At least four hospitals in Lebanon announced on Friday that they were suspending work because of Israeli strikes, while a Hezbollah-affiliated health organisation said that 11 paramedics had been killed in the past 24 hours.

The four closures capped two weeks of Israeli strikes on hospitals and healthcare workers in Lebanon that have shuttered at least 37 facilities and killed dozens of medical staff, according to the World Health Organisation.

Late on Friday night, the Israeli army issued a statement alleging that Hezbollah was using medical vehicles to transport fighters and weapons, warning that it would strike any vehicle it suspected of being used for military purposes.

Hospital staff in southern Lebanon told the BBC that health facilities treating wounded civilians had been hit with direct Israeli strikes. The BBC has approached the IDF for comment.

Dr Mounes Kalakish, director of the Marjayoun governmental hospital in southern Lebanon, told the BBC that the hospital had no choice but to close on Friday after an airstrike hit two ambulances at the hospital’s entrance way on Friday, killing seven paramedics.

“The nurses and doctors were terrified,” he said. “We tried to calm them and carry on working, but it was not possible.”

The emergency director of the hospital, Dr Shoshana Mazraani, said she was sitting at the front of the building when the strike happened. She said that she heard the cries of the paramedics who were hit and ran towards the damaged ambulances, but was warned to stay back by colleagues fearful of a follow up strike.

The Marjayoun hospital had already been hanging on by a thread, Dr Mazraani said, with a core team of just 20 doctors remaining from the centre’s usual 120 staff. The closure on Friday was a “tragedy for the region”, she said.

“We serve a huge population here, many villages. We had 45 inpatient beds, all now empty. We were the only hospital providing dialysis in the region, for example. We have had to turn away emergency patients and tell others to leave.”

Rita Suleiman, the nursing director at the Saint Therese hospital, on the edge of Beirut’s southern suburbs, told the BBC that the hospital had also struggled on after being badly damaged by a strike on Friday but was later forced to suspend all services.

Other hospitals were carrying on with severely limited services. Dr Mohammed Hamadeh, director of the Tebnine hospital, told the BBC on Friday a nearby strike had rocked the building.

“The blast was very close,” he said. “We are still trying to operate but we cannot leave the confines of the hospital because it is too dangerous.”

Late on Friday night, the Salah Ghandour hospital in Bint Jbeil announced it had closed after being “violently shelled”, following an order from the Israeli army to evacuate.

The Israeli army said it was targeting a mosque adjacent to the hospital which it claimed was being used by Hezbollah fighters.

The strikes on healthcare facilities have not been limited to the south of Lebanon. Israel hit a medical centre in central Beirut on Thursday belonging to the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Health Organisation, killing nine and wounding 14. The Israeli army said the strike targeted “terror assets”.

The Lebanese Red Cross said on Thursday that four of its paramedics were wounded in a strike on a convoy evacuating patients, despite the organisation co-ordinating with the Israeli army.

Gabriel Karlsson, country manager in Beirut for the British Red Cross, told the BBC: “Health and aid workers must be able to help those in need without fearing for their own safety. Teams from the Red Cross and Red Crescent are a lifeline, supporting communities tirelessly – they must be protected.”

World Health Organisation director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Thursday that 28 healthcare workers had been killed in Lebanon over the previous 24 hours, and many other healthcare staff were no longer reporting for work because of the strikes.

Dr Kalakish, the director of the Marjayoun hospital, told the BBC that prior to the strike that closed his hospital it was already operating with no anaesthesiologist or other specialists.

Some staff had fled the bombardment for their own safety, he said, while others had been prevented from reaching the hospital because of air strikes on nearby roads.

Lebanon’s Health Minister Firass Abiad said on Thursday that 97 rescue workers had been killed since Hezbollah and Israel began fighting last October.

More than 40 of those – paramedics and firefighters – were in just three days this past week, he said.

In the year 1939, as German tanks and soldiers invaded Poland, a famous Polish artist and his film-star wife pawned off their jewellery and fled the country.

Stefan Norblin and Lena left behind their dream home, which they were in the process of building, and their entire artistic legacy in exchange for safety.

The couple aimed to seek refuge in America and travelled across Romania, Turkey and Iraq, finally arriving in colonial India, where they spent six years.

Their lengthy stopover resulted in the unlikely collaboration between the artist and Indian maharajas (rulers), and gave India some of its finest artworks that blend Western aesthetics with Indian iconography.

Between 1941 and 1946, several Indian kings commissioned Norblin to decorate their palaces with paintings, and even design their interiors in the art deco style – a modernist style that celebrates innovation and technology.

Norblin rose to the occasion by painting beautiful murals of Hindu gods, entire scenes from Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana and even the country’s famed tigers, leopards and elephants in his characteristic blended style.

His paintings can be found in the Umaid Bhawan Palace in Rajasthan state – the home of the ruler of the erstwhile princely state of Jodhpur, which has now been converted into a luxury hotel – as well as the palace of the rulers of Morbi in Gujarat state.

He also painted portraits for the Maharaja of Ramgarh in Bihar state, but these artworks have been lost to time, says Claus-Ullrich Simon, an expert on Norblin, in Chitraanjali – a documentary which chronicles the artist’s works in India.

His murals are grand and vibrant, infused with a sense of movement and emotion. They depict recognisable characteristics of the art deco style, like minimalist, elongated human figures, geometric shapes and bold colours; but they are fused with innovative interpretations of traditional Indian imagery, including the features and postures of Hindu gods.

Norblin was born in 1892 in Warsaw into a wealthy family of industrialists. His father wanted him to become a businessman and sent him to study commerce in Antwerp, Belgium. But Norblin’s interests lay in painting, a gene he probably inherited from his great-uncle who was a descendant of a famous French painter.

So, a young Norblin quit his studies and set off for Europe, where he visited numerous galleries and made illustrations for magazines in Belgium, France and England, writes Agnieszka Kasprzak in the article The Unplanned Return of Stefan Norblin.

He later returned to Warsaw and took up work as a graphic artist, stage designer and book illustrator and gradually developed a fan-following among the social elite. Norblin was best known for his portraits.

He met and married Lena, his second wife, in 1933 and the influential couple lived a comfortable life in Warsaw. But World War Two uprooted them from their homeland and transported them to the shores of far-away India.

The couple first arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai) in British India, and were greeted by a confluence of cultures, religions and languages, says architect Rahul Mehrotra in Chitraanjali. Here, the couple set up home and Norblin began exhibiting his work in top galleries, attracting the attention of rich patrons.

In the 1930s and 40s, the art deco style was a huge trend in Europe, but it had not yet permeated the architectural landscape of India. But the sons of many of India’s maharajas were exposed to the style when they travelled abroad to study.

And so, when Maharaja Mahendrasinhji’s son was building a new palace in Morvi (now Morbi) – which he christened The New Palace – he wanted it designed and furnished in the art deco style.

He tasked Norblin with beautifying the interiors of the place with his paintings. The artist made massive murals depicting hunting scenes, Hindu god Shiva lost in prayer, portraits of the ruler’s ancestors and imagery that captured the flora and fauna of the area. His human figures have a mix of dark and light complexions and a mystical, nymph-like quality.

The artist’s next big commission came from Umaid Singh, who invited Norblin to decorate and design the interiors of the royal residence in Jodhpur. The request was perhaps the result of a shipping accident, which destroyed the furniture the maharaja had ordered from London, Kasprzak writes in her paper, Polish Artist At The Service of Maharajas.

One can see some of Norblin’s finest work in the sprawling Umaid Bhawan Palace. Most captivating are his murals of the goddess Durga, who is often depicted riding a lion and slaying a demon. The goddess is also depicted having many hands, each carrying a lethal weapon.

In one of Norblin’s paintings of Durga, the goddess looks almost like an Egyptian princess; in another, strokes of black paint give shape to the goddess, making her look almost like a shadow streaking across the wall.

In one of the rooms called The Oriental Room, Norblin has painted a series of six murals depicting important scenes from the Ramayana, including goddess Sita’s abduction by the demon king Ravana and her walking into the fire to prove her chastity to her husband, Lord Ram. Norblin has also designed entire rooms in the palace, including the king’s and queen’s suites, the sitting room and dining areas.

Over time, several of Norblin’s paintings were damaged due to a lack of care, heat and humidity, but they have now been restored by the Polish government. His works have been exhibited in Poland and India, but they remain unknown to many. That’s probably because the artist didn’t enjoy the same amount of success after he left India for America.

The artistic community in San Francisco, where the family set up home, was not as welcoming of the Polish artist. He received few commissions and after a while, he stopped painting as his eyesight began to falter due to glaucoma. His wife, once a famous actress, took up work as a manicurist in a beauty salon to support them.

The family struggled to make ends meet and Norblin slipped into depression. In 1952, the artist took his own life, not wanting to become a burden on his family. With his death, the legacy of his paintings in India slipped into oblivion, until they were re-discovered by Claus-Ullrich Simon in the 1980s.

Since then, a lot has been done to bring the artist’s work back into the spotlight, but a lot more remains to be done.

When an audio clip appeared to show a local school principal making derogatory comments, it went viral online, sparked death threats against the educator and sent ripples through a suburb outside the city of Baltimore. But it was soon exposed as a fake, manipulated by artificial intelligence – so why do people still believe it’s real?

“I seriously don’t understand why I have to constantly put up with these dumbasses here every day.”

So began what appeared to be a long tirade from the principal of Pikesville High School, punctuated with racist, antisemitic and offensive tropes. It sounded like it had been secretly recorded.

The speaker went on to bemoan “ungrateful black kids” and Jewish people in the community.

The clip, first posted in January, went viral nationally. But it really struck a nerve in the peaceful, leafy suburb of Pikesville, which has large black and Jewish populations, and in the nearby city of Baltimore, Maryland. Principal Eric Eiswert was put on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.

Alfie Malone, a black man who lives in nearby Baltimore, spotted other members of his community posting the clip and assumed it was real.

“In the back of your mind you think this is probably the way people really actually feel about us,” Mr Malone said. “And then to hear that actually come across audio.”

In an effort to corroborate what he was hearing, Mr Malone checked out other real recordings of Mr Eiswert on social media and they sounded the same.

So the part-time postman, part-time podcaster hit the re-share button.

The clip started to gain traction across social media as more people spread it online. One of the most shared versions was well on its way to passing two million views within hours. Already, that’s around 60 times the entire population of Pikesville.

But what those sharing the clip didn’t realise at the time was that another bombshell was about to drop: the clip was an AI-generated fake.

For BBC Radio 4’s Why Do You Hate Me USA, I’ve been in Maryland investigating the impact this clip had on that town. It reads almost like a fable about the dangers AI poses, especially when local communities are targeted.

When the clip landed on the desk of Kristen Griffith, an education reporter at the Baltimore Banner, she thought it was going be a relatively straightforward story of a teacher being exposed for making offensive remarks.

But as is best-practice in journalism, Ms Griffith wanted to give the principal the chance to comment and tell his side of the story. So, she reached out to his union representative, who said not only did Mr Eiswert condemn the comments, but he didn’t make them.

“He said right away, oh, we think this is fake… We believe it’s AI,” she told the BBC. “I hadn’t heard that angle” before.

But when she published that explanation, her readers were not convinced. Far from raising questions about the clip’s veracity, it just fuelled backlash from people who thought the allegation of fakery was just an excuse or an attempt to evade accountability.

It was at this point that local police started investigating the case. Staff at Pikesville High told them they were feeling unsafe because of all the attention, and they were concerned that the school was bugged with recording devices.

Principal Eiswert’s reputation had taken a serious hit too. Security was stepped up around both him and the school. He became a target for social media hate and threats. I found dozens of abusive messages taking aim at him on social media.

Then in April, Baltimore Police Chief Robert McCullough confirmed they now had “conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic”.

And they believed they knew who made the fake.

Police charged 31-year-old Dazhon Darien, the school’s athletics director, with several counts related to the fake video. Charges included theft, retaliating against a witness and stalking.

He was arrested at the airport, where police say he was planning to fly to Houston, Texas.

Police say that Mr Darien had been under investigation by Principal Eiswert over an alleged theft of $1,916 (£1,460) from the school. They also allege there had been “work performance challenges” and his contract was likely not to be renewed.

Their theory was that by creating the deepfake recording, he hoped to discredit the principal before he could be fired.

Investigators say they traced an email used to send the original video to a server connected to Mr Darien, and allege that he used Baltimore County Public Schools’ computer network to access AI tools. He is due to stand trial in December 2024.

Mr Darien’s legal representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Baltimore County Schools Superintendent Myriam Rogers had previously said it was “a very difficult time” for the school community, the principal and his family.

Representatives for Pikesville High School and Mr Eiswert did not respond to my requests for further comment.

Because the clip was audio-only, it meant there were no visual giveaways, like robotic movements that normally reveal AI manipulation. It also mentioned jargon, like “grade-level expectations”, and other details, like staff names, that only people close to the school would know.

When you listen carefully, though, there are clear edits between sentences – and the voice, while similar to the principal, sounds quite monotonous. Artificial intelligence can use several minutes of a real recording – from, say, your favourite actor in a film or a presidential candidate giving a speech – to then generate a clip that makes it sound like they said something they never did.

But perhaps the biggest reason why people believed the video was real was because it felt true, Mr Malone told me.

It tapped into his own experiences of racism as a black man living in Baltimore.

When Mr Malone heard the principal describe black students as lazy, it immediately reminded him of slurs and discrimination he’d encountered at school and work.

Months later, the effects of the fake audio clip are still felt in Pikesville. Mr Eiswert has moved jobs and is working in another school. And even though some community members told me they now accept the video is fake, the damage is done.

“This is a Jewish neighbourhood and to say something that’s so inflammatory about the community was upsetting,” a woman called Sharon told me as she packed her grandchild’s pram into a car in a house opposite the high school last August.

For several minutes, Sharon talked to me as though the clip was real.

“I think when people say things like that, other people join in that and it makes me more fearful.”

When her husband chimed in from the car, reminding her the clip was actually fake, she admitted she did “find out later it was AI-generated”. But she said she was still angry about it.

I found that for people like Sharon, who had believed the clip was real, even for a short time, it stayed with them – especially when the message echoed genuine experiences of racism and discrimination. It reminded me of something I hear time and time again while investigating misinformation and conspiracy theories: “Well, even if it’s not real, it’s what I think they think.”

All the major social media companies say they have policies to label, remove and limit the spread of AI-generated posts. But that action only happens when it can be proven a clip is fake. By that point, it could have already reached millions of people.

Alfie Malone said even earlier that day, he spoke to a friend who still had no idea the clip was AI-generated.

“I honestly believe that a lot of people here in this city don’t really know that that’s not true,” he said.

He said he felt sorry that Mr Eiswert, the school principal, was wrongly accused of making the comments. He is also worried the episode has undermined real experiences of racism.

He said he’d think twice before re-sharing a clip like this again.

“I’ve been burnt by the fire once. I’m not touching the stove again.”

Thailand is a country in shock: three days ago, 20 children and three teachers were killed when their bus was engulfed in flames.

It was one of the South East Asian country’s worst road accidents, and investigators have uncovered a series of safety failures which some have suggested effectively turned the vehicle into a “bomb on wheels”.

It has left the country – still mourning the loss of the 23 on board the bus – wondering how this was ever allowed to happen, and if it could happen again?

Video taken of the bus, after the driver had collided with a concrete barrier and come to a stop, showed jets of fire shooting up from underneath the vehicle and turning it into an inferno within minutes, giving the passengers in the rear no chance of escape.

Investigators found the bus, which was converted to run on compressed natural gas (CNG), had six gas cylinders legally installed in the rear.

But they also found five more illegally fitted under the front of the bus.

The investigation found that a pipe coming from one of those in the front broke in the impact, leaking gas which ignited the fire. The trapped passengers appear to have been unable to open the rear emergency exit too, although it is not clear yet why.

The government responded by ordering all of the more than 13,000 public and private buses powered by CNG to come in for inspection, and suspended all long-distance school bus trips.

But the conversion to CNG was just one of many alterations made since the bus was first registered in 1970.

It was a kind of “franken-bus”, with new bodywork added several times, and only parts of the chassis remaining from the original.

It had once been a double-decker, but – when new regulations imposed height limitations on these because of their propensity to overturn in an accident – it was converted into a single-decker.

Passengers were seated on the upper deck, with the lower deck used to accommodate all the gas cylinders. Social media users have likened the bus to a bomb on wheels.

This is despite Thailand’s gradual introduction over the past 15 years of regulations for bus safety laid out by the UNECE, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, a body responsible for establishing international standards in many areas. But application of these rules have been slow and piecemeal.

“The problem is most of the manufacturers in Thailand cannot reach that standard,” says Sumet Ongkittikul, a transport specialist at the Thailand Development Research Institute. “So the implementation has been delayed, to allow them to catch up.

“Also, the regulations only apply to new buses. But most of the buses operating in Thailand are old.”

Modifying old bus chassis with new bodywork is a local industry, where safety standards are for the most part far behind those in many other countries.

It is thought that at least 80% of the buses connecting Thailand’s cities are in this older, adapted category.

“A new bus, from a good manufacturer, is very expensive,” Sumet Ongkittikul explains. “So they use an old chassis, and a local manufacturer to build new bodywork, and that is counted only as an old bus, where the new regulations do not apply.”

For example, UNECE regulation UN R118, which requires bus interiors to be made with non-flammable materials, was officially introduced in Thailand in 2022, but does not apply to buses made before then, or buses adapted using older chassis.

Less flammable materials might have helped mitigate the bus fire on Tuesday.

