Ratan Tata, who has died aged 86, was one of India’s most internationally recognised business leaders.

The tycoon led the Tata Group – known as a “salt-to-software” conglomerate of more than 100 companies, employing some 660,000 people – for more than two decades. Its annual revenues are in excess of $100bn (£76.5bn).

Founded by Jamsetji Tata, a pioneer of Indian business, the 155-year-old Tata Group straddles a business empire ranging from Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Steel to aviation and salt pans.

The ethos of the company “yokes capitalism to philanthropy, by doing business in ways that make the lives of others better”, according to Peter Casey, author of The Story of Tata, an authorised book on the group.

Tata Sons, the holding company of the group, has a “number of companies that includes privately held and publicly traded companies, yet they are in essence all owned by a philanthropic trust”, he explains.

Ratan Tata was born in 1937 in a traditional family of Parsis – a highly educated and prosperous community that traces its ancestry to Zoroastrian refugees in India. His parents separated in the 1940s.

Tata went to college in the US, where he got a degree in architecture at Cornell University. During his seven-year-long stay, he learned to drive cars and fly. He had some harrowing experiences: he once lost an engine while flying a helicopter in college and twice lost the single engine in his plane. “So I had to glide in,” he told an interviewer. Later, he would often fly his company’s business jet.

He returned to India in 1962 when his grandmother Lady Navajbai fell ill and called for him. It was then that JRD Tata – a relative from a different branch of the family – asked him to join the Tata Group. “He [JRD Tata] was my greatest mentor… he was like a father and a brother to me – and not enough has been said about that,” Tata told an interviewer.

Ratan Tata was sent to a company steel plant in Jamshedpur in eastern India where he spent a couple of years on the factory floor before becoming the technical assistant to the manager. In the early 70s, he took over two ailing group firms, one making radios and TVs and the other textiles. He managed to turn around the first, and had mixed results with the textile company.

In 1991, JRD Tata, who had led the group for over half a century, appointed Ratan Tata as his successor over senior company aspirants for that position. “If you were to find the publications of that time, the criticism was personal – JRD got clubbed with nepotism and I was branded as the wrong choice,” Ratan Tata later said.

Peter Casey writes that under Ratan Tata’s leadership, a “great but rather stodgy Indian manufacturer began emerging as a global brand with great emphasis on consumer goods”.

But the journey was a mixed one.

During his tenure the group made many bold acquisitions, among them the takeover of Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus and UK-based car brands Jaguar and Land Rover. Some of those decisions paid off, while others – including a failed telecom venture – have cost the company a lot of money.

A high point came in 2000, when Tata bought Tetley and became the world’s second-largest tea company. The deal was the largest takeover of an international brand by an Indian company.

A few years later, a visiting journalist from a UK-based newspaper asked Tata whether he liked the irony of an Indian company buying a leading British brand. “Tata is too shrewd and too shy to be caught gloating about his successes like some territory-grabbing East India Company nabob,” the journalist later wrote.

Tata’s foray into building a safe, affordable car turned out to be a disappointment. It was launched amid great fanfare in 2009 as a compact with the base model costing just 100,000 rupees ($1,222; £982). But after the initial success and euphoria, the brand began to lose out to other manufacturers due to issues with production and marketing.

Tata later said it was a “huge mistake to brand Nano as the world’s cheapest car. People don’t want to be seen driving the world’s cheapest car!”

His resilience was also tested during the Mumbai terror attacks of 26 November, 2008. Tata’s marquee Taj Mahal Palace was one of the two luxury hotels that was attacked, along with a train station, a hospital, a Jewish cultural centre, and some other targets in Mumbai.

Thirty-three of the 166 people who died in the 60-hour siege were at the Taj. This included 11 hotel employees, a third of the hotel’s total casualties. Tata pledged to look after the families of employees who were killed or injured, and paid the relatives of those killed the salaries they would have earned for the rest of their lives. He also spent more than $1bn to restore the damaged hotel within 21 months.

Towards the end of his career, Tata found himself embroiled in an unsavoury controversy. In October 2016 he returned to Tata Sons as interim chairman for a few months after the previous incumbent, Cyrus Mistry, was ousted, sparking a bitter management feud (Mistry died in a car crash in September 2022). The role was eventually given to Natarajan Chandrasekaran, who was formerly the chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, India’s most valuable company with a market capitalisation of $67bn.

Peter Casey described Tata as a “modest, reserved and even shy man”. He found a “stately calm” about him and a “fierce discipline”, which included preparing a handwritten to-do list every day. He also described himself as a “bit of an optimist”.

Tata was also a modest and reflective businessman. After the police were called in to end a strike that crippled operations at one of his firm’s factories in Pune in 1989, Tata told journalists: “Perhaps we took our workers for granted. We assumed that we were doing all that we could do for them, when probably we were not.”

In 2009, Tata spoke at a school alumni function about his dream for his country, “where every Indian has an equal opportunity to shine on merit”.

“In a country like ours,” he said, “you have to try and lead by example, not flaunt your wealth and prominence.”

There are few stars whose impact on Bollywood is as enduring as that of Rekha. As the actor turns 70 on Thursday, film writer Yasser Usman explores her charm and legacy.

Rekha is one of India’s most glamorous icons – a woman who captured headlines and people’s imaginations for decades while blazing a path for generations of female actors in India.

In the 1970s, she was widely covered for her transformation from a loud, gauche young girl from southern India who entered Bollywood with no knowledge of the Hindi language to a discerning National Award-winning actor who spoke impeccable Urdu and Hindi and brimmed with confidence.

But the unrelenting attention on her personal life took a toll as she withdrew from public life in the years since, choosing to fiercely protect her privacy.

Yet, time and again over the past few decades, Rekha has proved that the air of enigma surrounding her has only left audiences wanting more.

With almost every public appearance, she still captures hearts and creates viral moments on the internet.

Born in Chennai (then Madras) in 1954 as Bhanurekha, she was deeply affected by her mother’s – actress Pushpavalli – struggles and hurt by the absence of her father, Tamil film star Gemini Ganesan.

She was still a teenager when she started acting, mainly because her family faced financial difficulties. In Bombay (now Mumbai), the home of Hindi cinema, she had to grapple with an unfamiliar language and a male-dominated industry.

“Bombay was like a jungle, and I had walked in unarmed. It was one of the most frightening phases of my life… Guys did try and take advantage of my vulnerability,” she once said.

As her early work garnered attention, she faced relentless body-shaming, with viewers, journalists and even other actors ridiculing her weight and skin colour.

In her later interviews, she also spoke about how, as a teenager, she was forced to do some scenes she wasn’t comfortable.

Just as everything seemed to stack up against her, the young actor flipped the script.

With candid interviews and statements unheard of in 1970s India, Rekha became a headliner act for gossip magazines. The young starlet’s unapologetic frankness about her sexuality was nothing short of revolutionary.

Rekha was unflinchingly open about her relationships with her co-actors. But due to a lack of reciprocation in public by the men in question, she was often humiliated, with the press using unsavoury headlines to describe her.

In part challenged by the narrative around her, Rekha underwent a dramatic makeover in the mid-70s when she started fitness trends and learnt to pick the right make-up that worked for her.

An early pioneer of fitness trends, she brought liquid diets into popular conversations, became an ambassador for aerobics and embraced yoga long before it became a celebrity craze.

Once derided for her unconventional appearance, Rekha managed to redefine beauty and fitness standards and create a more democratic industry for actors of all skin tones.

But it was the re-invention of her craft that truly made her an ambassador of transformations.

Along with her appearance, she also honed her acting with meticulous attention to diction and technique.

Her performances were marked by a rare emotional depth in critically acclaimed films like Ghar (1978), where she delicately portrayed the trauma of a rape survivor. She effortlessly transitioned to comedy in Khoobsurat (1980) and her alluring performance in Silsila (1981) cemented her iconic mainstream appeal.

That same year, her career-defining role in Umrao Jaan elevated her to the ranks of India’s most celebrated actresses and earned her a national award.

Her foray into arthouse cinema showcased her immense versatility, with exquisite performances in Kalyug (1981), Utsav (1984) and Ijaazat (1987). Her versatility was on full display in the action-packed intensity of the blockbuster Khoon Bhari Maang (1988).

Her ability to seamlessly transition between genres and characters was the hallmark of her career.

Rekha heralded a new era in the Hindi film industry where she owned her narrative, built an aura around herself, and was rightfully crowned a diva.

In 1990, she married businessman Mukesh Aggarwal but the couple soon grew apart. The same year, when she was in the US for a programme, her estranged husband of just a few months tragically took his own life.

She returned home to lurid media headlines such as “The Macabre Truth Behind Mukesh’s Suicide” and “The Black Widow”.

Posters of her film Sheshnaag (1990) were vandalised, and she was shunned for a while by the film industry.

Being cast out overnight set off her final transformative phase.

For about a year, she put all her energy into the action-packed revenge-drama Phool Baney Angaare (1991), which did well at the box office.

But despite the audience’s love and her successful comeback, Rekha, once known for her fierce and candid persona, now presented a significantly toned-down, melancholic, and philosophical approach.

In an interview to BBC, she once said “[The media] would write whatever they want adding their own spicy takes… I was very angry and hurt. And whenever I am very hurt I tend to shut up. So that’s exactly what I did – I stopped talking.”

This was perhaps her final makeover, a metamorphosis which firmly established her as the enigmatic diva we know today.

Since then, not much is known of her personal life and her film appearances have grown sparser.

Yet, when she leans into her diva image, like in the sensuous song Kaisi Paheli Zindagani from Parineeta (2005), or when she takes to the stage to dance to one of her old hits, her fans are still glad to celebrate.

A Nepalese teenager has broken the world record for the youngest mountaineer to summit Earth’s 14 highest peaks.

Nima Rinji Sherpa, 18, stood atop Tibet’s Mount Shishapangma at about 06:05 local time on Wednesday.

In doing so, he became the latest of just a few dozen people to have scaled all of the world’s “eight-thousanders” – the 14 mountains that the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation (UIAA) recognises as more than 8,000 metres above sea level.

Sherpa, who started climbing high-altitude mountains at the age of 16, summited all eight-thousanders in 740 days.

He reached the peak of Nepal’s Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest mountain, on 30 September, 2022 – shortly after finishing his 10th-grade high school exams.

On each trek the young athlete was accompanied by his climbing partner, Pasang Nurbu Sherpa.

The record-shattering ascent on Wednesday marked the latest in a long list of accolades for Nima Rinji, who is also the world’s youngest climber to have scaled Himalayan mountains G1 and G2; the youngest climber to have scaled Kashmir’s Nanga Parbat; and the youngest climber to have scaled both Mount Everest and nearby Lhotse within 10 hours.

Standing atop Mount Shishapangma on Wednesday morning, though, another life ambition was front of mind for the 18-year-old: to subvert the stereotype of Sherpas as mere helpers who assist foreign climbers on their ascents.

“This summit is not just the culmination of my personal journey, but a tribute to every Sherpa who has ever dared to dream beyond the traditional boundaries set for us,” Nima Rinji said shortly after scaling Mount Shishapangma.

“Mountaineering is more than labour, it is a testament to our strength, resilience and passion.”

Although the word ‘Sherpa’ is commonly used to describe someone who is a mountain guide or porter working in the Everest area, it is in fact the name of an ethnic group of people who live in the mountains of Nepal.

Nima Rinji said he wants to prove to younger generation of Sherpas that they can “rise above the stereotype of being only support climbers and embrace their potential as top-tier athletes, adventurers, and creators”.

“We are not just guides; we are trailblazers,” he said on Wednesday. “Let this be a call to every Sherpa to see the dignity in our work, the power in our heritage, and the limitless possibilities in our future.”

Nima Rinji comes from a family of record-holding mountaineers, who now run Seven Summit Treks: Nepal’s largest mountaineering expedition company, and the group with whom he completed the Mount Shishapangma climb.

Speaking to the BBC shortly after the record had been set, his father, Tashi Lakpa Sherpa, recounted the moment he delivered the news via satellite phone.

“He told me, ‘Dad, I reached the summit at 6:05 Chinese time. ‘My colleague Pasang Norbu and I have arrived’,” Tashi Lakpa recalled.

“Being highly trained and professional, he wasn’t even thrilled; it was normal. I said ‘I had faith in you. Return safely’.”

Rakesh Gurung, Director of Adventure Tourism and Mountaineering Branch under Nepal’s Department of Tourism, confirmed to the BBC that Nima Rinji had set the record.

“The peak has been confirmed this morning. Now I understand that there is a matter of giving a certificate after returning to the base camp,” he said.

The previous record holder for the youngest mountaineer to scale all eight-thousanders was also a Nepali climber, Mingma Gyabu ‘David’ Sherpa, who achieved it at the age of 30 in 2019.

“This record is difficult to break now,” Gurung noted.

All 14 eight-thousanders are located in Asia, in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges.

US President Joe Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have held a much-anticipated 30-minute phone call – believed to be their first contact since August – which included discussions on Israel’s intended retaliation to Iran’s missile strike last week.

The White House described the dialogue as “direct” and “productive”, and said Biden and Netanyahu had agreed to stay in “close contact” in coming days. Vice President Kamala Harris also joined the call.

Speaking shortly afterwards, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said its attack against Iran would be “deadly, precise and above all surprising”.

Two forces are at work. One is Joe Biden’s reluctance to see the US dragged into a war with Iran that it believes would be unnecessary and dangerous.

The other is a strong sense among some in Israel that they have an opportunity to deal a body blow to Iran – their mortal enemy.

Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah has energised Israelis who were desperate to break out of the grinding war of attrition on their border with Lebanon.

Lebanon, for them, felt like success and progress, a stark contrast to the position in Gaza.

Despite Israel’s onslaught on Gaza that has killed at least 42,000 people, most of them civilians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not been able to deliver his two war aims – the destruction of Hamas and the recovery of the hostages.

Hamas is still fighting, and still holds around 100 hostages, many of whom might be dead.

The damage done to Israel’s enemies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, has produced in some Israelis an urgent conviction to go further and mount a direct assault on Iran.

For them, a devastating air attack on Iran is a seductive prospect.

Top of the target list for many Israelis are the heavily fortified sites, some driven deep into mountains where Iran houses nuclear facilities that Israel and others fear could be used to make a bomb.

President Biden has made clear the US opposes the idea.

The US believes Iran is not about to make a nuclear weapon. An attack could push them to construct one.

One of the most prominent voices in Israel pressing Netanyahu to ignore US wishes is former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett who says Israel must not hesitate to act against what he calls the Iranian octopus.

He told me that it was “the 11th hour”.

Like the opposition politician and former general Benny Gantz, Bennett believes Iran is weaker than it has been for decades because of the damage done to Hezbollah and Hamas.

“Essentially Iran was defending itself with two arms, Hezbollah and Hamas. They were sort of its insurance policy against a strike,” Bennett says.

“But now both of those arms are pretty much neutralised.”

Bennett sees the moment as a once in a generation opportunity to do real damage to Iran’s Islamic Regime.

He adds: “Here’s the thing. The strategy with Iran – ultimately it’s not going to happen tomorrow.

“We need to accelerate the demise of this regime. This is a regime that will fall.

“If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, the likelihood that they’ll use it in order to save the regime is high. And that means that they’re going to turn the whole Middle East into a nuclear nightmare.”

• Middle East conflict: How will it end?

Bennett recalled two Israeli attacks on nuclear facilities he believes made the Middle East much safer – in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

“People don’t like it,” Bennett says. “But we saved the world from [Bashar al-] Assad with nuclear weapons.

“We have the thankless job of taking out the nuclear facilities of the worst regimes in the world. Everyone likes to criticise us, but we’re doing that job.

“And if they get that bomb, it’s everyone’s problem. It’s not our problem. I want to see how Londoners will feel when there’s an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb. We cannot allow that to happen.”

Iran and Israel have been in direct conflict since April, after Israel assassinated leading Iranian generals with a big airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Syria.

Iran’s retaliation was a missile strike on Israel. The escalation has continued.

The latest came on Tuesday last week in response to Israel’s assault on Iran’s ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Iran unleashed a huge ballistic missile attack, and Israel’s prime minister vowed to hit back.

President Biden was reluctant to restrain Israel in Gaza. And has “urged” Israel to minimise harm to civilians in Lebanon. But he has been adamant that Israel must not answer the Iranians with a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The US believes Iran is not about to make a nuclear weapon.

President Biden has said Israel must defend itself – but not by attacking Iranian nuclear sites – or its oil industry.

The US fears getting dragged into a war it doesn’t want. And there are concerns that if Iran can ride out an attack it will go for broke to produce a nuclear warhead for its missiles.

The next phases in this spiralling war depend on the extent of Israel’s retaliation – which may come any day now.

Eight-year-old Grace Welch has been waiting since 2019 for her older sister to occupy the bed next to hers.

Her parents had told her that, Penelope, a 10-year-old born in China, would be joining the family, who live in Kentucky in the US.

Grace, also adopted from China, was born without her left forearm. Her mother, Aimee Welch, said Penelope too has a “serious but manageable” special need, although she did not wish to disclose it.

The Welch family, who have four biological sons, sought to adopt children with disabilities after the birth of a nephew without arms.

“He taught us all what a person with limb differences can achieve with the right love and support. His birth started us on the path towards adopting Grace,” Ms Welch said. “We believe in the dignity and worth of each person, just as they are, in all their diversity.”

But the pandemic delayed their plans.

Then in September, China announced that it was putting a stop to international adoptions, including cases where families were already matched with adoptee children.

The painful wait will particularly determine the fates of China’s most vulnerable children – those with special needs.

Up-to-date statistics are not readily available, but Beijing’s civil affairs ministry said that 95% of international adoptions between 2014 and 2018 involved children with disabilities.

These children “will have no future” without international adoption as they are unlikely to be adopted domestically, says Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Ms Welch said Grace was especially saddened by the news that Penelope may never come home: “She told me, ‘We were meant to be a family of eight so that everyone could have a buddy.’”

Ms Welch called on China to “keep the promises made to the children already matched with adoptive parents”.

Beijing has not commented since the September announcement, when it thanked families for their “love in adopting children from China”. It said the ban was in line with international agreements and showed China’s “overall development and progress”.

China began allowing international adoptions in 1992 as the country was opening up, and they peaked in the mid 2000s. More than 160,000 children have been adopted by families across the world in the last three decades.

A contentious one-child policy had forced families to give up children, especially girls and kids with special needs. Social stigma around disability had also led to more children with special needs ending up in orphanages.

Dani Nelson, who was adopted to the US in 2017, said she was given basic care at an orphanage in the southwestern city of Guiyang, but it was “not enough for me to live a normal life”.

The 21-year-old was born with spina bifida – a spinal defect – and hydrocephalus, which is a neurological disorder that causes water to gather around her brain.

In her first three years in the US, she had seven surgeries which she said helped her “lead a normal life”.

“I joined a swim team. I got a job… Adoption saved my life,” said Ms Nelson, who now works as a cashier at a coffee shop.

Like in many Asian societies, disabled people in China face discrimination and are sometimes even seen as a source of “bad luck”.

China has made some strides in improving accessibility to the disabled, but public infrastructure, especially in rural areas, are still weaker than countries in the West. It has only recently started developing education institutions and curricula for students with special needs.

Only the most seriously disabled receive financial support from the government.

The BBC had previously interviewed Chinese adults with special needs whose parents have had to stop working to care for them.

Aware of these challenges, waiting families are concerned about what will happen to the children they were meant to adopt, some of whom need urgent medical treatment.

Meghan and David Briggs were matched with a boy in Zhengzhou, Henan, in 2020. The 10-year-old has a “moderate special need that requires medical intervention”, Mrs Briggs said.

The couple live with their biological son, also 10, in Pennsylvania. Mr Briggs said the family made a “wilful choice” to adopt a child who is more vulnerable and less likely to get the specialised care and therapy in an institution in China than with a family in the US.

“Such care is a financial and emotional responsibility. We were prepared to offer this care because we view this child as our family,” said Mr Briggs, who himself was adopted from South Korea.

“He was promised a family by his own government,” Ms Briggs said. “The children are the ones who will suffer with this decision,” she said.

Not everyone agrees.

Some, including adult adoptees, are relieved about that Beijing has ended foreign adoption.

“My experience as a transracial adoptee being raised in a predominantly white, Christian city is that you often get looked down upon. I was constantly reminded that I don’t belong,” said Lucy Sheen, who was adopted by a white family in the UK.

