungary.

• What we know about firm linked to Lebanon pagers

The origins of the radio devices, which exploded in the second wave of attacks, are less clear.

We know that at least some of those that exploded were the IC-V82 model produced by the Japanese company, ICOM.

Those devices were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, according to a security source speaking to Reuters news agency.

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.

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

ICOM said in a statement it had stopped manufacturing and selling the model almost a decade ago, in October 2014 – and said it had also discontinued production of the batteries needed to operate it.

The company said it does not outsource manufacturing overseas – and all its radios are produced at a factory in Western Japan.

According to Kyodo news agency, Icom director Yoshiki Enomoyo suggested that photos of the damage around the battery compartment of the exploded walkie-talkies suggest they may have been retrofitted with explosives.

• Japan firm says it stopped making walkie-talkies used in Lebanon blasts

Videos show victims reaching into their pockets in the seconds before the devices detonated, causing chaos in streets, shops and homes across the country.

Lebanese authorities have concluded that the devices were detonated by “electronic messages” sent to them, according to a letter by the Lebanese mission to the UN, seen by Reuters news agency.

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

We do not yet know what kind of message was sent to the radio devices.

This is the question many in Lebanon are now asking – paranoid that other devices, cameras, phones or laptops could have also been rigged with explosives.

The Lebanese Army has been on the streets of Beirut using a remote-controlled bomb disposal robot to carry out controlled explosions.

BBC crews in Lebanon have been stopped and told not to use their phones or cameras.

“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, told a BBC correspondent.

• ‘We don’t know if our phones are safe’: Lebanon on edge after exploding device attacks

There are several theories as to why the devices were triggered to explode this week.

One is that Israel chose this moment to send a devastating message to Hezbollah, following almost a year of escalating cross-border hostilities after Hezbollah fired rockets at or around northern Israel a day after the Hamas attack of 7 October.

The other is that Israel did not intend to put its plan in motion at this moment, but was forced to after fearing the plot was about to be exposed.

According to US outlet Axios, the original plan was for the pager attack to be the opening salvo of an all-out war as a way to try to cripple Hezbollah’s fighters.

But, it says, after Israel learned that Hezbollah had become suspicious, it chose to carry out the attack early.

Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has said one of its flights had to make an emergency landing after a mouse scurried out of a passenger’s in-flight meal on Wednesday.

The aircraft was flying from Norway’s capital Oslo to Malaga in Spain and was forced to make an emergency landing in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The diversion was in line with company procedures as the furry stowaway posed a safety risk, airline spokesperson Oystein Schmidt told the AFP news agency.

Passengers on the flight were later flown to Malaga on a different aircraft.

Airlines usually have strict restrictions involving rodents on board planes in order to prevent electrical wiring being chewed through.

“This is something that happens extremely rarely,” Mr Schmidt said.

“We have established procedures for such situations, which also include a review with our suppliers to ensure this does not happen again.”

Jarle Borrestad experienced the incident first-hand, telling the BBC News Channel in a recorded video that the mouse escaped from the box of food that the woman sat next to him on the flight was opening.

Mr Borrestad said the situation was very calm and that people “were not stressed at all”.

However, he admitted that he did put his socks over his trousers so the mouse did not crawl up his legs.

Mr Borrestad said that while the flight was diverted, it only added a few extra hours to the journey.

It is the second rodent-related travel incident in a week.

A train service in southern England had to be terminated mid-journey after two squirrels boarded a carriage and one refused to get off.

Police in southern Pakistan have shot dead a doctor accused of blasphemy, drawing condemnation from human rights groups.

Dr Shahnawaz Kanbhar was killed “just by chance” in shootout with officers who did not know it was him, according to a local police chief in Sindh province Niaz Khoso

Dr Kanbhar had gone into hiding on Tuesday after being accused of insulting Islam’s prophet Muhammad and sharing blasphemous content on social media.

He is the second blasphemy suspect in Pakistan to be shot dead in the space of a week.

According to a police report, officers in the city of Mirpur Khas had tried to stop two men riding on a motorcycle on Wednesday, in order to search their vehicle.

Instead of complying, the report says, one of the men opened fire. A gun battle ensued, in which Dr Kanbhar was killed.

It was only after the shootout that officers learned that the man they had shot was Dr Kanbhar, according to Khoso, the local police chief. The second person on the motorcycle escaped.

Another police official, Khas Asad Chaudhry, told BBC Urdu that Dr Kanbhar was accidentally shot by his companion on the motorcycle.

However, a relative of Dr Kanbhar has told BBC Urdu that he was killed in a “fake encounter” – something which local police deny.

The Interior Minister for Sindh province Zia-ul-Hasan Linjar has ordered an independent inquiry into Dr Kanbhar’s death.