And even the very limited regulations which did apply to the ill-fated bus appear to have been broken.

According to the police, the bus was inspected in May this year, but they believe the illegal addition of gas cylinders was made after that.

Two days after the accident, the police say they caught the bus owner trying to remove improperly installed gas cannisters from the five other buses.

The company has had its licence to run buses suspended, and the owner has been charged with causing death through negligence, with other criminal charges being considered.

But will this accident finally bring about a change in Thailand’s dire road safety record?

The country is currently on its fifth National Road Safety Master Plan, but with little progress to show for it.

For years, it has sat in the top 10 countries with the highest per capita road fatalities. At times, it has been number two.

Data from the TDRI found that over the 10 years to 2023, an average of 17,914 people died from road accidents per year.

In the UK, which has a similar population, fatalities are 10 times lower.

Anyone who travels regularly on Thai roads will be familiar with the dangerous behaviour habitually exhibited by many drivers.

Exceeding the speed limit is commonplace and rarely punished. Cars weave in and out of traffic, leaving little margin for error. Commercial vehicles are often overloaded, badly designed and poorly lit. Motorbike riders routinely fail to wear helmets, far more than in neighbouring countries.

Some blame corruption in the police force. Others blame the Buddhist belief in karma, putting misfortunes like car accidents down to bad luck rather than bad habits.

Although there are posters graphically warning of the dangers of drinking and driving, there has also not been a sustained road safety campaign mounted by any Thai government. Some researchers believe this is because most fatalities, on motorbikes and on public buses, affect lower income groups, and not the policymakers who usually drive, or are driven, in high-end cars with high safety levels.

For all of the appalling statistics, road safety is not seen as an urgent issue, and gets little attention from the public.

There have been plenty of equally horrific accidents before involving long-distance buses, yet they are little safer today than they were 10 years ago.

Transport Minister Suriya Jungrungreangkit has announced a special committee to look into all aspects of road safety following Tuesday’s fatal accident, but it has been greeted with little fanfare or enthusiasm.

If this initiative really does bring about meaningful improvements, and bring down the annual death toll, it will break the pattern of ineffectual measures which have characterised nearly all of Thailand’s road safety efforts to date.

A few metres from a charred home in Kibbutz Be’eri, Simon King tends to a patch of ground in the sunshine. The streets around him are eerily quiet, the silence punctuated only by the sound of air strikes that ring in the near distance.

In this community almost a year ago, 101 people were killed after gunmen from Hamas and other groups rampaged through Be’eri’s tree-lined streets, burning homes and shooting people indiscriminately. Another 30 residents and their family members were taken to Gaza as hostages.

Survivors hid in safe rooms all day and long into the night – exchanging horrifying details with each other over community WhatsApp groups, as they tried to make sense of what was happening.

The kibbutz was a strong community, where people lived and operated together as one. Neighbours were more like extended family. It is one of a small number of kibbutzim in Israel that still operates as a collective.

But now, post-7 October, the collective is splintered – psychologically and physically.

About one in 10 were killed. Only a few of the survivors have returned to their homes. Some travel back to the kibbutz daily to work, but can’t face overnight stays. Many, after months in a hotel, are now living in prefabricated buildings on another kibbutz 40km (25 miles) away.

The community, built up over nearly 80 years, is being tested like never before, and its future is uncertain.

There are reminders everywhere of those who didn’t survive – says Dafna Gerstner, who grew up in Be’eri, and spent 19 terrifying hours on 7 October holed up in a safe room – designed to protect residents from rocket attacks.

“You look to the left and it’s like, ‘Oh it’s my friend who lost her parents.’ You look to the right, ‘It’s my friend who lost her father,’ [and then] ‘She lost her mother.’ It’s everywhere you look.”

Inside Be’eri, surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire, you are never far from a house completely burnt or destroyed, or an empty patch of land where a home, wrecked that day, has been demolished.

Some streets might, upon first glance, appear almost untouched – but look closely and even there you will see markings spray-painted on walls by military units on or after 7 October. Houses where people were killed or kidnapped have black banners on the facades with their names and photos.

In the carcass of one burnt-out home, a board game rests on top of a coffee table, next to a melted television remote control. Food, long-rotten, is still in the fridge-freezer and the smell of burning lingers.

“Time stood still in the house,” says Dafna, 40, as she pokes through the ash-covered wreckage. She and her family had been playing that board game on the eve of the attacks.

Here, her disabled father and his Filipina carer hid for hours in their fortified safe room, as their home burned down around them. Dafna says it is a miracle they both survived.

Her brother did not. A member of Be’eri’s emergency response squad, he was killed in a gunfight at the kibbutz’s dental clinic. Dafna was staying in his house at the time, on a visit from her home in Germany.

Dozens of buildings in Be’eri are spattered with bullet holes – including the nursery. The play park and petting zoo are empty. No children have moved back, and the animals have been sent to new homes.

The kibbutz’s empty streets sometimes come alive, though, in a surprising way – with organised tours for visitors, who give donations.

Israeli soldiers, and some civilians from Israel and abroad, come to see the broken homes, and hear accounts of the devastation, in order to understand what happened.

Two of those who volunteer to lead the tours, Rami Gold and Simon King, say they are determined to ensure what happened here is remembered.

Simon, 60, admits this can be a difficult process.

“There’s a lot of mixed feelings and [the visitors] don’t really know what to ask but they can see and hear and smell… it’s a very heavy emotional experience.”

Rami, 70, says these occasions are often followed by restless nights. Each tour, he says, takes him back to 7 October.

He is one of the few who moved back to Be’eri after the attacks.

And the tours are not popular with everyone. “At some point it felt like someone took over the kibbutz – everybody was there,” Dafna says.

But Simon says the stories have to be told. “Some don’t like it because it’s their home and you don’t want people rummaging around,” he says. “But you have to send the message out, otherwise it will be forgotten.”

At the same time, both he and Rami say they are looking to the future, describing themselves as “irresponsible optimists”. They continue to water the lawns and fix fences, amid the destruction, as others build new homes that will replace those destroyed.

Simon describes the rebuilding as therapy.

Established in 1946, Be’eri is one of 11 Jewish communities in this region set up before the creation of the state of Israel. It was known for its left-leaning views, and many of its residents believed in, and advocated for, peace with the Palestinians.

After the attacks, many residents were moved into a hotel by the Dead Sea – the David Hotel – some 90 minutes’ drive away.

In the aftermath of the attacks, I witnessed their trauma.

Shell-shocked residents gathered in the lobby and other communal areas, as they tried to make sense of what had happened, and who they had lost, in hushed conversations. Some children clung to their parents as they spoke.

Still now, they say, the conversations have not moved on.

“Every person I speak to from Be’eri – it always goes back to this day. Every conversation is going back to dealing with it and the effects after it. We are always talking about it again and again and again,” says Shir Guttentag.

Like her friend Dafna, Shir was holed up that day in her safe room, attempting to reassure terrified neighbours on the WhatsApp group as Hamas gunmen stormed through the kibbutz, shooting residents and setting homes on fire.

Shir twice dismantled the barricade of furniture she had made against her front door to let neighbours in to hide. She told her children, “it’s OK, it’s going to be OK” as they waited to be rescued.

When they were eventually escorted to safety, she looked down at the ground, not wanting to see the remains of her community.

In the coming months at the Dead Sea hotel, Shir says she struggled as people began to leave – some to homes elsewhere in the country or to stay with families, others seeking to escape their memories by heading abroad.

Each departure was like “another break-up, another goodbye”, she says.

It is no longer unusual to see someone who is crying or looking sad among Be’eri’s grieving residents.

“In normal days it would have been like, ‘What happened? Are you OK?’ Nowadays everyone can cry and no-one asks him why,” Shir says.

Shir and her daughters, along with hundreds of other Be’eri survivors, have now moved to new, identical prefabricated homes, paid for by the Israeli government, on an expanse of barren land at another kibbutz, Hatzerim – about 40-minutes drive from Be’eri.

I was there on moving day.

It feels a world away from the manicured lawns of Be’eri, though grass has now been planted around the neighbourhood.

When single mother Shir led her daughters, aged nine and six, into their new bungalow, she told me her stomach was turning from excitement and nerves.

She checked the door to the safe room, where her children will sleep every night, noting that it felt heavier than the door at Be’eri. “I don’t know if it’s bulletproof. I hope so,” she said.

She chose not to bring many items from Be’eri because she wants to keep her home there as it was – and to remind herself that she will one day return.

The mass move to Hatzerim happened after it was put to a community vote – as is the case with all major kibbutz decisions. It is estimated about 70% of Be’eri’s survivors will live there for the time being. About half of the kibbutz’s residents have moved in so far, but more homes are on the way.

The journey from Hatzerim to Be’eri is shorter than it was from the hotel – and many people make the trip every day, to work in one of the kibbutz’s businesses, as they did before.

Shir travels to Be’eri to work at its veterinary clinic, but can’t imagine returning to live there yet.

“I don’t know what needs to happen, but something drastic, so I can feel safe again.”

In the middle of the day, the Be’eri lunch hall fills with people as they gather to eat together.

Shir, like many others, has reluctantly applied for a gun licence, never wanting to be caught off-guard again.

“It’s for my daughters and myself because, on the day, I didn’t have anything,” she says.

Her mother’s long-term partner was killed that day. When they talk about it, her mother says: “They destroyed us.”

Residents say they have relied on the support of their neighbours over the past year, but individual trauma has also tested a community that has historically operated as a collective.

The slogan at Be’eri is adapted from Karl Marx: “Everyone gives as much as he can and everyone gets as much as he needs.” But these words have now become hard to live by.

Many residents of working age are employed by Be’eri’s successful printing house, and other smaller kibbutz businesses. Profits are pooled and people receive housing and other amenities based on their individual circumstances.

However, the decision of some people not to return to work has undermined this principle of communal labour and living.

And if some residents decide they can never return to Be’eri that could, in turn, create fresh problems.

Many have little experience of non-communal living and would struggle financially if they lived independently.

The 7 October attack has also quietened calls for peace.

The kibbutz used to have a fund to support Gazans. Some residents would also help arrange medical treatment for Gazans at Israeli hospitals, members say.

Now, among some, strong views to the contrary are shared in person and on social media.

“They’ll [Gazans] never accept our being here. It’s either us or them,” says Rami.

Several people bring up the killing of resident Vivian Silver – one of Israel’s best-known peace advocates.

“For now, people are very mad,” Shir says.

“People still want to live in peace, but for now, I can’t see any partner on the other side.

“I don’t like to think in terms of hate and anger, it’s not who I am, but I can’t disconnect from what happened that day.”

Shir wears a necklace engraved with a portrait of her lifelong friend Carmel Gat, who was taken hostage from Be’eri that day.

Her biggest dream was that they would be reunited – but, on 1 September, Carmel’s body was found alongside five other hostages.

The IDF said they had been killed by Hamas just hours before a planned rescue attempt. Hamas said the hostages were killed in air strikes – but an autopsy on the returned bodies concluded they had all been shot multiple times at close range.

Be’eri is still waiting and hoping for the return of others. So far, 18 have been brought back alive, along with two dead bodies, while 10 are still in Gaza, at least three of whom are believed to still be alive.

Behind Dafna’s father’s house, 37-year-old Yuval Haran stands in front of the home where his father was killed, and many relatives were taken hostage, on 7 October. His brother-in-law Tal is still being held in Gaza.

“Until he comes back, my clock is still on 7 October. I don’t want revenge, I just want my family back, I just want to have a quiet peaceful life again,” Yuval says.

In all, some 1,200 people were killed across southern Israel on 7 October, with 251 taken to Gaza as hostages. Since then, in the Israeli military operation in Gaza, more than 41,000 people have been killed according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Hundreds of people – combatants and civilians – have also been killed in Lebanon in Israeli air strikes against the armed group Hezbollah, in a significant escalation of their long-running conflict.

Residents from Be’eri say that before 7 October, despite their proximity to the Gaza fence, they always felt safe – such was their faith in the Israeli military system. But that faith has now been shaken.

“I’m less confident and I’m less trusting,” Shir says.

She relives the events in her dreams.

“I wake up and I remind myself it’s over. But the trauma is, I think, for life. I don’t know if I can ever feel fully safe again.”

This summer Rami and Simon also took on the sombre task of digging graves for Be’eri’s dead, who are only just being moved back to the kibbutz from cemeteries elsewhere in Israel.

“After the 7th [October] this area was a military zone, we couldn’t bury them here,” says Rami, as he looks over the graves, a rifle slung across his body.

Simon says it brings up strong and passionate feelings – “but in the end they’re back at home”.

Each time a person is returned, the kibbutz holds a second funeral, with many residents in attendance.

Shir, in the temporary site at Hatzerim, says that for now, she is drawing strength from the community around her.

“We’re not whole, but we will be I hope,” she says.

“It’s a grieving community – sadder and angrier – but still a strong community.”

Butler County in Western Pennsylvania is rock-solid Trump country.

In front yards, on the sides of roads and at filling stations, the messages on the billboards are blunt.

“Bulletproof” is one, on a picture of the former president with his fist raised, moments after he was shot in this very town.

Another, more overtly political, reads: “Even my dog hates Biden.”

The former president got twice as many votes as Joe Biden here in 2020, beating Hillary Clinton in 2016 by a similar margin. In fact, this county has only voted Democrat once in the past 150 years of presidential elections.

Butler has always been proud to be known as the home of the American Jeep but this year it is better remembered for one thing – where a former Republican president was inches away from being assassinated.

A bullet grazed his ear that day, on 13 July, and Butler is undergoing its own healing process as Donald Trump returns to the same spot, the Farm Show grounds, for a rally on Saturday evening.

Trump’s speech is expected to begin at about 17:00 local time (21:00 GMT), with the site reportedly already in lockdown ahead of his visit.

For the first time since publicly endorsing the former president, Elon Musk – the boss of X, Tesla and SpaceX – has confirmed he will be in the audience.

Ahead of Trump’s return to Butler, the BBC has spoken to some of the people who were just a few feet away from him as the gunfire rang out back in July.

There is sadness and guilt among local Republicans and resentment, too, that their county – so staunchly pro-Trump – was where this happened.

“That was the saddest moment of my life,” said Jim Hulings, chairman of the Butler County Republican Party, who was 30ft away at the time and thought Trump had been killed. “I was horrified to think that somebody had the audacity to shoot a great man.”

Jondavid Longo, the mayor of Slippery Rock, a small town just a few miles away, was on stage moments before the shooting, part of the warm-up act.

When the gunman began to fire, he instinctively used his body to cover his pregnant wife. He says he replays the incident in his mind every day.

“It’s a difficult thing for us to come to terms with,” he said. There is guilt that somebody else did lose their life that day, he says, and two others were seriously injured.

• Unanswered questions as Trump returns to Butler
• Wife of man killed at Trump rally struggles with loss

That person was Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former volunteer fire fighter, who died after throwing himself in front of the bullets to protect his wife and daughters.

His widow Helen seems lost and distracted when I meet her. It’s clear she’s struggling.

“I think about it every day. I see it every time I close my eyes.”

She and Corey were childhood sweethearts, married for 29 years. And both staunch supporters of Trump.

They joked that day that the former president was going to invite Corey up on stage, she said. Days later, his fire chief’s jacket was taken to the Republican convention in Milwaukee and placed on stage as Trump made his acceptance speech for the nomination.

“I just cried because, you know, I said he got his moment on stage with Trump.”

Like Helen, Trump supporters in Butler have dozens of questions about how it could have happened.

While the motive of the 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Crooks, remain obscure, what has become much clearer is the series of security blunders that led to him pulling the trigger.

Two hours before he opened fire, he was able to fly a drone around the site without being detected because Secret Service counter-surveillance equipment was not working.

Communications failures meant that suspicious sightings of Crooks an hour and a half before he shot at Trump were not passed on to all elements of the Secret Service.

More than half an hour before the shooting, he was seen by police using a rangefinder pointed at the stage – a device often used by hunters pursuing their prey.

Yet a little over 25 minutes later, Crooks had managed to climb on to the roof of a local business and fire eight shots. Seconds later he was dead, a single shot to the head from a Secret Service sniper.

Those few seconds are still haunting many of those who witnessed it.

Lucie Roth can be seen in the VIP seats behind Trump in one of the most recognisable pictures of the shooting, taken by a Reuters photographer.

She initially thought the gunfire was fireworks but then she heard screams to “Get down!” and dropped to the floor.

“I truly thought he was dead. I saw the Secret Service pile on top of him like he was the quarterback at a football game.”

She was still down when she heard the crowd roar and cheer, and knew then he was OK.

Renae Billow and her 11-year-old son and Trump impersonator, Gino Benford, were a few feet away from Lucie and Gino is clearly visible in the Reuters photo, complete with a blond wig and a dark suit.

Speaking from the family home in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Gino says he was both scared and calm, “half and half”, when the shots rang out.

“I thought, who would want to do this to such a great president?”

Reporting from just outside the rally that night, we began to interview people as they left.

But one man stood out. He was wearing a Trump hat with fake orange hair sprouting out of it and holding a can of beer.

Greg Smith’s words, in which he described how he had seen the gunman on the roof and tried to warn the Secret Service, reverberated around the world.

• Witness tells BBC he saw gunman on roof

It provided the first hint at the catastrophic security failure and a clip of the interview was viewed by tens of millions of people on social media.

Meeting him again this week at his store, just yards from the scene of the shooting, he still feels angry.

“I was very frustrated when I talked to you, extremely frustrated because I think of the time frame. He was on that roof for minutes, crawling, and we were pointing and yelling.”