Ms Sheen, now in her 60s, added that her adoptive family had little knowledge of her Chinese culture and heritage. She was once told off for asking to learn Mandarin.

“Some adopters have a ‘white-saviour’ mentality or have the ideology that they are bringing us where they come from because ‘West is best’, I think that needs to change,” she added.

Nanchang Project, a non-profit group that helps connect adoptees to their roots in China, said it felt “a sense of relief that no more children will be separated from their birthplace, culture, and identity”.

“We hope this moment can shift focus toward the need for post-adoptive services to support Chinese adoptees and their families for the rest of their lives,” the group said in a statement last month.

Under the new policy, China will only send children overseas for adoption if the adoptive parents are blood relatives. The BBC understands that US authorities are in talks with Beijing on whether a further exception can be made for waiting families.

John and Anne Contant who were matched with five-year-old Corrine in 2019, said they “honour China’s decision to change course on their adoption policy”.

“If there have been more families wanting to adopt domestically, that’s wonderful… Our ask is for these 300 children who have been matched [to families in the US] to be allowed to come home,” he said.

The couple live in Chicago with six children. Three of them were adopted from China and live with albinism, as does Corinne.

The Contants spoke to Corinne via WeChat when their plans to travel to China were shelved because of the pandemic.

“Corinne met our children, saw her home and the room that had been prepared for her, and experienced the excitement our children felt in preparation for her arrival,” Mr Contant said.

“In one of our conversations, she pointedly asked, ‘When are you coming to get me?’”

After more than 100 years hidden in the icy waters of Antarctica, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been revealed in extraordinary 3D detail.

For the first time we can see the vessel, which sank in 1915 and lies 3,000m down at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, as if the murky water has been drained away.

The digital scan, which is made from 25,000 high resolution images, was captured when the ship was found in 2022.

It’s been released as part of a new documentary called Endurance, which will be shown at cinemas.

The team has scoured the scan for tiny details, each of which tell a story linking the past to the present.

In the picture below you can see the plates that the crew used for daily meals, left scattered across the deck.

In the next picture there’s a single boot that might have belonged to Frank Wild, Shackleton’s second-in-command.

Perhaps most extraordinary of all is a flare gun that’s referenced in the journals the crew kept.

The flare gun was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, as the ship that had been the crew’s home was lost to the ice.

“Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship,” explains Dr John Shears who led the expedition that found Endurance.

“And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck. And there we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there’s that flare gun, incredible.”

Sir Ernest Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer who led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out to make the first land crossing of Antarctica.

But the mission was doomed from the outset.

Endurance became stuck in pack ice within weeks of setting off from South Georgia.

The ship, with the crew on board, drifted for months before the order was eventually given to abandon ship. Endurance finally sank on 21 November 1915.

Shackleton and his men were forced to travel for hundreds of miles over ice, land and sea to reach safety – miraculously all 27 of the crew survived.

Their extraordinary story was recorded in their diaries, as well as in Frank Hurley’s photographs, which have had colour added for the Endurance documentary.

The ship itself remained lost until 2022.

Its discovery made headlines around the world – and the footage of Endurance revealed that it is beautifully preserved by the icy waters.

The new 3D scan was made using underwater robots that mapped the wreck from every angle, taking thousands of photographs. These were then “stitched” together to create a digital twin.

While footage filmed at this depth can only show parts of Endurance in the gloom, the scan shows the complete 44m long wooden wreck from bow to stern – even recording the grooves carved into the sediment as the ship skidded to a halt on the seafloor.

The model reveals how the ship was crushed by the ice – the masts toppled and parts of the deck in tatters – but the structure itself is largely intact.

Shackleton’s descendants say Endurance will never be raised – and its location in one of the most remote parts of the globe means visiting the wreck again would be extremely challenging.

But Nico Vincent from Deep Ocean Search, who developed the technology for the scans, along with Voyis Imaging and McGill University, said the digital replica offers a new way to study the ship.

“It’s absolutely fabulous. The wreck is almost intact like she sank yesterday,” said Mr Vincent, who was also a co-leader for the expedition.

He said the scan could be used by scientists to study the sea life that has colonised the wreck, to analyse the geology of the sea floor, and to discover new artefacts.

“So this is really a great opportunity that we can offer for the future.”

The scan belongs to the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust who also funded and organised the expedition to find Shackleton’s ship.

The Endurance documentary is premiering at the London Film Festival on 12 October and will be released in cinemas in the UK on 14 October.

Human activity is continuing to drive what conservation charity the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) calls a “catastrophic” loss of species.

From elephants in tropical forests to hawksbill turtles off the Great Barrier Reef, populations are plummeting, according to a stocktake of the world’s wildlife.

The Living Planet Report, a comprehensive overview of the state of the natural world, reveals global wildlife populations have shrunk by an average of 73% in the past 50 years.

The loss of wild spaces was “putting many ecosystems on the brink”, WWF UK head Tanya Steele said, and many habitats, from the Amazon to coral reefs, were “on the edge of very dangerous tipping points”.

The report is based on the Living Planet Index of more than 5,000 bird, mammal, amphibian, reptile and fish population counts over five decades.

Among many snapshots of human-induced wildlife loss, it reveals 60% of the world’s Amazon pink river dolphins have been wiped out by pollution and other threats, including mining and civil unrest.

It also captured hopeful signs of conservation success.

A sub-population of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains of East Africa increased by about 3% per year between 2010 and 2016, for example.

But the WWF said these “isolated successes are not enough, amid a backdrop of the widespread destruction of habitats”.

Tom Oliver, professor of ecology at the University of Reading, who is unconnected with the report, said when this information was combined with other datasets, insect declines for example, “we can piece together a robust – and worrying – picture of global biodiversity collapse”.

The report found habitat degradation and loss was the biggest threat to wildlife, followed by overexploitation, invasive species, disease, climate change and pollution.

Lead author and WWF chief scientific adviser Mike Barrett said through human action, “particularly the way that we produce and consume our food, we are increasingly losing natural habitat”.

The report also warns nature loss and climate change are fast pushing the world towards irreversible tipping points, including the potential “collapse” of the Amazon rainforest, whereby it can no longer lock away planet-warming carbon and mitigate the impacts of climate change.

“Please don’t just feel sad about the loss of nature,” Mr Barrett said.

“Be aware that this is now a fundamental threat to humanity and we’ve really got to do something now.”

Valentina Marconi, from the Zoological Society of London’s Institute of Zoology, told BBC News the natural world was in a “precarious position” but with urgent, collective action from world leaders “we still have the chance to reverse this”.

This alarm call for the planet’s wildlife comes as world leaders prepare to gather for the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, in Colombia, to discuss how to restore nature.

Almost 200 countries have committed to a landmark 2022 UN agreement to tackle nature loss, including setting aside 30% of the planet for nature by 2030.

The UK has signed up to the pledge, with the foreign secretary announcing the climate issue and decline in nature would be “central” to government policy.

Ms Steele said the report was an “incredible wake-up call”.

“Healthy ecosystems underpin our health, prosperity and wellbeing,” she told BBC News.

“We don’t think this sits on the shoulders of the average citizen – it’s the responsibility of business and of government.

“We need to look after our land and our most precious wild places for future generations.”

A New Zealand father who disappeared with his three children into the country’s wilderness three years ago has been publicly seen with them for the first time in years.

A national search has been under way for Tom Phillips since he took Ember, 8, Maverick, 9, and Jayda, 11, away from their family home in December 2021, after a dispute with their mother.

Police believe they have been hiding and camping in the North Island’s western Waikato region and and earlier this year posted an NZ$80,000 (£37,200) appeal for information.

The sighting last week came from a group of teenage pig hunters who had been trekking through the bush and filmed the encounter on their phones.

New Zealand media reported the teenagers had briefly spoken to one of their children – asking if anyone knew they were there. They had replied “only you” and kept walking, the father of one of the teenagers told New Zealand’s 1News.

The teenagers reported that Mr Phillips had been carrying a gun and had a long beard while the children were masked and carrying their own packs.

New Zealand Police have described the sighting as “credible”, and said it was “positive information” for relatives.

“We know it will be reassuring for the children’s wider family,” said Det Insp Andrew Saunders.

While there have been a number of reported sightings of Mr Phillips – this is the first time he is believed to have been seen with all three of his children.

The footage was shot on 3 October in a bush area of Marokopa, with police becoming aware of it at about 19:00 local time (06:00 GMT) that day. That prompted a three- day search involving police and army helicopters.

In the video, Tom Phillips can be seen leading his children through the rugged terrain. They are all wearing camouflage clothing.

Speaking to the New Zealand Herald newspaper on Thursday, the mother of the children, Cat, expressed her relief that they were still alive and that her children appeared well enough to be carrying their own bags.

She accused her ex-partner of using the children as “pawns in his game”.

“They shouldn’t have to be worrying about where they’re going to sleep that night or whether they’re going to be warm,” she told the paper.

She also said authorities should be doing more to track down her ex-partner, and appealed to those she believed were helping her ex-husband.

Police have said they believe Mr Phillips is being helped by other parties.

In June, authorities offered the cash reward for information which would lead to the safe return of the children – although the offer expired before being claimed.

Police said the children had not been in contact with other people in the past three years, and had not received an education.

“We believe that Tom and the children are being assisted and we’re urging anyone who’s doing this to please stop, do the right thing and tell police what you know,” said Det Insp Andrew Saunders.

Last year, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Mr Phillips over his suspected involvement in a bank robbery in Te Kuiti, a small town in the North Island.

Police said he had an accomplice during the alleged incident, and cautioned the public against approaching him as he was probably armed.

Two civilians have been killed and several others wounded after the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah fired at least 150 rockets into northern Israel.

Paramedics said a man and a woman in their 40s were fatally wounded by shrapnel in the border town of Kiryat Shmona. They were a couple who had been out walking their dog along a wooded street.

Hezbollah said it had targeted Israeli forces in Kiryat Shmona, which most residents have evacuated after a year of cross-border fighting.

These were the first Israeli civilians killed by Hezbollah since the conflict escalated two weeks ago, when Israel launched an intense air campaign targeting the Iran-backed group before invading southern Lebanon.

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The rocket or fragments that hit Kiryat Shmona on Wednesday also sparked several fires.

We could smell the fires burning before we saw them. In one street, neighbours watched as three teams of firefighters tackled plumes of smoke from a house where a rocket had landed.

Katy Krelshtein watched in disbelief from the other side of the road – the house next door belonged to her father.

“I saw red,” she replied, when I asked for her reaction. “It’s gone beyond fear now – it’s just anger.”

Rockets have been a daily reality for a year now in Kiryat Shmona, and many people there said they wanted their military to do whatever it takes to make them stop.

As we arrived and began filming, there were several more rocket alerts and interceptions. This close to the border, residents have just seconds to reach a shelter.

We watched as one large barrage of more than 20 rockets, followed by what looked like a missile, were all intercepted in the sky overhead – part of what the Israeli military said were 90 projectiles launched from Lebanon in a single eight-minute window.

Earlier on Wednesday, we were in another town to the west, where the border cuts straight down the hill overlooking it. Burned patches of forest mark where artillery and rockets have landed.

In the deserted streets below, the sound of gunfire from across the hill echoed around empty houses.

Shelley Barkan, one of very few who have stayed there, said there were sometimes eight or nine rocket alerts each day now.

“I’ve got pieces of rockets in my garden,” she said. “Their aim is to murder us, to kill us, to send Israel to the sea, and our aim is to defend ourselves.”

She showed us the catering hall where she helps prepare food for the local soldiers.

While we were there, we heard a barrage of rockets fired from Lebanon over our heads towards Israeli towns further south.

Minutes later, rockets landed in the coastal city of Haifa, wounding another five people, including a teenage boy.

Israel has gone on the offensive after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza, saying it wants to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of Israeli border areas displaced by Hezbollah rocket, missile and drone attacks.

The hostilities have escalated steadily since Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Palestinians on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel.

The military says the aim of its ground invasion, which began nine days ago, is to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure along the border that it says poses an imminent threat to Israeli communities.

There were reports of intense battles between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah fighters in several southern Lebanese areas on Wednesday.

Hezbollah said its fighters had pushed back Israeli troops advancing towards the western village of Labbouneh, attacked others inside the eastern village of Maroun al-Ras, and shelled troops near Mays al-Jabal, which is near Kiryat Shmona.

The Israeli military, meanwhile, said its troops and aircraft had destroyed more than 100 Hezbollah targets across southern Lebanon over the past day.

The Lebanese health ministry said at least four people had been killed and 10 injured in an Israeli air strike on the village of Wardaniyeh, to the north-east of the coastal city of Sidon.

The state-run National News Agency reported that the strike hit a hotel housing displaced families.

Eurovision winner Nemo has said the song contest’s organisers didn’t do enough to support participants who were caught up in a row over Israel’s inclusion in this year’s show.

“I felt very alone,” the Swiss singer, 25, told BBC News. “I really hope they have things in place for the next year.”

Nemo, who has just released their first single since winning the contest in May, added that the event had “in a way” been overshadowed by the political controversy.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs Eurovision, said it had introduced changes that would provide “more clarity and protection” for artists at future contests.

In the build-up to this year’s Eurovision, there were calls for Israel to be banned from the competition over the country’s military action in Gaza, and pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of Swedish host city Malmö.

Some contestants, including Nemo, came under pressure to boycott the show, while Israel’s entrant Eden Golan reportedly faced death threats.

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Nemo, who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, has since got a record deal and was speaking to BBC News after their new track, Eurostar, was released.

Reflecting on their experiences during Eurovision, Nemo described the atmosphere backstage as “quite tense”.

“There were situations that are still being investigated by the EBU,” they said.

“They told us they would get back to us and they haven’t yet. It’s a shame that the EBU takes so long in my honest opinion.”

When asked if the organisers did enough to support contestants at the time, they paused before answering.

“No. I don’t think so,” they said. “Because I sometimes felt very alone with a lot of things, or at least with the other artists, and it took long for them to get back to artists when they wrote to them.”

With global politics remaining febrile, Nemo added: “I really hope they have things in place for the next year to make sure that part of the whole contest, especially mentally, gets taken care of.

“Because I did feel alone and I know that some other artists were also feeling that way.”

In a statement, the EBU said it was “very mindful” of the experiences of several artists at this year’s contest.

“The process of dealing internally with individual incidents is ongoing and we are determined to ensure all rules are applied fairly and consistently,” it said.

It said an independent consultation had resulted in recommendations, including developing a duty of care protocol for people participating in the contest.

“We believe these will help address many of the issues in Malmö and help everyone, no matter their role, to have a positive and safe experience at the Eurovision Song Contest.”

In March, Nemo, the UK’s Olly Alexander and seven other Eurovision contestants shared a statement in which they rejected calls to boycott the competition over the Gaza war.

Asked why they made the decision to compete, Nemo said they believe the contest fundamentally has good intentions.

“I made friends from all over Europe and I would say I made very meaningful connections with other artists from places I’ve never been before, listening to music I’ve never heard before, getting to know people that are different to you. Always I think that’s a very good thing,” they said.

“At the core of this contest, I think it’s an exchange of different cultures and coming together and I really believe in that sentiment.”

This year’s Eurovision was more fraught than usual.

Israel, which has taken part in the contest since 1973, had to change the lyrics of its entry after the original version broke rules on political neutrality because it was thought to reference the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.

At the event, there were backstage tensions between the Israeli delegation and some other countries, which Israel later said amounted to “an unprecedented display of hatred”.

Meanwhile, during the semi-finals, former Swedish winner Eric Saade performed in the half-time slot with a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf wrapped around his wrist.

And in the build-up to the grand final, Ireland’s contestant withdrew from a dress rehearsal after complaining about Israeli TV of coverage of their performance; and France’s singer broke with protocol in the dress rehearsal by interrupting his song to make an impassioned speech about peace.

Separately, the Dutch entry was disqualified because of an alleged confrontation with a female camera operator.

Although the rows did partly overshadow their win, Nemo added that they stayed focused on telling their story, “because it was – and I’m still convinced it is – an important story to tell”.

“Knowing that it had an impact, and a lot of people found something in that, and a lot of people gained something from that, especially young queer people, that makes me really happy.”

Nemo, who was 24 at the time of the contest, became the first non-binary artist to win Eurovision.

Fittingly, they wrote the winning song, The Code, to explain how they came to terms with their identity.

The victory represented a big moment for the LGBTQ community which has, for a long time, treated Eurovision as a safe haven.

“It was only right after Eurovision that I started to realise the scale of what this moment meant to a lot of people,” Nemo said.

They said their win sparked a wider discussion in their own home country, including around offering a third gender option on passports – something Switzerland has so far resisted.

But they also felt the win gave “a lot of queer people hope and feeling understood and finally seen”.

“I didn’t grow up with a non-binary person to look up to. I think we’ve recently had these role models come up,” they added. “I’m really grateful even to be a part of this moment in time.”

Nemo, who grew up in Switzerland, has been living in Berlin for the past few years and recently moved to London.

They said the inspiration for their new single, Eurostar, came as they took the train from Paris to the UK capital in July.

“At that time, I was in the craziest phase of post-Eurovision madness, that was every day [having] no sleep, going to the next stop, and I felt the train incorporated all of that.”

Nemo sings on a track that is all about living life in the moment and getting carried away in the music.

They said the song was also a metaphor for their arrival in London, a city they described as “inspiring”.

Nemo described the experience of Eurovision as one of “crazy ups and downs”.

“I was a Swiss-based artist that a few people from Switzerland knew and suddenly you have eyes all around you from all around the world,” they said.

For now, they’re focusing on making music and enjoying the moment. But can they turn their victory into lasting fame?

Some Eurovision winners clearly have – such as Swedish pop band Abba and Italian band Måneskin. Most, however, do not.

“I don’t know if my goal is to become Abba,” they said. “I think the goal for me is to find my own voice.”

As for the UK’s own Eurovision hopes, after Alexander received the dreaded ‘nul points’ from the public this year, Nemo has the following advice.

“I would say to any artist that’s thinking of going to Eurovision, I would just do it, and I believe Olly really did that,” they said.

“Do it if you feel like you’re going to enjoy it, and you’re going to enjoy it no matter what the result is.”

Actress Jenna Fischer has revealed she has been receiving treatment for breast cancer since December last year.

Best known for her role as receptionist Pam Beesly in the US version of The Office, Jenna said she was “now cancer-free” after surgery and multiple rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

“I’m happy to say I’m feeling great,” Jenna shared on Instagram, adding she was opening up about her treatment to encourage other people to check for signs of the disease.

“If I had waited six months longer, things could have been much worse,” she wrote.

Jenna, who also hosts the Office Ladies podcast, played Pam in the mockumentary series between 2005 and 2013 alongside Steve Carrell, who plays regional manager Michael Scott.

The much-memed series, based on a BBC series of the same name starring Ricky Gervais, is one of the most-watched shows on Netflix and repeatedly ranks among the most popular US sitcoms.

Jenna said her cancer was found after a routine scan in October 2023 which she said she’d been putting off.

“Seeing women post photos of their mammogram appointments on Instagram needled me into setting my own (which I was late for),” she wrote.

After that appointment, she said further tests found she had “stage 1 triple positive breast cancer”.

Jenna said that “luckily” her cancer was caught early but the tumour was aggressive so needed multiple rounds of treatment.

There are a number of types of breast cancer and some, like triple positive, are known as hormone receptor-positive cancers.

This means the tumours are encouraged to grow by hormones, such as oestrogen, progesterone and a protein called HER2, that are found naturally in the body

These cancers are much more likely to respond to drug treatments that target these hormones to help stop the cancer cells dividing and growing.

Cancer Research says the term “triple positive breast cancer” is not widely used in the UK, instead being called “invasive breast cancer”.

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer affecting women in the UK according to the NHS, but it can also affect men.

More than 50,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with it each year and figures from Cancer Research suggest one in every seven women in the country will be diagnosed in their lifetime.

It still claims the lives of more than 11,000 British people each year, but Cancer Research says survival rates are improving, with 76% of patients living for at least 10 years after diagnosis.

During chemotherapy, Jenna said she lost her hair and shared a photo on Instagram of her “patchy pixie” cut as it grew back.

She said she was ready to “ditch the wigs” she has been wearing for the past year, adding that “many people” in her life did not know she was undergoing treatment.

“I needed spaces and people who did not regard me as a cancer patient.”

