Millions of people in the Middle East dream of safe, quiet lives without drama and violent death. The last year of war, as bad as any in the region in modern times, has shown yet again that dreams of peace cannot come true while deep political, strategic and religious fault lines remain unbridged. Once again, war is reshaping the politics of the Middle East.

The Hamas offensive came out of well over a century of unresolved conflict. After Hamas burst through the thinly defended border, it inflicted the worst day the Israelis had suffered.

Around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, were killed. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, phoned President Joe Biden and told him that “We’ve never seen such savagery in the history of the state”; not “since the Holocaust.” Israel saw the attacks by Hamas as a threat to its existence.

Since then, Israel has inflicted many terrible days on the Palestinians in Gaza. Nearly 42,000 people, mostly civilians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Much of Gaza is in ruins. Palestinians accuse Israel of genocide.

The war has spread. Twelve months after Hamas went on the offensive the Middle East is on the edge of an even worse war; wider, deeper, even more destructive.

A year of killing has stripped away layers of assumptions and illusions. One is Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that he could manage the Palestinian issue without making concessions to their demands for self-determination.

With that went the wishful thinking that had comforted Israel’s worried Western allies. Leaders in the US and UK, and others, had convinced themselves that Netanyahu, despite opposing a Palestinian state alongside Israel all his political life, could somehow be persuaded to accept one to end the war.

Netanyahu’s refusal reflected almost universal distrust of Palestinians inside Israel as well as his own ideology. It also torpedoed an ambitious American peace plan.

President Biden’s “grand bargain” proposed that Israel would receive full diplomatic recognition by Saudi Arabia, the most influential Islamic country, in return for allowing Palestinian independence. The Saudis would be rewarded with a security pact with the US.

The Biden plan fell at the first hurdle. Netanyahu said in February that statehood would be “huge reward” for Hamas. Bezalel Smotrich, one of the ultra-nationalist extremists in his cabinet, said it would be an “existential threat” to Israel.

The Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, presumed to be alive, somewhere in Gaza had his own illusions. A year ago, he must have hoped that the rest of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” would join, with full force, into a war to cripple Israel. He was wrong.

Sinwar kept his plans to attack Israel on 7 October so secret that he took his enemy by surprise. He also surprised some on his own side. Diplomatic sources told the BBC that Sinwar might not even have shared his plans with his own organisation’s exiled political leadership in Qatar. They had notoriously lax security protocols, talking on open lines that could be easily overheard, one source said.

Far from going on the offensive, Iran made it clear it did not want a wider war, as Israel invaded Gaza and President Biden ordered American carrier strike groups to move closer to protect Israel.

Instead, Hassan Nasrallah, and his friend and ally, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, restricted themselves to rocketing Israel’s northern border, which they said would continue until a ceasefire in Gaza. The targets were mostly military, but Israel evacuated more than 60,000 people away from the border. In Lebanon, perhaps twice as many had to flee over the months as Israel hit back.

Israel made clear it would not tolerate an indefinite war of attrition with Hezbollah. Even so, the conventional wisdom was that Israel would be deterred by Hezbollah’s formidable fighting record in previous wars and its arsenal of missiles, provided by Iran.

In September, Israel went on the offensive. No one outside the senior ranks of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Mossad spy agency believed so much damage could be inflicted so quickly on Iran’s most powerful ally.

Israel remotely exploded booby-trapped pagers and radios, destroying Hezbollah’s communications and killing leaders. It launched one of the most intense bombing campaigns in modern warfare. On its first day Israel killed about 600 Lebanese people, including many civilians.

The offensive has blown a big hole in Iran’s belief that its network of allies cemented its strategy to deter and intimidate Israel. The key moment came on 27 September, with the huge air strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut that killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and many of his top lieutenants. Nasrallah was a vital part of Iran’s “axis of resistance”, its informal alliance and defence network of allies and proxies.

Israel broke out of the border war by escalating to a bigger one. If the strategic intention was to force Hezbollah to cease fire and pull back from the border, it failed. The offensive, and invasion of south Lebanon, has not deterred Iran.

Iran seems to have concluded that its open reluctance to risk a wider war was encouraging Israel to push harder. Hitting back was risky, and guaranteed an Israeli response, but for the supreme leader and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, it had become the least bad option.

On Tuesday 1 October, Iran attacked Israel with ballistic missiles.

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Kibbutz Kfar Aza is very close to the wire that was supposed to protect Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. The kibbutz was a small community, with modest homes on an open-plan campus of lawns and neat gardens. Kfar Aza was one of Hamas’s first targets on 7 October. Sixty-two people from the kibbutz were killed by Hamas. Of the 19 hostages taken from there into Gaza, two were killed by Israeli troops after they escaped from captivity. Five hostages from Kfar Aza are still in Gaza.

The Israeli army took journalists into Kfar Aza on 10 October last year, when it was still a battle zone. We saw Israeli combat troops dug into the fields around the kibbutz and could hear gunfire as they cleared buildings where they suspected Hamas fighters might be sheltering. Israeli civilians killed by Hamas were being carried out in body bags from the ruins of their homes. Hamas fighters killed by Israeli soldiers as they fought their way into the kibbutz still lay on the neat lawns, turning black as they decomposed in the strong Mediterranean sun.

A year later the dead are buried but very little has changed. The living have not returned to live in their homes. Ruined houses have been preserved as they were when I saw them on 10 October last year, except the names and photos of the people who lived and were killed inside them are displayed on big posters and memorials.

Zohar Shpak, a resident who survived the attack with his family, showed us round the homes of neighbours who were not as lucky. One of the houses had a large photo on its wall of the young couple who lived there, both killed by Hamas on 7 October. The ground around the houses has been dug over. Zohar said the young man’s father had spent weeks sifting earth to try to find his son’s head. He had been buried without it.

The stories of the dead of 7 October, and the hostages, are well known in Israel. Local media still talk about their country’s losses, adding new information to old pain.

Zohar said it was too early to think about how they might rebuild their lives.

“We are still inside the trauma. We are not in post-trauma. Like people said, we’re still here. We are still in the war. We wanted the war will be ended, but we want it will be ended with a victory, but not an army victory. Not a war victory.

“My victory is that I could live here, with. My son and daughter, with my grandchildren and living peacefully. I believe in peace.”

Zohar and many other Kfar Aza residents identified with the left wing of Israeli politics, meaning that they believed Israel’s only chance of peace was allowing the Palestinians their independence. Israelis like Zohar and his neighbours are convinced that Netanyahu is a disastrous prime minister who bears a heavy responsibility for leaving them vulnerable and open to attack on 7 October.

But Zohar does not trust the Palestinians, people he used to ferry to hospitals in Israel in better times when they were allowed out of Gaza for medical treatment.

“I don’t believe those people who are living over there. But I want the peace. I want to go to Gaza’s beach. But I don’t trust them. No, I don’t trust any one of them.”

Hamas leaders do not accept that the attacks on Israel were a mistake that brought the wrath of Israel, armed and supported by the United States down on to the heads of their people. Blame the occupation, they say, and its lust for destruction and death.

In Qatar, an hour or so before Iran attacked Israel on 1 October, I interviewed Khalil al-Hayya, the most senior Hamas leader outside Gaza, second only in their organisation to Yahya Sinwar. He denied his men had targeted civilians – despite overwhelming evidence – and justified the attacks by saying it was necessary to put the plight of the Palestinians on the world’s political agenda.

“It was necessary to raise an alarm in the world to tell them that here there is a people who have a cause and have demands that must be met. It was a blow to Israel, the Zionist enemy.”

Israel felt the blow, and on 7 October, as the IDF was rushing troops to the Gaza border, Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech promising a “mighty vengeance”. He set out war aims of eliminating Hamas as a military and political force and bringing the hostages home. The prime minister continues to insist that “total victory” is possible, and that force will in the end free the Israelis held by Hamas for a year.

His political opponents, including relatives of the hostages, accuse him of blocking a ceasefire and a hostage deal to appease ultra-nationalists in his government. He is accused of putting his own political survival before the lives of Israelis.

Netanyahu has many political enemies in Israel, even though the offensive in Lebanon has helped repair his poll numbers. He remains controversial but for most Israelis the war in Gaza is not. Since 7 October, most Israelis have hardened their hearts to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

Two days into the war, Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, said he had ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip.

“There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Since then, under international pressure, Israel has been forced to loosen its blockade. At the United Nations at the end of September, Netanyahu insisted Gazans have all the food they need.

The evidence shows clearly that is not true. Days before his speech, UN humanitarian agencies signed a declaration just demanding an end to “appalling human suffering and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”.

“More than 2 million Palestinians are without protection, food, water, sanitation, shelter, health care, education, electricity and fuel – the basic necessities to survive. Families have been forcibly displaced, time and time again, from one unsafe place to the next, with no way out.”

BBC Verify has analysed the condition of Gaza after a year of war.

The Hamas-run health ministry says nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed so far. Analysis of satellite imagery by US academics Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek suggests 58.7% of all buildings have been damaged or destroyed.

But there is another human cost – displacement – with civilians repeatedly instructed to move by the IDF.

The effects of the movement of people can be seen from space.

Satellite images show how tents have amassed and dispersed in central Rafah. It’s a pattern that has been repeated across the strip.

These waves of displacement began on 13 October, when the IDF told residents of the northern half of the strip to move south for their own “safety”.

BBC Verify has identified more than 130 social media posts like these shared by the IDF, detailing which areas were designated combat zones, routes to take out and where temporary pauses in fighting would take place.

In total, these often-overlapping posts amounted to about 60 evacuation orders covering more than 80% of the Gaza strip.

On many of the notices, BBC Verify has found key details to be unreadable and drawn boundaries inconsistent with the text.

The IDF has designated a coastal area – al-Mawasi – in southern Gaza as a humanitarian zone. It still gets bombed. BBC Verify has analysed footage of 18 air strikes within the zone’s borders.

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Satellite pictures show a huge bottleneck of people on Salah al-Din Street, after Israel ordered the effective depopulation of northern Gaza. Somewhere in the crowds moving down Salah al-Din, Gaza’s main north-south route, was Insaf Hassan Ali, her husband and two children, a boy of 11 and a girl of seven. So far, they have all survived, unlike many members of their extended family.

Israel does not allow journalists into Gaza to report freely. We assume that is because Israel does not want us to see what it has done there. We commissioned a trusted Palestinian freelancer inside Gaza to interview Insaf Ali and her son.

She spoke about the terrible fear they felt as they walked south, with perhaps one million others, on the orders of the Israeli army. Death was everywhere, she says.

“We were walking on Salah al-Din Street. A car in front of us was hit. We saw it, and it was burning… On the left, people were killed, and on the right, even the animals—donkeys were thrown around, they were bombed.

“We said, ‘That’s it, we’re done.’ We said, ‘now the rocket that is coming will be for us’.”

Insaf and her family had a comfortable middle-class life before the war. Since then, they have been displaced 15 times on the orders of Israel. Like millions of others, they are destitute, often hungry, living in a tent at al-Mawasi, a desolate area of sand dunes. Snakes, scorpions and venomous giant worms invade the tents and have to be swept out. As well as the risk of death in an air strike, they face hunger, disease and the faecal dust generated when millions of people do not have access to proper sanitation.

Insaf wept for her old life, and the people they have lost.

“Our lives were beautiful, and suddenly we had nothing—no clothes, no food, no essentials for life. Constantly being displaced is incredibly hard on my children’s health. They’ve had malnutrition and they have been infected with diseases, including amoebic dysentery and hepatitis.”

Insaf said that the beginning of months of Israeli bombing felt like the “horrors of judgement day”.

“Any mother would feel the same, anyone who owns something precious and is afraid it might slip from their hands at any moment. Each time we moved to a house, it would be bombed, and someone in our family would be killed.”

The only chance of making even small improvements in the lives of Insaf and her family and well over two million others in Gaza is to agree a ceasefire. If the killing stops, diplomats might have a window to stop the slide into a much wider catastrophe.

More disasters await in the future, if the war drags on and a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians cannot shake the hatred and horror many currently feel about the actions of the other side.

Insaf’s 11-year-old son, Anas Awad, has been deeply affected by everything he has seen.

“There’s no future for Gaza’s children. The friends I used to play with have been martyred. We used to run around together. May God have mercy on them. The mosque where I used to memorise the Quran has been bombed. My school has been bombed. So has the playground… everything has gone. I want peace. I wish I could return with my friends and play again. I wish we had a house, not a tent.”

“I don’t have friends anymore. Our whole life has turned to sand. When I go out to the prayer area, I feel anxious, and hesitant. I don’t feel right.”

His mother was listening.

“It has been the hardest year of my life. We saw sights we should not have seen – scattered bodies, the desperation of a grown man holding a bottle of water to drink for his children. Of course, our homes are no longer homes; they are just piles of sand, but we hope for the day when we can return.’

UN humanitarian agencies have condemned both Israel and Hamas: “The parties’ conduct over the last year makes a mockery of their claim to adhere to international humanitarian law and the minimum standards of humanity that it demands.”

Both sides deny accusations they have broken the laws of war. Hamas claims it ordered its men not to kill Israeli civilians. Israel says it warns Palestinian civilians to get out of harm’s way but Hamas uses them as human shields.

Israel has been referred to the International Court of Justice, accused by South Africa of genocide. The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has applied for arrest warrants on a range of war crimes charges for Yahya Sinwar of Hamas, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

For Israelis the Hamas attacks on 7 October were a painful reminder of centuries of pogroms against Jews in Europe that culminated in the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany. In the first month of the war, the Israeli writer and former politician Avraham Burg explained the profound psychological impact on his country.

“We, the Jews,” he told me, “we believe that the state of Israel is the first and best immune system and protective system versus Jewish history. No more pogroms, no more Holocaust, no more mass murderers. And all of a sudden, all of it is back.”

Ghosts of the past tormented Palestinians as well. Raja Shehadeh, the celebrated Palestinian writer and human rights campaigner believes that Israel wanted to make another Nakba – another catastrophe: in his latest book What Does Israel Fear From Palestine? he writes “as the war progressed I could see that they meant every word and did not care about civilians, including children. In their eyes, as well as the eyes of most Israelis, all Gazans were guilty”.

No one can doubt Israel’s determination to defend its people, helped enormously by the might of the United States. It is clear though, that the war has shown that nobody can fool themselves that Palestinians will accept lives lived forever under an Israeli military occupation, without proper civil rights, freedom of movement and independence.

After generations of conflict Israelis and Palestinians are used to confronting each other. But they are also used to living alongside each other, however uncomfortably. When a ceasefire comes, and with a new generation of leaders, there will be chances to push again for peace.

But that is a more distant future. The rest of the year and into 2025, with a new president in the White House, are uncertain and full of danger.

For months after Hamas attacked Israel, the fear was that the war would spread, and get worse. Slowly, and then very quickly, it happened, after Israel’s devastating attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanon.

It is too late to say the Middle East is on the brink. Israel is facing off against Iran. The warring parties have plunged over it, and countries not yet directly involved are desperate not to be dragged over the edge.

As I write Israel has still not retaliated for Iran’s ballistic missile attack on 1 October. It has indicated that it intends to inflict a severe punishment. President Biden and his administration, Israel’s constant supplier of weapons and diplomatic support, are trying to calibrate a response that might offer Iran a way to stop the accelerating climb up the ladder of escalation, a phrase strategists use to describe the way wars speed from crisis to disaster.

The proximity of the US elections, along with Joe Biden’s steadfast support for Israel, despite his misgivings about the way it has been fighting, do not induce much optimism that the US will somehow finesse a way out.

The signals from Israel indicate that Netanyahu, Gallant, the generals of the IDF and the intelligence agencies believe they have the upper hand. October 7th was a disaster for them. All the major security and military chiefs, except the prime minister, apologised and some resigned. They had not planned for a war with Hamas. But planning for the war with Hezbollah started after the last one ended in 2006 in a humiliating stalemate for Israel. Hezbollah has suffered blows from which it might never recover.

So far Israel’s victories are tactical. To get to a strategic victory it would need to coerce its enemies into changing their behaviour. Hezbollah, even in its reduced state, is showing that it wants to fight on. Taking on Israeli infantry and tanks now that south Lebanon has once more been invaded might negate some of Israel’s advantages in air power and intelligence.

If Iran answers Israel’s retaliation with another wave of ballistic missiles other countries might get pulled in. In Iraq, Iran’s client militias could attack American interests. Two Israeli soldiers were killed by a drone that came from Iraq.

Saudi Arabia is also looking on nervously. Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman has made clear his view of the future. He would contemplate recognising Israel, but only if the Palestinians get a state in return and Saudi Arabia gets a security pact with the United States.

Joe Biden’s role, simultaneously trying to restrain Israel while supporting it with weapons, diplomacy and carrier strike groups, exposes the Americans to getting involved in a wider war with Iran. They don’t want that to happen, but Biden has pledged that he will come to Israel’s aid if it becomes necessary.

Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, and the damage done to Iran’s strategy and its “axis of resistance” is fostering a new set of illusions among some in Israel and the United States. The dangerous idea is that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the Middle East by force, imposing order and neutering Israel’s enemies. Joe Biden – and his successor – should be wary of that.

The last time that restructuring the Middle East by force was contemplated seriously was after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on America, when US President George W Bush and Tony Blair, the UK’s prime minister, were getting ready to invade Iraq in 2003.

The invasion of Iraq did not purge the Middle East of violent extremism. It made matters worse.

The priority for those who want to stop this war should be a ceasefire in Gaza. It is the only chance to cool matters and to create a space for diplomacy. This year of war started in Gaza. Perhaps it can end there too.

A British climber who went missing in the Himalayas has spoken of her relief after surviving for two days in “brutal” conditions that put her life in danger.

