The UK has announced it is giving up sovereignty of a remote but strategically important cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean after more than half a century.

The deal – reached after years of negotiations – will see the UK hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move.

This includes the tropical atoll of Diego Garcia, used by the US government as a military base for its navy ships and long-range bomber aircraft.

The announcement, made in a joint statement by the UK and Mauritian Prime Ministers, ends decades of often fractious negotiations between the two countries.

The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia – a key factor enabling the deal to go forward at a time of growing geopolitical rivalries in the region between Western countries, India, and China.

• The BBC visits the secretive Chagos Islands military base

The deal is still subject to finalisation of a treaty, but both sides have promised to complete it as quickly as possible.

“This is a seminal moment in our relationship and a demonstration of our enduring commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes and the rule of law,” the statement from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth read.

The leaders also said they were committed “to ensure the long-term, secure and effective operation of the existing base on Diego Garcia which plays a vital role in regional and global security”.

The treaty will also “address wrongs of the past and demonstrate the commitment of both parties to support the welfare of Chagossians”.

The UK will provide a package of financial support to Mauritius, including annual payments and infrastructure investment.

Mauritius will also be able to begin a programme of resettlement on the Chagos Islands, but not on Diego Garcia.

There, the UK will ensure operation of the military base for “an initial period” of 99 years.

US President Joe Biden welcomed the “historic agreement”, saying it was a “clear demonstration that through diplomacy and partnership, countries can overcome long-standing historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes”.

He said it secured the future of a key military base which “plays a vital role in national, regional, and global security.”

Amongst the Chagossians, opinions are divided. Isabelle Charlot, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme, said the deal brought back hopes her family could return to her father’s island “roots”.

Plans for the Mauritius government to arrange resettlement would mean a “place that we can call home – where we will be free,” she said.

But Frankie Bontemps, a second generation Chagossian in the UK, told the BBC that he felt “betrayed” and “angry” at the news because “Chagossians have never been involved” in the negotiations.

“We remain powerless and voiceless in determining our own future and the future of our homeland”, he said, and called for the full inclusion of Chagossians in drafting the treaty.

In recent years, the UK has faced rising diplomatic isolation over its claim to what it refers to as the British Indian Ocean Territory, with various United Nations bodies, including its top court and general assembly, overwhelmingly siding with Mauritius and demanding the UK surrender what some have called its “last colony in Africa”.

The government of Mauritius has long argued that it was illegally forced to give the Chagos Islands away in return for its own independence from the UK in 1968.

At the time, the British government had already negotiated a secret deal with the US, agreeing to lease it the largest atoll, Diego Garcia, for use as a military base.

Britain later apologised for forcibly removing more than 1,000 islanders from the entire archipelago and promised to hand the islands to Mauritius when they were no longer needed for strategic purposes.

But until very recently, the UK insisted that Mauritius itself had no legitimate claim to the islands.

For decades, the tiny island nation of Mauritius struggled to win any serious international support on the issue.

A handful of Chagos islanders, who’d been forced to abandon their homes in the late 1960s and early 70s, repeatedly took the British government to court.

But it was only recently that international opinion began to shift.

African nations began to speak with one voice on the issue, pushing the UK hard on the issue of decolonialisation.

Then Brexit left many European nations reluctant to continue backing the UK’s stance in international forums.

The Mauritian government went on the attack, accusing the UK government of verbal threats.

And the Mauritians began to wage an increasingly sophisticated campaign – at the UN, in courts, and in the media – even landing and planting a flag on the archipelago without British authorisation.

The negotiations that brought about Thursday’s deal began under the previous UK government.

But the timing of this breakthrough reflects a growing sense of urgency in international affairs, not least regarding Ukraine, with the UK keen to remove the Chagos issue as an obstacle to winning more global support, particularly from African nations, with the prospect of a second Trump presidency looming.

The Chagos islanders themselves – some in Mauritius and the Seychelles, but others living in Crawley in Sussex – do not speak with one voice on the fate of their homeland.

Some are determined to return to live on the isolated islands, some are more focused on their rights and status in the UK, while others argue that the Chagos archipelago’s status should not be resolved by outsiders.

A backlash from some voices in the UK can be expected, even though successive Conservative and Labour prime ministers have been working towards the same broad goal.

Tory leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat argued the deal had been “negotiated against Britain’s interest” and it was “disgraceful” that such talks had begun under the previous Conservative government.

He called it a “shameful retreat undermining our security and leaving our allies exposed”, while the former foreign secretary James Cleverly called it a “weak” deal.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the deal will “address the wrongs against the Chagossians of the past but it looks like it will continue the crimes long into the future”.

“It does not guarantee that the Chagossians will return to their homeland, appears to explicitly ban them from the largest island, Diego Garcia for another century, and does not mention the reparations they are all owed to rebuild their future”, Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor at HRW said in a statement.

There must be meaningful consultations with the Chagossians, Mr Baldwin said, or the UK, US and now Mauritius will be responsible for “a still-ongoing colonial crime.”

But there can be no doubting the historic significance of this moment.

Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its vast global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally.

The remaining British overseas territories are: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands. There are also two sovereign base areas on Cyprus under British jurisdiction.

You can get in touch via this link.

Elon Musk has been ordered by a federal court to answer further questions from lawyers about his takeover of Twitter – now called X – on Thursday. And the financial world has one question: Will he be there?

Last month, he was a no-show for a court ordered appearance at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) office in Los Angeles.

Thursday’s planned interview is part of a high-level investigation into whether Mr Musk waited too long to disclose he was building up a stake in Twitter before acquiring the social media platform in 2022.

The billionaire has previously said this delay was a mistake.

The nation’s top securities regulator is trying to force him to appear on Thursday by calling for possible sanctions.

For the 10 September court hearing, the SEC said it spent thousands of dollars to dispatch three lawyers – two from San Francisco and another from Washington DC -so they could take a sworn deposition from the billionaire tech mogul.

But three hours before the appointment, Mr Musk’s lawyers notified the SEC that he would not be able to appear.

Mr Musk, his lawyers wrote in a declaration, had urgently travelled to the East Coast a day earlier for a “high-risk” launch by his rocket company SpaceX.

But SpaceX had posted about the timing of the scheduled launch two days before Mr Musk’s deposition date.

And a day ahead of the meeting, he told interviewers at a conference that he planned to travel to Florida “if the weather is holding up” for the launch.

The SEC says he did not inform them of those plans.

The government lawyers only learned of the post and interview later.

They rescheduled the suddenly cancelled meeting and then they asked a federal court to make sure Mr Musk appeared.

Mr Musk has given two depositions since the SEC began looking into his $44bn (£34bn) purchase of Twitter in 2022. The agency has said in legal filings that it is probing whether his stock purchases before he bought the company outright and statements he made about those investments broke securities laws.

But Mr Musk refused to give testimony a third time, with his lawyers sending a letter to the SEC accusing it of harassment. In October, the SEC asked a court to order him to provide more testimony.

Mr Musk’s reason for missing last month’s appointment “smacks of gamesmanship,” SEC lawyers wrote in a 20 September filing.

They asked US District Judge Jacqueline Corley to impose a penalty on him if he skipped the next meeting, arguing it was needed to deter him from “failing to show up” on Thursday.

Mr Musk was supposed to seek written consent from the SEC or an order from the court to reschedule, they added.

Replying in his own filing, his lawyer Alex Spiro of the law firm Quinn Emanuel, said his client and his companies have cooperated with the SEC in this investigation and several others.

“In this investigation alone, Mr Musk has produced hundreds of documents, he has sat for testimony twice, his wealth manager has sat for testimony three times, and other individuals connected to Mr Musk have also sat for testimony, all without rescheduling or cancelling any of those testimonies,” Mr Spiro wrote.

Mr Musk’s lawyers say they too had travelled to Los Angeles to be at his deposition last month and “immediately notified the SEC of the emergency”.

The SEC declined to comment when approached by the BBC.

But in a court filing, SEC lawyer Robin Andrews asked US District Judge Jacqueline Corley to take a hard line against the billionaire.

“The Court must make clear that gamesmanship and delay tactics must cease,” Mr Andrews wrote.

One of the worst famines in decades could be under way in Sudan, a country in the middle of a civil war, aid workers warn.

Starvation in war-stricken Sudan “is almost everywhere”, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.

The BBC visited a hospital ward in Omdurman, just across the River Nile from the capital Khartoum.

Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” while trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat, and should not escape charges, prosecutors say.

A new court filing challenges Trump’s claim that he should avoid a trial thanks to a recent landmark US Supreme Court ruling. This said American presidents should be immune from prosecution when acting in an “official” capacity.

Trump was president when the alleged offences were committed – but prosecutors say he was acting in a “private” capacity, not an official one.

In response, Trump has repeated false claims that the 2020 vote was “rigged” and suggested the timing of the filing’s release was designed to hurt his 2024 campaign.

In an interview with NewsNation, he also criticised Special Counsel Jack Smith, the lead prosecutor in the election interference probe who submitted the filing.

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan released the document – filed by Mr Smith last week – with redactions on Wednesday.

This is one of four criminal cases Trump has faced since being voted out in 2020 – another of which led to a historic conviction in New York.

He is accused of seeking to illegally block the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, but denies wrongdoing.

The new 165-page document presents the clearest view yet of how Mr Smith’s team would pursue their case, having tweaked the wording of their charges after the Supreme Court’s intervention.

It gives details of Trump’s alleged scheme, including his actions when his supporters rioted at the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. It also outlines the efforts of Mike Pence, the vice-president at the time, to talk him down.

The issue remains prominent in US politics almost four years later, ahead of the 2024 election in November, which will be contested by Trump and Kamala Harris.

It came up in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, during which JD Vance refused to answer whether Trump, his running mate for 2024, lost in 2020.

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• A guide to Trump’s criminal cases
• Donald Trump: A quick guide to the Republican presidential nominee

The court filing may represent Mr Smith’s last chance to set out his case against Trump.

The case has been frequently delayed since charges were filed by the Department of Justice (DoJ) more than a year ago. Trump will not face trial before November’s election – and he may seek to have the case dropped if he wins.

Trump’s lawyers fought to keep the latest filing sealed. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung has called it “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional”.

In the newly-released document, Mr Smith and his team try to navigate the summer Supreme Court ruling – which dented their case – by narrowing their scope.

The Supreme Court ruling did not apply immunity to unofficial acts. The prosecutors argue that although Trump was still in office when attempting to overturn the 2020 vote, his attempts related to his campaign and his life as a private citizen. They call it a “private criminal effort”.

The court should therefore “determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as he would any other citizen,” the filing says.

The filing lays out several instances in which Pence, expressed doubt about his boss’s voter fraud claims and tried to persuade him to accept he lost the election.

In the court document, prosecutors say Trump was not upset when he learned his vice-president had been rushed to a secure location as rioters stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. “So what?” he allegedly said, when informed of the scenes.

Pence would later go public about his falling out with Trump in the wake of the storming of Congress, when some rioters shouted “hang Mike Pence” because the vice-president refused to obstruct the certification of election results.

The filing also alleges that Trump always planned to declare victory no matter the result, and laid the groundwork for this long before election day. It also accuses him of knowingly spreading false claims about the vote that he himself deemed “crazy”.

Mr Smith also provides several new details about the Trump campaign’s alleged role in sowing chaos in battleground states, where a large number of mail-in ballots were being counted in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the Democratic stronghold of Detroit, Michigan, when a large batch of ballots seemed to be in favour of Biden, a Trump campaign operative allegedly told his colleague to “find a reason” that something was wrong with the ballots to give him “options to file litigation”.

The filing also claims that Trump and his allies, including lawyer Rudy Giuliani, sought to “exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” on 6 January 2021 to delay the election certification. They allegedly did this by calling senators and leaving voicemails that asked them to object to the state electors.

Trump said on Wednesday that the case would end with his “complete victory”.

A trial date has not been set.

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

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The huge asteroid that hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was not alone, scientists have confirmed.

A second, smaller space rock smashed into the sea off the coast of West Africa creating a large crater during the same era.

It would have been a “catastrophic event”, the scientists say, causing a tsunami at least 800m high to tear across the Atlantic ocean.

Dr Uisdean Nicholson from Heriot-Watt University first found the Nadir crater in 2022, but a cloud of uncertainty hung over how it was really formed.

Now Dr Nicholson and his colleagues are sure that the 9km depression was caused by an asteroid hurtling into the seabed.

They cannot date the event exactly, or say whether it came before or after the asteroid which left the 180km-wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico. That one ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

But they say the smaller rock also came at the end of the Cretaceous period when they went extinct. As it crashed into Earth’s atmosphere, it would have formed a fireball.

“Imagine the asteroid was hitting Glasgow and you’re in Edinburgh, around 50 km away. The fireball would be about 24 times the size of the Sun in the sky – enough to set trees and plants on fire in Edinburgh,” Dr Nicholson says.

An extremely loud air blast would have followed, before seismic shaking about the size of a magnitude 7 earthquake.

Huge amounts of water probably left the seabed, and later cascaded back down creating unique imprints on the floor.

It is unusual for such large asteroids to crash out of our solar system on course for our planet within a short time of each other.

But the researchers don’t know why two hit Earth close together.

The asteroid that created the Nadir crater measured around 450-500m wide, and scientists think it hit Earth at about 72,000km/h.

The nearest humans have come to this scale of event was the Tunguska event in 1908 when a 50-metre asteroid exploded in the skies above Siberia.

The Nadir asteroid was about the size of Bennu, which is currently the most hazardous object orbiting near Earth.

Scientists say the most probable date that Bennu could hit Earth is 24 September 2182, according to Nasa. But it is still just a probability of 1 in 2,700.

There has never been an asteroid impact of this size in human history, and scientists normally have to study eroded craters on Earth or images of craters on other planets.

To further understand the Nadir crater, Dr Nicholson and team analysed high-resolution 3D data from a geophysical company called TGS.

Most craters are eroded but this one was well-preserved, meaning the scientists could look further into the rock levels.

“This is the first time that we’ve ever been able to see inside an impact crater like this – it’s really exciting,” says Dr Nicholson, adding there are just 20 marine craters in the world but none have been studied in detail like this.

The findings are reported in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.

As always, the Australian Grand Prix in 2006 was an eclectic buffet of fame and power – with everyone from actress Amanda Bynes to the Dutch Prime Minister, a 70s pop star, and the original Blue Wiggle treading pit lane.

Unnoticed in a corner, making small talk with Italian driver Jarno Trulli and former Miss Universe Jennifer Hawkins, was none other than 16-year-old Daniel Ricciardo.

The Perth boy had won a pass to the race – having been crowned Australian go-karting champion the year before – and on that day in April his world shifted.

Family friend and then mentor Remo Luciani jokes it was meeting Hawkins that did it: “He was practically drooling.”

But while rubbing shoulders with Formula 1 stars and feeling the rumbling roar of their engines, the shy teen got his first real taste of the life he was doggedly chasing.

“I think he saw the picture – ‘this is where I belong, this is what I want to do’,” Luciani tells the BBC.

Fast forward a few years and he’d not only become part of that world, but “a main character” in it.

But after 13 years in the sport – with an impressive 257 races, 32 podiums, and eight wins – his F1 career came to an end last week, after Red Bull dropped him from its team.

He bows out as one of the most successful and popular drivers on the circuit and the golden boy of Australian motorsport.

From the moment his motorsport-mad father let him on a go-kart track as a nine-year-old, Ricciardo has been making an impression.

“There’s those who get it at that age, and those that don’t, and he got it pretty quickly,” Tiger Kart Club stalwart John Wishart says.

Ricciardo didn’t blow the competition out of the water, but he quickly established himself as a fast but fair rival, with an infectious personality and fierce competitive spirit – a reputation he’s hung on to his entire career.

“What you see on the TV of Daniel today, he was exactly the same as a kid,” childhood friend Lewis Shugar tells the BBC.

“He was always laughing and having a good time, and if things didn’t go right for him, he still had a smile on his face,” Wishart says. “That in itself is a special talent.”

As he started to notch up race wins around Western Australia, chatter of his promise spread to the east coast.

Ricciardo soon joined Remo Racing – a self-styled development squad run by Luciani in Victoria.

“He was a very, very quick learner, and he was determined. He wanted to always go faster. I could see the hunger in him,” says Luciani – himself a karting legend and Australian Motorsport Hall of Fame inductee.

Ricciardo won his first race with the team in 2005 and went on to take out the national go-karting championship that year, while also racing Formula Ford cars in his home state.

And with that, he was on his way overseas – a “big move” that Ricciardo has said “changed everything”.