“I remember thinking ‘Why? Why isn’t someone doing something? How is this happening? How do I still hear President Trump talking as this is going on?'”

There is also pride in what he did in speaking out. People tell him he is part of history, the first person to tell the world what happened.

As someone who usually shuns the limelight, he added: “I jumped out of my comfort zone and did that. And I’m glad that it went like it did, that everything I told you that night has proven to be true.”

Greg, who that day was listening to Trump from outside the rally, does not plan to go to Saturday’s event. He says his 12-year-old son has been traumatised by it, jumping whenever he hears fire works.

Despite still feeling angry about the security lapses, Helen Comperatore and her daughters will go back.

It’s what Corey would have wanted, she says.

“I have tried to do that with everything I do, what would he want me to do? What would Corey do? And that’s how I go.”

• 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?

Bridget Jones fans have long adored the films for their cringe-worthy, hilarious and heartwarming scenes.

But Hugh Grant has warned that the fourth instalment in the franchise – due out on Valentine’s Day next year – will have a very different tone.

“As well as being extremely funny, it’s very, very sad,” said the actor, who will reprise his role as the dashing antagonist Daniel Cleaver.

He also revealed that there was “no obvious role” for him in the film, but “they wanted to cram me in”.

Oscar-winner Renée Zellweger is also back as the title character in Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy.

The film takes its title from the latest Bridget Jones novel, which was published in 2013.

In the book, readers rejoin Bridget in her 50s, a mother to two children and widowed following the death of her husband Mark Darcy.

Darcy was played by Colin Firth in the earlier Bridget Jones movies.

The production studio has not commented on how closely the new film will follow the storyline of its paperback namesake, but it has been revealed author Helen Fielding has written the script.

Speaking on the Graham Norton show, Grant indicated that Fielding had used a real-life tragedy to come up with the plotline.

“She had a sad story,” he said.

• Bridget Jones 4: Zellweger joined by Woodall
• New Bridget Jones book written secretly
• Bridget Jones vs Pride and Prejudice

“She got married to an American screenwriter, she had children and then he died.”

Grant said that Fielding then started writing a novel about a woman raising children by herself, and then realised the main character was “a bit like Bridget”.

“So she made it into a Bridget Jones book,” he said.

“And as well as being extremely funny, it’s very, very sad.”

Grant, who is best known for starring in romcoms including Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, did not appear in the third film.

He said that initially, he felt there was “absolutely no role” for his character, Daniel, in the fourth version either.

“But they wanted to cram me in,” he said.

So he said he sat down with producers to help shape the character, who was known in the earlier films for being a serial womaniser.

“I felt that what they proposed was fine, but not great.

“And I felt that he needed a third dimension, he’s in his 60s now, you can’t just have him smoothing his way down King’s Road eyeing up young girls.

“Something needs to have happened to him in the interim.

“So we invented a rather good – I invented a rather good – interim story.”

The final version got his approval, he said.

“It’s actually a very good and moving script. And I say that as someone who’s horrid about scripts. This was brilliant.”

Fielding’s first book Bridget Jones’s Diary was published in 1996 and a sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason was released three years later.

Written in the form of a personal diary, the novels chronicle the life of a hapless 30-something single working woman living in London.

In 2001, the first film adaptation starring American actress Zellweger, with Grant as Daniel Cleaver and Colin Firth as Mark Darcy, was released.

Zellweger was Oscar-nominated for the role and, in 2004, the sequel was released, although it was not as critically well received.

Emma Thompson, who debuted her character of Bridget’s despairing obstetrician in the third film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, is also set for a return in the fourth film.

New faces on the cast list include Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years A Slave) and Leo Woodall (One Day), who is rumoured to play Bridget’s younger love interest as she faces dating anew.

Fielding previously said she had decided to write Mark Darcy out of the series because she didn’t want Bridget to become “a smug married”, a fate deemed utterly lamentable by earlier musings of Jones.

Four people, including a two-year-old child, have died while attempting to cross the English Channel, according to French authorities.

The body of the child was found in a boat while three adults died in a separate incident in another boat, said Jacques Billant, prefect of the Pas-de-Calais region.

French interior minister Bruno Retailleau said the child was “trampled to death in a boat”, saying it was a “terrible tragedy” and people smugglers “have the blood of these people on their hands”.

Rescuers found the child in the boat on Saturday morning and an injured person was airlifted to hospital in Boulogne, the AFP news agency said.

It said the migrant boat, which was heading towards the UK, called for assistance and rescuers picked up 14 people on board, including the child.

The remaining passengers on the boat continued their journey.

“Our government will intensify the fight against these mafias who are getting rich by organising these crossings of death,” Retailleau said in a post on X.

UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, also posting on X, described the deaths as “appalling”, adding that “criminal smuggler gangs continue to organise these dangerous boat crossings”.

“The gangs do not care if people live or die – this is a terrible trade in lives,” she said.

She said she had been in touch with Reailleau on Saturday, and had met in Italy at the G7 meeting earlier this week, where they had discussed the matter.

An action plan agreed at that meeting “means new international joint investigative teams to pursue the gangs, finance and supply chains,” she had previously said.

On Tuesday, the country’s prime minister, Michel Barnier, said France needed a stricter immigration policy.

Mr Barnier said he would be “ruthless” with people traffickers, adding that they “exploit misery and despair” and encourage undocumented asylum seekers to cross the Channel and the Mediterranean Sea.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer previously said he was “absolutely determined” to tackle the smuggling gangs facilitating the crossings but he would not commit to a timeframe for doing that.

Figures from the Home Office show there were 395 migrants on 4 October who arrived in the UK in small boats without permission to enter the country, and 59 arrived on 29 September.

As of 15 September, more than 23,000 people had crossed the Channel in 2024.

At least 194 migrants died attempting to cross the English Channel between 2018 and September 2024, according to estimates from the International Organization for Migration, which is part of the UN.

Music icon Dolly Parton has announced she will make a personal donation of $1m (£762,000) towards disaster recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

Speaking at an event in her home state of Tennessee on Friday, the 78-year-old said the money would come “from my own bank account”.

Parton’s local commercial ventures – including the Dollywood amusement park – would also donate the same amount to the Mountain Ways Foundation, which is aiding those affected by flooding in the region.

During her remarks, Parton broke into song, singing “Helene, Helene” to the tune of her 1973 hit Jolene.

At least 225 people have died due to Helene, which tore through the south-east US in late September.

Helene is the deadliest mainland storm since Katrina in 2005.

Making landfall as a category four hurricane, Helene damaged structures, caused flash flooding and knocked out power to millions of homes. Over half a million properties remain without electricity as of Saturday.

The US government has said the clean-up effort could take years.

While a large proportion of the deaths occurred in North Carolina, others have been recorded in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

“This is my home,” Parton said at Friday’s news conference, which took place outside a Walmart store in Newport, Tennessee.

“God has been good to me and so has the public, and I feel that if there’s anything I can do to give back in any way I can I’m always willing to do that. I want to feel like I’m doing my part.”

Explaining that many of her relatives lived in the area, the singer said: “I was heartbroken like everybody else, and just amazed and devastated by it.”

She added: “All these people feel like my people.”

Eleven people have so far been confirmed dead in Tennessee due to the storm, according to the latest official tally, with more still unaccounted for.

At least two factory workers were swept away by floodwaters in Erwin, in the north-east of the state.

Parton, when asked what her message to victims was, responded: “I know it’s easy for us to say, ‘oh, things are going to get better’ when things are still really bad.”

“All we can say is that we are with you, that we love you, we hope that things get better real soon – and we’re going to do our part to try and make that possible.”

Coinciding with the news conference, Walmart announced it was increasing its recovery efforts funding to $10m (£7.6m).

The supermarket chain’s CEO, John Furner, said: “These aren’t just places where we have stores. These are communities where we work and live.”

He also described Parton as “a true American legend – and not just for the music, the art, the business, but because of her heart”.

The country music singer-songwriter has previously made large donations in response to life-changing events.

In 2016, her charity pledged to donate $1,000 a month to families affected by wildfires in Tennessee.

And in 2020, she contributed $1m towards the development of one of the Covid-19 vaccines.

When a small group of runners gathered on a chilly autumn morning in London 20 years ago, no-one could have realised they were taking part in something that would become an international hit.

Green Day’s album American Idiot had just reached number one, Ben Stiller’s Dodgeball was showing in cinemas and the first series of Strictly Come Dancing had just finished.

Organiser Paul Sinton-Hewitt enticed the pioneering 13 runners to turn up to what was then known as the Bushy Park Time Trial on 2 October 2004 after injury prevented him from taking part himself.

“It really affects people’s lives so that goodness that exists in a park on a Saturday morning extends to the whole week,” he says of an event with millions of weekly participants and volunteers.

For the uninitiated, Parkrun sees people of all ages and abilities gather in an outdoor space at 09:00 on Saturdays and run for 5km – or just over three miles.

Shorter 2km runs for children aged four to 14 and their families take place on Sunday mornings.

By Christmas of 2004, the numbers had doubled and by the time of the 2012 Olympics the event had expanded to every London borough.

Last month, Lithuania became the latest country to host a Parkrun, taking the overall tally of nations to 23.

Ireland is the most popular place for Parkrun worldwide – where between 8-9% of the population are registered.

In London, where it all began, there are now nearly 750,000 registered parkrunners (including Greater London) and about 100 events each weekend.

Born in Zimbabwe but raised in South Africa, Mr Sinton-Hewitt was given a CBE for services to grass-roots sport participation in 2014.

Now happily living in rural Sussex, he says “you get absorbed by the community, who make you feel special”.

He said: “Almost all the people I know have found that it’s really welcoming.

“It’s non-competitive. You can run it as hard as you like. You can be as competitive as you like but you’re not really competing with other people.

“You’re competing against yourself, and as a result, there’s this pressure is taken away and it’s just fun, right?”

10,000,000: Registered Parkrunners

900,000: Volunteers

2,500: Parkrun locations

2,000: GP surgeries linked with Parkrun

25: Parkruns in prisons and young offenders institutions

23: Countries where Parkrun takes place

Six years ago, Afe Komolafe was pre-diabetic and started doing Parkrun near her home in Hayes, west London.

The community engagement officer fell in love the weekly event and, after a brief break due to a knee injury, she now accompanies first-timers and even travels abroad with friends made at events for her Parkrun fix.

She said: “Parkrun means a whole lot to me. It’s community, friendship, health, well-being, fitness.

“It’s just special. It’s run by volunteers: there are no airs or graces about it.

“I’ve made so many friends through Parkrun.”

Nigel Rata, who has a PhD in atmospheric chemistry, has clocked up more than 200 events and tries to “get a Parkrun in wherever I am”.

The south Londoner describes it as a “family”.

He said: “There’s no expectation of what you do when you get there. There’s no expectation of performance… but fundamentally, it’s there for me.

“You’ll feel great afterwards, no matter how you feel going into it.

“Being with people being in the outdoors and getting fresh air in green spaces just works for me.”

For the man who started it all, arthritis in his left knee means he “can still make my way around the course, but generally it’s walking or I’m back volunteering”.

Mr Sinton-Hewitt said: “It helps me see the joys in life and and sets my my path out for the the rest of the week, so it’s a very important part of my existence.”

A shoot for a film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Bean was interrupted when traffic wardens began to ticket vehicles being used in a scene.

Filming was taking place in Handbridge in Chester for Anemone, a new feature co-written by triple Oscar-winner Day-Lewis and his 26-year-old son Ronan.

Photographs taken by passers-by showed Cheshire West And Chester Council traffic wardens placing tickets on a number of 1980s-era vehicles that had been parked on double-yellow lines along Overleigh Road.

The council, which is understood to have rejected a road closure bid by the crew, has been approached for comment.

Day-Lewis, 67, and his 65-year-old co-star Bean have been reportedly seen around the north-west of England in recent days, including on location in Warrington.

It is not known if the pair were in Handbridge – which appeared to be doubling for a location in Sheffield – when the traffic wardens struck.

Handbridge ward councillor Matt Carter posted on the local Handbridge Life Facebook group to say he had spoken to the council about the filming and had been told that the authority’s highways department had not approved it.

Carter also said he had been told an application for a full road closure had not been approved.

Anemone is being produced by Focus Features and is Day-Lewis’s first performance since retiring from acting in 2017 after The Phantom Thread.

He has won more Best Actor Academy Awards than any other performer, receiving Oscars for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood and Lincoln.

Focus Features described Anemone as a film exploring “the intricate relationships between fathers, sons and brothers, and the dynamics of familial bonds”.

The council and Focus Features have been approached for comment.

There have been many moments of extreme danger over the past year. This is the worst.

In the past seven days, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been assassinated, Israel has launched a ground invasion of Lebanon, and Iran has fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles at targets across Israel.

Western and regional powers – led by the US – have pushed for de-escalation. The UN Security Council called for an “immediate end” to hostilities and the G7, which includes the US, UK and Germany, has called for “restraint”.

But so far those efforts have failed – and the Middle East stands closer than ever to all-out war.

Here’s how the last week played out.

As the sun set over Beirut on 27 September, the south of the city was hit by a series of huge explosions.

Several apartment buildings had been struck, leaving a huge crater in the ground. Plumes of dust and debris filled the skyline, visible from across the Lebanese capital.

The strike, aimed at an underground bunker, killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Seen as a prize-target, Nasrallah had not been seen in public for years for fear of being assassinated by Israel.

His death capped a week of ramped-up Israeli strikes targeting Hezbollah that had left more than 500 people dead.

The week before that, a series of walkie-talkie and pager explosions targeting the group left at least 32 dead and over 3000 injured.

Nasrallah’s death wiped all hopes of a de-escalation, which just hours earlier had seemed possible.

A US proposal for a 21-day ceasefire had been discussed on the sidelines of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York. Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon had even said his side was “open to ideas”.

But hours after the strike, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on an early flight home from the UN – and any lingering hopes of diplomacy prevailing faded away.

Three days later, Israeli forces crossed into Lebanon, marking the start of a ground invasion.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its operations would be “limited and targeted”.

Fighting so far has driven nearly 1.2 million people from their homes, according to Lebanon’s crisis unit. At least 8 Israeli soldiers have been killed.

Israel says the operation is aimed at stopping Hezbollah’s ability to launch rockets and drones over the border – something it has done on an almost daily basis since Hamas, its Palestinian ally, launched a deadly raid into southern Israel almost a year ago, triggering the current Gaza war.

Now Israeli troops are fighting a ground war on two fronts simultaneously: Gaza and Lebanon. That hasn’t happened in decades.

The last war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2006, ended inconclusively with UN Resolution 1701, which stipulated Hezbollah withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon.

That never happened, and with Iranian support, Hezbollah grew in strength.

Israel has not said that it wants to remove Hezbollah entirely from Lebanon’s political landscape (as it has with Hamas in Gaza), but for all its talk of this being a “limited and targeted” operation, it’s clear that Israel is ruthlessly determined to cut Hezbollah down in size.

Spurred by an astonishing two and a half weeks, Israel is in an ambitious frame of mind.

The next day, at around 19:30 local time, 10 million Israelis were sent running for bomb shelters across the country after Iran launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel.

The nation’s air defence system sprang into action – and allies including the US and UK were involved in repelling the attack – another sign of the broadening scope of the conflict.

The IDF 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.

With its biggest proxy group in disarray, Tehran calculated that to restore some semblance of deterrence it needed to do something more dramatic than its last well-telegraphed missile and drone attack on Israel in April.

Hence the larger number of ballistic missiles and the lack of advance notice.

But while the attack was more than purely demonstrative, it did not appear to signal Iran’s desire for an all-out fight.

That’s hardly surprising. If it came to a full-on war, Iran knows that it would lose, and badly.

It could even herald the end of the Islamic Republic.

Israel, with powerful western allies – and a smattering of Middle Eastern neighbours willing to help shoot down Iranian missiles – is a regional superpower.

Iran, economically fragile and led by an unpopular government, is no match. Nor does it have the sort of allies that would be willing to spring to its defence in the event of a confrontation.

The supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, made suitably defiant noises at Friday prayers in Tehran, but Iran knows it cannot afford to escalate much further.

Despite Hezbollah’s devastating losses, it has vowed to fight on in Lebanon.

And history shows us it is easy for Israel to enter Lebanon, but difficult for them to leave.

As for Israel’s response to Iran, the region – and the world – has been on tenterhooks since Tuesday.

US president Joe Biden said he has discouraged Israel from striking Iranian nuclear or oil facilities as part of its retaliation.

A severe reaction seems inevitable, though, and some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent rhetoric suggests that he might be thinking, ultimately, of regime change in Iran.

But Israel’s immediate objectives are closer to home. “Total victory” in Gaza and removing the threat posed by Hezbollah along the northern border.

Israeli leaders point out that they at war on many fronts. Benjamin Netanyahu says there are seven: Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, Yemen, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

It’s true that over the past year, attacks have come from all these directions, even though pro-Iranian groups in Iraq and Syria have so far posed little real threat.

We’re not seeing an all-out regional war just yet, but with so many players feeling they have a stake in it, the war in Gaza has metastasised in a dramatic fashion.

Iran’s missile strikes on Israel were “correct, logical, and lawful”, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told a vast crowd which had gathered to hear him speak in Tehran on Friday.

The country’s supreme leader described the attack as the “minimum punishment” for what he called Israel’s “astonishing crimes” while leading Friday prayers in the capital, something he has not done since 2020.