Fay Manners, originally from Bedfordshire, and her climbing partner, Michelle Dvorak from the United States, were stranded on Chaukhamba mountain in northern India when the rope lifting their food, tent and climbing equipment snapped, leaving them without supplies.

The pair sent an emergency message at more than 20,000ft (6,096m), but search and rescue teams had initially been unable to find them.

Ms Manners told the BBC the pair were “terrified” as they tried to make part of the descent alone, before being met by rescuers.

Ms Manners is an alpinist, a mountain climber who specialises in difficult climbs, and now lives in Chamonix, France.

After a loose rock cut the rope being used to haul the pair’s bags, Ms Manners said she felt “despair”.

“I watched the bag tumble down the mountain and I immediately knew the consequence of what was to come,” she said.

“We had none of our safety equipment left. No tent. No stove to melt snow for water. No warm clothes for the evening. Our ice axes and crampons for retreat back to basecamp.

“No head torch for moving at night.”

The pair were able to send a text message to emergency services, prompting a search and rescue.

The women took cover on a ledge as it started snowing, sharing the only sleeping bag they had.

“I felt hypothermic, constantly shaking and with the lack of food my body was running out of energy to keep warm,” Ms Manners said.

The next morning a helicopter came to find the pair, but could not locate them – meaning they faced another 24 hours on the mountain.

“They did try to rescue us but the conditions were brutal for the company to operate in. Bad weather, fog, high altitude and they couldn’t find us as the face was so vast,” she explained.

After managing to abseil down the mountain face to some melting ice, the two women managed to catch some water in their bottles.

Ms Manners said they “barely survived” the storm that afternoon and the second night in the cold with no food and only a little water.

“The helicopter flew past again, couldn’t see us. We were destroyed,” she said.

“We knew we had to try to go down ourselves as the helicopter wasn’t going to help us.”

On that second morning they began to cautiously abseil down the rock spur, aware their weak condition could lead to mistakes.

At that point they spotted a team of French climbers coming towards them – rescuers who had heard about their situation from mutual friends.

They shared their equipment, food and sleeping bags with the women and contacted the helicopter with an exact location for rescue.

Ms Manners said: “I cried with relief knowing we might survive.

“They supported us to get across the steep glacier that would have been impossible without our equipment crampons and ice axes.

“We would have either frozen to death or attempted to cross the steep glaciers without the right equipment and slipped to our peril.

“Or maybe, maybe the helicopter would finally have found us?”

In 2022 Ms Manners was the first woman to make the ascent of the Phantom Direct route on the south face of the Grand Jorasses in Mont Blanc.

She has also successfully climbed peaks in Pakistan and Greenland in the past year.

Ms Manners has described her ambition to inspire women to pursue an interest in alpinism and pursue mountaineering as a hobby.

She said the incident that cut the rope “was unfortunate and very rare”.

“We did very well to survive and retreat in the way that we did,” Ms Manners added.

She said she felt “exhausted, mentally destroyed and over tired to the point I can’t sleep”.

Now the pair said they planned to eat local Indian food before they could get a flight home to their loved ones.

A Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office spokesperson said: “We have been supporting the family of a British woman reported missing in India who has since been safely rescued.”

When Taylor Swift is making $2bn in ticket sales, and Coldplay can sell out 10 nights at Wembley Stadium, it’s easy to conjure an image of touring musicians swimming in sweet piles of cash, like guitar-wielding Scrooge McDucks.

But for many artists, touring is becoming less and less viable. The cost of putting a show on the road – from van hire and petrol, to crew fees and accommodation – has skyrocketed since 2019.

Little Simz and Rachel Chinouriri are among the artists who’ve cancelled US tours this year because the finances didn’t add up.

In the middle of our interview about her new album, Everybody Needs A Hero, Dublin indie artist Orla Gartland explains how dire the situation has become.

In exactly one month, she’s setting off for her first ever North American tour, playing 13 dates in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Detroit and Philadelphia. Every night is sold out. Several venues have been upgraded due to high demand.

But she says, “the amount of money I’m going to lose on that tour is really eye-watering”.

How much, exactly?

“About 40 grand,” she winces.

“I even had to pay to expedite the band’s visas the other day… It’s pretty scary but it’s fine. Everything will go ahead.”

Gartland is determined to make it work, because a US tour has been at the top of her bucket-list since she was a 13-year-old posting music to YouTube under the name “MusicMaaad”.

“I’ve never gigged there properly, so putting this tour on sale was a real fingers-crossed-behind-the-back moment,” she says. “It was so cool when it sold out.”

The singer isn’t a household name yet but, to those in the know, she’s been one of indie’s most promising talents from the moment early EPs like Lonely People and Roots showcased her knack for sharp lyrics and sophisticated songwriting.

She cultivated her audience (and a degree of financial independence) by launching a “Secret Demo Club” in 2016 – with about 1,000 fans paying up to £13 a month to receive demo recordings, livestreams and “deep dive” songwriting videos direct from the singer herself.

And she picked up a new wave of fans in 2022 when her song Why Am I Like This was used in a pivotal scene of Netflix’s coming-of-age drama Heartstopper.

In the week after the show premiered, it was streamed 1.4 million times in America alone.

US fans have been begging Gartland to tour over there for years. With her second album about to hit the shelves, 2024 felt like the right time.

“America is such a big place, I’m just fascinated by it,” she says.

“The fans there seem to love music in a different way. I’ve had messages from people saying they’re going to drive 12 hours from North Carolina to see me.

“We wouldn’t do that here. People would just be like, ‘Why aren’t you playing in w London?’”

Gartland’s new album, Everybody Needs A Hero, is built for playing live. It’s packed with jagged guitar lines and fiery melodies that nip hungrily at your earlobes.

First single Kiss Ur Face Forever is a grunge-pop anthem to physical infatuation, while the follow-up Little Chaos is a frantic reflection of an unsettled mind.

Those bombastic songs are paired with more vulnerable, singer-songwriter tracks like The Hit – a homespun ballad where Gartland describes a friendship so close that “”.

The 12 songs act as an autopsy of a single, five-year relationship, examining all the different feelings you can have about the same person, from the heady rush of first love to the uneasy realisation that something’s gone wrong.

Incisive and wise, it recognises that all those emotions can co-exist – something she states explicitly in the opening song, Both Things Are True.

“When I listen to really, really commercial pop, I just find it a bit dumb,” Gartland explains.

“It’s so simplified – you fall in love or you break up. That’s just not my experience of relationships. It’s way more dense, and I thought it’d be interesting to commit to that as a thread running through the album.”

The complexity comes to the fore on Who Am I?, where Gartland sings about the tendency to put her partner’s interests before her own.

The song starts with an idle thought – “” – that spirals into an existential crisis. By the end of the song, Gartland is singing, “

“I see that in myself and in a lot of my female friends,” she says. “You’re sort of manic, running around, giving your energy to other people, then being left with this feeling of like, ‘God, I don’t even know what I want’.

“So that song was about trying to take your foot off the gas, and thinking, ‘If I take you out of the equation, does that leave my identity in shreds?’”

Released last Friday, critics have already given Everybody Needs a Hero an enthusiastic thumbs up. Far Out Magazine called it an “incredible evolution”, Dork magazine praised its “delightfully rebellious” sound, and Golden Plectrum named Gartland a “blue-ribbon songwriter in the alt-pop universe”.

The musician, conversely, has no idea what she thinks of the record.

“I have no perspective,” she laughs. “In my gut, I feel proud of it. I think it juts out at the edges a bit more than the music I made before – but I would love the ability to just wipe my memory and just hear it for the first time.”

Fair enough. She’s been living with the album for two years at this point, working in fits and starts around her commitments with the indie-pop supergroup Fizz.

The band, which she formed with her friends Dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown, delivered a ridiculously enjoyable album of harmony-driven psychedelic pop last year, and quickly found themselves becoming festival favourites.

That record was written and recorded in a little under a week, as the band shook off the pressures of their solo careers. For Gartland, who had spent years obsessing over tiny details in her home studio, the anything-goes approach was a revelation.

“It was such a big thing,” she says. “I realised how easy it is to suck the magic out of the song by tinkering too much.”

She still writes on her own – claiming that collaborators would find her methods “insufferable” – but approached recording sessions with a newfound looseness.

“Making sure everyone’s eating well, having a nice walk in the afternoon – all of that made it into the music,” she says. “You can hear it in someone’s vocal when they’re having a good time.”

Although some of the songs were written in her London apartment, others were constructed from improvised jam sessions held in Devon’s Middle Farm studios.

“Little Chaos was like that,” she says. “We picked a key, recorded for 40 minutes, and then I took all the separate parts home and cut them up.

“I made a chorus section, made a verse section and sang a vocal over the top.

“It was so exciting to have well-recorded drums to write over. It made me want to match that energy. I’d stand a bit taller when I was singing.”

The result is a record that bursts out of the speakers, brimming with confidence, assured in its worldview.

Gartland can’t wait to play the new music live. She might be losing money going to the US, but she’s expecting a “fun, gnarly” couple of weeks on the tour bus.

Her only regret is leaving her kitchen behind.

“Hotel food and endless deliveries just make my soul feel depleted,” she says.

“I’ve definitely watched YouTube videos of people making elaborate food with the apparatus given to you in a hotel room.”

Such as?

“Oh, like, cooking a toasted sandwich in a trouser press, or frying an egg on an iron covered in tinfoil.

“But I don’t know… I don’t think I can’t bring myself to try it.”

Two Chinese nationals have been killed and at least ten people injured after an explosion near Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan.

The Chinese embassy in Pakistan said there were “some local casualties” in what it described as a “terrorist attack”, though the overall death toll is still unclear.

The embassy added that the explosion targeted a convoy of Chinese engineers working on a power project in the country’s Sindh province.

The separatist Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), which has in recent years carried out attacks on Chinese nationals involved in projects, has claimed responsibility for the attack.

In a statement released on Monday, the militant group said it had “targeted a high-level convoy of Chinese engineers and investors” arriving from Karachi airport.

The attack was carried out using a “vehicle-borne improvised explosive device”, Reuters quoted the BLA as saying.

The explosion happened around 23:00 local time (17:00 GMT).

The Chinese embassy said that the engineers were part of the Chinese-funded enterprise Port Qasim Power Generation Co Ltd, which aims to build two coal power plants at Port Qasim, near Karachi.

The plant is part of the China-Pakistan economic corridor, which is also funding a number of infrastructure and energy projects in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, which has a rich supply of natural resources, including gas and minerals.

The BLA along with other ethnic Baloch groups has fought a long-running insurgency for a separate homeland.

It has regularly targeted Chinese nationals in the region, claiming ethnic Baloch residents were not receiving their share of wealth extracted from foreign investors.

The Chinese embassy on Monday reminded its citizens and Chinese enterprises in Pakistan to be vigilant and to “do their best to take safety precautions”. The embassy added that it will thoroughly investigate the attack and “severely punish the murderer”.

There has also been heightened security in Pakistan as it prepares to host the leaders’ summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

The blast was reportedly heard in various areas around the city, with footage from local media showing thick smoke and cars set alight.

Sindh Home Minister Ziaul Hasan Lanjar said that the explosion was likely to be have been caused by a suspected improvised explosive device (IED).

Pictures online show security officials and firefighters investigating the explosion site, where several vehicles have been charred by the blast.

A police surgeon, Dr Summaiya told Dawn news: “Ten injured persons, including one in critical condition, have been brought the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical College (JPMC).”

She added the injured included a police constable and a woman.

A statement posted on X from Sindh’s Interior Minister’s office said that a “tanker truck” had exploded on Airport Road and said the minister was in contact with the Malir Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) regarding the incident.

“We need to ascertain the facts,” the statement said.

Jinnah International Airport is functioning as usual today.

The BLA had claimed responsibility for past assaults on a Pakistani naval airbase near the Gwadar port, another main feature of the China-Pakistan economic corridor.

In April 2022, it killed three Chinese tutors and a Pakistani driver in a suicide bombing near Karachi University’s Confucius Institute.

Ildar Dadin, a well-known Russian opposition activist who was fighting in Ukraine on the side of Kyiv, has been killed in action, according to the group that recruited him.

A spokeswoman for that group, the Civic Council, told the BBC that Dadin had died, adding that “he was, and he remains a hero”.

The activist-turned-fighter was killed when soldiers from his volunteer battalion, the Freedom of Russia Legion, came under Russian artillery fire in the Kharkiv region of north-eastern Ukraine.

For now, there are no more details and the Legion itself won’t comment whilst it says a military operation is still active.

But Ilia Ponamarev, an exiled Russian opposition politician with previous links to the Legion, has told the BBC he is “certain, alas” that Dadin is dead.

Another source clarified that this was “confirmed by those who were with him in battle”.

The latest messages I’ve sent to his phone are still marked “unread”.

Ildar Dadin became known in Russia a decade ago for his persistence in staging peaceful protests as political repression there intensified.

He was the first person prosecuted under a new Article 212.1 – quickly dubbed Dadin’s Law – that in 2014 made it a criminal offence to commit repeat violations of Russia’s increasingly restrictive rules on protest.

In his case, that simply meant standing on the streets of Moscow with a banner.

Sentenced to two and a half years, Dadin was placed in a punishment cell and immediately went on hunger strike. His prison guards then tortured him to get him to stop.

Soon after his release in 2017, I met him in Moscow and he described being hung from a wall by his cuffed wrists. The guards had then threatened him with rape. He admitted that the brutality nearly broke him.

So when I learned that Dadin had joined a battalion of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine, I got back in touch and earlier this year and we had a series of long exchanges.

“I can’t sit by and do nothing and so become an accomplice to Russian evil, to its crimes,” Dadin explained his decision to sign-up, just as principled and intense as I remembered him.

He’d always considered himself a pacifist but now listed his reasons for taking-up arms: “The aggression, the mass killing, the torture, rape and looting.” Still, he chose the callsign Gandhi.

Dadin felt deeply that that he bore personal responsibility for Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour.

He argued that he and fellow Russians had failed to stop Vladimir Putin, allowing themselves to be scared off the streets by police violence and the threat of prison.

“The main thing now is to act according to my conscience,” Dadin wrote to me one night from near the frontline in Sumy.

He initially signed-up with the Siberian Battalion in June 2023 before moving to the Freedom of Russia Legion last winter – both officially part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Recruits are mainly Russian citizens who hope that helping Ukraine defeat Vladimir Putin will be a first step towards ending his rule in the Kremlin.

Their numbers aren’t clear, nor their effectiveness as a fighting force.

They have claimed some successes, including a cross-border incursion into Russia earlier this year at the time of Putin’s re-election.

But for Dadin, the experience wasn’t quite as he’d hoped.

He felt that some of the missions his unit were sent on were “pointless” in any military sense.

He described one battle where he ended up pinned down for eight hours by Russian fire in a bomb crater, with a drone trying to drop a grenade on him, whilst a fellow volunteer soldier bled to death.

And like many Ukrainian soldiers, he was exhausted, fighting with barely any days off and limping from a wound to his hip.

I wondered whether he might leave, but Dadin was clear his conscience would not allow him to sit “on the sidelines”.

Not whilst Ukrainians were being killed, as he put it, “by Russian criminals”.

“I tried to stop Russia – but did I do it? No,” he berated himself in one of our last chats. “And thousands of people have been killed because I did not do enough.”

Those who sent him to fight, disagree. “Ildar was strong, brave, principled and honest,” the Civic Council wrote. “That’s how we should remember him.”

A state of emergency has been declared in parts of Florida as a hurricane barrels towards the already-ravaged Gulf Coast.

The National Hurricane Centre confirmed that Milton – currently off the coast of Mexico – had intensified into a Category 1 hurricane on Sunday and could pose “life-threatening hazards” for parts of Florida’s west coast.

It comes just 10 days after Storm Helene – the deadliest mainland storm since Katrina in 2005 – tore through the south-east, killing at least 225 people, with hundreds still missing.

In Florida, where Helene left at least 14 dead, Governor Ron DeSantis issued the emergency warning for 35 counties and said preparations were under way to restore power and clear roads ahead of Milton’s arrival.

On Sunday, Milton had maximum sustained winds of 80mph (130km/h).

“There is increasing confidence that a powerful hurricane with life-threatening hazards will be affecting portions of the Florida west coast around the middle of this week,” the Hurricane Centre said.

Heavy rain was expected in the region from Sunday into Monday, with more rain and strong winds on Tuesday and Wednesday night.

Rainfall could be between 5-8in (127-203mm) across the Florida Peninsula and the Keys, with some areas receiving up to 12in (304mm), which could bring a risk of flash flooding and minor-to-moderate river flooding for parts of the west coast, the centre said.

The new hurricane comes as the clean-up efforts from Helene could take years, according to the US government.

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

Hundreds of roads remain closed, hampering efforts to send aid to hard-hit communities.

Helene, which made landfall as a category-four hurricane, damaged structures, caused flash flooding and knocked out power to millions of homes.

Maldivian President Mohammed Muizzu has told the BBC that he is confident that India will come to the aid of the island nation as it faces an economic crisis.

Muizzu, who begins a five-day visit to India on Sunday, is expected to seek a bailout worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Maldives is staring at a debt default as its foreign exchange reserves have dropped to $440m (£334m), just enough for one-and-a-half months of imports.

“India is fully cognizant of our fiscal situation, and as one of our biggest development partners, will always be ready to ease our burden, find better alternatives and solutions to the challenges we face,” Muizzu told the BBC in an email interview ahead of his visit.

Experts point out that Muizzu’s reconciliatory tone towards Delhi is a far cry from the rhetoric he adopted during his election campaign a year ago. That campaign had centred on an “India out” policy, demanding that Delhi must withdraw its troops from the island nation.

Speaking to the BBC, Muizzu did not directly address his anti-India campaign but said: “We are confident that any differences can be addressed through open dialogue and mutual understanding.”