But she highlighted the support she’d had from people who did know, including her co-star Angela Kinsey, who plays picky safety officer Angela Martin in the series and co-hosts the Office Ladies podcast.

“When I lost my hair, she wore hats to our work meetings to make sure I wasn’t the only one,” Jenna said.

Jenna told her followers that she will “continue to be treated and monitored”, and she urged fans: “Get ’em checked ladies”.

“My tumour was so small it couldn’t be felt on a physical exam,” she wrote, adding that had she delayed her scans “it could have spread”.

“Should you get a breast cancer diagnosis,” she wrote, “there is a village waiting to care for you.”

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

The winner of Fat Bear Week has finally been crowned – and she’s no stranger to the title.

Voters chose 128 Grazer, a mother bear who won Fat Bear Week last year, and whose cub was recently killed by her last remaining opponent in the competition, 32 Chunk.

The competition, which started a decade ago, allows viewers to watch live cameras of Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve and pick their favourite brown bear after the animals have beefed up on salmon in preparation for winter.

In a post on X, explore.org, the nature network that runs the contest, said 128 Grazer was “the first working mom to ever be crowned champion”.

In July, two of Grazer’s cubs were swept over a waterfall, where Chunk – the most dominant bear on the river – attacked them both, according to explore.org. One later succumbed to its injuries.

The two bears were later pitted against each other in Fat Bear Week’s competition, with Grazer eventually coming out on top, winning more than double Chunk’s votes with more than 71,000 votes.

A highly defensive mother bear, the 20-year-old Grazer is raising her third litter.

“Her fearless nature is respected by other bears who often choose to give her space instead of risking a confrontation. This elevates Grazer’s rank in the bear hierarchy above almost all bears except for the largest males,” her bear profile states.

Fat Bear Week came after a grisly series of events this year. The beginning of the contest was delayed by one day after a female bear was killed by a male bear on camera.

Each year, 12 bears are chosen for the Fat Bear Week bracket and fans can vote online to decide the winner.

Grazer also beat Chunk in 2023, when nearly 1.4 million votes were cast from more than 100 countries, according to Katmai Conservancy and explore.org.

Hurricane Milton has made landfall in Florida, with US officials warning that “life-threatening storm surge, extreme winds and flash flooding” are occurring in central parts of the southern state.

The “extremely dangerous” category three hurricane is one of the most powerful storms to form in the North Atlantic in recent years, the US National Hurricane Center (NHU) says.

It comes just two weeks after Hurricane Helene caused substantial damage across the US south-east.

Milton made landfall in Siesta Key, Florida – a coastal community south of Tampa – at about 20:30pm EST on Wednesday (01:30 GMT Thursday), according to the NHC.

With current gusts of up to 115mph (185km/h), Milton will continue lashing the state overnight and throughout Thursday as it cuts through the centre of Florida before heading into the Atlantic Ocean Thursday afternoon and evening.

Milton is striking some of the areas already decimated by Hurricane Helene. Tampa, which has a population of more than three million people in its wider metropolitan area, is just north of Siesta Key where the storm made landfall.

Forecasters are warning of torrential rain, flash flooding, high winds and possible storm surges – which occur when water moves inland from the coast.

They say Milton could be the worst storm to hit the area in about a century – with a surge of 10-15ft (3-4.5m) possible, and localised rainfall of up to 1.5ft.

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• What is a storm surge and how serious is the threat from Milton?
• BBC Verify: Fact checking misinformation about Hurricane Helene

Milton is moving inland along Florida’s west coast, the NHC says.

Milton became a category one hurricane on Sunday and has been steadily moving eastwards, through the Gulf of Mexico, after brushing past Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.

It has fluctuated slightly in strength, more than once achieving the most powerful status of category five, though it weakened before striking the US mainland.

The core of the hurricane is expected to pass over west-central Florida, with a large storm surge expected along a swathe of the state’s coast.

On Tuesday night, the NHC said the hurricane had “wobbled” to the south, leading forecasters to alter its track slightly. Even the most accurate forecasts are typically off by about 60 miles (100km) when the storm is 36 hours away, forecasters said.

Meteorologists are warning Hurricane Milton could also bring several tornadoes from scattered thunderstorms that may be triggered across central and southern Florida.

Floridians have been told to prepare for the state’s largest evacuation effort in years, with Governor Ron DeSantis warning that a “monster” is on the way.

Most counties are in an official state of emergency, and evacuations have been ordered up and down Florida’s west coast.

Disaster management authorities have issued a list and map of the evacuation orders.

Several large shelters have also been prepared as a last resort for those stranded.

Airports in Milton’s expected path have announced closures, and queues of traffic have been observed as people start to leave their homes.

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Hurricanes – sometimes known as cyclones or typhoons – are a type of tropical storm that form in the North Atlantic. They bring strong winds and heavy rain.

When ocean air is warm and moist, it rises, and then starts to cool – which causes clouds to form.

Sometimes this rising air can move away at the top of the hurricane more quickly than it can be replaced at the surface, causing the surface pressure to fall.

The falling pressure causes the winds to accelerate with more air then getting pulled in as the hurricane strengthens.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Association (Noaa) predicted that the 2024 hurricane season would be more active than usual. Rising average sea temperatures due to human-caused climate change were partly to blame, it said.

Hurricanes are separated into five categories based on their wind speed.

Milton was downgraded from a category five storm (the highest category) to a category four storm on Wednesday.

It is forecast to be downgraded further to a category three hurricane before it makes landfall, according to the NHC.

Category three hurricanes carry wind speeds of up to 130mph (209km/h) and can cause some damage to trees and buildings, Noaa says.

Hurricane Milton intensified quickly as it passed over exceptionally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, where sea surface temperatures are around 1-2C above average.

Warmer waters mean that hurricanes can pick up more energy, potentially leading to higher wind speeds.

A warmer atmosphere can also hold more moisture – up to about 7% for every 1C of temperature rise. This means that rainfall from hurricanes can be more intense.

And global sea-levels have been rising in recent decades, largely thanks to global warming.

This makes it more likely that a given storm surge will lead to coastal flooding.

In Florida, average sea-levels have risen by more than 7in (18cm) since 1970, according to US government data.

A full scientific analysis will be needed to quantify the exact role of climate change in Hurricane Milton.

But its rapid intensification fits with expectations of how these storms are changing in a warming world.

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President Joe Biden has said the “irresponsible and relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies” about the government’s hurricane response is “undermining confidence” in rescue and recovery efforts, even as Hurricane Milton heads towards Florida.

Since Hurricane Helene caused widespread damage in several states, misleading and false claims have been spreading and have intensified as Florida prepares for a new hurricane.

Against the backdrop of the election campaign, Donald Trump has been highly critical of the Biden-Harris administration’s response.

Biden has responded by condemning a number of claims by Trump and other Republicans – BBC Verify has been examining them.

At multiple campaign events since the hurricane struck, Trump and his allies have claimed that government money earmarked for disaster victims has been spent on migrants who crossed illegally into the US.

“Kamala spent all her Fema money – billions of dollars – on housing for illegal migrants,” Trump said in Michigan last week.

This claim is false.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), a government agency, has a Disaster Relief Fund – worth more than $20bn (£15bn) for the last financial year – which is ring-fenced to spend on responding to hurricanes and other natural disasters.

Fema also has a dedicated budget from Congress to be spent on food, shelter, transportation, and other support services for immigrants released from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) custody.

This budget amounts to around $1bn over the last two financial years – not the “billions” Trump claims.

So, these are two separate pots of money – administered by the agency – which Trump appears to be conflating.

Fema, which has now set up a fact-checking page on its website, called Trump’s claim “false” saying, “no money is being diverted from disaster response needs”.

In 2019, while Trump was president, money was diverted from Fema’s Disaster Relief Fund – around $38m – to give to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The focus on Fema’s current funding comes after the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas – who oversees the agency – warned that it was running low on funds for the rest of the hurricane season.

But Fema says it has “enough money right now for immediate response and recovery needs”.

Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have repeatedly highlighted a $750 payment from Fema to hurricane victims, often contrasting it with the money the US government spends on Ukraine or on illegal migrants.

“They promised $750 to American citizens who have lost everything,” Vance said at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday.

It is true that the victims are getting $750 but some context is needed.

This is just one type of assistance provided by Fema.

The $750 is what people can get as an upfront payment to help cover the costs of food, water, medication, and other emergency supplies.

Following this initial payment, disaster victims may receive additional funds following a Fema assessment.

This can go towards repairing damage to homes and personal property, and to help find a temporary place to stay.

So far, Fema has said that more than $210m has been given to communities affected by Hurricane Helene – this includes upfront payments and money to support housing needs.

When the hurricane first hit, Trump claimed that the governor of Georgia hadn’t spoken to President Biden following the state being badly affected.

“He has been calling the president, hasn’t been able to get him,” Trump said at a news conference in Georgia on the afternoon of 30 September.

But earlier that day, Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp – a Republican – said in an interview: “The president just called me yesterday afternoon, I missed him and called him right back, and he just said ‘hey what do you need?’ and I told him we’ve got what we need, we’re working through the federal process.”

“He offered if there’s other things we need to call him directly, which I appreciate,” he added.

Trump said at the Butler rally that “Kamala wined and dined in San Francisco, and all of the people in North Carolina – no helicopters, no rescue – it’s just – what’s happened there is very bad.”

This is false. By the time Trump made this remark on 5 October, the North Carolina National Guard, which is under the dual command of federal and state governments, had already posted on X that its “air assets have completed 146 flight missions, resulting in the rescue of 538 people and 150 pets”.

The post, published on 3 October, featured a video of a National Guard helicopter.

The North Carolina Department of Public Safety’s website says that President Biden approved the state governor’s request for military personnel and equipment to support rescue operations in North Carolina.

The National Guard and military personnel “are operating 50 helicopters” as part of search and rescue missions, and are also helping to deliver critical supplies in the state, the department said.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Multiple tornadoes have been reported across Florida as Hurricane Milton started lashing the state.

Twisters were spotted in south Florida and crossing a key interstate as drivers were on the road.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said forecasted conditions were helping Milton produce twisters and “several tornadoes will be likely” across central and south Florida – something that will continue through the evening. Multiple tornado warnings are in effect across the state.

Forecasters say tornadoes can form amid tropical weather but typically aren’t super strong – through they still pose a deadly threat.

Tornadoes can accompany any tropical weather, including hurricanes, according to the National Weather Service.

They often happen in thunderstorms in rain bands away from the eye of the storm – typically forming in the right quadrant of a storm, the weather service notes.

The reason this area is key is because it hosts the best wind shear and instability.

The weather service notes most of these twisters are “relatively weak and short-lived, but they still pose a significant threat”.

Tornadoes need particularly intense or unseasonable heat to develop. As the ground temperature increases, moist air heats and starts to rise.

When this moist, warm air meets dry, cold air above, a thunder cloud begins to build.

This cloud can develop quickly, bringing with it rain, thunder and lightning.

Winds blowing from different directions cause the air to rotate, after which a visible cone or funnel drops out of the cloud towards the ground.

Tornadoes can be hundreds of metres wide. They can last anywhere from several seconds to more than an hour, and can travel dozens of miles.

The Fujita scale is used to determine how powerful a tornado is. The highest on the scale – an F5 – is used to categorise tornadoes travelling at up to 318mph (511km/h).

These tornadoes can cause incredible damage, with the power to throw away vehicles and sweep away strong buildings.

US President Joe Biden has held a much-anticipated call with Israel’s prime minister – believed to be their first dialogue in weeks.

Benjamin Netanyahu and President Biden are thought to have discussed Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack last week amid escalating tensions in the Middle East.

The White House said US Vice-President Kamala Harris also joined the 30-minute call on Wednesday.

Not long after the call wrapped up, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said its retaliatory attack against Iran would be “deadly, precise and above all surprising”.

“They will not understand what happened and how it happened, they will see the results,” Gallant said.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described Biden and Netanyahu’s conversation as “direct and very productive”.

She told reporters that discussions on the Iran attack continued and said that as long as Beirut’s main airport remained open, the US would continue to make flights available for Americans still in Lebanon.

Elsewhere in the Middle East region, fighting has continued between Hezbollah and Israel, with four people killed in an Israeli air strike on a Lebanese village near the southern city of Sidon.

In the small Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, a couple out walking their dog were killed by Hezbollah rockets fired from Lebanon.

They are the first Israeli civilians to die since the cross-border conflict dramatically escalated 12 days ago.

Rockets have also struck the Israeli port city of Haifa, injuring at least five people.

Israel said it has carried out more than 1,100 air strikes since its ground invasion began in southern Lebanon on 30 September.

In an update shared on Wednesday evening, the Israeli Air Force said it had used fighter jets, helicopters and remotely manned aircraft to attack Hezbollah’s sites – and has also attacked 300 targets in northern Gaza as part of the fighting in Jabalia.

Previously, Netanyahu has vowed Iran will “pay the price” for the Iranian barrage – which Tehran said was in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and high-profile assassinations of Hezbollah leaders, including the late Hassan Nasrallah.

The US has defended Israel’s right to retaliate, but has also appeared to be trying to limit its response to Iran.

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• Analysis: What will it take to end the conflict?

Lebanon’s government says as many as 1.2 million people have fled their homes over the past year. Almost 180,000 people are in approved centres for the displaced.

In addition, more than 400,000 people have fled into war-torn Syria, including more than 200,000 Syrian refugees – a situation that the head of the UN’s refugee agency described as one of “tragic absurdity”.

Hezbollah – a Shia Islamist political, military and social organisation that wields considerable power in Lebanon – has remained defiant despite suffering a series of devastating blows in recent weeks, including the killing of its leader and most of its top military commanders.

On Monday, the group insisted it was “confident… in the ability of our resistance to oppose the Israeli aggression”.

Israel’s government – which designates Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation – has pledged to make it safe for tens of thousands of displaced residents to return to their homes near the Lebanese border after a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza.

Hostilities have escalated steadily since Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel on 8 October 2023 – the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel.

A year ago, after the October 7 attacks and the start of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, Joe Biden became the first US president to visit Israel at a time of war. I watched him fix his gaze at the TV cameras after meeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war cabinet in Tel Aviv, and tell the country: “You are not alone”. But he also urged its leadership not to repeat the mistakes an “enraged” America made after 9/11.

In September this year at the United Nations in New York, President Biden led a global roll call of leaders urging restraint between Israel and Hezbollah. Netanyahu gave his response. The long arm of Israel, he said, could reach anywhere in the region.

Ninety minutes later, Israeli pilots fired American-supplied “bunker buster” bombs at buildings in southern Beirut. The strike killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It marked one of the most significant turning points in the year since Hamas unleashed its attack on Israel on 7 October.

Biden’s diplomacy was being buried in the ruins of an Israeli airstrike using American-supplied bombs.

I’ve spent the best part of a year watching US diplomacy close up, travelling in the press pool with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on trips back to the Middle East, where I worked for seven years up until last December.

• Follow live updates on this story
• Analysis: What will it take to end the conflict?
• BBC Verify examines footage revealing scale of damage in Lebanon
• Gaza then and now – a visual guide to how life has changed in 12 months
• Watch: How do young Palestinians and Israelis see their future?

The single greatest goal for diplomacy as stated by the Biden administration has been to get a ceasefire for hostage release deal in Gaza. The stakes could barely be higher. A year on from Hamas smashing its way through the militarised perimeter fence into southern Israel where they killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped 250, scores of hostages – including seven US citizens – remain in captivity, with a significant number believed to be dead. In Gaza, Israel’s massive retaliatory offensive has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to figures from the Hamas-run health ministry, while the territory has been reduced to a moonscape of destruction, displacement and hunger.

Thousands more Palestinians are missing. The UN says record numbers of aid workers have been killed in Israeli strikes, while humanitarian groups have repeatedly accused Israel of blocking shipments – something its government has consistently denied. Meanwhile, the war has spread to the occupied West Bank and to Lebanon. Iran last week fired 180 missiles at Israel in retaliation for the killing of Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah group. The conflict threatens to deepen and envelop the region.

Covering the US State Department, I have watched the Biden administration attempt to simultaneously support and restrain Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. But its goal of defusing the conflict and brokering a ceasefire has eluded the administration at every turn.

Biden officials claim US pressure changed the “shape of their military operations“, a likely reference to a belief within the administration that Israel’s invasion of Rafah in Gaza’s south was more limited than it otherwise would have been, even with much of the city now lying in ruins.

Before the Rafah invasion, Biden suspended a single consignment of 2,000lb and 500lb bombs as he tried to dissuade the Israelis from an all-out assault. But the president immediately faced a backlash from Republicans in Washington and from Netanyahu himself who appeared to compare it to an “arms embargo”. Biden has since partially lifted the suspension and never repeated it.

The State Department asserts that its pressure did get more aid flowing, despite the UN reporting famine-like conditions in Gaza earlier this year. “It’s through the intervention and the involvement and the hard work of the United States that we’ve been able to get humanitarian assistance into those in Gaza, which is not to say that this is… mission accomplished. It is very much not. It is an ongoing process,” says department spokesman Matthew Miller.

In the region, much of Biden’s work has been undertaken by his chief diplomat, Antony Blinken. He has made ten trips to the Middle East since October in breakneck rounds of diplomacy, the visible side of an effort alongside the secretive work of the CIA at trying to close a Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

But I have watched multiple attempts to close the deal being spiked. On Blinken’s ninth visit, in August, as we flew in a C-17 US military transporter on a trip across the region, the Americans became increasingly exasperated. A visit that started with optimism that a deal could be within reach, ended with us arriving in Doha where Blinken was told that the Emir of Qatar – whose delegation is critical in communicating with Hamas – was ill and couldn’t see him.

A snub? We never knew for sure (officials say they later spoke by phone), but the trip felt like it was falling apart after Netanyahu claimed he had “convinced” Blinken of the need to keep Israeli troops along Gaza’s border with Egypt as part of the agreement. This was a deal breaker for Hamas and the Egyptians. A US official accused Netanyahu of effectively trying to sabotage the agreement. Blinken flew out of Doha without having got any further than the airport. The deal was going nowhere. We were going back to Washington.

On his tenth trip to the region last month, Blinken did not visit Israel.

For critics, including some former officials, the US call for an end to the war while supplying Israel with at least $3.8bn (£2.9bn) of arms per year, plus granting supplemental requests since 7 October, has amounted either to a failure to apply leverage or an outright contradiction. They argue the current expansion of the war in fact marks a demonstration, rather than a failure, of US diplomatic policy.

“To say [the administration] conducted diplomacy is true in the most superficial sense in that they conducted a lot of meetings. But they never made any reasonable effort to change behaviour of one of the main actors – Israel,” says former intelligence officer Harrison J. Mann, a career US Army Major who worked in the Middle East and Africa section of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time of the October 7th attacks. Mr Mann resigned earlier this year in protest at US support for Israel’s assault in Gaza and the number of civilians being killed using American weapons.

Allies of Biden flat-out reject the criticism. They point, for example, to the fact that diplomacy with Egypt and Qatar mediating with Hamas resulted in last November’s truce which saw more than 100 hostages released in Gaza in exchange for around 300 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. US officials also say the administration dissuaded the Israeli leadership from invading Lebanon much earlier in the Gaza conflict, despite cross border rocket fire between Hezbollah and Israel.

Senator Chris Coons, a Biden loyalist who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and who travelled to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia late last year, says it’s critical to weigh Biden’s diplomacy against the context of the last year.

“I think there’s responsibility on both sides for a refusal to close the distance, but we cannot ignore or forget that Hamas launched these attacks,” he says.

“He has been successful in preventing an escalation – despite repeated and aggressive provocation by the Houthis, by Hezbollah, by the Shia militias in Iraq – and has brought in a number of our regional partners,” he says.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert says Biden’s diplomacy has amounted to an unprecedented level of support, pointing to the huge US military deployment, including aircraft carrier strike groups and a nuclear power submarine, he ordered in the wake of October 7.

But he believes Biden has been unable to overcome the resistance of Netanyahu.

“Every time he came close to it, Netanyahu somehow found a reason not to comply, so the main reason for the failure of this diplomacy was the consistent opposition of Netanyahu,” says Olmert.

Olmert says a stumbling block for a ceasefire deal has been Netanyahu’s reliance on the “messianic” ultranationalists in his cabinet who prop up his government. They are agitating for an even stronger military response in Gaza and Lebanon. Two far-right ministers this summer threatened to withdraw support for Netanyahu’s government if he signed a ceasefire deal.