Each passing year brought a new step up the ladder. In 2006 he raced in Asia, before moving to Italy the year after, then signing to the Red Bull development programme as a “shy” and “immature” 18-year-old in 2008.

“Having that responsibility, that pressure, all of that, it forced me to grow up,” he told CNN Sport earlier this month.

In 2011 he made his long-awaited grand prix debut at Silverstone, on loan to Spanish team HRT, thrilling his supporters back home.

One described him as beating one-in-10-million odds.

“Just to sit in an F1 car is something that hardly anybody will ever do – so even just to have that opportunity is incredible,” Shugar says.

But Ricciardo wasn’t satisfied with just any spot on the grid, and by 2014 he’d earned a call up to the main Red Bull team, replacing fellow countryman Mark Webber.

“I’m ready,” Ricciardo declared at the time: “I’m not here to run around in 10th place.”

True to his word, he won three races that year, outperforming teammate and defending champion Sebastian Vettel.

Over his four years at Red Bull, he became known as the Honey Badger – for the affable demeanour which belied his killer racing instincts.

“His trademark was these terrific late-braking moves that would catch drivers by surprise,” Australian F1 journalist Michael Lamonato told the BBC.

“He always said he wanted the kind of reputation that meant he would be feared when another driver would see him in their mirrors, and I think he really achieved that.”

At the same time, his popularity off the track was soaring, even before the hit Netflix series Drive to Survive took F1 to new levels of acclaim.

“Daniel was one of the characters that was beginning to transcend the sport,” Lamonato says.

His signature shoey celebration – which is credited with popularising the practice in Australia – memeable media sound bites and humorous stunts have enamoured him to legions the world over.

“He seems like a mate, someone you could make friends with at the pub,” Melbournian fan Issy Futcher says.

“He’s made for this kind of stardom.”

The pinnacle of his career came with a gutsy win in Monaco in 2018, when he defended his lead for 50 laps while battling a failing engine, two years after a botched pit stop at the same circuit saw victory slip through his fingers.

“This was a redemption race… it really is his defining win,” Lamonato says.

But after ill-fated moves to Renault in 2019 and McLaren in 2021, where he struggled to replicate his previous success, he was left floundering in 2023 and returned to the broader Red Bull fold as a reserve driver.

He re-joined the starting line-up in its junior team – now called RB – halfway through the season though was soon derailed by a broken wrist and his form never recovered throughout 2024.

Rumours began to circulate and when the Singapore Grand Prix rolled around on 22 September, the writing was on the wall. In one last hurrah, Ricciardo was given a fresh set of tyres and set the fastest lap of the race.

After finishing last, the 35-year-old lingered in the cockpit for a beat.

In a teary post-race interview, Ricciardo said he was battling a lot of emotions.

“I’m aware it could be it,” he said. “I just wanted to savour the moment.”

He had only wanted to return to the grid if he could get podiums and so was “at peace” with his impending fate, he told Sky Sports.

Days later, Red Bull confirmed he would be replaced for the rest of the season by young Kiwi Liam Lawson – news that stirred outrage and cries of mistreatment.

Team boss Christian Horner said Ricciardo’s statistics and accolades weren’t the only measure of his success.

“From the moment you arrived at Red Bull it was obvious you were so much more than just a driver. Your constant enthusiasm, sense of humour and attitude will leave an indelible legacy,” he said.

Amid a wave of tributes from his peers, Ricciardo said it had been a “wild and wonderful” journey.

“I’ve loved this sport my whole life… It’ll always have its highs and lows, but it’s been fun and truth be told I wouldn’t change it,” he wrote on Instagram.

“Until the next adventure.”

While details of that next adventure are hotly anticipated, Lamonato says Ricciardo has already cemented himself as one of the most underrated F1 drivers.

“The best way to sum up Daniel Ricciardo is a driver of immense potential who suffered what so many do, and that is career wrong turns.”

His long career is near unmatched – only nine drivers have started more races – and his wins and podiums both put him in the top 40 drivers of all time, particularly impressive when factoring in that all were achieved without racing for the dominant team of the day.

And his legacy is already stamped at home in Australia – where karting figures say he’s inspired both an increase in grassroots participation and the next wave of Australian racing stars like Oscar Piastri and Jack Doohan.

Statistically, Ricciardo will be the fourth most successful Australian to have raced F1, but many think he’ll be remembered as the greatest.

“I don’t think anyone will have had an effect similar to him in terms of bringing the sport home to the audience,” Lamonato says.

“[He] did Australia proud,” Luciani concludes.

Atul Kumar, 18, was ecstatic when he found out in June that he had passed a tough examination that would allow him to join a prestigious technology college in India.

But then came the next step: paying 17,500 rupees ($281; £156) online to confirm his admission. It was a big amount for the family from Muzaffarnagar in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

His father managed to borrow the money, but Atul says he missed the online fee deadline by a few seconds, partly due to technical issues.

The family didn’t give up, filing petitions and court cases. This week, India’s top court stepped in and ordered the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Dhanbad, to restore Atul’s admission.

The Supreme Court invoked its extraordinary powers granted by India’s constitution, saying that “we cannot allow such a young talented boy to go away”.

The IITs are India’s top technology institutes, attracting more than a million candidates for nearly 18,000 seats in 23 colleges spread across the country. Students spend years in private coaching centres to prepare for the exams, and parents believe joining an IIT is a ticket to success.

Atul’s story has made headlines in India because of his financially deprived background and the challenges he overcame.

Atul is from the Dalit community, which lies at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy and is among the most marginalised in the country.

His father Rajendra Kumar earns about 450 rupees ($5; £4) a day as a daily wage labourer and his mother weaves cots at home.

But Rajendra Kumar says that nothing was more important to him than his children’s education. He even sold his house once to fund his eldest son’s studies, he told the BBC.

Two of Atul’s brothers are studying engineering at reputed colleges, while a third is doing a bachelor’s degree from a college in Muzaffarnagar.

Atul knew he also had to study hard, and he did that for hours every day in a dark corner of his house which got little sunlight. Erratic electricity supply made things worse, with daily power cuts lasting hours.

Rajendra Kumar says buying an inverter didn’t make sense as it cost nearly 25,000 rupees.

“But I would have sold the house [again] if needed,” he adds.

Atul had joined a free coaching centre for marginalised students in a nearby city, and this year was his last out of the two attempts allowed in IIT entrance examinations.

When Atul passed the exam, his father asked for help from a local moneylender. But the man backed out two hours before the fee deadline.

The father then had to turn to his friends, who immediately chipped in with 14,000 rupees. Rajendra Kumar dipped into his savings for the remaining 3,500 rupees.

He quickly deposited the amount in his eldest son’s bank account, while Atul logged in to complete the formalities.

By then, he had just 180 seconds left for the deadline.

“We tried to complete the task that requires many more minutes’ work in three minutes,” Rajendra Kumar said.

But the portal froze suddenly, he says, and Atul missed the deadline.

In shock, no-one in the family ate for a day.

Atul’s coaching centre reached out to IIT Dhanbad but his petition says they did not help him. The desperate family wrote emails to several college authorities and moved another court, but nothing worked.

The only option left now was the Supreme Court. In 2021, the court had allowed a Dalit student to join IIT Bombay after he also couldn’t pay his admission fee on time due to financial and technical difficulties.

Atul and his father contacted that student who put them in touch with the lawyer who fought his case.

In the Supreme Court, IIT Dhanbad argued that Atul had logged into the payment portal at 3pm, which indicated that it was not a last-minute attempt. It also pointed out that Atul was sent multiple reminders through text messages, well before the deadline.

But the court asked IIT why it was so keen to oppose his admission.

The court observed that there was no reason why the petitioner would not have paid the amount if he had the means to do so and ordered IIT Dhanbad to create an additional seat for Atul in the current batch.

The Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud then wished him luck in his studies.

“All the best, do well!,” he said.

The world’s longest treasure hunt appears to have come to an end, after an announcement in France that a buried statuette of a golden owl has finally been unearthed – after 31 years.

“We confirm that the replica of the golden owl was dug up last night, and that simultaneously a solution has been sent on the online verification system,” reads a post published on Thursday morning on the hunt’s official chatline.

“It is therefore now pointless travelling to dig at any place you believe the cache might be situated.”

The message was posted by Michel Becker, who illustrated the original Chouette d’Or (golden owl) book and sculpted the buried statuette in 1993.

No further information about the site or the finder was available and Mr Becker was not contactable by telephone.

Tens of thousands of people have taken part in the search, which has spawned a huge secondary literature in books, pamphlets and Internet sites.

They have all been following 11 complicated puzzles set out in the first book by its creator, Max Valentin. When he died in 2009, Mr Becker took over the operation.

The complex clues were supposed to lead to a precise point somewhere in France, where a bronze replica of the actual golden owl would be found under the ground. The winner would get the precious gold original.

A documentary on the treasure hunt by French broadcaster Canal+ said earlier this year that the value of the owl is estimated to be €150,000 (£126,000).

The world of chouetteurs – as the treasure-hunters are called – was in uproar on Thursday morning as news of the reported find spread.

“Finally – liberated!” reads one post on the hunt’s chatline on the Discord forum.

“I didn’t think I’d live to see the day,” reads another. And: “It’s like Covid. So good when it’s over.”

“Curiously, I’m relieved. I’m desperate to know the solutions now to see if I was on the right path,” comments another user.

Some hunters remained sceptical, fearing that the cache might have been discovered with a metal detector. Under the rules, the finder has to show that they correctly solved the enigmas and did not just stumble upon the owl by chance.

The hunt was mired in legal rows for some years after Mr Valentin’s death, and not all owl-hunters accepted Mr Becker’s inheritance of the central role.

Mr Becker himself originally had no knowledge of the situation of the buried owl. The solution was in a sealed envelope in the possession of Mr Valentin’s family.

But after the legal difficulties were resolved, Mr Becker read the solution and travelled to the spot to verify that the owl was still there.

In recent years, he has released more clues to the owl community, triggering interest in a new generation of chouetteurs.

Weeping relatives and friends mourned the 20 children and three teachers who died in a horrific bus fire in Thailand at a funeral on Thursday.

White and gold coffins lined the hall at Wat Khao Phraya Sangkharam School in Lan Sak, a small town in central Thailand. Relatives placed foods, clothes and toys on some of them.

A representative of the Thai royal family poured water on the coffins – a Buddhist funeral rite that symbolises purification – and placed wreaths.

Police have not determined the cause of Tuesday’s fire, which happened while the group was on a field trip. The bus driver, who turned himself in, has been charged with reckless driving causing deaths and injuries.

Nineteen children and three teachers are reported to have survived the fire. Sixteen of them are being treated in hospital for injuries. The ages of the children on board remain unclear, but the school caters for pupils between three and 15 years old.

Hundreds of people, including several cabinet ministers, attended the mass funeral. Among them was Education Minister Permpoon Chidchob, who handed out financial assistance to the victims’ families.

Authorities have carried out “merit-making ceremonies” or Buddhist rituals for those who lost their lives, the minister said.

“We made merit and prayed also for the students who are still at the hospital for their speedy recovery,” he said.

Some residents and monks in Lan Sak stayed up on Wednesday to receive the bodies from a mortuary in the capital, Bangkok.

A funeral procession was held earlier on Thursday, which saw families weeping as they clutched framed photographs of the victims.

Buddhist prayers for the victims will go on for the next four days, followed by a royal cremation ceremony next week ordered by Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn.

Across Thailand, teachers and students laid white flowers in their schools to mourn those who died in what is believed to be Thailand’s deadliest traffic accident in a decade.

The bus driver had told investigators the vehicle lost balance and scrapped a concrete barrier. Sparks of the collision could have set off the blaze, deputy regional police chief Chayanont Meesati said on Wednesday.

The bus, which was fuelled by compressed natural gas, had 11 gas canisters although it was permitted to install only six. The company that owned that bus told local broadcaster ThaiPBS that the vehicle had passed safety standards.

The Thai government has since ordered an inspection of all passenger buses equipped with compressed natural gas.

Tael Narach, the grandmother of a six-year-old victim told Reuters news agency she “fainted right away” on Tuesday when she got news of the fire from her son-in-law.

“I want justice and support (to get justice) for my grandchild,” said Tael, 69.

Nine people have died in a fire at a hospital in southern Taiwan, according to local media.

The fire struck the Pingtung county hospital at around 09:40 local time (01:00 GMT) – just as Typhoon Krathon made landfall to the west, in neighbouring Kaohsiung.

The wet and windy weather complicated the fire response, one report said.

The cause of the fire – which was put out more than three hours later, officials said – is still under investigation.

Some reports have suggested it was due to an electrical fault.

Photos showed thick grey smoke billowing from one of the hospital buildings as the fire was raging.

About 300 patients were evacuated and some sought shelter at a nearby commercial establishment.

Soldiers from a nearby military base helped firefighters put the blaze out.

Subramaniam Iswaran, a senior cabinet minister in Singapore’s government, has been sentenced to 12 months in prison in a high-profile trial that has gripped the wealthy nation.

Iswaran, 62, pleaded guilty to accepting gifts worth more than S$403,000 ($311,882; £234,586) while in public office, as well as obstructing the course of justice.

The gifts included tickets to the Formula 1 Grand Prix, a Brompton T-line bicycle, alcohol and a ride on a private jet.

Justice Vincent Hoong, who oversaw the case in Singapore’s High Court, emphasised that the former transport minister’s crimes were an abuse of power and jeopardised people’s trust in public institutions.

He also noted that Iswaran seemed to think he would be acquitted.

“In his letter to the prime minister, he stated he rejected (the charges) and expressed his strong belief he would be acquitted,” said Justice Hoong.

“Thus I have difficulty accepting these are indicative of his remorse.”

Iswaran will report to prison on 7 October.

He will serve his sentence at Changi, the same prison that holds Singapore’s death row prisoners, where the cells don’t have fans and most inmates sleep on straw mats instead of beds.

He is Singapore’s first political figure to be tried in court in nearly 50 years.

The nation prides itself on its squeaky clean image and lack of corruption. But that image, and the reputation of the governing People’s Action Party, have taken a hit as a result of Iswaran’s case.

The city state’s lawmakers are among the highest-paid in the world, with some ministers earning more than S$1 million ($758,000). Leaders justify the handsome salaries by saying it combats corruption.

Ministers cannot keep gifts unless they pay the market value of the gift to the government, and they must declare anything they receive from people they have business dealings with.

“It’s not a significant sum over his years of service, but on his salary, he could have very well afforded not to,” said Eugene Tan, an associate professor of law at Singapore Management University.

“I think the public were expecting the court to demonstrate zero tolerance for this sort of conduct.”

Iswaran’s defence team had asked for eight weeks, if the judge deemed prison necessary. His lawyer argued the charges were not an abuse of power and did not disadvantage the government.

Prosecutors meanwhile requested a six to seven-month sentence, saying Iswaran was “more than a passive acceptor of gifts”.

“If public servants could accept substantial gifts in such a situation, over the long term, public confidence in the impartiality and integrity of government would be severely undermined,” said Deputy Attorney-General Tai Wei Shyong.

“Not punishing such acts would send a signal that such acts are tolerated.”

Justice Hoong noted on Thursday that holders of high office have a particularly large impact on the public interest.

“Such persons set the tone for public servants in conducting themselves in accordance with high standards of integrity and must be expected to avoid any perception that they are susceptible to influence by pecuniary benefits,” he said.

While in government, Iswaran held multiple portfolios in the prime minister’s office: in home affairs, communications and, most recently, the transport ministry.

Prior to last year, the most recent case of a politician facing a major corruption probe was in 1986, when national development minister Teh Cheang Wan was investigated for accepting bribes. He took his own life before he was charged.

Before that, former minister of state for environment Wee Toon Boon was sentenced to 18 months jail in 1975 for a case involving more than $800,000.

Allegations against Iswaran first surfaced in July of last year. Nearly all the charges against him stem from his dealings involving billionaire property tycoon Ong Beng Seng, who helped bring the Formula 1 Grand Prix to Singapore. Ong Beng Seng is also under investigation.

When Iswaran discovered authorities were investigating Mr Ong’s associates he requested that Mr Ong bill him for his flight to Doha, Justice Hoong said on Thursday.

He acted with deliberation and premeditation, and in asking to be billed and paying for the ticket was trying to avoid investigations into the gifts, the judge added.

Iswaran was originally charged with 35 counts, including two counts of corruption, one charge of obstructing justice and 32 counts of “obtaining, as a public servant, valuable things”. But at a trial in late September, Iswaran pleaded guilty to lesser offences after the corruption charges were amended.