• The Maldives’ new president wants India out
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An Indian relief package will bolster the country’s foreign currency reserves.

Last month, global agency Moody’s downgraded the Maldives’ credit rating, saying that “default risks have risen materially”.

But Muizzu told the BBC that Male is not facing a sovereign debt default, adding that the country would not join an International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme to handle the crisis.

“We have our own home-grown agenda,” he said.

However, Moody has said that “(foreign) reserves remain significantly below the government’s external debt service of around $600m in 2025 and over $1bn in 2026”.

It’s not clear where Muizzu will find the money to overcome the reserves crisis and that’s where his Delhi visit is seen as crucial. India has already offered financial support worth $1.4bn to Male for various infrastructure and development projects.

Since Muizzu came to power in November 2023, relations between Male and Delhi have become strained.

Soon after taking over, he chose to travel to Turkey and China – his visit to the latter in January was seen especially as a high-profile snub to India as previous Maldivian leaders first visited Delhi after being elected. Around the same time, a controversy erupted in India after three Maldivian officials made derogatory comments about Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Muizzu also gave an ultimatum to India to withdraw about 80 troops based in the country. Delhi said they were stationed there to maintain and operate two rescue and reconnaissance helicopters and a Dornier aircraft it had donated years ago.

In the end, both countries reached a compromise by agreeing to replace soldiers with Indian civilian technical staff to operate the aircraft.

• Indian troops to exit the Maldives as China gains foothold
• Chinese ship’s port call in Maldives fans India tensions

Muizzu’s administration also announced that it would not renew a hydrographic survey agreement with India that was signed by the previous government to map the seabed in Maldivian territorial waters.

But the Maldivian president defended his decision.

“The decisions taken are based on our evolving domestic interests and strategic priorities. The will of the people, that elected me 10 months ago,” Muizzu said.

“I believe both the Maldives and India have a better understanding of each others’ priorities and concerns,” he added.

Some of Muizzu’s decisions were seen as a way to reduce Delhi’s influence and forge closer ties with India’s rival China.

In February, Muizzu’s administration allowed the port call of a Chinese research ship, Xiang Yang Hong 3, in the Maldives, much to Delhi’s displeasure. Some saw it as a mission to collect data which could – at a later date – be used by the Chinese military for submarine operations.

But Muizzu rejects the pro-China tag.

“I have made clear our foreign policy the day I took office – that it is a ‘Maldives First’ policy. Our relationships with other nations are guided by the principles of mutual respect and trust, non-interference and the pursuit of peace and prosperity,” he insists.

“We believe that through open communication and collaboration, we can address any concerns, contributing to a peaceful and prosperous Indian Ocean region,” he says.

Despite Muizzu’s attempts to move Male closer to Beijing, analysts say financial assistance from China hasn’t been forthcoming,

As a result, the president’s extraordinary turnaround towards India now is based on harsh realities.

Muizzu’s Delhi visit “is a realisation of how dependent the Maldives is on India, a dependency that no other country will find easy to fill”, says Azim Zahir, a Maldivian analyst.

Reports of antisemitic incidents in the US have reached a record high since last year’s Hamas attack in Israel, according to a preliminary report from the Anti-Defamation League Center for Extremism (ADL).

The group found more than 10,000 incidents from 7 October 2023 to 24 September of this year, more than a 200% increase compared to the same period a year earlier.

It is the highest ever since the ADL began tracking such incidents in 1979.

The report comes just days after the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint statement warning of possible violent threats amid the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East.

Since last October’s Hamas attack on Israel which saw around 1,200 people killed “Jewish Americans haven’t had a single moment of respite,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.

“Instead, we’ve faced a shocking number of antisemitic threats and experienced calls for more violence against Israelis and Jews everywhere.”

The more than 10,000 episodes of antisemitism reported by the ADL included roughly 8,015 incidents of verbal or written harassment, 1,840 incidents of vandalism and 150 incidents of physical assault.

The states with the highest number of recorded cases in the report were California, with 1,266 incidents, New York with 1,218, New Jersey with 830, and Florida with 463.

The ADL said that it expected its preliminary numbers to increase as it receives more data. The final report for 2024 will be published in the spring of 2025.

Part of the overall increase comes from a change in methodology to include “expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists that could be perceived as supporting terrorism”, the ADL said.

The ADL’s preliminary report tallied more than 3,000 of incidents that took place during anti-Israel rallies “which featured regular explicit expressions of support for terrorist groups”, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

Excluding these incidents, the ADL counted 7,523 episodes of antisemitism, a 103% increase from 2022.

Following the 7 October attack, Israel launched a massive military operation in the Gaza Strip with the stated aim of eliminating Hamas.

Since then, 41,870 Palestinians have been killed and more than 97,000 injured in Gaza, most of them women and children, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

The war inspired a wave of demonstrations across the US, particularly at college campuses, with many protesting against the growing humanitarian toll.

In Lebanon, more than 1,000 people have been killed while up to a million people may have been displaced since Israel launched its attack against Iran-backed Hezbollah.

• Big rise in antisemitic incidents in UK – charity
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• Anti-Muslim cases surge in UK since Hamas attacks, charity finds

The continued violence in the region has led to a surge in anti-Muslim and Islamophobic incidents as well across the US.

Anti-Muslim incidents reached 8,061 in 2023, according to a report from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released in April. The report marked the highest level since CAIR began tallying nearly 30 years ago, with nearly half coming after the 7 October attack.

A policewoman has been killed and 10 others injured in a shooting in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, local authorities said.

The gunman was shot dead at the scene after what police described as a “suspected terror attack” at the city’s central bus station.

The victim has been named as Shira Chaya Suslik, 19, a sergeant from Israel’s border police.

Israel’s ambulance service said medics are treating ten people for injuries, some of whom suffered gunshot wounds.

One of the injured is in a “moderate to serious” condition and four others are in a “moderate condition”, the ambulance service said.

They have been taken to the nearby Soroka Hospital.

Police said a preliminary investigation showed the gunman was “eliminated in a few seconds by the security forces” who were there.

Shortly after the attack, Israel’s Transport Minister Miri Regev called for the families of “terrorists” to be deported from the country.

“The time has come for a deterrent punishment to prevent the attacks on Israeli territory,” she wrote on X.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid described the attack as “severe and despicable”, writing on X “we must act hard against terrorism”.

Last week, seven people were killed in a shooting and knife attack in Tel Aviv after a gunman opened fire at members of the public in the Jaffa area.

Israeli authorities have said they are on high alert across the country ahead of the one year anniversary of Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on 7 October last year, which triggered the current Gaza war.

The Royal New Zealand Navy has lost its first ship to the sea since World War Two, after one of its vessels ran aground off the coast of Samoa.

HMNZS Manawanui, a specialist diving and ocean imaging ship, came into trouble about one nautical mile from the island of Upolu on Saturday night local time, while conducting a survey of a reef.

It later caught fire before capsizing.

All 75 people on board were evacuated onto lifeboats and rescued early on Sunday, New Zealand’s Defence Force said in a statement.

Officials said the cause of the grounding was unknown and will be investigated.

The incident occurred during a bout of rough and windy weather.

Military officials said rescuers “battled” currents and winds that pushed life rafts and sea boats towards the reefs, and swells made rescue efforts “challenging”.

Officials said the area had not been surveyed since 1987.

The vessel’s crew and passengers – including seven scientists and four foreign military personnel – are being accommodated in Samoa before being flown back to New Zealand.

As of 06:40 local time on Sunday (18:40 BST on Saturday), the ship was seen listing heavily with smoke billowing from it.

By 09:00 (21:00 BST on Saturday), it was below the surface.

Defence minister Judith Collins described the incident as “a really sad day for the Navy” during a news conference.

She added: “But everyone came through, and that, I have to say, is down to the professionalism [of the crew], the training and their own courage.”

Dave Poole, who witnessed the ship ablaze, told the Reuters news agency: “As we came into the bay we saw the ship and no smoke. Within 15 minutes fire and smoke were visible. It sank shortly after.”

HMNZS Manawanui is the first of New Zealand’s naval vessels to be unintentionally sunk since the nation participated in naval battles during World War Two.

Several other ships have been intentionally sunk in the intervening period for various reasons, including to serve as a diving wreck or an artificial reef.

Military officials said their efforts are now turning towards attempting to salvage the vessel and minimising the environmental impacts of the sinking.

Dame Judi Dench has spoken about her grief after the death of her close friend, fellow Dame Maggie Smith, who passed away last week.

The star was asked about Dame Maggie on stage during the Cheltenham Literature Festival by fellow actor Brendan O’Hea.

O’Hea also mentioned the death of Dame Judi’s husband, the actor Michael Williams, and then asked her what she had meant when she had once compared grief to petrol.

“I suppose because the energy that’s created by grief…,” she replied, before cutting her answer short, apparently lost for words.

Smith, best known for the Harry Potter films and Downton Abbey, was hailed as “a true legend” of stage and screen following her death at the age of 89.

Tributes were paid by King Charles III and the prime minister, as well as numerous co-stars from her long career.

The two veteran stars were the same age and had known each other for decades.

They had performed together on numerous occasions, including in the 2004 drama Ladies in Lavender.

Both starred in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in 2015, a comedy-drama that was a sequel to the 2011 hit film.

They also appeared in 2018 documentary Nothing Like a Dame, in which they playfully reminisced about their lives and careers.

• Maggie Smith obituary: A formidable star on stage and screen
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• Dame Maggie was ‘never shy on stage, always shy off it’

The interview on Saturday covered a wide range of topics, including Dame Judi’s life as an actress.

Towards the end of the session, O’Hea hesitated before saying: “I know I probably shouldn’t bring this up, I know the last week has been tricky for you because you lost your great friends Maggie Smith and Barbara Leigh-Hunt.”

Leigh-Hunt, an Olivier Award-winning actress, died last month at the age of 88. She and Dame Judi had appeared alongside each other in the 1992 BBC sitcom As Time Goes By.

O’Hea then brought up a previous explanation that Dame Judi had given, of how she copes with loved ones dying.

In a past interview with The Times, when discussing the aftermath of her husband’s death, she said: “Sometimes you have to do a play and it is really painful. That said, I’ve also found it unbelievably cathartic.

“You fortify yourself and use what you are going through as energy. Like petrol. It has helped me cope with the pain.”

O’Hea questioned her on that, asking: “You say that grief can act as petrol, what do you mean by that?”

Dench didn’t directly comment on either Smith or Leigh-Hunt, or her husband who died in 2001. But after mentioning her grief, she trailed off.

“It’s tricky. It’s tricky,” O’Hea jumped in.

Dench went on to talk about the trees she plants at her home in Surrey, in memory of her loved ones who have died.

She also laughed about how some of the trees grow to resemble the person they’re in honour of, while one of them, dedicated to the late actor Bob Peck, “won’t grow”.

Dame Maggie was known for her sharp tongue on screen and off during a varied and acclaimed career that spanned eight decades.

In the Harry Potter films, she played the acerbic Professor Minerva McGonagall, famous for her pointed witch’s hat and stern manner with the young wizards at Hogwarts.

Paying tribute, Daniel Radcliffe – who played the boy wizard – said: “She was a fierce intellect, had a gloriously sharp tongue, could intimidate and charm in the same instant and was, as everyone will tell you, extremely funny.”

In hit ITV drama Downton Abbey, Smith played Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, the grand matriarch who excelled at withering one-liners through the show’s six series.

Elsewhere in her career, she won two Oscars – for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1970 and California Suite in 1979.

She had four other nominations, and received seven Bafta awards.

King Charles described her as “a national treasure”, while Sir Keir Starmer said she was “beloved by so many for her great talent”.

For Tim Chan, who is unable to speak, facilitated communication is “a lifeline” that allows him to do things he once thought impossible, such as socialising, or studying for his PhD.

“I was presumed incompetent, and ignored or dismissed,” the 29-year-old, who was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, says using a text-to-voice tool in his home in Melbourne.

Facilitated communication involves someone guiding the hand, arm or back of a non-verbal person, so that they can point to letters or words on a bespoke keyboard.

Mr Chan’s facilitator is his mother Sara, and, over the past 20 years, her support has “faded” to a slight touch of his shoulder, which he says keeps him “focused”.

Advocates insist it is a miracle tool, one which gives disabled people a voice.

But a growing chorus of experts, families and even former facilitators want it banned, due to research indicating that the likely author of the messages is the facilitator, not the communicator.

They cite a string of criminal allegations made by non-verbal people using the method which have been dismissed by the courts and investigators.

The debate has sparked allegations of ableism, ruined legacies, inspired a new Louis Theroux documentary, and an international conversation about the power dynamics between disabled people and those who care for them.

Facilitated communication was created in 1977 by Australian disability advocate Rosemary Crossley, who died last year and left a complex legacy.

To those who knew her, she’s remembered as champion for “people with little or no functional speech”.

But others say her communications invention – and her formidable defence of it – were misguided and harmful. It is still used worldwide, despite being widely criticised.

The first notable subject to use facilitated communication was Anne McDonald, a non-verbal Australian woman with cerebral palsy, a severe intellectual disability, and no control over her limbs.

At the time, Crossley claimed that McDonald – then 16 – could communicate by pointing at magnetic letters while Crossley supported her upper arm.

Within weeks McDonald was spelling out whole sentences and doing fractions, despite having no formal education and being institutionalised since age three.

Some of Crossley’s colleagues expressed surprise that McDonald, who’d never read, could suddenly write eloquent prose, and cite literary references, when her arm was held by the highly educated Crossley.

One who raised questions was the institution’s head paediatrician and psychiatrist Dr Dennis Maginn, who wouldn’t validate Crossley’s communication theory without independent testing.

McDonald later accused him, facilitated by Crossley’s supported typing, of attempting to smother her to death with a pillow. Homicide investigators dismissed the claims, but his career never recovered.

“My thoughtful, introspective and well-intentioned father went through living hell,” his son, lawyer Paul Maginn, says, adding that “any right-thinking person” could see the allegation had been made up by Crossley.

Crossley even had her own initial doubts about the technique, writing at the time: “What I did not know was whether I was subconsciously manipulating [Anne] or imagining her hand movements.’’

McDonald – who ended up leaving the institution and living with Crossley – went on to use the method with other facilitators. She also earned a humanities degree and co-authored the book Annie’s Coming Out, which was turned into an award-winning film.

But despite all these achievements, McDonald’s mother Beverley “never believed” that her daughter could communicate: “I asked her questions and got nowhere,” she told the ABC in 2012, after her daughter died.

For Marlena Katene, facilitated communication has allowed her to “connect and say whatever I want”.

The 33-year-old Gold Coast native selects words using a keyboard. Her facilitator Bert, or a text-to-voice tool, then reads them aloud.

Speaking to the BBC both with and without Bert, Ms Katene says it’s “frustrating being constantly tested to be validated” and that “communication is about humanity more than science”.

She finds it alarming that some academics and disability advocacy organisations have led campaigns to disprove what she says is an effective method for thousands worldwide.

But experts have uncovered different findings, using a ‘double-blind’ experiment.

The method involves the facilitator and communicator being separated and given different prompts to study, such as a picture, before coming back together to take a test.

In more than 30 empirical studies, the non-verbal person ends up typing the prompts the facilitator was shown, meaning there’s no convincing evidence that messages written using facilitated communication are authored by the person with a disability.

“The science just isn’t there,” Howard Shane, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, tells the BBC.

Courts have reached the same conclusion.

A bevy of parents and caregivers have found themselves on trial over allegations – often sexual abuse – unearthed by facilitated communication.

Prof Shane has given evidence in 12 such cases – including that of Jose Cordero, who spent 35 days in a Miami jail and was barred from seeing his family for months after being accused, via a facilitator, of sexually abusing his seven-year-old autistic son. The case was dropped, citing a lack of credibility in facilitated communication.

In every trial he’s been involved in, testing proved the facilitator was the author of the accusations, Prof Shane says, or “they refused to participate” in testing altogether, citing “anxiety”.

But one of the most high profile facilitated communication cases – now the subject of a Netflix documentary – questioned whether the method could be used to provide proof of consent.

In 2015, university professor Anna Stubblefield was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault for raping a non-verbal 33-year-old man with severe mental disabilities and cerebral palsy. Facilitated communication testimony from the man was ruled unreliable under New Jersey’s test for scientific evidence.

Two years later, an appeals court overturned Stubblefield’s conviction, ordering a retrial on the basis that it was a violation of her rights to not allow her to use facilitated communication as a defence. In 2018 she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to time served.

She maintains the relationship was consensual and that the two were “intellectual equals in love”. Prof Shane’s controlled testing concluded that the man had the intellectual ability of a six-month-old.

Testifying in Stubblefield’s case James Todd, a psychology professor at Eastern Michigan University, argued that the university where Stubblefield received her training held some responsibility for the crime. He said Syracuse University was “championing facilitated communication over clear and established science,” and implored it to “renounce and repudiate” the technique for its “dangerous harms.”

Syracuse University, one of the only universities with a facilitated communication institute, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The BBC approached five different academic experts on facilitated communication worldwide to speak about the technique. All declined.

At least 30 medical associations worldwide oppose facilitated communication. Many, such as the UK’s National Autistic Society, warn that it’s “ineffective” and able to cause “significant harm.”

Other opponents include the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, The American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Paediatrics and Speech Pathology Australia.

These organisations cite peer-reviewed evidence indicating the technique is discredited pseudoscience and have flagged the risks it poses to disabled people, their families, and facilitators themselves, because of potential false allegations.

Clinical psychologist Adrienne Perry has warned the non-verbal person “is made a ‘screen’ for a facilitator’s hostilities, hopes, beliefs or suspicions”.

For speech trainer Janyce Boynton – who did her facilitated communication training at the University of Maine – the discovery was shocking.