“Ending the war as part of an agreement for the release of hostages means a major threat to Netanyahu and he’s not prepared to accept it, so he’s violating it, he’s screwing it all the time,” he says.

The Israeli prime minister has repeatedly rejected claims he blocked the deal, insisting he was in favour of the American-backed plans and sought only “clarifications”, while Hamas continually changed its demands.

But whatever the shuttle diplomacy, much has turned on the relationship between the US president and Netanyahu. The men have known each other for decades, the dynamics have been often bitter, dysfunctional even, but Biden’s positions predate even his relationship with the Israeli prime minister.

Passionately pro-Israel, he often speaks of visiting the country as a young Senator in the early 1970s. Supporters and critics alike point to Biden’s unerring support for the Jewish state – some citing it as a liability, others as an asset.

Ultimately, for President Biden’s critics, his biggest failure to use leverage over Israel has been over the scale of bloodshed in Gaza. In the final year of his only term, thousands of protesters, many of them Democrats, have taken to American streets and university campuses denouncing his policies, holding “Genocide Joe” banners.

Biden’s mindset, which underpins the administration’s position, was shaped at a time when the nascent Israeli state was seen as being in immediate existential peril, says Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York.

“American diplomacy has basically been, ‘whatever Israel’s war demands and requires we will give them to fight it’,” says Prof Khalidi.

“That means, given that this [Israeli] government wants an apparently unending war, because they’ve set war aims that are unattainable – [including] destroying Hamas – the United States is a cart attached to an Israeli horse,” he says.

He argues Biden’s approach to the current conflict was shaped by an outdated conception of the balance of state forces in the region and neglects the experience of stateless Palestinians.

“I think that Biden is stuck in a much longer-term time warp. He just cannot see things such as… 57 years of occupation, the slaughter in Gaza, except through an Israeli lens,” he says.

Today, says Prof Khalidi, a generation of young Americans has witnessed scenes from Gaza on social media and many have a radically different outlook. “They know what the people putting stuff on Instagram and TikTok in Gaza have shown them,” he says.

Kamala Harris, 59, Biden’s successor as Democratic candidate in next month’s presidential election against Donald Trump, 78, doesn’t come with the same generational baggage.

However, neither Harris nor Trump has set out any specific plans beyond what is already in process for how they would reach a deal. The election may yet prove the next turning point in this sharply escalating crisis, but quite how is not yet apparent.

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.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed directly to the people of Lebanon in a video published on Tuesday, telling them to turn against the Iran-backed Shia group Hezbollah or risk destruction on the scale of Gaza.

“Christians, Druze, Muslims Sunni and Shia, all of you are suffering because of Hezbollah’s futile war against Israel,” he said. “Stand up and take your country back.”

But in Shia, Sunni and Christian neighbourhoods of Beirut on Wednesday morning, Netanyahu’s appeal was falling largely – if not entirely – on deaf ears.

“Yes we heard the address but nobody here listens to Netanyahu,” said Yusuf Habbal, 31, as he cut pieces of the traditional Lebanese sweet Kunafah in his shop in Tariq El Jdideh, a Sunni area.

“Nobody told Netanyahu to occupy Palestine, nobody told him to occupy Lebanon. It is the Israelis who are driving this conflict.”

But Habbal and his fellow Sunnis “also do not accept what Hezbollah is doing”, he said.

“Before Netanyahu ever spoke about Hezbollah, we were against them. Beiruti people know that Hezbollah has their own agenda. And now they are driving us into a war we do not want.”

Hezbollah, which is a better-armed and more powerful force in Lebanon than the country’s own military, began firing rockets into northern Israel a year ago, in support for Hamas the day after the brutal 7 October attack.

The Hezbollah rockets signalled the beginning of a new phase of its clash with Israel. Last month, Israel escalated that simmering conflict when it expanded its bombing campaign of Lebanon, including in Beirut, before launching a ground invasion in the south of the country.

“They are striking very close to us now and it is terrifying,” said Mohammed Khair, 43, as he had his hair cut in a barber shop in Tariq El Jdideh.

“Nobody here wants this war, but nobody is going to be turned against Hezbollah by something Netanyahu said in a video,” he said.

Netanyahu was “always talking to the Palestinians, to the Lebanese,” said Tarraf Nasser, a 76-year-old retiree who was passing by the barber shop. “Nobody listens to Netanyahu,” he said. “He is not really talking to us.”

In Achrafieh, Beirut’s main Christian neighbourhood, there was a sense of futility at the Lebanese people’s ability to heed Netanyahu’s advice, even if they wanted to.

Antoine, a 75-year-old Catholic retiree, who asked to be identified only by his first name, was smoking a cigarette outside the neighbourhood’s Brewholic Café.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister of Israel, not Lebanon. He should take care of his people, not ours,” Antoine said.

“At the same time, it is true that we have to do something to be free from the influence of Iran. But we don’t have weapons and we don’t have politicians who can be truly Lebanese. All our politicians are affiliated to other states or groups, mostly Iran.”

Nobody in Lebanon was going to have domestic conflict because Netanyahu instructed them to, Antoine said. “We will do that on our own.”

Across the road in her shoe shop, Maya Habib, 35, gave a tired shrug at the Israeli prime minister’s video appeal. “Everyone here knows that Israel lies,” she said. “But listen, maybe he has a point. He warned everyone – don’t attack us, don’t come close to us, and it won’t be your war. Now it is.”

Among the Christians of Achrafieh, “people are paying attention” to Netanyahu, Habib said. “But nobody can do anything anyway,” she said, shrugging again. “We don’t even have a president. Netanyahu is saying all the weapons should go to the Lebanese army, but how?”

Hezbollah can still rely on staunch support in the neighbourhoods where it is the dominant force in political and social life, and among the Shia communities of mixed areas. Several Shia residents of the Mar Elias neighbourhood said they stood completely behind the group.

“We are all Hezbollah here, whatever Hezbollah does we will support them,” said Fadi Ali Kiryani, a 52-year-old corner shop owner. Like other people in Mar Elias, Kiryani said he was not concerned by Netanyahu’s threat that Lebanon would suffer the same destruction and suffering as Gaza.

“Even if it becomes worse here than Gaza, we will still fly the flag,” he said.

“My house in Dahieh has already been destroyed. I would rather my house was gone than the shoe on the foot of one Hezbollah fighter was damaged.”

Sitting behind the desk of her 40-year-old towel and bedlinens shop, 75-year-old Fany Sharara said that Hezbollah was the only force defending the people of Lebanon.

“Nothing Netanyahu could say could change my mind,” she said. “He is a criminal, an assassin, he cannot leave one child alive.”

Israel had “all of Europe and all of America” on its side, Sharara added. “We are with Hezbollah because they are the only ones defending us. Not the Lebanese government.”

A few doors down, and a few years younger, 24-year-old jewellery shop owner Ali Shoura was simply weary of everyone involved, he said. “Nobody really cares – the politicians, the people in power, the Lebanese government, Iran, Israel, America, Hezbollah too.”

He shook his head. “It’s all just theatre,” he said. “And we are all the victims.”

Amid gunfire and Israeli artillery shelling, Palestinian medics say that they have begun moving premature babies and other patients away from Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabalia refugee camp, as troops and tanks encircle it.

The Israeli military has been carrying out its third ground offensive in the area since the war in Gaza began, saying it is targeting regrouping Hamas fighters who aim to launch attacks.

Two other local hospitals are virtually inaccessible and face evacuation orders, Gazan health officials say.

Dozens of people are reported to have been killed and wounded in the north in recent days.

The Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said on Monday that its first responders had recovered the bodies of 15 people following an Israeli strike on a tented camp for displaced people next to the al-Yemen al-Saeed Hospital.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had “struck terrorists operating within a command-and-control centre embedded in an area in Jabalia that previously served as a medical compound”, and that it had taken steps to mitigate harm to civilians.

The Civil Defence also said five people were killed in a strike on a family home in the camp, which had more than 110,000 registered residents before the war.

Meanwhile, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) warned that its own shelters and services were being forced to shut.

“With almost no basic supplies available, hunger is spreading and deepening again,” Philippe Lazzarini said, adding that the second phase of the polio vaccination campaign for children in Gaza was also threatened.

Residents have been speaking to the BBC about their fear and desperation.

“I have been displaced more than 10 times. I’ve moved from house to house, from school to school, under shelling, and from street to street,” said Ahmed Leki, a 50-year-old father from the Falluja area of Jabalia.

“We are exhausted, completely worn out. There’s nothing left. Where can we go? We have small children, and there’s no safe place in Gaza, not a single safe inch,” he added.

“We left our homes with shells raining down on us, with bombing, destruction, and dismemberment all around us. Enough is enough.”

In recent days, new evacuation orders have been issued by the Israeli military covering a wide area in the north of the enclave, including Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia and parts of Gaza City.

All those remaining in the north – estimated at 400,000 people – have been told to head to the south.

“Displacement is extremely difficult, a tragedy. There is no transportation, no necessities for survival. Men, women, and children ask, ‘Where do we go?’ and the answer is, ‘I don’t know,’” said Bilal al-Amreeti, a local man.

“The sound of Israeli warplanes is above us, there is bombing, and the shelling continues everywhere.”

Despite Israel’s assurances, many Gazans fear that it aims to depopulate the north of the strip and turn it into a closed military zone or a Jewish settlement.

Syria’s foreign ministry has condemned a suspected Israeli air strike on an apartment building in Damascus that, it says, killed seven civilians.

The ministry said women and children were among the dead from Tuesday evening’s attack on the Mezzeh neighbourhood, which houses the Iranian embassy and other diplomatic facilities. Israel’s military has not commented.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll at 13, including nine civilians and two members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which is a key ally of Iran and Syria’s government.

The UK-based monitoring group said the strike targeted an apartment frequented by leaders of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”.

Syria’s state news agency, Sana, cited a military source as saying that the building was hit by three missiles launched by Israeli aircraft from the direction of the occupied Golan Heights.

Photographs from the scene showed emergency services personnel inspecting significant damage to apartments on the first, second and third floors.

“I was on my way home when the explosion happened and communications and electricity were cut off, so I could no longer contact my family,” electrician Adel Habib, 61, who lives in the building, told AFP news agency.

“These were the longest five minutes of my life until I heard the voices of my wife, children and grandchildren.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights identified the civilians killed as a Yemeni doctor, his wife and their three children, as well as a woman and her child, a female doctor and a man.

Iran’s embassy said no Iranian citizens were among the casualties.

On Wednesday, a Syrian police officer was killed in an Israeli strike near the south-western city of Quneitra, according to Sana.

In the evening, the Israeli military put out a statement saying it had conducted a strike in the Quneitra area that killed a man called Adham Jahout, whom it identified as a terrorist in Hezbollah’s “Golan Terrorist Network”.

As part of his role, it claimed, Jahout relayed information from Syrian government sources to Hezbollah and transmitted intelligence to facilitate the group’s operations against Israeli targets in the Golan Heights.

Last week, another Israeli strike in Mezzeh reportedly killed the son-in-law of the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Hassan Jaafar Qassir.

Israel has previously acknowledged carrying out hundreds of strikes in recent years on targets in Syria that it says are linked to Iran and allied armed groups such as Hezbollah.

The Israeli strikes in Syria have reportedly been more frequent since the start of the war in Gaza last October, in response to cross-border attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah and other groups in Lebanon and Syria.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Israeli air and artillery strikes have targeted Syrian territory on 104 occasions since January, killing at least 296 people and resulting in the damage or destruction of about 190 targets, including weapons depots, vehicles and Iran-backed militia headquarters.

Over the past three weeks, Israel has also gone on the offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, launching an intense and wide-ranging air campaign targeting the group’s infrastructure and weapons, and invading the south of the country.

There are few stars whose impact on Bollywood is as enduring as that of Rekha. As the actor turns 70 on Thursday, film writer Yasser Usman explores her charm and legacy.

Rekha is one of India’s most glamorous icons – a woman who captured headlines and people’s imaginations for decades while blazing a path for generations of female actors in India.

In the 1970s, she was widely covered for her transformation from a loud, gauche young girl from southern India who entered Bollywood with no knowledge of the Hindi language to a discerning National Award-winning actor who spoke impeccable Urdu and Hindi and brimmed with confidence.

But the unrelenting attention on her personal life took a toll as she withdrew from public life in the years since, choosing to fiercely protect her privacy.

Yet, time and again over the past few decades, Rekha has proved that the air of enigma surrounding her has only left audiences wanting more.

With almost every public appearance, she still captures hearts and creates viral moments on the internet.

Born in Chennai (then Madras) in 1954 as Bhanurekha, she was deeply affected by her mother’s – actress Pushpavalli – struggles and hurt by the absence of her father, Tamil film star Gemini Ganesan.

She was still a teenager when she started acting, mainly because her family faced financial difficulties. In Bombay (now Mumbai), the home of Hindi cinema, she had to grapple with an unfamiliar language and a male-dominated industry.

“Bombay was like a jungle, and I had walked in unarmed. It was one of the most frightening phases of my life… Guys did try and take advantage of my vulnerability,” she once said.

As her early work garnered attention, she faced relentless body-shaming, with viewers, journalists and even other actors ridiculing her weight and skin colour.

In her later interviews, she also spoke about how, as a teenager, she was forced to do some scenes she wasn’t comfortable.

Just as everything seemed to stack up against her, the young actor flipped the script.

With candid interviews and statements unheard of in 1970s India, Rekha became a headliner act for gossip magazines. The young starlet’s unapologetic frankness about her sexuality was nothing short of revolutionary.

Rekha was unflinchingly open about her relationships with her co-actors. But due to a lack of reciprocation in public by the men in question, she was often humiliated, with the press using unsavoury headlines to describe her.

In part challenged by the narrative around her, Rekha underwent a dramatic makeover in the mid-70s when she started fitness trends and learnt to pick the right make-up that worked for her.

An early pioneer of fitness trends, she brought liquid diets into popular conversations, became an ambassador for aerobics and embraced yoga long before it became a celebrity craze.

Once derided for her unconventional appearance, Rekha managed to redefine beauty and fitness standards and create a more democratic industry for actors of all skin tones.

But it was the re-invention of her craft that truly made her an ambassador of transformations.

Along with her appearance, she also honed her acting with meticulous attention to diction and technique.

Her performances were marked by a rare emotional depth in critically acclaimed films like Ghar (1978), where she delicately portrayed the trauma of a rape survivor. She effortlessly transitioned to comedy in Khoobsurat (1980) and her alluring performance in Silsila (1981) cemented her iconic mainstream appeal.

That same year, her career-defining role in Umrao Jaan elevated her to the ranks of India’s most celebrated actresses and earned her a national award.

Her foray into arthouse cinema showcased her immense versatility, with exquisite performances in Kalyug (1981), Utsav (1984) and Ijaazat (1987). Her versatility was on full display in the action-packed intensity of the blockbuster Khoon Bhari Maang (1988).

Her ability to seamlessly transition between genres and characters was the hallmark of her career.

Rekha heralded a new era in the Hindi film industry where she owned her narrative, built an aura around herself, and was rightfully crowned a diva.

In 1990, she married businessman Mukesh Aggarwal but the couple soon grew apart. The same year, when she was in the US for a programme, her estranged husband of just a few months tragically took his own life.

She returned home to lurid media headlines such as “The Macabre Truth Behind Mukesh’s Suicide” and “The Black Widow”.

Posters of her film Sheshnaag (1990) were vandalised, and she was shunned for a while by the film industry.

Being cast out overnight set off her final transformative phase.

For about a year, she put all her energy into the action-packed revenge-drama Phool Baney Angaare (1991), which did well at the box office.

But despite the audience’s love and her successful comeback, Rekha, once known for her fierce and candid persona, now presented a significantly toned-down, melancholic, and philosophical approach.

In an interview to BBC, she once said “[The media] would write whatever they want adding their own spicy takes… I was very angry and hurt. And whenever I am very hurt I tend to shut up. So that’s exactly what I did – I stopped talking.”

This was perhaps her final makeover, a metamorphosis which firmly established her as the enigmatic diva we know today.

Since then, not much is known of her personal life and her film appearances have grown sparser.

Yet, when she leans into her diva image, like in the sensuous song Kaisi Paheli Zindagani from Parineeta (2005), or when she takes to the stage to dance to one of her old hits, her fans are still glad to celebrate.

A Spanish couple on their honeymoon in Singapore have been held in the country after protesting against the Singaporean owner of the football club they support.

Dani Cuesta posted photographs of himself outside the home of Peter Lim, the billionaire owner of Valencia CF, holding a banner criticising the business magnate.

Mr Cuesta and his partner Mireia Sáez were stopped while trying to leave Singapore airport on Friday and had their passports confiscated, Valencia Mayor María José Catalá told Spanish radio station Onda Cero.

The pair are assisting with ongoing investigations into the alleged offence of “taking part in a public assembly”, Singapore police told the BBC.

Singapore has some of the world’s strictest laws on public assembly, which includes assemblies even of one person.

The government says these laws are necessary to maintain order and safety.

In 2020, a Singaporean activist who had long campaigned for freedom of speech was arrested for posing with a placard of a smiley face.

Shortly after arriving in Singapore on Thursday, Mr Cuesta posted on X that he would “take some photos with my lovely flag”, which reads “Lim Go Home”.

Mr Lim is deeply unpopular with Valencia fans, who have seen their club’s fortunes decline significantly over the course of his ten year tenure.

Encouraged by users online, Mr Cuesta posted a series of photos of himself at various tourist spots in Singapore holding the yellow banner.

Another image shows him outside what is believed to be the luxury complex where Mr Lim lives in Singapore.

A video he posted shows Mr Cuesta placing a yellow sticker reading “Lim out” – a common sight in the city of Valencia – on the residence’s gate.

The images quickly went viral among Valencia fans and Mr Cuesta even gave a light-hearted interview to a Valencia football podcast on Thursday.

He explained that as soon as his wife suggested going to Singapore, he had a “lightbulb moment” and decided to bring a banner and some stickers, which he placed on lampposts around the city.

“I told her ‘this is something I have to do’… perhaps it will be for nothing but it sends the message that we don’t want these people in Valencia,” Mr Cuesta told Tribuna Deportiva.

“I’ve not been detained yet,” he joked. “My wife’s been reading up about the laws in Singapore – she’s looking forward to getting through immigration tomorrow.”

Earlier that day, Mr Cuesta had joked on X that he did not want to “end up in a Singapore prison as that’s not the way I see my honeymoon going”.

The following day, as they attempted to board a flight to Bali, Singapore authorities stopped Mr Cuesta and Ms Sáez, according to Valencia’s mayor.

“[The Spanish embassy in Singapore] confirmed that two people had their passports taken away, due to an ongoing police investigation,” Ms Catalá told Spanish radio station Onda Cero.

“They can leave their hotel but not the country,” she added.

Valencia CF, meanwhile, said it was aware of the situation of two of the club’s supporters in Singapore.

“Valencia CF and La Liga are in contact with the Spanish embassy in Singapore, who have assured us that both are being advised and assisted in everything necessary with the objective of this being resolved as quickly as possible,” the club said in a statement.

Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the BBC that its embassy in Singapore is “providing assistance to those affected and is in permanent contact with their families”.

One of Singapore’s richest men, Mr Lim purchased Valencia CF in 2014 and became the first foreign owner in the club’s history.

After an initial honeymoon period, he quickly became unpopular with fans as the team’s performances declined and the club ran up huge debts off the pitch.

Traditionally a team that would challenge for domestic and European titles, Valencia currently lie third-bottom in the league.

Mr Lim has particularly been criticised for his friendship with Portuguese “super agent” Jorge Mendes and his alleged influence on the club’s recruitment of players and coaches.

Another associate of Mr Lim is former Manchester United defender Gary Neville, with whom he co-owned English lower-league club Salford City until earlier this year.

Despite having no managerial experience, Mr Neville was appointed Valencia’s head coach in 2015 but was sacked four months later after a disastrous spell in charge.

Libertad VCF, a Valencia fan group, said in a statement it had “total support and solidarity” with the recently married couple and called for them to be “freed immediately”.

“Their freedom of movement has been violated, simply for peacefully exercising their right to expression,” the statement added.

The White House’s address may be 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but the real road to the presidency runs through the state of Pennsylvania, the biggest prize among the electoral battleground map.

According to calculations by elections analyst Nate Silver, the candidate who wins Pennsylvania has more than a 90% of winning the White House.