Lawyers did not confirm whether a plea deal had been reached.

“The system still works and there is still that public commitment. But this particular case is certainly not going to win the party any favours,” Mr Tan said.

The case against Iswaran is one of a series of political scandals that has rocked the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which has long touted its strong stance against corruption and amoral behaviour.

In 2023, a separate corruption probe into the real estate dealings of two other ministers eventually cleared them of impropriety, while the speaker of Parliament resigned because of an extramarital affair with another lawmaker.

The property scandal raised questions about the privileged positions that ministers have in Singapore at a time of rising living costs.

Singapore must hold a general election by November 2025. The PAP’s share of the popular vote declined in the most recent elections, and it is facing a challenge to its decades-long one party dominance from an increasingly influential opposition party.

The Workers’ Party won a total of 10 seats in parliament in the last election, but has also been rocked by scandal. Its leader, Pritam Singh, has been charged with lying under oath to a parliamentary committee. He has rejected the accusations.

Iranians have been expressing a mixture of pride, uncertainty and fear since their country launched a large-scale ballistic missile attack on Israel on Tuesday night.

Within minutes of the attack starting, Persian social media feeds were filled with shaky videos showing the flashes of the missiles flying overhead.

Iran’s state television broadcast pictures of groups of people cheering on the streets, waving flags and chanting “Death to Israel”.

But the mood was different online, with not everyone expressing support for the attack.

Some shared tense scenes and heated debates about a possible war between the arch-foes, after decades of keeping their conflict largely in the shadows.

The contrasting reactions laid bare the deep divisions in Iran, where there is widespread discontent at the clerical establishment and frustration over the economic troubles caused by sanctions.

On one side of the debate are those who support the government’s actions with nationalist pride, while on the other are those who fear war, economic collapse and further suppression of domestic reform movements.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Tuesday’s missile strike successfully targeted Israeli military and intelligence bases and that it was retaliation for recent killings of the leaders of its allies Hamas and Hezbollah.

The Israeli military described the attack as “indiscriminate” and said that while it had been largely thwarted by air defences, there had been casualties and millions of Israelis had been sent running to bomb shelters.

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Iran will pay for the “big mistake”.

For many supporters of the Iranian government, the attack represented a proud moment of defiance.

“Bravo to [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei! Bravo to the Revolutionary Guards!” shouted a young woman in a clip that went viral.

Such sentiment frustrated other Iranians online.

“Please distinguish between the people and the Revolutionary Guards; we are under immense pressure,” pleaded a middle-aged man in a video shared on social media.

Some Iranians felt the strike was an unnecessary provocation that would only result in making their lives worse.

“We have no choice but to protect our country, but we are the ones who suffer the consequences,” said a concerned resident of the capital, Tehran.

In the hours after the strikes, rumours surfaced that Israel might respond by targeting Iran’s oil infrastructure, which is an important part of the country’s economy.

Videos quickly surfaced showing petrol stations overwhelmed, with long queues of people as they rushed to fill up their vehicles, fearing future shortages.

The missile attack has also diminished hopes for diplomatic progress with the West and other countries in the region.

The election of Masoud Pezeshkian as the new president in July had sparked optimism among those with moderate views. Some people saw him as a potential bridge in easing regional tensions.

But one BBC Persian viewer lamented that “this attack is another step away from diplomacy and a step closer to conflict”.

“I fear this war might be used as an excuse to intensify the crackdown of us, who are fighting for freedom,” a young activist said, referring to the nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests that erupted two years ago.

Many worry that a new conflict could not only undermine calls for reform, but also empower the government to further suppress internal dissent.

Unlike after previous escalations, this time there’s a growing fear of a potentially strong retaliatory response from Israel.

And many believe that Israel’s advanced military capabilities could bring unprecedented destruction if a full-scale war broke out.

“No-one wants war, not the people, not even the officials,” said a commentator on social media.

This sense of vulnerability has made the situation feel more precarious than ever before.

Amid the growing tensions, some people even called for regime change.

“The only way to save Iran is not through war, but through toppling the current regime,” said another BBC News Persian viewer, urging the West to support Iranians in their struggle against the government.

However, many believe the country’s future should be decided internally, free from any foreign intervention, to avoid the potential chaos that outside interference might cause.

Warning: This story contains details which some people may find upsetting

An Israeli air strike that killed multiple children at a former school twelve days ago had been targeting one local Hamas figure, the BBC has been told.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said a Hamas “command and control centre” had been embedded inside the compound in Gaza City, which it targeted in a “precise strike” on 21 September.

It killed 22 people, including 13 children and six women, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The school, closed during the war, had been housing displaced people, the health ministry said.

One young girl, Amal, told the BBC she had been inside the school building when it was hit and saw bodies “torn apart”.

“What have we done as children? We wake up and go to sleep terrified,” she said.

“At least protect the schools; we don’t have schools or homes – where do we go?”

Sources have told the BBC that one of those killed was a local Hamas figure, meaning many civilians died due to a single main target.

Huda Alhadad lost two children – son Muhammad, 13, and daughter Hanan, 12.

“I was coming from the hallway when the missile fell. I came and found my husband screaming, saying, ‘My children, my children, my children,'” she told the BBC.

“I asked him, ‘Where are they?’ I searched for them and found them under the rubble.”

In the twelve days after the air strike, at least eight more fatal strikes took place in Gaza on school buildings housing displaced families – the latest in a series of attacks on such buildings, which provide little safety.

Unicef has said more than 50% of schools used as shelters in Gaza had been directly hit during the current war, with “devastating consequences for children and families”.

In each of the latest strikes, the IDF released public statements saying the former schools had contained Hamas terrorists or “command and control” centres.

In their public statement about the 21 September strike, the IDF incorrectly named the former school they hit – Al-Zeitoun C – instead identifying another one nearby, Al-Falah.

We confirmed that Al-Zeitoun C was the one that had been hit by speaking to local people, as well as comparing videos of the attack aftermath with satellite imagery.

The Hamas-run Gazan authorities also named it as Al-Zeitoun C.

The relevant area is in the Al-Zeitoun neighbourhood and includes four distinct schools: Al-Falah, and Al-Zeitoun A, B, and C.

When asked about incorrectly naming the school, the IDF refused to comment.

It would also not comment on who was targeted.

The Hamas-run government media office said the Israeli military had committed a “horrific massacre” by bombing Al-Zeitoun C school, which shelters displaced people. It said that, in addition to those killed, the attack also caused severe injuries, including nine children who needed limbs amputating.

Dr Amjad Eliwa, an emergency physician who treated those injured in the strike, described over 30 injuries reaching his hospital, saying they were “mostly among children and women, with cases of amputations and very severe injuries”.

He described one of those who died as a woman who was six months pregnant.

This was corroborated by images of a foetus at the site of the strike, and residents said the dead woman was Barah Deraawi, who died along with two young daughters, Israa and Iman.

US President Joe Biden has said he does not support any potential Israeli retaliatory strike on Iranian nuclear sites after Iran launched around 180 missiles at Israel.

Tensions are high between Iran and Israel after the Iranian attack on Tuesday, which Israel said was mostly repelled by its missile defence system.

Iran said the barrage was a response to the killings of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Brig-Gen Abbas Nilforoushan.

Its attack also came after Israel announced a ground assault into Lebanon, in an effort to dismantle what it called Iran-backed Hezbollah’s “terrorist infrastructure” in border villages.

The US has repeatedly called for de-escalation and has also led long-running negotiations on a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian armed group Hamas in Gaza but so far without success.

Biden’s comment to reporters on Wednesday came during a trip to tour hurricane damage in North Carolina with Vice-President Kamala Harris.

“Would you support an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites by Israel?” Biden was asked by a reporter.

“The answer is no,” he responded.

He added that the US “will be discussing with the Israelis what they’re gonna do”.

He also said that he had consulted with the leaders of other G7 countries and they all agree that Israel “has the right to respond, but they should respond proportionally”.

US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, at a briefing, added: “It’s clear that this was an unprecedented escalation by Iran.

“Israel has the right to respond to it. We’re having discussions about what that response will be”.

So far, the White House has given no public indication of how it believes Israel should respond to Iran’s attack.

In a video message on Tuesday, Biden said that at his direction, US military forces in the region had helped shoot down the missiles fired from Iran.

He said the Iranian attack had been “defeated and ineffective”, calling it “a testament to intensive planning between the United States and Israel to anticipate and defend against the brazen attack we expected.”

“Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” Biden added.

The Middle East is once again on the brink of a deep and damaging war between two protagonists that have been facing off against each other for much of the past 45 years. This is now one of the most dangerous moments for the entire region.

Iran, which became an Islamic Republic after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, has long vowed to destroy the state of Israel, which it calls the “Zionist regime”. Israel accuses Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) of spreading violence across the Middle East through its allies and proxies, a view shared by several Arab governments.

Israel is poised to retaliate against Iran for Tuesday’s volley of ballistic missiles, some of which penetrated Israel’s air defences.

Iran says that was in response to two assassinations by Israel – of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

So what happens next?

Both Israel and its closest ally, the US, have vowed to punish Iran for launching 180 missiles at Israel. “Iran,” says Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, “will pay a heavy price.”

• Follow live updates on this story
• Watch: Video shows Iran’s missile attack on Israel
• Explained: What we know about Iran’s missile attack on Israel
• Explained: What is Israel’s Iron Dome missile system and how does it work?
• On the ground: First came the alert message, then the boom of interceptions

The restraint that Israel’s allies urged on it the last time there was a standoff like this in April is more muted this time. And given Israel’s determination to take on all its enemies at once – in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen and Syria – the Netanyahu government seems to be in no mood to hold back.

Israeli planners will likely now be debating not if and when to hit Iran, but how hard.

Aided by US satellite intelligence and by Mossad (Israel’s overseas spy agency) human agents on the ground in Iran, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has a wide range of targets to choose from. These can broadly be divided into three categories:

• Conventional military – An early and obvious target will be the bases from which Iran launched those ballistic missiles. So that means launch pads, command-and-control centres, refuelling tanks and storage bunkers. It could go further and hit bases belonging to the IRGC as well as air defences and other missile batteries. It could even try to assassinate key individuals involved in Iran’s ballistic missile programme.
• Economic – This would include Iran’s most vulnerable state assets – its petrochemical plants, its power generation and possibly its shipping interests. This, however, would be a deeply unpopular move in Iran as it would end up hurting ordinary people’s lives far more than any attack on the military.
• Nuclear – This is the big one for Israel. It is a known fact, established by the UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, that Iran is enriching uranium well beyond the 20% needed for civil nuclear power. Israel, and others, suspect Iran of trying to reach “breakout point” where it is within a very short timescale of being able to build a nuclear bomb. Sites on Israel’s possible target list include Parchin, the epicentre of Iran’s military nuclear programme, research reactors at Tehran, Bonab and Ramsar, as well as major facilities at Bushehr, Natanz, Isfahan and Ferdow.

A large part of their calculations will involve trying to second guess Iran’s response in turn and how to mitigate it. The Iranian position is that after launching those missiles at what it says were Israeli military targets on Tuesday the score is now settled. But it is warning that if Israel retaliates it will hit back in turn.

“This is only a glimpse of our capabilities,” said Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian. The IRGC reinforced this message, stating: “If the Zionist regime responds to Iran’s operations, it will face crushing attacks.”

Iran cannot defeat Israel militarily. Its air force is old and decrepit, its air defences are porous and it has had to contend with years of Western sanctions.

But it still has an enormous quantity of ballistic and other missiles as well as explosive-laden drones and numerous allied proxy militias around the Middle East. Its next volley of missiles could well target Israeli residential areas, rather than military bases. The attack by an Iran-backed militia on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities in 2019 showed just how vulnerable its neighbours are to attack.

The IRGC Navy, which operates in the Gulf, has large flotillas of small, fast missile attack boats which could, potentially, overwhelm the defences of a US Navy 5th Fleet warship in a swarm attack. If it had orders to do so, it could attempt to sow mines in the Strait of Hormuz, interrupting the flow of up to 20% of the world’s daily oil exports, something that would have a major impact on the global economy.

And then there are all the US military bases, dotted up and down the Arabian side of the Gulf, from Kuwait to Oman. Iran has given warning that if it is attacked it won’t just hit back at Israel, it will target any country it perceives as supporting that attack.

These then, are just some of the scenarios that defence planners in Tel Aviv and Washington will now be considering.

“If these fires continue, we indigenous people will die.”

Raimundinha Rodrigues Da Sousa runs the voluntary fire service for the Caititu indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon.

Their land is supposed to be protected under the Brazilian constitution.

But it has been on fire for more than 15 days.

For her brigade, their fight feels personal.

“Today it is killing the plants, in a while it will be us, because we inhale so much,” she says.

“It is a very aggressive fire that kills everything that comes its way.”

Her father, Ademar, tells us the constant smoke has caused him respiratory problems.

“I can’t sleep due to a lack of air. It wakes me up, I feel like I’m drowning,” he says.

The Amazon has had its worst forest fires in two decades. More than 62,000 square kilometres have been burned this year already – an area bigger than countries like Sri Lanka or Costa Rica.

The world relies on the Amazon to absorb a lot of its carbon. These fires mean it is now emitting record amounts itself.

Most fires here are illegally started by humans, according to scientists, the Federal Police, and the government: loggers and miners looking to exploit land in the Amazon, or farmers turning it into pasture.

It is much rarer for fires to occur naturally in the humid, tropical rainforest.

Many fires encroach on protected reserves or indigenous land, either by accidentally getting out of hand, or set by people as deliberate attempts to grab land.

Raimundinha says that when her brigade arrives at the scene of a fire, they often find bottles of gasoline and matches.

As she speaks, she spots another plume of smoke from some trees. She is certain it was started deliberately, as they’d only just extinguished the fires there and created a natural barrier to stop it spreading, by removing any dry vegetation from the area.

Her team go to investigate. As we get nearer, there is a distinctive smell of smoke.

The landscape on the way to the fire is like a graveyard of trees, collapsed and blackened in their entirety.

The rainforest here barely merits its name. The trees still standing are charred and warped like burnt matchsticks. The ground is coated in white powder like the remains of a barbecue.

Her team try to put out the flames with hoses they use to spray water, attached to small plastic containers they wear like backpacks. The water is limited, so they have to be selective.

The problem is, as soon as one is put out, another starts.

The indigenous chief, Ze Bajaga, says that the majority of these fires are arson, set by people who “no longer want the wellbeing of humanity, or nature”.

He blames a lack of “humanity”.

In recent years, deforestation has slowed in the Amazon. But despite attempted crackdowns by state authorities, lawlessness is still rife, and the state presence feels minimal.

Some of the Amazon is privately owned by individuals or companies. Private owners are meant to conserve 80% of the rainforest on their land by law, and can develop the remaining 20%. But this is not well policed.

Some of the land is classified as a state-owned protected reserve, or as an indigenous reserve. Some land though is undesignated entirely – meaning it is not privately owned by anyone, and has also not been protected as a reserve.

Those areas are particularly vulnerable to land-grabs. Everywhere you drive or fly over in the south of Amazonas state, mines, loggers and farms are visible.

Dorismar Luiz Baruffi, a soy farmer based in the Amazonas town of Humaitá, has owned his land for many years. He is against the fires, but can explain why farming has “exploded” in the Amazon.

At the heart of his, and others’, argument is the belief more land should be productive, not just protected.

“Growth of the population has increased planting up here. I started here because the region is good, it rains well here,” he explains.

“I believe if you’re working within the law, there’s no problem. It is a place that provides food. It is a state that can produce a lot. I think there is still a lot of land to be cultivated here in Amazonas.”

Deforestation is bad for farmers too though. The fewer trees there are, the less water vapour is emitted to create rain for their crops – which some farmers burn their land to make room for.

“We did poorly this year because of the drought,” he says.

The fires may be mostly started by humans, but they have been made worse by Brazil’s worst-ever drought, which has turned the normally damp vegetation into a dry tinderbox.

The drought has seen the level of the rivers drop to historic lows, and almost 60% of the country is under stress from the drought.

The rivers, in parts, are now completely dry and resemble a parched desert.

João Mendonça and his community live by the river. But the dry riverbed means they can no longer travel on the water, meaning they are cut off from nearby towns and cities.

Every day, at dawn, they must now travel by foot to the nearest city to fill up tanks of water.

Here, dolphins can be spotted popping out of the river and blue macaws fly overhead.

But João and his fellow villagers must then carry it on their backs to their community, burning their feet on the cracked dry riverbed and occasionally passing dead river life like turtles.