She’d been facilitating the communication of a 16-year-old non-verbal autistic girl, who’d accused her father and brother of sexual abuse via Ms Boynton’s facilitation. Prof Shane was called in to do a double-blind test with pictures.

“It turned out, even though I believed in facilitated communication, I was the author of all the answers,” Ms Boynton tells the BBC. “It was irrefutable. You just didn’t realise it.”

It left her feeling “terrible, confused and devastated”.

“I believe most facilitators are sincere,” she says. “They want to believe it’s true.”

Today, Tim Chan types that such criticisms are “extremely damaging”.

“We start doubting our ability to be a person in our own right,” he says, via his mum’s facilitation.

He has never undertaken the double-blind test.

“Testing a person with non-verbal autism will make them very anxious. They process information differently,” Ms Chan says. “It’s possible there’s some unconscious cueing going on. I don’t know,” she adds.

Prof Shane and academic specialists in speech, communications, psychology, and developmental disabilities all say the technique should be banned. “I recently worked on a case where somebody was in jail for a year before it finally emerged no testing was done,” Prof Shane says. “He was released when testing showed the allegations were false.”

But facilitated communication is still practised in some specialised schools, disability centres and institutes in the USA, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Part of the reason, Prof Shane says, is that families and facilitators “believe so strongly” their child has hidden skills.

“They need to accept the children for who they are – rather than what they’d like them to be.”

Dr Taghrid Diab does not follow Colonel Avichae Adraee on social media, so she didn’t see the IDF officer’s warning when it was posted late on Saturday night.

But her daughter did, and she forwarded it to her mother with an urgent question.

“Is this your clinic?”

Col Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic speaking spokesman, sometimes posts evacuation warnings on social media ahead of an Israeli air strike in Lebanon. The posts contain an aerial image with the target building highlighted in red.

Dr Diab, a 57-year-old gynaecologist who provides care to hundreds of women in the Beirut suburb of Dahieh, studied the image her daughter had sent.

It did not take long for her to recognise the apartment building directly next door to her clinic, shaded by an ominous red square. She began to cry.

“After 30 years of work, I knew my clinic was going be destroyed,” she said.

“I felt like my heart was going to explode.”

The Israeli air strike that followed was one of roughly 30 that pounded Dahieh overnight, in the most intense bombing of the Lebanese capital since Israel began its recent escalation against the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah last month.

According to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, 23 people were killed and 93 wounded in the strikes on Saturday and overnight into Sunday.

The IDF said in a statement it had “conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities” in the area belonging to Hezbollah. Israel says it is targeting the militant group to allow its citizens to return to the north of the country, where they have come under intensified rocket fire from southern Lebanon over the past year.

Hezbollah is the dominant force in Dahieh, a collection of neighbourhoods south of Beirut that has been heavily targeted during this recent escalation.

It was in Dahieh that a bunker-busting Israeli missile strike killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, a little over a week ago, flattening six residential buildings in the process.

And another similar strike reportedly killed Nasrallah’s presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine, in the area on Thursday night, although this has not been confirmed.

The once busy area is now largely devoid of life. Israeli drones can be easily heard buzzing overhead in the quiet left by the recent exodus of the suburb’s nearly 500,000 residents.

By the time the BBC arrived at the site of Dr Diab’s clinic on Sunday morning, the target building had vanished and been replaced by a smoking crater 9 metres (30 feet) deep, filled with twisted metal and mangled family possessions.

No one was killed in this strike, but Dr Diab’s clinic was destroyed, just as she had feared. She had decided to suspend services a few days earlier. “When they started to hit everywhere,” she said.

The destruction of the clinic was “a disaster”, she added. “Women from all over Dahieh and beyond depend on this clinic. Before the bombing we were seeing 50 patients every day.”

That service would likely now be out of commission for a very long time, she said, because the premises and medical equipment was likely all destroyed and was all uninsured.

One floor below Dr Diab’s clinic, Shakeeb Saleh’s lighting shop was also destroyed by the blast, and his ornate lighting hung blackened and charred.

“All of my stock has been smashed or burned, it is a huge, huge loss,” said Saleh, 73.

“It took me years to rebuild after a bomb hit my warehouse during the Israeli invasion of 1982. Now I am here again.”

Video footage posted on social media over the weekend showed widespread and significant destruction in Dahieh, with multi-storey buildings reduced to rubble.

A senior member of staff at the Al Rassoul Al-Azam hospital, one of the few remaining emergency healthcare facilities in Dahieh, which sits just150 metres from Dr Diab’s destroyed clinic, told the BBC that the hospital had reverberated with nearby strikes over the weekend.

The member of staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the situation at the hospital, said that it was operating at a severely limited capacity and had been receiving seriously wounded patients from strikes, including people with traumatic head and chest injuries.

Air strikes on the Dahieh area continued into the day on Sunday, and appeared to be intensifying ahead of an expected retaliation by Israel against Iran in the coming days.

Dr Diab’s voice caught in her throat when she described the neighbourhood around her clinic before the bombing began. “This area was always busy – schools, shops, clinics, there was traffic, people walking, life everywhere,” she said.

She opened her clinic with the dream that her daughters would one day work there with her. All three went to medical school, and the eldest, newly graduated, had just joined her staff before the clinic was destroyed.

That dream was now on hold, probably for some time. But not dead. “I will go back to Dahieh and work with my daughters,” she said.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says 26 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes on a mosque and school housing displaced Palestinians in the centre of the territory.

Dozens of people were also injured in strikes that hit Ibn Rushd school and Al-Aqsa Martyrs mosque in Deir al-Balah early on Sunday morning, the ministry said.

The Israeli military said it had targeted Hamas militants operating within “command and control” centres at the sites.

In north Gaza, Israeli forces surrounded the Jabalia area in response to what it said were Hamas efforts to rebuild.

The military also issued new possible evacuation zones in the north and re-opened routes to a humanitarian area.

Following the strikes in central Gaza, videos verified by the BBC as being from the mosque show bodies and blood on the ground among the rubble, while footage at the school shows the structure on fire and a man being pulled out on a stretcher.

Earlier, the Hamas-run civil defence agency said 21 people were killed and a large number wounded in the strike on the mosque, according to the AFP news agency.

Reuters news agency reported that at least 93 people were injured in the airstrikes, according to data from Gaza’s Hamas-run media office.

Sunday’s strikes occurred almost exactly one year on from 7 October 2023, when Hamas gunmen attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage.

Since then, 41,870 Palestinians have been killed and more than 97,000 injured in Gaza, according to the health ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.

According to the United Nations, which uses Gaza health ministry figures and considers them reliable, 187 people were killed in Gaza from 30 September to 4 October alone.

In a statement on the strike on the mosque, Hamas accused Israel of “bombing citizens’ homes and demolishing them over their heads, resulting in the deaths and injuries of dozens”.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that “before the attacks many steps were taken to reduce the chance of harming civilians, including the use of precision weaponry, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence information.”

The IDF accused Hamas of “exploiting civilian institutions and the population as human shields for terrorist acts”.

Later on Sunday, the IDF said it carried out an air strike on another school in northern Gaza, saying it was being used as a Hamas “command and control complex”.

Hamas has denied using schools and other civilian sites for military purposes.

Elsewhere in Gaza, Israel’s military began to surround Jabalia in the north overnight in response to what the IDF said were efforts by Hamas to rebuild in the area.

The military said it had struck “dozens of military targets” before and during the ground operation.

The IDF warned the public that north Gaza is “still considered a dangerous combat zone” and published a new map on Sunday showing zones for potential evacuation in the north.

It also said it had expanded the humanitarian zone in al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, although it is still smaller than it was at the start of July.

Both the mosque and the school hit on Sunday are located in the humanitarian zone.

The IDF said it had re-opened two evacuation routes from the north to access the zone.

Israel does not allow international journalists from media organisations, including the BBC, independent access to Gaza, making it hard to verify the facts on the ground.

The mother of the only British-Israeli hostage still being held by Hamas in Gaza has asked why the UK is not “fighting every moment to secure her release”.

Emily Damari, 28, was shot and taken from an Israeli kibbutz across the border into Gaza on 7 October.

Speaking at a London memorial event marking the attacks a year ago, her mother Mandy Damari said her daughter’s “plight seems to have been forgotten”.

Prime Minster Sir Keir Starmer said in a statement the UK “must unequivocally stand with the Jewish community”.

The dual national is among 97 hostages who remain unaccounted for.

Speaking at the Hyde Park memorial event, her mother said: “[Emily] is a daughter of both countries, but no one here mentions the fact that there is still a female British hostage being held captive by Hamas for a year now, and I sometimes wonder if people even know there is a British woman there.

“Imagine, for a moment if Emily was your daughter. Try to picture what she is going through.

“Since 7 October last year, she has been held a hostage by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza terror tunnels, 20 metres or more underground, kept in captivity, tortured, isolated, unable to eat, speak or even move without someone else’s permission.”

The crowd heard how Emily, who was born to her British mother in Israel and lived there, loved to visit the UK – her “second home across the sea”. She loved watching Spurs play, going to the pub, shopping at Primark and had also watched Ed Sheeran in concert, her mother said.

Her mother pleaded with Britain and other countries to do more to secure the release of her daughter, and the other hostages.

“How is it that she is still imprisoned there after one year? Why isn’t the whole world, especially Britain, fighting every moment to secure her release? She’s one of their own.”

She said some of the women and children who were released in the hostage deal in November had told her Emily was alive then, and spoke about how she helped the other hostages try to stay positive, even in the worst of times.

“Every day is living hell not knowing what Emily is going through. I do know from the hostages that returned that they were starved, sexually abused and tortured. Every moment lost is another moment of unimaginable suffering or even death.”

BBC News has approached the UK Foreign Office for comment.

Other hostages with British relatives held include Eli Sharabi, Oded Lifschitz and Avinatan Or. British-Israeli Nadav Popplewell was also kidnapped on 7 October and his body was recovered by Israeli soldiers in Gaza in August.

Families of Israeli hostages met Sir Keir and Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Monday, calling on them to “do more” to bring them home.

The prime minister agreed that the hostages must be freed and returned immediately, a subsequent press conference was told.

On Sunday, he said the country must “unequivocally” stand with the Jewish community and described 7 October as the “darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust”.

“As a father, a husband, a son, a brother – meeting the families of those who lost their loved ones last week was unimaginable. Their grief and pain are ours, and it is shared in homes across the land,” Sir Keir said.

He also reiterated his call for ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon.

The Hyde Park event, organised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and other groups, was attended by thousands of British Jews and supporters of Israel who waved British and Israeli flags with chants of “bring them home”.

Among the crowd, many of whom have family and friends in Israel, there was disbelief that the hostages still had not been freed, one year on.

Israeli ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely told the crowd: “We will do whatever we can to bring them home.”

Michael Wegier, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told BBC News: “The British Jewish community is traumatised like much of the Jewish community around the world, especially in Israel.

“There are 30,000 Jews from Britain who live in Israel. Many of us have friends and family there and we go there, and so we take what happens there very deeply and very personally.”

A vigil to remember the victims of the Hamas attack was also held in Glasgow where hundreds gathered at the steps of Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

On the eve of 7 October, a man was filmed damaging a Jewish memorial in Hove.

Sussex Police responded to the video, which had been circulated on X and other social media platforms, and confirmed the incident was being treated as a “hate crime”.

On Saturday tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian protestors marched through central London calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October by Hamas gunmen, during which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

At least 41,870 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Conversations in Tyre in southern Lebanon happen in a hurry now. It’s not wise to linger on the streets, and there are fewer and fewer people to talk to.

Chats can be cut short by the rumble of Israeli bombing, or the sound of outgoing rocket fire by Hezbollah – which can attract incoming fire.

Israeli drones buzz overhead.

You drive fast, but don’t speed, knowing there are eyes in the sky. Mostly you are the only car on an empty road – which can make you a target.

That knowledge is always with us, like the body armour we now wear.

But civilians here have no armour plating to shield them, and many Lebanese no longer have a roof over their heads. More than one million have been forced to flee, according to the Prime Minister, Najib Mikati.

War has created a vacuum here – sucking the life out of this ancient city proud of its Roman ruins, and golden sandy beach.

Streets are empty, and shops shuttered. The seashore is deserted. Windows rattle with Israeli air strikes.

The local civil defence headquarters lies abandoned – rescue teams were forced to evacuate – to save themselves after they got a telephone warning from Israel.

Israeli strikes are getting louder and closer to our hotel – in recent days several strikes on the hills opposite us appear to involve some of Israel’s most destructive bombs, weighing in at 1000lb.

And then there is the Hezbollah factor. Even as the armed group is trying to hold off invading Israeli troops on Lebanese soil, it is controlling the international media in the city of Tyre. It limits our movements, though it has no control over what we write or broadcast.

In hospitals, doctors look weary and overwhelmed. Many no longer go home because it is too dangerous to travel.

Instead, they tend to patients like nine-year-old Mariam, whose left leg is in a cast, and whose arm is heavily bandaged. She lies sleeping in a bed in Hiram Hospital, dark hair framing her face.

“She came in as part of a family of nine,” said Dr Salman Aidibi, the hospital CEO.

“Five of them were also treated. We operated on Mariam, and she is doing much better. We hope to send her home today. Most casualties are given first aid here and stabilised before being sent to other centres, because this hospital is on the front line.”

He says the hospital receives about 30-35 injured women and children a day, and it is taking its toll on staff.

“We need to be positive while we’re working,” he said. “It’s when we stop and contemplate, remember, that’s when we get emotional.”

Asked about what may lie ahead his response comes with a sigh. “We are in a war,” he says. “A destructive war on Lebanon. We hope for peace, but we are prepared for all eventualities.”

Also prepared for the worst is Hassan Manna. He’s staying put in Tyre as war tightens its grip. And he is staying open for business at the small coffee shop he has run for the past 14 years. Locals still pass by for a chat and some reassurance in the form of small plastic cups of sweet coffee.

“I’m not leaving my country,” Hassan told me. “I’m not leaving my house. I’m staying in my place, with my children. I’m not afraid of them (the Israelis).

“The whole world is out on the streets. We don’t want to be humiliated like that.

“Let me die in my house.”

Five of his neighbours were killed in their home by an Israeli air strike last weekend. Hassan saw it happen and was thrown in the air by two incoming Israeli missiles.

He managed to walk away with just an injured arm.

Was there a Hezbollah target there? We don’t know. Hassan says the dead were all civilians and members of one family, including two women and a baby.

Israel says its targets are Hezbollah fighters and their facilities, and not the people of Lebanon. Many here say otherwise – including doctors, and witnesses like Hassan.

Israel says it is taking steps to minimise the risk of harming civilians – accusing Hezbollah of hiding its infrastructure among civilian populations.

“There was nothing (no weapons) there,” Hassan insisted. “If there was, we would have left the area. There was nothing to be bombed. The woman was 75.”

After the strike he dug in the rubble for survivors until he collapsed and was taken to hospital himself.

When he speaks of his neighbours his voice breaks with anger and grief – and his eyes fill with tears.

“It’s unjust,” he said, “totally unjust. We know the people. They were born here. I swear I wish I had died with them.”

Ten days ago, we got the view in a Christian area, close to the border.

One local woman – who asked not to be named – told me everyone was living on their nerves.

“The phone is constantly beeping,” she said. “We can never know when (Israeli) attacks are coming. It’s always tense. Many nights we can’t sleep.”

We were interrupted by the sound of an Israeli air strike, which sent smoke rising from distant hills.

She reeled off a list of villages nearer the border – now deserted and destroyed after the past year of tit for tat exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel.

She said the damage in these areas was already far greater than in the five-week war of 2006. “If people want to come back later”, she said, “there are no houses left to come back to.

“And there is no house that did not lose relatives,” she said, “either close or distant. All the men are Hezbollah.”

Before the war the armed group was always “bragging about its weapons, and saying it would fight Israel forever,” she told me. “Privately, even their followers are now shocked at the quality and quantity of attacks by Israel.”

Few here would dare to guess at the future. “We have entered a tunnel,” she said, “and until now we cannot see the light.”

From Tel Aviv, to Tehran, to Washington no one can be sure what is coming next, and what the Middle East will look like the day after.

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.

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.

A new nine-month term begins for the US Supreme Court on Monday with major cases that will shape many aspects of American life.

The court’s nine justices are back after last year’s blockbuster term, which saw rulings that protected a widely used abortion pill or granting former President Donald Trump partial immunity from prosecution.

The coming months may bring legal disputes over the looming presidential elections, potentially consequential in what should be a closely-fought contest.

With its six-three conservative majority intact, its rulings may fuel further scepticism among the American public whose approval for its work is now at 43%, according to Gallup, a near-record low.

With a new year ahead, here’s a look at some of the major cases on its docket.

Perhaps the most high-profile case of the term will be US v Skrmetti, where the justices will hear the Biden administration’s challenge to a Republican-backed ban on gender care for minors.

The Tennessee ban, which took effect in July 2023, prohibits certain treatments for minors experiencing gender dysphoria, including the prescription of any puberty blockers or hormones, if the treatment is meant to “enable a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity”.

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A group of young transgender people, their families and medical providers, have joined the Biden administration in challenging a decision from the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that upheld the Tennessee ban.

The nine Supreme Court justices will be asked to weigh whether the ban violates the 14th Amendment of the US constitution, which grants equal protection under the law.

The decision could have consequences nationwide. More than 20 states have enacted laws in recent years to restrict access to bespoke care for transgender youth.

The restrictions have been opposed by major medical groups including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

On the second day of its term, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to a new regulation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) on so-called “ghost guns”, the mostly untraceable firearms made from at-home kits.

The case, Garland v VanDerStok, centres on whether the ATF may regulate these weapons in the same way it regulates commercial gun sales, including serial numbers and federal background checks.