“It’s the granddaddy of all the swing states,” said former Congressman Patrick Murphy, who represented a northeastern Pennsylvania as a Democrat from 2007 to 2011.

With its 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania – the fifth most populous US state – is the lynchpin of the swing-state electoral firewalls for both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

If the Democrats win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, along with one congressional district in Nebraska, she’s the next president. If the Republicans carry Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, Trump is back in the White House next year.

Without Pennsylvania, there is no way Trump can win without flipping at least three of the states Joe Biden won in 2020.

Nicknamed the Keystone State, Pennsylvania could in fact be the key to the White House.

Pennsylvania is not only the most valuable swing state, it also can be seen as a microcosm of the US as a whole – demographically, economically and politically.

It is a former manufacturing state that has been transitioning to newer industries and businesses, but it has a large energy sector because of its abundant oil shale deposits. Agriculture is still the second-largest industry in the state.

The majority of the population is white, but there are growing immigrant communities. Some areas, like Allentown – the working-class factory city made famous by a Billy Joel song – are now majority Hispanic. The state’s black population, at 12%, is just under the US total of 13%.

As for the politics, the state’s two large urban areas, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, heavily favour the Democrats. Between the two are vast stretches of rural territory where Republicans dominate. And the suburb that once were reliably conservative are now tilting to the left.

That gives rise to the old quip that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with (deeply Republican) Alabama in the middle.

Somehow, all these political cross-currents and shifting dynamics have kept Pennsylvania at a near dead-even balance when it comes to presidential elections. President Joe Biden won the state by about 80,000 votes in 2020. Donald Trump carried it by about 40,000 in his surprise 2016 win over Hillary Clinton.

Only once in the last 40 years has a candidate won Pennsylvania by double-digits – Barack Obama in his 2008 electoral landslide.

Current polling puts the race between Harris and Trump in the state at a virtual dead heat. According to the 538/ABC News poll tracker, Harris holds a lead by less than a percent – a margin that has hardly shifted over the course of this tumultuous political year.

Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have been pouring enormous resources into Pennsylvania. They are spending more on television advertising there than any other swing state. Both candidates make regular visits.

Harris introduced her running mate pick, Tim Walz, at a rally in Philadelphia. She spent days preparing for her presidential debate in Pittsburgh. She made a tentpole economic speech there two weeks ago.

Last Saturday, Trump held a massive rally in Butler, where in July he was nearly assassinated. On Wednesday he was in Biden’s hometown of Scranton and Reading.

And when the principals aren’t around, both campaigns have other politicians and officials to drum up support.

“A candidate can’t go into a county to talk to 1,200 people,” says former Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. “The state is too big. There’s just not time. That’s what surrogates are for.”

Rendell notes that the current governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro, is a big help for Democrats here, as he is very popular in the state and a dynamic speaker – qualities that had made him the odds-on favourite to be Harris’s vice-presidential pick.

For Harris, her keys to victory are to post dominating numbers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and win the suburbs by enough to offset Trump’s margins in the rest of the state.

An essential part of this strategy is to win over moderate voters and some Republicans – including the more than 160,000 who turned out to vote for former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in the state’s Republican primary, held earlier this year, well after Trump had already locked up the party’s nomination.

“What these people need to hear is ways in which both the past record of Kamala Harris and the future plans of Kamala Harris are basically centrist positions – that she is not this crazy, wild-eyed radical leftist,” said Craig Snyder, former Republican Senate staffer who is running Pennsylvania’s “Haley Voters for Harris” effort.

He added that the Harris campaign is making the most extensive effort to reach Republican voters that he’s seen in a generation.

Trump’s strategy is to squeeze all the support he can out of the conservative parts of the state, including by registering and mobilising those who may not have participated in past elections – a move Trump’s campaign officials say is a central focus of their grass-roots effort.

There are signs their work may be paying off, too. Registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans in the state, but the margin is just a few hundred thousand – the smallest its been since the state first began releasing figures in 1998.

While the college-educated voters in the suburbs may be difficult to convince, the Trump team thinks it can also chip away at traditionally Democratic support among blue-collar union voters and young black men.

“We’ve seen nationally that Trump has made some real inroads with African American men,” said Farah Jimenez, a conservative education activist. “They’re here in Philadelphia, and if you can convince them that he speaks more clearly to the things that concern them, it can at least start to provide a base for Republicans in Philadelphia.”

• The BBC’s flagship political debate programme heads to Pennsylvania on Thursday, 10 October
• It will be recorded at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, presented by Fiona Bruce and featuring a local audience
• They will quiz a panel including the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher, former Trump campaign adviser Bryan Lanza and commentator Mehdi Hasan
• Watch the discussion on the BBC website from 16:00 EST (21:00 BST)
• UK audiences can also watch on BBC One and iPlayer, global audiences on the BBC News channel

Four years ago, the results in Pennsylvania took days to come in – due, in large part, to the more than two million mail-in ballots cast because of the Covid pandemic. Major media outlets didn’t project Biden as the winner until four days after the election.

Mail-in voting is expected to be lower this year, but the state reports that it has already received 217,000 completed ballots that, by Pennsylvania law, cannot be opened and tabulated until election night.

Another wildcard is the more than 27,000 military and overseas voter ballots that have been distributed by Pennsylvania state officials so far. If the race is as close as polls indicate, those votes could make a difference – even if they take longer to arrive and be recorded.

“I can’t imagine that it’s not going to take several days after to get a count,” said Snyder. “And if the count is very close, we’re going to get into lawsuits and recounts and all the rest of it. So everybody needs to buckle up.”

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.

Like many Americans, Hayden Cook decided long ago who to vote for in this year’s presidential election.

And yet, every day, the 19-year-old from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania is bombarded with political ads, despite installing a blocker on YouTube and opting out of cable television.

“It’s still so constant,” Cook said. “Work is six minutes away – you’re already hearing two or three ads; then we have the radio on at work and there’s ads there.”

More than $10bn (£7.6bn) is expected to be spent on political advertising this election. That is up some 20-25% from 2020 – itself a record-setting cycle – depending on which forecaster is consulted.

Most of that money will be funnelled through a handful of critical, highly competitive states that are expected to decide the election, with almost $1bn going towards one state alone: Pennsylvania.

The Keystone State is expected to attract $935m in ad spending this election, including $450m on the presidential contest between former President Donald Trump and Vice-President Kamala Harris, according to research firm AdImpact.

And that does not include all the free media coverage the candidates have received as they repeatedly return to the state on the campaign trail.

Cook, a political junkie, doesn’t mind the barrage – but has been bemused by some of it.

At one point, the family home was getting multiple mailers each day from a conservative group, despite everyone being a registered Democrat.

“It’s absolutely non-stop,” Cook said. “It’s everywhere.”

In the UK, election campaigns are limited to 25 working days, spending is capped, and political advertising on radio and television is banned.

So the frenzy in the US can seem nonsensical – especially in a contest where so many voters like Cook have already made up their minds about the candidates.

Polling this year has suggested only a tiny fraction of voters – about 3%, much smaller than in historic elections – are undecided.

But surveys also indicate Trump and Harris are locked in a dead heat while even some decided voters are expressing dissatisfaction and uncertainty, raising the possibility of an election-day surprise.

“Advertising in presidential races typically matters only at the margins – it doesn’t matter very much – but if the margin is in play, it matters a lot to the overall outcome,” said Erika Fowler, professor of government at Wesleyan University and co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project.

If election success were determined by dollars alone, Harris could be declared the winner now.

Her campaign – and that of Joe Biden before he quit the race – has been significantly out-fundraising and out-spending her Republican rival’s.

At the start of September, it had $235m in the bank, almost twice as much as Trump’s $135m.

Her campaign spent roughly $135m on media product and ad buys the month prior, which amounted to nearly 80% of $174m in total expenditures in August, the most recent official figures available, according to federal filings.

That was more than double the roughly $57m the Trump campaign spent on advertising and mailers the same month, and his overall $61m in spending was also far lower.

But elections are about more than a bottom line.

In the 2016 and 2020 election, Trump was also outspent but he dominated the headlines, giving him free coverage that helped to narrow the gap, Prof Fowler said.

• the BBC’s flagship political debate programme heads to Pennsylvania on Thursday, 10 October
• it will be recorded at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, presented by Fiona Bruce and featuring a local audience
• panel will include the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher, former Trump campaign adviser Bryan Lanza and commentator Mehdi Hasan
• will be streamed on BBC website from 16:00 EST (21:00 BST)
• UK audiences can also watch on BBC One and iPlayer, global audiences on the BBC News channel

This year, since Harris became the nominee, she has appeared to close Trump’s lead with free press, while the Democrats’ spending advantage has continued to widen, according to Prof Fowler. Over some weeks in September, Harris had been outspending Trump on Facebook and Instagram by a factor of 16:1.

“I have never seen margins like that before,” Prof Fowler said.

When you factor in spending by outside groups, the gap between Trump and Harris narrows.

But Geoff Pereira, head of content and insights at Media Radar CMAC, which tracks advertising on traditional television and radio, said Trump may be gambling, based on past experience and tight polls, that commercials won’t be the deciding factor.

After all, pro-Trump groups backed by some of his wealthiest supporters, such as Elon Musk’s America PAC, have claimed they plan to steer their spending to other areas, such as turnout.

“He was outspent in 2016 and 2020 and he’s being outspent to a greater extent this cycle, at least so far,” Mr Pereira said. “Will it matter?”

“Reading between the lines, he thinks he doesn’t necessarily need it.”

Advertising by a candidate has been found to help boost turnout by supporters, said Cameron Shelton, a professor of political economy at Claremont McKenna College. That makes it potentially important in states like Pennsylvania, where polls suggest margins will be slim.

But unless it is targeted, the messages can also backfire, Prof Shelton warned.

His research on the 2012 and 2016 elections found that political ads were as likely to propel opponents to the polls in anger as they were to bring in supporters.

“Ads don’t persuade,” he said. “What happens is the ad just pushes you towards your preconceptions. It polarises, it enflames.”

“If you get a balanced audience, it looks like you’re increasing the other side’s votes just as much as your own,” he said.

Harris’s Facebook page is currently running more than 300 ads targeting voters in Pennsylvania, compared with 22 on Trump’s page, many of them pitched to younger audiences and women, a BBC Verify analysis found.

But mass advertising on traditional television – which tends to reach a population of older, more reliable voters – continues to account for the majority of spending for both campaigns.

Over the summer, campaign ads focused on issues important to each candidates’ base: immigration for Trump and healthcare and abortion for Harris.

But in more recent weeks, the economy – an issue of importance to voters in both camps and one in which Trump and Republicans have historically held the advantage – has gained focus, Prof Fowler said.

In Pennsylvania, Trump has attacked Harris over fracking, an advanced oil and gas drilling technique which she previously supported banning. Fracking plays a key role in the state, which is the second biggest producer of natural gas in the US.

Harris has spotlighted adverts aimed at traditional Republicans and rural voters, in which former Trump voters and farmers argue that he worked only for the wealthy.

All the ads can make for awkward moments in politically diverse company, said Tim Anzelone, a 36-year-old from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who recently hosted a watch party to celebrate the start of the season for his NFL team, the Steelers.

Worried about political ads spurring arguments among his guests, he strategised ahead of time to mute the television during every commercial break.

The plan worked, he said: “People didn’t pay attention… I would guess 50% of the ads were presidential [election-related] and nobody talked about it.”

He said he was ready for the election to be over, having already made up his mind about the race – a private decision he declined to share.

“The ads definitely don’t sway me at all,” he said. “I always do think it’s a huge waste of money but it must be working for someone.”

In future elections, Prof Shelton said he expected targeting to become much more precise, reducing the risk of backlash and uncomfortable party dynamics – but also likely pushing America further apart.

“My sad projection would be then we’re going to get even more siloed and polarised,” he said. “I’m going to see a certain set of ads that make me believe one thing and you’re going to see a certain set of ads that make you believe another.”

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win a US election
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• ANALYSIS: What could be the ‘October Surprise’?
• FACT-CHECK: Debunking Trump claim about hurricane funds
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

A couple in India have said they are “delighted” after a court ordered a hospital to hand over the frozen semen sample of their dead son to them so they could have a grandchild through surrogacy.

The landmark Delhi High Court order came after a four-year legal battle.

“We were very unlucky, we lost our son. But the court has given us a very precious gift. We would now be able to get our son back,” the mother, Harbir Kaur, told the BBC.

Ms Kaur and her husband Gurvinder Singh petitioned the court after Delhi’s Ganga Ram Hospital in December 2020 refused to release their son’s semen which was stored in their fertility lab.

The couple’s 30-year-old son, Preet Inder Singh, had been diagnosed in June 2020 with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma – a form of blood cancer – and admitted to the hospital for treatment.

“Before he began chemotherapy, the hospital advised him to store his semen as the treatment could adversely affect the quality of his sperm,” Gurvinder Singh told the BBC.

Preet Inder, who was unmarried, agreed and his sample was frozen on 27 June 2020. He died in early September.

A few months later, when the grief-stricken parents sought access to their son’s frozen sperm, the hospital declined their request. The couple then petitioned the Delhi High Court.

The couple, who are in their 60s, told the court that they would bring up any child born using their son’s semen sample. And in the event of their death, their two daughters have given an undertaking in court that they will take full responsibility for the child.

In her order last week, Justice Prathiba Singh said that “under Indian law, there was no prohibition against posthumous reproduction” if the sperm owner had given consent.

She added that parents were entitled to the sample as in the absence of a spouse or children, they became legal heirs under the Hindu Succession Act.

The couple say they approached the court because they wanted to carry on his “legacy” and that the order would help them preserve a connection with him and help their family name to continue.

“He loved his sisters and was much loved by his friends. He is the screensaver on my phone. I start my day by looking at his face every morning,” Ms Kaur said. She did not want to share a photo of him with the BBC over privacy concerns.

She added that the family was considering using his sperm in surrogacy and that a relative had agreed to be the surrogate. “We will keep it in the family,” she said. Under Indian law commercial surrogacy is illegal.

The case is rare, but not without precedent, her lawyer Suruchii Aggarwal told the BBC.

In court, she cited the 2018 case of a 48-year-old woman in the western Indian city of Pune who got twin grandchildren through surrogacy using the semen of her 27-year-old son who had died of brain cancer in Germany.

Her son, who was also unmarried, had authorised his mother and sister to use his semen after his death and the hospital in Germany handed over his sample to them.

Ms Aggarwal also gave the example of a case from 2019 where the New York Supreme Court allowed the parents of a 21-year-old military cadet killed in a skiing accident to use his frozen sperm to have a grandchild.

In her order, Justice Singh also cited a number of cases of posthumous reproduction, including a 2002 case from Israel where the parents of a 19-year-old soldier killed in Gaza had obtained legal permission to use their son’s sperm to have a child through a surrogate mother.

So if there is a precedent, why did the hospital reject the couple’s request?

As Justice Singh noted in her order, there is no international consensus on the issue.

The US, UK, Japan, Czech Republic and some other countries allow posthumous reproduction with written consent. Australia imposes an additional condition of a one-year wait period after the death to allow time for emotions to settle.

The practice is prohibited in a number of countries such as Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Malaysia, Pakistan, Hungary and Slovenia, while most of India’s South Asian neighbours – Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh – have no guidelines.

And even in countries that have laws on posthumous reproduction, a majority of cases involve a spouse who wants to use frozen eggs or sperm to conceive.

The number of bereaved parents seeking sperm of their sons has risen in Israel, and as the conflict with Russia has escalated, soldiers in Ukraine are offered semen cryopreservation free of charge. But in India, this is still relatively rare.

In court, Ganga Ram Hospital said legally they could only release the sample to the spouse. They said there were no clear laws or guidelines that governed the release of semen samples of an unmarried deceased male to his parents or legal heirs.

The Indian government also opposed the couple’s petition, saying that surrogacy laws in India were meant to assist infertile couples or women, not people who wanted to have a grandchild.

The authorities also pointed out that Preet Inder was unmarried – India’s Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Act 2021 bars single people from having children via surrogacy – and that he had not left any written or oral consent for the use of his frozen sperm so his parents did not have an automatic right to use it.

Ms Aggarwal, the couple’s lawyer, argued in court that while filling in the form for storing his semen, Preet Inder had clearly specified that it was for the purpose of IVF.

The form, she told the BBC, had the mobile numbers of both father and son, which implied consent. She pointed out that the father had been paying the lab for preserving the sample.

The ART Act, she said, was introduced to stop commercial use of surrogacy, to regulate and supervise clinics, not to impinge upon personal freedoms of aggrieved parents.

Justice Singh agreed with Ms Aggarwal’s argument that Preet Inder had given consent for his sperm to be used for the purpose of having children.

“He was not married and did not have any partner. He intended for the sample to be used in order to bear a child. When he passed away, the parents being the heirs of the deceased, and semen samples being genetic material and constituting property, the parents are entitled for release of the same.”

Under those circumstances, the court said they could not prohibit the couple from accessing the semen sample of their son.

The court order, Ms Kaur says, has offered her a “glimmer of hope, a light” that “we will be able to bring our son back”.

“I have prayed every day to fulfil all my child’s unfulfilled desires. It’s taken four years, but my prayers have been answered,” she adds.

Kylie Minogue loves a puzzle.

Waiting for a concert to begin, she’ll chip away at crosswords, sudoku grids and the New York Times’ Spelling Bee to keep her nerves at bay.

Her friend, author Kathy Lette, once claimed the pop star is a fiend at Scrabble, saying: “She knows how to score big and doesn’t mess around.” (Coincidentally, Kylie’s name is a valid Scrabble word, scoring a respectable 12 points.)

But when she plays Wordle, the daily word-guessing game, she has an unusual strategy: Deliberately getting it wrong.

“It’s annoying if you get it in two lines,” she says. “I want it to be more of a challenge.

“I like to get down to the pointy end, where everything’s at stake.”

You could call it a metaphor for her career. Kylie thrives on challenges, and she’s faced more than a few over the last 37 years – from spiteful critics and creative mis-fires to a life-changing encounter with breast cancer.

Right now, she’s on a high, thanks to her global hit Padam Padam.

Released just in time for Pride month in 2023, the slinky, sinuous club anthem became an unexpected viral smash. Its onomatopoeic title, meant to represent a heartbeat, was quickly adopted as gay slang for anything and everything.

In the UK, Padam Padam gave Kylie her first top 10 hit in more than a decade. In February, she Padam-ed her first Grammy Award in 20 years. In March, she was Padam-ed a “global icon” at the Brit Awards.

In the fluctuating market of pop stardom, Kylie’s stock has never been higher.

“It’s so weird, because I never stop working,” she says, “but then there’s these peaks.

“I look at it like surfing – not that I’m surfer, but I have caught a wave once in my life, so I understand the principle.

“We’re paddling, paddling, paddling, and sometimes you catch a wave. So I really want to ride this one and enjoy the view – because I know how exhausting it is to paddle and miss the wave.”

That’ll be why Padam Padam’s parent album, Tension, is getting a sequel – an ex, if you please. Thirteen new tracks that dive deeper into the slick electro aesthetics of the original.

“I guess I’m really stretching it out!” Kylie laughs.

In the era of Eras, it’s unusual for a pop star to repeat themselves but, in this case, success bred success. After Tension topped the charts, writers from all over the world started pitching their best new material to team Kylie.

“I couldn’t say no,” she says. “The list kept getting longer and I said, ‘Maybe this is a shaping up to be… well, not the next album, because the next album will be a different thing, but a whole lot more than a little bit more’.”

The album features collaborations with Sia, The Blessed Madonna, Tove Lo, Diplo and Orville Peck. But the lead single, Lights, Camera, Action, reunites Kylie with Padam Padam’s co-writer Ina Wroldsen.

Packed with pulsing beats, it’s all about serving the fiercest of fierce looks. Karl Lagerfeld and John Paul Gaultier are namechecked in the lyrics. In the video, Kylie rocks a dress made from crime scene tape.

Does she still get a thrill from pulling the perfect outfit together?

“Um, the thought of fittings makes me go like this,” she says, rolling her eyes in mock exasperation.

“But when you find the outfit that works, there’s a real high. Then the next high is getting it all off – face, hair, outfit, shoes, all of it, and getting comfy again.

“I call it the debunk,” she says. “I’ll slip into a very worn pair of track pants and that one T-shirt that’s in favour for six months.

“Fifty shades of comfortable – that’s my buzz.”

When on tour, she’s required to change her outfit mid-show seven or eight times a night, navigating her way into corsets and sequins and feathered headdresses as a clock ticks down to the next song.