They make this journey several times a day in scorching heat.

“It’s the worst drought I’ve ever seen in my life,” João says. “It has brought a lot of consequences… the absence of food on the riverside dwellers’ table. The fish are gone.”

“One of the biggest difficulties is access to the city, now the river is dry. There are elderly people, people with chronic illnesses who must make this journey.”

Sandra Gomes Vieira, who lives with a kidney disease, and her family are among those now cut off from the city.

“Before it was easier when I was feeling sick. My husband would put me in a canoe that would arrive in the city. Now, I must walk across that sand to reach it. There are days when I can’t do anything, I need people to carry me,” she says.

One of her three daughters has had to drop out of school: “She’s not studying because she couldn’t face walking across that sand in the heat. She felt sick.”

The drought is also making it harder to make a living.

“We live off selling products we grow. Now my produce is spoiling. And there is no way to take them to the city.”

The impact of these fires and the drought on people’s lives in Amazonas is clear, but their message for everybody else is too.

“There are people who don’t even care about this kind of thing,” says Raimundinha Rodrigues Da Sousa, who is battling the fires every day.

“They’re just doing it without thinking about tomorrow. But for you to live in nature, you must take care of it.”

Days after a tropical storm inundated parts of North Carolina with catastrophic flooding, leaving scores dead and hundreds more missing, entire communities are beginning to come to terms with devastating losses and, for some, narrow escapes.

For over 40 years, Nancy Berry’s trailer in the town of Boone was her mountain oasis and her family’s homestead.

It was where she created memories with family and friends, and where she preserved the memories of those lost. Her mother died in the same trailer.

But it took just a matter of hours for Hurricane Helene to wash it all away.

Now, the 77-year-old is trying to salvage what remains. On her bed, still soaked from the floods, she’s placed mementos of who she was, and where she came from.

On top of the pile, her son’s death certificate from when he died of Covid three years ago.

“I grabbed it and laid it out,” she told the BBC. “I’ve got to protect my family’s history. A lot of it is lost though.”

It was Ms Berry’s great-niece who saved her, helping her wade through three to four feet of water.

“They kept calling me – thank God for the cell phones. You never know, a long time ago, what would have happened,” Ms Berry recalled.

When her great-niece arrived, she found Ms Berry trying to save some of her belongings by putting them up high.

“Aunt Nanny. Come on. Get out. Get out,” she called out.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Ms Berry replied. She grabbed her purse, handing it to her great-niece, who carried it over her head while helping Ms Berry to safety.

“She’s strong and she was just pushing me, pulling and that water was – ,” Ms Berry, said, shuddering. “It was not a nice moment.”

As flood water levels rose, others on her street had to be rescued by boat.

Ms Berry’s hometown is a relatively quiet place tucked between the mountains, with a population of about 20,000.

Its landscape is marked by creeks and rivers that flow beneath towering green trees rising into the clouds.

It’s also home to Appalachian State University, which has converted one of its facilities into an emergency shelter for the storm-stricken.

Communities like this one can be fairly isolated – built off a dirt road on a mountainside. Such features add to Boone’s beauty – but also its vulnerability.

Two people are reported by local outlets to have died in the surrounding Watauga County.

Western North Carolina, located more than 300 miles (482km) from the ocean, is no stranger to storms, said Kathie Dello, a climate expert at North Carolina State University.

Six people died when a tropical storm caused “catastrophic” flooding in nearby Carusoe – but nothing like this, she said. At least 180 people are now known to have died. More than 600 are still unaccounted for. Thousands are without power, and fresh water supplies are dwindling.

The government has deployed 6,000 National Guard members and 4,800 federal aid workers to the region, but many have criticised the response, saying that the bulk of rescue efforts have been left up to volunteers.

“We were cut off from [the outside world] for about three days,” said Kennie McFee, the fire chief for Green Valley.

“Here, it was mainly neighbours helping neighbours.”

The cities of Boone and Asheville were hard hit, but remote communities located deep within the Appalachian Mountains are also seriously struggling, Diello told the BBC.

Even before the storm, mobile reception and Wi-Fi was patchy. Poverty and rough, rural roads have added to the difficulties people have faced getting out.

“A lot of times people say ‘well, why didn’t they leave?’,” Diello said. “Well maybe you can’t afford a tank of gas, and how many nights in a hotel in a safer place? Maybe you know you can’t leave your family, maybe you can’t leave your job.”

In Green Valley, a woman, who did not want the BBC to use her name, said that five days after the storm she still had no power and no communication with the outside world.

Her only functioning device was a battery powered antenna radio that she said was decades-old.

“If you’re raised in the mountains, you’ll cope,” she said.

While talking with the BBC, a car pulled up to bring her news of her family that lived down the road. She hadn’t seen or heard from them since the storm hit.

“They were all okay, another thank you, Lord,” she said.

Although she recalled bad storms, the woman said she’d never seen anything like Helene.

Less than a five-minute walk from where she stood in her driveway, another house was completely flattened.

“God is getting people’s attention. He really is getting people’s attention, not just here, but it’s everywhere,” she said. “But I really think it’s just, it’s to let us know who’s in control.”

Nicole Rojas, 25, moved to her remote home up the mountain in Vilas, North Carolina not long ago from nearby Tennessee, where she had lived, in her own words, “off grid”.

“I kind of wish I would have stuck to my lifestyle a little bit, because I always had drinking water, showering water, food,” she told the BBC, while looking for supplies in Boone.

Now, she and her roommates, who include a 54-year-old woman named Karen, Karen’s 74-year-old mother and a family with young children, will likely be without power for weeks, she heard, with the only way in and out a single-lane, tree-strewn road.

“The only reason I was even able to step out was from the gentlemen in the community taking out their chainsaws and their tractors and moving all the trees,” she said.

Ms Rojas had been at home on Friday, when the storm struck the mountain. On Sunday, after her neighbours spent all of Saturday clearing the road, she and Karen ventured out to town. Karen, who amid the chaos of the storm had suffered a life-threatening allergy attack after being stung by an insect, brought supplies back to their house.

Ms Rojas, meanwhile, stayed in Boone with friends, so that she could go to work at a local health store. She plans to return home, with more supplies, on Wednesday.

It was at work when it all finally hit her, after hearing the story of another customer.

“She had to drive by a truck that was picking up, that had like, dead bodies on there, and she started crying,” she recalled. “And that’s when I just broke down.”

“You hear everyone’s horror stories about how, like, literally their entire house just slid down the mountain.”

“I feel like I just survived the apocalypse.”

It has been hailed as the most valuable shipwreck in the world.

A Spanish galleon, the San José, was sunk by the British off the coast of Colombia more than 300 years ago. It had a cargo of gold, silver and emeralds worth billions of dollars.

But years after it was discovered, a debate still rages over who owns that treasure and what should be done with the wreck.

The Colombian and Spanish states have staked a claim to it, as have a US salvage company and indigenous groups in South America. There have been court battles in Colombia and the US, and the case is now before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague.

The Colombian government says it wants to raise the remains of the vessel and put it in a museum. Treasure hunters point to the commercial value of the cargo, which could be as much as $18bn (£13.bn).

But archaeologists say the wreck – and thousands like it scattered across the world – should be left where it is. Maritime historians remind us that the San José is a graveyard and should be respected as such: around 600 people drowned when the ship went down.

“It’s a great mess and I see no easy way out of this,” says Carla Rahn Phillips, a historian who has written a book about the San José. “The Spanish state, the Colombian government, the various indigenous groups, the treasure hunters. I don’t think there’s any way that everyone can be satisfied.”

• BBC Business Daily – Who owns the $18bn shipwreck?

• Colombia begins exploring ‘holy grail of shipwrecks’

• New artefacts found on San José shipwreck

The San José sank in 1708 as it sailed from what is now Panama towards the port city of Cartagena in Colombia. From there it was due to cross the Atlantic to Spain, but the Spanish were at war with the British at the time, and a British warship intercepted it.

The British wanted to seize the ship and its treasure, but fired a cannonball into the San José’s powder magazines by mistake. The ship blew up and sank within minutes.

The wreck lay on the seabed until the 1980s, when a US salvage company, Glocca Mora, said it had found it. It tried to persuade the Colombians to go into partnership to raise the treasure and split the proceeds, but the two sides could not agree on who should get what share, and plunged into a legal battle.

In 2015, the Colombians said they had found the ship, independently of the information provided by the Americans, on a different part of the sea bed. Since then they have argued that Glocca Mora, now known as Sea Search Armada, has no right to the ship or its treasure.

The Spanish state has staked its claim, arguing that the San José and its cargo remains state property, and indigenous groups from Bolivia and Peru say they are entitled to at least a part of the booty.

They argue that it is not Spanish treasure because it was plundered by the Spanish from mines in the Andes during the colonial period.

“That wealth came from the mines of Potosí in the Bolivian highlands,” says Samuel Flores, a representative of the Qhara Qhara people, one of the indigenous groups.

“This cargo belongs to our people – the silver, the gold – and we think it should be raised from the sea bed to stop treasure hunters looting it. How many years have gone by? Three hundred years? They owe us that debt.”

The Colombians have released tantalising videos of the San José, taken with submersible cameras. They show the prow of a wooden ship, encrusted with marine life, a few bronze cannons scattered across the sand, and blue-and-white porcelain and gold coins shining on the ocean floor.

As part of its court case at the Hague, Sea Search Armada commissioned a study of the cargo. It estimates its value at $7-18bn.

“This treasure that sank with the ship included seven million pesos, 116 steel chests full of emeralds, 30 million gold coins,” says Rahim Moloo, the lawyer representing Sea Search Armada. He described it as “the biggest treasure in the history of humanity”.

Others are less convinced.

“I try to resist giving present-day estimates of anything,” says Ms Rahn Phillips.

“If you’re talking about gold and silver coins, do we make an estimate based on the weight of the gold now? Or do we look at what collectors might pay of these gold coins?

“To me it’s almost meaningless to try to come up with a number now. The estimates of the treasure hunters, to me, they’re laughable.”

While the San José is often described as the holy grail of shipwrecks, it is – according to the United Nations – just one of around three million sunken vessels on our ocean floors. There is often very little clarity over who owns them, who has the right to explore them, and – if there is treasure on board – who has the right to keep it.

In 1982, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Law of the Sea – often described as “the constitution of the oceans”, but it says very little about shipwrecks. Because of that, the UN adopted a second set of rules in 2001 – the Unesco Underwater Cultural Heritage 2001 Convention.

That says far more about wrecks, but many countries have refused to ratify it, fearing it will weaken their claim to riches in their waters. Colombia and the US, for example, have not signed it.

“The legal framework right now is neither clear nor comprehensive,” says Michail Risvas, a lawyer at Southampton University in the UK. A specialist in international arbitration and maritime disputes, he adds: “I’m afraid international law does not have clear-cut answers.”

For many archaeologists, wrecks like the San José should be left in peace and explored “in situ” – on the ocean floor.

“If you just go down and take lots of artefacts and bring them to the surface, you just have a pile of stuff. There’s no story to tell,” says Rodrigo Pacheco Ruiz, a Mexican deep-sea diver who has explored dozens of wrecks around the world.

“You can just count coins, you can count porcelain, but there is no ‘why was this on board? Who was the owner? Where was it going?’ – the human story behind it.”

Juan Guillermo Martín, a Colombian maritime archaeologist who has followed the case of the San José closely, agrees.

“The treasure of the San José should remain at the bottom of the sea, along with the human remains of the 600 crew members who died there,” he says. “The treasure is part of the archaeological context, and as such has no commercial value. Its value is strictly scientific.”

The BBC has confronted a neo-Nazi in Finland who shared online instructions on how to commit arson with UK rioters during the summer.

The 20-year-old was an administrator in the Southport Wake Up group on the Telegram messaging app, where he was known as “Mr AG”. He posted the arson manual, which was pinned to the top of the group chat.

In late July and early August, the group was key in helping to organise and provoke protests that turned to violence in England and Northern Ireland.

We tracked Mr AG – whose real name is Charles-Emmanuel Mikko Rasanen – to an apartment on the outskirts of the Finnish capital, Helsinki.

It was from here, more than 1,000 miles away from Southport, that the neo-Nazi took a prominent online role during the UK riots.

On 29 July, within hours of the killings of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, the Southport Wake Up group was created.

Within days it had grown to more than 14,000 members. Mr Rasanen – or Mr AG as he was known online – helped to run the group chat.

The group organised the very first protest in the UK, on St Luke’s Road in Southport, the day after the killings. That protest later turned into a riot.

Before the group was taken down by Telegram, a series of other protest locations were advertised, as well as a list of dozens of refugee centres, suggested as potential targets.

Alongside that list, Mr AG posted the arson manual, writing: “Something fun for you to read.”

The manual is believed to have been written by a Russian fascist group proscribed as terrorists in their own country.

It includes details on how to avoid the police and it encourages the targeting of Muslims and Jews.

Underneath the post, other members wrote aggressive and offensive comments, including: “I’m ready for these migrant boys,” while another describes “invaders” as “a stupid bunch underestimating whites”.

Mr AG pinned the post to the top of the group, which meant it was in full view of all 14,000 members when they logged in.

At the time, several riots had broken out across the UK.

The BBC travelled to Finland to confront Mr Rasanen – we had previously emailed him. He refused to answer any of our questions, but did not deny sending the posts or being an administrator of the Southport Wake Up group.

Before we left him, he also accused the BBC of harassment and rang the police.

On his Telegram accounts, Mr Rasanen celebrates Hitler and promotes a neo-Nazi group called the Nordic Resistance Movement, which is banned as a terrorist organisation in the US.

He also posts voice notes – in one he describes himself as a “national socialist”, and in another he appears to call for the genocide of Jewish people.

Veli-Pekka Hämäläinen, an investigative journalist at Yle, Finland’s national broadcaster, says Mr Rasanen has been active online “for many years”.

Mr Hämäläinen’s team has also spoken to him about his role in the UK riots. He believes Mr Rasanen’s involvement in the Southport Wake Up group transformed him from a solitary extremist into someone with an audience of thousands.

“This is an example of how lone internet keyboard warriors can turn dangerous,” says Mr Hämäläinen.

He says he has seen Finnish police records, which show Mr Rasanen was investigated when he was a teenager for making an illegal threat, but that he has never been charged with a crime.

The BBC has also been told of Mr Rasanen’s previous online links to a far-right white nationalist group in the UK, Patriotic Alternative (PA).

He was an active member of a private gaming group chat, and his posts were shared by key figures in PA, according to the British anti-fascist research group, Red Flare.

These included the group’s Yorkshire regional organiser, Sam Melia, who was jailed earlier this year for inciting racial hatred.

During the time of the UK riots, a post by Mr AG read: “When is the same violence coming to Northern Europe?”

A spokesperson for Red Flare – which first identified Mr AG’s real identity and his links to Southport Wake Up – says Mr Rasanen should be held accountable for what he has done.

“What we have here is a case of a young man sitting behind his keyboard in a different country starting racist violence in Britain,” they say. “It exposes the transnational nature of the far-right in the world today.”

The BBC contacted Patriotic Alternative, and although the group refused to answer specific questions, it did say what Mr AG posted on PA’s public channel was “fine” and that PA was not involved in what Mr AG posted in other Telegram groups.

Speaking to the BBC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, says “if [Mr Rasanen] was in the UK he would be arrested and prosecuted under the 2006 Terrorism Act”.

Mr Hall estimates at least half of terrorism propaganda prosecutions last year involved the Telegram app.

It’s unclear if Finland would extradite one of its own nationals to the UK, and the Home Office has declined to comment on whether any extradition request or other action is being taken in respect of the matter. The BBC is not aware of any arrest warrant being issued.

The National Police Board of Finland says it is “aware of the matter”, but it is not possible to comment in more detail.

A spokesperson for Telegram has told the BBC its moderators removed UK channels calling for violence when they were discovered in August, including Southport Wake Up.

Its statement adds: “Of course, we are ready to co-operate with both the UK and Finnish governments on this matter through the appropriate channels.”

A spokesperson for the UK government says it is working at pace to implement the Online Safety Act, which requires social media platforms to remove illegal content and prevent the spread of misinformation.

“We will not let the internet serve as a haven for those seeking to sow division in our communities,” says the spokesperson.

For several years, Masato Kanda hardly slept.

“Three hours a night is an exaggeration,” he laughs as he speaks to the BBC from Tokyo.

“I slept for three hours consecutively before being woken up but I then went back to bed, so if you add them up, I got a bit more.”

So why was this 59 year-old bureaucrat’s schedule so punishing?

Until the end of July, he was Japan’s vice finance minister for international affairs, the country’s top currency diplomat, or yen czar.

Key to the role was fending off currency market speculators who could trigger turmoil in one of the world’s largest economies.

Historically, authorities intervened to weaken the value of the Japanese currency. A weak yen is good for exporters like Toyota and Sony as it makes goods cheaper for overseas buyers.

But when the yen plummeted during Mr Kanda’s time in office it increased the cost of importing essential items like food and fuel, causing a cost of living crisis in a country more used to seeing prices fall rather than rise.

In his three years in the role, the value of the yen against the US dollar weakened by more than 45%.

To control the yen’s slide, Mr Kanda unleashed an estimated 25 trillion yen ($173bn) to support the currency, marking Japan’s first such intervention in almost a quarter of a century.

“The Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance are very clear. They intervene not at a particular level of the currency, but they intervene when market volatility is too much,” says economist Jesper Koll.

Japan now finds itself on the US Treasury’s watchlist of potential currency manipulators.

But Mr Kanda argues that what he did was not market manipulation.

“Markets should move based on fundamentals but occasionally they fluctuate excessively because of speculation, and they don’t reflect fundamentals which don’t change overnight,” he says.

“When it affects ordinary consumers who have to buy food or fuel, that is when we intervened.”

While countries like the US and UK can raise interest rates to boost the value of their currencies, Japan had for years been unable to put up the cost of borrowing due to the weakness of its economy.

Professor Seijiro Takeshita of the University of Shizuoka says Japan had no other option other than to intervene in the currency markets.

“It is not the right thing to do, but in my opinion it is the only thing they can do.”

The irony is that the yen’s value jumped in recent months without Mr Kanda or his successor lifting a finger after the Bank of Japan surprised the markets with a rate hike, and the country got a new prime minister.

So was the $170bn bid to prop up the yen a waste of money?

No, says Mr Kanda and points out that his interventions actually made a profit although he emphasises that it was never a goal.

On whether or not his actions were ultimately successful he says: “It is not up to me to evaluate, but many say our exchange management stopped the excessive level of speculation.”

Markets or historians should be the final judges, he adds.

After decades of economic stagnation, Mr Kanda also sounds an optimistic note about Japan’s prospects.

“We are finally seeing investments and wages rising, and we have a chance to go back to a normal market economy,” he says.

A more surprising legacy for this “humble public servant” is him becoming a star on the internet after Japanese social media users celebrated his ability to surprise financial markets with a series of AI generated dancing videos.

The release of a blockbuster Pakistani film has been put on hold in India after officials in Delhi refused to give permission for its screening, the BBC has learnt.

A remake of a 1979 Punjabi film, The Legend of Maula Jatt, is the highest ever grossing film in Pakistan.

The movie was set to release in the northern Indian state of Punjab on Wednesday, which would have made it the first Pakistani film to hit Indian screens in more than a decade.

The South Asian neighbours share a frosty relationship and tensions often affect cultural exchanges between them.

On Wednesday, a source close to Zee Studios – the film’s distributor in India – confirmed to the BBC that its release had been stalled indefinitely, after the information and broadcasting ministry denied them permission.

It’s not immediately clear why the film was put on hold. The BBC has contacted the ministry for comment.

Starring Pakistan’s biggest stars Fawad Khan and Mahira Khan, the 2022 film tells the story of a local folk hero who takes on the leader of a rival clan.

The film was initially supposed to release in India in 2022, but its screening was postponed indefinitely – until last month when its maker Bilal Lashari announced it would hit Indian theatres soon.

“Two years in, and still house full on weekends in Pakistan! Now, I can’t wait for our Punjabi audience in India to experience the magic of this labour of love!” he wrote on Instagram.

However, the news sparked protests in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, where the regional Maharashtra Navnirman Sena political party said it would not allow the film’s release “under any circumstances”. Mumbai, which is located in the state, is home to Bollywood, India’s largest film industry.

Following tensions, Zee Studios decided to limit the film’s release to Punjab state, which shares a border and language with Pakistan’s Punjab province.

Despite tense relations, Indian and Pakistan have always shared an affinity for each other’s art and culture.

Movies and web series made in India and Pakistan travel widely across the border. India’s Bollywood and Punjabi movies are particularly popular in Pakistan, while Pakistani series enjoy a large viewership in India.

Performers in both the countries also have a history of cross-border collaborations, working together on film and music projects.

But such collaborations came to a halt when Bollywood dropped Pakistani actors in 2016 and Pakistan banned Indian movies in 2019, over military tensions between the countries.

A few Punjabi movies from India have been screened in Pakistan in recent months.

In 2023, India’s Supreme Court dismissed a petition that sought a complete ban on performers from Pakistan, asking the petitioners to not to be “so narrow minded”.

Encouraged by this mild thaw in relations and Maula Jatt’s global success, its makers had hoped the folk drama would attract audiences in India.

The leading actors of Maula Jatt are well-known in India for starring in popular Pakistani dramas. They have also previously appeared in big-budget Bollywood films.

Despite having the mighty Zambezi River and the massive hydro-powered Kariba Dam, Zambia is currently grappling with the worst electricity blackouts in living memory.

The crisis is so severe that cities and towns across the country are sometimes without electricity for three consecutive days, with people counting themselves lucky if the lights come on for an hour or two.

The power cuts have come as a shock to the 43% of Zambians who are connected to the grid and have taken electricity for granted all their lives.

But one of the severest droughts in decades – caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon – has decimated Zambia’s power-generation capacity.

Nowadays, I sometimes go to bars and restaurants to find people not eating or drinking – they are there just to charge their phones amid the pounding noise of generators.

There is also a booming business of people making money by charging the phones of those without power.

Zambia sources up to 84% of its electricity from water reservoirs such as lakes and rivers, while only 13% comes from coal.

Contributions from solar, diesel and heavy fuel oil are even lower, accounting for 3%.

For several weeks, the crisis was compounded while the country’s only coal-fired power plant, Maamba Energy, was not operating at maximum capacity as it underwent routine maintenance work.

On Wednesday, there was finally some good news when Minister of Energy Makozo Chikote said the plant was now fully operational, and Zambians would have at least three hours of electricity a day.

President Hakainde Hichilema declared the drought a national disaster in February but the government has been unable to solve the energy crisis because Zambia is heavily reliant on the Kariba Dam for its electricity.

A financial crunch also severely restricted the government’s ability to import power as suppliers wanted payment upfront, though a spokesman for state-owned power utility Zesco, Matongo Maumbi, told the BBC’s Focus on Africa podcast that electricity was being imported from Mozambique and South Africa to ease the crisis, especially in the mining industry – Zambia’s main export earner and source of foreign currency.

Located on the Zambezi, the fourth-longest river in Africa, Kariba was built in the 1950s and is the reservoir for the country’s largest underground power station, Kariba North Bank Power Station. A power station on the other bank serves Zimbabwe.

But because of the drought that has led to parts of the river drying up, only one of the six turbines at Zambia’s power station is operating, resulting in the generation of a paltry 7% of the 1,080 MW installed at Kariba.

The dam retains the water of the Zambezi with a curving wall that is 128m (420ft) high, 579m (1,900ft) long and 21m (69ft) thick.

Engineer Cephas Museba – who has been working for Zesco for 19 years – says he has never seen water levels so low at Kariba.

“I think we stopped receiving the rains as early as February. It’s supposed to rain up to April. If we compare the history of this basin, this is the lowest we have received,” he told me.

It has triggered an electricity crisis that is being felt in every business and home.

Some companies are opening for fewer hours, and retrenching staff.

It can even be difficult to find bread – bakeries are making fewer loaves because they find it too expensive to keep generators running.

Fortunately, the government has installed huge generators in some markets, government offices and hospitals, though stories are still being shared on social media of how kidney patients are struggling to cope.

Some patients need to be hooked up to a dialysis machine for up to three hours a day but power only gets restored for about an hour or two, sometimes after midnight.

On other occasions, there is no electricity at all for 72 hours in a row.

On those days, I wear the same clothes as the previous day, rather than a washed but wrinkled shirt that has not been ironed.

Life has become more difficult for everyone.

One day recently, I woke up to be greeted by a foul smell as blood flowed from under the fridge.

All the meat we had bought had gone off and we had to give it to our German Shepherd dog, the happiest member of our household these days.

The other day I bought relish from a supermarket – but when I opened the package at the dinner table I realised that it was more food for our dog.

My food budget, already tight because of the cost-of-living crisis, is now even tighter. Buying perishable items in bulk at a cheaper price is completely out of the question as they will just rot.

The government has been encouraging homes and businesses to switch to solar, and has scrapped import taxes for solar equipment to make it cheaper to buy.

But some people say their solar panels do not generate enough electricity when there is little sunlight – and they cannot afford to install more panels. Most Zambians cannot afford solar panels at all.

Now, many families have resorted to cooking and heating water on portable gas stoves – but shops have been running out of gas too because of high demand.

So in desperation and because it is cheaper, they buy charcoal to cook and heat water – despite its negative impact on the environment and the climate.

The electricity crisis has also had an impact on the boreholes that middle-class families have dug on their properties.

As boreholes work with electricity and solar-powered pumps, homes are now also without a constant supply of water, making it impossible to even flush the toilet.

In some schools, children are advised to take five litres of water each day to reduce the possibility of a sanitation crisis – and the outbreak of waterborne diseases like cholera, which hit the country at the start of the year.

Many families now fill buckets – or bath tubs – with water, hoping it will last until the lights are back, and toilets can be flushed.

All of this has left Zambians frustrated and angry. They point out that the blackouts highlight the failure of successive governments to plan ahead – something that President Hichilema’s administration has now pledged to do.

Mr Maumbi said that Zesco was investing in more energy sources, including solar plants, so that dependency on hydro-power falls to around 60%.

But Zambia’s focus is not only on green energy – coal is also in the mix.

In July, the energy regulator approved plans to build only the country’s second coal-fired power plant.

It is the dirtiest fossil fuel, producing the most greenhouse gases when burnt, but the government feels that to avoid a similar crisis in the future, it has little option but to press ahead.

• Joy and relief as South Africa manages to keep its lights on
• Can green energy power Africa’s future?
• No power, no pinot – power cuts hit vineyards

BBC presenter Laura Kuenssberg’s scheduled interview with Boris Johnson has been cancelled, after she accidentally sent the former prime minister her briefing notes.

Boris Johnson: The Laura Kuenssberg Interview was due to be broadcast on Thursday evening on BBC One.

However, the BBC’s former political editor said it was “not right for the interview to go ahead” after sharing notes with him which had been intended for her colleagues.

Kuenssberg described it as “embarrassing and disappointing”, but said “red faces aside, honesty is the best policy”.

The BBC said it had agreed with Johnson’s team that cancelling the interview was “the best way forward”.

Johnson is currently taking part in media interviews to promote his new memoir, which has also been recently serialised in a newspaper.

Presenters usually work with a team of researchers to prepare a brief ahead of a major interview.

The process usually includes gathering biographical material about the subject, highlighting controversies, and coming up with suggested lines of questioning.

In a statement posted on X late on Wednesday, Kuenssberg explained: “While prepping to interview Boris Johnson tomorrow, by mistake I sent our briefing notes to him in a message meant for my team.

“That obviously means it’s not right for the interview to go ahead.”

She continued: “It’s very frustrating, and there’s no point pretending it’s anything other than embarrassing and disappointing, as there are plenty of important questions to be asked.

“But red faces aside, honesty is the best policy. See you on Sunday,” she added, referring to her regular Sunday morning politics programme which will go ahead as normal.

In a statement, the BBC said: “[Thursday’s] interview with Boris Johnson won’t be going ahead.

“As Laura has explained, interview briefing notes meant for colleagues were inadvertently shared with him. This makes an interview tomorrow untenable.

“Under the circumstances, both the BBC and Mr Johnson’s team have agreed this is the best way forward.”

Kuenssberg had said on her programme at the weekend that her interview with Johnson would be his “first on his time in office since his dramatic departure from Downing Street“.

The BBC said it had moved EastEnders back to its usual slot of 19:30 BST in Thursday’s schedule in place of the interview.

Johnson is still due to be interviewed by another BBC journalist, Matt Chorley, on 5 Live on Tuesday.

Sign up for Laura Kuenssberg’s weekly newsletter here.

Dozens of tigers have died in zoos in south Vietnam after a bird flu outbreak, according to state media.

Three lions and a panther were also reported to have died of the virus alongside 47 tigers since August.

The H5N1 outbreak hit the Vuon Xoai zoo near Ho Chi Minh City and the My Quynh safari park in neighbouring Long An province.

An official told Reuters news agency that the animals had likely fallen ill after being fed meat from chickens which had been infected.

The Vietnamese ministry of health said two samples taken from dead tigers tested positive for bird flu, and officials are “tracking the source of the chicken to determine the cause”.

The zoos declined to comment when contacted by AFP news agency.

Advice on the World Health Organization (WHO) website warns against consuming raw or undercooked meat and eggs from regions experiencing bird flu outbreaks due to the high risk of infection.

The H5N1 strain of the virus primarily infects animals, and the WHO says almost all cases of human infection arise from close contact with infected live or dead birds, or contaminated environments.

Since 2022, there have been increasing reports of deadly outbreaks among mammals caused by influenza viruses, including H5N1.

Close to 900 human infections have been reported since 2003, of which more than half were fatal.

The US Central Intelligence Agency has launched a new drive to recruit informants in China, Iran and North Korea.

The organisation posted messages on its social media accounts in Mandarin, Farsi and Korean on Wednesday, instructing users how to contact it securely.

This latest effort follows a campaign to enlist Russians in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, which the CIA says was a success.

“We want to make sure individuals in other authoritarian regimes know that we’re open for business,” a CIA spokesman said in a statement.

The recruitment messages – which were placed on platforms such as X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram and LinkedIn, as well as on the dark web – asked for individuals’ names, locations and contact details.

Detailed instructions advised users to contact the CIA via its official website using trusted encrypted Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or an anonymous web browser known as the Tor network, which is often used to access the dark web.

“I can’t remember any sort of recruitment effort like this, using YouTube or social media in this way, at least in Korean,” said Mason Richey, associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.

“It seems like they’re basing this off the success they had in Russia – but I would question how effective this will be considering most North Koreans don’t have access to the internet,” he told the BBC.

Professor Richey suggested that the United States may be targeting North Korean traders who informally cross the border with China and might be able to access VPN networks.

US intelligence considers North Korea, Iran and China “hard targets” when it comes to intelligence gathering, given the harsh level of surveillance all countries employ to stamp out dissent.

“This effort represents just one way in which CIA is adapting to a new global environment of increased state repression and global surveillance,” the spy agency’s statement continued.

But Professor Richey questioned the value of any intelligence that the campaign might be able to gather.

“I suppose you have to assume the CIA knows what it’s doing, but you do wonder how many of these discontented people are close enough to power and close enough to the places where important decisions are made,” he said.

“It does, at the very least though, throw some sand in the gears of these counter-intelligence operations,” he added.

American intelligence chiefs, encouraged by efforts in Russia, are nonetheless confident they will reach enough dissatisfied citizens who are willing to contact them with potentially useful information.

“There are plenty of people who have access to information and who are disaffected from the Xi regime in China,” CIA Deputy Director David Cohen told Bloomberg.

“You’ve got people inside who… for lots of different motivations fundamentally do not like the direction that Xi is taking the country and understand that there’s a path to helping their own country by working with us,” he added.

Liu Pengyu, a Chinese embassy spokesman, said the US was waging “an organised and systematic” disinformation campaign against China.

“Any attempts to drive a wedge between the Chinese people and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) or to weaken their close bond will inevitably fail,” Mr Liu said in a statement.

In rolling out a campaign of this scale across different countries, Dr Richey said the United States was giving a good indication of how it sees its national security challenges.

“The US is now convinced that it’s in not just a series of bilateral confrontations with China and Russia and Iran and North Korea – but rather, it’s in a confrontation with an emerging bloc,” said Professor Richey.

“Which obviously recalls a sense of the Cold War.”

The case of two black women who were allegedly shot and fed to pigs by a white farmer and two of his workers has caused outrage in South Africa.

Maria Makgato, 45, and Lucia Ndlovu, 34, were allegedly looking for food on the farm near Polokwane in South Africa’s northern Limpopo province in August when they were shot.

Their bodies were then alleged to have been given to pigs in an apparent attempt to dispose of the evidence.

A court has begun hearing whether to grant bail to farm owner Zachariah Johannes Olivier, 60, and his employees Adrian de Wet, 19, and William Musora, 50, ahead of their murder trial.

The three men have not yet been asked to enter a plea in court, which will happen when the trial begins at a later date.

Protesters demonstrated outside court in Polokwane, holding placards demanding that the suspects be denied bail.

Inside, the courtroom was packed with families of the victims and the accused – and magistrate Ntilane Felleng agreed to an application for the proceedings to be filmed by the media, saying it was in the public interest to do so.

After several hours, she adjourned the bail hearing until 6 November to allow for further investigations – so the suspects remain in custody.

Earlier, Ms Makgato’s brother Walter Mathole told the BBC the incident had further exacerbated racial tension between black and white people in South Africa.

This is especially rife in rural areas of the country, despite the end of the racist system of apartheid 30 years ago.

• South Africa’s deadly love affair with guns
• The volunteer crime fighters using whistles, whips and guns

The three men in court in Polokwane also face charges of attempted murder for shooting at Ms Ndlovu’s husband , who was with the women at the farm – as well as possession of an unlicensed firearm.

Mabutho Ncube survived the ordeal on the evening of Saturday 17 August – and crawled away and managed to call a doctor for help.

He says he reported the incident to police and officers found the decomposing bodies of his wife and Ms Makgato in the pigsty several days later.

Mr Mathole said he was with officers and saw a horrific sight inside the pig enclosure: his sister’s body which had been partly eaten by the animals.

The group had reportedly gone to the farm in search of edible food from consignments of recently expired or soon-to-be-expired produce. These were sometimes left at the farm and given to the pigs.

The family of Ms Makgato say they are devastated by her killing – especially her four sons, aged between 22 and five years old.

“My mum died a painful death, she was a loving mother who did everything for us. We lacked nothing because of her,” Ranti Makgato, the oldest of her sons, tearfully told the BBC.

“I think I’ll sleep better at night if the alleged killers are denied bail,” he added.

The opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party has said the farm should be shut down.

“The EFF cannot stand by while products from this farm continue to be sold as they pose a danger to consumers,” it said after the bodies were found.

The South African Human Rights Commission has condemned the killings and called for anti-racism dialogues between affected communities.

Groups representing farmers, who are often white, say farming communities feel under attack in a country with a high rate of crime – though there is no evidence farmers are at any greater risk than anyone else.

There have been two other incidents that have ratcheted up racial tension recently.

In the eastern province of Mpumalanga, a farmer and his security guard were arrested in August for the alleged murder of two men at a farm in Laersdrift near the small town of Middleburg.

It is alleged the two men, whose bodies were burnt beyond recognition, were accused of stealing sheep.

The accused remain in custody while the ashes undergo DNA analysis.

The most recent case involves a 70-year old white farmer who is alleged to have driven over a six-year-old boy, breaking both of his legs, for stealing an orange on his farm.

The bail hearing for Christoffel Stoman, from Lutzville in Western Cape province, is ongoing.

The court has heard that mother and son were walking past the farm as they made their way to town to buy groceries.

It is alleged the six-year-old stopped to pick up an orange that was on the ground – and the mother watched on in horror as the farmer allegedly mowed him down.

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said the farmer was facing two counts of attempted murder and reckless driving.

NPA spokesperson Eric Ntabazalila told the BBC that the state was opposing the accused’s application for bail.

Two political parties – the African Transformation Movement and the Pan Africanist Congress – are calling for the expropriation of Mr Stoman’s farm following the incident.

• South Africans’ anger over land set to explode
• Are protesters right on South Africa farm murder rate?
• The groups playing on the fears of a ‘white genocide’

The annual Fat Bear Week contest has begun in Alaska, just days after one of the contestants was killed by a rival.

The competition, which started a decade ago, allows viewers to select their favourite brown bear after the animals have fattened up by gorging on salmon in preparation for winter.

But the beginning of this year’s contest was delayed by one day after a female bear was killed by a male bear on Monday.

The entire incident was captured on film as cameras were already set up in anticipation of the contest, which is livestreamed around the world each year.

Voters can pick between a dozen contestants for the crown of Fat Bear at Alaska’s Katmai National Park.

But a pall was cast over this year’s event when one of the competitors, bear 402, was fatally mauled by bear 469 on Monday in the Brooks River for reasons that remain unclear.

“National parks like Katmai protect not only the wonders of nature, but also the harsh realities,” Katmai National Park and Preserve said in a statement.

“Each bear seen on the webcams is competing with others to survive.”

Every year brown bears from the national park devour dozens of salmon a day along the Brooks River with the intention of bulking up before winter.

Twelve bears are chosen for the Fat Bear Week bracket and fans can vote online to decide the winner.

Among the contestants this year is the 2023 champion, Grazer, who is a mother raising her first cub.

Last year’s runner-up, Chunk, has yet to secure the title.

Over the past 10 years the competition has grown from a one-day event with 1,700 votes to a worldwide weeklong celebration.

Nearly 1.4 million votes were cast from more than 100 countries in 2023, according to Katmai Conservancy and Explore.org, which help organise the event.

Fans can vote on Explore.org’s website every day of the seven-day competition.

A winner will be announced 8 October.

Atul Kumar, 18, was ecstatic when he found out in June that he had passed a tough examination that would allow him to join a prestigious technology college in India.

But then came the next step: paying 17,500 rupees ($281; £156) online to confirm his admission. It was a big amount for the family from Muzaffarnagar in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

His father managed to borrow the money, but Atul says he missed the online fee deadline by a few seconds, partly due to technical issues.

The family didn’t give up, filing petitions and court cases. This week, India’s top court stepped in and ordered the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Dhanbad, to restore Atul’s admission.

The Supreme Court invoked its extraordinary powers granted by India’s constitution, saying that “we cannot allow such a young talented boy to go away”.

The IITs are India’s top technology institutes, attracting more than a million candidates for nearly 18,000 seats in 23 colleges spread across the country. Students spend years in private coaching centres to prepare for the exams, and parents believe joining an IIT is a ticket to success.

Atul’s story has made headlines in India because of his financially deprived background and the challenges he overcame.

Atul is from the Dalit community, which lies at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy and is among the most marginalised in the country.

His father Rajendra Kumar earns about 450 rupees ($5; £4) a day as a daily wage labourer and his mother weaves cots at home.

But Rajendra Kumar says that nothing was more important to him than his children’s education. He even sold his house once to fund his eldest son’s studies, he told the BBC.

Two of Atul’s brothers are studying engineering at reputed colleges, while a third is doing a bachelor’s degree from a college in Muzaffarnagar.

Atul knew he also had to study hard, and he did that for hours every day in a dark corner of his house which got little sunlight. Erratic electricity supply made things worse, with daily power cuts lasting hours.

Rajendra Kumar says buying an inverter didn’t make sense as it cost nearly 25,000 rupees.

“But I would have sold the house [again] if needed,” he adds.

Atul had joined a free coaching centre for marginalised students in a nearby city, and this year was his last out of the two attempts allowed in IIT entrance examinations.

When Atul passed the exam, his father asked for help from a local moneylender. But the man backed out two hours before the fee deadline.

The father then had to turn to his friends, who immediately chipped in with 14,000 rupees. Rajendra Kumar dipped into his savings for the remaining 3,500 rupees.

He quickly deposited the amount in his eldest son’s bank account, while Atul logged in to complete the formalities.

By then, he had just 180 seconds left for the deadline.

“We tried to complete the task that requires many more minutes’ work in three minutes,” Rajendra Kumar said.

But the portal froze suddenly, he says, and Atul missed the deadline.

In shock, no-one in the family ate for a day.

Atul’s coaching centre reached out to IIT Dhanbad but his petition says they did not help him. The desperate family wrote emails to several college authorities and moved another court, but nothing worked.

The only option left now was the Supreme Court. In 2021, the court had allowed a Dalit student to join IIT Bombay after he also couldn’t pay his admission fee on time due to financial and technical difficulties.

Atul and his father contacted that student who put them in touch with the lawyer who fought his case.

In the Supreme Court, IIT Dhanbad argued that Atul had logged into the payment portal at 3pm, which indicated that it was not a last-minute attempt. It also pointed out that Atul was sent multiple reminders through text messages, well before the deadline.

But the court asked IIT why it was so keen to oppose his admission.

The court observed that there was no reason why the petitioner would not have paid the amount if he had the means to do so and ordered IIT Dhanbad to create an additional seat for Atul in the current batch.

The Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud then wished him luck in his studies.

“All the best, do well!,” he said.

A doctor charged in the drug-related death of actor Matthew Perry has pleaded guilty in the case.

Dr Mark Chavez changed his plea to guilty in a Los Angeles court to a charge of conspiring to distribute the surgical anaesthetic ketamine.

Chavez, 54, operated a ketamine clinic and sold ketamine lozenges to Dr Salvador Plasencia, who supplied them to Perry, the star of NBC sitcom Friends.

Chavez is one of five people charged in Perry’s death. The 54-year-old actor was found dead in his backyard jacuzzi in southern California in October 2023.

A post-mortem examination found a high concentration of the drug ketamine in his blood and determined “acute effects” of the substance had killed him.

Ketamine is used as a treatment for depression, anxiety and pain.

In his plea agreement, Chavez admitted he obtained ketamine from both his former clinic and a wholesale distributor through a fraudulent prescription.

Prosecutors said Perry’s assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, worked with the two doctors to provide the actor with more than $50,000 (£38,000) of ketamine in the weeks before his death.

According to the indictment, the two medical doctors exchanged texts discussing how much they could charge Perry for vials of the drug, with one message reading: “I wonder how much this moron will pay.”

The plea allows Chavez to plead guilty to a lesser charge for his co-operation in the investigation, though he could still face up to 10 years in prison.

“He has accepted responsibility. He is co-operating,” his attorney told the court.

Chavez has turned over his passport and agreed to surrender his medical licence immediately.

He is free on bail until sentencing on 2 April 2025.

Iranians have been expressing a mixture of pride, uncertainty and fear since their country launched a large-scale ballistic missile attack on Israel on Tuesday night.

Within minutes of the attack starting, Persian social media feeds were filled with shaky videos showing the flashes of the missiles flying overhead.

Iran’s state television broadcast pictures of groups of people cheering on the streets, waving flags and chanting “Death to Israel”.

But the mood was different online, with not everyone expressing support for the attack.

Some shared tense scenes and heated debates about a possible war between the arch-foes, after decades of keeping their conflict largely in the shadows.

The contrasting reactions laid bare the deep divisions in Iran, where there is widespread discontent at the clerical establishment and frustration over the economic troubles caused by sanctions.

On one side of the debate are those who support the government’s actions with nationalist pride, while on the other are those who fear war, economic collapse and further suppression of domestic reform movements.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Tuesday’s missile strike successfully targeted Israeli military and intelligence bases and that it was retaliation for recent killings of the leaders of its allies Hamas and Hezbollah.

The Israeli military described the attack as “indiscriminate” and said that while it had been largely thwarted by air defences, there had been casualties and millions of Israelis had been sent running to bomb shelters.

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Iran will pay for the “big mistake”.

For many supporters of the Iranian government, the attack represented a proud moment of defiance.

“Bravo to [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei! Bravo to the Revolutionary Guards!” shouted a young woman in a clip that went viral.

Such sentiment frustrated other Iranians online.

“Please distinguish between the people and the Revolutionary Guards; we are under immense pressure,” pleaded a middle-aged man in a video shared on social media.

Some Iranians felt the strike was an unnecessary provocation that would only result in making their lives worse.

“We have no choice but to protect our country, but we are the ones who suffer the consequences,” said a concerned resident of the capital, Tehran.

In the hours after the strikes, rumours surfaced that Israel might respond by targeting Iran’s oil infrastructure, which is an important part of the country’s economy.

Videos quickly surfaced showing petrol stations overwhelmed, with long queues of people as they rushed to fill up their vehicles, fearing future shortages.

The missile attack has also diminished hopes for diplomatic progress with the West and other countries in the region.

The election of Masoud Pezeshkian as the new president in July had sparked optimism among those with moderate views. Some people saw him as a potential bridge in easing regional tensions.

But one BBC Persian viewer lamented that “this attack is another step away from diplomacy and a step closer to conflict”.

“I fear this war might be used as an excuse to intensify the crackdown of us, who are fighting for freedom,” a young activist said, referring to the nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests that erupted two years ago.

Many worry that a new conflict could not only undermine calls for reform, but also empower the government to further suppress internal dissent.

Unlike after previous escalations, this time there’s a growing fear of a potentially strong retaliatory response from Israel.

And many believe that Israel’s advanced military capabilities could bring unprecedented destruction if a full-scale war broke out.

“No-one wants war, not the people, not even the officials,” said a commentator on social media.

This sense of vulnerability has made the situation feel more precarious than ever before.

Amid the growing tensions, some people even called for regime change.

“The only way to save Iran is not through war, but through toppling the current regime,” said another BBC News Persian viewer, urging the West to support Iranians in their struggle against the government.

However, many believe the country’s future should be decided internally, free from any foreign intervention, to avoid the potential chaos that outside interference might cause.

The UK has announced it is giving up sovereignty of a remote but strategically important cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean after more than half a century.

The deal – reached after years of negotiations – will see the UK hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move.

This includes the tropical atoll of Diego Garcia, used by the US government as a military base for its navy ships and long-range bomber aircraft.

The announcement, made in a joint statement by the UK and Mauritian Prime Ministers, ends decades of often fractious negotiations between the two countries.

The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia – a key factor enabling the deal to go forward at a time of growing geopolitical rivalries in the region between Western countries, India, and China.

• The BBC visits the secretive Chagos Islands military base

The deal is still subject to finalisation of a treaty, but both sides have promised to complete it as quickly as possible.

“This is a seminal moment in our relationship and a demonstration of our enduring commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes and the rule of law,” the statement from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth read.

The leaders also said they were committed “to ensure the long-term, secure and effective operation of the existing base on Diego Garcia which plays a vital role in regional and global security”.

The treaty will also “address wrongs of the past and demonstrate the commitment of both parties to support the welfare of Chagossians”.

The UK will provide a package of financial support to Mauritius, including annual payments and infrastructure investment.

Mauritius will also be able to begin a programme of resettlement on the Chagos Islands, but not on Diego Garcia.

There, the UK will ensure operation of the military base for “an initial period” of 99 years.

US President Joe Biden welcomed the “historic agreement”, saying it was a “clear demonstration that through diplomacy and partnership, countries can overcome long-standing historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes”.

He said it secured the future of a key military base which “plays a vital role in national, regional, and global security.”

Amongst the Chagossians, opinions are divided. Isabelle Charlot, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme, said the deal brought back hopes her family could return to her father’s island “roots”.

Plans for the Mauritius government to arrange resettlement would mean a “place that we can call home – where we will be free,” she said.

But Frankie Bontemps, a second generation Chagossian in the UK, told the BBC that he felt “betrayed” and “angry” at the news because “Chagossians have never been involved” in the negotiations.

“We remain powerless and voiceless in determining our own future and the future of our homeland”, he said, and called for the full inclusion of Chagossians in drafting the treaty.

In recent years, the UK has faced rising diplomatic isolation over its claim to what it refers to as the British Indian Ocean Territory, with various United Nations bodies, including its top court and general assembly, overwhelmingly siding with Mauritius and demanding the UK surrender what some have called its “last colony in Africa”.

The government of Mauritius has long argued that it was illegally forced to give the Chagos Islands away in return for its own independence from the UK in 1968.

At the time, the British government had already negotiated a secret deal with the US, agreeing to lease it the largest atoll, Diego Garcia, for use as a military base.

Britain later apologised for forcibly removing more than 1,000 islanders from the entire archipelago and promised to hand the islands to Mauritius when they were no longer needed for strategic purposes.

But until very recently, the UK insisted that Mauritius itself had no legitimate claim to the islands.

For decades, the tiny island nation of Mauritius struggled to win any serious international support on the issue.

A handful of Chagos islanders, who’d been forced to abandon their homes in the late 1960s and early 70s, repeatedly took the British government to court.

But it was only recently that international opinion began to shift.

African nations began to speak with one voice on the issue, pushing the UK hard on the issue of decolonialisation.

Then Brexit left many European nations reluctant to continue backing the UK’s stance in international forums.

The Mauritian government went on the attack, accusing the UK government of verbal threats.

And the Mauritians began to wage an increasingly sophisticated campaign – at the UN, in courts, and in the media – even landing and planting a flag on the archipelago without British authorisation.

The negotiations that brought about Thursday’s deal began under the previous UK government.

But the timing of this breakthrough reflects a growing sense of urgency in international affairs, not least regarding Ukraine, with the UK keen to remove the Chagos issue as an obstacle to winning more global support, particularly from African nations, with the prospect of a second Trump presidency looming.

The Chagos islanders themselves – some in Mauritius and the Seychelles, but others living in Crawley in Sussex – do not speak with one voice on the fate of their homeland.

Some are determined to return to live on the isolated islands, some are more focused on their rights and status in the UK, while others argue that the Chagos archipelago’s status should not be resolved by outsiders.

A backlash from some voices in the UK can be expected, even though successive Conservative and Labour prime ministers have been working towards the same broad goal.

Tory leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat argued the deal had been “negotiated against Britain’s interest” and it was “disgraceful” that such talks had begun under the previous Conservative government.

He called it a “shameful retreat undermining our security and leaving our allies exposed”, while the former foreign secretary James Cleverly called it a “weak” deal.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the deal will “address the wrongs against the Chagossians of the past but it looks like it will continue the crimes long into the future”.

“It does not guarantee that the Chagossians will return to their homeland, appears to explicitly ban them from the largest island, Diego Garcia for another century, and does not mention the reparations they are all owed to rebuild their future”, Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor at HRW said in a statement.

There must be meaningful consultations with the Chagossians, Mr Baldwin said, or the UK, US and now Mauritius will be responsible for “a still-ongoing colonial crime.”

But there can be no doubting the historic significance of this moment.

Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its vast global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally.

The remaining British overseas territories are: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands. There are also two sovereign base areas on Cyprus under British jurisdiction.

You can get in touch via this link.

Iran launched almost 200 ballistic missiles towards Israel on Tuesday night.

The Israeli military said most of the missiles were intercepted, but that a small number struck central and southern Israel. The only person reported to have been killed was a Palestinian man in the occupied West Bank.

It was Iran’s second such attack on Israel this year, after it launched about 300 missiles and drones in April.

Here’s what we know so far.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the attack involved more than 180 missiles, which tallied with Iranian state media reports saying that about 200 missiles were launched.

The US said the attack was “nearly twice the scope” of what happened in April.

Sirens sounded as Israel’s entire 10 million population was told to head into bomb shelters at about 19:30 local time (16:30 GMT) on Tuesday.

Social media videos verified by the BBC showed missiles flying over the densely populated cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem less than 15 minutes later. Explosions could be heard overhead as air defences intercepted the incoming missiles.

The footage also showed several missiles hitting areas around the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert and the headquarters of the Mossad spy agency near Tel Aviv.

“There were a small number of hits in the centre of Israel, and other hits in southern Israel,” said IDF spokesman Rear Adm Daniel Hagari. “The majority of the incoming missiles were intercepted by Israel and a defensive coalition led by the United States.”

The Israeli military confirmed on Wednesday some of its air bases had been hit during the attack, but said no weapons, aircraft or critical infrastructure was damaged and the air force’s operational abilities were not affected.

Iranian state media cited the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) as saying the missiles hit Nevatim, Hatzerim and Tel Nof airbases, as well as Israeli tanks in Netzarim – a reference to an Israeli military corridor in central Gaza – and gas installations in the southern city of Ashkelon.

The semi-official Tasnim news agency said Iran had for the first time used Fattah hypersonic missiles that it claimed “cannot be intercepted”, as well as Emad and Qadr ballistic missiles. However, the IDF said the barrage did not include any hypersonic missiles, according to Israeli media.

On Wednesday, the IDF said several air force bases were damaged in the missile attack, but that no aircraft were damaged, according to Israeli media reports.

“Only administrative buildings and peripheral components were hit,” the IDF was quoted as saying, while adding that “upcoming missions remain unaffected”.

The IDF also reportedly said that damage to infrastructure and property in civilian areas was “only minor” and was likely to have been caused by shrapnel from intercepted missiles.

Just north of Tel Aviv on Wednesday, close to the Mossad’s headquarters, a BBC correspondent found several badly damaged cars and a pile of earth next to a road where a missile impact was said to have caused a crater between 8m and 10m deep.

The nearby municipality of Hod HaSharon also said about 100 houses were damaged by a missile explosion and shrapnel. “This was a very powerful impact with a huge risk of claiming human lives,” the municipality said.

And a video released by the IDF showed the head of its Home Front Command visiting a school that was hit by a missile in the Gedera area, just to the east of Ashkelon, causing extensive damage to a classroom.

Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service paramedics treated two people with light injuries from shrapnel in the Tel Aviv area, as well as some people with minor injuries caused by falling as they moved to shelters.

However, the Palestinian Civil Defence authority said a Palestinian man was killed when he was hit by a falling missile fragment in the West Bank city of Jericho.

CCTV footage showed the rear half of a large, black missile plummeting directly on to a man as he walks along a road at night. It was not clear if the missile had been intercepted.

The New York Times identified him as Sameh al-Asali, a 37-year-old Palestinian construction worker from Gaza who had been sheltering in Jericho since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas last October.

The IDF has not provided details about how the missiles were shot down, besides saying that Israeli and US-led forces were involved and that Israeli air defences “operated impressively, with high rates of interception”.

It also did not say exactly how many were intercepted, explaining that it wanted to avoid “giving Iran and Hezbollah information that will help them learn lessons”. The IDF claimed that 99% of the Iranian projectiles launched in April’s attack were intercepted.

Israel has a sophisticated system of air defences, the best-known of which is the Iron Dome. It is designed to intercept short-range rockets of the sort fired by Hamas and Hezbollah.

While it was used to defend against some elements of Iran’s last attack in April, other elements of the country’s “layered” defence systems probably did the bulk of the work on Tuesday.

David’s Sling – a joint US-Israeli manufactured system – is used to intercept medium to long-range rockets, as well as ballistic and cruise missiles. And when it comes to long-range ballistic missiles, which fly outside the Earth’s atmosphere, Israel has the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 interceptors.

The Pentagon said two US Navy destroyers deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean fired a dozen interceptors as part of the efforts to defend Israel, but that it was not known whether they took down any of the missiles.

UK Defence Secretary John Healey said British forces had “played their part in attempts to prevent further escalation”. But the BBC understands that British military jets did not shoot down any Iranian missiles.

Verified footage also showed missile interceptions over the Jordanian capital, Amman. The Arab kingdom’s forces also shot down a number of missiles during Iran’s last attack in April.

• How do Israel’s air defence systems work?

The IRGC said in a statement that the missile barrage was retaliation for what it called the “violation of Iran’s sovereignty and the martyrdom” of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed by an explosion in Tehran in July that Iranian officials blamed on Israel, but Israeli officials did not claim.

The statement described the barrage as having been “in line with the legitimate right of the nation to defend itself”.

It also said the attack was in response to the Israeli air strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut last Friday that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Brig-Gen Abbas Nilforoushan, the operations commander of the IRGC’s overseas arm, the Quds Force.

A senior Iranian official told Reuters news agency the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had personally given the order for Tuesday’s missile attack.

The escalation also came hours after Israeli troops began an invasion of southern Lebanon to remove what the military said were “Hezbollah terror targets” in border villages that posed a threat to residents of northern Israel.

Israel has gone on the offensive against the Shia Islamist political and military organisation after almost a year of cross-border hostilities sparked by the war with Hamas in Gaza. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are backed by Iran and designated as terrorist organisations by Israel, the US, UK and others.

Iran does not recognise Israel’s right to exist and seeks its eradication. It has spent years building a network of armed groups across the Middle East, known as the “Axis of Resistance”, which are opposed to Israel and the US.

Israel believes that Iran poses an existential threat and has spent years engaged in a shadow war with Iran that has is now increasingly out in the open.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told a cabinet meeting on Tuesday night that Iran’s missile attack “failed”, having been “thwarted thanks to Israel’s air defence array”.

“Iran made a big mistake tonight and it will pay for it,” he added. “The regime in Iran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves and our determination to retaliate against our enemies.”

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant also vowed vengeance.

“Iran has not learned a simple lesson – those who attack the state of Israel pay a heavy price,” he said in a statement.

US President Joe Biden reaffirmed US support for Israel after the missile attack, describing it as “defeated and ineffective”.

Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin also condemned what he called “this outrageous act of aggression by Iran”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the UK stood with Israel and recognised her “right to self-defence”.

France and Japan also condemned Iran’s attack, but also called on all parties to avoid further escalation.

The US told Israel before the attack that it had intelligence indicating that Iran was preparing to launch ballistic missiles imminently, which allowed the IDF to warn Israeli civilians to be prepared to seek shelter.

However, US officials said after the attack that they had received no warning from the Iranian government.

Iran’s mission to the UN also said in a statement: “No notice was given to the United States prior to our response.”

The Wall Street Journal citing Arab officials in the region as saying that Iran “telegraphed” to Arab countries on Monday night that it was going to launch an attack similar in scale to April’s.

The officials also said Israel had sent clear messages back to Iran that it would respond to any attack on Israeli territory with a strikes that targeted Iranian nuclear or oil facilities.

The IDF’s Chief of Staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, said: “We will choose when to exact the price and demonstrate our precise and surprising offensive capabilities, in accordance with the directive of the political echelon.”

Axos cited Israeli officials as saying that Israel’s response would be “significant” and that it could target oil production facilities inside Iran and other strategic sites.

Some analysts suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities could also be targeted.

President Biden said the US was “fully supportive of Israel” and that he would discuss a response with Israel’s prime minister.

But Biden made clear that he saw any Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites as off limits. Asked by reporters whether he would support such an attack, he said: “The answer is no.”

The IRGC warned that Iran’s response would be “crushing” if Israel dared to retaliate.

Israel responded to April’s attack by launching a missile that hit an air defence battery at an Iranian airbase, following Western calls for restraint.

The huge asteroid that hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was not alone, scientists have confirmed.

A second, smaller space rock smashed into the sea off the coast of West Africa creating a large crater during the same era.

It would have been a “catastrophic event”, the scientists say, causing a tsunami at least 800m high to tear across the Atlantic ocean.

Dr Uisdean Nicholson from Heriot-Watt University first found the Nadir crater in 2022, but a cloud of uncertainty hung over how it was really formed.

Now Dr Nicholson and his colleagues are sure that the 9km depression was caused by an asteroid hurtling into the seabed.

They cannot date the event exactly, or say whether it came before or after the asteroid which left the 180km-wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico. That one ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

But they say the smaller rock also came at the end of the Cretaceous period when they went extinct. As it crashed into Earth’s atmosphere, it would have formed a fireball.

“Imagine the asteroid was hitting Glasgow and you’re in Edinburgh, around 50 km away. The fireball would be about 24 times the size of the Sun in the sky – enough to set trees and plants on fire in Edinburgh,” Dr Nicholson says.

An extremely loud air blast would have followed, before seismic shaking about the size of a magnitude 7 earthquake.

Huge amounts of water probably left the seabed, and later cascaded back down creating unique imprints on the floor.

It is unusual for such large asteroids to crash out of our solar system on course for our planet within a short time of each other.

But the researchers don’t know why two hit Earth close together.

The asteroid that created the Nadir crater measured around 450-500m wide, and scientists think it hit Earth at about 72,000km/h.

The nearest humans have come to this scale of event was the Tunguska event in 1908 when a 50-metre asteroid exploded in the skies above Siberia.

The Nadir asteroid was about the size of Bennu, which is currently the most hazardous object orbiting near Earth.

Scientists say the most probable date that Bennu could hit Earth is 24 September 2182, according to Nasa. But it is still just a probability of 1 in 2,700.

There has never been an asteroid impact of this size in human history, and scientists normally have to study eroded craters on Earth or images of craters on other planets.

To further understand the Nadir crater, Dr Nicholson and team analysed high-resolution 3D data from a geophysical company called TGS.

Most craters are eroded but this one was well-preserved, meaning the scientists could look further into the rock levels.

“This is the first time that we’ve ever been able to see inside an impact crater like this – it’s really exciting,” says Dr Nicholson, adding there are just 20 marine craters in the world but none have been studied in detail like this.

The findings are reported in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.

Atul Kumar, 18, was ecstatic when he found out in June that he had passed a tough examination that would allow him to join a prestigious technology college in India.

But then came the next step: paying 17,500 rupees ($281; £156) online to confirm his admission. It was a big amount for the family from Muzaffarnagar in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

His father managed to borrow the money, but Atul says he missed the online fee deadline by a few seconds, partly due to technical issues.

The family didn’t give up, filing petitions and court cases. This week, India’s top court stepped in and ordered the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Dhanbad, to restore Atul’s admission.

The Supreme Court invoked its extraordinary powers granted by India’s constitution, saying that “we cannot allow such a young talented boy to go away”.

The IITs are India’s top technology institutes, attracting more than a million candidates for nearly 18,000 seats in 23 colleges spread across the country. Students spend years in private coaching centres to prepare for the exams, and parents believe joining an IIT is a ticket to success.

Atul’s story has made headlines in India because of his financially deprived background and the challenges he overcame.

Atul is from the Dalit community, which lies at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy and is among the most marginalised in the country.

His father Rajendra Kumar earns about 450 rupees ($5; £4) a day as a daily wage labourer and his mother weaves cots at home.

But Rajendra Kumar says that nothing was more important to him than his children’s education. He even sold his house once to fund his eldest son’s studies, he told the BBC.

Two of Atul’s brothers are studying engineering at reputed colleges, while a third is doing a bachelor’s degree from a college in Muzaffarnagar.

Atul knew he also had to study hard, and he did that for hours every day in a dark corner of his house which got little sunlight. Erratic electricity supply made things worse, with daily power cuts lasting hours.

Rajendra Kumar says buying an inverter didn’t make sense as it cost nearly 25,000 rupees.

“But I would have sold the house [again] if needed,” he adds.

Atul had joined a free coaching centre for marginalised students in a nearby city, and this year was his last out of the two attempts allowed in IIT entrance examinations.

When Atul passed the exam, his father asked for help from a local moneylender. But the man backed out two hours before the fee deadline.

The father then had to turn to his friends, who immediately chipped in with 14,000 rupees. Rajendra Kumar dipped into his savings for the remaining 3,500 rupees.

He quickly deposited the amount in his eldest son’s bank account, while Atul logged in to complete the formalities.

By then, he had just 180 seconds left for the deadline.

“We tried to complete the task that requires many more minutes’ work in three minutes,” Rajendra Kumar said.

But the portal froze suddenly, he says, and Atul missed the deadline.

In shock, no-one in the family ate for a day.

Atul’s coaching centre reached out to IIT Dhanbad but his petition says they did not help him. The desperate family wrote emails to several college authorities and moved another court, but nothing worked.

The only option left now was the Supreme Court. In 2021, the court had allowed a Dalit student to join IIT Bombay after he also couldn’t pay his admission fee on time due to financial and technical difficulties.

Atul and his father contacted that student who put them in touch with the lawyer who fought his case.

In the Supreme Court, IIT Dhanbad argued that Atul had logged into the payment portal at 3pm, which indicated that it was not a last-minute attempt. It also pointed out that Atul was sent multiple reminders through text messages, well before the deadline.

But the court asked IIT why it was so keen to oppose his admission.

The court observed that there was no reason why the petitioner would not have paid the amount if he had the means to do so and ordered IIT Dhanbad to create an additional seat for Atul in the current batch.

The Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud then wished him luck in his studies.

“All the best, do well!,” he said.

Israel has invaded southern Lebanon in a dramatic escalation of its conflict with Hezbollah.

The Israeli ground operation began on Monday night, days after an air strike killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iran-backed armed group.

Hezbollah has fired rockets into northern Israel as Lebanon has endured two weeks of aerial bombardment that Lebanese authorities say has killed more than 1,000 people and forced up to a million to flee their homes.

Israel has a decades-long history of conflict with Hezbollah but the war in Gaza has sparked a year of deadly cross-border fighting between them.

We will be continually updating maps in this page to help explain the conflict.

• What is Hezbollah and why is Israel attacking Lebanon?

Lebanon is a small country with a population of about 5.5 million people, which borders Syria to the north and east, Israel to the south, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. It is about 170km (105 miles) away from Cyprus.

Israeli troops and tanks that had gathered close to the border crossed into Lebanon on Tuesday but it is unclear exactly where they are operating.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has said it is carrying out “limited, localised, and targeted ground raids” in southern Lebanon to dismantle what it calls Hezbollah’s “terrorist infrastructure”.

Israeli troops are fighting directly with Hezbollah fighters on the ground, according to the BBC’s Nick Beake who is in northern Israel.

Several Israeli soldiers have been killed in mortar attacks and ambushes by Hezbollah during operations in southern Lebanon aimed at “eliminating terrorists,” according to the IDF.

Hezbollah said its fighters had clashed with Israeli forces in Adaisseh, Kafr Kila, Maroun al-Ras and Yaroun – all Lebanese villages close to the border with Israel.

A ground operation in southern Lebanon comes with many risks for Israeli forces. Unlike the flat coastal plains of Gaza, southern Lebanon has rolling hills and some mountainous terrain that makes it difficult for tanks to move easily without fear of being ambushed.

Hezbollah is also thought to have a network of tunnels in the region, with the group having been preparing for another full-scale conflict with Israel since the 34-day war in 2006.

As part of its invasion of southern Lebanon, the IDF has ordered people living in some villages to evacuate, telling those remaining to leave their homes and “immediately head to the north of the Awali River” – which meets the coast about 50km (30 miles) from the border with Israel.

Lebanese civilians have also been warned by the IDF not to use vehicles to travel south across the Litani River, located about 30km (20 miles) north of the border.

About a million people lived in southern Lebanon before the conflict escalated almost a year ago.

Tens of thousands have been fleeing north since Israeli air strikes in the region intensified in late September. The main route for civilians trying to leave the south is the coastal road that runs the length of the country – but areas along that route have been hit by air strikes in recent days.

• How Israel-Hezbollah conflict escalated to a ground invasion

Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon came after nearly two weeks of intense air strikes that Israel’s military says target Hezbollah in the south of the country, the eastern Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Israel says it is hitting Hezbollah sites, including weapons stores and ammunition dumps, but Lebanese officials say more than 100 women and children have been killed.

The majority of the rockets recently fired by Hezbollah have targeted northern areas of Israel. But some rockets have reached further south and damaged homes near the coastal city of Haifa.

There has been almost a year of cross-border hostilities between Israel’s forces and Hezbollah, sparked by the war in Gaza.

Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets at northern Israel during that time, forcing some Israelis living there to flee south, while the IDF has launched air strikes and artillery fire against Hezbollah positions in Lebanon.

As the chart below shows, the number of weekly Israeli attacks on Lebanon more than tripled in the week before the IDF launched its ground invasion. The number of Hezbollah attacks, while small in comparison, also increased in the same week.

Israel has intensified strikes on Beirut, the capital of Lebanon.

The majority of the strikes have hit Dahieh, a southern suburb of the city that is a densely populated area home to thousands of civilians.

The suburb has a strong Hezbollah presence and a series of Israeli strikes on buildings in the area killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September.

There have also been Israeli aerial attacks on locations closer to the centre of the city. A strike on an apartment block close to the Lebanese parliament building on Oct 2 killed several people including rescue officers and paramedics, according to Beirut’s civil defence.

Israel is now engaged in hostilities with armed forces and non-state armed groups in several countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Syria and Iran-backed groups operating in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Iran’s ballistic missile attack against Israel on Tuesday was the latest major escalation.

What happens next is unclear, but Israel has vowed to respond, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing the attack as “a big mistake” that Iran “will pay for”.

• How could Israel respond, and what might Iran do then?

Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” while trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat, and should not escape charges, prosecutors say.

A new court filing challenges Trump’s claim that he should avoid a trial thanks to a recent landmark US Supreme Court ruling. This said American presidents should be immune from prosecution when acting in an “official” capacity.

Trump was president when the alleged offences were committed – but prosecutors say he was acting in a “private” capacity, not an official one.

In response, Trump has repeated false claims that the 2020 vote was “rigged” and suggested the timing of the filing’s release was designed to hurt his 2024 campaign.

In an interview with NewsNation, he also criticised Special Counsel Jack Smith, the lead prosecutor in the election interference probe who submitted the filing.

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan released the document – filed by Mr Smith last week – with redactions on Wednesday.

This is one of four criminal cases Trump has faced since being voted out in 2020 – another of which led to a historic conviction in New York.

He is accused of seeking to illegally block the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, but denies wrongdoing.

The new 165-page document presents the clearest view yet of how Mr Smith’s team would pursue their case, having tweaked the wording of their charges after the Supreme Court’s intervention.

It gives details of Trump’s alleged scheme, including his actions when his supporters rioted at the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. It also outlines the efforts of Mike Pence, the vice-president at the time, to talk him down.

The issue remains prominent in US politics almost four years later, ahead of the 2024 election in November, which will be contested by Trump and Kamala Harris.

It came up in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, during which JD Vance refused to answer whether Trump, his running mate for 2024, lost in 2020.

• Trump has some immunity from prosecution, Supreme Court rules
• Trump faces revised 2020 charges after Supreme Court ruling
• A guide to Trump’s criminal cases
• Donald Trump: A quick guide to the Republican presidential nominee

The court filing may represent Mr Smith’s last chance to set out his case against Trump.

The case has been frequently delayed since charges were filed by the Department of Justice (DoJ) more than a year ago. Trump will not face trial before November’s election – and he may seek to have the case dropped if he wins.

Trump’s lawyers fought to keep the latest filing sealed. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung has called it “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional”.

In the newly-released document, Mr Smith and his team try to navigate the summer Supreme Court ruling – which dented their case – by narrowing their scope.

The Supreme Court ruling did not apply immunity to unofficial acts. The prosecutors argue that although Trump was still in office when attempting to overturn the 2020 vote, his attempts related to his campaign and his life as a private citizen. They call it a “private criminal effort”.

The court should therefore “determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as he would any other citizen,” the filing says.

The filing lays out several instances in which Pence, expressed doubt about his boss’s voter fraud claims and tried to persuade him to accept he lost the election.

In the court document, prosecutors say Trump was not upset when he learned his vice-president had been rushed to a secure location as rioters stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. “So what?” he allegedly said, when informed of the scenes.

Pence would later go public about his falling out with Trump in the wake of the storming of Congress, when some rioters shouted “hang Mike Pence” because the vice-president refused to obstruct the certification of election results.

The filing also alleges that Trump always planned to declare victory no matter the result, and laid the groundwork for this long before election day. It also accuses him of knowingly spreading false claims about the vote that he himself deemed “crazy”.

Mr Smith also provides several new details about the Trump campaign’s alleged role in sowing chaos in battleground states, where a large number of mail-in ballots were being counted in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the Democratic stronghold of Detroit, Michigan, when a large batch of ballots seemed to be in favour of Biden, a Trump campaign operative allegedly told his colleague to “find a reason” that something was wrong with the ballots to give him “options to file litigation”.

The filing also claims that Trump and his allies, including lawyer Rudy Giuliani, sought to “exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” on 6 January 2021 to delay the election certification. They allegedly did this by calling senators and leaving voicemails that asked them to object to the state electors.

Trump said on Wednesday that the case would end with his “complete victory”.

A trial date has not been set.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• ANALYSIS: Only one candidate is talking about China
• DISINFO: Pro- and anti-Trump voters united by one belief
• 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.

Weeping relatives and friends mourned the 20 children and three teachers who died in a horrific bus fire in Thailand at a funeral on Thursday.

White and gold coffins lined the hall at Wat Khao Phraya Sangkharam School in Lan Sak, a small town in central Thailand. Relatives placed foods, clothes and toys on some of them.

A representative of the Thai royal family poured water on the coffins – a Buddhist funeral rite that symbolises purification – and placed wreaths.

Police have not determined the cause of Tuesday’s fire, which happened while the group was on a field trip. The bus driver, who turned himself in, has been charged with reckless driving causing deaths and injuries.

Nineteen children and three teachers are reported to have survived the fire. Sixteen of them are being treated in hospital for injuries. The ages of the children on board remain unclear, but the school caters for pupils between three and 15 years old.

Hundreds of people, including several cabinet ministers, attended the mass funeral. Among them was Education Minister Permpoon Chidchob, who handed out financial assistance to the victims’ families.

Authorities have carried out “merit-making ceremonies” or Buddhist rituals for those who lost their lives, the minister said.

“We made merit and prayed also for the students who are still at the hospital for their speedy recovery,” he said.

Some residents and monks in Lan Sak stayed up on Wednesday to receive the bodies from a mortuary in the capital, Bangkok.

A funeral procession was held earlier on Thursday, which saw families weeping as they clutched framed photographs of the victims.

Buddhist prayers for the victims will go on for the next four days, followed by a royal cremation ceremony next week ordered by Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn.

Across Thailand, teachers and students laid white flowers in their schools to mourn those who died in what is believed to be Thailand’s deadliest traffic accident in a decade.

The bus driver had told investigators the vehicle lost balance and scrapped a concrete barrier. Sparks of the collision could have set off the blaze, deputy regional police chief Chayanont Meesati said on Wednesday.

The bus, which was fuelled by compressed natural gas, had 11 gas canisters although it was permitted to install only six. The company that owned that bus told local broadcaster ThaiPBS that the vehicle had passed safety standards.

The Thai government has since ordered an inspection of all passenger buses equipped with compressed natural gas.

Tael Narach, the grandmother of a six-year-old victim told Reuters news agency she “fainted right away” on Tuesday when she got news of the fire from her son-in-law.

“I want justice and support (to get justice) for my grandchild,” said Tael, 69.

Subramaniam Iswaran, a senior cabinet minister in Singapore’s government, has been sentenced to 12 months in prison in a high-profile trial that has gripped the wealthy nation.

Iswaran, 62, pleaded guilty to accepting gifts worth more than S$403,000 ($311,882; £234,586) while in public office, as well as obstructing the course of justice.

The gifts included tickets to the Formula 1 Grand Prix, a Brompton T-line bicycle, alcohol and a ride on a private jet.

Justice Vincent Hoong, who oversaw the case in Singapore’s High Court, emphasised that the former transport minister’s crimes were an abuse of power and jeopardised people’s trust in public institutions.

He also noted that Iswaran seemed to think he would be acquitted.

“In his letter to the prime minister, he stated he rejected (the charges) and expressed his strong belief he would be acquitted,” said Justice Hoong.

“Thus I have difficulty accepting these are indicative of his remorse.”

Iswaran will report to prison on 7 October.

He will serve his sentence at Changi, the same prison that holds Singapore’s death row prisoners, where the cells don’t have fans and most inmates sleep on straw mats instead of beds.

He is Singapore’s first political figure to be tried in court in nearly 50 years.

The nation prides itself on its squeaky clean image and lack of corruption. But that image, and the reputation of the governing People’s Action Party, have taken a hit as a result of Iswaran’s case.

The city state’s lawmakers are among the highest-paid in the world, with some ministers earning more than S$1 million ($758,000). Leaders justify the handsome salaries by saying it combats corruption.

Ministers cannot keep gifts unless they pay the market value of the gift to the government, and they must declare anything they receive from people they have business dealings with.

“It’s not a significant sum over his years of service, but on his salary, he could have very well afforded not to,” said Eugene Tan, an associate professor of law at Singapore Management University.

“I think the public were expecting the court to demonstrate zero tolerance for this sort of conduct.”

Iswaran’s defence team had asked for eight weeks, if the judge deemed prison necessary. His lawyer argued the charges were not an abuse of power and did not disadvantage the government.

Prosecutors meanwhile requested a six to seven-month sentence, saying Iswaran was “more than a passive acceptor of gifts”.

“If public servants could accept substantial gifts in such a situation, over the long term, public confidence in the impartiality and integrity of government would be severely undermined,” said Deputy Attorney-General Tai Wei Shyong.

“Not punishing such acts would send a signal that such acts are tolerated.”

Justice Hoong noted on Thursday that holders of high office have a particularly large impact on the public interest.

“Such persons set the tone for public servants in conducting themselves in accordance with high standards of integrity and must be expected to avoid any perception that they are susceptible to influence by pecuniary benefits,” he said.

While in government, Iswaran held multiple portfolios in the prime minister’s office: in home affairs, communications and, most recently, the transport ministry.

Prior to last year, the most recent case of a politician facing a major corruption probe was in 1986, when national development minister Teh Cheang Wan was investigated for accepting bribes. He took his own life before he was charged.

Before that, former minister of state for environment Wee Toon Boon was sentenced to 18 months jail in 1975 for a case involving more than $800,000.

Allegations against Iswaran first surfaced in July of last year. Nearly all the charges against him stem from his dealings involving billionaire property tycoon Ong Beng Seng, who helped bring the Formula 1 Grand Prix to Singapore. Ong Beng Seng is also under investigation.

When Iswaran discovered authorities were investigating Mr Ong’s associates he requested that Mr Ong bill him for his flight to Doha, Justice Hoong said on Thursday.

He acted with deliberation and premeditation, and in asking to be billed and paying for the ticket was trying to avoid investigations into the gifts, the judge added.

Iswaran was originally charged with 35 counts, including two counts of corruption, one charge of obstructing justice and 32 counts of “obtaining, as a public servant, valuable things”. But at a trial in late September, Iswaran pleaded guilty to lesser offences after the corruption charges were amended.

Lawyers did not confirm whether a plea deal had been reached.

“The system still works and there is still that public commitment. But this particular case is certainly not going to win the party any favours,” Mr Tan said.

The case against Iswaran is one of a series of political scandals that has rocked the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which has long touted its strong stance against corruption and amoral behaviour.

In 2023, a separate corruption probe into the real estate dealings of two other ministers eventually cleared them of impropriety, while the speaker of Parliament resigned because of an extramarital affair with another lawmaker.

The property scandal raised questions about the privileged positions that ministers have in Singapore at a time of rising living costs.

Singapore must hold a general election by November 2025. The PAP’s share of the popular vote declined in the most recent elections, and it is facing a challenge to its decades-long one party dominance from an increasingly influential opposition party.

The Workers’ Party won a total of 10 seats in parliament in the last election, but has also been rocked by scandal. Its leader, Pritam Singh, has been charged with lying under oath to a parliamentary committee. He has rejected the accusations.

The US Central Intelligence Agency has launched a new drive to recruit informants in China, Iran and North Korea.

The organisation posted messages on its social media accounts in Mandarin, Farsi and Korean on Wednesday, instructing users how to contact it securely.

This latest effort follows a campaign to enlist Russians in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, which the CIA says was a success.

“We want to make sure individuals in other authoritarian regimes know that we’re open for business,” a CIA spokesman said in a statement.

The recruitment messages – which were placed on platforms such as X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram and LinkedIn, as well as on the dark web – asked for individuals’ names, locations and contact details.

Detailed instructions advised users to contact the CIA via its official website using trusted encrypted Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or an anonymous web browser known as the Tor network, which is often used to access the dark web.

“I can’t remember any sort of recruitment effort like this, using YouTube or social media in this way, at least in Korean,” said Mason Richey, associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.

“It seems like they’re basing this off the success they had in Russia – but I would question how effective this will be considering most North Koreans don’t have access to the internet,” he told the BBC.

Professor Richey suggested that the United States may be targeting North Korean traders who informally cross the border with China and might be able to access VPN networks.

US intelligence considers North Korea, Iran and China “hard targets” when it comes to intelligence gathering, given the harsh level of surveillance all countries employ to stamp out dissent.

“This effort represents just one way in which CIA is adapting to a new global environment of increased state repression and global surveillance,” the spy agency’s statement continued.

But Professor Richey questioned the value of any intelligence that the campaign might be able to gather.

“I suppose you have to assume the CIA knows what it’s doing, but you do wonder how many of these discontented people are close enough to power and close enough to the places where important decisions are made,” he said.

“It does, at the very least though, throw some sand in the gears of these counter-intelligence operations,” he added.

American intelligence chiefs, encouraged by efforts in Russia, are nonetheless confident they will reach enough dissatisfied citizens who are willing to contact them with potentially useful information.

“There are plenty of people who have access to information and who are disaffected from the Xi regime in China,” CIA Deputy Director David Cohen told Bloomberg.

“You’ve got people inside who… for lots of different motivations fundamentally do not like the direction that Xi is taking the country and understand that there’s a path to helping their own country by working with us,” he added.

Liu Pengyu, a Chinese embassy spokesman, said the US was waging “an organised and systematic” disinformation campaign against China.

“Any attempts to drive a wedge between the Chinese people and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) or to weaken their close bond will inevitably fail,” Mr Liu said in a statement.

In rolling out a campaign of this scale across different countries, Dr Richey said the United States was giving a good indication of how it sees its national security challenges.

“The US is now convinced that it’s in not just a series of bilateral confrontations with China and Russia and Iran and North Korea – but rather, it’s in a confrontation with an emerging bloc,” said Professor Richey.

“Which obviously recalls a sense of the Cold War.”