The Biden administration first imposed the restrictions in 2022, but was quickly blocked by a lower court, which sided with a group of firearms owners, gun rights groups and firearms manufacturers who argued the ATF had overstepped its authority.

The Justice Department then appealed, bringing the case to the country’s highest court.

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The case could have major implications for US gun control. The White House has said the unregistered weapons pose an increasing threat, with 20,000 suspected ghost guns found during criminal investigations in 2021 – a tenfold increase from five years earlier.

The top court will also hear a case to clarify how courts can determine if a police officer acted with reasonable force.

A three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit ruled this year that a Texas police officer reasonably feared for his life when he shot and killed a driver during a traffic stop in Houston in 2016.

Ashtian Barnes had been driving a vehicle his girlfriend rented, which had unpaid toll fees when officer Roberto Felix Jr stopped him. Mr Barnes initially stopped and opened his boot, but then began to drive away. Officer Felix jumped on to the vehicle and fired two shots into the car, according to dashcam footage. A bullet struck Mr Barnes in the head and he died.

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Mr Barnes’s mother, Janice Hughes Barnes, sued on her son’s behalf, arguing the deadly use of force against her son was unreasonable and violated his Fourth Amendment rights, which protect people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.

The judges found that Officer Felix had behaved reasonably under the Fourth Amendment’s “moment of threat” doctrine, which asks whether the officer had been in danger at the moment he used force. Under this standard, the officer’s actions until that moment are not taken into account.

One of the justices on the panel, Judge Patrick Higginbotham, wrote a concurring opinion expressing frustration with the test, and asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

If he had been allowed to consider the “totality of circumstances”, Judge Higginbotham said, he would have found the officer had violated Mr Barnes’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Though a date on this case has not yet been set, at some point this term the Supreme Court justices will consider a challenge from the adult entertainment industry over a Texas law requiring pornography websites to verify the age of their users.

The law requires porn sites where one-third of their content is harmful to minors to use age-verification measures to ensure all visitors are 18 years of age or older.

It also requires the sites to post health warnings, saying porn is addictive, impairs development and increases the demand for child exploitation – claims the industry disputes.

Several other US states, including Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana and North Carolina, require certain websites to verify the ages of visitors.

The Free Speech Coalition, which represents the porn industry, has challenged the law, saying it violates the First Amendment’s free speech protection.

The challenge was successful before a federal district court, but that ruling was overturned on appeal by a Fifth Circuit panel.

The ruling could have broad implications for First Amendment protections, possibly upending past ruling which found the free speech rights of adults outweighed the possible harm to minors.

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?

“Our people respect the Russian and Ukrainian people,” says Savvo Dobrovic. “I simply haven’t noticed any bad relations.”

It sounds like a recipe for tension and confrontation: tens of thousands of people from opposing sides in a bitter, protracted war descending on a small Balkan nation with its own very recent memories of conflict.

But Montenegro has managed the influx so far.

Since February 2022, Ukrainian refugees and Russian exiles have fanned out across Europe, fleeing war, conscription and Vladimir Putin’s rule.

More than four million people have fled Ukraine for temporary protection in the European Union – to Germany and Poland and elsewhere.

But beyond the EU, Montenegro has let in in more than 200,000 Ukrainians, making it the highest per capita Ukrainian refugee population in the world.

“Montenegrins are very patient, they are people who want to help,” says Dobrovic, a property owner in the Adriatic resort of Budva.

The word , meaning “slowly”, is integral to their way of life.

“It amazes me – they’re a mountain people, but all that’s left from that noisy temperament is a desire to hug you,” says Natalya Sevets-Yermolina, who runs the Russian cultural centre Reforum in Budva.

Montenegro, a Nato member and candidate for EU status, has not been without its problems.

It has a substantial ethnic Serb population, many of whom have pro-Russian sympathies, and six Russian diplomats were expelled two years ago on suspicion of spying.

But it has won praise for its response to the refugee crisis – in particular its decision to grant Ukrainians temporary protection status, which has now been extended until March 2025.

The most recent figures from September last year show more than 10,000 had benefited, and the UN says 62,000 Ukrainians had registered some legal status by then. That is nearly 10% of Montenegro’s population.

Thousands more have come from Russia or Belarus.

For all of these groups Montenegro is attractive for its visa-free regime, similar language, common religion and Western-leaning government.

That welcome does not always extend to their quality of life.

While there are plenty of jobs for immigrants in coastal areas, they are often seasonal and poorly paid. Better quality, professional work is harder to find. The luckier ones have been able to retain the jobs they had back home, working remotely.

Another difficulty is that it is almost impossible to get citizenship here, a problem for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to renew their passports.

There has been a strong Russian presence in Montenegro for years, and it has a reputation, perhaps unfairly, as a playground for the very rich.

Many Russians and Ukrainians have property or family connections, but there is also a large contingent who ended up here almost by chance, feeling completely lost.

It was for them that non-profit shelter (Haven) was set up.

Based in Budva, it gives the most desperate arrivals a safe place and a warm welcome for two weeks as they find their feet.

They are given help with documentation, hunting for jobs and flats, and Ukrainians can also come for two weeks as a “holiday” from the war.

Valentina Ostroglyad, 60, came here with her daughter a year ago from Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital in south-eastern Ukraine that comes under repeated, deadly Russian bombardment.

“When I first arrived in Montenegro I couldn’t handle fireworks, or even a roof falling in – I associated it with those explosions,” she said.

Now she is working as an art teacher and enjoying her adopted country: “Today I went up to a spring, admired the mountains and sea. And people are very kind.”

The ongoing grimness of the war ensures that Ukrainians keep coming, no longer able to endure the pain and suffering at home.

Sasha Borkov, a driver from Kharkiv, was separated from his wife and six children, aged four to 16, as they left Ukraine in late August.

He was turned back at the Polish border – he previously did jail time in Hungary for transporting irregular migrants and is banned from the EU. His family were allowed to continue to Germany while he, after a tense few days travelling around Europe, was finally allowed to touch down in Montenegro.

Visibly stressed and exhausted, he described how the war had finally driven him and his family from their home.

“When you see and hear every day houses being destroyed, people being killed, it’s impossible to convey,” he said.

“Our flat isn’t damaged but windows get broken, and [the bombs] are getting closer and closer.”

Borkov said he had been looking at the possibility of going to Montenegro since the start of the war: “[Pristaniste] took me in, gave me food and drink, a place to stay. I rested, then I started looking for work.”

He has already found a job and his family are due to join him here. He is applying for temporary protection, and a place at a Ukrainian refugee centre.

Elsewhere in Budva, Yuliya Matsuy has set up a children’s centre for Ukrainians to take lessons in history, English, maths and art – or just to dance, sing and watch films.

Many were traumatised by war, she says: “They weren’t interested in the mountains or the sea, they wanted nothing.”

“But when they started interacting, their eyes were smiling. Those children’s smiles and emotions were something that’s impossible to convey. And only then we understood we were doing the right thing.”

Now most are settled. The younger children learned Montenegrin and now attend local schools, while the older ones have continued their learning remotely at Ukrainian schools.

Both charities have Russian volunteers, which has helped foster good relations between the Russian and Ukrainian communities here.

Other parts of Europe have seen occasional friction. At the start of the war, Germany recorded a rise in attacks on Ukrainians and Russians.

But there has been little of that so far in Montenegro.

There is a sense of tolerance here and Pristaniste and its volunteers have had a role in promoting it.

Sasha Borkov distinguishes between Russians he has met in Budva and those fighting the war in Ukraine.

“People here are trying to help, they’re not doing anything against our country, against us, against my children, [unlike] those who fire at and destroy our houses, and say that they’re liberating us.”

Friendships have grown among volunteers and residents, and between residents, and one Russian-Ukrainian couple who lived at Pristaniste recently married.

Empathy is a major factor. A recent talk in Budva by Kyiv-based journalist Olha Musafirova about her work, in Ukrainian, had Russians in the audience in tears, horrified by their country’s actions.

For Ukrainian actor Katarina Sinchillo, Russian diasporas can vary and Montenegro’s is “sensitive”.

“I think the people who live here are a somewhat different community because it’s the intelligentsia,” she says, “educated people who can’t live without the arts.”

Russian-Ukrainian joint projects are vanishingly rare.

But Sinchillo set up a theatre here, with husband and fellow actor Viktor Koshel, using actors from all over the former Soviet Union.

Their plays are well attended, she says: “Progressive Russian people, who are helping Ukraine, go with interest and pleasure.”

Koshel says the environment here is perfect for such contacts. ”Here the countryside is heavenly, it takes you away from those urbanist, gloomy, depressive moods, political propaganda etc. You go to the sea and all that disappears.”

They have also collaborated with veteran Russian rock musician Mikhail Borzykin, who has seen big changes in the Russian diaspora over the past three years.

Before the war, he says, “fierce arguments” about Putin in the Russian community were commonplace, but the recent influx of anti-war immigrants created a different atmosphere.

“The overwhelming majority of young people who have come here, they of course understand the horror of what’s happening, so there is agreement on the main questions,” he says.

As for the pro-Kremlin former members of Russia’s corrupt elite, who he calls the they are sitting quietly in the properties they bought in Montenegro years ago.

“Conflicts are not aired in public,” he says.

Borzykin is part of a volleyball group of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians and says they are “all on the same wavelength”.

Despite the relatively warm welcome, the future of some immigrants remains uncertain.

Strict citizenship laws mean many of them will not be able to stay here indefinitely.

Most Ukrainians seem keen to return home if the war ends, assuming they still have homes to go to.

“Currently there’s a huge threat to our lives, but if it ends of course we’ll go home,” says Sasha Borkov. “There’s nowhere better than home”.

But most Russians say it will take much more than the fall of the regime to persuade them to go back permanently.

Natalya Sevets-Yermolina, who comes from the northern city of Petrozavodsk, says she’s not in a hurry.

“I have the problem that it’s not Putin that persecuted me but those little people I lived in the same city with,” she says. “Putin is far away but those who do his bidding will remain, even if he dies soon.”

Borzykin says he too is unlikely to return quickly, as attitudes could take decades to change.

“Germany needed 30 years [after the Nazis] while the new generation came along. I’m afraid I won’t have that long.”

With one month to election day, the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is the electoral equivalent of a bare-knuckle brawl.

The race for the White House still appears deadlocked, both nationally and in battleground states, so victory will be decided by the slimmest of margins – every new voter engaged, every undecided voter swayed, could help land a knock-out punch.

“In any super close race, where the electorate is divided down the middle, a difference of a percentage point or two could be decisive,” says David Greenberg, a presidential historian at Rutgers University.

While party strategists are focused on how to earn that decisive edge, it could just as easily be an event out of their control, an unexpected twist, that upends the campaign in the final weeks.

It’s already been a year of political shockwaves – from one candidate surviving two assassination attempts and being convicted of a crime, to another, President Joe Biden, dropping out of the race in favour of his much younger vice-president.

However, when the surprises drop in October – think Trump’s Access Hollywood tape or Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 – there is scarcely time left to recover or regain momentum after a misstep or bad news cycle.

This week alone, there were several new rumbles that could turn into political storms by 5 November.

The first potential political storm was a literal one. Hurricane Helene tore through two key electoral battlegrounds last week, Georgia and North Carolina. Because of the intense focus on both states during this presidential race, a humanitarian disaster, with a death toll already over 200, has also become a political issue.

Harris pledged long-term aid to the region at a stop in Georgia earlier this week, and visited those affected by the storm in North Carolina on Saturday.

“We’re here for the long haul,” she said in Georgia.

Meanwhile, both states are essentially must-wins for Trump, and polls show a dead heat. While visiting Georgia, the former president claimed that Americans were losing out on emergency relief money because it had been spent on migrants. In fact, the two distinct programmes have separate budgets, and the Biden administration accused Republicans of spreading “bold-faced lies” about funding for the disaster response.

When disaster strikes, it’s not easy for the government to keep everyone happy. If Trump’s attacks land, any voter dissatisfaction with recovery efforts could potentially impact the result in two of the most closely-watched states in the country.

Thousands of miles from the disaster-ravaged American southeast, a manmade crisis continues to inject itself into American politics. The Gaza war is in danger of expanding into a regional conflagration, as Israeli forces fought Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon and Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel earlier this week.

While Harris has presented herself as a candidate of change, she put no distance between herself and the current administration when it comes to US-Israeli policies. That comes with risks.

Hopes for any kind of pre-election ceasefire in Gaza appear firmly dashed, and the White House at this point is trying to ensure that the inevitable Israeli response to Tuesday’s Iranian strike doesn’t lead to all-out war.

On Thursday night, Biden was not exactly reassuring.

“I don’t believe there’s going to be an all-out war,” he said. “I think we can avoid it. But there’s a lot to do yet.”

The war is also having consequences at home for Democrats, even if American voters usually don’t think directly about foreign policy when they cast their ballots.

Harris’s commitment to continue supplying arms to Israel is a problem for two key segments of the Democratic base: Arab-Americans in the must-win state of Michigan, and young voters on campuses, where anti-war protests could start up again.

The conflict in the Middle East has also fuelled pocketbook concerns. Biden’s mention of the possibility that Israel would target Iranian refineries caused the price of oil to jump more than 5% on Thursday.

If there’s one thing that American consumers are particularly sensitive to, it’s higher prices at the petrol pump.

Across the board, public opinion surveys continue to show that the economy is the top issue for American voters. And Harris and the Democrats received some good news on that front on Friday, with the latest employment figures showing robust job growth over the past few months and an unemployment level that dropped to 4.1%.

According to Mr Greenberg, however, voter concerns on the economy are about more than the latest job figures.

“When people complain about the economy, what they’re really complaining about is the longer-term failure in certain parts of the country – rural America’s de-industrialised communities,” he says. “Those are parts of the country that are hurting even in a good economy.”

For most of the election season, Trump has fared better than Harris when voters are asked who they think would do a better job with the economy, including in a recent CNN poll. But there are signs his lead may not be set in stone, such as a Cook Political Report survey of swing states that showed the two candidates tied on who would be best at dealing with inflation.

One looming economic pitfall for Democrats also evaporated this week – the dockworkers strike, which had briefly shut down critical ports on the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico for the first time in 50 years. Both parties agreed to return to the bargaining table in January, reopening the ports. If a work stoppage had continued, it could have disrupted supply chains and driven up consumer prices in the weeks before the election.

Meanwhile, undocumented crossings at the US-Mexico border have returned to pre-Covid pandemic levels, after hitting a record high of 249,741 last December.

While the impact of that border surge is still being felt in many American cities, the urgency of the crisis may be diminishing.

While much of this week’s news could spell trouble for Harris and the Democrats, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Trump.

His conduct during the 6 January attack on the US Capitol once again came into focus on Wednesday, when a federal judge released a document from special counsel Jack Smith outlining his case and evidence against Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election result.

The document, which argued that the former president should not be given presidential immunity from prosecution, contained new details about Trump’s words and actions leading up to the Capitol riot by his supporters.

A recent CNN poll shows that voters favour Harris over Trump on issues of “protecting democracy” by 47% to 40% – so anything that renews attention on the chaotic final weeks of Trump’s presidency could be to the Democrat’s advantage.

The term “October surprise” has been a fixture in American political lexicon for nearly 50 years. Campaigns dread the unexpected headline or crisis that pushes their candidates off message and changes the trajectory of a race.

Even the smallest ripple in public opinion might deliver the White House in a year when the electoral margins in the swing states could be measured in only tens of thousands of votes.

November’s balloting, says Mr Greenberg, is shaping up to be a nail-biter.

“I don’t have any fingernails left,” he says. “I could totally imagine this election going either way with extremely significant consequences riding on that vote no matter where your loyalty is.”

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• ANALYSIS: Only one candidate is talking about China
• DISINFO: Pro- and anti-Trump voters united by one belief
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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

It was a regeneration idea that started half a century ago in the US, and has spread to other parts of the world.

But can selling off empty, derelict properties for a nominal amount help solve urban blight? And who are the winners and losers in such schemes?

Judy Aleksalza’s house in the Pigtown area of Baltimore feels like a real-life version of the Tardis, Doctor Who’s famous time-travelling police box. It seems bigger on the inside than the outside.

It’s part of a row of impeccably kept 19th Century terrace houses – there are freshly watered plant pots outside many of the front steps, and no litter or graffiti.

Ms Aleksalza bought the then abandoned property back in the 1976 for the same price as her neighbours – $1 (75p).

Since then she has spent tens of thousands of dollars, and much more in blood sweat and tears, transforming it. Poor weather, contractors who failed to do the work, it was, in Judy’s words – “a horror story”.

“I came very close to declaring personal bankruptcy,” she says. “It’s kind of like childbirth, you know. It was horrible while it was going on.

“But you know, after it was all over, I said ‘it is mine, it’s all mine’. And the stability of having your own home is everything.”

Baltimore, 40 miles (64km) northeast of Washington DC, was one of the first cities in the US to try what it called “urban homesteading”. Vacant properties were sold off for just one dollar, allowing people to get on the housing ladder who might not otherwise be able to afford it.

The scheme was run by Jay Brodie who at the time was a senior figure in the city’s housing department.

“We picked names out of a hat and started meeting with them,” he remembers. “Once it was finished, it made the cover of the American Express magazine… and we said ‘we have something here’.

“We’re talking about something that you can see and touch. They were living examples of what could be done with Baltimore row houses.”

The project came to a halt in 1988 after Mr Brodie left the department in the early 1980s. But some ideas never quite go away, and instead spread their wings.

Fast forward to 2013, and three and a half thousand miles away, another port city that had faced similar issues of urban decay decided to try something similar – Liverpool.

Tony Mousedale from Liverpool City Council’s housing department had heard about the idea of selling off abandoned properties cheaply. He suggested Liverpool try it.