“It’s frantic, it’s really stressful,” she admits. “I might swear a lot.

“It just takes one thing to go wrong, and you’re all freaking out.”

She adds: “I did pass by the wardrobe [department] on a gig I did recently, and I said, ‘I’m a despicable human being. I’m so sorry.’

“They were like, ‘No, what happens in quick change stays in quick change’.”

The thought of the singer losing her temper is intriguing.

Of course she flips out sometimes – we all do – but “angry Kylie” is so antithetical to her public persona that it’s hard to imagine.

She’s one of pop’s most poised stars, choosing her words carefully and brushing away personal questions with a practised affability. In conversation, she offers glimpses of intimacy and vulnerability, but typically closes them off with a positive affirmation, neatly steering the discussion back towards her career.

The only people who know her true feelings are her family.

“When it’s not going well, that’s who I turn to – mum, dad, my brother and my sister,” she says.

Her younger brother Brendan, a camera operator, has even taught her a technique for shaking off stress, which she calls “the foofer valve”.

“When the emotion has got to come out, or you’ve got to have a big cry or a moan, you let out a noise, , like a kettle letting off steam, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I feel so much better’.”

The foofer valve was crucial at the start of Kylie’s pop career.

Early reviews called her music “hackneyed”, “lightweight” and “emotionless”. After watching her first Australian tour in 1990, the Sydney Morning Herald declared: “It is amazing how successful mediocrity can become.”

“It wasn’t cool that people were as nasty as they were,” she says now, “and it wasn’t some invisible person behind a keyboard.

“These were grown adults who should have known better.”

How did she cope?

“To be honest, I don’t know what made me keep going,” she replies. “But one of the blessings is that I had a job and I had to show up to work.

“There were definitely times when I would have liked to hide in a cave, so it’s good if you have that responsibility [of acting]. You have to show up, and then you’re distracted by other things.”

Critics might not have warmed to her, but the public were always on Kylie’s side.

Even during her ill-fated “indie years”, fans snapped up experimental and wayward songs like Confide In Me and the Nick Cave duet Where The Wild Roses Grow.

“I’m very proud of the times I swam against the current when it felt like things were going against me,” she says. “It’s a rewarding feeling.”

The new millennium brought a major reset.

Spinning Around, released in 2000, was a textbook comeback single, and she followed it up with the hypnotically cool Can’t Get You Out Of My Head – still the biggest-selling single of her career.

Then, in 2005, on the UK leg of her greatest hits tour, Kylie started experiencing blurred vision on stage.

Putting it down to exhaustion, she soldiered on, especially after a health check gave her the all-clear.

“When they say, ‘You don’t need to worry’, that’s what you want to hear, so you believe it,” she recalls.

But a second test revealed that Kylie had early-stage breast cancer. Her career was put on hold as she had chemotherapy and a lumpectomy.

The public responded with an outpouring of love that she describes as “really moving”.

To this day, she’s kept all the letters, drawings and cards that fans sent her.

“There were envelopes that just said, ‘Kylie Minogue, Australia’, and the post department bothered to [deliver] them,” she says.

“I just felt there was a trail of love and support. It really made such a difference to me.”

Kylie got the all-clear in 2006, and she hit the road again almost immediately.

Determination and persistence have been the keys to her longevity, and today it’s the search for the next Padam Padam that keeps her motivated.

It all links back to her love of word games. “Music’s a bit of a puzzle, too, trying to figure it all out.”

But where Brainteasers are bound by logic, pop music is more like gambling. Luck and timing are just as important as creative choices. And the public is petulant, demanding more of the same, but losing interest if you don’t evolve.

Kylie has successfully walked that tightrope for five decades, something that fellow pop icon Madonna acknowledged when she asked her to duet on stage in Los Angeles this March.

“It was kind of mind-blowing,” Kylie recalls. “I spoke to her manager and he said, ‘M would really like to sing I Will Survive with you’.

“The reasoning for that is she lost her mother to breast cancer, and she knows some of my story. But even more relevant, for her and I, was that we’re women who’ve survived this industry.

“It’s never easy,” she adds. “I don’t think anyone it to be easy, because where’s the challenge? But we’re still here, doing what we love.”

Pausing to reflect, the singer is momentarily overawed.

“There’s so much that’s happened that eight-year-old me, or even 20-year-old me, wouldn’t have been able to compute,” she says.

“You’re going to meet Prince one day. He’s going to write a song for you. You’re going to sing on stage with Madonna.

“I mean, I’m amazed. I’m like, ‘Is this even my life?'”

That’s one puzzle where the answer is self-evident.

Speculation over the wellbeing and whereabouts of Cameroon’s 91-year-old President Paul Biya has become a hot topic across Africa this week.

After attending the China-Africa summit in Beijing in early September, it was perhaps no surprise that he gave the UN General Assembly in New York a miss.

But when he stayed away from this week’s summit of French-speaking countries (La Francophonie) at Viller Cotterêts, north of Paris, the rumour mill went into overdrive, as he had not been seen in public for about a month.

Cameroon’s ambassador in France insisted that Biya is “in good health” and in Geneva – his habitual base when away from home.

Other sources suggested this was because he needed to rest under medical supervision after a heavy diplomatic schedule in July and August.

After all, he is Africa’s oldest head of state and the second longest-serving, narrowly beaten to that record by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema of neighbouring Equatorial Guinea.

Such mundane indications were not enough to still speculative guesswork about Biya in Africa-interested media and political circles.

So finally the government spokesman, René Sadi, issued a formal denial of the rumours, adding that the president would return home “in the next few days”.

And the head of the president’s private office, with him in Geneva, insisted he was “in excellent health”.

Cameroon occupies a key strategic location, as the gateway to landlocked Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR).

Apart from struggling to fully suppress jihadist violence around Lake Chad, it also wrestles with a complex and often violent crisis in its English-speaking regions.

In leading the response to these challenges, Biya has brought an unusual personal style that often eschews the front of the stage, without any apparent personal need to engage in diplomatic presenteeism or performative summitry.

He is a habitual non-attendee at many gatherings of African leaders.

Even back home, with his measured speech and cautious tone, Biya has for many years spaced his personal interventions, largely delegating the day-to-day running of the government, and handling of technical dossiers, to a succession of prime ministers.

Unexplained absences from public view have been nothing out of the ordinary for this most enigmatic of presidents.

Rumours that he has died do surface from time to time, largely because of these unannounced disappearances from the scene.

But this low-key style belies the determination with which he contrived his arrival in power in 1982, elbowing aside his patron and predecessor Ahmadou Ahidjo, promising liberalising change before entrenching a hold on the presidency that no subsequent challenger or campaign of protest has managed to shift.

As a wave of multi-party democratising change swept across much of Africa at the beginning of the 1990s, Biya was one of several incumbent leaders to shrewdly adapt, allowing sufficient reform to take the heat out of mass protest while nevertheless firmly keeping control.

Since one narrow election victory back in 1992, he has shrugged off subsequent political challenges, helped perhaps by manipulation of the polls and certainly by the divisions among often tactically inept opponents.

Now, with Biya’s current seven-year term drawing to an end in November 2025, supporters have even been pressing the 91-year-old to stand again.

Critics feel that it is long past time for Cameroon’s national leadership to pass to a younger generation who could tackle national problems and explore opportunities for development and progress with more speed and dynamism.

In 2016 teachers and lawyers in the two mainly English-speaking regions, South-West and North-West, protested over the failure to properly resource English language rights and public services.

If Biya had responded more rapidly and with a more assertively generous and loudly touted reform package, perhaps he could have assuaged discontent early on – and thus averted the eventual slide into violent confrontation between the security forces and armed militants demanding outright secession.

Biya did later bring forward reforms – to meet the grievances of the English-speaking regions and, nationwide, to decentralise power to regional councils.

But sometimes citizens have faced long waits before the regime addresses their concerns – decentralised structures were not set up until many years after the original framework legislation had been passed.

Some Cameroonians are, however, comfortable with Biya’s restrained approach to leadership and his readiness to leave successive prime ministers to handle routine decisions.

They see his role as more symbolic and distant, akin almost to a constitutional monarch.

Certainly, this representational role is a dimension of the presidency with which he has seemed at ease.

On 15 August, for example, he was at Boulouris, on the Côte d’Azur in France, where he gave a detailed 12-minute address at the commemoration of the 1944 Allied landings to liberate southern France from the Nazis – an operation in which many troops from the French African territories took part.

And in fact, despite frequent absences from the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé – usually retreating either to his home village in the forested south or to his preferred international base, Geneva’s Intercontinental Hotel – Biya has continued to take the key sensitive political and strategic decisions.

The main gatekeeper to the heart of power at the Étoudi presidential palace is the Secretary General of the Presidency, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh.

A power system where Biya, as the head of state, keeps his cards so close to his chest inevitably generates gossip about his own intentions for the 2025 election and about potential successors.

But some of the senior regime figures most frequently tipped, such as Laurent Esso and René Sadi, are by now themselves far from youthful.

Support groups have also appeared to promote a passing of the torch to the president’s elder son Franck Biya, a businessman – although Franck himself has never shown any interest in politics or given any hint of such ambitions.

But in today’s Africa, where disenchantment with the political establishment runs deep, particularly among young urban populations, establishment attempts to secure the continuation of power can carry risks.

In neighbouring Gabon, President Ali Bongo was deposed by the army last year after the regime manipulated the 2023 election to deliver him a further seven-year term despite his fragile state of health.

And when Senegal’s President Macky Sall lined up his Prime Minister Amadou Ba as his successor, he was decisively rebuffed by the voters who opted instead for the young reformist opponent Bassirou Diomaye Faye.

Biya and his inner circle may feel confident of avoiding such scenarios. But that will require a shrewd reading of popular sentiment, especially among youth and the middle-class in big cities such as Yaoundé and Douala.

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• Fresh faces in Mozambique’s poll as independence era leaders bow out

A group of Sub-Saharan African men are playing bingo in a conference room of a hotel near the northern Spanish city of León.

They laugh and celebrate when their numbers are called out, but many of these asylum seekers have harrowing stories.

Among them is Michael, who fled Ghana to escape a violent feud that saw his sister and father killed. After travelling by land to Morocco, he paid a trafficker who put him on an inflatable boat crammed with people which took him to the Canary Islands.

“I was so happy, because I knew all my troubles, and the people trying to kill me, were behind me,” he says. “Because once you are in Spain you are safe.”

In Ghana he worked as a petrol pump attendant and a storekeeper. He also started studying human resource management, which he hopes to be able to continue in Spain once he has settled.

“Spain is one of the most respected countries in the world,” he says. “Being here is an opportunity for me.”

Around 170 asylum seekers are staying in this hotel, in the town of Villaquilambre, which has been converted into a migrant centre.

They are among the many thousands of people who take the maritime route between the African coast and Spain each year.

So far this year, more than 42,000 undocumented migrants have arrived in Spain, an increase of 59% on 2023, the vast majority having undertaken the perilous crossing to the Canary Islands.

The archipelago’s difficulties in managing these large numbers have contributed to a fierce political debate about immigration, mirroring that in many other European countries. In Spain the controversy is driven in great part by the far-right Vox party, which frequently describes the trend as an “invasion”.

However, the arrivals have also underlined a major potential source of manpower for an economy which faces stiff demographic challenges.

Javier Díaz-Giménez, a professor of economics at the IESE business school and an expert in pensions, says that a baby boom which lasted from the mid-50 to the late-70s has created a generation of Spaniards who are heading for pension age, and the “baby crash” that followed means there are not enough workers to replace them.

“The next 20 years are going to be critical, because more and more people are going to retire,” he says. “According to the most recent demographic scenario, 14.1 million people will retire during that time.”

One way of tackling the workforce deficit, he says, is to ape the kind of economic model implemented by Japan, which has a similarly low birth rate, by investing heavily in algorithms and machines. The obvious alternative to that is immigration.

“If you want to grow GDP, if you want to pay pensions for all the retiring baby boomers, you need to grow GDP in a different way to how we’re growing it now, because there will not be as many people, unless we bring them in through immigration,” adds Prof Díaz-Giménez.

Spain’s central bank has put a figure on the projected labour shortfall. In a report published in April, it said that the country will need around 25 million immigrants over the next 30 years.

The left-wing Spanish government has also made the economic case for immigrants, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez describing them as representing “wealth, development and prosperity” for his country, while on a recent tour of Mauritania, Gambia and Senegal.

“The contribution of migrant workers to our economy is fundamental, as is the sustainability of our social security system and pensions,” he said.

Mr Sánchez’s coalition is hoping that a proposal to legalise the status of up to 500,000 undocumented migrants, mainly from Latin America, will get through parliament. Spain has seen nine such mass regularisations in its democratic era, most recently in 2005 under a previous government led by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party.

However, the country’s economic needs contrast with ordinary Spaniards’ perception of immigration. A new poll shows that 41% of people are “very worried” by the phenomenon, making it their fifth-biggest concern after inflation, housing, inequality and unemployment.

While only 9% of Spaniards associate immigrants with economic progress, 30% link them to insecurity, and 57% believe that there are too many of them.

Villaquilambre, meanwhile, is an example of how undocumented new arrivals can integrate into the workforce.

The asylum seekers here are allowed to work six months after their arrival in Spain.

“Before they receive the authorisation to start working we place great emphasis on them learning Spanish, as well as offering them training courses and classes on risk avoidance,” says Dolores Queiro, of the San Juan de Dios Foundation, the non-governmental organisation that manages the migrant centre in Villaquilambre.

“When the date for them being able to start working approaches we get in touch with different companies – and they contact us as well – and we start looking for jobs for them.”

Companies get in touch, she says, “because they know that we have people here who want to work.”

Makan, from Mali, has just started working for a local business, GraMaLeon, which makes walls, bathrooms and kitchen counters out of marble and granite. He commutes the short distance from the hotel to the factory each day on an electric scooter.

“I’m happy to be working,” he says, in halting Spanish, after completing a shift hauling slabs of marble around the factory.

Ramiro Rodríguez Alaez, co-owner of the business, which employs around 20 people, says that finding workers is not easy.

“We need a lot of manpower in this profession. But it’s tough, it gets cold, you have to lift heavy weight, so it’s not a job that many young people here want to do.

“There aren’t a lot of companies in this industry around here, but those that do exist all need people. We’re all looking for people locally and we can’t find them.”

He adds: “Immigrants provide an important source of manpower for us.”

Australia’s prime minister has apologised for making a “hurtful” comment in parliament, after he mocked opposition lawmakers by asking them if they had Tourette’s syndrome.

The remark – which was quickly withdrawn – has angered disability advocates and been labelled “ableist” and “despicable” by MPs across the political spectrum.

Late on Tuesday, Anthony Albanese returned to the chamber to ask for forgiveness from Australians living with the disorder.

“I regret saying it. It was wrong. It was insensitive and I apologise,” he said in his address.

Albanese made the taunt after facing interjections from frontbenchers, including shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, during a speech on tax changes.

“Have you got Tourette’s or something? You know, you just sit there, babble, babble, babble,” he said, responding to the interruptions.

Tourette’s syndrome is a condition that causes people to make involuntary movements or sounds, called tics.

The President of the Tourette Syndrome Association of Australia said Albanese’s comment demonstrated the need to increase awareness about the disorder.

“For him to just flippantly use it in such an offhanded manner speaks volumes… we have a lot of work to do,” Mandy Maysey told Seven News.

“If people see Albanese doing that in parliament, then it will trickle down, and people already use it as a punchline or an insult,” she added.

The Australian Greens disability spokesman Jordon Steele-John, who has cerebral palsy, criticised Albanese for “using disability as the butt of his jokes” – saying that “casual ableism is still ableism”.

Opposition health spokeswoman Anne Ruston had earlier called the taunt “despicable” and demanded the PM apologise to the “entire Tourette’s community”.

“Mocking a disability is no laughing matter,” she wrote on X.

Research estimates one in every 100 school-aged children may have Tourette’s syndrome in Australia and that roughly 1-2% live with the disorder in the UK.

Tourette’s syndrome is a genetic inherited neurological condition, which means it can be passed on from birth parents to their children.

British computer scientist Professor Demis Hassabis has won a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “revolutionary” work on proteins, the building blocks of life.

Prof Hassabis, 48, co-founded the artificial intelligence (AI) company that became Google DeepMind.

Professor John Jumper, 39, who worked with Prof Hassabis on the breakthrough, shares the award along with US-based Professor David Baker, 60.

Proteins are the building blocks of life and are found in every cell in the human body.

Better understanding proteins has driven huge breakthroughs in medicine. It is used in solving antibiotic resistance and to image enzymes that can decompose plastics.

Prof Hassabis said it was the “honour of a lifetime” to receive the Nobel.

“I’ve dedicated my whole life to working on AI because I believe in its potential to change the world,” he said in a press conference on Wednesday.

He said the Nobel committee did not have his phone number. Instead they called his wife, but she ignored the call several times before realising it was a Swedish number and might be important.

He encouraged children to not only play computer games, but also make them, saying that his early gaming was the gateway to his experimentation with AI.

Speaking about being awarded the prize, Prof John Jumper said it felt “so unreal at this moment” but that “the prize represents the promise of computational biology”.

But the Nobel committee also struggled to reach him.

“I got a number from a Swedish number and I absolutely could not believe it. I was really hoping it wasn’t a delivery or something,” he said.

The pair of scientists used artificial intelligence to predict the structures of almost all known proteins and created a tool called AlphaFold2.

Proteins are made of chains of building blocks called amino acids that each fold in a unique shape. Scientists had long struggled to predict the shape of each of the millions of proteins, but that structure drives what it does in the human body.

Understanding the structure is crucial to knowing how to target the protein and alter its behaviour, which is crucial in medicine.

The Nobel committee called AlphaFold2 a “complete revolution”, and the tool is now used for 200 million proteins worldwide.

Before the pair starting working on the problem, just a tiny fraction of protein structures had been worked out.

The pair received one half of the Nobel prize. The other half was awarded to Prof Baker for what the committee called the “almost impossible feat” of building new proteins.

In 2003 Prof Baker used amino acids to design a new protein, opening the door to the creation of new proteins used in pharmaceuticals, vaccines and other tools.

He too used computer software in predicting protein structures, designing the Rosette programme in the 1990s.

Prof Baker, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle, told the committee shortly after the announcement that he was “very excited and very honoured”.

“I stood on the shoulders of giants,” he said, when asked how he had cracked the code of creating proteins.

He said he was sleeping when the phone rang, and when the announcement was made, his wife “starting screaming very loudly”.

The announcement was made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

The winners share a prize fund worth 11m Swedish kronor (£810,000). Prof Baker will receive half of the award, with the remaining half going to Prof Hassabis and Prof Jumper.

Prof Hassabis grew up in London with Greek-Cypriot and Singaporean parents.

He was a child prodigy in chess and reached master standard at the age of 13.

He completed his A-levels aged 16 and was asked by Cambridge University to take a gap year due to his young age.

Before and after graduating in computer science, he worked in computer game design, winning numerous awards.

He then completed a PhD at University College London, before working at several US universities.

In 2010 he co-founded machine learning company DeepMind that was bought by Google in 2014.

It aims to use neuroscience with machine learning to produce powerful algorithms that can be applied to a range of problems.

His work has won numerous awards, now including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Tesla boss Elon Musk is to unveil the firm’s long-awaited robotaxi prototype, the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California on Thursday.

Self-driving cars have long fascinated Mr Musk and he has made a series of bold predictions about them – including that they will save lives or earn their owners money, through being rented out for rides or even overnight stays.

But when he takes to the stage for the event – which the company has billed We, Robot – he will be under pressure to quell persistent doubts about the electric vehicle maker’s ability to execute on his ambitions.

The project has undergone delays, having been originally slated for release in August before being moved to October.

Mr Musk explained away the latest delay by saying it was down to some last minute changes from him.

“Requested what I think is an important design change to the front, and extra time allows us to show off a few other things,” Musk wrote in a July post on his social media platform X.

But analysts say it is now time for the company to show real progress with the project.

‘There is certainly heavy build-up after discussing the Robotaxi concept without concrete details for so long,” said Jessica Caldwell of edmunds.com.

“The expectation is that this event should clear the air on the concept,” Caldwell added, saying it would be a “letdown” if Tesla fails to reveal a developed concept and operational details on Thursday.

Relatively little is known so far about the Cybercab.