Khamenei’s speech came three days after Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel, in what it said was retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

The Farsi-speaking supreme leader delivered part of his speech in Arabic to address Palestinian and Lebanese supporters.

During his sermon, Khamenei praised Nasrallah and voiced support for Hamas and Hezbollah, which he said provided “vital service to the entire region and the entire Islamic world”.

He said Iran-aligned armed groups “will not back down” in their conflict with Israel, which entered a new phase after Hamas launched deadly raids into Israel almost one year ago.

Iran is the main backer of Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as other armed groups around the Middle East which have attacked Israel. They often dub themselves the “Axis of Resistance”.

In recent weeks, several senior leaders of Iran-backed groups and Iran’s powerful military wing, the Revolutionary Guards, have been killed in Israeli strikes or presumed Israeli assassinations.

The supreme leader’s appearance in front of a crowd of tens of thousands in Tehran is a sign of the gravity of the moment for the Iranian regime, which is facing widespread domestic discontent.

It could be read as an attempt to show strength and restore Iran’s credibility as leader of the “Axis of Resistance”.

The public appearance was also intended to show that Khamenei is not in hiding, after reports emerged that he had been taken to a secure location following Nasrallah’s assassination.

The Grand Mosalla Mosque was flooded with people after Iranians were given free transport to attend the sermon. A large Palestinian flag was seen in the crowd.

Khamenei holds ultimate power in Iran, but very rarely leads Friday prayers himself.

The last time he did was in 2020, after the US killed Iran’s most senior military commander, Qassem Soleimani. The time before that was in 2012.

Iran is still reeling from the loss of its allies Nasrallah and Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran in July.

Israel is widely considered to be behind Haniyeh’s killing, though it has never commented on his death.

Khamenei also told the crowd that Iran would retaliate if, as expected, Israel launches a response to Tuesday’s missile attack.

“If we needed to do that again, we would do it again in the future,” Khamenei told supporters.

On Thursday, US President Joe Biden suggested a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s oil infrastructure had been discussed, as Israel continued to weigh up how to strike back at Tehran.

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 US military says it has launched strikes on the Iranian-backed Houthi group in Yemen, hitting 15 targets.

The Pentagon said it used aircraft and warships to launch the attacks in order “to protect freedom of navigation”.

Several explosions were reported in some of Yemen’s main cities, including the capital Sanaa.

Since November, the Houthis have launched attacks on around 100 ships in the Red Sea, sinking two vessels. The rebel group says the attacks are retaliation for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, said the attacks targeted weapons systems, bases and other equipment belonging to the Houthis.

Houthi-aligned media say the Yemeni capital of Sanaa was among cities hit.

On Monday, the Houthis said they had shot down a US-made MQ-9 Reaper drone over Yemen. The US military acknowledged losing an unmanned aircraft.

Last week the Pentagon said the Houthis had launched “a complex attack” on US Navy ships in the region, though all of the weapons launched were shot down.

Sanaa has had a respite from bombing in the past two years since fighting between the warring parties in Yemen largely subsided.

As well as the attacks on ships in the Red Sea, the Houthis have fired several missiles and drones at Israel directly.

In July a drone launched from Yemen struck Tel Aviv, killing one person and injuring 10. Last month, the group fired several missiles at Israel, including one that targeted Israel’s main airport.

Both times Israel responded by attacking sites in Yemen.

Earlier this year, the US, UK and 12 other nations launched Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect Red Sea shipping lanes against the Houthis.

The Houthis are part of a network of armed groups in the Middle East backed by Iran that includes Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

As China prepared to celebrate its Golden Week holiday and mark the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic, the ruling Communist Party rolled out a raft of measures aimed at boosting its ailing economy.

The plans included help for the country’s crisis-hit property industry, support for the stock market, cash handouts for the poor and more government spending.

Shares in mainland China and Hong Kong chalked up record gains after the announcements.

But economists warn the policies may not be enough to fix China’s economic problems.

Some of the measures announced by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) on 24 September took direct aim at the country’s beaten-down stock market.

The new tools included funding worth 800bn yuan ($114bn; £85.6bn) that can be borrowed by insurers, brokers and asset managers to buy shares.

PBOC governor, Pan Gongsheng, also said the central bank would offer support to listed companies that want to buy back their own shares and announced plans to lower borrowing costs, and allow banks to increase their lending.

Just two days after the PBOC’s announcement, President Xi Jinping chaired a surprise economy-focused meeting of the country’s top leaders, known as the Politburo.

Officials promised to intensify government spending aimed to support the economy.

On Monday, the day before China headed off for a weeklong holiday, the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index jumped by more than 8%, in its best day since the 2008 global financial crisis. The move capped off a five-day rally that saw the index jump by 20%.

The following day, with financial markets closed on the mainland, the Hang Seng in Hong Kong rose by over 6%.

“Investors loved the announcements”, China analyst, Bill Bishop said.

While investors may have been popping champagne corks, Xi has deeper issues to tackle.

The People’s Republic marking its 75th anniversary means it has been in existence longer than the only other major communist state, the Soviet Union, which collapsed 74 years after it was foundEd.

“Avoiding the fate of the Soviet Union has long been a key concern for China’s leaders,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

At the forefront of officials’ minds will be boosting confidence in the broader economy amid growing concerns that it may miss its own 5% annual growth target.

“In China targets must be met, by any means necessary,” said Yuen Yuen Ang, professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University.

“The leadership worries that failing to meet them in 2024 will worsen a downward spiral of slow growth and low confidence.”

One of the main drags on the world’s second-largest economy has been the downturn in the country’s property market, which began three years ago.

Aside from policies aimed at boosting stocks, the recently unveiled stimulus package also targeted the real estate industry.

It includes measures to increase bank lending, mortgage rate cuts and lower minimum down payments for second-home buyers.

But there is scepticism that such moves are enough to shore up the housing market.

“Those measures are welcome but unlikely to shift the needle much in isolation,” said Harry Murphy Cruise, an economist at Moody’s Analytics.

“China’s weakness stems from a crisis of confidence, not one of credit; firms and families don’t want to borrow, regardless of how cheap it is to do so.”

At the Politburo session, China’s top leaders vowed to go beyond interest rate cuts and tap government funds to boost economic growth.

However, other than setting priorities like stabilising the property market, supporting consumption and boosting employment, the officials offered little in the way of details about the size and scope of government spending.

“Should the fiscal stimulus fall short of market expectations, investors could be disappointed,” warned Qian Wang, chief economist for the Asia Pacific region at Vanguard.

“In addition, cyclical policy stimulus does not fix the structural problems,” Ms Wang noted, suggesting that without deeper reforms the challenges China’s economy faces will not go away.

Economists see tackling entrenched issues in the real estate market as key to fixing the broader economy.

Property is the biggest investment most families will make and falling house prices have helped to undermine consumer confidence.

“Ensuring the delivery of pre-sold but unfinished homes would be key,” said a note from Sophie Altermatt, an economist with Julius Baer.

“In order to increase domestic consumption on a sustainable basis, fiscal support for household incomes needs to go beyond one-off transfers and rather come through improved pension and social security systems.”

On the day of the 75th anniversary, an editorial in the state-controlled newspaper, People’s Daily, struck an optimistic tone, recognising that “while the journey ahead remains challenging, the future is promising”.

According to the article, concepts created by President Xi such as “high-quality development” and “new productive forces” are key to unlocking that path to a better future.

The emphasis on those ideas reflects Xi’s push to switch from the fast drivers of growth in the past, such as property and infrastructure investment, while trying to develop a more balanced economy based on high-end industries.

The challenge China faces, according to Ms Ang, is that the “old and the new economies are deeply intertwined; if the old economy falters too quickly, it will inevitably hinder the rise of the new”.

“This is what the leadership has come to realise and is responding to.”

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,” Melbourne 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 of Australia’s F1 stars, but many think he’ll be remembered as the biggest.

“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.

The eight couples have wedded, their week-long honeymoons are over and now they are adjusting to married life, living on top of each other in small London apartments.

But can they really be coached into loving each other?

Channel 4’s Married at First Sight is a bold social experiment, where single people marry total strangers, meeting for the first time at the altar.

In this series, several couples are off to a rocky start – issues of attraction, clashing personalities and avoidant behaviour has been plaguing some participants.

To help them navigate the trials and tribulations of marriage the show has three matchmaking experts – Paul Brunson, Mel Schilling and Charlene Douglas.

With most couples relying heavily on the advice from them, to what extent is what we see on TV similar to the therapy that happens in a real counselling room?

Psychotherapeutic Counsellor Emma Loker explains that the format of the show is “somewhat like group therapy” as couples discuss their relationships with the experts in front of everyone at the commitment ceremonies.

The ceremonies are filmed across a full day, meaning the couples get more time with the experts than is seen in the condensed one hour of television.

During the ceremony, it’s not uncommon for the other participants to gasp, tut, cry and pull all sorts of faces, which Loker says is a key difference, as in a counselling room “people will be told to be respectful of one another”.

The couples live in the same complex, meaning they often confide in each other about their relationships.

I’m the first to speed dial my friends to moan about my partner, but where my friends keep my relationship drama a secret, most MAFS participants are eager to share their titbit of gossip with others.

Dr Sham Singh, a US based psychiatrist says “external support may be well-meant, but too many voices can be confusing”.

“Therapy is a place where both partners get to be heard without some outside bias”, he explains, adding that he helps couple “strengthen their direct communication so that they become confident enough to tackle an issue first before involving others”.

The matchmakers have advised couples to focus on direct communication, but this can sometimes be challenging, due to the format of the show.

It includes prompt questions for the couples to address, at the weekly dinner parties, which can fuel the drama.

In response, a spokesperson for MAFS tells the BBC the show “is unscripted and observational, and reflects the wide variety of sometimes complex and challenging relationship dynamics that exist in the real world”.

The matchmakers have been known to give participants a telling-off for certain behaviours or comments that they deem unacceptable.

Life coach Paul told Eve she wasn’t “giving this experiment any bit of fairness”, while his fellow expert Mel called her out for “lying” at the commitment ceremony.

But counsellor Jonathan Eddie says he would “absolutely never” tell a client off.

Susie Masterson, a trauma therapist, explains that the experts may be expressing disappointment “as a way to reflect how friends or family might react in a real-world setting, which can help couples understand how their behaviour impacts others”.

Lou Campbell, a relationship counsellor, explains that the telling-off “is entirely made for TV” as qualified therapists “challenge behaviours” but don’t scold their clients.

She thinks the matchmakers using this technique is concerning because “many participants seem quite vulnerable and could benefit from real individual therapy”.

Counsellor Loker has reservations about the experts giving guidance as they could “unintentionally give harmful advice or miss critical emotional red flags that could exacerbate issues in the relationship”.

A MAFS spokesperson said the “onscreen experts bring a wealth of experience, and are qualified specialists in a range of disciplines, from psychodynamic and psychosexual therapy, to couples counselling, life coaching and matchmaking.

“They offer the couples informed and educated advice and guidance throughout the process.”

The spokesperson added that additional offscreen psychological support is also available to the contributors.

One of the issues troubling some couples this year is physical attraction, and the experts have have reprimanded Adam and Casper for their “unkind” words and “nonsense” excuses as they have both said they are not attracted to “curvy girls”.

“Those sound like personal judgements and it’s an ethical principal that we are not judgemental,” explains counsellor Eddie.

When it comes to physical attraction, therapist Dr Olivia Lee recommends “small acts of kindness, open dialogue, and intentional time together”.

This advice is very similar to what the experts told the two men struggling to find their wives attractive because they aren’t petite or brunette.

Dr Lee says there are definitely some similarities between advice from the experts and qualified therapists “especially when it comes to fostering open communication, addressing conflict, and exploring emotional needs”.

Mel’s intervention with Caspar definitely seems to have helped the couple, but Dr Lee cautions that the advice the experts dish out is often too short-term for it to have a lasting impact.

One of the most stark differences between the show’s experts and qualified counsellors is that the former often want their matchmaking to succeed so encourage participants to stay on the show.

“I have no vested interest in the outcome of my clients’ relationships, my focus is on supporting them in whatever direction feels most authentic for them,” Masterson says.

Similarly, the experts told Richelle she had to commit to the process fully which is understandable for the TV experiment,

Masterson explains that ultimatums are not usually used by qualified counsellors as it’s not her job “to force couples to stay together”.

She adds that Richelle’s “signs of avoidant attachment could be an underlying therapeutic challenge” which the experts may not qualified to help her with.

While it’s clear that the experts are well intentioned in their advice and it can be somewhat helpful, Dr Lee says it’s important to remember that the primary focus of the show is to entertain and what the experts say “shouldn’t be considered sound therapeutic advice”.

Advice from a qualified counsellor is more likely to help a flailing marriage than the opinions of matchmakers, but in the context of a reality TV show, the experts strike a pretty good balance between being helpful and entertaining.

Thailand is a country in shock: three days ago, 20 children and three teachers were killed when their bus was engulfed in flames.

It was one of the South East Asian country’s worst road accidents, and investigators have uncovered a series of safety failures which some have suggested effectively turned the vehicle into a “bomb on wheels”.

It has left the country – still mourning the loss of the 23 on board the bus – wondering how this was ever allowed to happen, and if it could happen again?

Video taken of the bus, after the driver had collided with a concrete barrier and come to a stop, showed jets of fire shooting up from underneath the vehicle and turning it into an inferno within minutes, giving the passengers in the rear no chance of escape.

Investigators found the bus, which was converted to run on compressed natural gas (CNG), had six gas cylinders legally installed in the rear.

But they also found five more illegally fitted under the front of the bus.

The investigation found that a pipe coming from one of those in the front broke in the impact, leaking gas which ignited the fire. The trapped passengers appear to have been unable to open the rear emergency exit too, although it is not clear yet why.

The government responded by ordering all of the more than 13,000 public and private buses powered by CNG to come in for inspection, and suspended all long-distance school bus trips.

But the conversion to CNG was just one of many alterations made since the bus was first registered in 1970.

It was a kind of “franken-bus”, with new bodywork added several times, and only parts of the chassis remaining from the original.

It had once been a double-decker, but – when new regulations imposed height limitations on these because of their propensity to overturn in an accident – it was converted into a single-decker.

Passengers were seated on the upper deck, with the lower deck used to accommodate all the gas cylinders. Social media users have likened the bus to a bomb on wheels.

This is despite Thailand’s gradual introduction over the past 15 years of regulations for bus safety laid out by the UNECE, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, a body responsible for establishing international standards in many areas. But application of these rules have been slow and piecemeal.

“The problem is most of the manufacturers in Thailand cannot reach that standard,” says Sumet Ongkittikul, a transport specialist at the Thailand Development Research Institute. “So the implementation has been delayed, to allow them to catch up.

“Also, the regulations only apply to new buses. But most of the buses operating in Thailand are old.”

Modifying old bus chassis with new bodywork is a local industry, where safety standards are for the most part far behind those in many other countries.

It is thought that at least 80% of the buses connecting Thailand’s cities are in this older, adapted category.

“A new bus, from a good manufacturer, is very expensive,” Sumet Ongkittikul explains. “So they use an old chassis, and a local manufacturer to build new bodywork, and that is counted only as an old bus, where the new regulations do not apply.”

For example, UNECE regulation UN R118, which requires bus interiors to be made with non-flammable materials, was officially introduced in Thailand in 2022, but does not apply to buses made before then, or buses adapted using older chassis.

Less flammable materials might have helped mitigate the bus fire on Tuesday.

And even the very limited regulations which did apply to the ill-fated bus appear to have been broken.

According to the police, the bus was inspected in May this year, but they believe the illegal addition of gas cylinders was made after that.

Two days after the accident, the police say they caught the bus owner trying to remove improperly installed gas cannisters from the five other buses.

The company has had its licence to run buses suspended, and the owner has been charged with causing death through negligence, with other criminal charges being considered.

But will this accident finally bring about a change in Thailand’s dire road safety record?

The country is currently on its fifth National Road Safety Master Plan, but with little progress to show for it.

For years, it has sat in the top 10 countries with the highest per capita road fatalities. At times, it has been number two.

Data from the TDRI found that over the 10 years to 2023, an average of 17,914 people died from road accidents per year.

In the UK, which has a similar population, fatalities are 10 times lower.

Anyone who travels regularly on Thai roads will be familiar with the dangerous behaviour habitually exhibited by many drivers.

Exceeding the speed limit is commonplace and rarely punished. Cars weave in and out of traffic, leaving little margin for error. Commercial vehicles are often overloaded, badly designed and poorly lit. Motorbike riders routinely fail to wear helmets, far more than in neighbouring countries.

Some blame corruption in the police force. Others blame the Buddhist belief in karma, putting misfortunes like car accidents down to bad luck rather than bad habits.

Although there are posters graphically warning of the dangers of drinking and driving, there has also not been a sustained road safety campaign mounted by any Thai government. Some researchers believe this is because most fatalities, on motorbikes and on public buses, affect lower income groups, and not the policymakers who usually drive, or are driven, in high-end cars with high safety levels.

For all of the appalling statistics, road safety is not seen as an urgent issue, and gets little attention from the public.

There have been plenty of equally horrific accidents before involving long-distance buses, yet they are little safer today than they were 10 years ago.

Transport Minister Suriya Jungrungreangkit has announced a special committee to look into all aspects of road safety following Tuesday’s fatal accident, but it has been greeted with little fanfare or enthusiasm.

If this initiative really does bring about meaningful improvements, and bring down the annual death toll, it will break the pattern of ineffectual measures which have characterised nearly all of Thailand’s road safety efforts to date.

More than 90 years after India’s first Test match at Lord’s in 1932, Rohit Sharma’s team has made history. With a win over Bangladesh in Chennai last month, India now boasts more Test victories than losses, standing at 179 wins to 178 defeats across 580 Tests. Cricket writer Suresh Menon explores India’s remarkable transformation into a Test cricket powerhouse.

In every field of human endeavour, there are moments when circumstances and people align, sparking change.

In popular music this happened with the Beatles, where four boys emerged from the same place at the same time and created a new sound.

In sport, such changes are usually led by a single player who has around him a bunch who are almost as good. It happened in football with Pele as Brazil won three of four World Cups between 1958 and 1970 with him in the side.

With the arrival of a baby-faced Sachin Tendulkar, the fortunes of Indian cricket changed. His supporting cast was just as important to the transformation: Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Zaheer Khan, Rahul Dravid, Virender Sehwag, VVS Laxman, Sourav Ganguly, Harbhajan Singh and MS Dhoni. Many would find a place in a team of all-time India greats.

Before Tendulkar’s debut in November 1989, India had won just 43 Tests and lost more than twice that number out of the 257 matches played. The remaining were draws.

In the Tendulkar era, India registered 78 wins against 60 losses out of the 217 matches played.

But it was a period when the number of draws – 79 – was still significant. Only seven wins had come in the “SANE” countries: South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and England. Draws in these countries were still seen as victory of sorts – the mindset with which India began international cricket.

Domestically, changes were happening. Led by Ganguly, and carried forward by Dhoni, India were discovering players beyond the traditional centres. If you were good enough, it didn’t matter where you were from; you would get your chance. This was despite the cricket board itself and the various local bodies often being drenched in politics.

Tendulkar retired in 2013, and since then India have won 58 while losing just 29 Tests of the 106 played. Significantly, there have been only 19 draws.

India won back-to-back series in Australia as they matched their rivals for aggression and in self-belief. This was no longer merely a cricketing change now, it was a psychological one.

Virat Kohli occasionally went beyond the pale as skipper, but he was passionate about Test cricket and passionate about winning – an attitude that seeped into the team.

Set to chase 364 in his first Test as captain in Adelaide in 2014, India nearly pulled it off and lost the match by just 48 runs.

It was a turning point. A new approach was created. Kohli, who led India in most Tests, at 68, was allergic to draws. It meant India played positive cricket at all times. Kohli drew just 16% of his Tests, the lowest among the top six captains in history. Even Clive Lloyd had 35% draws.

Kohli had a talented bunch around him – Cheteswar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ishant Sharma, Ravindra Jadeja, KL Rahul. Again, players were discovered outside the traditional centres.

Another psychological change was that India no longer worshipped at the altar of orthodoxy. Effectiveness was more important than style. Jasprit Bumrah, who fast-tracked into international cricket, and is possibly India’s greatest fast bowler, might not have made it in earlier generations. He is unorthodox; coaches would have recommended some other profession.

The cricket board too finally began to react to regular defeats abroad – India lost all Tests to Australia and England in a six-month span in 2011-12.

The golden generation was retiring. Much was made of the ineffectiveness of domestic cricket. The board decided that pitches had to help quick bowlers. It instructed curators to retain 3mm to 8mm grass on pitches. The result over a period was two-fold. India discovered a group of talented fast bowlers while also ensuring the batters could play fast bowling better.

You needed fast bowlers to win abroad consistently. The low points of Indian cricket can usually be traced to their weakness against fast bowling. In Manchester in 1952, they were dismissed twice on the same day – for 58 and 82 – as Fred Trueman and Alec Bedser ran through the side.

In the “Summer of 42” at Lord’s in 1974, they folded for 42 thanks to Geoff Arnold’s and Chris Old’s dominant bowling. It gave rise to one of the most cruel cartoons in sport, with a woman telling her husband emerging from the toilet, “You should have gone home. Now you have missed the entire Indian innings.”

However, India’s dismissal for 36 at Adelaide in 2020 inspired neither cartoons nor panic. That was accepted as a freak innings where every good ball picked a wicket and there were hardly any bad balls. But it required great confidence to pass it off as one of those things – that confidence carried India to victories in two Tests that followed, and with it the series.

There was a phase, 2002-2004, when India won Tests at Port of Spain, Leeds, Adelaide, Multan and Rawalpindi. But only in Pakistan did they win the series. Veteran writer David Frith thought India then had the finest Top 6 batting line-up in the history of the game. There was both heft and elegance, a rare combination.

But that team did not live up to its potential. This is one of the ironies of Indian cricket – that their most celebrated team did not dominate as they should have.

What the current team has is heart. That 36 in Adelaide and 78 in Leeds serve to highlight the temperament of players who can let bygones be bygones and remember only the good times. It is a rare quality in an individual, even rarer in a team.

In the past, Indian teams always had a couple of outstanding individuals on whom everything rested. With Sunil Gavaskar dismissed, half the team was gone. If the great spinners were collared, there was no one to turn to until Kapil Dev came along, and if he had a bad day, that was that.

In the 1960s, India won only one series abroad, in New Zealand. That helped consolidate India’s biggest strength: spin bowling. That most romanticised generation led by a Nawab, Mansur Ali Khan of Pataudi, with its essentially amateur spirit was necessary. Just as necessary was the one represented by Tendulkar, when India performed with greater consistency.

All this was before the Kohli-led bunch of professionals could emerge. When India were first ranked No.1 in 2009, they had not won a series in Australia, South Africa or Sri Lanka. Now only South Africa remains.

Indian cricket has moved on, and now we are looking at the end game of the recent stars: Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja. Already, Rishabh Pant, Bumrah, Shubhman Gill, Yashaswi Jaiswal and a host of emerging fast bowlers have indicated they are ready to take over. India play five Tests in Australia starting in November.

Suddenly the pressure is on Australia. The Tendulkar generation constructed a solid foundation, the Kohli-Sharma one has built on that. At the end of the Chennai Test against Bangladesh, India’s wins outstripped losses, 179-178 in 580 Tests. Statistical evidence of a new India, if such were needed.

It’s the end of a meal out and you’ve been presented with the bill. Suddenly the pleasure of the food you’ve just eaten is replaced by a faint wave of anxiety as you realise you’ve got to work out how much to tip.

If you tip too little will you face the wrath of the waiting staff? Will you end up tipping too much? And if the service was bad, should you tip at all?

The debate is not restricted to restaurants – gratuities can be offered to many workers including hairdressers, taxi drivers and hotel porters.

A new law means workers must receive all of their tips – which is expected to benefit some three million workers in England, Scotland and Wales.

But there are no hard and fast rules about how much you have to leave.

Mae, a 17-year-old waitress for a small business, says she doesn’t expect customers to tip on top of the service charge that is added to the bill.

“So it’s quite unusual for customers to tip afterwards, which is fine. Lots of customers actually double check that when they’re paying that there is service on there and that it gets divided fairly.”

But she says one of her friends works somewhere where they don’t add a service charge so the customers there do tip – mostly.

A tip is “an uncalled for and spontaneous payment offered by a customer,” according to the government, whereas a service charge is “an amount added to the customer’s bill before it is presented”.

Etiquette expert Laura Akano, from Polished Manners, says it’s always “up to the individual” how much to tip but thinks “it’s important to show appreciation if you’ve had a good service”.

If a service charge is discretionary you can ask for it to be removed. If it’s mandatory you can’t – but the establishment must make this clear to you verbally or in writing before you order.

Both tips and service charges may be shared between many staff – for example, the person who brought you your dish as well as the one who washed it up.

Peter, 40, from Leeds, says the most memorable tip he got was from his two favourite regulars in a pub.

He knew them well, and would have their pints poured for them before they reached the bar.

One evening he was closing up and they invited him to join them – at a local strip club.

“They paid for all my drinks, and a dance for me,” he says. “That was generous.”

On his final shift at the bar some other regular customers pressed £10 notes into his hands and wished him well, “which was very kind of them”, he says.

However, he has also worked in restaurants where tips were withheld by the management, and a hotel where the service charge was never paid to staff.

“But when you need a job, and that’s what’s available, you don’t really argue too loudly,” he says.

The new law means the service charge must now be paid to staff.

It’s entirely up to you how much you leave as a tip, but many tourism websites suggest leaving about 10% to 15% in the UK.

Where Mae works, a 12.5% service charge is added to the bill.

Jemma Swallow, who used to own a tea shop in London, says 10% “covers most situations, without leaving the customer resentful of being asked for it and the staff for not receiving one”.

Ms Akano agrees that 10% is about right. “Whether people do that or not is a different thing but it’s nice to have a guide.”

Outside the UK, in countries such as the US, tipping can involve paying more than 20%, which is often compulsory even if the service is mediocre.

Mae says she doesn’t tip in the UK because the service is almost always included, but did when she went to the US.

“I did tip every time because the tipping culture is different there. That being said, it was a bit uncomfortable at times.”

In some Asian countries tipping is seen as rude, although the spread of Western-brand hotels is making the practice less of a taboo.

“Penelope”, not her real name, is a kitchen manager and says the level of tip depends on where you’re eating.

If it’s a Hungry Horse, you have certain expectations of what the meal will be like, and will tip accordingly. If you’re dining at the Ivy, however, you’re likely to tip more “to give the impression you’re a big spender”, she says.

“At the end of the day, it’s theatre,” she adds.

If a discretionary service charge has been added to your bill and you don’t think it should have been then you have the right to ask for it to be removed.

Regular restaurant goer Nige Eaton, 56, from Bedfordshire, says he’s always been concerned that tips don’t reach staff, and doesn’t like eateries that automatically add a service charge.

“When it’s printed on the bill, it does feel like some sort of blackmail and some customers feel forced to pay it, which is wrong,” he says.

If staff do a good job, they should be tipped – but this should be down to the customer, he says.

Etiquette expert John-Paul Stuthridge says it’s prudent to check restaurant websites to see whether a service charge is included “given the prevalence of ‘surprise’ service charges”.

“You could ask a member of staff, but discretion is the name of the game, so try to ask them swiftly and out of earshot from your guests.”

Ms Akano suggests letting a member of staff know you’re unhappy about the charge before the bill even arrives. This way they might remove the service charge for you.

Tipping in many industries has evolved from the days of leaving spare change on a table, with card and contactless payments now the norm.

However, “the spirit of tipping to thank hardworking staff remains strong,” says Kate Nicholls, chief executive of trade group UK Hospitality.

“If you want to tip a particular person, a cash tip will allow them to keep it themselves, while leaving a tip on the bill or behind on the table will benefit the whole team, from front-of-house to chefs and kitchen porters working hard in the kitchen.”

An alternative to tipping in the 21st Century could be leaving a social media post, which people increasingly do, and is “honestly very appreciated”, according to Mae, who says her bosses “are really on it with things like reposting stories where people have photos of the food”.

Mr Stuthridge says leaving a positive review on social media can actually be worth more than a good tip, depending on the size and nature of the restaurant.

“The time and energy spent to leave a good review probably helps the business more in the long term than any loose change could.”

Set against a backdrop of cliffside mansions, bronzed bodies, and vast ocean views – Bondi is the go-to suburb for international brands looking to launch down under.

So, when news broke on TikTok that a Crumbl Cookie pop-up was coming to Sydney’s iconic beachside hub, few raised questions.

With a host of famous fans, the US-based bakery chain – which only sells domestically and in Canada – has secured a cult-like following.

But when Australian foodies sunk their teeth into the treats, outrage spread like wildfire after it became clear they were eating days-old goods, sold by a few enterprising locals – with no connection to Crumbl – who had brought the cookies back in suitcases from Hawaii.

Adding insult to injury was the eye-watering price tag, with consumers paying A$17.50 ($12;£9) for the stale snacks, which had aged inside the belly of a commercial airline.

Labelled the great “cookie controversy” and “Crumblgate” by commentators, the doughy drama has sparked debate online – prompting calls for legal action to be taken against the sellers, as well as jabs against those willing to pay such an exorbitant amount simply to be pictured indulging in the latest trendy treat.

It even inspired a last-minute Washington Post Food review of the cookies, which ruled them “underwhelming” and “under baked”.

The saga unfolded after scores of people spent the day snaking around a commercial block in North Bondi on Sunday to secure their brightly coloured signature Crumbl box.

All of it was seemingly captured on TikTok – often in real-time – as consumer after consumer filmed themselves biting into the hardened treats, responding with a series of grimaces rather than delight.

“This is actually very bad… the texture is just weird,” one vlogger said.

“I spent A$150 on 10 cookies,” another woman blurted out mid-video, before offering a scathing review.

Another group recorded themselves simply sniffing the battered treats, before offering a ranking of 3/10.

The founder of the US company, quickly took to social media to clarify that the Australian pop-up, was not affiliated with his firm.

All of which prompted a confusing story, followed by an apology by the Sydney organisers.

In a statement, a spokesperson – who declined to give his full name – said that hundreds of the cookies had been purchased while on a trip to Hawaii and then brought back to Australia in luggage.

He said that everything the pop-up had done – including using professionally shot photographs of the sweets and mimicking the Crumbl branding – was “legal”.

And that they’d tried to adhere to the Crumbl storage requirements, which advises that the products can still be consumed after three days, if kept in an airtight container.

“We kept them to these requirements. Some were warmed to enhance their texture, which is what Crumbl does as well.

“We apologise that they don’t live up to expectations. However, they are just cookies at the end of the day,” the statement added.

The strangeness of a group of people “going on an international flight to go and procure biscuits” is not lost on Australian marketing expert Andrew Hughes, however he says the bait and switch tactics are far from new.

One recent example he pointed to was when scores of people bought tickets to a so-called Bridgerton-themed ball in Detroit, Michigan.

But instead of being met with the glitz, glamour and expensive food event organisers had promised, they were left with soggy noodles, a single violin, and a pole dancer.

To understand how these viral scams lure people in, it’s important to examine the powerful emotions elicited by the “fear of missing out” – or FOMO for short – Hughes says.

“In an age where information travel so quickly… people don’t want to be behind the curve. They act out of impulse instead of logic,” he explains.

It’s unclear whether the Crumbl spin off violated Australian consumer law, or whether those affected have grounds to act.

But beyond a few cease-and-desist letters, Hughes thinks it’s unlikely the US-brand will take further action.

“They’ll deny it. They’ll say it’s bad. But at the end of the day, it’s good publicity because it raises their brand awareness in Australia.

“All of a sudden, people who hadn’t heard of them are now talking about them.”

A child in the Canadian province of Ontario has died from rabies after being exposed to a bat in their bedroom, Canadian health officials have said.

The death was made public by Dr Malcolm Lock of the Haldimand-Norfolk Health Unit, who told councillors at a board meeting on Wednesday that the unnamed child was exposed to the virus in an area north of Sudbury.

“They woke up with a bat in their bedroom,” Dr Lock said, adding that the parents did not see signs of a bite or scratches and did not get the child a rabies vaccine as a result.

It marks the first domestically-acquired case of human rabies in Ontario since 1967.

The child, whose age was not shared by officials, was taken to hospital after the incident in early September and later died.

Rabies is a rare but deadly viral disease that can be spread to humans from an infected animal – such as bats, coyotes, foxes or raccoons – most commonly through its saliva.

The disease, which can cause severe damage to the brain and the spinal cord, nearly always causes death once symptoms have appeared, according to the World Health Organization.

Dr Lock said the percentage of bats with rabies in the southern Ontario region he oversees has increased from less than 10% to 16% in recent years.

“It’s extremely important that anyone who has a form of exposure [to bats] seeks medical attention,” he said, adding that treatment and vaccination should be quickly sought, even if bite marks aren’t immediately visible.

According to Health Canada, the Canadian government’s health department, cases of rabies among humans in the country are rare.

Since reporting began in 1924, there have been 28 cases of rabies across six provinces, all of which were fatal.

The health agency said that nearly all human cases of rabies in Canada are a result of exposure to bats, or due to exposure to rabies while in another country.

In the US, fewer than 10 people die from rabies each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This is a “dramatic decline” from the 1960s, the healthy agency said, driven largely by prevention efforts.

There were 25 cases of human rabies documented in the US from 2009 to 2018, the CDC said, seven of which were contracted outside of the country.

Like Canada, humans in the US are more commonly exposed to rabies through rabid bats, which are found in all US states except Hawaii.

In the UK, all rabies since 1902 were a result of an infection that occurred abroad, according to data by the British government. There have been 26 cases reported since 1946, all involving people who got infected outside of the UK.

In 2002, a licensed bat handler in Scotland died from an infection with a rabies-like virus that is present in a small number of indigenous bats – though a subsequent study found they pose little threat to people.

The latest documented case was in 2018 involving a traveller who was bitten by a cat in Morocco.

A huge solar flare, the largest since 2017, has been spotted erupting from the Sun’s surface.

Solar flares are made up of electromagnetic radiation that travel from the Sun at the speed of light and can reach Earth in about eight minutes.

They can disrupt some radio communications and satellites but most of us are unlikely to see those effects.

There is also a chance that northern latitudes could see the Northern Lights this weekend as two geomagnetic storms are predicted to hit Earth.

Solar flares do not cause the Northern Lights. They are caused by a phenomenon called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that erupt from an active sun spot.

Combined with flares, they can create solar storms that interact with Earth’s magnetic field or magnetosphere.

The CMEs spew out plasma and magnetic field, and up to billions of tons of material, that can hit Earth. As our magnetosphere repels the storm, it creates the aurora.

“There is the potential for a coronal mass ejection to arrive at Earth late on Friday or early on Saturday, which could lead to visible aurora for Scotland, Northern Ireland and parts of northern England,” said Met Office Space Weather Manager Krista Hammond.

A second CME is likely to hit Earth on Saturday and Sunday, associated with the solar flare which is rated X9.

That means “enhanced auroral visibility is possible further south across central England and similar latitudes, though cloud and rain could hamper viewing potential for some,” says Krista Hammond.

In the US, aurora might be seen in the northern states, and from the mid-west to Oregon, according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Centre.

The X9 solar flare emitted is the largest categorised by Nasa. The smallest is B, followed by C, M, and X. The scale ranks from 1 to 9, so X9 is the most powerful in Nasa’s ranking.

The Sun is approaching something called “solar maximum” which is when it is most active in an 11-year cycle.

As the Sun continues in this active phase, Earth is more likely to be hit by strong geomagnetic storms, meaning there is higher chance of seeing the Aurora Borealis for the next few months.

But scientists only know if solar maximum has happened six months after the event, because they use six months of data analysing the intensity and frequency of sun spots.

Current predictions suggest we could reach solar maximum at the end of 2024 or early 2025.

BBC weather presenter Simon King says the UK weather does not look good for people hoping to spot the aurora this weekend.

“It would just be the far north-east of Scotland getting the odd break in the cloud for a short time,” he says.

“If activity turns out to be a bit stronger, the best of the clear skies on Friday night will be more towards central and south England.

He says clouds may hamper viewings on Saturday night despite the evening starting with a lot of clear skies.

The convictions of Erik and Lyle Menendez, who were jailed more than three decades ago for the murder of their parents in the US, are set to be reviewed.

The brothers shot Jose and Kitty Menendez at their Beverly Hills mansion in 1989, in what prosecutors said was a plot to inherit their father’s fortune.

On Thursday, LA County district attorney George Gascon said there was “a moral and an ethical obligation” to review evidence submitted by the brothers last year, which claimed they were sexually abused by their father and acted in self-defence.

There has been renewed public interest in the murders since a Netflix series depicting the events was released in September.

During the original trial, prosecutors said the killings were motivated by greed.

They said the brothers spent much of their large inheritance on Rolex watches, cars and luxury property prior to becoming suspects.

These allegations of lavish spending, aired in a widely watched televised trial, made the case notorious in the US.

That original trial ended with a hung jury after the Menendez brothers submitted allegations of abuse spanning several years.

At a second trial, the abuse claims were largely withheld. The brothers were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1996.

Lyle Menendez was 21 and Erik Menendez was 18 at the time of the murders.

New evidence now being considered includes a 1988 letter from Erik Menendez to his cousin, which reportedly appears to reference his father’s abuse.

“None of this information has been confirmed,” Gascon – the most senior prosecutor in LA Country – told a news conference.

He continued: “We are not, at this point, ready to say that we either believe or do not believe that information.

“But we’re here to tell you that we have a moral and an ethical obligation to review what is being presented to us.”

He added that his team was “not saying there was anything wrong with the original trial”.

Gascon said a review could potentially lead to resentencing or a new trial. A hearing is set for 26 November, the BBC’s US partner CBS News reports.

Gascon said his office had received an influx of calls following the release of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story on Netflix

The drama has caused controversy, with relatives saying the brothers had been “victimised by this grotesque shockadrama”.

The show’s creator Ryan Murphy has defended the series, and described the family’s negative reaction as “predictable at best”.

On Thursday, reality TV star Kim Kardashian voiced her support for the brothers, further fuelling renewed popular interest in the case.

“They are not monsters. They are kind, intelligent, honest men,” she said in an article for NBC News.

A political row has erupted after Donald Trump claimed Americans hit hard by Hurricane Helene were losing out on emergency relief money because it had been spent on migrants.

The White House swiftly rebutted the claims and accused Republicans of spreading “bold-faced lies” about funding for the disaster response.

On Wednesday US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which he oversees, was short on cash for the rest of hurricane season.

Trump and his allies expressed outrage that the agency had spent over $640m (£487m) on housing migrants.

But officials pointed out that this funding, authorised by Congress, was part of an entirely different programme run by Fema unconnected to disaster relief.

With less than a month to go before the White House election, Trump and the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris are neck and neck in the handful of swing states, such as storm-hit North Carolina and Georgia, that will decide the vote.

The deadliest mainland US hurricane since Katrina in 2005, Helene tore through the south-east last week, claiming at least 225 lives and leaving hundreds more missing.

Both Trump and Vice-President Harris have made trips to some of the affected states.

Republicans have attempted to link the disaster relief effort to immigration – an issue seen as a strength for Trump – but have spread misinformation about how government money is used.

At an event in Evans, Georgia, on Friday, Trump said, without evidence, that: “A lot of the money that was supposed to go to Georgia and supposed to go to North Carolina and all of the others is going and has gone already.

“It’s been gone for people that came into the country illegally, and nobody has ever seen anything like that. That’s a shame.”

Fema did receive a budget from Congress – $640m in the last fiscal year – to provide housing to immigrants applying for US citizenship.

But the cash came via a federal immigration agency, Customs and Border Protection.

It was spent through Fema’s Shelter and Services Program (SSP) and is a separate pot of money to the agency’s Disaster Relief Fund of nearly $20bn, which is used to respond to hurricanes and other natural disasters.

Fema’s disaster relief budget for the year expired at the end of September and the agency is currently running on temporary funding while Congress negotiates a new annual budget.

The agency has responded to Trump’s claim with a dedicated fact-check page, and a statement from the Department of Homeland Security.

“This is false,” Fema said in a statement. “No money is being diverted from disaster response needs.”

So far, more than $45m has been given to communities affected by Hurricane Helene, said the agency.

Fema has also shipped over 11.5m meals and 12.6m litres of water in the aftermath of Helene, said Vice-President Harris on Friday, adding that more than 5,600 federal personnel were on the ground.

But Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday that it was “madness” for billions of dollars in foreign aid to be sent to Ukraine, instead of to American citizens who had lost everything in the storm.

Meanwhile, critics of Trump have pointed out that when he was president back in 2019, $155m was transferred from Fema’s operating budget to fund deportations of migrants to Mexico.

Bridget Jones fans have long adored the films for their cringe-worthy, hilarious and heartwarming scenes.

But Hugh Grant has warned that the fourth instalment in the franchise – due out on Valentine’s Day next year – will have a very different tone.

“As well as being extremely funny, it’s very, very sad,” said the actor, who will reprise his role as the dashing antagonist Daniel Cleaver.

He also revealed that there was “no obvious role” for him in the film, but “they wanted to cram me in”.

Oscar-winner Renée Zellweger is also back as the title character in Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy.

The film takes its title from the latest Bridget Jones novel, which was published in 2013.

In the book, readers rejoin Bridget in her 50s, a mother to two children and widowed following the death of her husband Mark Darcy.

Darcy was played by Colin Firth in the earlier Bridget Jones movies.

The production studio has not commented on how closely the new film will follow the storyline of its paperback namesake, but it has been revealed author Helen Fielding has written the script.

Speaking on the Graham Norton show, Grant indicated that Fielding had used a real-life tragedy to come up with the plotline.

“She had a sad story,” he said.

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“She got married to an American screenwriter, she had children and then he died.”

Grant said that Fielding then started writing a novel about a woman raising children by herself, and then realised the main character was “a bit like Bridget”.

“So she made it into a Bridget Jones book,” he said.

“And as well as being extremely funny, it’s very, very sad.”

Grant, who is best known for starring in romcoms including Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, did not appear in the third film.

He said that initially, he felt there was “absolutely no role” for his character, Daniel, in the fourth version either.

“But they wanted to cram me in,” he said.

So he said he sat down with producers to help shape the character, who was known in the earlier films for being a serial womaniser.

“I felt that what they proposed was fine, but not great.

“And I felt that he needed a third dimension, he’s in his 60s now, you can’t just have him smoothing his way down King’s Road eyeing up young girls.

“Something needs to have happened to him in the interim.

“So we invented a rather good – I invented a rather good – interim story.”

The final version got his approval, he said.

“It’s actually a very good and moving script. And I say that as someone who’s horrid about scripts. This was brilliant.”

Fielding’s first book Bridget Jones’s Diary was published in 1996 and a sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason was released three years later.

Written in the form of a personal diary, the novels chronicle the life of a hapless 30-something single working woman living in London.

In 2001, the first film adaptation starring American actress Zellweger, with Grant as Daniel Cleaver and Colin Firth as Mark Darcy, was released.

Zellweger was Oscar-nominated for the role and, in 2004, the sequel was released, although it was not as critically well received.

Emma Thompson, who debuted her character of Bridget’s despairing obstetrician in the third film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, is also set for a return in the fourth film.

New faces on the cast list include Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years A Slave) and Leo Woodall (One Day), who is rumoured to play Bridget’s younger love interest as she faces dating anew.

Fielding previously said she had decided to write Mark Darcy out of the series because she didn’t want Bridget to become “a smug married”, a fate deemed utterly lamentable by earlier musings of Jones.

A few metres from a charred home in Kibbutz Be’eri, Simon King tends to a patch of ground in the sunshine. The streets around him are eerily quiet, the silence punctuated only by the sound of air strikes that ring in the near distance.

In this community almost a year ago, 101 people were killed after gunmen from Hamas and other groups rampaged through Be’eri’s tree-lined streets, burning homes and shooting people indiscriminately. Another 30 residents and their family members were taken to Gaza as hostages.

Survivors hid in safe rooms all day and long into the night – exchanging horrifying details with each other over community WhatsApp groups, as they tried to make sense of what was happening.

The kibbutz was a strong community, where people lived and operated together as one. Neighbours were more like extended family. It is one of a small number of kibbutzim in Israel that still operates as a collective.

But now, post-7 October, the collective is splintered – psychologically and physically.

About one in 10 were killed. Only a few of the survivors have returned to their homes. Some travel back to the kibbutz daily to work, but can’t face overnight stays. Many, after months in a hotel, are now living in prefabricated buildings on another kibbutz 40km (25 miles) away.

The community, built up over nearly 80 years, is being tested like never before, and its future is uncertain.

There are reminders everywhere of those who didn’t survive – says Dafna Gerstner, who grew up in Be’eri, and spent 19 terrifying hours on 7 October holed up in a safe room – designed to protect residents from rocket attacks.

“You look to the left and it’s like, ‘Oh it’s my friend who lost her parents.’ You look to the right, ‘It’s my friend who lost her father,’ [and then] ‘She lost her mother.’ It’s everywhere you look.”

Inside Be’eri, surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire, you are never far from a house completely burnt or destroyed, or an empty patch of land where a home, wrecked that day, has been demolished.

Some streets might, upon first glance, appear almost untouched – but look closely and even there you will see markings spray-painted on walls by military units on or after 7 October. Houses where people were killed or kidnapped have black banners on the facades with their names and photos.

In the carcass of one burnt-out home, a board game rests on top of a coffee table, next to a melted television remote control. Food, long-rotten, is still in the fridge-freezer and the smell of burning lingers.

“Time stood still in the house,” says Dafna, 40, as she pokes through the ash-covered wreckage. She and her family had been playing that board game on the eve of the attacks.

Here, her disabled father and his Filipina carer hid for hours in their fortified safe room, as their home burned down around them. Dafna says it is a miracle they both survived.

Her brother did not. A member of Be’eri’s emergency response squad, he was killed in a gunfight at the kibbutz’s dental clinic. Dafna was staying in his house at the time, on a visit from her home in Germany.

Dozens of buildings in Be’eri are spattered with bullet holes – including the nursery. The play park and petting zoo are empty. No children have moved back, and the animals have been sent to new homes.

The kibbutz’s empty streets sometimes come alive, though, in a surprising way – with organised tours for visitors, who give donations.

Israeli soldiers, and some civilians from Israel and abroad, come to see the broken homes, and hear accounts of the devastation, in order to understand what happened.

Two of those who volunteer to lead the tours, Rami Gold and Simon King, say they are determined to ensure what happened here is remembered.

Simon, 60, admits this can be a difficult process.

“There’s a lot of mixed feelings and [the visitors] don’t really know what to ask but they can see and hear and smell… it’s a very heavy emotional experience.”

Rami, 70, says these occasions are often followed by restless nights. Each tour, he says, takes him back to 7 October.

He is one of the few who moved back to Be’eri after the attacks.

And the tours are not popular with everyone. “At some point it felt like someone took over the kibbutz – everybody was there,” Dafna says.

But Simon says the stories have to be told. “Some don’t like it because it’s their home and you don’t want people rummaging around,” he says. “But you have to send the message out, otherwise it will be forgotten.”

At the same time, both he and Rami say they are looking to the future, describing themselves as “irresponsible optimists”. They continue to water the lawns and fix fences, amid the destruction, as others build new homes that will replace those destroyed.

Simon describes the rebuilding as therapy.

Established in 1946, Be’eri is one of 11 Jewish communities in this region set up before the creation of the state of Israel. It was known for its left-leaning views, and many of its residents believed in, and advocated for, peace with the Palestinians.

After the attacks, many residents were moved into a hotel by the Dead Sea – the David Hotel – some 90 minutes’ drive away.

In the aftermath of the attacks, I witnessed their trauma.

Shell-shocked residents gathered in the lobby and other communal areas, as they tried to make sense of what had happened, and who they had lost, in hushed conversations. Some children clung to their parents as they spoke.

Still now, they say, the conversations have not moved on.

“Every person I speak to from Be’eri – it always goes back to this day. Every conversation is going back to dealing with it and the effects after it. We are always talking about it again and again and again,” says Shir Guttentag.

Like her friend Dafna, Shir was holed up that day in her safe room, attempting to reassure terrified neighbours on the WhatsApp group as Hamas gunmen stormed through the kibbutz, shooting residents and setting homes on fire.

Shir twice dismantled the barricade of furniture she had made against her front door to let neighbours in to hide. She told her children, “it’s OK, it’s going to be OK” as they waited to be rescued.

When they were eventually escorted to safety, she looked down at the ground, not wanting to see the remains of her community.

In the coming months at the Dead Sea hotel, Shir says she struggled as people began to leave – some to homes elsewhere in the country or to stay with families, others seeking to escape their memories by heading abroad.

Each departure was like “another break-up, another goodbye”, she says.

It is no longer unusual to see someone who is crying or looking sad among Be’eri’s grieving residents.

“In normal days it would have been like, ‘What happened? Are you OK?’ Nowadays everyone can cry and no-one asks him why,” Shir says.

Shir and her daughters, along with hundreds of other Be’eri survivors, have now moved to new, identical prefabricated homes, paid for by the Israeli government, on an expanse of barren land at another kibbutz, Hatzerim – about 40-minutes drive from Be’eri.

I was there on moving day.

It feels a world away from the manicured lawns of Be’eri, though grass has now been planted around the neighbourhood.

When single mother Shir led her daughters, aged nine and six, into their new bungalow, she told me her stomach was turning from excitement and nerves.

She checked the door to the safe room, where her children will sleep every night, noting that it felt heavier than the door at Be’eri. “I don’t know if it’s bulletproof. I hope so,” she said.

She chose not to bring many items from Be’eri because she wants to keep her home there as it was – and to remind herself that she will one day return.

The mass move to Hatzerim happened after it was put to a community vote – as is the case with all major kibbutz decisions. It is estimated about 70% of Be’eri’s survivors will live there for the time being. About half of the kibbutz’s residents have moved in so far, but more homes are on the way.

The journey from Hatzerim to Be’eri is shorter than it was from the hotel – and many people make the trip every day, to work in one of the kibbutz’s businesses, as they did before.

Shir travels to Be’eri to work at its veterinary clinic, but can’t imagine returning to live there yet.

“I don’t know what needs to happen, but something drastic, so I can feel safe again.”

In the middle of the day, the Be’eri lunch hall fills with people as they gather to eat together.

Shir, like many others, has reluctantly applied for a gun licence, never wanting to be caught off-guard again.

“It’s for my daughters and myself because, on the day, I didn’t have anything,” she says.

Her mother’s long-term partner was killed that day. When they talk about it, her mother says: “They destroyed us.”

Residents say they have relied on the support of their neighbours over the past year, but individual trauma has also tested a community that has historically operated as a collective.

The slogan at Be’eri is adapted from Karl Marx: “Everyone gives as much as he can and everyone gets as much as he needs.” But these words have now become hard to live by.

Many residents of working age are employed by Be’eri’s successful printing house, and other smaller kibbutz businesses. Profits are pooled and people receive housing and other amenities based on their individual circumstances.

However, the decision of some people not to return to work has undermined this principle of communal labour and living.

And if some residents decide they can never return to Be’eri that could, in turn, create fresh problems.

Many have little experience of non-communal living and would struggle financially if they lived independently.

The 7 October attack has also quietened calls for peace.

The kibbutz used to have a fund to support Gazans. Some residents would also help arrange medical treatment for Gazans at Israeli hospitals, members say.

Now, among some, strong views to the contrary are shared in person and on social media.

“They’ll [Gazans] never accept our being here. It’s either us or them,” says Rami.

Several people bring up the killing of resident Vivian Silver – one of Israel’s best-known peace advocates.

“For now, people are very mad,” Shir says.

“People still want to live in peace, but for now, I can’t see any partner on the other side.

“I don’t like to think in terms of hate and anger, it’s not who I am, but I can’t disconnect from what happened that day.”

Shir wears a necklace engraved with a portrait of her lifelong friend Carmel Gat, who was taken hostage from Be’eri that day.

Her biggest dream was that they would be reunited – but, on 1 September, Carmel’s body was found alongside five other hostages.

The IDF said they had been killed by Hamas just hours before a planned rescue attempt. Hamas said the hostages were killed in air strikes – but an autopsy on the returned bodies concluded they had all been shot multiple times at close range.

Be’eri is still waiting and hoping for the return of others. So far, 18 have been brought back alive, along with two dead bodies, while 10 are still in Gaza, at least three of whom are believed to still be alive.

Behind Dafna’s father’s house, 37-year-old Yuval Haran stands in front of the home where his father was killed, and many relatives were taken hostage, on 7 October. His brother-in-law Tal is still being held in Gaza.

“Until he comes back, my clock is still on 7 October. I don’t want revenge, I just want my family back, I just want to have a quiet peaceful life again,” Yuval says.

In all, some 1,200 people were killed across southern Israel on 7 October, with 251 taken to Gaza as hostages. Since then, in the Israeli military operation in Gaza, more than 41,000 people have been killed according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Hundreds of people – combatants and civilians – have also been killed in Lebanon in Israeli air strikes against the armed group Hezbollah, in a significant escalation of their long-running conflict.

Residents from Be’eri say that before 7 October, despite their proximity to the Gaza fence, they always felt safe – such was their faith in the Israeli military system. But that faith has now been shaken.

“I’m less confident and I’m less trusting,” Shir says.

She relives the events in her dreams.

“I wake up and I remind myself it’s over. But the trauma is, I think, for life. I don’t know if I can ever feel fully safe again.”

This summer Rami and Simon also took on the sombre task of digging graves for Be’eri’s dead, who are only just being moved back to the kibbutz from cemeteries elsewhere in Israel.

“After the 7th [October] this area was a military zone, we couldn’t bury them here,” says Rami, as he looks over the graves, a rifle slung across his body.

Simon says it brings up strong and passionate feelings – “but in the end they’re back at home”.

Each time a person is returned, the kibbutz holds a second funeral, with many residents in attendance.

Shir, in the temporary site at Hatzerim, says that for now, she is drawing strength from the community around her.

“We’re not whole, but we will be I hope,” she says.

“It’s a grieving community – sadder and angrier – but still a strong community.”

On 1 October, Israel began a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Shortly afterwards, Iran launched more than 180 missiles towards Israel.

With the war in Gaza still ongoing, fears of an all-out regional conflict in the Middle East remain high.

How big a danger is this threat of further escalation? For BBC InDepth, we asked a range of experts to share their analysis of why the conflict has escalated, and what might happen next.

Israel seems to have upgraded its goals from weakening Hezbollah to enforce a ceasefire deal that secures Israel’s north, to seeking to neutralise Hezbollah permanently. Despite inflicting huge losses on Hezbollah, Israel’s military campaign won’t make Hezbollah disappear.

It’s hard to know the difference between government rhetoric and what it will do on the ground. What they say they’re doing is removing the threat of Hezbollah to protect civilians in Northern Israel who live in sovereign territory and need to return after being displaced for a year as a result of ongoing rocket fire from Hezbollah, who joined the fight with Hamas after October 7. But this government also has religious forces setting forth, not a strategy, but a cosmic vision of conquest. And therefore we can’t rule out that there may be an expansionist ethos.

Israel would like the Lebanese state to reassert authority over Hezbollah. This reminds me of the 1982 Israeli ground war in Lebanon against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. That didn’t turn out so well in the long-term for Israeli citizens living near the Lebanese border. Israel in this case will need to focus on the short-term gain of calming the situation enough that its displaced 60,000 residents of northern Israel can return to their homes.

The balance of power in the Middle East is beginning to shift in a way that is weakening Iran’s influence in the region. But any such change in the status quo is a process that will take a long time to materialise.

It’s too soon to reach that conclusion, but what’s certain is the Iran-led axis is reeling and Israel seems to have achieved some significant tactical gains. Whether it can translate those to strategic gains through diplomacy remains to be seen.

Not the map, but the power balance for sure. For the past 20 years, Iran and its proxies (Hamas and Hezbollah) on one side and Israel on the other have held each other to a draw, meaning there was mutual deterrence. That was shattered on 7 October, and Israel is trying to get the upper hand.

It’s too soon to tell. My feeling is, talk to me in two weeks or talk to me in a year and we will know if there’s been a re-occupation of Southern Lebanon… At the same time, you have the conflict with Iran, but I don’t think they’re trying to redraw the borders in the Middle East.

The fact that Iran has clearly lost Hamas and Hezbollah as effective deterrents means that an increasing number of figures in the Iranian establishment are going to want to develop a nuclear weapon.

However, what does this mean in practice? And when will Israel find out? Israeli intelligence is pretty good in Iran – if Iran does start building a weapon, will Israel find out next week? If Iran goes ahead with this, it enters a very risky area. But as things stand, Iran’s conventional military capabilities are a joke compared to Israel’s, so it has relied on non-traditional means such as militias – which have proved to be of little use.

The nuclear ambition in Iran is a concern for Israel for obvious reasons. Anti-Israel animus remains central to the regime. For Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the project to destroy Israel is the oldest and most central demand. It’s the only project he’s been able to advance towards, and the only thing the Islamic Republic is a leader in is the anti-Israel project – it’s the only state in the world that shoots at Israel.

However, there is a more pragmatic element within the Iranian political establishment, which often gets forgotten, and which believes Iran has no business fighting the Palestinian war for the Palestinians.

Iran will do whatever it takes to secure its nuclear programme. It will perceive an Israeli attack on its nuclear programme as an existential threat.

It may be that in the Iranian perception, the only thing they’ve got left that could potentially genuinely be a game-changer, is to go nuclear. I don’t know what exactly that might mean – maybe they have a capability already, and they could demonstrate it by conducting a nuclear test in the desert somewhere.

Israel’s widening campaign is sowing increasing anger among the populations in the Middle East who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. This makes achieving peace in the future harder.

Certainly, a larger war will spread Israel thin, especially when it has yet to achieve the eradication of Hamas in Gaza. However, Israel continues to have the military support of the United States.

Israel has been fighting in Gaza for a year and there has been major destruction of Hamas brigades and a severe loss of fighters. The biggest problem for achieving its aims in Gaza is that Israel has no vision for an alternative governing force. The problem isn’t that Israeli forces are being spread thin, but that Israel needs a political strategy for a government framework that leads to Palestinian self-determination and has international and Palestinian buy-in. Without that, Gaza will be a constant threat and a constant military drain.

Israel cannot achieve its aims in Gaza because it doesn’t have a political aim – it never did, and it went to war without one. And this will potentially be its Achilles’ heel. But Netanyahu probably doesn’t feel like he needs to seek any kind of political outcome because he can go to endless war, and yet still have much of the Western world on his side.

Any American president can exert influence on Benjamin Netanyahu if he or she wants to. But none of them have thought it beneficial. Kamala Harris has less long-term baggage than Joe Biden in terms of wanting to give unconditional levels of support to Israel, but her party is internally divided – on one side there is strong support for Israel and on the other side, some are calling for an arms embargo. Those are a minority, but the Democratic voices calling to constrain Israel somehow are growing significantly. Trump is a wildcard. He talks big, but he doesn’t like America being dragged into wars.

I think Donald Trump might exert more influence than Kamala Harris. He is more pro-Netanyahu, or at least pro-right-wing Israel, but he’s very much against dragging the US into war.

Any US administration that is providing $10bn (£7.6bn) to help Israel’s military operations will have leverage, especially as Israel’s economy is suffering. The question is whether there is any US politician in a position of real authority who is willing to absorb the political cost domestically of using that leverage. At present there is not in either party. There is no Ronald Reagan or George HW Bush in prospect.

They’re harder to pinpoint with every missile fired or air strike launched.

I am very pessimistic about the prospects of de-escalation… most likely the perception within the Israel Defence Forces and at the political level within Netanayhu’s war cabinet is that they have the momentum. In warfare, when one side believes it has the momentum against its adversary, you don’t want to give it up, because you can continue to put pressure on your enemy.

This conflict will not be won militarily by any actor involved. Ultimately, diplomacy is the only way towards stability.

There are two obvious off-ramps. The first is for Israel to accept a ceasefire in Gaza that will pull back forces to agreed locations so that humanitarian aid can move and that allows for a new Palestinian governing authority that Palestinians, not Israelis or Americans, will choose. The second is for a ceasefire in Lebanon that will see Hezbollah cease rocket/missile attacks on Israel in return for Israel halting its airstrikes and ground incursions.

I don’t think Netanyahu is looking for off-ramps. But the one potential off-ramp is if there were major concessions from Iran, a major turnaround in Iranian policy, starting with the nuclear programme but including the support for Hezbollah and Hamas. I can’t imagine it happening, but that would be an off-ramp.

In Lebanon, the off-ramp is for a ceasefire and an agreement on new security arrangements in the south. I don’t think this option is available before the end of this year and while we’re awaiting a new US administration.

There are no off-ramps here unless the US and other major Western governments make it their business to change the direction of events on the ground in the Middle East.

Thailand is a country in shock: three days ago, 20 children and three teachers were killed when their bus was engulfed in flames.

It was one of the South East Asian country’s worst road accidents, and investigators have uncovered a series of safety failures which some have suggested effectively turned the vehicle into a “bomb on wheels”.

It has left the country – still mourning the loss of the 23 on board the bus – wondering how this was ever allowed to happen, and if it could happen again?

Video taken of the bus, after the driver had collided with a concrete barrier and come to a stop, showed jets of fire shooting up from underneath the vehicle and turning it into an inferno within minutes, giving the passengers in the rear no chance of escape.

Investigators found the bus, which was converted to run on compressed natural gas (CNG), had six gas cylinders legally installed in the rear.

But they also found five more illegally fitted under the front of the bus.

The investigation found that a pipe coming from one of those in the front broke in the impact, leaking gas which ignited the fire. The trapped passengers appear to have been unable to open the rear emergency exit too, although it is not clear yet why.

The government responded by ordering all of the more than 13,000 public and private buses powered by CNG to come in for inspection, and suspended all long-distance school bus trips.

But the conversion to CNG was just one of many alterations made since the bus was first registered in 1970.

It was a kind of “franken-bus”, with new bodywork added several times, and only parts of the chassis remaining from the original.

It had once been a double-decker, but – when new regulations imposed height limitations on these because of their propensity to overturn in an accident – it was converted into a single-decker.

Passengers were seated on the upper deck, with the lower deck used to accommodate all the gas cylinders. Social media users have likened the bus to a bomb on wheels.

This is despite Thailand’s gradual introduction over the past 15 years of regulations for bus safety laid out by the UNECE, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, a body responsible for establishing international standards in many areas. But application of these rules have been slow and piecemeal.

“The problem is most of the manufacturers in Thailand cannot reach that standard,” says Sumet Ongkittikul, a transport specialist at the Thailand Development Research Institute. “So the implementation has been delayed, to allow them to catch up.

“Also, the regulations only apply to new buses. But most of the buses operating in Thailand are old.”

Modifying old bus chassis with new bodywork is a local industry, where safety standards are for the most part far behind those in many other countries.

It is thought that at least 80% of the buses connecting Thailand’s cities are in this older, adapted category.

“A new bus, from a good manufacturer, is very expensive,” Sumet Ongkittikul explains. “So they use an old chassis, and a local manufacturer to build new bodywork, and that is counted only as an old bus, where the new regulations do not apply.”

For example, UNECE regulation UN R118, which requires bus interiors to be made with non-flammable materials, was officially introduced in Thailand in 2022, but does not apply to buses made before then, or buses adapted using older chassis.

Less flammable materials might have helped mitigate the bus fire on Tuesday.

And even the very limited regulations which did apply to the ill-fated bus appear to have been broken.

According to the police, the bus was inspected in May this year, but they believe the illegal addition of gas cylinders was made after that.

Two days after the accident, the police say they caught the bus owner trying to remove improperly installed gas cannisters from the five other buses.

The company has had its licence to run buses suspended, and the owner has been charged with causing death through negligence, with other criminal charges being considered.

But will this accident finally bring about a change in Thailand’s dire road safety record?

The country is currently on its fifth National Road Safety Master Plan, but with little progress to show for it.

For years, it has sat in the top 10 countries with the highest per capita road fatalities. At times, it has been number two.

Data from the TDRI found that over the 10 years to 2023, an average of 17,914 people died from road accidents per year.

In the UK, which has a similar population, fatalities are 10 times lower.

Anyone who travels regularly on Thai roads will be familiar with the dangerous behaviour habitually exhibited by many drivers.

Exceeding the speed limit is commonplace and rarely punished. Cars weave in and out of traffic, leaving little margin for error. Commercial vehicles are often overloaded, badly designed and poorly lit. Motorbike riders routinely fail to wear helmets, far more than in neighbouring countries.

Some blame corruption in the police force. Others blame the Buddhist belief in karma, putting misfortunes like car accidents down to bad luck rather than bad habits.

Although there are posters graphically warning of the dangers of drinking and driving, there has also not been a sustained road safety campaign mounted by any Thai government. Some researchers believe this is because most fatalities, on motorbikes and on public buses, affect lower income groups, and not the policymakers who usually drive, or are driven, in high-end cars with high safety levels.

For all of the appalling statistics, road safety is not seen as an urgent issue, and gets little attention from the public.

There have been plenty of equally horrific accidents before involving long-distance buses, yet they are little safer today than they were 10 years ago.

Transport Minister Suriya Jungrungreangkit has announced a special committee to look into all aspects of road safety following Tuesday’s fatal accident, but it has been greeted with little fanfare or enthusiasm.

If this initiative really does bring about meaningful improvements, and bring down the annual death toll, it will break the pattern of ineffectual measures which have characterised nearly all of Thailand’s road safety efforts to date.

When an audio clip appeared to show a local school principal making derogatory comments, it went viral online, sparked death threats against the educator and sent ripples through a suburb outside the city of Baltimore. But it was soon exposed as a fake, manipulated by artificial intelligence – so why do people still believe it’s real?

“I seriously don’t understand why I have to constantly put up with these dumbasses here every day.”

So began what appeared to be a long tirade from the principal of Pikesville High School, punctuated with racist, antisemitic and offensive tropes. It sounded like it had been secretly recorded.

The speaker went on to bemoan “ungrateful black kids” and Jewish people in the community.

The clip, first posted in January, went viral nationally. But it really struck a nerve in the peaceful, leafy suburb of Pikesville, which has large black and Jewish populations, and in the nearby city of Baltimore, Maryland. Principal Eric Eiswert was put on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.

Alfie Malone, a black man who lives in nearby Baltimore, spotted other members of his community posting the clip and assumed it was real.

“In the back of your mind you think this is probably the way people really actually feel about us,” Mr Malone said. “And then to hear that actually come across audio.”

In an effort to corroborate what he was hearing, Mr Malone checked out other real recordings of Mr Eiswert on social media and they sounded the same.

So the part-time postman, part-time podcaster hit the re-share button.

The clip started to gain traction across social media as more people spread it online. One of the most shared versions was well on its way to passing two million views within hours. Already, that’s around 60 times the entire population of Pikesville.

But what those sharing the clip didn’t realise at the time was that another bombshell was about to drop: the clip was an AI-generated fake.

For BBC Radio 4’s Why Do You Hate Me USA, I’ve been in Maryland investigating the impact this clip had on that town. It reads almost like a fable about the dangers AI poses, especially when local communities are targeted.

When the clip landed on the desk of Kristen Griffith, an education reporter at the Baltimore Banner, she thought it was going be a relatively straightforward story of a teacher being exposed for making offensive remarks.

But as is best-practice in journalism, Ms Griffith wanted to give the principal the chance to comment and tell his side of the story. So, she reached out to his union representative, who said not only did Mr Eiswert condemn the comments, but he didn’t make them.

“He said right away, oh, we think this is fake… We believe it’s AI,” she told the BBC. “I hadn’t heard that angle” before.

But when she published that explanation, her readers were not convinced. Far from raising questions about the clip’s veracity, it just fuelled backlash from people who thought the allegation of fakery was just an excuse or an attempt to evade accountability.

It was at this point that local police started investigating the case. Staff at Pikesville High told them they were feeling unsafe because of all the attention, and they were concerned that the school was bugged with recording devices.

Principal Eiswert’s reputation had taken a serious hit too. Security was stepped up around both him and the school. He became a target for social media hate and threats. I found dozens of abusive messages taking aim at him on social media.

Then in April, Baltimore Police Chief Robert McCullough confirmed they now had “conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic”.

And they believed they knew who made the fake.

Police charged 31-year-old Dazhon Darien, the school’s athletics director, with several counts related to the fake video. Charges included theft, retaliating against a witness and stalking.

He was arrested at the airport, where police say he was planning to fly to Houston, Texas.

Police say that Mr Darien had been under investigation by Principal Eiswert over an alleged theft of $1,916 (£1,460) from the school. They also allege there had been “work performance challenges” and his contract was likely not to be renewed.

Their theory was that by creating the deepfake recording, he hoped to discredit the principal before he could be fired.

Investigators say they traced an email used to send the original video to a server connected to Mr Darien, and allege that he used Baltimore County Public Schools’ computer network to access AI tools. He is due to stand trial in December 2024.

Mr Darien’s legal representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Baltimore County Schools Superintendent Myriam Rogers had previously said it was “a very difficult time” for the school community, the principal and his family.

Representatives for Pikesville High School and Mr Eiswert did not respond to my requests for further comment.

Because the clip was audio-only, it meant there were no visual giveaways, like robotic movements that normally reveal AI manipulation. It also mentioned jargon, like “grade-level expectations”, and other details, like staff names, that only people close to the school would know.

When you listen carefully, though, there are clear edits between sentences – and the voice, while similar to the principal, sounds quite monotonous. Artificial intelligence can use several minutes of a real recording – from, say, your favourite actor in a film or a presidential candidate giving a speech – to then generate a clip that makes it sound like they said something they never did.

But perhaps the biggest reason why people believed the video was real was because it felt true, Mr Malone told me.

It tapped into his own experiences of racism as a black man living in Baltimore.

When Mr Malone heard the principal describe black students as lazy, it immediately reminded him of slurs and discrimination he’d encountered at school and work.

Months later, the effects of the fake audio clip are still felt in Pikesville. Mr Eiswert has moved jobs and is working in another school. And even though some community members told me they now accept the video is fake, the damage is done.

“This is a Jewish neighbourhood and to say something that’s so inflammatory about the community was upsetting,” a woman called Sharon told me as she packed her grandchild’s pram into a car in a house opposite the high school last August.

For several minutes, Sharon talked to me as though the clip was real.

“I think when people say things like that, other people join in that and it makes me more fearful.”

When her husband chimed in from the car, reminding her the clip was actually fake, she admitted she did “find out later it was AI-generated”. But she said she was still angry about it.

I found that for people like Sharon, who had believed the clip was real, even for a short time, it stayed with them – especially when the message echoed genuine experiences of racism and discrimination. It reminded me of something I hear time and time again while investigating misinformation and conspiracy theories: “Well, even if it’s not real, it’s what I think they think.”

All the major social media companies say they have policies to label, remove and limit the spread of AI-generated posts. But that action only happens when it can be proven a clip is fake. By that point, it could have already reached millions of people.

Alfie Malone said even earlier that day, he spoke to a friend who still had no idea the clip was AI-generated.

“I honestly believe that a lot of people here in this city don’t really know that that’s not true,” he said.

He said he felt sorry that Mr Eiswert, the school principal, was wrongly accused of making the comments. He is also worried the episode has undermined real experiences of racism.

He said he’d think twice before re-sharing a clip like this again.

“I’ve been burnt by the fire once. I’m not touching the stove again.”

Butler County in Western Pennsylvania is rock-solid Trump country.

In front yards, on the sides of roads and at filling stations, the messages on the billboards are blunt.

“Bulletproof” is one, on a picture of the former president with his fist raised, moments after he was shot in this very town.

Another, more overtly political, reads: “Even my dog hates Biden.”

The former president got twice as many votes as Joe Biden here in 2020, beating Hillary Clinton in 2016 by a similar margin. In fact, this county has only voted Democrat once in the past 150 years of presidential elections.

Butler has always been proud to be known as the home of the American Jeep but this year it is better remembered for one thing – where a former Republican president was inches away from being assassinated.

A bullet grazed his ear that day, on 13 July, and Butler is undergoing its own healing process as Donald Trump returns to the same spot, the Farm Show grounds, for a rally on Saturday evening.

Trump’s speech is expected to begin at about 17:00 local time (21:00 GMT), with the site reportedly already in lockdown ahead of his visit.

For the first time since publicly endorsing the former president, Elon Musk – the boss of X, Tesla and SpaceX – has confirmed he will be in the audience.

Ahead of Trump’s return to Butler, the BBC has spoken to some of the people who were just a few feet away from him as the gunfire rang out back in July.

There is sadness and guilt among local Republicans and resentment, too, that their county – so staunchly pro-Trump – was where this happened.

“That was the saddest moment of my life,” said Jim Hulings, chairman of the Butler County Republican Party, who was 30ft away at the time and thought Trump had been killed. “I was horrified to think that somebody had the audacity to shoot a great man.”

Jondavid Longo, the mayor of Slippery Rock, a small town just a few miles away, was on stage moments before the shooting, part of the warm-up act.

When the gunman began to fire, he instinctively used his body to cover his pregnant wife. He says he replays the incident in his mind every day.

“It’s a difficult thing for us to come to terms with,” he said. There is guilt that somebody else did lose their life that day, he says, and two others were seriously injured.

• Unanswered questions as Trump returns to Butler
• Wife of man killed at Trump rally struggles with loss

That person was Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former volunteer fire fighter, who died after throwing himself in front of the bullets to protect his wife and daughters.

His widow Helen seems lost and distracted when I meet her. It’s clear she’s struggling.

“I think about it every day. I see it every time I close my eyes.”

She and Corey were childhood sweethearts, married for 29 years. And both staunch supporters of Trump.

They joked that day that the former president was going to invite Corey up on stage, she said. Days later, his fire chief’s jacket was taken to the Republican convention in Milwaukee and placed on stage as Trump made his acceptance speech for the nomination.

“I just cried because, you know, I said he got his moment on stage with Trump.”

Like Helen, Trump supporters in Butler have dozens of questions about how it could have happened.

While the motive of the 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Crooks, remain obscure, what has become much clearer is the series of security blunders that led to him pulling the trigger.

Two hours before he opened fire, he was able to fly a drone around the site without being detected because Secret Service counter-surveillance equipment was not working.

Communications failures meant that suspicious sightings of Crooks an hour and a half before he shot at Trump were not passed on to all elements of the Secret Service.

More than half an hour before the shooting, he was seen by police using a rangefinder pointed at the stage – a device often used by hunters pursuing their prey.

Yet a little over 25 minutes later, Crooks had managed to climb on to the roof of a local business and fire eight shots. Seconds later he was dead, a single shot to the head from a Secret Service sniper.

Those few seconds are still haunting many of those who witnessed it.

Lucie Roth can be seen in the VIP seats behind Trump in one of the most recognisable pictures of the shooting, taken by a Reuters photographer.

She initially thought the gunfire was fireworks but then she heard screams to “Get down!” and dropped to the floor.

“I truly thought he was dead. I saw the Secret Service pile on top of him like he was the quarterback at a football game.”

She was still down when she heard the crowd roar and cheer, and knew then he was OK.

Renae Billow and her 11-year-old son and Trump impersonator, Gino Benford, were a few feet away from Lucie and Gino is clearly visible in the Reuters photo, complete with a blond wig and a dark suit.

Speaking from the family home in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Gino says he was both scared and calm, “half and half”, when the shots rang out.

“I thought, who would want to do this to such a great president?”

Reporting from just outside the rally that night, we began to interview people as they left.

But one man stood out. He was wearing a Trump hat with fake orange hair sprouting out of it and holding a can of beer.

Greg Smith’s words, in which he described how he had seen the gunman on the roof and tried to warn the Secret Service, reverberated around the world.

• Witness tells BBC he saw gunman on roof

It provided the first hint at the catastrophic security failure and a clip of the interview was viewed by tens of millions of people on social media.

Meeting him again this week at his store, just yards from the scene of the shooting, he still feels angry.

“I was very frustrated when I talked to you, extremely frustrated because I think of the time frame. He was on that roof for minutes, crawling, and we were pointing and yelling.”

“I remember thinking ‘Why? Why isn’t someone doing something? How is this happening? How do I still hear President Trump talking as this is going on?'”

There is also pride in what he did in speaking out. People tell him he is part of history, the first person to tell the world what happened.

As someone who usually shuns the limelight, he added: “I jumped out of my comfort zone and did that. And I’m glad that it went like it did, that everything I told you that night has proven to be true.”

Greg, who that day was listening to Trump from outside the rally, does not plan to go to Saturday’s event. He says his 12-year-old son has been traumatised by it, jumping whenever he hears fire works.

Despite still feeling angry about the security lapses, Helen Comperatore and her daughters will go back.

It’s what Corey would have wanted, she says.

“I have tried to do that with everything I do, what would he want me to do? What would Corey do? And that’s how I go.”

• 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?

Voters in the US go to the polls on 5 November to elect their next president.

The election was initially a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris.

The big question now is – will America get its first woman president or a second Donald Trump term?

As election day approaches, we’ll be keeping track of the polls and seeing what effect the campaign has on the race for the White House.

Harris has been ahead of Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July, as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

The two candidates went head to head in a televised debate in Pennsylvania on 10 September that just over 67 million people tuned in to watch.

A majority of national polls carried out in the week after suggested Harris’s performance had helped her make some small gains, with her lead increasing from 2.5 percentage points on the day of the debate to 3.3 points just over a week later.

That marginal boost was mostly down to Trump’s numbers though. His average had been rising ahead of the debate, but it fell by half a percentage point in the week afterwards.

You can see those small changes in the poll tracker chart below, with the trend lines showing how the averages have changed and the dots showing the individual poll results for each candidate.

While these national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, they’re not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election.

That’s because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.

There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.

• What is the electoral college?

Right now, the polls are very tight in the seven states considered battlegrounds in this election with just one or two percentage points separating the candidates.

That includes Pennsylvania, which is key as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven states and therefore winning it makes it easier to reach the 270 votes needed.

In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day Biden quit the race he was trailing Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in these seven states.

One thing to note is that there are fewer state polls than national polls being carried out at the moment so we have less data to go on and every poll has a margin of error that means the numbers could be higher or lower.

But looking at the trends since Harris joined the race does help highlight the states in which she seems to be in a stronger position, according to the polling averages.

In the chart below you can see that Harris has been leading in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin since the start of August – but the margins are still small.

All three had all been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his path to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden retook them in 2020 and if Harris can do the same this year then she will be on course to win the election.

The figures we have used in the graphics above are averages created by polling analysis website 538, which is part of American news network ABC News. To create them, 538 collects the data from individual polls carried out both nationally and in battleground states by lots of polling companies.

As part of its quality control, 538 only includes polls from companies that meet certain criteria, like being transparent about how many people they polled, when the poll was carried out and how the poll was conducted (telephone calls, text message, online, etc).

You can read more about the 538 methodology here.

At the moment, the polls suggest that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are within a couple of percentage points of each other in swing states – and when the race is that close, it’s very hard to predict winners.

Polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Polling companies will be trying to fix that problem in a number of ways, including how to make their results reflect the make-up of the voting population.

Those adjustments are difficult to get right and pollsters still have to make educated guesses about other factors like who will actually turn up to vote on 5 November.

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• Read more about: Kamala Harris | Donald Trump | US election

The US military says it has launched strikes on the Iranian-backed Houthi group in Yemen, hitting 15 targets.

The Pentagon said it used aircraft and warships to launch the attacks in order “to protect freedom of navigation”.

Several explosions were reported in some of Yemen’s main cities, including the capital Sanaa.

Since November, the Houthis have launched attacks on around 100 ships in the Red Sea, sinking two vessels. The rebel group says the attacks are retaliation for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, said the attacks targeted weapons systems, bases and other equipment belonging to the Houthis.

Houthi-aligned media say the Yemeni capital of Sanaa was among cities hit.

On Monday, the Houthis said they had shot down a US-made MQ-9 Reaper drone over Yemen. The US military acknowledged losing an unmanned aircraft.

Last week the Pentagon said the Houthis had launched “a complex attack” on US Navy ships in the region, though all of the weapons launched were shot down.

Sanaa has had a respite from bombing in the past two years since fighting between the warring parties in Yemen largely subsided.

As well as the attacks on ships in the Red Sea, the Houthis have fired several missiles and drones at Israel directly.

In July a drone launched from Yemen struck Tel Aviv, killing one person and injuring 10. Last month, the group fired several missiles at Israel, including one that targeted Israel’s main airport.

Both times Israel responded by attacking sites in Yemen.

Earlier this year, the US, UK and 12 other nations launched Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect Red Sea shipping lanes against the Houthis.

The Houthis are part of a network of armed groups in the Middle East backed by Iran that includes Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

At least four hospitals in Lebanon announced on Friday that they were suspending work because of Israeli strikes, while a Hezbollah-affiliated health organisation said that 11 paramedics had been killed in the past 24 hours.

The four closures capped two weeks of Israeli strikes on hospitals and healthcare workers in Lebanon that have shuttered at least 37 facilities and killed dozens of medical staff, according to the World Health Organisation.

Late on Friday night, the Israeli army issued a statement alleging that Hezbollah was using medical vehicles to transport fighters and weapons, warning that it would strike any vehicle it suspected of being used for military purposes.

Hospital staff in southern Lebanon told the BBC that health facilities treating wounded civilians had been hit with direct Israeli strikes. The BBC has approached the IDF for comment.

Dr Mounes Kalakish, director of the Marjayoun governmental hospital in southern Lebanon, told the BBC that the hospital had no choice but to close on Friday after an airstrike hit two ambulances at the hospital’s entrance way on Friday, killing seven paramedics.

“The nurses and doctors were terrified,” he said. “We tried to calm them and carry on working, but it was not possible.”

The emergency director of the hospital, Dr Shoshana Mazraani, said she was sitting at the front of the building when the strike happened. She said that she heard the cries of the paramedics who were hit and ran towards the damaged ambulances, but was warned to stay back by colleagues fearful of a follow up strike.

The Marjayoun hospital had already been hanging on by a thread, Dr Mazraani said, with a core team of just 20 doctors remaining from the centre’s usual 120 staff. The closure on Friday was a “tragedy for the region”, she said.

“We serve a huge population here, many villages. We had 45 inpatient beds, all now empty. We were the only hospital providing dialysis in the region, for example. We have had to turn away emergency patients and tell others to leave.”

Rita Suleiman, the nursing director at the Saint Therese hospital, on the edge of Beirut’s southern suburbs, told the BBC that the hospital had also struggled on after being badly damaged by a strike on Friday but was later forced to suspend all services.

Other hospitals were carrying on with severely limited services. Dr Mohammed Hamadeh, director of the Tebnine hospital, told the BBC on Friday a nearby strike had rocked the building.

“The blast was very close,” he said. “We are still trying to operate but we cannot leave the confines of the hospital because it is too dangerous.”

Late on Friday night, the Salah Ghandour hospital in Bint Jbeil announced it had closed after being “violently shelled”, following an order from the Israeli army to evacuate.

The Israeli army said it was targeting a mosque adjacent to the hospital which it claimed was being used by Hezbollah fighters.

The strikes on healthcare facilities have not been limited to the south of Lebanon. Israel hit a medical centre in central Beirut on Thursday belonging to the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Health Organisation, killing nine and wounding 14. The Israeli army said the strike targeted “terror assets”.

The Lebanese Red Cross said on Thursday that four of its paramedics were wounded in a strike on a convoy evacuating patients, despite the organisation co-ordinating with the Israeli army.

Gabriel Karlsson, country manager in Beirut for the British Red Cross, told the BBC: “Health and aid workers must be able to help those in need without fearing for their own safety. Teams from the Red Cross and Red Crescent are a lifeline, supporting communities tirelessly – they must be protected.”

World Health Organisation director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Thursday that 28 healthcare workers had been killed in Lebanon over the previous 24 hours, and many other healthcare staff were no longer reporting for work because of the strikes.

Dr Kalakish, the director of the Marjayoun hospital, told the BBC that prior to the strike that closed his hospital it was already operating with no anaesthesiologist or other specialists.

Some staff had fled the bombardment for their own safety, he said, while others had been prevented from reaching the hospital because of air strikes on nearby roads.

Lebanon’s Health Minister Firass Abiad said on Thursday that 97 rescue workers had been killed since Hezbollah and Israel began fighting last October.

More than 40 of those – paramedics and firefighters – were in just three days this past week, he said.

President Joe Biden has said he is unsure whether Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is holding off on agreeing a Gaza ceasefire deal in order to influence next month’s US election.

He was asked the question during a surprise appearance at a White House press briefing on Friday, telling reporters: “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know – but I’m not counting on that.”

Biden then directed some terse words at his longtime ally: “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none,” he said. “And I think [Netanyahu] should remember that.”

Some Democrats have voiced concern that Netanyahu is ignoring the US president’s calls to negotiate a ceasefire and hostage release deal in order to harm the party’s chances in November.

Earlier this week, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN: “I don’t think you have to be a hopeless cynic to read some of Israel’s actions, some of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s actions, as connected to the American election.”

Polls suggest the escalating violence in the Middle East and the failure to secure a diplomatic agreement is hurting Biden and his replacement as the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.

The president’s approval rating among Arab-Americans has plummeted over the past year, largely due to anger at US support for Israel’s military campaign, and this could damage the party’s prospects in November.

Biden has been pushing for a diplomatic agreement between Israel and Hamas for months, and has indicated several times that one is close. A deal before the election would be a major boost for the president and the Democratic Party but appears increasingly unlikely.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• DISINFO: Pro- and anti-Trump voters united by one belief
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

While the Biden administration has mostly criticised Hamas for failing to reach an agreement, the president has also expressed increasing public frustration with Netanyahu, who he recently said was not doing enough to strike a deal.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has rejected suggestions from Washington that an agreement is close.

“Hamas is not there with a deal. There’s not a deal in the making, unfortunately,” the Israeli prime minister said earlier this month just hours after a US official said it was 90% complete.

The increasingly fractious relationship between Biden and Netanyahu, who have known one another for decades, contrasts with the friendly relationship the Israeli leader had with former president Donald Trump, the current Republican nominee.

Israel, meanwhile, has continued strikes on Gaza and pushed ahead with a ground invasion in southern Lebanon. It has also vowed to respond to an Iranian ballistic missile attack this week.

At his appearance at Friday’s press briefing, which came as a shock to reporters in the room as it was his first since becoming president four years ago, Biden responded to concern that Israel could strike Iranian oil fields in retaliation.

“The Israelis have not concluded what they are going to do in terms of a strike,” he said. “If I were in their shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oil fields.”

Biden caused oil prices to rise on Thursday when he said the US was discussing with Israel the possibility of strikes on Iran’s oil infrastructure.