So they offered properties in the Webster Triangle area of Wavertree for just £1.

“I think we just felt that there was an appetite for people who were keen to renovate derelict houses, starting from scratch, putting their own stamp on it,” says Mr Mousedale.

“We put that sort of concept out there, and received a very positive response. I think it really captured people’s imagination.”

It might have raised a lot of interest, but some of the more than 100 buyers were brought down to earth with a bump.

“There was a rat infestation, and I had a tree growing out of the front bay window frame,” says Maxine Sharples, one of those who bought into the scheme. “It was gruelling, backbreaking work. It was filthy.”

Despite all the heartache and hard work, Maxine Sharples says it was worth it. “It’s completely changed my life. I don’t take it for granted that I’m living in the home of my dreams that I renovated and got for a quid.”

Similar schemes have also introduced in other countries, including Italy, and Spain.

And things have in some ways come full circle. Earlier this year Baltimore unveiled new plans to help regenerate its blighted neighbourhoods.

Part of that? A scheme called the Fixed Pricing Program that would allow residents to buy a derelict property for just $1.

Any individual wishing to buy a house for a dollar needs to show that they have $90,000 for the renovation. Plus, they must already live in the city, and promise to reside in the renovated property for five years.

Interest in the project is said to be high. Alice Kennedy, the Baltimore Housing Commissioner, tells me: “I think that it definitely got people more excited or interested than even, I think, we recognized that would happen.”

Yet so far only a handful of people have met the criteria and actually been successful.

Meanwhile, non-profit providers of affordable housing, known as “community land trusts”, can also buy the Baltimore buildings for $1, while large housing developers can apply to purchase them for $3,000.

Such $1 home schemes are quick to make media headlines, but critics questions what they can achieve. One such sceptic is David Simon, the creator of the hit TV series The Wire, which was set in Baltimore.

The gritty show, which was broadcast from 2002 to 2008, was inspired by Mr Simon’s own experience as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

He says that the original Baltimore scheme didn’t benefit those who were economically marginalised, as the properties were bought by people who had enough money to do them up.

“I mean it brought tax base back to the city,” says Mr Simon, who still lives and works in Baltimore. “But it wasn’t socialistic in the sense that I don’t think it was successful in, in spreading the wealth. But I don’t think any urban renewal, or any urban reclamation, that I’m familiar with in the city, has ever been egalitarian.”

In Liverpool Tony Mousedale accepts that while its scheme has helped improve the area in question, there are still issues with anti-social behaviour, and there are still boarded up properties that haven’t been renovated, a decade later.

“I would say anti-social incidents are not as frequent as they used to be,” he says. “Generally speaking, the homes for a pound scheme has been a driver for regenerating the area. There is still a way to go. I think in some ways regeneration never finishes, does it? There’s always more to do.”

Back in Baltimore, David Lidz runs Waterbottle Cooperative, a grassroots organisation that buys up decaying properties in Baltimore and renovates them to rent to people on low incomes.

He is concerned that individuals buying homes for a $1 may lead to areas being gentrified, which results in general rent levels being “jacked up” and people on lower incomes being “pushed out”.

“So then you ask yourself where do those people go? Well they move over to the next rotting neighbourhood. That’s not good.”

At the Baltimore Housing Commissioner’s office, Alice Kennedy says she’s aware of the problems previous renewal schemes have created, and is keen to learn the lessons of the past.

“A top priority for all of us that work in the city is to redress the racist housing policies of the past and the socioeconomic segregation,” she says.

“For me, success is really knowing that our communities are going to be whole again, and that they’re going to have the ability to thrive from birth to death as a human in the city of Baltimore.”

A woman who spent 48 years wondering why an application for her dream job was never answered has finally found out why.

Tizi Hodson, 70, from Gedney Hill in Lincolnshire, could not believe her eyes when she opened the post to discover her original letter applying for a job as a motorcycle stunt rider, sent in January 1976, had been stuck behind a post office drawer all these years.

Despite it getting lost in the post, the setback did not hamper her daredevil career as she found a job that took her all over the world.

Describing the letter being returned as “amazing”, Ms Hodson said: “I always wondered why I never heard back about the job. Now I know why.”

At the top of the letter is a handwritten note that reads: “Late delivery by Staines Post Office. Found behind a draw [sic]. Only about 50 years late.”

Ms Hodson doesn’t know who returned the letter, or how it even found its way to her.

“How they found me when I’ve moved house 50-odd times, and even moved countries four or five times, is a mystery,” she said.

“It means so much to me to get it back all this time later.

“I remember very clearly sitting in my flat in London typing the letter.

“Every day I looked for my post but there was nothing there and I was so disappointed because I really, really, wanted to be a stunt rider on a motorcycle.”

Luckily for Ms Hodson, the silence following her application did not put her off from trying for other jobs.

She moved to Africa, worked as a snake handler and horse whisperer, learned to fly and became an aerobatic pilot and flying instructor.

Looking back at the letter she sent when she was just starting out, Ms Hodson said: “I was very careful not to let people who were advertising for a stunt rider know that I was female, or I thought I would have had no chance of even getting an interview.

“I even stupidly told them I didn’t mind how many bones I might break as I was used to it.

“It seems incredible to get the letter back after all this time.

“If I could speak to my younger self, I would tell her to go and do everything I’ve done. I’ve had such a wonderful time in life, even if I have broken a few bones.”

Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds latest episode of Look North here.

The mother of a British backpacker murdered in New Zealand has climbed to Everest base camp in memory of her daughter.

Grace Millane, 22, from Wickford in Essex, was killed on a Tinder date in Auckland in December 2018.

Her mother Gillian Millane said it had been “the hardest thing I have ever done” after battling snow up to her knees to reach the camp.

The climb raised money for the White Ribbon charity, which aims to end male violence against women.

“The weather was the worst they have had there for 12 years. It was all very emotional,” she said.

“It was freezing, I was wet though to the skin and the altitude was very hard to deal with. We were sleeping in rooms with no heating, there were landslides and paths were being washed away.

“But other than all that, I had a wonderful time and I had an amazing team behind me.”

It took the team eight days of climbing to reach the camp – which sits at an altitude of 17,598ft (5364m) – and four days to get back down.

Mrs Millane left a stone engraved with her daughter’s name at the top, alongside one with the name of her late husband David, who died from cancer in 2020.

She had previously left stones with their names on at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.

After Grace’s death, Mrs Millane started the charity initiative Love Grace, which collects donated handbags and fills them with toiletries for domestic abuse victims, inspired by her daughter’s love of handbags.

So far, the charity has filled more than 20,000 bags for women in the UK and across the world, with Mrs Millane appointed an OBE for her efforts.

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 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.

The mother of the only British-Israeli hostage still being held by Hamas in Gaza has asked why the UK is not “fighting every moment to secure her release”.

Emily Damari, 28, was shot and taken from an Israeli kibbutz across the border into Gaza on 7 October.

Speaking at a London memorial event marking the attacks a year ago, her mother Mandy Damari said her daughter’s “plight seems to have been forgotten”.

Prime Minster Sir Keir Starmer said in a statement the UK “must unequivocally stand with the Jewish community”.

The dual national is among 97 hostages who remain unaccounted for.

Speaking at the Hyde Park memorial event, her mother said: “[Emily] is a daughter of both countries, but no one here mentions the fact that there is still a female British hostage being held captive by Hamas for a year now, and I sometimes wonder if people even know there is a British woman there.

“Imagine, for a moment if Emily was your daughter. Try to picture what she is going through.

“Since 7 October last year, she has been held a hostage by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza terror tunnels, 20 metres or more underground, kept in captivity, tortured, isolated, unable to eat, speak or even move without someone else’s permission.”

The crowd heard how Emily, who was born to her British mother in Israel and lived there, loved to visit the UK – her “second home across the sea”. She loved watching Spurs play, going to the pub, shopping at Primark and had also watched Ed Sheeran in concert, her mother said.

Her mother pleaded with Britain and other countries to do more to secure the release of her daughter, and the other hostages.

“How is it that she is still imprisoned there after one year? Why isn’t the whole world, especially Britain, fighting every moment to secure her release? She’s one of their own.”

She said some of the women and children who were released in the hostage deal in November had told her Emily was alive then, and spoke about how she helped the other hostages try to stay positive, even in the worst of times.

“Every day is living hell not knowing what Emily is going through. I do know from the hostages that returned that they were starved, sexually abused and tortured. Every moment lost is another moment of unimaginable suffering or even death.”

BBC News has approached the UK Foreign Office for comment.

Other hostages with British relatives held include Eli Sharabi, Oded Lifschitz and Avinatan Or. British-Israeli Nadav Popplewell was also kidnapped on 7 October and his body was recovered by Israeli soldiers in Gaza in August.

Families of Israeli hostages met Sir Keir and Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Monday, calling on them to “do more” to bring them home.

The prime minister agreed that the hostages must be freed and returned immediately, a subsequent press conference was told.

On Sunday, he said the country must “unequivocally” stand with the Jewish community and described 7 October as the “darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust”.

“As a father, a husband, a son, a brother – meeting the families of those who lost their loved ones last week was unimaginable. Their grief and pain are ours, and it is shared in homes across the land,” Sir Keir said.

He also reiterated his call for ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon.

The Hyde Park event, organised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and other groups, was attended by thousands of British Jews and supporters of Israel who waved British and Israeli flags with chants of “bring them home”.

Among the crowd, many of whom have family and friends in Israel, there was disbelief that the hostages still had not been freed, one year on.

Israeli ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely told the crowd: “We will do whatever we can to bring them home.”

Michael Wegier, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told BBC News: “The British Jewish community is traumatised like much of the Jewish community around the world, especially in Israel.

“There are 30,000 Jews from Britain who live in Israel. Many of us have friends and family there and we go there, and so we take what happens there very deeply and very personally.”

A vigil to remember the victims of the Hamas attack was also held in Glasgow where hundreds gathered at the steps of Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

On the eve of 7 October, a man was filmed damaging a Jewish memorial in Hove.

Sussex Police responded to the video, which had been circulated on X and other social media platforms, and confirmed the incident was being treated as a “hate crime”.

On Saturday tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian protestors marched through central London calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October by Hamas gunmen, during which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

At least 41,870 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

When South Indian star Sid Sriram thinks back to starting out in the music industry, the word “disrupter” comes to his mind.

His debut in Tamil cinema got a “lot of pushback”, he says.

Indian-born, American-raised Sriram blends a unique Carnatic (South Indian) singing style with soul and R&B influences from his youth.

He says Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Luther Vandross are big inspirations.

People questioned “what kind of voice is this? Why is he singing like this?” says Sriram.

But he didn’t let the early criticism stop him and has largely let his music do the talking.

This year he became the first South Indian to perform at Coachella, opened for US indie star Bon Iver on his US tour and is about to embark on the UK leg of his All Love No Hate tour.

It will be his biggest solo UK show, in front of a crowd at the O2 Arena in London.

“I’ve always had the vision to take our music and elevate it to the highest level,” Sriram explains to BBC Asian Network’s Tamil and South Indian music show.

A wave of South Asian musicians have been appearing in mainstream spaces and collaborating with western artists.

Punjabi megastar Diljit Dosanjh featured on The Tonight Show, AP Dhillon worked with Stormzy and Arijit Singh brought out Ed Sheeran at his concert.

Sriram says the success of these artists inspires him to do the same with his Carnatic style.

“My mission since the beginning has been to take my Carnatic musical roots and amplify them across the globe,” he says.

Sriram, who is best known for songs such as Srivalli, Kalaavathi and Neeli Neeli Aakasam, says he felt “the world wasn’t ready” when he first entered the West.

“Now, over a decade later, it’s clear to me that the world is not only ready for this perspective, but they need it. It’s an exciting time.”

Describing himself as a “cultural bridge between two different worlds”, Sriram says being that conduit is what he has “always wanted to do.”

During his Coachella set, Sriram performed a Tamil religious song known as Thiruppugazh which went viral online.

“It was very affirming for me and inspiring for sure,” he says.

He is also signed to label Def Jam, which has artists such as Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Pusha T.

Last year he went viral with his critically acclaimed NPR Tiny Desk concert and released Sidharth, an album in English which mixes Carnatic music with R&B and indie rock influences.

Sriram says that album has helped open up Tamil music to a new audience.

“Even if I’m doing an English album show I’ll still sing some Tamil film songs and I always get non-South Asian people texting me like: ‘Whoa, what was that song?’

“I call myself an ambassador of my language, my culture, my people and if I call myself that then I have to put action to that.”

While Diljit Dosanjh and Arijit Singh cover the globally popular Bollywood and bhangra genres, Sriram is the first Carnatic singer since AR Rahman to do the same.

AR Rahman was one of the first South Indian artists to work with mainstream acts, but he did so using Bollywood and film music, most notably with the Oscar-winning soundtrack for Slumdog Millionaire.

Sriram contacted AR Rahman after Slumdog Millionaire, which, to his pleasant surprise, gave him his first break.

It’s a journey he is keen to celebrate in the UK show, where he will play Tamil cinema hits from his debut to now.

“I love performing in the UK because it feels like the audience understands my roots, as well as a lot of the cultural touch points I grew up with in California.

“The resonance is special.

“I came to the UK for the first time last year and it immediately felt like home,” he says.

But he’s not settling.

There is “more to come” which includes Sriram’s own original Tamil music, as opposed to tunes composed by others.

“The next wave is just putting out music in my mother tongue that feels like it’s just pushing the boundary.

“In the way I would if I was making English music and continuing to expand.”

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 principle 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.

Two Chinese nationals have been killed and at least ten people injured after an explosion near Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan.

The Chinese embassy in Pakistan said there were “some local casualties” in what it described as a “terrorist attack”, though the overall death toll is still unclear.

The embassy added that the explosion targeted a convoy of Chinese engineers working on a power project in the country’s Sindh province.

The separatist Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), which has in recent years carried out attacks on Chinese nationals involved in projects, has claimed responsibility for the attack.

In a statement released on Monday, the militant group said it had “targeted a high-level convoy of Chinese engineers and investors” arriving from Karachi airport.

The attack was carried out using a “vehicle-borne improvised explosive device”, Reuters quoted the BLA as saying.

The explosion happened around 23:00 local time (17:00 GMT).

The Chinese embassy said that the engineers were part of the Chinese-funded enterprise Port Qasim Power Generation Co Ltd, which aims to build two coal power plants at Port Qasim, near Karachi.

The plant is part of the China-Pakistan economic corridor, which is also funding a number of infrastructure and energy projects in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, which has a rich supply of natural resources, including gas and minerals.

The BLA along with other ethnic Baloch groups has fought a long-running insurgency for a separate homeland.

It has regularly targeted Chinese nationals in the region, claiming ethnic Baloch residents were not receiving their share of wealth extracted from foreign investors.

The Chinese embassy on Monday reminded its citizens and Chinese enterprises in Pakistan to be vigilant and to “do their best to take safety precautions”. The embassy added that it will thoroughly investigate the attack and “severely punish the murderer”.

There has also been heightened security in Pakistan as it prepares to host the leaders’ summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

The blast was reportedly heard in various areas around the city, with footage from local media showing thick smoke and cars set alight.

Sindh Home Minister Ziaul Hasan Lanjar said that the explosion was likely to be have been caused by a suspected improvised explosive device (IED).

Pictures online show security officials and firefighters investigating the explosion site, where several vehicles have been charred by the blast.

A police surgeon, Dr Summaiya told Dawn news: “Ten injured persons, including one in critical condition, have been brought the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical College (JPMC).”

She added the injured included a police constable and a woman.

A statement posted on X from Sindh’s Interior Minister’s office said that a “tanker truck” had exploded on Airport Road and said the minister was in contact with the Malir Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) regarding the incident.

“We need to ascertain the facts,” the statement said.

Jinnah International Airport is functioning as usual today.

The BLA had claimed responsibility for past assaults on a Pakistani naval airbase near the Gwadar port, another main feature of the China-Pakistan economic corridor.

In April 2022, it killed three Chinese tutors and a Pakistani driver in a suicide bombing near Karachi University’s Confucius Institute.

Millions of people in the Middle East dream of safe, quiet lives without drama and violent death. The last year of war, as bad as any in the region in modern times, has shown yet again that dreams of peace cannot come true while deep political, strategic and religious fault lines remain unbridged. Once again, war is reshaping the politics of the Middle East.

The Hamas offensive came out of well over a century of unresolved conflict. After Hamas burst through the thinly defended border, it inflicted the worst day the Israelis had suffered.

Around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, were killed. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, phoned President Joe Biden and told him that “We’ve never seen such savagery in the history of the state”; not “since the Holocaust.” Israel saw the attacks by Hamas as a threat to its existence.

Since then, Israel has inflicted many terrible days on the Palestinians in Gaza. Nearly 42,000 people, mostly civilians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Much of Gaza is in ruins. Palestinians accuse Israel of genocide.

The war has spread. Twelve months after Hamas went on the offensive the Middle East is on the edge of an even worse war; wider, deeper, even more destructive.

A year of killing has stripped away layers of assumptions and illusions. One is Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that he could manage the Palestinian issue without making concessions to their demands for self-determination.

With that went the wishful thinking that had comforted Israel’s worried Western allies. Leaders in the US and UK, and others, had convinced themselves that Netanyahu, despite opposing a Palestinian state alongside Israel all his political life, could somehow be persuaded to accept one to end the war.

Netanyahu’s refusal reflected almost universal distrust of Palestinians inside Israel as well as his own ideology. It also torpedoed an ambitious American peace plan.

President Biden’s “grand bargain” proposed that Israel would receive full diplomatic recognition by Saudi Arabia, the most influential Islamic country, in return for allowing Palestinian independence. The Saudis would be rewarded with a security pact with the US.

The Biden plan fell at the first hurdle. Netanyahu said in February that statehood would be “huge reward” for Hamas. Bezalel Smotrich, one of the ultra-nationalist extremists in his cabinet, said it would be an “existential threat” to Israel.

The Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, presumed to be alive, somewhere in Gaza had his own illusions. A year ago, he must have hoped that the rest of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” would join, with full force, into a war to cripple Israel. He was wrong.

Sinwar kept his plans to attack Israel on 7 October so secret that he took his enemy by surprise. He also surprised some on his own side. Diplomatic sources told the BBC that Sinwar might not even have shared his plans with his own organisation’s exiled political leadership in Qatar. They had notoriously lax security protocols, talking on open lines that could be easily overheard, one source said.

Far from going on the offensive, Iran made it clear it did not want a wider war, as Israel invaded Gaza and President Biden ordered American carrier strike groups to move closer to protect Israel.

Instead, Hassan Nasrallah, and his friend and ally, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, restricted themselves to rocketing Israel’s northern border, which they said would continue until a ceasefire in Gaza. The targets were mostly military, but Israel evacuated more than 60,000 people away from the border. In Lebanon, perhaps twice as many had to flee over the months as Israel hit back.

Israel made clear it would not tolerate an indefinite war of attrition with Hezbollah. Even so, the conventional wisdom was that Israel would be deterred by Hezbollah’s formidable fighting record in previous wars and its arsenal of missiles, provided by Iran.

In September, Israel went on the offensive. No one outside the senior ranks of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Mossad spy agency believed so much damage could be inflicted so quickly on Iran’s most powerful ally.

Israel remotely exploded booby-trapped pagers and radios, destroying Hezbollah’s communications and killing leaders. It launched one of the most intense bombing campaigns in modern warfare. On its first day Israel killed about 600 Lebanese people, including many civilians.

The offensive has blown a big hole in Iran’s belief that its network of allies cemented its strategy to deter and intimidate Israel. The key moment came on 27 September, with the huge air strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut that killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and many of his top lieutenants. Nasrallah was a vital part of Iran’s “axis of resistance”, its informal alliance and defence network of allies and proxies.

Israel broke out of the border war by escalating to a bigger one. If the strategic intention was to force Hezbollah to cease fire and pull back from the border, it failed. The offensive, and invasion of south Lebanon, has not deterred Iran.

Iran seems to have concluded that its open reluctance to risk a wider war was encouraging Israel to push harder. Hitting back was risky, and guaranteed an Israeli response, but for the supreme leader and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, it had become the least bad option.

On Tuesday 1 October, Iran attacked Israel with ballistic missiles.

___

Kibbutz Kfar Aza is very close to the wire that was supposed to protect Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. The kibbutz was a small community, with modest homes on an open-plan campus of lawns and neat gardens. Kfar Aza was one of Hamas’s first targets on 7 October. Sixty-two people from the kibbutz were killed by Hamas. Of the 19 hostages taken from there into Gaza, two were killed by Israeli troops after they escaped from captivity. Five hostages from Kfar Aza are still in Gaza.

The Israeli army took journalists into Kfar Aza on 10 October last year, when it was still a battle zone. We saw Israeli combat troops dug into the fields around the kibbutz and could hear gunfire as they cleared buildings where they suspected Hamas fighters might be sheltering. Israeli civilians killed by Hamas were being carried out in body bags from the ruins of their homes. Hamas fighters killed by Israeli soldiers as they fought their way into the kibbutz still lay on the neat lawns, turning black as they decomposed in the strong Mediterranean sun.

A year later the dead are buried but very little has changed. The living have not returned to live in their homes. Ruined houses have been preserved as they were when I saw them on 10 October last year, except the names and photos of the people who lived and were killed inside them are displayed on big posters and memorials.

Zohar Shpak, a resident who survived the attack with his family, showed us round the homes of neighbours who were not as lucky. One of the houses had a large photo on its wall of the young couple who lived there, both killed by Hamas on 7 October. The ground around the houses has been dug over. Zohar said the young man’s father had spent weeks sifting earth to try to find his son’s head. He had been buried without it.

The stories of the dead of 7 October, and the hostages, are well known in Israel. Local media still talk about their country’s losses, adding new information to old pain.

Zohar said it was too early to think about how they might rebuild their lives.

“We are still inside the trauma. We are not in post-trauma. Like people said, we’re still here. We are still in the war. We wanted the war will be ended, but we want it will be ended with a victory, but not an army victory. Not a war victory.

“My victory is that I could live here, with. My son and daughter, with my grandchildren and living peacefully. I believe in peace.”

Zohar and many other Kfar Aza residents identified with the left wing of Israeli politics, meaning that they believed Israel’s only chance of peace was allowing the Palestinians their independence. Israelis like Zohar and his neighbours are convinced that Netanyahu is a disastrous prime minister who bears a heavy responsibility for leaving them vulnerable and open to attack on 7 October.

But Zohar does not trust the Palestinians, people he used to ferry to hospitals in Israel in better times when they were allowed out of Gaza for medical treatment.

“I don’t believe those people who are living over there. But I want the peace. I want to go to Gaza’s beach. But I don’t trust them. No, I don’t trust any one of them.”

Hamas leaders do not accept that the attacks on Israel were a mistake that brought the wrath of Israel, armed and supported by the United States down on to the heads of their people. Blame the occupation, they say, and its lust for destruction and death.

In Qatar, an hour or so before Iran attacked Israel on 1 October, I interviewed Khalil al-Hayya, the most senior Hamas leader outside Gaza, second only in their organisation to Yahya Sinwar. He denied his men had targeted civilians – despite overwhelming evidence – and justified the attacks by saying it was necessary to put the plight of the Palestinians on the world’s political agenda.

“It was necessary to raise an alarm in the world to tell them that here there is a people who have a cause and have demands that must be met. It was a blow to Israel, the Zionist enemy.”

Israel felt the blow, and on 7 October, as the IDF was rushing troops to the Gaza border, Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech promising a “mighty vengeance”. He set out war aims of eliminating Hamas as a military and political force and bringing the hostages home. The prime minister continues to insist that “total victory” is possible, and that force will in the end free the Israelis held by Hamas for a year.

His political opponents, including relatives of the hostages, accuse him of blocking a ceasefire and a hostage deal to appease ultra-nationalists in his government. He is accused of putting his own political survival before the lives of Israelis.

Netanyahu has many political enemies in Israel, even though the offensive in Lebanon has helped repair his poll numbers. He remains controversial but for most Israelis the war in Gaza is not. Since 7 October, most Israelis have hardened their hearts to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

Two days into the war, Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, said he had ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip.

“There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Since then, under international pressure, Israel has been forced to loosen its blockade. At the United Nations at the end of September, Netanyahu insisted Gazans have all the food they need.

The evidence shows clearly that is not true. Days before his speech, UN humanitarian agencies signed a declaration just demanding an end to “appalling human suffering and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”.

“More than 2 million Palestinians are without protection, food, water, sanitation, shelter, health care, education, electricity and fuel – the basic necessities to survive. Families have been forcibly displaced, time and time again, from one unsafe place to the next, with no way out.”

BBC Verify has analysed the condition of Gaza after a year of war.

The Hamas-run health ministry says nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed so far. Analysis of satellite imagery by US academics Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek suggests 58.7% of all buildings have been damaged or destroyed.

But there is another human cost – displacement – with civilians repeatedly instructed to move by the IDF.

The effects of the movement of people can be seen from space.

Satellite images show how tents have amassed and dispersed in central Rafah. It’s a pattern that has been repeated across the strip.

These waves of displacement began on 13 October, when the IDF told residents of the northern half of the strip to move south for their own “safety”.

BBC Verify has identified more than 130 social media posts like these shared by the IDF, detailing which areas were designated combat zones, routes to take out and where temporary pauses in fighting would take place.

In total, these often-overlapping posts amounted to about 60 evacuation orders covering more than 80% of the Gaza strip.

On many of the notices, BBC Verify has found key details to be unreadable and drawn boundaries inconsistent with the text.

The IDF has designated a coastal area – al-Mawasi – in southern Gaza as a humanitarian zone. It still gets bombed. BBC Verify has analysed footage of 18 air strikes within the zone’s borders.

___

Satellite pictures show a huge bottleneck of people on Salah al-Din Street, after Israel ordered the effective depopulation of northern Gaza. Somewhere in the crowds moving down Salah al-Din, Gaza’s main north-south route, was Insaf Hassan Ali, her husband and two children, a boy of 11 and a girl of seven. So far, they have all survived, unlike many members of their extended family.

Israel does not allow journalists into Gaza to report freely. We assume that is because Israel does not want us to see what it has done there. We commissioned a trusted Palestinian freelancer inside Gaza to interview Insaf Ali and her son.

She spoke about the terrible fear they felt as they walked south, with perhaps one million others, on the orders of the Israeli army. Death was everywhere, she says.

“We were walking on Salah al-Din Street. A car in front of us was hit. We saw it, and it was burning… On the left, people were killed, and on the right, even the animals—donkeys were thrown around, they were bombed.

“We said, ‘That’s it, we’re done.’ We said, ‘now the rocket that is coming will be for us’.”

Insaf and her family had a comfortable middle-class life before the war. Since then, they have been displaced 15 times on the orders of Israel. Like millions of others, they are destitute, often hungry, living in a tent at al-Mawasi, a desolate area of sand dunes. Snakes, scorpions and venomous giant worms invade the tents and have to be swept out. As well as the risk of death in an air strike, they face hunger, disease and the faecal dust generated when millions of people do not have access to proper sanitation.

Insaf wept for her old life, and the people they have lost.

“Our lives were beautiful, and suddenly we had nothing—no clothes, no food, no essentials for life. Constantly being displaced is incredibly hard on my children’s health. They’ve had malnutrition and they have been infected with diseases, including amoebic dysentery and hepatitis.”

Insaf said that the beginning of months of Israeli bombing felt like the “horrors of judgement day”.

“Any mother would feel the same, anyone who owns something precious and is afraid it might slip from their hands at any moment. Each time we moved to a house, it would be bombed, and someone in our family would be killed.”

The only chance of making even small improvements in the lives of Insaf and her family and well over two million others in Gaza is to agree a ceasefire. If the killing stops, diplomats might have a window to stop the slide into a much wider catastrophe.

More disasters await in the future, if the war drags on and a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians cannot shake the hatred and horror many currently feel about the actions of the other side.

Insaf’s 11-year-old son, Anas Awad, has been deeply affected by everything he has seen.

“There’s no future for Gaza’s children. The friends I used to play with have been martyred. We used to run around together. May God have mercy on them. The mosque where I used to memorise the Quran has been bombed. My school has been bombed. So has the playground… everything has gone. I want peace. I wish I could return with my friends and play again. I wish we had a house, not a tent.”

“I don’t have friends anymore. Our whole life has turned to sand. When I go out to the prayer area, I feel anxious, and hesitant. I don’t feel right.”

His mother was listening.

“It has been the hardest year of my life. We saw sights we should not have seen – scattered bodies, the desperation of a grown man holding a bottle of water to drink for his children. Of course, our homes are no longer homes; they are just piles of sand, but we hope for the day when we can return.’

UN humanitarian agencies have condemned both Israel and Hamas: “The parties’ conduct over the last year makes a mockery of their claim to adhere to international humanitarian law and the minimum standards of humanity that it demands.”

Both sides deny accusations they have broken the laws of war. Hamas claims it ordered its men not to kill Israeli civilians. Israel says it warns Palestinian civilians to get out of harm’s way but Hamas uses them as human shields.

Israel has been referred to the International Court of Justice, accused by South Africa of genocide. The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has applied for arrest warrants on a range of war crimes charges for Yahya Sinwar of Hamas, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

For Israelis the Hamas attacks on 7 October were a painful reminder of centuries of pogroms against Jews in Europe that culminated in the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany. In the first month of the war, the Israeli writer and former politician Avraham Burg explained the profound psychological impact on his country.

“We, the Jews,” he told me, “we believe that the state of Israel is the first and best immune system and protective system versus Jewish history. No more pogroms, no more Holocaust, no more mass murderers. And all of a sudden, all of it is back.”

Ghosts of the past tormented Palestinians as well. Raja Shehadeh, the celebrated Palestinian writer and human rights campaigner believes that Israel wanted to make another Nakba – another catastrophe: in his latest book What Does Israel Fear From Palestine? he writes “as the war progressed I could see that they meant every word and did not care about civilians, including children. In their eyes, as well as the eyes of most Israelis, all Gazans were guilty”.

No one can doubt Israel’s determination to defend its people, helped enormously by the might of the United States. It is clear though, that the war has shown that nobody can fool themselves that Palestinians will accept lives lived forever under an Israeli military occupation, without proper civil rights, freedom of movement and independence.

After generations of conflict Israelis and Palestinians are used to confronting each other. But they are also used to living alongside each other, however uncomfortably. When a ceasefire comes, and with a new generation of leaders, there will be chances to push again for peace.

But that is a more distant future. The rest of the year and into 2025, with a new president in the White House, are uncertain and full of danger.

For months after Hamas attacked Israel, the fear was that the war would spread, and get worse. Slowly, and then very quickly, it happened, after Israel’s devastating attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanon.

It is too late to say the Middle East is on the brink. Israel is facing off against Iran. The warring parties have plunged over it, and countries not yet directly involved are desperate not to be dragged over the edge.

As I write Israel has still not retaliated for Iran’s ballistic missile attack on 1 October. It has indicated that it intends to inflict a severe punishment. President Biden and his administration, Israel’s constant supplier of weapons and diplomatic support, are trying to calibrate a response that might offer Iran a way to stop the accelerating climb up the ladder of escalation, a phrase strategists use to describe the way wars speed from crisis to disaster.

The proximity of the US elections, along with Joe Biden’s steadfast support for Israel, despite his misgivings about the way it has been fighting, do not induce much optimism that the US will somehow finesse a way out.

The signals from Israel indicate that Netanyahu, Gallant, the generals of the IDF and the intelligence agencies believe they have the upper hand. October 7th was a disaster for them. All the major security and military chiefs, except the prime minister, apologised and some resigned. They had not planned for a war with Hamas. But planning for the war with Hezbollah started after the last one ended in 2006 in a humiliating stalemate for Israel. Hezbollah has suffered blows from which it might never recover.

So far Israel’s victories are tactical. To get to a strategic victory it would need to coerce its enemies into changing their behaviour. Hezbollah, even in its reduced state, is showing that it wants to fight on. Taking on Israeli infantry and tanks now that south Lebanon has once more been invaded might negate some of Israel’s advantages in air power and intelligence.

If Iran answers Israel’s retaliation with another wave of ballistic missiles other countries might get pulled in. In Iraq, Iran’s client militias could attack American interests. Two Israeli soldiers were killed by a drone that came from Iraq.

Saudi Arabia is also looking on nervously. Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman has made clear his view of the future. He would contemplate recognising Israel, but only if the Palestinians get a state in return and Saudi Arabia gets a security pact with the United States.

Joe Biden’s role, simultaneously trying to restrain Israel while supporting it with weapons, diplomacy and carrier strike groups, exposes the Americans to getting involved in a wider war with Iran. They don’t want that to happen, but Biden has pledged that he will come to Israel’s aid if it becomes necessary.

Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, and the damage done to Iran’s strategy and its “axis of resistance” is fostering a new set of illusions among some in Israel and the United States. The dangerous idea is that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the Middle East by force, imposing order and neutering Israel’s enemies. Joe Biden – and his successor – should be wary of that.

The last time that restructuring the Middle East by force was contemplated seriously was after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on America, when US President George W Bush and Tony Blair, the UK’s prime minister, were getting ready to invade Iraq in 2003.

The invasion of Iraq did not purge the Middle East of violent extremism. It made matters worse.

The priority for those who want to stop this war should be a ceasefire in Gaza. It is the only chance to cool matters and to create a space for diplomacy. This year of war started in Gaza. Perhaps it can end there too.

A British climber who went missing in the Himalayas has spoken of her relief after surviving for two days in “brutal” conditions that put her life in danger.

Fay Manners, originally from Bedfordshire, and her climbing partner, Michelle Dvorak from the United States, were stranded on Chaukhamba mountain in northern India when the rope lifting their food, tent and climbing equipment snapped, leaving them without supplies.

The pair sent an emergency message at more than 20,000ft (6,096m), but search and rescue teams had initially been unable to find them.

Ms Manners told the BBC the pair were “terrified” as they tried to make part of the descent alone, before being met by rescuers.

Ms Manners is an alpinist, a mountain climber who specialises in difficult climbs, and now lives in Chamonix, France.

After a loose rock cut the rope being used to haul the pair’s bags, Ms Manners said she felt “despair”.

“I watched the bag tumble down the mountain and I immediately knew the consequence of what was to come,” she said.

“We had none of our safety equipment left. No tent. No stove to melt snow for water. No warm clothes for the evening. Our ice axes and crampons for retreat back to basecamp.

“No head torch for moving at night.”

The pair were able to send a text message to emergency services, prompting a search and rescue.

The women took cover on a ledge as it started snowing, sharing the only sleeping bag they had.

“I felt hypothermic, constantly shaking and with the lack of food my body was running out of energy to keep warm,” Ms Manners said.

The next morning a helicopter came to find the pair, but could not locate them – meaning they faced another 24 hours on the mountain.

“They did try to rescue us but the conditions were brutal for the company to operate in. Bad weather, fog, high altitude and they couldn’t find us as the face was so vast,” she explained.

After managing to abseil down the mountain face to some melting ice, the two women managed to catch some water in their bottles.

Ms Manners said they “barely survived” the storm that afternoon and the second night in the cold with no food and only a little water.

“The helicopter flew past again, couldn’t see us. We were destroyed,” she said.

“We knew we had to try to go down ourselves as the helicopter wasn’t going to help us.”

On that second morning they began to cautiously abseil down the rock spur, aware their weak condition could lead to mistakes.

At that point they spotted a team of French climbers coming towards them – rescuers who had heard about their situation from mutual friends.

They shared their equipment, food and sleeping bags with the women and contacted the helicopter with an exact location for rescue.

Ms Manners said: “I cried with relief knowing we might survive.

“They supported us to get across the steep glacier that would have been impossible without our equipment crampons and ice axes.

“We would have either frozen to death or attempted to cross the steep glaciers without the right equipment and slipped to our peril.

“Or maybe, maybe the helicopter would finally have found us?”

In 2022 Ms Manners was the first woman to make the ascent of the Phantom Direct route on the south face of the Grand Jorasses in Mont Blanc.

She has also successfully climbed peaks in Pakistan and Greenland in the past year.

Ms Manners has described her ambition to inspire women to pursue an interest in alpinism and pursue mountaineering as a hobby.

She said the incident that cut the rope “was unfortunate and very rare”.

“We did very well to survive and retreat in the way that we did,” Ms Manners added.

She said she felt “exhausted, mentally destroyed and over tired to the point I can’t sleep”.

Now the pair said they planned to eat local Indian food before they could get a flight home to their loved ones.

A Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office spokesperson said: “We have been supporting the family of a British woman reported missing in India who has since been safely rescued.”

The Royal New Zealand Navy has lost its first ship to the sea since World War Two, after one of its vessels ran aground off the coast of Samoa.

HMNZS Manawanui, a specialist diving and ocean imaging ship, came into trouble about one nautical mile from the island of Upolu on Saturday night local time, while conducting a survey of a reef.

It later caught fire before capsizing.

All 75 people on board were evacuated onto lifeboats and rescued early on Sunday, New Zealand’s Defence Force said in a statement.

Officials said the cause of the grounding was unknown and will be investigated.

The incident occurred during a bout of rough and windy weather.

Military officials said rescuers “battled” currents and winds that pushed life rafts and sea boats towards the reefs, and swells made rescue efforts “challenging”.

Officials said the area had not been surveyed since 1987.

The vessel’s crew and passengers – including seven scientists and four foreign military personnel – are being accommodated in Samoa before being flown back to New Zealand.

As of 06:40 local time on Sunday (18:40 BST on Saturday), the ship was seen listing heavily with smoke billowing from it.

By 09:00 (21:00 BST on Saturday), it was below the surface.

Defence minister Judith Collins described the incident as “a really sad day for the Navy” during a news conference.

She added: “But everyone came through, and that, I have to say, is down to the professionalism [of the crew], the training and their own courage.”

Dave Poole, who witnessed the ship ablaze, told the Reuters news agency: “As we came into the bay we saw the ship and no smoke. Within 15 minutes fire and smoke were visible. It sank shortly after.”

HMNZS Manawanui is the first of New Zealand’s naval vessels to be unintentionally sunk since the nation participated in naval battles during World War Two.

Several other ships have been intentionally sunk in the intervening period for various reasons, including to serve as a diving wreck or an artificial reef.

Military officials said their efforts are now turning towards attempting to salvage the vessel and minimising the environmental impacts of the sinking.

Dame Judi Dench has spoken about her grief after the death of her close friend, fellow Dame Maggie Smith, who passed away last week.

The star was asked about Dame Maggie on stage during the Cheltenham Literature Festival by fellow actor Brendan O’Hea.

O’Hea also mentioned the death of Dame Judi’s husband, the actor Michael Williams, and then asked her what she had meant when she had once compared grief to petrol.

“I suppose because the energy that’s created by grief…,” she replied, before cutting her answer short, apparently lost for words.

Smith, best known for the Harry Potter films and Downton Abbey, was hailed as “a true legend” of stage and screen following her death at the age of 89.

Tributes were paid by King Charles III and the prime minister, as well as numerous co-stars from her long career.

The two veteran stars were the same age and had known each other for decades.

They had performed together on numerous occasions, including in the 2004 drama Ladies in Lavender.

Both starred in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in 2015, a comedy-drama that was a sequel to the 2011 hit film.

They also appeared in 2018 documentary Nothing Like a Dame, in which they playfully reminisced about their lives and careers.

• Maggie Smith obituary: A formidable star on stage and screen
• Shakespeare to Harry Potter: Six of her greatest roles
• Dame Maggie was ‘never shy on stage, always shy off it’

The interview on Saturday covered a wide range of topics, including Dame Judi’s life as an actress.

Towards the end of the session, O’Hea hesitated before saying: “I know I probably shouldn’t bring this up, I know the last week has been tricky for you because you lost your great friends Maggie Smith and Barbara Leigh-Hunt.”

Leigh-Hunt, an Olivier Award-winning actress, died last month at the age of 88. She and Dame Judi had appeared alongside each other in the 1992 BBC sitcom As Time Goes By.

O’Hea then brought up a previous explanation that Dame Judi had given, of how she copes with loved ones dying.

In a past interview with The Times, when discussing the aftermath of her husband’s death, she said: “Sometimes you have to do a play and it is really painful. That said, I’ve also found it unbelievably cathartic.

“You fortify yourself and use what you are going through as energy. Like petrol. It has helped me cope with the pain.”

O’Hea questioned her on that, asking: “You say that grief can act as petrol, what do you mean by that?”

Dench didn’t directly comment on either Smith or Leigh-Hunt, or her husband who died in 2001. But after mentioning her grief, she trailed off.

“It’s tricky. It’s tricky,” O’Hea jumped in.

Dench went on to talk about the trees she plants at her home in Surrey, in memory of her loved ones who have died.

She also laughed about how some of the trees grow to resemble the person they’re in honour of, while one of them, dedicated to the late actor Bob Peck, “won’t grow”.

Dame Maggie was known for her sharp tongue on screen and off during a varied and acclaimed career that spanned eight decades.

In the Harry Potter films, she played the acerbic Professor Minerva McGonagall, famous for her pointed witch’s hat and stern manner with the young wizards at Hogwarts.

Paying tribute, Daniel Radcliffe – who played the boy wizard – said: “She was a fierce intellect, had a gloriously sharp tongue, could intimidate and charm in the same instant and was, as everyone will tell you, extremely funny.”

In hit ITV drama Downton Abbey, Smith played Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, the grand matriarch who excelled at withering one-liners through the show’s six series.

Elsewhere in her career, she won two Oscars – for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1970 and California Suite in 1979.

She had four other nominations, and received seven Bafta awards.

King Charles described her as “a national treasure”, while Sir Keir Starmer said she was “beloved by so many for her great talent”.

Maldivian President Mohammed Muizzu has told the BBC that he is confident that India will come to the aid of the island nation as it faces an economic crisis.

Muizzu, who begins a five-day visit to India on Sunday, is expected to seek a bailout worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Maldives is staring at a debt default as its foreign exchange reserves have dropped to $440m (£334m), just enough for one-and-a-half months of imports.

“India is fully cognizant of our fiscal situation, and as one of our biggest development partners, will always be ready to ease our burden, find better alternatives and solutions to the challenges we face,” Muizzu told the BBC in an email interview ahead of his visit.

Experts point out that Muizzu’s reconciliatory tone towards Delhi is a far cry from the rhetoric he adopted during his election campaign a year ago. That campaign had centred on an “India out” policy, demanding that Delhi must withdraw its troops from the island nation.

Speaking to the BBC, Muizzu did not directly address his anti-India campaign but said: “We are confident that any differences can be addressed through open dialogue and mutual understanding.”

• The Maldives’ new president wants India out
• Maldives president visits India amid trouble in tourist paradise

An Indian relief package will bolster the country’s foreign currency reserves.

Last month, global agency Moody’s downgraded the Maldives’ credit rating, saying that “default risks have risen materially”.

But Muizzu told the BBC that Male is not facing a sovereign debt default, adding that the country would not join an International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme to handle the crisis.

“We have our own home-grown agenda,” he said.

However, Moody has said that “(foreign) reserves remain significantly below the government’s external debt service of around $600m in 2025 and over $1bn in 2026”.

It’s not clear where Muizzu will find the money to overcome the reserves crisis and that’s where his Delhi visit is seen as crucial. India has already offered financial support worth $1.4bn to Male for various infrastructure and development projects.

Since Muizzu came to power in November 2023, relations between Male and Delhi have become strained.

Soon after taking over, he chose to travel to Turkey and China – his visit to the latter in January was seen especially as a high-profile snub to India as previous Maldivian leaders first visited Delhi after being elected. Around the same time, a controversy erupted in India after three Maldivian officials made derogatory comments about Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Muizzu also gave an ultimatum to India to withdraw about 80 troops based in the country. Delhi said they were stationed there to maintain and operate two rescue and reconnaissance helicopters and a Dornier aircraft it had donated years ago.

In the end, both countries reached a compromise by agreeing to replace soldiers with Indian civilian technical staff to operate the aircraft.

• Indian troops to exit the Maldives as China gains foothold
• Chinese ship’s port call in Maldives fans India tensions

Muizzu’s administration also announced that it would not renew a hydrographic survey agreement with India that was signed by the previous government to map the seabed in Maldivian territorial waters.

But the Maldivian president defended his decision.

“The decisions taken are based on our evolving domestic interests and strategic priorities. The will of the people, that elected me 10 months ago,” Muizzu said.

“I believe both the Maldives and India have a better understanding of each others’ priorities and concerns,” he added.

Some of Muizzu’s decisions were seen as a way to reduce Delhi’s influence and forge closer ties with India’s rival China.

In February, Muizzu’s administration allowed the port call of a Chinese research ship, Xiang Yang Hong 3, in the Maldives, much to Delhi’s displeasure. Some saw it as a mission to collect data which could – at a later date – be used by the Chinese military for submarine operations.

But Muizzu rejects the pro-China tag.

“I have made clear our foreign policy the day I took office – that it is a ‘Maldives First’ policy. Our relationships with other nations are guided by the principles of mutual respect and trust, non-interference and the pursuit of peace and prosperity,” he insists.

“We believe that through open communication and collaboration, we can address any concerns, contributing to a peaceful and prosperous Indian Ocean region,” he says.

Despite Muizzu’s attempts to move Male closer to Beijing, analysts say financial assistance from China hasn’t been forthcoming,

As a result, the president’s extraordinary turnaround towards India now is based on harsh realities.

Muizzu’s Delhi visit “is a realisation of how dependent the Maldives is on India, a dependency that no other country will find easy to fill”, says Azim Zahir, a Maldivian analyst.

Ildar Dadin, a well-known Russian opposition activist who was fighting in Ukraine on the side of Kyiv, has been killed in action, according to the group that recruited him.

A spokeswoman for that group, the Civic Council, told the BBC that Dadin had died, adding that “he was, and he remains a hero”.

The activist-turned-fighter was killed when soldiers from his volunteer battalion, the Freedom of Russia Legion, came under Russian artillery fire in the Kharkiv region of north-eastern Ukraine.

For now, there are no more details and the Legion itself won’t comment whilst it says a military operation is still active.

But Ilia Ponamarev, an exiled Russian opposition politician with previous links to the Legion, has told the BBC he is “certain, alas” that Dadin is dead.

Another source clarified that this was “confirmed by those who were with him in battle”.

The latest messages I’ve sent to his phone are still marked “unread”.

Ildar Dadin became known in Russia a decade ago for his persistence in staging peaceful protests as political repression there intensified.

He was the first person prosecuted under a new Article 212.1 – quickly dubbed Dadin’s Law – that in 2014 made it a criminal offence to commit repeat violations of Russia’s increasingly restrictive rules on protest.

In his case, that simply meant standing on the streets of Moscow with a banner.

Sentenced to two and a half years, Dadin was placed in a punishment cell and immediately went on hunger strike. His prison guards then tortured him to get him to stop.

Soon after his release in 2017, I met him in Moscow and he described being hung from a wall by his cuffed wrists. The guards had then threatened him with rape. He admitted that the brutality nearly broke him.

So when I learned that Dadin had joined a battalion of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine, I got back in touch and earlier this year and we had a series of long exchanges.

“I can’t sit by and do nothing and so become an accomplice to Russian evil, to its crimes,” Dadin explained his decision to sign-up, just as principled and intense as I remembered him.

He’d always considered himself a pacifist but now listed his reasons for taking-up arms: “The aggression, the mass killing, the torture, rape and looting.” Still, he chose the callsign Gandhi.

Dadin felt deeply that that he bore personal responsibility for Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour.

He argued that he and fellow Russians had failed to stop Vladimir Putin, allowing themselves to be scared off the streets by police violence and the threat of prison.

“The main thing now is to act according to my conscience,” Dadin wrote to me one night from near the frontline in Sumy.

He initially signed-up with the Siberian Battalion in June 2023 before moving to the Freedom of Russia Legion last winter – both officially part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Recruits are mainly Russian citizens who hope that helping Ukraine defeat Vladimir Putin will be a first step towards ending his rule in the Kremlin.

Their numbers aren’t clear, nor their effectiveness as a fighting force.

They have claimed some successes, including a cross-border incursion into Russia earlier this year at the time of Putin’s re-election.

But for Dadin, the experience wasn’t quite as he’d hoped.

He felt that some of the missions his unit were sent on were “pointless” in any military sense.

He described one battle where he ended up pinned down for eight hours by Russian fire in a bomb crater, with a drone trying to drop a grenade on him, whilst a fellow volunteer soldier bled to death.

And like many Ukrainian soldiers, he was exhausted, fighting with barely any days off and limping from a wound to his hip.

I wondered whether he might leave, but Dadin was clear his conscience would not allow him to sit “on the sidelines”.

Not whilst Ukrainians were being killed, as he put it, “by Russian criminals”.

“I tried to stop Russia – but did I do it? No,” he berated himself in one of our last chats. “And thousands of people have been killed because I did not do enough.”

Those who sent him to fight, disagree. “Ildar was strong, brave, principled and honest,” the Civic Council wrote. “That’s how we should remember him.”

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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A state of emergency has been declared in parts of Florida as a hurricane barrels towards the already-ravaged Gulf Coast.

The National Hurricane Centre confirmed that Milton – currently off the coast of Mexico – had intensified into a Category 1 hurricane on Sunday and could pose “life-threatening hazards” for parts of Florida’s west coast.

It comes just 10 days after Storm Helene – the deadliest mainland storm since Katrina in 2005 – tore through the south-east, killing at least 225 people, with hundreds still missing.

In Florida, where Helene left at least 14 dead, Governor Ron DeSantis issued the emergency warning for 35 counties and said preparations were under way to restore power and clear roads ahead of Milton’s arrival.

On Sunday, Milton had maximum sustained winds of 80mph (130km/h).

“There is increasing confidence that a powerful hurricane with life-threatening hazards will be affecting portions of the Florida west coast around the middle of this week,” the Hurricane Centre said.

Heavy rain was expected in the region from Sunday into Monday, with more rain and strong winds on Tuesday and Wednesday night.

Rainfall could be between 5-8in (127-203mm) across the Florida Peninsula and the Keys, with some areas receiving up to 12in (304mm), which could bring a risk of flash flooding and minor-to-moderate river flooding for parts of the west coast, the centre said.

The new hurricane comes as the clean-up efforts from Helene could take years, according to the US government.

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

Hundreds of roads remain closed, hampering efforts to send aid to hard-hit communities.

Helene, which made landfall as a category-four hurricane, damaged structures, caused flash flooding and knocked out power to millions of homes.

Reports of antisemitic incidents in the US have reached a record high since last year’s Hamas attack in Israel, according to a preliminary report from the Anti-Defamation League Center for Extremism (ADL).

The group found more than 10,000 incidents from 7 October 2023 to 24 September of this year, more than a 200% increase compared to the same period a year earlier.

It is the highest ever since the ADL began tracking such incidents in 1979.

The report comes just days after the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint statement warning of possible violent threats amid the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East.

Since last October’s Hamas attack on Israel which saw around 1,200 people killed “Jewish Americans haven’t had a single moment of respite,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.

“Instead, we’ve faced a shocking number of antisemitic threats and experienced calls for more violence against Israelis and Jews everywhere.”

The more than 10,000 episodes of antisemitism reported by the ADL included roughly 8,015 incidents of verbal or written harassment, 1,840 incidents of vandalism and 150 incidents of physical assault.

The states with the highest number of recorded cases in the report were California, with 1,266 incidents, New York with 1,218, New Jersey with 830, and Florida with 463.

The ADL said that it expected its preliminary numbers to increase as it receives more data. The final report for 2024 will be published in the spring of 2025.

Part of the overall increase comes from a change in methodology to include “expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists that could be perceived as supporting terrorism”, the ADL said.

The ADL’s preliminary report tallied more than 3,000 of incidents that took place during anti-Israel rallies “which featured regular explicit expressions of support for terrorist groups”, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

Excluding these incidents, the ADL counted 7,523 episodes of antisemitism, a 103% increase from 2022.

Following the 7 October attack, Israel launched a massive military operation in the Gaza Strip with the stated aim of eliminating Hamas.

Since then, 41,870 Palestinians have been killed and more than 97,000 injured in Gaza, most of them women and children, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

The war inspired a wave of demonstrations across the US, particularly at college campuses, with many protesting against the growing humanitarian toll.

In Lebanon, more than 1,000 people have been killed while up to a million people may have been displaced since Israel launched its attack against Iran-backed Hezbollah.

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• Anti-Muslim cases surge in UK since Hamas attacks, charity finds

The continued violence in the region has led to a surge in anti-Muslim and Islamophobic incidents as well across the US.

Anti-Muslim incidents reached 8,061 in 2023, according to a report from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released in April. The report marked the highest level since CAIR began tallying nearly 30 years ago, with nearly half coming after the 7 October attack.