According to reports, it will have two seats and butterfly wings. It is thought it will use a combination of cameras and computing power to navigate the roads, as opposed to laser-based sensors, known as Lidar, favoured by rivals

Musk has hinted that when complete, some of the robotaxis in Tesla’s network would be owned and operated by the company, but that Tesla owners would have the option to rent their vehicles out on Tesla’s network when they are not driving them.

In a note on Wednesday morning, analysts Wedbush said they expected on-site demos in the prototype, which they said they will attend.

But industry-watchers will also be looking for projections “on Cybercab scaling, overall cost per mile,” and a Tesla ride-share app, Wedbush said.

“With very few industry events as widely anticipated as this, we believe Musk will address the near-term pain points,” Wedbush analysts wrote.

The “We, Robot” event comes as some top executives, including the head of Tesla’s new vehicles program, have recently left the company.

Some have also said the company would be better off focussing on a low cost electric vehicle (EV), to shore up its position against increasing competition from other EV car makers.

However, Tesla has long sought to launch a full self-driving competitor to Google-parent Alphabet’s Waymo, whose driverless vehicles are now a frequent and much-discussed sight on the streets of San Francisco.

The company also offers rides in Phoenix and Los Angeles, and just expanded limited service in Austin, Texas.

Last week, Waymo announced it would add the Hyundai Ioniq 5 to its robotaxi fleet after the vehicles undergo on-road testing with the company’s technology.

Despite Mr Musk’s evident excitement around the technology – and the high stakes for Tesla – it seems he is going for a more low profile approach to media coverage than some of his previous showy product rollouts

Despite multiple inquiries, the BBC did not secure an invitation to the unveiling.

We weren’t alone. An anchor at Bloomberg TV has posted publicly on X about wanting to cover the event in person – even tagging Musk directly – also without success.

Ratan Tata, who has died aged 86, was one of India’s most internationally recognised business leaders.

The tycoon led the Tata Group – known as a “salt-to-software” conglomerate of more than 100 companies, employing some 660,000 people – for more than two decades. Its annual revenues are in excess of $100bn (£76.5bn).

Founded by Jamsetji Tata, a pioneer of Indian business, the 155-year-old Tata Group straddles a business empire ranging from Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Steel to aviation and salt pans.

The ethos of the company “yokes capitalism to philanthropy, by doing business in ways that make the lives of others better”, according to Peter Casey, author of The Story of Tata, an authorised book on the group.

Tata Sons, the holding company of the group, has a “number of companies that includes privately held and publicly traded companies, yet they are in essence all owned by a philanthropic trust”, he explains.

Ratan Tata was born in 1937 in a traditional family of Parsis – a highly educated and prosperous community that traces its ancestry to Zoroastrian refugees in India. His parents separated in the 1940s.

Tata went to college in the US, where he got a degree in architecture at Cornell University. During his seven-year-long stay, he learned to drive cars and fly. He had some harrowing experiences: he once lost an engine while flying a helicopter in college and twice lost the single engine in his plane. “So I had to glide in,” he told an interviewer. Later, he would often fly his company’s business jet.

He returned to India in 1962 when his grandmother Lady Navajbai fell ill and called for him. It was then that JRD Tata – a relative from a different branch of the family – asked him to join the Tata Group. “He [JRD Tata] was my greatest mentor… he was like a father and a brother to me – and not enough has been said about that,” Tata told an interviewer.

Ratan Tata was sent to a company steel plant in Jamshedpur in eastern India where he spent a couple of years on the factory floor before becoming the technical assistant to the manager. In the early 70s, he took over two ailing group firms, one making radios and TVs and the other textiles. He managed to turn around the first, and had mixed results with the textile company.

In 1991, JRD Tata, who had led the group for over half a century, appointed Ratan Tata as his successor over senior company aspirants for that position. “If you were to find the publications of that time, the criticism was personal – JRD got clubbed with nepotism and I was branded as the wrong choice,” Ratan Tata later said.

Peter Casey writes that under Ratan Tata’s leadership, a “great but rather stodgy Indian manufacturer began emerging as a global brand with great emphasis on consumer goods”.

But the journey was a mixed one.

During his tenure the group made many bold acquisitions, among them the takeover of Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus and UK-based car brands Jaguar and Land Rover. Some of those decisions paid off, while others – including a failed telecom venture – have cost the company a lot of money.

A high point came in 2000, when Tata bought Tetley and became the world’s second-largest tea company. The deal was the largest takeover of an international brand by an Indian company.

A few years later, a visiting journalist from a UK-based newspaper asked Tata whether he liked the irony of an Indian company buying a leading British brand. “Tata is too shrewd and too shy to be caught gloating about his successes like some territory-grabbing East India Company nabob,” the journalist later wrote.

Tata’s foray into building a safe, affordable car turned out to be a disappointment. It was launched amid great fanfare in 2009 as a compact with the base model costing just 100,000 rupees ($1,222; £982). But after the initial success and euphoria, the brand began to lose out to other manufacturers due to issues with production and marketing.

Tata later said it was a “huge mistake to brand Nano as the world’s cheapest car. People don’t want to be seen driving the world’s cheapest car!”

His resilience was also tested during the Mumbai terror attacks of 26 November, 2008. Tata’s marquee Taj Mahal Palace was one of the two luxury hotels that was attacked, along with a train station, a hospital, a Jewish cultural centre, and some other targets in Mumbai.

Thirty-three of the 166 people who died in the 60-hour siege were at the Taj. This included 11 hotel employees, a third of the hotel’s total casualties. Tata pledged to look after the families of employees who were killed or injured, and paid the relatives of those killed the salaries they would have earned for the rest of their lives. He also spent more than $1bn to restore the damaged hotel within 21 months.

Towards the end of his career, Tata found himself embroiled in an unsavoury controversy. In October 2016 he returned to Tata Sons as interim chairman for a few months after the previous incumbent, Cyrus Mistry, was ousted, sparking a bitter management feud (Mistry died in a car crash in September 2022). The role was eventually given to Natarajan Chandrasekaran, who was formerly the chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, India’s most valuable company with a market capitalisation of $67bn.

Peter Casey described Tata as a “modest, reserved and even shy man”. He found a “stately calm” about him and a “fierce discipline”, which included preparing a handwritten to-do list every day. He also described himself as a “bit of an optimist”.

Tata was also a modest and reflective businessman. After the police were called in to end a strike that crippled operations at one of his firm’s factories in Pune in 1989, Tata told journalists: “Perhaps we took our workers for granted. We assumed that we were doing all that we could do for them, when probably we were not.”

In 2009, Tata spoke at a school alumni function about his dream for his country, “where every Indian has an equal opportunity to shine on merit”.

“In a country like ours,” he said, “you have to try and lead by example, not flaunt your wealth and prominence.”

Indian tycoon Ratan Tata has died aged 86, says the Tata Group, the conglomerate he led for more than two decades.

Tata was one of India’s most internationally recognised business leaders.

The Tata Group is one of India’s largest companies, with annual revenues in excess of $100bn (£76.5bn).

In a statement announcing Tata’s death, the current chairman of Tata Sons described him as a “truly uncommon leader”.

Natarajan Chandrasekaran added: “On behalf of the entire Tata family, I extend our deepest condolences to his loved ones.

“His legacy will continue to inspire us as we strive to uphold the principles he so passionately championed.”

During his tenure as chairman of the Tata Group, the conglomerate made several high-profile acquisitions, including the takeover of Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus, UK-based car brands Jaguar and Land Rover, and Tetley, the world’s second-largest tea company.

UK Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said in tribute that Tata was a “titan of the business world” who “played a huge role in shaping British industry”.

A profile published in the Economist magazine in 2011 called Tata a “titan”, crediting him with transforming the family group into “a global powerhouse”.

“He owns less than 1% of the group that bears his family name. But he is a titan nonetheless: the most powerful businessman in India and one of the most influential in the world,” the magazine said.

In 2012, he retired as chairman of the group and was appointed chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, the group’s holding company.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed Tata as a “visionary business leader, a compassionate soul and an extraordinary human being”.

Paying tribute on X, formerly known as Twitter, Modi recounted “countless interactions” with Tata and said he was “extremely pained” by his death.

• Obituary: Ratan Tata, the ‘modest’ Indian tycoon

Tata was born in a traditional Parsi family in 1937. He studied architecture and structural engineering at Cornell University in the US.

In 1962, he joined Tata Industries – the promoter company of the group – as an assistant and spent six months training at a company plant in Jamshedpur.

From here, he went on to work at the Tata Iron and Steel Company (now Tata Steel), Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and National Radio and Electronics (Nelco).

In 1991, JRD Tata, who had led the group for over half a century, appointed Ratan Tata as his successor. “He [JRD Tata] was my greatest mentor… he was like a father and a brother to me – and not enough has been said about that,” Tata later told an interviewer.

In 2008, the Indian government awarded him the Padma Vibhushan, the country’s second-highest civilian honour.

Peter Casey, author of The Story of Tata, described Tata as a “modest, reserved and even shy man” who had a “stately calm” about him and a “fierce discipline”.

He was drawn into a rare unsavoury controversy in 2016, when his successor as Tata Sons chairman, Cyrus Mistry, was ousted from the role, sparking a bitter management feud. Mistry died in a car crash in 2022.

The business tycoon also had a lighter side to him. His love for fast cars and planes was well-known – the Tata group website describes these as some of his “enduring passions”.

Tata was also a scuba diving enthusiast, a hobby that fizzled with age “as his ears could take the pressure no more”.

He was also a dog lover and fondly remembered the many pets who gave him company over the decades.

“My love for dogs as pets is ever strong and will continue for as long as I live,” the industrialist said in a 2021 interview.

“There is an indescribable sadness every time one of my pets passes away and I resolve I cannot go through another parting of that nature. And yet, two-three years down the road, my home becomes too empty and too quiet for me to live without them, so there is another dog that gets my affection and attention, just like the last one,” he said.

He was also often praised for his simplicity. In 2022, a video of him travelling in a Nano car – one of the world’s cheapest cars, now mostly remembered as one of Tata’s failed dreams – went viral on social media.

After more than 100 years hidden in the icy waters of Antarctica, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been revealed in extraordinary 3D detail.

For the first time we can see the vessel, which sank in 1915 and lies 3,000m down at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, as if the murky water has been drained away.

The digital scan, which is made from 25,000 high resolution images, was captured when the ship was found in 2022.

It’s been released as part of a new documentary called Endurance, which will be shown at cinemas.

The team has scoured the scan for tiny details, each of which tell a story linking the past to the present.

In the picture below you can see the plates that the crew used for daily meals, left scattered across the deck.

In the next picture there’s a single boot that might have belonged to Frank Wild, Shackleton’s second-in-command.

Perhaps most extraordinary of all is a flare gun that’s referenced in the journals the crew kept.

The flare gun was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, as the ship that had been the crew’s home was lost to the ice.

“Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship,” explains Dr John Shears who led the expedition that found Endurance.

“And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck. And there we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there’s that flare gun, incredible.”

Sir Ernest Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer who led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out to make the first land crossing of Antarctica.

But the mission was doomed from the outset.

Endurance became stuck in pack ice within weeks of setting off from South Georgia.

The ship, with the crew on board, drifted for months before the order was eventually given to abandon ship. Endurance finally sank on 21 November 1915.

Shackleton and his men were forced to travel for hundreds of miles over ice, land and sea to reach safety – miraculously all 27 of the crew survived.

Their extraordinary story was recorded in their diaries, as well as in Frank Hurley’s photographs, which have had colour added for the Endurance documentary.

The ship itself remained lost until 2022.

Its discovery made headlines around the world – and the footage of Endurance revealed that it is beautifully preserved by the icy waters.

The new 3D scan was made using underwater robots that mapped the wreck from every angle, taking thousands of photographs. These were then “stitched” together to create a digital twin.

While footage filmed at this depth can only show parts of Endurance in the gloom, the scan shows the complete 44m long wooden wreck from bow to stern – even recording the grooves carved into the sediment as the ship skidded to a halt on the seafloor.

The model reveals how the ship was crushed by the ice – the masts toppled and parts of the deck in tatters – but the structure itself is largely intact.

Shackleton’s descendants say Endurance will never be raised – and its location in one of the most remote parts of the globe means visiting the wreck again would be extremely challenging.

But Nico Vincent from Deep Ocean Search, who developed the technology for the scans, along with Voyis Imaging and McGill University, said the digital replica offers a new way to study the ship.

“It’s absolutely fabulous. The wreck is almost intact like she sank yesterday,” said Mr Vincent, who was also a co-leader for the expedition.

He said the scan could be used by scientists to study the sea life that has colonised the wreck, to analyse the geology of the sea floor, and to discover new artefacts.

“So this is really a great opportunity that we can offer for the future.”

The scan belongs to the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust who also funded and organised the expedition to find Shackleton’s ship.

The Endurance documentary is premiering at the London Film Festival on 12 October and will be released in cinemas in the UK on 14 October.

US President Joe Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have held a much-anticipated 30-minute phone call – believed to be their first contact since August – which included discussions on Israel’s intended retaliation to Iran’s missile strike last week.

The White House described the dialogue as “direct” and “productive”, and said Biden and Netanyahu had agreed to stay in “close contact” in coming days. Vice President Kamala Harris also joined the call.

Speaking shortly afterwards, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said its attack against Iran would be “deadly, precise and above all surprising”.

Two forces are at work. One is Joe Biden’s reluctance to see the US dragged into a war with Iran that it believes would be unnecessary and dangerous.

The other is a strong sense among some in Israel that they have an opportunity to deal a body blow to Iran – their mortal enemy.

Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah has energised Israelis who were desperate to break out of the grinding war of attrition on their border with Lebanon.

Lebanon, for them, felt like success and progress, a stark contrast to the position in Gaza.

Despite Israel’s onslaught on Gaza that has killed at least 42,000 people, most of them civilians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not been able to deliver his two war aims – the destruction of Hamas and the recovery of the hostages.

Hamas is still fighting, and still holds around 100 hostages, many of whom might be dead.

The damage done to Israel’s enemies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, has produced in some Israelis an urgent conviction to go further and mount a direct assault on Iran.

For them, a devastating air attack on Iran is a seductive prospect.

Top of the target list for many Israelis are the heavily fortified sites, some driven deep into mountains where Iran houses nuclear facilities that Israel and others fear could be used to make a bomb.

President Biden has made clear the US opposes the idea.

The US believes Iran is not about to make a nuclear weapon. An attack could push them to construct one.

One of the most prominent voices in Israel pressing Netanyahu to ignore US wishes is former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett who says Israel must not hesitate to act against what he calls the Iranian octopus.

He told me that it was “the 11th hour”.

Like the opposition politician and former general Benny Gantz, Bennett believes Iran is weaker than it has been for decades because of the damage done to Hezbollah and Hamas.

“Essentially Iran was defending itself with two arms, Hezbollah and Hamas. They were sort of its insurance policy against a strike,” Bennett says.

“But now both of those arms are pretty much neutralised.”

Bennett sees the moment as a once in a generation opportunity to do real damage to Iran’s Islamic Regime.

He adds: “Here’s the thing. The strategy with Iran – ultimately it’s not going to happen tomorrow.

“We need to accelerate the demise of this regime. This is a regime that will fall.

“If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, the likelihood that they’ll use it in order to save the regime is high. And that means that they’re going to turn the whole Middle East into a nuclear nightmare.”

• Middle East conflict: How will it end?

Bennett recalled two Israeli attacks on nuclear facilities he believes made the Middle East much safer – in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

“People don’t like it,” Bennett says. “But we saved the world from [Bashar al-] Assad with nuclear weapons.

“We have the thankless job of taking out the nuclear facilities of the worst regimes in the world. Everyone likes to criticise us, but we’re doing that job.

“And if they get that bomb, it’s everyone’s problem. It’s not our problem. I want to see how Londoners will feel when there’s an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb. We cannot allow that to happen.”

Iran and Israel have been in direct conflict since April, after Israel assassinated leading Iranian generals with a big airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Syria.

Iran’s retaliation was a missile strike on Israel. The escalation has continued.

The latest came on Tuesday last week in response to Israel’s assault on Iran’s ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Iran unleashed a huge ballistic missile attack, and Israel’s prime minister vowed to hit back.

President Biden was reluctant to restrain Israel in Gaza. And has “urged” Israel to minimise harm to civilians in Lebanon. But he has been adamant that Israel must not answer the Iranians with a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The US believes Iran is not about to make a nuclear weapon.

President Biden has said Israel must defend itself – but not by attacking Iranian nuclear sites – or its oil industry.

The US fears getting dragged into a war it doesn’t want. And there are concerns that if Iran can ride out an attack it will go for broke to produce a nuclear warhead for its missiles.

The next phases in this spiralling war depend on the extent of Israel’s retaliation – which may come any day now.

A New Zealand father who disappeared with his three children into the country’s wilderness three years ago has been publicly seen with them for the first time in years.

A national search has been under way for Tom Phillips since he took Ember, 8, Maverick, 9, and Jayda, 11, away from their family home in December 2021, after a dispute with their mother.

Police believe they have been hiding and camping in the North Island’s western Waikato region and and earlier this year posted an NZ$80,000 (£37,200) appeal for information.

The sighting last week came from a group of teenage pig hunters who had been trekking through the bush and filmed the encounter on their phones.

New Zealand media reported the teenagers had briefly spoken to one of their children – asking if anyone knew they were there. They had replied “only you” and kept walking, the father of one of the teenagers told New Zealand’s 1News.

The teenagers reported that Mr Phillips had been carrying a gun and had a long beard while the children were masked and carrying their own packs.

New Zealand Police have described the sighting as “credible”, and said it was “positive information” for relatives.

“We know it will be reassuring for the children’s wider family,” said Det Insp Andrew Saunders.

While there have been a number of reported sightings of Mr Phillips – this is the first time he is believed to have been seen with all three of his children.

The footage was shot on 3 October in a bush area of Marokopa, with police becoming aware of it at about 19:00 local time (06:00 GMT) that day. That prompted a three- day search involving police and army helicopters.

In the video, Tom Phillips can be seen leading his children through the rugged terrain. They are all wearing camouflage clothing.

Speaking to the New Zealand Herald newspaper on Thursday, the mother of the children, Cat, expressed her relief that they were still alive and that her children appeared well enough to be carrying their own bags.

She accused her ex-partner of using the children as “pawns in his game”.

“They shouldn’t have to be worrying about where they’re going to sleep that night or whether they’re going to be warm,” she told the paper.

She also said authorities should be doing more to track down her ex-partner, and appealed to those she believed were helping her ex-husband.

Police have said they believe Mr Phillips is being helped by other parties.

In June, authorities offered the cash reward for information which would lead to the safe return of the children – although the offer expired before being claimed.

Police said the children had not been in contact with other people in the past three years, and had not received an education.

“We believe that Tom and the children are being assisted and we’re urging anyone who’s doing this to please stop, do the right thing and tell police what you know,” said Det Insp Andrew Saunders.

Last year, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Mr Phillips over his suspected involvement in a bank robbery in Te Kuiti, a small town in the North Island.

Police said he had an accomplice during the alleged incident, and cautioned the public against approaching him as he was probably armed.

There are few stars whose impact on Bollywood is as enduring as that of Rekha. As the actor turns 70 on Thursday, film writer Yasser Usman explores her charm and legacy.

Rekha is one of India’s most glamorous icons – a woman who captured headlines and people’s imaginations for decades while blazing a path for generations of female actors in India.

In the 1970s, she was widely covered for her transformation from a loud, gauche young girl from southern India who entered Bollywood with no knowledge of the Hindi language to a discerning National Award-winning actor who spoke impeccable Urdu and Hindi and brimmed with confidence.

But the unrelenting attention on her personal life took a toll as she withdrew from public life in the years since, choosing to fiercely protect her privacy.

Yet, time and again over the past few decades, Rekha has proved that the air of enigma surrounding her has only left audiences wanting more.

With almost every public appearance, she still captures hearts and creates viral moments on the internet.

Born in Chennai (then Madras) in 1954 as Bhanurekha, she was deeply affected by her mother’s – actress Pushpavalli – struggles and hurt by the absence of her father, Tamil film star Gemini Ganesan.

She was still a teenager when she started acting, mainly because her family faced financial difficulties. In Bombay (now Mumbai), the home of Hindi cinema, she had to grapple with an unfamiliar language and a male-dominated industry.

“Bombay was like a jungle, and I had walked in unarmed. It was one of the most frightening phases of my life… Guys did try and take advantage of my vulnerability,” she once said.