The killing of Dr Kanbhar comes a week after an officer opened fire inside a police station in the south-western city of Quetta, fatally wounding another suspect who was being held on accusations of blasphemy.

The deaths have drawn strong condemnation from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), which said it was “gravely concerned by the alleged extrajudicial killing of two people accused of blasphemy.”

“This pattern of violence in cases of blasphemy, in which law enforcement personnel are allegedly involved, is an alarming trend,” it said in a statement issued on Friday.

Dr Kanbhar was shot dead a day after Islamists in nearby Umerkot staged a protest demanding his arrest and burned down his clinic.

His relatives told BBC Urdu that they had to travel for miles to bury his body, after having been blocked by local people and officials.

The incident in Sindh province comes a week after an officer opened fire inside a police station in the south-western city of Quetta, fatally wounding another suspect held on accusations of blasphemy.

The man had been arrested last Wednesday after officers rescued him from an enraged mob that claimed he had insulted Muhammad.

However, the man’s family and tribe said they forgave the officer and that the man had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by insulting Muhammad, according to local media reports.

Though killings of blasphemy suspects by mobs are common, such killings by police are rare in Pakistan.

Accusations, or even simply rumours, of blasphemy spark rioting and rampage by mobs that can escalate into killings.

Under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death – though authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy.

Pakistan has witnessed a surge in attacks on blasphemy suspects in recent years.

In June, a mob broke into a police station in the north-western town of Madyan, snatched a detainee who was a tourist, and then killed him over allegations that he had desecrated Islam’s holy book.

Sri Lankans are voting for a new president in the first election since mass protests sparked by the country’s worst-ever economic crisis unseated the leader in 2022.

Saturday’s vote is widely regarded as a referendum on economic reforms meant to put the country on the road to recovery.

But many are still struggling to make ends meet because of tax hikes, and cuts to subsidies and welfare.

Multiple analysts predict that economic concerns will be front of mind for voters in what is shaping up to be a close race.

“The country’s soaring inflation, skyrocketing cost-of-living and poverty have left the electorate desperate for solutions to stabilise prices and improve livelihoods,” Soumya Bhowmick, an associate fellow at India-based think tank the Observer Research Foundation, told the BBC.

“With the country seeking to emerge from its economic collapse, this election serves as a crucial moment for shaping Sri Lanka’s recovery trajectory and restoring both domestic and international confidence in its governance.”

President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was charged with the monumental task of leading Sri Lanka out of its economic collapse, is seeking another term.

The 75-year-old was appointed by parliament a week after former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa was chased out of power.

Shortly after taking office, Wickremesinghe crushed what was left of the protest movement. He has also been accused of shielding the Rajapaksa family from prosecution and allowing them to regroup – allegations he has denied.

Another strong contender is leftist politician Anura Kumara Dissanayake, whose anti-corruption platform has seen him draw increasing public support.

More candidates are running in Saturday’s election than any other in Sri Lanka’s history. But of more than three dozen, four are dominating the limelight.

Other than Wickremesinghe and Dissanayake, there is also the leader of the opposition, Sajith Premadasa, and the 38-year-old nephew of the ousted president, Namal Rajapaksa.

Counting begins once polls close at 16:00 local time (10:30 GMT), but results are not expected to become clear until Sunday morning.

The “Aragalaya” (struggle) uprising that deposed former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa was sparked by an economic meltdown.

Years of under-taxation, weak exports and major policy errors, combined with the Covid-19 pandemic dried up the country’s foreign exchange reserves. Public debt reached more than $83 billion and inflation soared to 70%.

While the country’s social and political elite were largely insulated against the fallout, basics like food, cooking gas and medicine became scarce for ordinary people, fuelling resentment and unrest.

Then-president Rajapaksa and his government were blamed for the crisis, leading to months-long protests calling for his resignation.

On 13 July 2022, in dramatic scenes that were broadcast around the world, crowds overran the presidential palace, jumping into the swimming pool and ransacking the house.

In the wake of Rajapaksa’s flight from the country – an exile that lasted 50 days – the interim government of President Wickremesinghe imposed strict austerity measures to salvage the economy.

Although the economic reforms have successfully brought down inflation and strengthened the Sri Lankan rupee, everyday Sri Lankans continue to feel the pinch.

“Jobs are the hardest thing to find,” says 32-year-old Yeshan Jayalath. “Even with an accounting degree, I can’t find a permanent job.” Instead, he has been doing temporary or part-time jobs.

Many small businesses across the country are also still reeling from the crisis.

Norbet Fernando, who was forced to shut his roof tile factory north of Colombo in 2022, told the BBC that raw materials such as clay, wood and kerosene are three times more costly than they were two years ago. Very few people are building homes or buying roof tiles, he added.

“After 35 years, it hurts to see my factory in ruins,” Fernando told the BBC, adding that of the 800 tile factories in the area, only 42 have remained functional since 2022.

Central bank data on business sentiments shows depressed demand in 2022 and 2023 – and though the situation is improving in 2024, it’s still not back to pre-crisis levels.

“The Sri Lankan economy may for now have been put back on its feet, but many citizens still need to be convinced the price is worth paying,” Alan Keenan, the International Crisis Group’s (ICG) senior consultant on Sri Lanka, told the BBC.

Ranil Wickremesinghe: Having previously lost twice at the presidential polls, Saturday marks his third chance to be elected by the Sri Lankan people, rather than parliament

Anura Kumara Dissanayake: The candidate of the leftist National People’s Party alliance promises tough anti-corruption measures and good governance

Sajith Premadasa: The opposition leader is representing the Samagi Jana Balawegaya party – his father served as the second executive president of Sri Lanka before he was assassinated in 1993

Namal Rajapaksa: The son of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who led the country between 2005 and 2015, he hails from a powerful political lineage, but will need to win over voters who blame his family for the economic crisis

Voters in Sri Lanka elect a single winner by ranking up to three candidates in order of preference.

If a candidate receives an absolute majority, they will be declared the winner. If not, a second round of counting will commence, with second and third-choice votes then taken into account.

No election in Sri Lanka has ever progressed to the second round of counting, as single candidates have always emerged as clear winners based on first-preference votes.

This year could be different.

“Opinion polls and initial campaigning suggest the vote is likely, for the first time ever, to produce a winner who fails to gain a majority of votes,” said Mr Keenan, of ICG.

“Candidates, party leaders and election officials should be prepared to handle any possible disputes calmly and according to established procedures.”

US Vice-President Kamala Harris has spoken of her willingness to use her gun if an intruder entered her home.

“If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” she said in a jokey exchange during a livestreamed event in Michigan with host Oprah Winfrey on Thursday.

After a laugh, the Democratic presidential nominee continued: “I probably shouldn’t have said that, but my staff will deal with that later.”

Harris, who highlighted during the recent presidential debate that she was a gun-owner, went on to reiterate that she supported a ban on assault weapons.

A firearm of that type was “literally designed to be a tool of war”, she told Winfrey. “It has no place on the streets of a civil society.”

Harris’s opponents have increasingly pointed to Harris’s attitude on guns as being indicative of her shifting policy positions ahead of the November election.

While she stressed her support for an assault weapons ban on Thursday, last week’s ABC News debate moderator noted that the Democrat no longer supported a “buyback” programme that would force gun owners to hand over their AR-15s and other assault-style weapons to the government.

Buyback proposals gained steam during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race, with Harris voicing her support at the time. “We have to have a buyback programme, and I support a mandatory gun buyback programme,” she said in October 2019.

During the presidential debate, Harris did not directly explain why she no longer supported the buyback idea.

Asked by Winfrey to confirm if she had been a gun owner for “a while” herself, Harris replied that she had. She said she was was a supporter of the US Second Amendment, which protects the right to gun ownership.

But Harris stressed that she wanted tighter gun laws.

She went on to set out her case for a ban on assault weapons, citing America’s problem with school shootings.

It was “bone-chilling” for a child to have to go through a drill for such an incident, Harris said. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” she added.

After one of the most recent US mass shootings, a 14-year-old boy has been charged with murdering four people at a high school in Georgia.

During Thursday’s event with Winfrey – who also spoke at last month’s Democratic National Convention – Harris was also questioned on topics including immigration and the economy.

Celebrities including Jennifer Lopez featured in the session, which was watched by about 300,000 people.

• Why Kamala Harris is highlighting her gun ownership
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Harris’s gun ownership has been a matter of public record since 2019, when she said: “I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do – for personal safety. I was a career prosecutor.”

But her ownership came to the attention of many in the US – including Winfrey, by her admission – during last week’s presidential head-to-head with Republican rival Donald Trump. It marked the first time the issue had come up in a 2024 debate.

Harris denied a Trump claim that she would “confiscate everybody’s gun” if elected to the White House, pointing out that both she and her running-mate Tim Walz, a hunting enthusiast, had firearms of their own.

Trump, too, has also owned three guns, though he had to surrender two of them and face restrictions on the third after facing criminal charges in New York.

Harris also outlined her stance at a recent rally in North Carolina, saying: “We who believe in the freedom to live safe from gun violence will finally pass an assault weapons ban, universal background checks and red-flag laws.”

So-called red-flag laws allow people to apply to a judge to confiscate another person’s gun if they are deemed to be a risk to themselves or others.

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