As her early work garnered attention, she faced relentless body-shaming, with viewers, journalists and even other actors ridiculing her weight and skin colour.

In her later interviews, she also spoke about how, as a teenager, she was forced to do some scenes she wasn’t comfortable.

Just as everything seemed to stack up against her, the young actor flipped the script.

With candid interviews and statements unheard of in 1970s India, Rekha became a headliner act for gossip magazines. The young starlet’s unapologetic frankness about her sexuality was nothing short of revolutionary.

Rekha was unflinchingly open about her relationships with her co-actors. But due to a lack of reciprocation in public by the men in question, she was often humiliated, with the press using unsavoury headlines to describe her.

In part challenged by the narrative around her, Rekha underwent a dramatic makeover in the mid-70s when she started fitness trends and learnt to pick the right make-up that worked for her.

An early pioneer of fitness trends, she brought liquid diets into popular conversations, became an ambassador for aerobics and embraced yoga long before it became a celebrity craze.

Once derided for her unconventional appearance, Rekha managed to redefine beauty and fitness standards and create a more democratic industry for actors of all skin tones.

But it was the re-invention of her craft that truly made her an ambassador of transformations.

Along with her appearance, she also honed her acting with meticulous attention to diction and technique.

Her performances were marked by a rare emotional depth in critically acclaimed films like Ghar (1978), where she delicately portrayed the trauma of a rape survivor. She effortlessly transitioned to comedy in Khoobsurat (1980) and her alluring performance in Silsila (1981) cemented her iconic mainstream appeal.

That same year, her career-defining role in Umrao Jaan elevated her to the ranks of India’s most celebrated actresses and earned her a national award.

Her foray into arthouse cinema showcased her immense versatility, with exquisite performances in Kalyug (1981), Utsav (1984) and Ijaazat (1987). Her versatility was on full display in the action-packed intensity of the blockbuster Khoon Bhari Maang (1988).

Her ability to seamlessly transition between genres and characters was the hallmark of her career.

Rekha heralded a new era in the Hindi film industry where she owned her narrative, built an aura around herself, and was rightfully crowned a diva.

In 1990, she married businessman Mukesh Aggarwal but the couple soon grew apart. The same year, when she was in the US for a programme, her estranged husband of just a few months tragically took his own life.

She returned home to lurid media headlines such as “The Macabre Truth Behind Mukesh’s Suicide” and “The Black Widow”.

Posters of her film Sheshnaag (1990) were vandalised, and she was shunned for a while by the film industry.

Being cast out overnight set off her final transformative phase.

For about a year, she put all her energy into the action-packed revenge-drama Phool Baney Angaare (1991), which did well at the box office.

But despite the audience’s love and her successful comeback, Rekha, once known for her fierce and candid persona, now presented a significantly toned-down, melancholic, and philosophical approach.

In an interview to BBC, she once said “[The media] would write whatever they want adding their own spicy takes… I was very angry and hurt. And whenever I am very hurt I tend to shut up. So that’s exactly what I did – I stopped talking.”

This was perhaps her final makeover, a metamorphosis which firmly established her as the enigmatic diva we know today.

Since then, not much is known of her personal life and her film appearances have grown sparser.

Yet, when she leans into her diva image, like in the sensuous song Kaisi Paheli Zindagani from Parineeta (2005), or when she takes to the stage to dance to one of her old hits, her fans are still glad to celebrate.

Eight-year-old Grace Welch has been waiting since 2019 for her older sister to occupy the bed next to hers.

Her parents had told her that, Penelope, a 10-year-old born in China, would be joining the family, who live in Kentucky in the US.

Grace, also adopted from China, was born without her left forearm. Her mother, Aimee Welch, said Penelope too has a “serious but manageable” special need, although she did not wish to disclose it.

The Welch family, who have four biological sons, sought to adopt children with disabilities after the birth of a nephew without arms.

“He taught us all what a person with limb differences can achieve with the right love and support. His birth started us on the path towards adopting Grace,” Ms Welch said. “We believe in the dignity and worth of each person, just as they are, in all their diversity.”

But the pandemic delayed their plans.

Then in September, China announced that it was putting a stop to international adoptions, including cases where families were already matched with adoptee children.

The painful wait will particularly determine the fates of China’s most vulnerable children – those with special needs.

Up-to-date statistics are not readily available, but Beijing’s civil affairs ministry said that 95% of international adoptions between 2014 and 2018 involved children with disabilities.

These children “will have no future” without international adoption as they are unlikely to be adopted domestically, says Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Ms Welch said Grace was especially saddened by the news that Penelope may never come home: “She told me, ‘We were meant to be a family of eight so that everyone could have a buddy.’”

Ms Welch called on China to “keep the promises made to the children already matched with adoptive parents”.

Beijing has not commented since the September announcement, when it thanked families for their “love in adopting children from China”. It said the ban was in line with international agreements and showed China’s “overall development and progress”.

China began allowing international adoptions in 1992 as the country was opening up, and they peaked in the mid 2000s. More than 160,000 children have been adopted by families across the world in the last three decades.

A contentious one-child policy had forced families to give up children, especially girls and kids with special needs. Social stigma around disability had also led to more children with special needs ending up in orphanages.

Dani Nelson, who was adopted to the US in 2017, said she was given basic care at an orphanage in the southwestern city of Guiyang, but it was “not enough for me to live a normal life”.

The 21-year-old was born with spina bifida – a spinal defect – and hydrocephalus, which is a neurological disorder that causes water to gather around her brain.

In her first three years in the US, she had seven surgeries which she said helped her “lead a normal life”.

“I joined a swim team. I got a job… Adoption saved my life,” said Ms Nelson, who now works as a cashier at a coffee shop.

Like in many Asian societies, disabled people in China face discrimination and are sometimes even seen as a source of “bad luck”.

China has made some strides in improving accessibility to the disabled, but public infrastructure, especially in rural areas, are still weaker than countries in the West. It has only recently started developing education institutions and curricula for students with special needs.

Only the most seriously disabled receive financial support from the government.

The BBC had previously interviewed Chinese adults with special needs whose parents have had to stop working to care for them.

Aware of these challenges, waiting families are concerned about what will happen to the children they were meant to adopt, some of whom need urgent medical treatment.

Meghan and David Briggs were matched with a boy in Zhengzhou, Henan, in 2020. The 10-year-old has a “moderate special need that requires medical intervention”, Mrs Briggs said.

The couple live with their biological son, also 10, in Pennsylvania. Mr Briggs said the family made a “wilful choice” to adopt a child who is more vulnerable and less likely to get the specialised care and therapy in an institution in China than with a family in the US.

“Such care is a financial and emotional responsibility. We were prepared to offer this care because we view this child as our family,” said Mr Briggs, who himself was adopted from South Korea.

“He was promised a family by his own government,” Ms Briggs said. “The children are the ones who will suffer with this decision,” she said.

Not everyone agrees.

Some, including adult adoptees, are relieved about that Beijing has ended foreign adoption.

“My experience as a transracial adoptee being raised in a predominantly white, Christian city is that you often get looked down upon. I was constantly reminded that I don’t belong,” said Lucy Sheen, who was adopted by a white family in the UK.

Ms Sheen, now in her 60s, added that her adoptive family had little knowledge of her Chinese culture and heritage. She was once told off for asking to learn Mandarin.

“Some adopters have a ‘white-saviour’ mentality or have the ideology that they are bringing us where they come from because ‘West is best’, I think that needs to change,” she added.

Nanchang Project, a non-profit group that helps connect adoptees to their roots in China, said it felt “a sense of relief that no more children will be separated from their birthplace, culture, and identity”.

“We hope this moment can shift focus toward the need for post-adoptive services to support Chinese adoptees and their families for the rest of their lives,” the group said in a statement last month.

Under the new policy, China will only send children overseas for adoption if the adoptive parents are blood relatives. The BBC understands that US authorities are in talks with Beijing on whether a further exception can be made for waiting families.

John and Anne Contant who were matched with five-year-old Corrine in 2019, said they “honour China’s decision to change course on their adoption policy”.

“If there have been more families wanting to adopt domestically, that’s wonderful… Our ask is for these 300 children who have been matched [to families in the US] to be allowed to come home,” he said.

The couple live in Chicago with six children. Three of them were adopted from China and live with albinism, as does Corinne.

The Contants spoke to Corinne via WeChat when their plans to travel to China were shelved because of the pandemic.

“Corinne met our children, saw her home and the room that had been prepared for her, and experienced the excitement our children felt in preparation for her arrival,” Mr Contant said.

“In one of our conversations, she pointedly asked, ‘When are you coming to get me?’”

False claims suggesting that Hurricane Milton was “engineered” and that the weather in Florida is being “manipulated” have been spreading on social media.

There is no technology that allows humans to create and control hurricanes.

But on platforms like X and TikTok, posts alleging – without evidence – that the US government is secretly controlling the weather have been viewed millions of times.

Many were published by accounts known for spreading conspiracy theories, as well as misinformation about Covid-19 or vaccines.

These users shared the belief that Hurricane Milton, one of the strongest storms in recent US history, was purposefully created by shadowy forces at the heart of US politics.

But they proposed several different explanations for how that was supposedly done.

Some users claimed weather manipulation techniques like cloud seeding are to blame.

Cloud seeding involves manipulating existing clouds to try to produce more rain, for example in countries with a dry climate.

But the south-east of the US had already been hit by huge amounts of rainfall from Hurricane Helene, which triggered deadly flooding in several states just two weeks ago.

“When we cloud seed, it is because we do not have enough aerosols or water vapor within the atmosphere to see condensation occur, so we try and force it through cloud seeding,” says Jill Trepanier, an expert in extreme weather phenomena from Louisiana State University.

“Over the western Gulf of Mexico and the Bay of Campeche, that is not a problem. The Earth will make a hurricane all on its own.”

Other users blamed “geoengineering” instead – a wide array of methods to manipulate the environment with a view to reducing the effects of climate change.

But there are no tools that would allow humans to create or control storms like this one.

“There is no possibility using current knowledge and technology to use geoengineering to modify hurricanes,” says Suzana Camargo from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Hurricanes are natural weather systems.

Typically they begin as what is known as a tropical wave – a low pressure area where thunderstorms and clouds develop.

As strong winds push this system away from Africa and towards the Americas, warm, moist air rises from the tropical Atlantic Ocean, and the system of clouds and winds begins to spin.

With sufficient energy from the warm ocean waters, combined with favourable circulation patterns in the atmosphere, it may be able to strengthen into a full hurricane.

Social media posts seen by BBC Verify wrongly suggest hurricanes like this one are being created for sinister reasons, including to attempt to sway next month’s presidential election.

Those assertions are false, but there is a link to human activity because of the way climate change is making these storms generally more intense.

Climate change – caused by emissions of planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide from human activities – is not thought to be increasing the number of tropical storms worldwide.

But rising temperatures do make the strongest hurricanes more likely.

Warmer seas mean that these storms can pick up more energy, potentially leading to higher wind speeds.

Hurricane Milton strengthened particularly quickly as it moved over the Gulf of Mexico, where sea surface temperatures were around 1-2C warmer than average.

Peak sustained wind speeds increased from 90mph (150km/h) to 175mph (280km/h) in just 12 hours on 7 October, according to National Hurricane Center data.

For some social media users, this sudden change was perceived as “evidence” to back their suggestions this was not a “natural” storm, but instead one manufactured by humans.

But this trend fits with expectations of hurricanes generally intensifying more quickly in a warming world.

“As we warm the planet, we anticipate a lot of potential impacts to hurricanes that can make them more damaging – including the ability to strengthen more quickly over unnaturally warm ocean waters,” explains Andra Garner, an assistant professor at Rowan University in New Jersey.

Hurricane Helene – which hit Florida around two weeks ago – also intensified rapidly over the Gulf of Mexico.

A new study released on Wednesday found that the exceptionally high sea surface temperatures over its track were made hundreds of times more likely by human-caused warming.

“[Helene] was significantly more destructive because of climate change,” explains Ben Clarke of the World Weather Attribution group, which led the study.

Beyond typically stronger winds, climate change is also affecting other hurricane hazards.

A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture – up to about 7% for every 1C of temperature rise. This means that rainfall can be more intense.

And global sea-levels have been rising in recent decades, largely thanks to global warming. This makes it more likely that a given storm surge – short-term increases to sea-levels from storms – will lead to coastal flooding.

In Florida, average sea-levels have risen by more than 18cm (7in) since 1970, according to US government data.

For some of the users spreading conspiracy theories around Hurricane Milton, this too amounts to “scaremongering”. But the evidence suggests otherwise.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed directly to the people of Lebanon in a video published on Tuesday, telling them to turn against the Iran-backed Shia group Hezbollah or risk destruction on the scale of Gaza.

“Christians, Druze, Muslims Sunni and Shia, all of you are suffering because of Hezbollah’s futile war against Israel,” he said. “Stand up and take your country back.”

But in Shia, Sunni and Christian neighbourhoods of Beirut on Wednesday morning, Netanyahu’s appeal was falling largely – if not entirely – on deaf ears.

“Yes we heard the address but nobody here listens to Netanyahu,” said Yusuf Habbal, 31, as he cut pieces of the traditional Lebanese sweet Kunafah in his shop in Tariq El Jdideh, a Sunni area.

“Nobody told Netanyahu to occupy Palestine, nobody told him to occupy Lebanon. It is the Israelis who are driving this conflict.”

But Habbal and his fellow Sunnis “also do not accept what Hezbollah is doing”, he said.

“Before Netanyahu ever spoke about Hezbollah, we were against them. Beiruti people know that Hezbollah has their own agenda. And now they are driving us into a war we do not want.”

Hezbollah, which is a better-armed and more powerful force in Lebanon than the country’s own military, began firing rockets into northern Israel a year ago, in support for Hamas the day after the brutal 7 October attack.

The Hezbollah rockets signalled the beginning of a new phase of its clash with Israel. Last month, Israel escalated that simmering conflict when it expanded its bombing campaign of Lebanon, including in Beirut, before launching a ground invasion in the south of the country.

“They are striking very close to us now and it is terrifying,” said Mohammed Khair, 43, as he had his hair cut in a barber shop in Tariq El Jdideh.

“Nobody here wants this war, but nobody is going to be turned against Hezbollah by something Netanyahu said in a video,” he said.

Netanyahu was “always talking to the Palestinians, to the Lebanese,” said Tarraf Nasser, a 76-year-old retiree who was passing by the barber shop. “Nobody listens to Netanyahu,” he said. “He is not really talking to us.”

In Achrafieh, Beirut’s main Christian neighbourhood, there was a sense of futility at the Lebanese people’s ability to heed Netanyahu’s advice, even if they wanted to.

Antoine, a 75-year-old Catholic retiree, who asked to be identified only by his first name, was smoking a cigarette outside the neighbourhood’s Brewholic Café.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister of Israel, not Lebanon. He should take care of his people, not ours,” Antoine said.

“At the same time, it is true that we have to do something to be free from the influence of Iran. But we don’t have weapons and we don’t have politicians who can be truly Lebanese. All our politicians are affiliated to other states or groups, mostly Iran.”

Nobody in Lebanon was going to have domestic conflict because Netanyahu instructed them to, Antoine said. “We will do that on our own.”

Across the road in her shoe shop, Maya Habib, 35, gave a tired shrug at the Israeli prime minister’s video appeal. “Everyone here knows that Israel lies,” she said. “But listen, maybe he has a point. He warned everyone – don’t attack us, don’t come close to us, and it won’t be your war. Now it is.”

Among the Christians of Achrafieh, “people are paying attention” to Netanyahu, Habib said. “But nobody can do anything anyway,” she said, shrugging again. “We don’t even have a president. Netanyahu is saying all the weapons should go to the Lebanese army, but how?”

Hezbollah can still rely on staunch support in the neighbourhoods where it is the dominant force in political and social life, and among the Shia communities of mixed areas. Several Shia residents of the Mar Elias neighbourhood said they stood completely behind the group.

“We are all Hezbollah here, whatever Hezbollah does we will support them,” said Fadi Ali Kiryani, a 52-year-old corner shop owner. Like other people in Mar Elias, Kiryani said he was not concerned by Netanyahu’s threat that Lebanon would suffer the same destruction and suffering as Gaza.

“Even if it becomes worse here than Gaza, we will still fly the flag,” he said.

“My house in Dahieh has already been destroyed. I would rather my house was gone than the shoe on the foot of one Hezbollah fighter was damaged.”

Sitting behind the desk of her 40-year-old towel and bedlinens shop, 75-year-old Fany Sharara said that Hezbollah was the only force defending the people of Lebanon.

“Nothing Netanyahu could say could change my mind,” she said. “He is a criminal, an assassin, he cannot leave one child alive.”

Israel had “all of Europe and all of America” on its side, Sharara added. “We are with Hezbollah because they are the only ones defending us. Not the Lebanese government.”

A few doors down, and a few years younger, 24-year-old jewellery shop owner Ali Shoura was simply weary of everyone involved, he said. “Nobody really cares – the politicians, the people in power, the Lebanese government, Iran, Israel, America, Hezbollah too.”

He shook his head. “It’s all just theatre,” he said. “And we are all the victims.”

A Nepalese teenager has broken the world record for the youngest mountaineer to summit Earth’s 14 highest peaks.

Nima Rinji Sherpa, 18, stood atop Tibet’s Mount Shishapangma at about 06:05 local time on Wednesday.

In doing so, he became the latest of just a few dozen people to have scaled all of the world’s “eight-thousanders” – the 14 mountains that the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation (UIAA) recognises as more than 8,000 metres above sea level.

Sherpa, who started climbing high-altitude mountains at the age of 16, summited all eight-thousanders in 740 days.

He reached the peak of Nepal’s Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest mountain, on 30 September, 2022 – shortly after finishing his 10th-grade high school exams.

On each trek the young athlete was accompanied by his climbing partner, Pasang Nurbu Sherpa.

The record-shattering ascent on Wednesday marked the latest in a long list of accolades for Nima Rinji, who is also the world’s youngest climber to have scaled Himalayan mountains G1 and G2; the youngest climber to have scaled Kashmir’s Nanga Parbat; and the youngest climber to have scaled both Mount Everest and nearby Lhotse within 10 hours.

Standing atop Mount Shishapangma on Wednesday morning, though, another life ambition was front of mind for the 18-year-old: to subvert the stereotype of Sherpas as mere helpers who assist foreign climbers on their ascents.

“This summit is not just the culmination of my personal journey, but a tribute to every Sherpa who has ever dared to dream beyond the traditional boundaries set for us,” Nima Rinji said shortly after scaling Mount Shishapangma.

“Mountaineering is more than labour, it is a testament to our strength, resilience and passion.”

Although the word ‘Sherpa’ is commonly used to describe someone who is a mountain guide or porter working in the Everest area, it is in fact the name of an ethnic group of people who live in the mountains of Nepal.

Nima Rinji said he wants to prove to younger generation of Sherpas that they can “rise above the stereotype of being only support climbers and embrace their potential as top-tier athletes, adventurers, and creators”.

“We are not just guides; we are trailblazers,” he said on Wednesday. “Let this be a call to every Sherpa to see the dignity in our work, the power in our heritage, and the limitless possibilities in our future.”

Nima Rinji comes from a family of record-holding mountaineers, who now run Seven Summit Treks: Nepal’s largest mountaineering expedition company, and the group with whom he completed the Mount Shishapangma climb.

Speaking to the BBC shortly after the record had been set, his father, Tashi Lakpa Sherpa, recounted the moment he delivered the news via satellite phone.

“He told me, ‘Dad, I reached the summit at 6:05 Chinese time. ‘My colleague Pasang Norbu and I have arrived’,” Tashi Lakpa recalled.

“Being highly trained and professional, he wasn’t even thrilled; it was normal. I said ‘I had faith in you. Return safely’.”

Rakesh Gurung, Director of Adventure Tourism and Mountaineering Branch under Nepal’s Department of Tourism, confirmed to the BBC that Nima Rinji had set the record.

“The peak has been confirmed this morning. Now I understand that there is a matter of giving a certificate after returning to the base camp,” he said.

The previous record holder for the youngest mountaineer to scale all eight-thousanders was also a Nepali climber, Mingma Gyabu ‘David’ Sherpa, who achieved it at the age of 30 in 2019.

“This record is difficult to break now,” Gurung noted.

All 14 eight-thousanders are located in Asia, in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges.