US President Joe Biden has said he is “absolutely, positively” urging Israel to stop firing at UN peacekeepers during its conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, following two incidents in 48 hours.

On Friday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its troops were responsible for the incident, in which two Sri Lankan soldiers for the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) were injured.

IDF soldiers operating around the Unifil base in Naqoura identified a threat and opened fire, the Israeli army said, adding the incident would be investigated “at the highest levels”.

On Thursday, Unfil’s two Indonesian soldiers were injured falling from an observation tower after an Israeli tank fired towards it.

The leaders of France, Italy and Spain issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s actions, saying they were unjustifiable and should immediately come to an end.

Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry said it “strongly condemns” the IDF attack which injured two of its soldiers.

The head of UN peacekeeping said there was reason to believe some firing on UN positions in southern Lebanon had been direct, though he did not ascribe responsibility for the incidents.

“For example we have a case where a tower was hit by a fire and also damages to cameras at one of the positions – which obviously to us very much looked like direct fire,” Jean-Pierre Lacroix told the BBC’s Newshour programme.

As Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon continues, the IDF and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah continued to fire missiles and rockets across the Israel-Lebanon border.

The IDF said it had detected about 100 rockets crossing into northern Israel from Lebanon within the space of half an hour on Friday. Two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were detected crossing from Lebanon, one of which was intercepted, the IDF said.

The Lebanese ministry of health said three people, including a two-year-old girl, were killed in an Israeli raid on the city of Sidon in southern Lebanon. Two Lebanese soldiers were killed after Israeli forces targeted an army post in the town of Kafra in southern Lebanon, the Lebanese army said.

In the capital, Beirut, emergency workers continued to comb through the wreckage of buildings hit by two Israeli air strikes on Thursday.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the attacks came with no warning and killed 22 people, all civilians, and injured another 117. Israel has not commented.

Israeli forces launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon last month as they escalated their response to rocket fire from Hezbollah.

Hezbollah and Israel have been trading near-daily cross-border fire since last October, when the Palestinian armed group Hamas in the Gaza Strip carried out a deadly attack in southern Israel.

The IDF has said the UN post struck in Naqoura on Friday was about 164ft (50m) away from the source of the threat identified by soldiers. It said it had told peacekeeping troops to stay in protected spaces at the time.

Unifil said Israeli military vehicles had knocked over barriers at another UN site in Labbouneh, closer to the border with Israel.

The incidents represented a “serious development”, it said.

Mikati said Friday’s attack was “a crime which is directed at the international community”.

Israel argues that Unifil has failed to stabilise the region, and has asked peacekeepers to withdraw northwards so it can confront Hezbollah.

The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, has reiterated Israel’s call for Unifil personnel to withdraw north by 5km (3 miles) to “avoid danger,” but the UN’s Jean-Pierre Lacroix said they would remain in position.

About 10,000 peacekeepers from 50 countries are stationed in Lebanon, alongside around 800 civilian staff.

Since 1978, they have patrolled the area between the Litani River and the UN-recognised boundary between Lebanon and Israel, known as the “Blue Line”.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel on 8 October last year, the day after Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel. The Iran-backed group says it is acting in solidarity with the Palestinians and has said it will stop firing if there is a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Over the past three weeks, Israel has dramatically escalated its campaign against Hezbollah, intensifying air strikes against southern Lebanon and southern parts of Beirut, assassinating Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and launching a ground invasion.

Lebanon says more than 2,000 people have been killed, mainly in the recent escalation, and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. This week Hezbollah rocket fire has killed two Israeli civilians and a Thai national, Israeli authorities say.

In a separate development on Friday, Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defence agency was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying at least 30 people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jabalia town and refugee camp in the north of the Palestinian enclave.

The IDF has not commented on the issue.

Meanwhile, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said “thousands are trapped” in the Jabalia refugee camp, including five of its staff.

The MSF said Israeli forces had issued evacuation orders on 7 October in Jabalia, “while carrying out attacks at the same time”, meaning people could not leave safely.

Dr Mohammed Salha, the acting director of the al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, told the BBC’s Newshour programme the area had been under siege for seven days.

He warned that the hospital would run out of fuel on Saturday, as Israeli forces were “cutting Jabalia from the rest of Gaza”.

“No medication, no medical supplies, no healthy water, no fuel, so pressure, pressure on these people to move and go directly to the south,” Dr Salha said.

Israel has been conducting a new ground operation in the area, saying it is targeting regrouping Hamas fighters who aim to launch attacks, with dozens of people reportedly killed or wounded in northern Gaza in recent days.

Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon is about to end its second week, as Israel’s war has already entered its second year. Appeals for a ceasefire have increased following an air strike in Beirut on Thursday night, and the wounding on Friday, for the second day running, of UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon by Israeli military fire.

A new offensive is taking place in Jabalia, in northern Gaza, despite persistent calls for the conflict there to end. Israel’s allies are also urging restraint as the country prepares to retaliate against Iran, following last week’s ballistic missile attack.

However, Israel will continue to pursue its own path, and resist this pressure, because of three factors: 7 October, Benjamin Netanyahu and the United States.

It was in January 2020 when Iranian general Qassem Soleimani landed at Baghdad airport on a night-time flight from Damascus. Soleimani was the head of Iran’s notorious Quds Force, an elite, clandestine unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps specialising in overseas operations.

The group – whose name means Jerusalem, and whose main adversary was Israel – was responsible for arming, training, funding and directing proxy forces abroad in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories and beyond. At the time, Soleimani was perhaps the second most powerful man in Iran, after the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

As Soleimani’s convoy left the airport, it was destroyed by missiles fired from a drone that killed him instantly.

Although Israel provided intelligence to help locate its arch-adversary, the drone belonged to the United States. The assassination order had been given by then US President Donald Trump, not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” former President Trump would later say in a speech referring to the Soleimani assassination. In a separate interview, Trump also suggested that he had expected Israel to play a more active role in the attack and complained that Netanyahu was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier”.

While Trump’s account of events is disputed, at the time it was believed that Netanyahu, who praised the killing, was concerned that direct Israeli involvement could provoke a large-scale attack against Israel, either from Iran directly, or its proxies in Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories. Israel was fighting a shadow war with Iran, but each side was careful to keep the fighting within certain bounds, for fear of provoking the other into a larger-scale conflict.

Just over four years later, in April of this year, the same Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Israeli jets to bomb a building in the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing two Iranian generals amongst others.

Then in July, the Israeli prime minister authorised the assassination of Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top military commander, in an air strike on Beirut. The response of the current US president was reportedly to swear at him, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, who claims that President Joe Biden was aghast that Israel’s prime minister was prepared to escalate a conflict the White House had been trying to bring to an end for months.

“You know, the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor,” President Biden is reported to have said.

The same prime minister, characterised as being too cautious by one US president, was then castigated as being too aggressive by his successor.

What separates the two episodes is of course 7 October 2023 – the bloodiest day in the history of Israel and a political, military and intelligence failure of catastrophic proportions.

What unites the two moments, however, is Netanyahu defying the will of a US president.

Both factors help to explain the way Israel continues to prosecute the current war.

Israel’s most recent wars concluded after a few weeks, once international pressure built so much that the United States insisted on a ceasefire.

The ferocity and scale of the Hamas attack against Israel, the impact on Israeli society and its sense of security, mean that this war was always going to be unlike any recent conflict.

For a US administration pouring billions of dollars’ worth of weapons into Israel, Palestinian civilian deaths and suffering in Gaza have been deeply uncomfortable, and politically damaging for the administration. For America’s critics in the region, the apparent impotence of the superpower when it comes to influencing the largest recipient of US aid is baffling.

Even after US jets were involved in repelling Iranian attacks on Israel in April – a clear sign of how Israel’s security is underwritten by its larger ally – Israel continued to bat away attempts to change the course of its war.

This summer, Israel chose to escalate its conflict with Hezbollah, without seeking prior approval from the United States.

As Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Netanyahu has learned from more than 20 years of experience that US pressure is something he can withstand, if not ignore. Netanyahu knows that the US, particularly in an election year, will not take action that forces him to divert from his chosen course (and believes, in any event, that he is fighting America’s enemies too).

Especially when it comes to the latest escalation, it would be wrong to assume that Netanayhu is operating outside the Israeli political mainstream. If anything, the pressure on him is to be tougher to strike harder against Hezbollah, but also Iran.

When a ceasefire plan in Lebanon was mooted by the US and France last month, criticism of the proposed 21-day truce came from the opposition, and the main left-wing grouping in Israel, as well as the right-wing parties.

Israel is determined to continue its wars now, not just because it feels it can withstand international pressure, but also because Israel’s tolerance of the threats it faces has shifted after 7 October.

Hezbollah has for years stated its aim to invade the Galilee in northern Israel. Now that the Israeli public has experienced the reality of gunmen infiltrating homes, that threat cannot be contained, it must be removed.

Israel’s perception of risk has also changed. Long-held notions of military red lines in the region have evaporated. Several acts have been committed in the past year that could, until recently, have led to an all-out conflict, raining bombs and missiles on Tehran, Beirut, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Israel has assassinated the head of Hamas while he was a guest of the Iranians in Tehran; it has also killed the entire leadership of Hezbollah, including Hassan Nasrallah; it has assassinated senior Iranian officials inside diplomatic buildings in Syria.

Hezbollah has fired more than 9,000 missiles, rockets and drones at Israeli cities, including ballistic missiles at Tel Aviv. The Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have also launched large missiles at Israel’s cities, intercepted by Israeli defences as they re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere above central Israel. Iran has launched not one, but two attacks against Israel in the past six months involving more than 500 drones and missiles. Israel has invaded Lebanon.

Any one of these might, in the past, have precipitated a regional war. The fact that they have not will change the way a normally cautious, risk-averse Israeli prime minister decides on his next move.

When two white vapour trails cross the sky near the front line in eastern Ukraine, it tends to mean one thing. Russian jets are about to attack.

But what happened near the city of Kostyantynivka was unprecedented. The lower trail split in two and a new object quickly accelerated towards the other vapour trail until they crossed and a bright orange flash lit up the sky.

Was it, as many believed, a Russian war plane shooting down another in so-called friendly fire 20km (12 miles) from the front line, or a Ukrainian jet shooting down a Russian plane?

Intrigued, Ukrainians soon found out from the fallen debris that they had just witnessed the destruction of Russian’s newest weapon – the S-70 stealth combat drone.

This is no ordinary drone. Named Okhotnik (Hunter), this heavy, unmanned vehicle is as big as a fighter jet but without a cockpit. It is very hard to detect and its developers claim it has “almost no analogy” in the world.

That all may be true, but it clearly went astray, and it appears the second trail seen on the video came from a Russian Su-57 jet, apparently chasing it down.

The Russian plane may have been trying to re-establish the contact with the errant drone, but as they were both flying into a Ukrainian air defence zone, it is assumed a decision was made to destroy the Okhotnik to prevent it ending up in enemy hands.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv have commented officially on what happened in the skies near Kostyantynivka. But analysts believe the Russians most likely lost control over their drone, possibly due to jamming by Ukraine’s electronic warfare systems.

This war has seen many drones but nothing like Russia’s S-70.

It weighs more than 20 tonnes and reputedly has a range of 6,000km (3,700 miles).

Shaped like an arrow, it looks very similar to American X-47B, another stealth combat drone created a decade ago.

The Okhotnik is supposed to be able to carry bombs and rockets to strike both ground and aerial targets as well as conduct reconnaissance.

And, significantly, it is designed to work in conjunction with Russia’s fifth-generation Su-57 fighter jets.

It has been under development since 2012 and the first flight took place in 2019.

But until last weekend there was no evidence that it had been used in Russia’s two-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine.

Earlier this year it was reportedly spotted at the Akhtubinsk airfield in southern Russia, one of the launch sites to attack Ukraine.

So it is possible the abortive flight over Kostyantynivka was one of Moscow’s first attempts to test its new weapon in combat conditions.

Wreckage of one of Russia’s notorious long-range D-30 glide bombs was reportedly found amidst the aircraft’s crash site.

These deadly weapons use satellite navigation to become even more dangerous.

So what was the Okhotnik doing flying with an Su-57 jet? According to Kyiv-based aviation expert Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi, the warplane may have transmitted a signal from a ground base to the drone to increase the extent of their operation.

The stealth drone’s failure is no doubt a big blow for Russia’s military. It was due to go into production this year but clearly the unmanned aircraft is not ready.

Four protype S-70s are thought to have been built and it is possible the one blown out of the sky over Ukraine was the most advanced of the four.

Even though it was destroyed, Ukrainian forces may still be able to glean valuable information about the Okhotnik.

“We may learn whether it has its own radars to find targets or whether the ammunition is pre-programmed with co-ordinates where to strike,” explains Anatoliy Khrapchysnkyi.

Just by studying images from the crash site, he believes it is clear the drone’s stealth capabilities are rather limited.

As the engine nozzle’s shape is round, he says it can be picked up by radar. The same goes for the many rivets on the aircraft which are most likely made of aluminium.

No doubt the wreckage will be pored over by Ukrainian engineers and their findings passed on to Kyiv’s Western partners.

And yet, this incident shows the Russians are not standing still, reliant on their massive human resources and conventional weapons.

They are working on new and smarter ways to fight the war. And what failed today may succeed next time.

While millions of people in Florida fled Hurricane Milton, Mike Smalls Jr ventured into the violent winds in Tampa, Florida, holding a blow-up mattress, an umbrella and a pack of ramen noodles.

He went outside Wednesday evening as the storm pounded the US state and livestreamed on the platform Kick. He told his online audience if he reached 10,000 views, he would launch himself and his mattress into the water.

Once he hit the threshold, he took the plunge. Then he got worried: “The wind started picking up and I don’t know how to swim…so I had to grab on to the tree.”

The area was under an evacuation order – meaning residents had been advised by local officials to leave their homes, for their own safety.

Mike’s hour-long stream from Tampa Bay has more than 60,000 views on the streaming platform Kick, and has been seen by millions after being clipped up and posted on other social-media platforms, including X.

Live streaming – filming yourself in real time – has become increasingly lucrative for content creators looking to make quick money.

But these streams can involve dangerous stunts, as content creators try to stand out in an increasingly competitive environment.

Many people have criticised Mike’s behaviour on social media, suggesting he’s risking his life for clicks.

He made it safely – and told me he’d do the risky stunt again, “if the price is right”.

When asked about the backlash, he admits what he did was “controversial” and acknowledges that some might think he is risking not just his life, but the lives of those who might have to save him. But, he added: “From a content creator standpoint, people like to see kind of edgy things.”

• ‘The tornado was inside our house’ – Florida reels after Milton
• ‘It’s eerie to see its power’ – Florida woman documents 20 hours in hurricane’s path in messages to BBC
• Helene is deadliest mainland US hurricane since Katrina

The Tampa Police Department said in a statement: “Ignoring mandatory evacuation orders puts lives at risk. When individuals disregard these warnings, they not only jeopardise their own safety, but also create additional challenges for first responders who are working tirelessly to save lives.

“Intentionally placing oneself in harm’s way could divert critical resources and delay vital rescue operations for others.”

Hundreds of people have died during this year’s hurricane season, which has devastated parts of the US south-eastern coast.

Millions had been forced to evacuate as Hurricane Milton, which at its peak was measured as a category 5 storm, made landfall on Wednesday along Florida’s Gulf Coast. At least 16 people have died in the storm, millions are still without power and thousands had to be rescued by first responders as water overtook homes.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton have bookended an exceptionally busy period of tropical weather in the US. In less than two weeks, five hurricanes formed – not far off from what the Atlantic would typically see during an entire year.

Mike is one of a number of content creators on social media platforms, including Kick and TikTok, who have been livestreaming and making money from pulling reckless stunts and risking their lives in hurricanes.

Livestreaming content is Mike’s full-time job, he says.

Previous stunts posted on his profile include setting fireworks off inside a bedroom and winding up staff in fast-food restaurants.

His plan for livestreaming Hurricane Milton was: “Get some nice clips, and then, if things get too wild, I can, just, you know, track my little five, 10-minute walk back home,” he added.

This wasn’t the first time he’d exposed himself to danger.

A few weeks before Milton struck, he went out into Hurricane Helene – which also hit Florida – carrying a tent as a prop and livestreamed for more than five hours.

He filmed himself on his phone holding up the tent in an underpass, saying he was “going to survive the hurricane. Why? To entertain the people”.

Just metres away, the ocean was crashing over barriers.

“It’s my job just to entertain and think of creative things to entertain my chat. And if people want to, you know, if they’re inspired by what I do, I respect it,” he said, adding you have to gauge and “do things at your own risk”.

Platforms like Kick offer incentives: money for the number of views streamers get and donations from people who like what they’re doing.

Smalls Jr did not specify how much money he earned from this particular livestream, but said the metrics vary from streamers, with some making $300 to $400 per hour. He added he made enough from his latest stream to pay a few bills.

• No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’
• Explainer: Why is Hurricane Milton causing so many tornadoes in Florida

It might appear, Mike says, that he’s doing anything for views, but he says he takes safety very seriously. Despite not knowing how to swim, he insists that he assessed the risks.

He speaks with bravado after surviving the natural disaster: “I stayed here, and I didn’t die and I’m chilling.”

When asked to respond to specific questions on Smalls Jr and the platform’s responsibility, Kick said it is “a fiercely creator-first platform, and we do not influence the content our creators chose to stream. However, if that content breaches our Terms of Service, or is in any way illegal, then we can impose a ban or suspension”.

They did not comment when asked about whether Smalls Jr’s action breach their specific community guidelines which detail: “Safety First: Prioritise safety for yourself, your audience, the public and anyone else involved.”

TikTok told the BBC that their monetisation guidelines lay out how some content is not eligible to earn money through LIVE features, including “content that tricks or manipulates others… exploits controversial issues to bait engagement, or exploits the suffering of vulnerable people”.

Mike’s profile – and his hurricane content – is still available.

When asked about endangering the lives of emergency workers, Smalls Jr said he knows what he’s getting himself into.

“Don’t save me,” he said. “If I do another hurricane? All right. You ain’t got to say nothing. I do not want to put your life at risk. No.”

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Boeing will axe its workforce by a tenth – cutting 17,000 jobs – and delay production as the aeroplane maker deals with issues across its business.

Chief executive Kelly Ortberg said in an email to staff that “executives, managers, and employees'” jobs are all at risk.

The business also warned of losses in its weapons and military equipment manufacturing arm, and pushed back the delivery date of its 777X plane.

The news comes as the business grapples with staff striking and mounting concerns around the quality of its planes.

Mr Ortberg said in the email that the company will reduce its headcount “over the coming months”.

“Next week, your leadership team will share more tailored information about what this means for your organization,” he said, adding that it will not proceed with the next cycle of furloughs.

“The state of our business and our future recovery require tough actions,” said Mr Ortberg.

As well as cutting jobs, the company also is delaying production of its 777X due to “the challenges we have faced in development, as well as from the flight test pause and ongoing work stoppage”, a possible reference to the ongoing strike that has been going on for several weeks.

“We have notified customers that we now expect first delivery in 2026,” he said.

A month-long union strike at Boeing has grown contentious, as approximately 33,000 workers sought a better pay package.

Talks appeared to fall apart this week, and the union’s lead negotiator, John Holden, told Reuters, “We’re in this for the long haul and our members understand that.”

The global credit ratings agency S&P has put Boeing on CreditWatch, a sign that they could downgrade the aeroplane manufacturer’s rating if the strike drags out.

The company was already under congressional scrutiny after a January incident, during which a defect caused a panel to blow out on a Boeing 737-MAX jet shortly after takeoff.

No-one was injured, and Boeing’s then-chief executive Dave Calhoun said the company was “acknowledging our mistake”.

A longtime resident of the north Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan, Doug spends part of his days building electric vehicles for Ford as a machine repairman.

But he would never buy one.

A former Democrat and unionised auto worker, Doug – who declined to share his name for fear of pushback from his union – is exactly the type of Michigan voter Donald Trump is working to recruit and Kamala Harris is eager to win back.

With less than a month before election day, the former president has been stoking fears in the state that Harris wants to ban gas-powered vehicles and that auto workers could lose their jobs in the push to electrify cars. The message is resonating with Doug and some other Michigan voters who spoke to the BBC.

“It could definitely cost us our jobs, and it already has cost a lot of people their jobs,” Doug told the BBC on a sunny October day outside a Meijer supermarket in Warren.

Harris has pushed back on Trump’s rhetoric, telling voters at a rally in Flint, Michigan, last week that her administration would not put a stop to vehicles that use petrol. The vice-president endorsed phasing out petrol cars when she ran for president in 2019, but has since reversed her support for the policy.

“Michigan, let us be clear,” she said in Flint, “Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”

Experts say Trump’s electric vehicle criticism is his Michigan spin on a broader economic message as he tries to appeal to voters in the key midwestern swing state.

Speaking to a crowd of hundreds at a Detroit Economic Club event on Thursday, the former president doubled down on the message, saying that United Automobile Workers president Shawn Fain wanted “all electric cars”, a move Trump said was costing the auto industry their “whole business”.

“That has just become a front message of Republicans: that these plans or hopes to electrify the vehicles are going to destroy the auto industry and take away jobs,” said Jonathan Hanson, a lecturer at University of Michigan’s Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy.

And Harris’s challenges to that message haven’t broken through to some Michigan voters, who still believe Trump’s claim that Harris wants a country of entirely electric vehicles.

“I don’t trust them,” 82-year-old Warren resident Ruth Zimmer said of electric cars. “I want it to be the way it always was, with a good, old-fashioned car.”

On Friday in Michigan, Harris’s running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz tried to appeal to those sceptical of electric vehicles and took aim at Trump’s comments about mandates.

“It should just be your choice. We need to make those choices affordable and available to people,” he said. “Nobody’s mandating anything to you. If you want to drive, like I do, a ‘79 International Harvester Scout that is sweet as hell … knock yourself out.”

Walz and Trump’s visits to the state comes as recent polls suggest Harris’s support may be slipping slightly in the key battleground state. A September poll from Quinnipiac University found Trump ahead by three points in Michigan, after other polls suggested Harris had been leading by a slim margin for the past month.

Trump’s attacks on electric vehicles are also complicated by one of his biggest supporters, billionaire Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, an electric car company. Musk has endorsed Trump and appeared at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last week, cheering him on from behind the podium.

Appealing to the state’s automobile and union worker population – once a staunchly Democratic voting bloc – will prove key for Harris and Trump to close the gap in Michigan, experts say.

Trump picked up a number of these voters in the state in his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, though President Joe Biden won some of their votes back in 2020. Nationally, Clinton ended up winning 51% of union households, compared to Trump’s 42%, in a race she lost in Michigan by some 10,000 votes. Biden won union households 56% to 40%, according to 2020 exit polls.

Some former Democratic union workers in Michigan have grown disillusioned with the party as the cost of living has risen. Doug, the Warren resident, said adding that pressure from his union leadership to stay in line with Democrats had turned him off.

“You must be a Democrat, or you’re totally exiled,” Doug said.

Harris, he added, was just President Joe Biden “in a nutshell”.

The vice-president is struggling to win over the labour vote more than Biden, who had cast himself as the most pro-union president in history. Though Harris and Walz have key labour endorsements, they’ve struggled to earn support from rank-and-file union members.

For the first time in three decades, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters – the largest union in the country – declined to endorse a presidential candidate, finding a majority of its rank-and-file members supported Trump.

In Michigan, where the automotive and transportation industry employ 20% of the workforce, Democrats are not getting as much credit as they had hoped for their electric vehicle investments in the state, said Matt Grossmann, a politics professor at Michigan State University.

This year, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a $1.7b (£1.3b) investment to convert shuttered and struggling auto plants in Michigan and several other mid-western states to manufacture electric vehicles and parts of their supply chain.

“Many in the auto industry and surrounding it don’t necessarily think that that would benefit Michigan,” Mr Grossmann said.

Automakers broadly seem to be on board with shifting their fleets over to more electric vehicles, Mr Hanson said, but the transition is expensive and requires complementary investments in factories for special materials such as batteries.

As a part of the nearly $2b federal investment, a General Motors factory in Lansing, Michigan, has received $500m to shift production from petrol to electric vehicles.

In Detroit just two days before Trump arrived, his Republican running mate JD Vance said the Lansing investment was “table scraps” compared to the job losses that would be on the horizon from the shift to electric vehicles.

Kevin Moore, the president of the Teamsters union in Michigan, called Trump and Vance’s electric vehicle claims a “bold-faced lie”.

“They’re not going to get rid of combustible, gas vehicles,” he told the BBC. “They can coincide together.”

His group – and several Teamsters unions in swing states – have endorsed Harris for president.

Moore said he believed Michigan workers would not buy into Trump’s statement that electrification would cost auto workers their jobs.

“They’re astute,” he said of auto workers. “Donald Trump was a gold spoon-fed billionaire. [Harris] lived her life in middle-class America.”

EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power

ANALYSIS: What could be the ‘October Surprise’?

FACT-CHECK: Debunking Trump claim about hurricane funds

US singer and actress Selena Gomez joined her co-stars on the red carpet at the London Film Festival on Friday, for the UK premiere of her Oscar-tipped film Emilia Pérez.

The Spanish-language musical was one of the breakout hits of the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where Gomez and three of her co-stars were jointly named best actress.

The others – Zoe Saldaña, Adriana Paz, Karla Sofía Gascón – appeared alongside Gomez in London, where the film hopes to continue its momentum in the awards race.

Emilia Pérez follows a Mexican Cartel leader (played by Gascón), who asks a high-powered lawyer named Rita (Saldaña) to help him fake his own death.

But the reason he wants to retire and disappear from the world of crime isn’t what you might expect – the cartel leader wants to change gender and live a new life as a woman.

The rest of the film focuses on four women, including the newly-transitioned Emilia Pérez, as they each pursue their own version of happiness in modern-day Mexico.

Pérez is portrayed by Argentinian trans actress Gascón, who has been tipped as a possible best actress contender in the forthcoming awards race.

Gomez plays the drug lord’s wife, who is kept in the dark about her former lover’s new identity, while Paz portrays Emilia’s new romantic interest after transitioning.

All four of the film’s stars walked the red carpet ahead of the film’s UK premiere at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the London Film Festival on Friday.

French director Jacques Audiard came up with the idea for the film after reading a chapter in Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute about a drug lord who changes identity.

Audiard went one step further for the film, and made it a story of changing gender.

“I was less interested in a change of identity to evade competitor drug barons, and more interested in the change of identity for the sake of the person she was and is,” the director told BBC News. “I was more interested in the past and what led to that transition.”

The role required someone very specific – a trans actress, who was a Spanish speaker, who could also sing and dance.

Recalling the casting process, Gascón tells BBC News: “I was contacted when I was in Mexico by a production team, and was told ‘We need an actress as crazy as you – you’re the only one who can do this role, but you need to learn five songs for tomorrow!’

“And I was like ‘OK, let’s record the whole album and we’ll go on tour as soon as you want!’” she joked. “But I did say, ‘this is going to be difficult, I’m not a singer’. But the team in the film, they worked with me incredibly, they really helped me with all the songs and made it so that we could do the best work possible.”

Asked about Gascón’s casting, Audiard added simply: “Without her there would be no film.”

Interestingly, the actress campaigned to play both the male and female roles – in other words, the character both before and after transition.

Audiard had originally intended for a different actor to play the male drug lord Manitas, because, the director explained, he was “uncomfortable asking [Gascón] to revisit something she was moving away from”.

But, Gascón recalled: “I said to Jacques, I want to play this role in the complete arc, because for me it is important to do the full part. It wouldn’t be the same film if another actor played [Manitas].”

That meant using effects and make-up such as a fake beard, she explained, so she could play the drug baron in the first section of the musical.

“This film is this film because the same actress played the complete performance,” Gascón continued. “It’s that kind of role you have once in your life and I didn’t want to lose the opportunity to play this.”

Reviews of Emilia Pérez, which is released on Netflix next month, have been generally positive so far.

“It’s a wild, gritty, glitter-soaked ride that defies convention and classification,” said Entertainment Weekly’s Maureen Lee Lenker.

She praised the film’s performances, commenting: “Selena Gomez is a welcome surprise, shedding any remaining hints of her Disney Channel origins in her portrayal of a hard-loving wife of a narco.

“The film’s climax in particular allows Gomez to shine as a dramatic actress in new ways. She conveys heartache and anguish through a tortured physicality that propels her into the unpredictable state of a woman on the verge of something dangerous.”

There has also been praise for Gascón, a “wonderful discovery” who gives “a magnificent performance”, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney.

The Telegraph’s Tim Robey described the film as “amazingly confident – it’s clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful and absolutely bonkers”, while Hoai-Tran Bui of Inverse said it was “an emotionally fulfilling triumph”.

Not all critics were as enthusiastic about the film, however.

“Emilia Pérez was originally intended to be an opera, which perhaps partly explains its saccharine sentimentality, repetitive lyrics, and diverging story branches. But that doesn’t excuse its almost random, whiplash-inducing tonal pivots,” said Slant’s Kyle Turner.

However, Lauren Bradshaw of Fangirl Freakout said: “Emilia Pérez is a magnificent, genre-bending thrill ride that transcends the typical movie construct, breathing a fresh burst of excitement into the way we think about film.”

As an actress, Gomez is best known for starring in Only Murders in the Building, but also has a successful singing career with hits including Back To You, Wolves and Love You Like a Love Song.

Saldaña, meanwhile, has starred in a large number of blockbusters in the last two decades, with roles in the Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy franchises.

It remains to be seen whether Emilia Pérez could be a big awards player, but Academy voters may see an opportunity to recognise Saldaña’s box office success via this more critically acclaimed work.

Their co-star Adriana Paz is a Mexican actress whose credits include Not Forgotten, Hilda and La Caridad.

But the film’s breakout star is arguably Gascón, who already had a successful acting career before transitioning in 2018.

Praising her performance in his review, Rooney said: “The warmth, the joyous self-realisation, the complexity and authenticity… that illuminate [Gascón’s] characterisation no doubt owe much to the parallels in the Spanish star’s life – in her own words, she was an actor before becoming an actress, a father before becoming a mother.”

Emilia Pérez has already been selected as France’s entry for the best international feature category at the Oscars, which take place in March.

More from the London Film Festival:

• Oscars contender Conclave makes London debut

• Elton John film documents singer’s farewell tour

• Saoirse Ronan says WW2 film is ‘incredibly relevant’

It was the call the family of a young British climber who went missing on Everest 100 years ago had given up hope of ever getting.

Last month, a team of climbers filming a National Geographic documentary stumbled on a preserved boot, revealed by melting ice on a glacier.

This boot was believed to belong to Andrew Comyn “Sandy” Irvine, who disappeared while attempting to climb Everest in June 1924 with his partner George Mallory.

What’s more, it could potentially help solve one of mountaineering’s biggest mysteries: whether or not the pair succeeded in becoming the first people to summit Everest, 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top.

Well-known adventurer Jimmy Chin, who led the team for National Geographic, hailed the discovery of the boot – with a foot inside it – as a “monumental and emotional moment”.

But for Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers it was simply “extraordinary”.

“I just froze…. We had all given up any hope any trace of him would be found,” she told the BBC.

A number of people have searched for Irvine’s body over the years, partly because the 22-year-old is said to have been carrying a camera with an undeveloped film inside, potentially with a photograph of the pair at the summit.

Could the discovery of the boot be the first step to finding his body – and the camera?

The family have now given a DNA sample to help confirm the foot is indeed Irvine – but the filmmaking team is fairly confident it belongs to the mountaineer. The sock found inside the boot being has a name tag stitched into it with the words “A.C. Irvine”.

“I mean, dude… there’s a label on it,” Chin, who is known for making Oscar-winning climbing documentary Free Solo alongside his wife, was quoted as saying in a National Geographic report.

The team made the discovery as they descended the Central Rongbuk Glacier by the north face of Everest in September.

Along the way, they found an oxygen bottle marked with the date 1933. An Everest expedition that year had found an item belonging to Irvine.

Energised by this possible sign that Irvine’s body could be nearby, the team searched the glacier for several days, before one of them saw the boot emerging from melting ice.

It was a fortuitous find – they estimated the ice had only melted a week before their discovery.

The foot has since been removed from the mountain because of concerns that ravens were disturbing it, according to reports, and passed to the Chinese mountaineering authorities who govern the north face of Everest.

For Irvine’s descendants, the discovery has been emotional – especially in this, the centenary year of his disappearance.

Summers had grown up hearing stories of her grandmother’s adventurous, Oxford-educated younger brother, who they knew as “Uncle Sandy”.

“My grandmother had a photo of him by her bed until the day she died,” she recalled. “She said he was a better man than anyone would ever be.”

Birkenhead-born Irvine was just 22 when he disappeared, the youngest member of an expedition that has intrigued the mountaineering world for a century.

He and Mallory were last seen alive on 8 June 1924 as they set off for the peak.

Mallory’s body would not be found until 1999 by an American climber. In recent decades, the search for the climbers’ remains has been mired in controversy amid suspicions that the bodies were moved.

Summers has always dismissed those stories and suspicions, revealing her feeling of “relief” following the Chin’s call that “he was still there on the mountain”.

But what if it could now be proved that Irvine and Mallory reached the summit, becoming the first to do so – an idea which, Summers acknowledged, would “turn mountaineering history onto its head”?

“It would be nice – we would all feel very proud,” she said. “But the family has always maintained the mystery, and the story of how far they got and how brave they were, was really what it was about.”

And anyway, she said, “the only way we will ever know is if we find a picture in the camera he was believed to be carrying”.

The search, she suspects, will now continue for that camera. “I think it will be irresistible,” she said.

Whether it will be found remains to be seen.

Chin, meanwhile, is hoping that the boot’s discovery – “a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground” – will “finally bring peace of mind to his relatives and the climbing world at large”.

For Summers, it is a chance to remind the world about a young man “who took life and lived it”, embracing every opportunity – and above all, was “having fun”.

But perhaps surprisingly, she and her cousins are grateful the older generation were not here for this discovery.

“For them, Everest is his grave,” she explained.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton – which have devastated parts of the south-east United States – have bookended an exceptionally busy period of tropical storms.

In less than two weeks, five hurricanes formed, which is not far off what the Atlantic would typically get in an entire year.

The storms were powerful, gaining strength with rapid speed.

Yet in early September, when hurricane activity is normally at its peak, there were peculiarly few storms.

So, how unusual has this hurricane season been – and what is behind it?

The season started ominously. On 2 July, Hurricane Beryl became the earliest category five hurricane to form in the Atlantic on records going back to 1920.

Just a few weeks earlier in May, US scientists had warned the 2024 season from June to November could be “extraordinary”.

It was thought that exceptionally warm Atlantic temperatures – combined with a shift in regional weather patterns – would make conditions ripe for hurricane formation.

So far, with seven weeks of the official season still to go, there have been nine hurricanes – two more than the Atlantic would typically get.

However, the total number of tropical storms – which includes hurricanes but also weaker storms – has been around average, and less than was expected at the start of the year.

After Beryl weakened, there were only four named storms, and no major hurricanes, until Helene became a tropical storm on 24 September.

That is despite warm waters in the tropical Atlantic, which should favour the growth of these storms.

Across the Main Development Region for hurricanes – an area stretching from the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean – sea surface temperatures have been around 1C above the 1991-2020 average, according to BBC analysis of data from the European climate service.

Atlantic temperatures have been higher over the last decade, mainly because of climate change and a natural weather pattern known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

The recipe for hurricane formation involves a complex mix of ingredients beyond sea temperatures, and these other conditions were not right.

“The challenge [for forecasting] is that other factors can change quickly, on the timescale of days to weeks, and can work with or against the influence of sea surface temperatures,” explains Christina Patricola, associate professor at Iowa State University.

Researchers are still working to understand why this was the case, but likely reasons include a shift to the West African monsoon and an abundance of Saharan dust.

These both hampered storm development by creating unfavourable conditions in the atmosphere.

But even during this period, scientists were warning that the oceans remained exceptionally warm and that intense hurricanes were still possible through the rest of the season.

And in late September, they came.

Starting with Helene, six tropical Atlantic storms were born in quick succession.

Fuelled by very warm waters – and now more favourable atmospheric conditions – these storms strengthened, with five becoming hurricanes.

Four of these five underwent what is known as “rapid intensification”, where maximum sustained wind speeds increase by at least 30 knots (35mph; 56km/h) in 24 hours.

Historical data suggests that only around one in four hurricanes rapidly intensify on average.

Rapid intensification can be particularly dangerous, because these quickly increasing wind speeds can give communities less time to prepare for a stronger storm.

Hurricane Milton strengthened by more than 90mph in 24 hours – one of the fastest such cases of intensification ever recorded, according to BBC analysis of data from the National Hurricane Center.

Scientists at the World Weather Attribution group have found that the winds and rain from both Helene and Milton were worsened by climate change.

“One thing this hurricane season is illustrating clearly is that the impacts of climate change are here now,” explains Andra Garner from Rowan University in the US.

“Storms like Beryl, Helene, and Milton all strengthened from fairly weak hurricanes into major hurricanes within 12 hours or less, as they travelled over unnaturally warm ocean waters.”

Milton also took an unusual, although not unprecedented, storm path, tracking eastward through the Gulf of Mexico, where waters have been exceptionally warm.

“It is very rare to see a [category] five hurricane appearing in Gulf of Mexico,” says Xiangbo Feng, research scientist in tropical cyclones at the University of Reading.

Warmer oceans make stronger hurricanes – and rapid intensification – more likely, because it means storms can pick up more energy, potentially leading to higher wind speeds.

US forecasters are currently watching an area of thunderstorms located over the Cabo Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa.

This could develop into another tropical storm over the next couple of days, but that remains uncertain.

As for the rest of the season, high sea surface temperatures remain conducive for further storms.

There is also the likely development of the natural La Niña weather phenomenon in the Pacific, which often favours Atlantic hurricane formation as it affects wind patterns.

But further activity will rely on other atmospheric conditions remaining favourable, which are not easy to predict.

Either way, this season has already highlighted how warm seas fuelled by climate change are already increasing the chances of the strongest hurricanes – something that is expected to continue as the world warms further.

“Hurricanes occur naturally, and in some parts of the world they are regarded as part of life,” explains Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

“But human-caused climate change is supercharging them and exacerbating the risk of major damage.”

Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors, has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

Known as hibakusha, the survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been recognised by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Nobel Committee Chair Joergen Watne Frydnes said the group had “contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo”.

Mr Frydnes warned the “nuclear taboo” was now “under pressure” – and praised the group’s use of witness testimony to ensure nuclear weapons must never be used again.

Founded in 1956, the organisation sends survivors around the world to share their testimonies of the “atrocious damage” and suffering caused by the use of nuclear weapons, according to its website.

Their work began almost a decade after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On 6 August 1945, a US bomber dropped the uranium bomb above the city of Hiroshima, killing around 140,000 people.

Three days later a second nuclear weapon was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan’s surrender, announced by Emperor Hirohito shortly afterwards, ended World War Two.

Speaking to reporters in Japan, a tearful Toshiyuki Mimaki, the co-head of the group, said: “Never did I dream this could happen,” the AFP news agency quotes him as saying.

Mr Mimaki criticised the idea that nuclear weapons bring peace. “It has been said that because of nuclear weapons, the world maintains peace. But nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists,” Mr Mimaki said, according to reports by AFP.

In a BBC interview last year, he said despite only being three years old at the time the nuclear bomb hit Hiroshima – he could still remember dazed and burnt survivors fleeing past his home.

The prize – which consist of a diploma, a gold medal and a sum of $1m (£765,800) – will be presented at a ceremonies in Oslo in December, marking the anniversary of the death of the scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.

The group has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize “many times” in the past, including in 2005 when it received a special mention by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, its website says.

The decision to recognise Nihon Hidankyo means the Nobel committee has steered away from more controversial nominees for the peace prize.

There had been widespread speculation the United Nations agency supporting Palestinians – UNRWA – was being considered for the prize.

Although the organisation is the main provider of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, nine of its members were fired for alleged involvement in the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year.

More than 12,000 people had signed a petition urging the committee not to award UNRWA the prize.

There were equal concerns about the nomination of the International Court of Justice.

The UN’s main judicial organ is currently considering allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and has already issued a statement urging the Israeli authorities to refrain from genocidal acts.

But while giving the prize to Nihon Hidankyo may be a non-controversial choice, it could also focus global attention on the threat of nuclear conflict which overshadows the fighting in both Ukraine and the Middle East.

Throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its leaders have repeatedly hinted that they may be ready to use tactical nuclear weapons if western allies increase their support for Ukraine in a way Russia considers unacceptable.

These threats have succeeded in restraining western support for fear of escalation.

In the Middle East, the subtext for much of Israel’s strategy is the fear that Iran is seeking nuclear capability, something Tehran denies.

The Nobel committee’s decision may renew a debate about the use of nuclear weapons at a time when some countries look enviously at their deterring power.

This year’s peace prize had 286 nominations, a number comprising 197 individuals and 89 organisations.

Nominations can be made by people in positions of significant authority, including members of national assemblies, governments and international courts of law.

Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi won the prize in 2023, when she was honoured for her work fighting the oppression of women in Iran.

Ms Mohammadi is currently being held in Evin prison in Tehran, having already spent 12 years in jail serving multiple sentences related to her activism.

The head of Ukraine’s Odesa region has said its three ports are “not possible” to protect fully because they span such a large area and Russia has intensified its missile attacks.

He was speaking to the BBC after a 16-year-old girl, two women and a man were killed in a Russian strike on a two-floor building to the north-west of Odesa city.

It was the fourth such attack on the Black Sea coastal region in five days, and regional head Oleh Kiper said “probably a ballistic missile was targeting an infrastructure facility, but it hit nearby instead – into this place.”

Russia has not commented on its wave of missile strikes. A further nine people were killed in an attack on a cargo ship early on Thursday.

There have been ballistic missile strikes on Odesa’s ports before. But never so many, in quick succession.

Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Russia had carried out 60 such attacks in just three months, damaging or destroying almost 300 port facilities. He said 79 people had been killed or wounded and 22 civilian vessels hit.

Oleh Kiper told the BBC that Odesa’s current air defences were unable to cover all three ports in Odesa region as they spanned over about 80km (50 miles): “So the main focus is on the city of Odesa, where over a million people live. The rest of the ports and towns remain in a difficult situation.”

Other Ukrainian ports – in the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolayiv regions – are no longer operating, making the facilities in Odesa more important than ever to Ukrainian exports.

He suggested Russia was attacking civilian vessels now to harm Ukraine’s economy and to scare the world with what it could do.

“They hit [the ships in Odesa] so that the insurance companies and the ship owners refuse to enter our ports, into the combat zone, Kiper said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general has said criminal proceedings have begun into the death in Russian detention of a prominent Ukrainian journalist who chronicled life under occupation in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Viktoriia Roshchyna had been briefly detained in the occupied eastern city of Berdyansk in 2022 but she disappeared in the occupied east in August 2023 and it was not until a few months ago that Russian authorities confirmed she was being held.

Ukrainian intelligence officials said she was supposed to have been included in a prisoner exchange and Russian reports said she died on 19 September while being moved to a detention centre in Moscow.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Roshchyna’s death had come as a heavy blow. “For all of us in Ukraine, the issue of captured and deported people remains incredibly painful. These are adults and children, many civilians who are now held in prisons and camps in Russia,” he wrote on X.

Zelensky met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday before heading to Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

He is promoting a “victory plan” to end the war and told a briefing in Berlin he would like to see the war end “no later than next year, 2025,” adding that it was very important that aid to Kyiv did not decrease in the coming year.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni had earlier promised Zelensky that support for Kyiv would last “for as long as needed”.

Zelensky denied he had been discussing terms for a ceasefire. “The key is to strengthen Ukraine’s positions and relations with our closest partners,” he stressed.

Russian forces continue to make gains in eastern Ukraine, and on Friday authorities in the strategically important hilltop city of Toretsk said only 40-50% of it remained under Ukrainian control.

Ukrainian troops are outgunned and outnumbered and are also under pressure in the Pokrovsk. The two cities are seen as vital for maintaining the army’s supply lines.

Earlier this week Ukraine’s military targeted a big oil terminal on the east coast of Russian-occupied Crimea.

Satellite images show the offshore facility at Feodosia is still burning five days after the attack. Russian-installed official Igor Tkachenko said that even though the fire was not out, it was fully under control.

The Ukrainian military said the terminal was the biggest in Crimea and helped supply Russia’s occupying forces.

More than 1,000 residents have had to leave their homes because of the strike, which Kyiv says is in retaliation for Russian attacks that have destroyed much of its power infrastructure.

The Cameroonian authorities have banned the media from discussing the health of President Paul Biya, following rumours of his death.

Interior Minister Paul Atanga Nji told regional governors that these stories “disturb the tranquillity of Cameroonians”.

“Any debate in the media about the president’s condition is therefore strictly prohibited,” he insisted, threatening that “offenders will face the rigour of the law.”

The 91-year-old leader – in office for more than four decades – has not been seen in public since 8 September, when he attended a China-Africa forum in Beijing.

Several officials have pushed back against speculation around Biya’s condition, insisting he was in good health and on a private stay in Geneva, Switzerland.

Nji said that the health status of the president was a matter of national security and urged governors to create units to ensure the order was being followed by private media outlets and social media.

• The 91-year-old African president who keeps defying death rumours

Many journalists in the country have said they consider the ban a violation of press freedom.

“By saying that mention should not be made of the president’s [health] situation, I find it an infringement on our rights,” a Cameroonian journalist told the BBC on condition of anonymity. He added that “it’s going to really affect the way we report because we’ll certainly not want to run into trouble with government”.

The media restrictions have also raised concerns about the safety of journalists in a country where media professionals are regularly targeted by officials and insurgent groups.

In the past, Anglophone separatists have kidnapped journalists while the government has arrested and detained members of the media.

“I will continue to report even though I fear they could track me down, because there’s no way my report will not talk about the president’s whereabouts or what could be happening to him. I’ll continue to do my job,” another journalist said.

In a statement on Thursday, global press freedom organisation the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) urged the Cameroonian government to “end its threats to sanction private media journalists who report on the condition and whereabouts of President Paul Biya”.

“The health of the president, who has been in power for 41 years and may seek re-election next year, is of public interest. Any misguided attempt to censor reporting about his health for national security reasons simply fuels rampant speculation,” Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa Programme, stated.

“The Cameroonian government should simply put the rumours to rest by arranging a public appearance by the head of state,” she suggested.

As speculation about the wellbeing of President Biya continues, Cameroonians are highly anticipating his return to the country in the coming days, as promised by the authorities.

• Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis – fuelled by student rejects and poor spelling
• Singer Libianca on ‘horrific threats’ over Cameroon war
• Cameroon’s Bamenda, where only the coffin trade is booming

Hurricane Milton tore through Florida this week. Tornadoes, floods and storm surges have left a trail of destruction and displaced millions of people – at least 16 people have died.

Anne and Sam Frost are Brits who moved to Tampa in 2023. They have a five-month-old baby called Georgia.

On Monday, after learning that their town was in the route of the hurricane, they evacuated home and travelled to Jacksonville.

“I’ve never felt anything like this, to know by week’s end your whole world could be different, not in a good way and not by choice. It’s like grief without the death,” Anne told the BBC.

While stuck in traffic with others fleeing, struggling to find gas and caring for their child they have been waiting and watching anxiously to see if they would lose their home.

Anne shared her diary from the week with us below.

Sam was fifth in the queue for sand bags at 06:00 (11:00 BST). When it finally opened at 07:45 (12:45 BST) the queue was in the hundreds.

He also got plywood for the windows – our local hardware store had a collection point.

We have done all we can to protect our home and our belongings and now we protect ourselves and our daughter by leaving.

We left at around 20:00 (01:00 BST). We passed several dry gas stations and one with a queue formed of more than 40 cars.

As we drove we passed blue “evacuation route” signs. We joined The I-75 which had heavy traffic, like daytime rush hour.

We came off at Withlacoochee and there was another 30-car queue for gas. We were going to stop for food but the Wendy’s drive-thru had about 30 cars queued up.

Waze, a navigation app, kept us off the I-75, travelling through little towns on the 301.

We travelled down winding roads reminiscent of the UK before stopping for food at a McDonald’s struggling to keep up with the unusually high number of customers.

We stopped at the 7-11 for gas but even here, in what feels like the middle of nowhere with no evacuation order in place (yet), it’s all out.

We finally found a gas station with some pumps available and were able to get another half a tank, but as we drove on we passed more which were completely out.

We have arrived in Wildwood and the hotel has a sign on the door – no vacancies at all. We are very lucky to have booked in advance. Tomorrow we will head to Jacksonville.

We set off from Wildwood at 11:00 (16:00 BST). We were warned to stay off the I-75 by the hotel staff.

Waze added 30 minutes to our journey several times. We mainly stayed on the 301 but came off it to avoid standstill traffic at Lawtey.

We passed houses that would have no chance of surviving if it were to hit this far north.

It all took its toll: our fussy baby, the constant nursery rhymes, and getting lost as Waze tried to help us avoid traffic.

It’s been amazing as a Brit to see the scale of the logistical efforts that go into preparing for hurricanes.

From the enormous dump trucks full of sand to the tankers of fuel being brought in; shelters set up in schools and free Uber rides – it’s a remarkable effort.

Teco (the energy supplier) has mobilised 4,500 linesmen to be ready to restore power.

We’re in Jacksonville now and we just have to wait and watch the spaghetti models (a forecasting tool to give an idea of where a storm could make an impact).

As someone commented online, “we don’t pray it hits somewhere else, we pray it gets weaker.”

• Does US lack relief money for Hurricane Milton?
• How Hurricane Milton compares to Hurricane Helene
• Is climate change making hurricanes and typhoons worse?
• Hurricanes: A look inside the deadly storms
• Are you in Florida? Please share your experiences

Wednesday is spent waiting for updates and watching the radars. The skies are grey and it’s raining in Jacksonville.

Hope fades instantly as I hear the reporters say how catastrophic this hurricane will be when it hits.

Our house is predicted to get the north side of the eye of the storm – all the wind and rain, so flooding is a risk from overly-saturated ground. And then we see that the storm is predicted to hit north of Sarasota, basically in the bay itself.

Any further, tiny jump means we will get surge water from the bay as well. I have to stop watching. It is an anxious wait.

At around 21:00 (02:00 BST) the storm carries east when the predicted path was north, which means when it hits it will be south of the bay.

For us, it means the bay drains and we will avoid surge water, but for those south it means they’re getting that water, wind and rain.

Then come the reports of people who remained in their homes calling for emergency services to get them out, but once hurricane force winds hit the emergency services will not be sent out.

I watch the cameras on our house and can see the bushes and trees moving. But as the storm moves through we still have a house intact. It feels incredible, how unlikely it was that we’d have anything left and how close to it we came.

I woke up at 04:00 (09:00 BST) and checked the home cameras – they were still on! And we had no flooding! We’ve lost two fences but it’s a small price to pay.

We live near a school so they buried the power cables in the area a few years ago and you realise what a difference that makes, but many are not so lucky as 74% of our county are out of power.

There’s flooding as far away from the coast as Plant City and Lakeland so I don’t know how we avoided it.

Authorities have closed access to Pinellas County entirely while they assess damage. Our county has boil-water and conserve water notices.

Tampa has an area-by-area re-entry plan and again I’m in awe at the logistical efforts and planning. The pictures of damage so close to us and in familiar places are devastating and we are feeling so very fortunate and grateful.

Our plans have changed as we can get home earlier now if we want to. So instead of staying another night in Jacksonville we will set off for Tampa via Orlando.

A deluge of misinformation online about back-to-back hurricanes in the US has been fuelled by a social media universe that rewards engagement over truth.

The scale and speed of false rumours about Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton has been unlike many of the frenzies I’ve investigated online before.

Viral posts have ranged from seemingly innocuous questions about the legitimacy of forecasts and rescue efforts, to false claims – repeated by Donald Trump – that hurricane relief funds are being spent on migrants who entered the US illegally.

Others spread false images of the wreckage – faked pictures of children fleeing devastation that were generated by artificial intelligence (AI), old clips showing different storms or computer-generated (CGI) videos. And then there were those who shared false and evidence-free conspiracy theories about the government manipulating – or “geo-engineering”- the weather.

“Yes they can control the weather,” wrote Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene last week on X.

• Fact-checking claims about hurricane response efforts
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Most of the viral misinformation has come from social media profiles which have blue ticks and a track-record for sharing conspiracy theories. Several accounts which spread Hurricane Milton misinformation this week had previously shared posts suggesting real-life events were staged or rigged, from elections to political violence, the pandemic and wars.

I messaged dozens of accounts which shared false and misleading posts on X related to both hurricanes. Their accounts seemed to be able to go viral precisely because of changes made at X since Elon Musk became owner. While the blue-check used to be given out only to people who had been verified and vetted, users are now allowed to purchase these ticks. The algorithm, in turn, gives their posts greater prominence. They can also then profit from sharing posts, regardless of whether they are true or not.

X’s revenue sharing policy means that blue-tick users can earn a share of revenue from the ads in their replies. On 9 October, the site announced that “payouts are increasing”, and accounts would now be paid based on engagement from other users who pay to get Premium membership, not the adverts in their responses.

This has incentivised some users to share whatever it is that will go viral – however untrue. Several of those I messaged acknowledged to me that they benefitted from getting engagement from their posts and sharing content they know will get attention.

It’s true, most social media companies allow users to make money from views. But YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook have guidelines which allow them to de-monetise or suspend profiles that post content that spreads misinformation, and say they label posts when they are misleading. X does not have guidelines on misinformation in the same way.

While it has rules against faked AI content and “Community Notes” to add context to posts, it removed a previous feature which allowed users to report misleading information.

X did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Misleading posts which go viral on X can also travel over to the comment section of videos on other sites, too, showing how an idea shared on one site can spread through the social-media ecosystem.

“Wild Mother”, a social media influencer who regularly shares unproven theories across different sites, said that four years ago, her comments were filled with “people calling me names, denying it”.

“And now, I was surprised to see that nearly every comment is in agreement,” she said, referring to a recent post discussing conspiracy theories about geo-engineering and the recent hurricanes.

There is a real-world impact to this kind of disinformation, which can undermine trust in authorities – in this case – during a complex rescue and recovery operation following Hurricane Milton.

Although misinformation has always spread during natural disasters, there’s a crucial difference between now and previous storms. For one, the falsehoods being shared are spreading to more people – fewer than three dozen false or abusive posts were viewed 160 million times on X, according to the Institute of Strategic Dialogue think tank.

They have also taken on a sharper political edge because of the impending US presidential election.

Many of the most viral posts come from accounts which support Donald Trump, ISD found. And they are taking aim at foreign aid and migrants.

Several posts and videos have even targeted relief workers, who are accused of “treason” for taking part in untrue, outlandish plots.

The anger and distrust this can foster risks inhibiting efforts on the ground. Ahead of an election, it also risks undermining wider faith in how systems and government work, and of overshadowing any legitimate criticism of governments’ efforts.

While Wild Mother, and people like her, choose to view this as a sign that “more and more people are waking up to reality”, I see it as a sign that these conspiracy theories are gaining a wider audience.

She tells me how “a well informed collective is much harder to control”. In other words, the more people who believe these kinds of evidence-free conspiracy theories, the harder it is to combat them.

This ultimately comes down to the way the algorithms across social media sites favour engagement above all else. These conspiracy theories, false claims and hate can reach hundreds of thousands of people before anyone realises they’re are untrue – and those sharing them can be rewarded with views, likes, followers or money in return.

Amid acrid smoke and cries from residents, rescue workers were searching Friday morning for signs of anyone left trapped in the rubble from two Israeli air strikes that hit central Beirut overnight.

According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, 22 people died and 117 were wounded, making these the deadliest strikes in central Beirut of the recent escalation.

At the site of the heaviest of the two, in the Shia neighbourhood of Basta, the head of the Civil Defence rescue team Youssef Al-Mallah told the BBC that five people were still unaccounted for.

The Civil Defence has appealed for family members of the missing to come forward with any information on their whereabouts, Al-Mallah said.

Unconfirmed reports Friday said that Wafiq Safa, the head of Hezbollah’s liaison and coordination unit, was the target of one of the strikes but managed to survive.

Israeli authorities have not commented. They issued no warnings ahead of the strikes, as they have in some instances.

Both the strikes on Beirut hit residential buildings in densely packed neighbourhoods. The missile that hit Basta fell close to the site of an earlier strike that killed nine people last week. It destroyed a four-storey building completely and severely damaged or destroyed at least three adjacent buildings.

The other strike, on the mostly Shia neighbourhood of Nweiri, hit the third floor of an eight-storey building, ejecting large pieces of rubble into the street and destroying cars and shopfronts below.

The timing of the strikes – at about 20:00 local time, 18:00 BST – meant that many residents of the neighbourhoods were at home or on the street in the vicinity.

Hassan Jaafar, a 22-year-old security guard, was at home with friends just 50m from the Basta strike. He told the BBC they heard a “roar that seemed to grow closer with every second”.

“The shockwave knocked us off our feet, sending us backwards as dust and debris filled the air,” he said. “For a moment, everything vanished in a cloud of ash.”

Jaafar said he and his friends were bruised and cut in the strike by flying debris and glass. “In that moment, it felt like the war had expanded into our lives,” he said.

On the massive pile of rubble left by the strike on Friday morning, distraught residents looked on at their destroyed apartments and pleaded with members of the Civil Defence team to help them retrieve surviving possessions.

One group of women was searching for a missing relative – a mother of young children who was last seen on a stretcher at the site. The Civil Defence team told the group they needed to check at every hospital in person.

“If she left here on a gurney she will be at a hospital somewhere,” a rescue worker said.

Ibtisam Mazloum, 42, was in her building nearby when the strike hit. “If they want to fight they should fight at the border,” she said, angily. “The civilians in Beirut are not part of this.”

At the site of the Nweiri strike, Musa Araf, who works for the Civil Defence, described being in his apartment on the sixth floor of the target building when the missile hit.

“I didn’t panic because of my job, I am used to it,” he said. “But my children were screaming and clinging on to me. One of my grandchildren was cut by flying glass.”

This is the third time Israel has launched air strikes on Beirut outside of the city’s southern suburb of Dahieh, where the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah has a strong presence.

The previous strikes on central Beirut targeted members of Hezbollah and the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, according to the IDF. One hit a health clinic which the IDF described as Hezbollah-affiliated and killed nine people.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch called on Friday for an inquiry into Israeli attacks on UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon. Reports said that an observation post belonging to the United Nations peacekeeping mission (Unifil) had been fired at by Israeli forces.

The incident would mark the fourth time in recent days that Israeli troops have fired at Unifil bases. Yesterday, two Indonesian peacekeepers were injured after an Israeli tank fired at a watchtower at the force’s headquarters in Ras al-Naqoura.

Hezbollah said on Friday it had launched an attack on an Israeli military base in the northern city of Haifa using explosive-laden drones.

The Iran-backed group said the attack was a retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut.

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.

When an Israeli air strike hit her employer’s house in southern Lebanon, Andaku (not her real name) found herself all alone, locked inside and terrified.

The 24-year-old Kenyan woman has been working in Lebanon as a domestic worker for the past eight months, but she says the last month has been the toughest as Israel’s military has intensified its bombardment of what it has said are Hezbollah targets across the country.

“There were a lot of bombings. It was too much. My employers locked me in the house and left to save their own lives,” she tells BBC News Arabic.

The sound of explosions has left Andaku traumatised. She has lost track of how many days she was left alone in the house before her employers returned.

“When they came back, they threw me out. They never paid me and I had nowhere to go,” she says, adding that she was lucky enough to have enough money to catch a bus to the capital, Beirut.

Andaku’s story is not the only one.

Last Friday, UN officials said most of Lebanon’s nearly 900 government-organised shelters were full following the escalation of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, and expressed concern for the tens of thousands of mostly female domestic workers in the country.

According to the International Organization for Migration, there are around 170,000 migrant workers in Lebanon. Many of them are women from Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Philippines.

“We are receiving increasing reports of migrant domestic workers being abandoned by their Lebanese employers, either left on the streets or in their homes as their employers flee,” Mathieu Luciano, the IOM’s head of office in Lebanon, told a press briefing in Geneva.

Many migrant domestic workers move to Lebanon to be able to provide financial support for their families back home.

The average monthly salary for African domestic workers is estimated to be around $250 (£191), whereas Asian housekeepers could earn up to $450.

Migrant domestic workers have to abide by the Kafala (sponsorship) system in Lebanon, which does not guarantee protected rights for migrant workers, and allows employers to confiscate their passports and withhold their wages. They find work through local agencies.

“The lack of legal protections within the Kafala system, combined with restricted movement, means many can become trapped in exploitative conditions. This has resulted in instances of abuse, isolation, and psychological trauma among migrant workers,” says IOM spokesman Joe Lowry.

“Furthermore, we are aware of cases of migrants being locked into houses of Lebanese citizens who are fleeing, to look after their properties,” he adds.

Mina (also not her real name) is from Uganda and has been a domestic worker in Lebanon for one year and four months.

She tells the BBC she was mistreated by the family she worked for and decided to escape and return to her agency.

Hoping she would receive help, Mina said she was shocked to learn that she had to work for another family on a two-year contract before she could return home.

“When I returned to the [agency], I told them I had worked enough to be able to pay for my ticket and return back home. They took my money and asked me to work in a house for two years to be able to travel home,” the 26-year-old says.

Having to live with the continuous sounds of explosions led to Mina’s mental health being affected. She was not able to do her assigned domestic tasks properly, so she asked her new employer to leave.

She had been working for a family in Baalbek, a city in the Bekaa Valley in north-eastern Lebanon.

“[The family] had beaten me, pushed me and thrown me out… There were so many bombs at that time. When I left, I had nowhere to go,” she says.

Another domestic worker from Kenya, Fanaka, 24, says her agency would send her to work in different homes every two months and that she suffered from continuous headaches.

“I have been trying to do my best at work, but nobody is born perfect,” she says.

The women say they faced many challenges while living on the streets, as many shelters refused to take them in, claiming they were reserved for displaced Lebanese and not foreigners.

All three managed to reach Caritas Lebanon, a non-governmental organisation that has been providing help and protection for migrant workers since 1994.

In audio recordings sent to the BBC, migrant workers from Sierra Leone said dozens of them remained stranded on the streets of Beirut and were in desperate need of food.

Others told local media that they were denied entry to government-organised shelters in schools because they were not Lebanese.

The BBC contacted local authorities, who denied any form of discrimination.

Sources from the ministry of education told the BBC: “No specific centres have been designated for foreign domestic workers, but at the same time, they have not been refused entry.”

It is understood that some workers are avoiding official shelters, fearing repercussions over their incomplete legal documentation.

Hessen Sayah Korban, head of the protection department at Caritas Lebanon, says her NGO is currently sheltering around 70 migrant domestic workers, who are mainly mothers with children.

She says more funding is needed to be able to provide shelter for up to 250 domestic workers who have either been abandoned by their employers or are homeless and had their official documents confiscated.

“We are trying to provide them with all the help needed; it can be legal, mental or physical.”

She adds that many domestic workers require help with their mental health because they have been traumatised.

Since the beginning of October, the IOM has received more than 700 new requests from people seeking help to return to their countries of origin.

Ms Korban says Caritas, along with other NGOs, is assisting the abandoned domestic workers wanting to leave by co-ordinating with the IOM, various embassies and consulates, and the Lebanese security services.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a video address Tuesday, which he said was directed at the people of Lebanon, 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 warning was falling largely – if not entirely – being ignored.

“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.”

“Now I think about it, I definitely chose the wrong industry.”

Xiao Chen*, who works in a private equity firm in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, says he is having a rough year.

For his first year in the job, he says he was paid almost 750,000 yuan ($106,200; £81,200). He was sure he would soon hit the million-yuan mark.

Three years on, he is earning half of what he made back then. His pay was frozen last year, and an annual bonus, which had been a big part of his income, vanished.

The “glow” of the industry has worn off, he says. It had once made him “feel fancy”. Now, he is just a “finance rat”, as he and his peers are mockingly called online.

China’s once-thriving economy, which encouraged aspiration, is now sluggish. The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has become wary of personal wealth and the challenges of widening inequality.

Crackdowns on billionaires and businesses, from real estate to technology to finance, have been accompanied by socialist-style messaging on enduring hardship and striving for China’s prosperity. Even celebrities have been told to show off less online.

Loyalty to the Communist Party and country, people are told, now trumps the personal ambition that had transformed Chinese society in the last few decades.

Mr Chen’s swanky lifestyle has certainly felt the pinch from this U-turn. He traded a holiday in Europe for a cheaper option: South East Asia. And he says he “wouldn’t even think about” buying again from luxury brands like “Burberry or Louis Vuitton”.

But at least ordinary workers like him are less likely to find themselves in trouble with the law. Dozens of finance officials and banking bosses have been detained, including the former chairman of the Bank of China.

On Thursday, the former vice-governor of the People’s Bank of China, Fan Yifei, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, according to state media.

Fan was found guilty of accepting bribes worth more than 386 million yuan ($54.6m; £41.8m).

The industry is under pressure. While few companies have publicly admitted it, pay cuts in banking and investment firms are a hot topic on Chinese social media.

Posts about falling salaries have generated millions of views in recent months. And hashtags like “changing career from finance” and “quitting finance” have gained more than two million views on the popular social media platform Xiaohongshu.

Some finance workers have been seeing their income shrink since the start of the pandemic but many see one viral social media post as a turning point.

In July 2022, a Xiaohongshu user sparked outrage after boasting about her 29-year-old husband’s 82,500-yuan monthly pay at top financial services company, China International Capital Corporation.

People were stunned by the huge gap between what a finance worker was getting paid and their own wages. The average monthly salary in the country’s richest city, Shanghai, was just over 12,000 yuan.

It reignited a debate about incomes in the industry that had been started by another salary-flaunting online user earlier that year.

Those posts came just months after Xi called for “common prosperity” – a policy to narrow the growing wealth gap.

In August 2022, China’s finance ministry published new rules requiring firms to “optimise the internal income distribution and scientifically design the salary system”.

The following year, the country’s top corruption watchdog criticised the ideas of “finance elites” and the “only money matters” approach, making finance a clearer target for the country’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign.

The changes came in a sweeping but discreet way, according to Alex*, a manager at a state-controlled bank in China’s capital, Beijing.

“You would not see the order put into written words – even if there is [an official] document it’s certainly not for people on our level to see. But everyone knows there is a cap on it [salaries] now. We just don’t know how much the cap is.”

Alex says employers are also struggling to deal with the pace of the crackdown: “In many banks, the orders could change unexpectedly fast.”

“They would issue the annual guidance in February, and by June or July, they would realise that the payment of salaries has exceeded the requirement. They then would come up with ways to set up performance goals to deduct people’s pay.”

Mr Chen says his workload has shrunk significantly as the number of companies launching shares on the stock market has fallen. Foreign investment has decreased in China, and domestic businesses have also turned cautious – because of the crackdowns and weak consumption.

In the past his work often involved new projects that would bring money into his firm. Now his days are mostly filled with chores like organising the data from his previous projects.

“The morale of the team has been very low, the discussion behind the bosses backs are mostly negative. People are talking what to do in three to five years.”

It’s hard to estimate if people are leaving the industry in large numbers, although there have been some layoffs. Jobs are also scarce in China now, so even a lower-paying finance job is still worth keeping.

But the frustration is evident. A user on Xiaohongshu compared switching jobs to changing seats – except, he wrote, “if you stand up you might find your seat is gone.”

Mr Chen says that it’s not just the authorities that have fallen out of love with finance workers, it’s Chinese society in general.

“We are no longer wanted even for a blind date. You would be told not to go once they hear you work in finance.”

On 9 August, the Indian city of Kolkata was shaken when a trainee doctor was found raped and murdered at one of its oldest hospitals. Though an arrest was swiftly made, accusations of a cover-up and evidence-tampering quickly surfaced, fuelling public outrage. Since then, daily protests, human chains and candlelight vigils have filled Kolkata’s streets. Now, the city’s largest festival unfolds amid some of the city’s most fervent protests in years.

Kolkata is celebrating its biggest annual festival – Durga Puja, when the ten-armed Goddess Durga is said to visit her earthly home, her entire family in tow.

At Durga Puja pandals – or temporary temples – the goddess stands in the middle astride a lion, flanked by her children – elephant-headed Ganesha, warrior god Kartikeya on his peacock, the goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati – while the defeated buffalo demon lies at her feet, symbolising the triumph of good over evil.

These days, it’s not just the gods that draw the crowds. The pandals have become quite elaborate. Some recreate landmarks like Dubai’s Burj Khalifa or the mangrove forests of Sundarbans. Others are installations with social messaging – conserve water, pray for world peace, save handicrafts.

That led to Durga Puja being billed as one of the biggest street art festivals in the world. Arts organisation Mass Art has been putting together previews of selected Pujas, especially so that foreign guests can get a sense, says its secretary, Dhrubajyoti Bose Suvo, of how a “city transforms into a public gallery”.

But this year, the largest street art event of the city has come face to face with the biggest street protests Kolkata has seen in years. Some of the idols are different, and even the artwork on the walls reflects anguish and protest with figures of women and animals rendered in stark red, black and white.

The protests broke out after the 31-year-old doctor was found brutally killed at RG Kar Medical College on the night of 9 August. After a gruelling 36-hour shift, she had fallen asleep in a seminar room due to the lack of a designated rest area. Her half-naked body, bearing severe injuries, was discovered the next morning on the podium.

“Of course there is an effect [of the incident] on us,” says visual artist Sanatan Dinda. “I do not paint inside an ivory tower. I speak of the society around me in my work.”

Upset over the incident, Dinda resigned from a government-run arts organisation. He says, “Now I am on the streets with everyone else. Now I have no fear.”

In September, Dinda and the clay artists who built the Durga images in the historic artisan neighbourhood of Kumartuli led a protest march demanding justice for the woman they called “our Durga”.

Dinda says he has made “improvisations” to the Durga images he was working on this year.

At one in Bagha Jatin in south Kolkata, his mother Goddess looks more fierce than maternal. The lion she normally rides is springing out of her chest. Each of her ten arms holds a spear to slay evil. The artwork on the walls reflects anguish and protest with figures of naked women and animals rendered in stark red, black and white.

Art as protest is not new.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s , commemorating the 1983 police killing of a man allegedly writing graffiti in the New York subway, found renewed relevance during the Black Lives Matter movement. Public artists like Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Diego Rivera, and Banksy – whose stencils span walls from Kyiv to the West Bank – have long used art to deliver political messages.

Durga Puja art is public art, but it’s also central to a religious festival that fuels the state’s economy. A British Council report valued Durga Puja’s 2019 economic impact at over $4.5bn, nearly 3% of West Bengal state’s GDP.

With so much at stake, neighbourhood clubs organising pujas have to tread warily. They cannot alienate thousands of ordinary citizens looking for a good time, not a sermon. They get financial grants from the government that’s facing the protests. They have to work with the police on permits and traffic control.

A few have opted to forego taking money from the government.

One puja in Kankurgachi, in the northeastern side of the city, chose Lajja (Shame) as its theme after the protests erupted. Its Durga is covering her eyes, her lion keeping vigil over the body of a woman wrapped in a white sheet. The organiser is openly affiliated with the state’s opposition party.

Close by, another puja creates a tableau of the bereaved family, the mother sitting on the bed, the father at a sewing machine, their daughter’s picture in doctor’s scrubs on the wall. Other organisers are more circumspect, not wanting to wade into political waters.

“But we still want to make a point, especially as a women-led women-run club,” says Mousumi Dutta, president of the Arjunpur Amra Sabai Club.

Their theme this year is Discrimination. The artist uses the Constitution of India and its articles promising equality as the backdrop to the goddess while local actors enact the gap between the promise of the Constitution and reality through street theatre.

The theme had been decided earlier but the tragedy gave it a different urgency. “We have decided to not call this year’s Durga Puja a festival,” says Dutta. “We are calling it a pledge instead. A pledge to create a world where we won’t have to keep coming out on to the streets to demand justice.”

The demand for justice for a woman resonates with Durga Puja anyway, a festival built around a goddess vanquishing evil. One puja had already chosen women power as its theme which now matches the zeitgeist.

Durga puja theme designers say they were already neck-deep in work when the protests erupted.

“Perhaps if it had happened earlier it would have been different. By August I was committed to the organisers and to some 450 people working with me,” says Susanta Shibani Pal. But he says the issue “subconsciously” crept into the art.

His installation Biheen (The Void) for the Tala Prattoy puja, covers 35,000 sq ft, immersing the viewer into what he calls a “black hole”.

His Durga has no body, her life force represented by a flickering candle, much like the candles that are part of the protests. “A viewer might read this as my protest. I might call it coincidence. I started this work before RG Kar happened,” he said.

While some are bringing the mood of protest into their Durga Puja art, others are bringing protest art to their Durga Puja. Chandreyee Chatterjee’s family has been celebrating Durga Puja at their home in Kolkata for 16 years. Chatterjee also participated in many of the street protests.

She admits she was in no mood to celebrate this year. They will still have a Durga Puja but with a difference. “We will do what the rituals require, nothing more. Anything that comes under the heading of celebration, like dancing, is being done away with this year.”

She and her friends have also had an artistic little badge made. It shows a hand grasping a flaming torch. Underneath in Bengali are the words “We want justice.”

“I will be giving it to friends and family who come to our Puja,” says Chatterjee. “We want to remind people we have a long long way to go.”

Actress Lupita Nyong’o has condemned the Kenyan authorities’ crackdown on huge anti-tax protests that began in June.

Demonstrators were met with police brutality, according to rights groups, with dozens of people killed and numerous others abducted.

Nyong’o, whose father was jailed and tortured under a former president, Daniel arap Moi, told the BBC: “It is chilling to know that this government is resorting to tactics that I had thought had been left in the past.”

In response, the government said it was not possible to compare two “very different” administrations and that it “regrets any death that occurred”.

But Nyong’o, an Oscar winner who grew up in Kenya but now lives in the US, said the government’s handling of the protests was “upsetting”.

“The more things change. the more they stay the same… I don’t know how this story ends,” said Nyong’o, who has starred in Hollywood hits like 12 Years a Slave and Black Panther, during an interview about her new podcast.

• Was there a massacre after Kenya’s anti-tax protests?
• Batons, tear gas, live fire – Kenyans face police brutality

Her father, Anyang’ Nyong’o, is currently a county governor in Kenya and acting leader of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), one of the country’s main political parties.

The governing United Democratic Alliance (UDA) brought ODM politicians into the government in July, as part of a series of measures aimed at placating the protesters.

In the 1980s, Anyang’ Nyong’o, a political science professor at the time, was among a group of academics who organised against Moi’s regime.

Moi, in office from 1978 to 2002, ruled Kenya with an iron fist and ruthlessly suppressed his political opponents.

After Lupita Nyong’o’s uncle, also an activist, disappeared, the family fled to Mexico. Her uncle’s body has never been found, but according to local reports, the family believes he was pushed off a boat.

“I am deeply grateful for the younger people who are on the front lines fighting for a different Kenya,” Lupita Nyong’o said of this generation’s protesters.

Isaac Mwaura, spokesperson for the current Kenyan government, told the BBC that the authorities were “very co-operative with the protesters and acceded to the demands, including the president not assenting to the finance bill”. It was controversial tax measures in that bill that sparked the trouble.

As for reports that people were killed during the demonstrations, Mwaura said: “Only police statistics are official. The government regrets any death that occurred during the protests and anyone who may have caused such will be held responsible following the rule of law.”

Nyong’o detailed her father’s ordeal in the latest episode of her storytelling podcast, Mind Your Own.

In it, Nyong’o and other African contributors tell entertaining real-life tales in order to explore what it means to be from the continent.

So far in the series, accounts have hailed from Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and the diaspora.

Nyong’o tells her dad’s story in an episode named The Freedom Fathers – the only one so far where politics and oppression are mentioned.

This is intentional – the actress said she wanted to focus on “quirky”, “peculiar” tales rather than well-trodden subjects such as conflict, disaster and poverty.

“I think that all too often we can be narrow about our idea of what is African… I wanted to stay away from the hot button issues that are in the news, that are making it across the globe, because those already exist,” she said.

“What are the stories that we don’t know about – an ordinary person going through an extraordinary situation?”

Although Mind Your Own was produced by American company Snap Studios, numerous African creatives were hired to work behind the scenes.

For example, the podcast’s cover art was made by Mateus Sithole, an artist Nyong’o met in Mozambique, while Nigerian-American musician Sandra Lawson-Ndu did the theme song.

“I really wanted to have as many African hands touch this project as possible. I wanted to send a message, a clear message… this is by and for Africans, without it being exclusionary of anybody else,” Nyong’o said.

However, she acknowledges that it is not possible to encapsulate the entire continent, comprising 54 countries, in one podcast.

“There’s absolutely no way that I would task myself in trying to give the ultimate or comprehensive thesis of Africa – that’s crazy!” she said.

“Africa is going to be as as malleable and as changeable as the people who come from there.

“So we’re never going to be done telling our own stories.”

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Virginia McCullough knew why the police had smashed through her front door, but part of her wondered why it took them so long to discover she had murdered her parents. “Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy,” she calmly told the officers handcuffing her. Neighbours thought John and Lois McCullough had retired to the seaside, but the reality was they were callously poisoned by their daughter. Why did she do it?

The goings-on inside the McCullough family home in Great Baddow near Chelmsford, Essex, were becoming increasingly secretive in 2019.

Relatives were asked to stay away and friends were told Mr and Mrs McCullough had retired to the Clacton area on Essex’s sunshine coast.

The gruesome reality was very different. It would be four years before anyone found out the horrors that took place behind closed doors on Pump Hill.

John McCullough, a retired business studies lecturer, had been fatally poisoned and the 70-year-old’s body was hidden in a crudely-built tomb made out of breeze blocks and blankets.

The corpse of his 71-year-old wife, Lois, was stashed behind sleeping bags and duvets in an upstairs wardrobe.

Mrs McCullough had been battered with a hammer and stabbed, but she too had also been poisoned with prescription medication administered by her daughter.

Virginia McCullough, 36, was handed a life sentence at Chelmsford Crown Court for their murders, to serve a minimum of 36 years, on Friday.

“The curtains were always drawn and you couldn’t see if anybody was in the house,” said Phil Sargeant, who lived next door to the McCulloughs for 20 years.

“They were just like shadows, they’d move very quickly from A to B.”

Mr Sargeant now knows why there was such secrecy at his neighbours’ house.

“I find it quite difficult even to say that Virginia murdered her parents or killed her parents,” he added.

“She’d come across as quite pleasant; she was funny, she was irreverent as well. She had a dark sense of humour.”

In September 2023, Essex Police took a call from Essex County Council’s safeguarding team.

A GP at Mr and Mrs McCullough’s registered practice had raised a concern for their welfare, having not seen them for some time.

Their absences had been explained by their daughter, who offered a range of excuses for each appointment she cancelled on her parents’ behalf.

Conveniently for her, the country had been in Covid-enforced lockdowns for a large period of time they had not been seen.

But when police spoke to McCullough, it became clear something was not adding up – why were her parents always out of the area?

Alan Thomson, who rented a television to the McCulloughs, also had his suspicions.

It followed a phone call from McCullough, abruptly cancelling the rental on her parents’ behalf.

When Mr Thomson’s staff arrived at the family home to pick it up, they were told they could not enter the property – and the TV was already prepared by the front door.

“I got the feeling perhaps she was a bit of a fantasist, but no way would I have thought she’d be a murderer,” he said.

When police raided the property, it was not the first time they had visited.

Weeks prior to the discovery of the bodies, McCullough invited officers inside to discuss an allegation of an assault against her.

Only she knew the intent of this call, but some believed she was testing the water.

Ultimately, the assault allegation came to nothing.

McCullough was more forthcoming when officers returned in September 2023.

“I did know that this day would come eventually,” she confessed.

“I deserve to get what’s coming, sentence-wise, because that’s the right thing to do and then that might give me a bit of peace.”

Documents recovered inside the property painted a picture of a woman desperately trying to keep her parents from discovering a financial black hole she had dug.

Abusing their goodwill, she had been living rent free, spending their money and racking up large credit card debts in their names.

Forged letters showed McCullough had been tricking her parents into thinking they had lost money through scams. In reality, it was money “frittered away” by their daughter.

To them, she was well-qualified, suitably employed and working hard towards becoming an artist – a future she claimed would also bring financial benefits for her parents.

Instead, she was reaping the financial rewards of manipulating, abusing and taking advantage of her parents’ kindness.

In total, McCullough benefited from £149,697 as a result of murdering her parents – combined from their pensions and spending on their credit cards, as well as selling assets.

The court also heard she spent £21,000 on online gambling between 2019 and 2023.

Her lies – and the fear of being exposed – ultimately led to her cruelly killing her parents.

Paul Hastings, a greengrocer at the Vineyards shopping centre near their home, had also noticed their disappearance.

He was told by McCullough that her parents, who used to purchase goods from his shop, were no longer living in Great Baddow.

Mr Hastings said her peculiar nature meant she could say things without arousing much suspicion.

“She came in to the shop and said ‘The police are after me, they think I killed my mum and dad’,” Mr Hastings said.

“I thought ‘That’s a bit odd’ but didn’t think anything else of it, I just thought it was her eccentric nature.”

He explained McCullough would sometimes visit his shop four times a day, before disappearing for the next fortnight.

Debbie Pollard said McCullough would visit the flower shop she ran and bombard her with food and presents.

“We knew she was odd but I would never have dreamt she would ever be capable of doing what she actually did,” she said.

“She’s actually lived in that house all those years with her mum and dad’s remains in there – that horrifies me. Horrifies me.”

Both Mr Hastings and Ms Pollard both said McCullough had also pretended to be pregnant, even creating a fake bump under her clothing.

Throughout her sentencing on Friday, McCullough stared at the floor, emotionless.

It was only when she listened back to her interview with police, describing how she murdered her mother, that she began to weep.

“She looked so innocent; she was just sat there listening to the radio,” McCullough told the officers.

“I did go in three times to build up some gumption but I knew I had to get it done and can’t hesitate.

“She was just staring at me in disbelief.”

Det Supt Rob Kirby, from Essex Police, said her otherwise composed reaction in court was typical of the “considered, meticulous” murderer she was.

“Throughout the course of our investigation, we have built a picture of the vast levels of deceit, betrayal and fraud she engaged in,” he said.

“It was on a shocking and monumental scale.

“McCullough lied about almost every aspect of her life, maintaining a charade to deceive everyone close to her and clearly taking advantage of her parents’ good will.

“She is an intelligent and adept manipulator who chose to kill her parents callously and without a thought for them or those who continue to suffer as a result of their loss.”

What if someone told you mermaids were real?

Forget the fish tails, we mean women capable of holding their breath for minutes on end as they dive under the sea several hundred times a day.

These are the haenyeo divers of South Korea, a community of women from Jeju Island who have been free-diving (without oxygen) to harvest seafood for centuries.

Now, with most of them in their 60s, 70s and 80s, their traditions and way of life are in danger as fewer younger women take up the profession, and with the ocean potentially changing beyond recognition.

It’s these facts that prompted US-Korean film-maker Sue Kim to team up with female education advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafazai to share their story with the world, in their film The Last of the Sea Women.

The daughter of Korean immigrants, US-born Kim first came across the haenyeo when she was a child, holidaying in South Korea.

“I was so struck by them for the same reasons that you see in the film – they were so incredibly bold and vibrant and confident. They were also so loud… fighting and laughing, and they just gave off this very big energy and occupied their space so unapologetically,” says Kim.

“I just fell in love with that entire vibe and big energy when I was a little girl. And so I grew up staying fascinated with them. They were a version of Korean womanhood that I was inspired by and wanted to emulate,” she adds.

“I was so shocked that I did not know about the haenyeo, like so many people did not know, I said yes straight away,” explains Malala, who was a producer on the film.

“The story really took on an urgency about 10 years ago when I found out that this was probably the last generation of the haenyeo,” explains Kim. “It became more of an urgent mandate to make sure someone documented… while we still had them and while they could still tell us their own story in their own words.”

The film follows the women going about their gruelling work during the harvest season and examines the challenges they face both in and out of the water.

They head out to dive at 6am daily. They hold their breath for a couple of minutes, come back up to the surface and go back down again – between 100 and 300 times a session.

Just imagine the fitness levels. They harvest for four hours and then spend another three or four shelling and preparing their catch.

There are various theories as to why women began to take over this traditionally male job so many years ago. The Visit Jeju website states that the number of men was low overall in the population due to a high portion of them dying on the rough seas while boat fishing.

As a result, there weren’t many men to harvest the ocean, so women gradually took over the job.

This is the first major documentary about the haenyeo and Kim says it was hard to gain access.

“The haenyeo communities, they’re very insular,” she explains.

“They’re rural communities that live in fishing villages. They don’t interact with the cities of Jeju much.”

Kim found a researcher who had a history with NGOs and had contacts in the community.

“So this woman… introduced us, then I went down and I basically spent two weeks with… the Haenyeo communities and really gaining their trust. And I did that by mostly listening.

“They actually wanted to talk about all the things that were happening to them.

“They wanted to talk about the fact that they felt that they were on the verge of extinction. They wanted to talk about what was happening to the ocean that no-one seemed to know about or care about.”

Kim says she had to reassure the women that she wouldn’t stereotype them or pity them for working into old age.

“They love working! They think they’re so strong and empowered by doing so.”

Kim told them she would show them in their “true power.”

“‘I promise I will not take on this sad grandma trope because that’s not how I see you, I see you as heroes’,” she explained to the group.

“After that, we became a family.”

The risks are big. There is no insurance available for the job, as it’s too dangerous. And now the ocean – and the women’s livelihood – is under threat.

Global warming is resulting in less sea life, particularly in shallow water; diving deeper is more difficult without oxygen.

Much of the film focuses on the women’s protests against the radioactive water from Japan’s Fukishima plant being discharged into the ocean (Jeju borders Japan), which takes one of the haeneyeos, Soon Deok Jang, directly to the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The message from experts is, overwhelmingly, that the release is safe and it got the green light from the International Atomic Energy Agency – but not all scientists agree on the impact it will have.

While the haenyeo do harvest marine life, there are regulations in place about when they’re allowed to harvest certain seafood, which helps to protect the ecosystem.

Another reason they don’t use oxygen tanks is because “they believe that by holding their breath, that will allow them the natural amount of marine life that they should harvest”, Kim explains, which helps avoid overfishing.

Perhaps the bigger threat though, is from within, with fewer younger women choosing to pursue this difficult profession.

A training school was set up in the early 2000s to try to stem the dwindling numbers but only 5% of those attending go on to become haenyeos.

All is not lost though. The film introduces us to two young women from another island who have found a following on social media and point out the flexible hours the job can offer around family life. One of them had to learn to swim at the age of 30 to do the job.

The older women meet with them for festivals and protests – they call them “their babies” while they are named “aunties” in return.

Yousafzai is inspired: “When I look at the haenyeo and how they work together, it just reminds me of the collective work that women are doing everywhere else, including the advocacy that Afghan woman are doing to raise awareness of the systematic oppression they are facing.”

“When a girl is watching this documentary, I want her to believe in herself and realise that she can do anything. She can stay under the water for two to three minutes without oxygen,” she says. “And of course I still have to take some swimming classes to learn how to swim! I’m at point zero, but it has inspired me to consider swimming.”

Donald Trump has appeared on a slew of shows with huge audiences of young men, sitting for interviews with influencers, comedians and podcasters outside the usual political media. What’s his strategy?

About 15 minutes into Donald Trump’s conversation with comedian Theo Von, the chat veered into territory not usually heard in a stump speech.

“I had a great brother who taught me a lesson, don’t drink. Don’t drink, and don’t smoke,” the former president said. “I admired so much about him… And he had a problem with alcohol.”

“I’ve been in recovery for most of the past 10 years,” Von replied. “Drugs and alcohol.”

Trump seemed genuinely interested.

“Which is worse?” he asked. The pair went on to chat at length about addiction and the drugs industry.

Politics wasn’t entirely absent – within a few minutes Trump was back alluding to his grievances against the “deep state” and the voting system – but the friendly chat was a prime example of a larger campaign strategy.

Trump has done a series of interviews with podcasters and alternative media that together comprise a concerted effort to reach young men.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

Although the tactic isn’t new – for months, stretching back to last year, Trump has been appearing on alternative, male-dominated media outlets with big audiences – it’s taken on a greater importance in the final stages of this election.

In August the Trump campaign told reporters that they are targeting a key group of voters that makes up just over a tenth of the electorate in swing states. They’re mostly younger men, and mostly white, but the group includes more Latinos and Asian-Americans than the general population.

And they believe they can reach these often fickle voters by putting Trump on shows hosted by people like Von, internet pranksters Nelk Boys, YouTuber Logan Paul and Adin Ross, a livestreaming gamer who has repeatedly been banned from sites for violating rules on offensive language.

The Nelk Boys are reportedly spearheading a voter registration drive on behalf of Trump which they hope will reach like-minded audiences.

Although they may not exactly be household names in the world of mainstream media, these podcasts have audiences of millions. Von’s Trump interview has nearly 14 million views on YouTube.

Polls indicate the political gender gap among young people has widened since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee in July. Overall the vice-president seems to be pulling more young people into her camp – but her support among young women has risen faster than her support among young men.

Recent research by the Harvard Youth Poll indicates 70% of women under age 30 support Harris, while 23% plan to vote for Trump. Among men in the same age group, 53% back Harris and 36% support Trump.

Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life, part of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, says that the political gender gap mirrors larger social divisions which have left many young men feeling like few politicians are looking out for them.

“Trump is very good at turning things into zero-sum games,” Mr Cox says. “Young men are trying to understand their place in society that is rapidly evolving, as a group they are struggling more academically, they have mental health challenges and rising rates of suicide.

“These are very real concerns and there’s a sense in the political realm that nobody’s advocating for them,” he said.

But Trump’s podcast tour is not so much a question of policy, Mr Cox says, and more about “showing up” and talking with a different style to a different crowd.

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The attempt to switch up the vibe is apparent in his recent podcast interviews, where the mostly relaxed former president leads with chat about golf and mixed martial arts and Maga-world policies – Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan that often refers to an America-first approach – are assumed to be good common sense rather than controversial topics to be picked apart and debated.

Before the addiction chat on Von’s show, Trump praised Ultimate Fighting Championship competitors including Dustin Poirier, displaying more than a casual knowledge of the sport.

“Boy, I’ll tell you, he’s a warrior,” Trump said, “The man he was fighting was tough… as that fight went along, he just got stronger and stronger.”

Von did not push back – and in fact eagerly agreed – when Trump made a host of unsubstantiated and erroneous statements about voting, immigration and the border, including claiming that “hundreds of thousands of murderers” had entered the country.

On the podcast circuit, there’s plenty of messing around, but sometimes the hosts seem awestruck, deferential or even nervous. Before one chat, the Nelk Boys videoed themselves chugging cans of their own-brand boozy seltzer to calm themselves down before Trump walked into the room.

But their audiences aren’t demanding tough questioning or detailed policy positions.

“A lot of young people are not looking for hard news,” says Mr Cox. “Their first interests might be crypto or video games, and the politics comes later – through the side door, not the front door.”

There are other signs that Trump is making a hard pivot towards male voters – for instance filling the Republican National Convention stage with the likes of Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan and UFC chief executive Dana White, instead of being introduced – like he was at previous conventions – by his daughter, Ivanka.

Judging from the comments on the podcast interviews, many viewers and listeners already back the former president, but getting them out to the polls may be the real challenge.

Voting rates among young people lag behind overall, and young men tend to vote at slightly lower rates than young women.

The Harris campaign is also making a podcast play of its own, aimed at young women. The vice-president recently appeared on the popular sex-and-relationships pod Call Her Daddy, where she too faced less-than-aggressive questioning.

Garrett, a Logan Paul fan from Houston in his early 20s, runs his own YouTube channel under the name Spy Jay.

He said he finds Paul’s brand – “being a Maverick” – appealing, and before watching the interview he had an overall positive view of Trump, calling him “a patriotic nationalist who wants to restore the country back to an improved state from before”.

“But the persecution he’s facing, while there’s a relentless intention in the media to rewrite who he is and what he stands for, implies a greater evil at play,” he said. “And that makes me feel more inclined to be open-minded about voting for him.”

Watching Trump on Paul’s podcast – the internet star asked Trump if he’d ever been in a fight – and Trump’s interview with Adin Ross, only confirmed his views, Garrett told the BBC.

Garrett said he thought young Americans were increasingly tuning into politics, and that Trump is tapping into alt-media spaces “like no other candidate has before”.

“So whether it’s a good strategy or bad, it is going to reach quite a few of the young folks,” he said.

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• A quick guide to Donald Trump

Responses online to the video have been broadly positive. “No one can convince me Trump isn’t just a bro when it comes down to it” said one, while another read “Love or hate Trump, but he definitely knows how to make an interview entertaining”.

But some experts question whether Trump has much room to grow his voting base among heavily male subcultures, where he has long had support.

“Trump already seems to have captured the manospheric and hypermasculine over-25s, so this is a late stage and rather desperate attempt to become relevant,” said Jack Bratich, a media professor at Rutgers University who studies the male-heavy online spaces known as the “manosphere”.

Extremely online young men were very active during the 2016 election campaign, when political memes and extreme message boards like 4chan burst into prominence, says Bratich.

The situation is very different eight years later, he says, with “no identifiable right-wing youth-based online political movement” getting heavily involved in this year’s contest.

However, he notes there is little risk and potentially large rewards for Trump.

Whether it pays off will depend on convincing young men who don’t tend to get involved in politics to log off and head to the polls.

Like so many other things in this election, plays for younger voters are full of unknowns.

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

A 300-year-old gravestone commemorating a woman who was mauled to death by a tiger has been restored.

Hannah Twynnoy was living in Malmesbury in the 18th Century when the animal, thought to have been part of a travelling menagerie housed in a pub yard, escaped and attacked her.

Her gruesome death, aged just 33, has attracted visitors to her grave in the grounds of Malmesbury Abbey ever since.

The inscription on her headstone had become so illegible that, prompted by a local campaign, masonry restorers were brought in to spruce it up.

Hannah Twynnoy was working as a servant in the White Lion Inn when she died on 23 October 1703.

Believed to be the first person to be killed by a tiger in England, the exact nature of her death is unknown as nothing was written about it until about 100 years later.

However, according to local history, the pub accommodated wild beasts for exhibition, one of which was a tiger.

Despite being told regularly not to tease the animals, it is believed that Hannah taunted the tiger, which lunged at her, pulled its fixing from the wall and “tore her to pieces”.

Local historian Christina Staff told BBC Wiltshire that it was unlikely Hannah’s family would have been able to afford an elaborate headstone and somebody else would have paid for her burial.

“It would have cost a fair bit to put that (the headstone) there, but maybe the people who were responsible for her dying, through their guilt, could have supplied it,” she said.

A poem carved on the stone includes the line, “For tyger fierce took life away”; a detail which has regularly drawn curious onlookers to the graveyard.

“(Her headstone) might not be contemporary; it could have been a bit later when people realised the story brought trade to the town,” added Ms Staff.

Malmesbury undertaker Chris Brooks said: “The restoration all came about because you couldn’t really make out the inscription properly.

“Somebody wrote into the community magazine, the Jackdaw, and then everyone became involved.

“All the letters have been repainted by hand. We wanted to protect the lichen and to make sure the stone was still in keeping with the surroundings.”

Chinese police have detained four workers of the Taiwanese iPhone maker, Foxconn, in circumstances Taipei has described as “strange”.

The employees were arrested in Zhengzhou in Henan province on “breach of trust” charges, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said in a statement.

The BBC has contacted Foxconn for comment.

The company is the biggest maker of iPhones for US technology giant Apple and is one of the largest employers in the world, with major manufacturing facilities in China.

Taiwanese authorities suggested the detentions may be a case of “abuse of power” by Chinese police officers and said the case undermines the confidence of businesses operating in China.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said they were not aware of the matter.

In October last year, China’s tax and land authorities launched an investigation into the company.

At that time, Foxconn’s founder Terry Gou was running as an independent candidate in Taiwan’s presidential election.

Taiwan has urged its citizens to “avoid non-essential travel” to the mainland as well as Hong Kong and Macau after China unveiled guidelines in June detailing criminal punishments for what Beijing described as diehard “Taiwan independence” separatists.

Foxconn’s facility in Zhengzhou is the world’s largest iPhone factory which is widely known as “iPhone City”.

Despite a long-standing geopolitical rift between Beijing and Taipei, Foxconn is among many Taiwanese businesses that have built factories in China.

Beijing sees the island as a breakaway province that will, eventually, be part of the country, and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this.

But many Taiwanese consider themselves to be part of a separate nation – although most are in favour of maintaining the status quo where Taiwan neither declares independence from China nor unites with it.

The Princess of Wales has made an unexpected appearance alongside the Prince of Wales on a visit to Southport, where they held a private meeting with the bereaved families of three children killed in a knife attack in July.

This was Catherine’s first official public engagement since she finished her chemotherapy treatment.

Royal sources say she decided to join Prince William to show her “support, empathy and compassion to the local community”.

The couple spoke to emergency responders who helped at the scene of the devastating knife attack in the north-west seaside town.

Catherine gave a hug to some of the emergency workers, with fire chief Phil Garrigan saying “she could see the emotion in them”.

The royal visit to Southport had been planned as a low key event, to allow time to be spent in private with families of the three children who died and with the yoga teacher who was present during the attack.

But Catherine was a surprise addition as she made one of only a handful of public appearances this year, since revealing her cancer diagnosis.

Wearing a long brown, autumnal-looking coat, she arrived with her husband to meet the bereaved families and emergency workers described by Prince William as “heroes”.

With her chemotherapy having ended, Catherine has begun a gradual return to work, including meetings about her early years campaign last month.

However, this is the biggest moment so far in returning to royal duties.

Catherine has spoken of having “good days and bad days” and Kensington Palace has cautioned that her appearances might have to be flexible and be subject to last minute changes.

The visit to Southport was intended by Prince William and Catherine to show the community that it had “not been forgotten”.

The prince and princess heard about efforts to bring the community together after the knife attack – and the wave of riots that followed.

Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, were killed on 29 July, 2024, in the attack on a children’s dance group.

The royal couple spent 90 minutes talking to the families of the three children – and later passed on the families’ thanks to emergency responders, in a meeting in Southport Community Centre.

Catherine told the emergency workers they had supported families through their “darkest times” – and she said: “On behalf of them, thank you.”

Ten other people – eight of whom were children – were injured in the stabbings.

Axel Rudakubana, 17, was arrested at the scene and has been charged with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder.

The royal couple told emergency workers from police and the health services about the importance of protecting their own well-being and mental health.

“The first thing we thought about was actually how on earth you guys are going to handle having seen what you’ve seen. So please take your time, don’t rush back to work, do whatever you need to,” said Prince William, who with Catherine has campaigned for people to be more open about mental health concerns.

The couple had made a donation to a fundraiser to provide physical and psychological help for police and ambulance staff who were caught up in the attack and the riots that followed.

In a message on social media, Prince William and Catherine said their Southport visit had been a “powerful reminder of the importance of supporting one another in the wake of unimaginable tragedy”.

Former chief constable Andy Rhodes described the visit as a “massive boost” for emergency workers.

“It was quite emotional. It is still raw for people,” he said.

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An abrupt silence swamped the courtroom in Avignon as three large television screens, positioned high on three walls, flickered back to life. One could sense people bracing themselves.

In a bleak trial about extraordinary allegations of drugs and rape, it was time to show more of Dominique Pelicot’s carefully curated home videos.

Those videos, filmed by Pelicot and kept on a hard drive that he labelled “abuse”, document assaults on his ex-wife, Gisèle, over the course of a decade.

Fifty men are accused of raping her after she was drugged and left unconscious in the couple’s bed by her husband.

Now 72, Gisèle Pelicot has waived her anonymity so the full details of what she was subjected to can be revealed to the French public. Her lawyers fought to have videos of the crimes screened in court.

Although the judge had earlier said people “of a sensitive disposition” would be able to leave, one of Gisèle Pelicot’s legal team said many had decided to “look the rape straight in the eye”.

Many of the men recruited by her ex-husband on the internet insist they did not believe what they were doing was rape.

Dominique Pelicot sat behind a glass panel, slumped in his chair. His grey hair neatly cut, his left hand raised to block his view of the screen.

Gisèle Pelicot sat on the opposite side of the court, her head against the wall, her eyes occasionally closed. A blank, unreadable expression on her face.

On the screen, in near silence, a short, pale man wearing only blue underpants and black socks, could be seen approaching a bed.

The camera wobbled as it followed him. Behind the man, a woman lay on her left side, almost naked, on a crumpled white sheet. And then, without edits, without any blurring, the sex acts began.

At times, later in the video, you could clearly hear the woman snoring.

In court, Dominique Pelicot appeared to place both hands over his ears. For years he had laced his wife’s food and drink with an anti-anxiety drug, which made her unconscious and seriously affected her health.

This and other videos, shown in court and on Gisèle Pelicot’s insistence to the public watching from an overflow room near by, lie at the heart of the prosecution’s case.

Prosecutors argue that all 50 men who accepted online invitations from Pelicot to visit the family home in the village of Mazan, near Avignon, must have known his wife was unconscious.

Therefore, they must have realised that she was not a consenting partner in some kind of sex game in which she merely pretended to be asleep. Therefore, they must have intended to rape her.

But a string of defence lawyers and their clients have now sought to challenge that.

The man visible on screen in this particular video was a 43-year-old carpenter, named in court as Vincent C.

He stood now in front of the judges in a separate glass-walled area at the rear of the courtroom, with his head bowed down, looking away from the screen.

“Do you recognise the facts of aggravated rape that you are accused of?” asked lead judge Roger Arata – an affable figure with a large white moustache.

“No,” Vincent C replied.

His explanation, delivered haltingly, amounted to a hazy assumption that, since Dominique Pelicot had told him his wife was a consenting partner in a sex game, he had not given the matter any more thought.

At this point Gisèle Pelicot left the courtroom for a few minutes, saying “I can’t bear that man”.

Vincent C acknowledged the experience was “weird,” and unlike anything he had encountered with other couples. And yet, he went on, “I didn’t say to myself: this isn’t going well… I don’t think [about much else] in those moments.”

However, having spoken to his mother and to lawyers, and watching the trial unfold, Vincent C said he had come to understand more about French law, the meaning of rape and the gravity of his actions.

“Now that I am being told how the events unfolded, yes, the acts I committed would amount to rape.”

“Are you aware that Gisèle Pelicot was a victim of your acts?” asked the judge.

“Yes.”

Pelicot has himself admitted all the charges against him.

Outside the courtroom, a lawyer representing another of the accused men distinguished between Pelicot and the others.

“Today it’s clear that Dominique Pelicot’s position is to try to dilute his responsibility by dragging down 50 other men. [Gisèle] is the victim. The question is whether the others were complicit in it or were tricked into participating,” said Paul-Roger Gontard.

While some of the accused have admitted to rape, others have claimed to have spoken or interacted with Gisèle Pelicot in the bedroom.

“So, there are grey zones in this trial,” Mr Gontard continued, pointing to the fact that the videos themselves had already been edited by Pelicot himself, meaning that evidence potentially helpful for the defence could have been cut out.

“He selected what he wanted to keep. He selected the shots. But don’t let that fool you. Everyone says he’s very manipulative.

“Many [of the accused] thought it was a libertine project with the couple, only to discover it was actually a sinister and criminal scheme devised by the husband.

“The question today is when did they realise something was wrong? This realisation varies among [the accused]. The question often arises – why didn’t they leave? It’s not that simple to leave at that moment when faced with a clearly dominant personality in a situation where they are naked and recorded by a camera,” the lawyer added.

Ten minutes’ drive from the courthouse, in a small house in a suburb of Avignon, another of the accused, who has already testified in the trial, agreed to speak to the BBC on condition of anonymity. The man, a nurse by profession, portrayed himself as a victim of Dominique Pelicot.

“I was terrified… I was reduced to the state of an instrument. He was the one who told me: ‘do this.’ I said to myself, this man is not normal, he is a psychopath. It is an ambush, a trap. He is going to kill me in this house,” said the accused man.

He also claimed that Gisèle Pelicot had “reacted to simple caresses… she scratches herself with a co-ordinated movement”, which he said led him to believe that she was conscious and merely pretending to sleep.

When I challenged him, suggesting he was simply seeking to present himself as a victim to avoid culpability, he insisted that was not the case.

He lashed out, repeatedly, at the way the trial was being conducted, at alleged “pseudo-feminists”, and the “hysteria” the media had generated.

Speaking forcefully, but occasionally sobbing, he maintained he was not a rapist. However, he acknowledged that “I will never be considered innocent in this case. I will always carry my guilt with me. I know that.”

The trial in Avignon is set to continue for many more weeks, with a verdict due shortly before Christmas.

Only half of the accused have so far been called to testify, but already this case has revealed, in the grimiest detail, the horrors to which Gisèle Pelicot was subjected, and her extraordinary courage in declining her right to privacy.

The case has also highlighted longstanding debates about French laws and attitudes surrounding rape, and the extent to which a woman’s consent is, or should be considered, a factor in court.

Many of the men have admitted wrongdoing and, like Vincent C, even apologised to Gisèle Pelicot in the courtroom, but they have also insisted that since they didn’t intend to rape, they should not be found guilty of it.

The Northern Lights have splashed vivid colour across UK night skies once again, with stunning images captured all across the country.

The lights, also known as aurora borealis, were expected to be seen only as far south as the Midlands, but Thursday night was the strongest and most widespread showing of the phenomenon in the UK since May, according to BBC Weather.

The aurora forecast is not looking as good for Friday night, with cloud cover and rain expected to prevent sightings.

Sky-watchers in the Shetland Islands have the best chance.

BBC Weather Watchers, readers and viewers sent in almost 5,000 photos of the lights after Thursday’s display – here are some of the best, along with some agency pictures and snaps shared with the BBC on social media.

The Northern Lights have been visible right across the UK and into continental Europe after an extremely geomagnetic storm – G5 – which is the highest on the 1-5 scale.

Starting at around 19:00 BST on Thursday, many people were able to view the aurora. It then weakened slightly for a time, before coming back even stronger around midnight and continuing until dawn on Friday.

Meteorologists advise a long exposure camera when trying to capture the auroras, as the phenomenon is not always visible with the naked eye.

However, many people reported that they were able to see some of the colours further south without using cameras.

What used to be a once-in-a-lifetime event for people in the UK – or a bucket list trip to the Arctic circle – has become more common in the last couple of years.

The auroras have been particularly visible in 2024 due to the biggest geomagnetic storm since 2003, according to Sean Elvidge, a professor in space environment at the University of Birmingham.

Aurora displays occur when charged particles collide with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere around the magnetic poles.

As they collide, light is emitted at various wavelengths, creating colourful displays in the sky.

The auroras are most commonly seen over high polar latitudes, and are chiefly influenced by geomagnetic storms which originate from activity on the Sun.

The UK has seen more of the Northern Lights in 2024 than in many recent years.

Increased UK sightings have been helped by the Sun reaching a “maximum” in it’s 11-year solar cycle.

During this maximum, the number of sunspots increases which leads to more Coronal Mass Ejections sending charged particles to Earth, creating the aurora.

With overall high activity on the Sun with lots of sunspots, there is a high chance we’ll get more of these Coronal Mass Ejections directed to Earth in the coming months.

However, experts say whilst it will still be possible to see the Northern Lights in the UK once the Sun passed its peak, stargazers should expect a “gradual decline” in visibility.

Tesla boss Elon Musk has unveiled the firm’s long-awaited robotaxi, the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California.

The futuristic-looking vehicle, featuring two wing-like doors – and no pedals or steering wheel – deposited Mr Musk in front of an audience eager to hear details about a project he considers key to Tesla’s next chapter.

At the event, billed “We, Robot,” the multi-billionaire reiterated his view that fully self-driving vehicles will be safer than those operated by humans and could even earn owners money by being rented out for rides.

However, investors have so far not shared his enthusiasm – Tesla’s share price fell after markets opened in the US on Friday morning.

The value of its stock was down more than eight percent, trading at around $219, at 11:45 Eastern Time (16:45 BST).

Meanwhile shares in ride-hailing rivals Uber and Lyft – which have their own autonomous ambitions – were each trading up to 10% higher.

Questions are being asked about Mr Musk’s prediction that production of the Cybercab would begin some time “before 2027”, given his track record of failing to meet his own deadlines.

“I tend to be optimistic with time frames,” he quipped during the event.

He said the Cybercab – which would compete with rivals including Alphabet-owned Waymo – would cost less than $30,000 (£23,000).

However analysts have cast doubt on how realistic that plan is.

“It will be extremely difficult for Tesla to offer a new vehicle at that price within that timescale,” said Paul Miller, from research Forrester.

“Without external subsidies, or Tesla making a loss on every vehicle, it doesn’t seem plausible to launch at anything close to that price this decade,” he added.

Mr Musk also said he expected to see “fully autonomous unsupervised” technology available in Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y in Texas and California next year “with permission where ever regulators approve it.”

But that approval is far from guaranteed.

“It is a big chunk of metal driving on roads at high speeds, so safety concerns are big,” said Samitha Samaranayake, an associate professor in engineering at Cornell University.

Tesla’s self-driving ambitions rely on cameras that are cheaper than radar and Lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors that are the technology backbone of many competitors’ vehicles.

By teaching its cars to drive, Tesla plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) trained by the raw data it collects from its millions of vehicles.

But the research community “is not sold on whether the Tesla style of doing things can give the safety guarantees that we would like,” Mr Samaranayake said.

The cybercab project has undergone delays, having originally been due for release in August.

This summer, in a post on X , formerly Twitter, Mr Musk said the wait was due to design changes he felt were important.

Meanwhile, competing robotaxis are already operating on some US roads.

• How robotaxis are dividing San Francisco
• Robotaxi tech improves but can they make money?

Tesla also seems poised to post its first ever decline in annual sales as competitors pile into the electric vehicle market, even as sales have softened.

Despite that dour backdrop, Tuesday’s event was heavy on spectacle – complete with Tesla’s humanoid robots dancing and serving drinks to attendees.

Mr Musk also unveiled another prototype for a “Robovan” which can ferry up to 20 passengers around at a time.

The sleek shuttle “could be a mode of transportation over the coming years that Tesla leverages,” said Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives who attended the event in person.

Another analyst said the event felt like a step back into memory lane while also signalling the path ahead.

“Musk did a fantastic job of painting an ideal future for transportation that promises to both free up our time and increase safety,” said Jessica Caldwell, head of insights at Edmunds.

But despite the showmanship, there are doubts about whether he can deliver the vision he sketched out.

“Many questions remain about how this will be achieved from a practical standpoint,” Caldwell added.

The deployment of robotaxis has encountered setbacks, with driverless cars operated by General Motors subsidiary Cruise being suspended in San Francisco after a pedestrian was knocked down.

But the sector continues to expand.

Waymo said in early October it would add the Hyundai Ioniq 5 to its robotaxi fleet after the vehicles undergo on-road testing with the company’s technology.

Ride-hailing giant Uber also wants to add more autonomous vehicles to its fleet to expand on its delivery and ridesharing options for customers.

It announced a multi-year alliance with driverless car developer Cruise in August.

Chinese tech company Baidu is also reportedly looking to expand its robotaxi division, Apollo Go, beyond China – where the vehicles are active in several cities.

Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon is about to end its second week, as Israel’s war has already entered its second year. Appeals for a ceasefire have increased following an air strike in Beirut on Thursday night, and the wounding on Friday, for the second day running, of UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon by Israeli military fire.

A new offensive is taking place in Jabalia, in northern Gaza, despite persistent calls for the conflict there to end. Israel’s allies are also urging restraint as the country prepares to retaliate against Iran, following last week’s ballistic missile attack.

However, Israel will continue to pursue its own path, and resist this pressure, because of three factors: 7 October, Benjamin Netanyahu and the United States.

It was in January 2020 when Iranian general Qassem Soleimani landed at Baghdad airport on a night-time flight from Damascus. Soleimani was the head of Iran’s notorious Quds Force, an elite, clandestine unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps specialising in overseas operations.

The group – whose name means Jerusalem, and whose main adversary was Israel – was responsible for arming, training, funding and directing proxy forces abroad in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories and beyond. At the time, Soleimani was perhaps the second most powerful man in Iran, after the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

As Soleimani’s convoy left the airport, it was destroyed by missiles fired from a drone that killed him instantly.

Although Israel provided intelligence to help locate its arch-adversary, the drone belonged to the United States. The assassination order had been given by then US President Donald Trump, not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” former President Trump would later say in a speech referring to the Soleimani assassination. In a separate interview, Trump also suggested that he had expected Israel to play a more active role in the attack and complained that Netanyahu was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier”.

While Trump’s account of events is disputed, at the time it was believed that Netanyahu, who praised the killing, was concerned that direct Israeli involvement could provoke a large-scale attack against Israel, either from Iran directly, or its proxies in Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories. Israel was fighting a shadow war with Iran, but each side was careful to keep the fighting within certain bounds, for fear of provoking the other into a larger-scale conflict.

Just over four years later, in April of this year, the same Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Israeli jets to bomb a building in the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing two Iranian generals amongst others.

Then in July, the Israeli prime minister authorised the assassination of Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top military commander, in an air strike on Beirut. The response of the current US president was reportedly to swear at him, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, who claims that President Joe Biden was aghast that Israel’s prime minister was prepared to escalate a conflict the White House had been trying to bring to an end for months.

“You know, the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor,” President Biden is reported to have said.

The same prime minister, characterised as being too cautious by one US president, was then castigated as being too aggressive by his successor.

What separates the two episodes is of course 7 October 2023 – the bloodiest day in the history of Israel and a political, military and intelligence failure of catastrophic proportions.

What unites the two moments, however, is Netanyahu defying the will of a US president.

Both factors help to explain the way Israel continues to prosecute the current war.

Israel’s most recent wars concluded after a few weeks, once international pressure built so much that the United States insisted on a ceasefire.

The ferocity and scale of the Hamas attack against Israel, the impact on Israeli society and its sense of security, mean that this war was always going to be unlike any recent conflict.

For a US administration pouring billions of dollars’ worth of weapons into Israel, Palestinian civilian deaths and suffering in Gaza have been deeply uncomfortable, and politically damaging for the administration. For America’s critics in the region, the apparent impotence of the superpower when it comes to influencing the largest recipient of US aid is baffling.

Even after US jets were involved in repelling Iranian attacks on Israel in April – a clear sign of how Israel’s security is underwritten by its larger ally – Israel continued to bat away attempts to change the course of its war.

This summer, Israel chose to escalate its conflict with Hezbollah, without seeking prior approval from the United States.

As Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Netanyahu has learned from more than 20 years of experience that US pressure is something he can withstand, if not ignore. Netanyahu knows that the US, particularly in an election year, will not take action that forces him to divert from his chosen course (and believes, in any event, that he is fighting America’s enemies too).

Especially when it comes to the latest escalation, it would be wrong to assume that Netanayhu is operating outside the Israeli political mainstream. If anything, the pressure on him is to be tougher to strike harder against Hezbollah, but also Iran.

When a ceasefire plan in Lebanon was mooted by the US and France last month, criticism of the proposed 21-day truce came from the opposition, and the main left-wing grouping in Israel, as well as the right-wing parties.

Israel is determined to continue its wars now, not just because it feels it can withstand international pressure, but also because Israel’s tolerance of the threats it faces has shifted after 7 October.

Hezbollah has for years stated its aim to invade the Galilee in northern Israel. Now that the Israeli public has experienced the reality of gunmen infiltrating homes, that threat cannot be contained, it must be removed.

Israel’s perception of risk has also changed. Long-held notions of military red lines in the region have evaporated. Several acts have been committed in the past year that could, until recently, have led to an all-out conflict, raining bombs and missiles on Tehran, Beirut, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Israel has assassinated the head of Hamas while he was a guest of the Iranians in Tehran; it has also killed the entire leadership of Hezbollah, including Hassan Nasrallah; it has assassinated senior Iranian officials inside diplomatic buildings in Syria.

Hezbollah has fired more than 9,000 missiles, rockets and drones at Israeli cities, including ballistic missiles at Tel Aviv. The Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have also launched large missiles at Israel’s cities, intercepted by Israeli defences as they re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere above central Israel. Iran has launched not one, but two attacks against Israel in the past six months involving more than 500 drones and missiles. Israel has invaded Lebanon.

Any one of these might, in the past, have precipitated a regional war. The fact that they have not will change the way a normally cautious, risk-averse Israeli prime minister decides on his next move.

When two white vapour trails cross the sky near the front line in eastern Ukraine, it tends to mean one thing. Russian jets are about to attack.

But what happened near the city of Kostyantynivka was unprecedented. The lower trail split in two and a new object quickly accelerated towards the other vapour trail until they crossed and a bright orange flash lit up the sky.

Was it, as many believed, a Russian war plane shooting down another in so-called friendly fire 20km (12 miles) from the front line, or a Ukrainian jet shooting down a Russian plane?

Intrigued, Ukrainians soon found out from the fallen debris that they had just witnessed the destruction of Russian’s newest weapon – the S-70 stealth combat drone.

This is no ordinary drone. Named Okhotnik (Hunter), this heavy, unmanned vehicle is as big as a fighter jet but without a cockpit. It is very hard to detect and its developers claim it has “almost no analogy” in the world.

That all may be true, but it clearly went astray, and it appears the second trail seen on the video came from a Russian Su-57 jet, apparently chasing it down.

The Russian plane may have been trying to re-establish the contact with the errant drone, but as they were both flying into a Ukrainian air defence zone, it is assumed a decision was made to destroy the Okhotnik to prevent it ending up in enemy hands.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv have commented officially on what happened in the skies near Kostyantynivka. But analysts believe the Russians most likely lost control over their drone, possibly due to jamming by Ukraine’s electronic warfare systems.

This war has seen many drones but nothing like Russia’s S-70.

It weighs more than 20 tonnes and reputedly has a range of 6,000km (3,700 miles).

Shaped like an arrow, it looks very similar to American X-47B, another stealth combat drone created a decade ago.

The Okhotnik is supposed to be able to carry bombs and rockets to strike both ground and aerial targets as well as conduct reconnaissance.

And, significantly, it is designed to work in conjunction with Russia’s fifth-generation Su-57 fighter jets.

It has been under development since 2012 and the first flight took place in 2019.

But until last weekend there was no evidence that it had been used in Russia’s two-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine.

Earlier this year it was reportedly spotted at the Akhtubinsk airfield in southern Russia, one of the launch sites to attack Ukraine.

So it is possible the abortive flight over Kostyantynivka was one of Moscow’s first attempts to test its new weapon in combat conditions.

Wreckage of one of Russia’s notorious long-range D-30 glide bombs was reportedly found amidst the aircraft’s crash site.

These deadly weapons use satellite navigation to become even more dangerous.

So what was the Okhotnik doing flying with an Su-57 jet? According to Kyiv-based aviation expert Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi, the warplane may have transmitted a signal from a ground base to the drone to increase the extent of their operation.

The stealth drone’s failure is no doubt a big blow for Russia’s military. It was due to go into production this year but clearly the unmanned aircraft is not ready.

Four protype S-70s are thought to have been built and it is possible the one blown out of the sky over Ukraine was the most advanced of the four.

Even though it was destroyed, Ukrainian forces may still be able to glean valuable information about the Okhotnik.

“We may learn whether it has its own radars to find targets or whether the ammunition is pre-programmed with co-ordinates where to strike,” explains Anatoliy Khrapchysnkyi.

Just by studying images from the crash site, he believes it is clear the drone’s stealth capabilities are rather limited.

As the engine nozzle’s shape is round, he says it can be picked up by radar. The same goes for the many rivets on the aircraft which are most likely made of aluminium.

No doubt the wreckage will be pored over by Ukrainian engineers and their findings passed on to Kyiv’s Western partners.

And yet, this incident shows the Russians are not standing still, reliant on their massive human resources and conventional weapons.

They are working on new and smarter ways to fight the war. And what failed today may succeed next time.

US President Joe Biden has said he is “absolutely, positively” urging Israel to stop firing at UN peacekeepers during its conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, following two incidents in 48 hours.

On Friday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its troops were responsible for the incident, in which two Sri Lankan soldiers for the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) were injured.

IDF soldiers operating around the Unifil base in Naqoura identified a threat and opened fire, the Israeli army said, adding the incident would be investigated “at the highest levels”.

On Thursday, Unfil’s two Indonesian soldiers were injured falling from an observation tower after an Israeli tank fired towards it.

The leaders of France, Italy and Spain issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s actions, saying they were unjustifiable and should immediately come to an end.

Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry said it “strongly condemns” the IDF attack which injured two of its soldiers.

The head of UN peacekeeping said there was reason to believe some firing on UN positions in southern Lebanon had been direct, though he did not ascribe responsibility for the incidents.

“For example we have a case where a tower was hit by a fire and also damages to cameras at one of the positions – which obviously to us very much looked like direct fire,” Jean-Pierre Lacroix told the BBC’s Newshour programme.

As Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon continues, the IDF and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah continued to fire missiles and rockets across the Israel-Lebanon border.

The IDF said it had detected about 100 rockets crossing into northern Israel from Lebanon within the space of half an hour on Friday. Two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were detected crossing from Lebanon, one of which was intercepted, the IDF said.

The Lebanese ministry of health said three people, including a two-year-old girl, were killed in an Israeli raid on the city of Sidon in southern Lebanon. Two Lebanese soldiers were killed after Israeli forces targeted an army post in the town of Kafra in southern Lebanon, the Lebanese army said.

In the capital, Beirut, emergency workers continued to comb through the wreckage of buildings hit by two Israeli air strikes on Thursday.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the attacks came with no warning and killed 22 people, all civilians, and injured another 117. Israel has not commented.

Israeli forces launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon last month as they escalated their response to rocket fire from Hezbollah.

Hezbollah and Israel have been trading near-daily cross-border fire since last October, when the Palestinian armed group Hamas in the Gaza Strip carried out a deadly attack in southern Israel.

The IDF has said the UN post struck in Naqoura on Friday was about 164ft (50m) away from the source of the threat identified by soldiers. It said it had told peacekeeping troops to stay in protected spaces at the time.

Unifil said Israeli military vehicles had knocked over barriers at another UN site in Labbouneh, closer to the border with Israel.

The incidents represented a “serious development”, it said.

Mikati said Friday’s attack was “a crime which is directed at the international community”.

Israel argues that Unifil has failed to stabilise the region, and has asked peacekeepers to withdraw northwards so it can confront Hezbollah.

The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, has reiterated Israel’s call for Unifil personnel to withdraw north by 5km (3 miles) to “avoid danger,” but the UN’s Jean-Pierre Lacroix said they would remain in position.

About 10,000 peacekeepers from 50 countries are stationed in Lebanon, alongside around 800 civilian staff.

Since 1978, they have patrolled the area between the Litani River and the UN-recognised boundary between Lebanon and Israel, known as the “Blue Line”.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel on 8 October last year, the day after Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel. The Iran-backed group says it is acting in solidarity with the Palestinians and has said it will stop firing if there is a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Over the past three weeks, Israel has dramatically escalated its campaign against Hezbollah, intensifying air strikes against southern Lebanon and southern parts of Beirut, assassinating Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and launching a ground invasion.

Lebanon says more than 2,000 people have been killed, mainly in the recent escalation, and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. This week Hezbollah rocket fire has killed two Israeli civilians and a Thai national, Israeli authorities say.

In a separate development on Friday, Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defence agency was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying at least 30 people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jabalia town and refugee camp in the north of the Palestinian enclave.

The IDF has not commented on the issue.

Meanwhile, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said “thousands are trapped” in the Jabalia refugee camp, including five of its staff.

The MSF said Israeli forces had issued evacuation orders on 7 October in Jabalia, “while carrying out attacks at the same time”, meaning people could not leave safely.

Dr Mohammed Salha, the acting director of the al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, told the BBC’s Newshour programme the area had been under siege for seven days.

He warned that the hospital would run out of fuel on Saturday, as Israeli forces were “cutting Jabalia from the rest of Gaza”.

“No medication, no medical supplies, no healthy water, no fuel, so pressure, pressure on these people to move and go directly to the south,” Dr Salha said.

Israel has been conducting a new ground operation in the area, saying it is targeting regrouping Hamas fighters who aim to launch attacks, with dozens of people reportedly killed or wounded in northern Gaza in recent days.

A longtime resident of the north Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan, Doug spends part of his days building electric vehicles for Ford as a machine repairman.

But he would never buy one.

A former Democrat and unionised auto worker, Doug – who declined to share his name for fear of pushback from his union – is exactly the type of Michigan voter Donald Trump is working to recruit and Kamala Harris is eager to win back.

With less than a month before election day, the former president has been stoking fears in the state that Harris wants to ban gas-powered vehicles and that auto workers could lose their jobs in the push to electrify cars. The message is resonating with Doug and some other Michigan voters who spoke to the BBC.

“It could definitely cost us our jobs, and it already has cost a lot of people their jobs,” Doug told the BBC on a sunny October day outside a Meijer supermarket in Warren.

Harris has pushed back on Trump’s rhetoric, telling voters at a rally in Flint, Michigan, last week that her administration would not put a stop to vehicles that use petrol. The vice-president endorsed phasing out petrol cars when she ran for president in 2019, but has since reversed her support for the policy.

“Michigan, let us be clear,” she said in Flint, “Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”

Experts say Trump’s electric vehicle criticism is his Michigan spin on a broader economic message as he tries to appeal to voters in the key midwestern swing state.

Speaking to a crowd of hundreds at a Detroit Economic Club event on Thursday, the former president doubled down on the message, saying that United Automobile Workers president Shawn Fain wanted “all electric cars”, a move Trump said was costing the auto industry their “whole business”.

“That has just become a front message of Republicans: that these plans or hopes to electrify the vehicles are going to destroy the auto industry and take away jobs,” said Jonathan Hanson, a lecturer at University of Michigan’s Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy.

And Harris’s challenges to that message haven’t broken through to some Michigan voters, who still believe Trump’s claim that Harris wants a country of entirely electric vehicles.

“I don’t trust them,” 82-year-old Warren resident Ruth Zimmer said of electric cars. “I want it to be the way it always was, with a good, old-fashioned car.”

On Friday in Michigan, Harris’s running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz tried to appeal to those sceptical of electric vehicles and took aim at Trump’s comments about mandates.

“It should just be your choice. We need to make those choices affordable and available to people,” he said. “Nobody’s mandating anything to you. If you want to drive, like I do, a ‘79 International Harvester Scout that is sweet as hell … knock yourself out.”

Walz and Trump’s visits to the state comes as recent polls suggest Harris’s support may be slipping slightly in the key battleground state. A September poll from Quinnipiac University found Trump ahead by three points in Michigan, after other polls suggested Harris had been leading by a slim margin for the past month.

Trump’s attacks on electric vehicles are also complicated by one of his biggest supporters, billionaire Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, an electric car company. Musk has endorsed Trump and appeared at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last week, cheering him on from behind the podium.

Appealing to the state’s automobile and union worker population – once a staunchly Democratic voting bloc – will prove key for Harris and Trump to close the gap in Michigan, experts say.

Trump picked up a number of these voters in the state in his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, though President Joe Biden won some of their votes back in 2020. Nationally, Clinton ended up winning 51% of union households, compared to Trump’s 42%, in a race she lost in Michigan by some 10,000 votes. Biden won union households 56% to 40%, according to 2020 exit polls.

Some former Democratic union workers in Michigan have grown disillusioned with the party as the cost of living has risen. Doug, the Warren resident, said adding that pressure from his union leadership to stay in line with Democrats had turned him off.

“You must be a Democrat, or you’re totally exiled,” Doug said.

Harris, he added, was just President Joe Biden “in a nutshell”.

The vice-president is struggling to win over the labour vote more than Biden, who had cast himself as the most pro-union president in history. Though Harris and Walz have key labour endorsements, they’ve struggled to earn support from rank-and-file union members.

For the first time in three decades, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters – the largest union in the country – declined to endorse a presidential candidate, finding a majority of its rank-and-file members supported Trump.

In Michigan, where the automotive and transportation industry employ 20% of the workforce, Democrats are not getting as much credit as they had hoped for their electric vehicle investments in the state, said Matt Grossmann, a politics professor at Michigan State University.

This year, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a $1.7b (£1.3b) investment to convert shuttered and struggling auto plants in Michigan and several other mid-western states to manufacture electric vehicles and parts of their supply chain.

“Many in the auto industry and surrounding it don’t necessarily think that that would benefit Michigan,” Mr Grossmann said.

Automakers broadly seem to be on board with shifting their fleets over to more electric vehicles, Mr Hanson said, but the transition is expensive and requires complementary investments in factories for special materials such as batteries.

As a part of the nearly $2b federal investment, a General Motors factory in Lansing, Michigan, has received $500m to shift production from petrol to electric vehicles.

In Detroit just two days before Trump arrived, his Republican running mate JD Vance said the Lansing investment was “table scraps” compared to the job losses that would be on the horizon from the shift to electric vehicles.

Kevin Moore, the president of the Teamsters union in Michigan, called Trump and Vance’s electric vehicle claims a “bold-faced lie”.

“They’re not going to get rid of combustible, gas vehicles,” he told the BBC. “They can coincide together.”

His group – and several Teamsters unions in swing states – have endorsed Harris for president.

Moore said he believed Michigan workers would not buy into Trump’s statement that electrification would cost auto workers their jobs.

“They’re astute,” he said of auto workers. “Donald Trump was a gold spoon-fed billionaire. [Harris] lived her life in middle-class America.”

EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power

ANALYSIS: What could be the ‘October Surprise’?

FACT-CHECK: Debunking Trump claim about hurricane funds

While millions of people in Florida fled Hurricane Milton, Mike Smalls Jr ventured into the violent winds in Tampa, Florida, holding a blow-up mattress, an umbrella and a pack of ramen noodles.

He went outside Wednesday evening as the storm pounded the US state and livestreamed on the platform Kick. He told his online audience if he reached 10,000 views, he would launch himself and his mattress into the water.

Once he hit the threshold, he took the plunge. Then he got worried: “The wind started picking up and I don’t know how to swim…so I had to grab on to the tree.”

The area was under an evacuation order – meaning residents had been advised by local officials to leave their homes, for their own safety.

Mike’s hour-long stream from Tampa Bay has more than 60,000 views on the streaming platform Kick, and has been seen by millions after being clipped up and posted on other social-media platforms, including X.

Live streaming – filming yourself in real time – has become increasingly lucrative for content creators looking to make quick money.

But these streams can involve dangerous stunts, as content creators try to stand out in an increasingly competitive environment.

Many people have criticised Mike’s behaviour on social media, suggesting he’s risking his life for clicks.

He made it safely – and told me he’d do the risky stunt again, “if the price is right”.

When asked about the backlash, he admits what he did was “controversial” and acknowledges that some might think he is risking not just his life, but the lives of those who might have to save him. But, he added: “From a content creator standpoint, people like to see kind of edgy things.”

• ‘The tornado was inside our house’ – Florida reels after Milton
• ‘It’s eerie to see its power’ – Florida woman documents 20 hours in hurricane’s path in messages to BBC
• Helene is deadliest mainland US hurricane since Katrina

The Tampa Police Department said in a statement: “Ignoring mandatory evacuation orders puts lives at risk. When individuals disregard these warnings, they not only jeopardise their own safety, but also create additional challenges for first responders who are working tirelessly to save lives.

“Intentionally placing oneself in harm’s way could divert critical resources and delay vital rescue operations for others.”

Hundreds of people have died during this year’s hurricane season, which has devastated parts of the US south-eastern coast.

Millions had been forced to evacuate as Hurricane Milton, which at its peak was measured as a category 5 storm, made landfall on Wednesday along Florida’s Gulf Coast. At least 16 people have died in the storm, millions are still without power and thousands had to be rescued by first responders as water overtook homes.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton have bookended an exceptionally busy period of tropical weather in the US. In less than two weeks, five hurricanes formed – not far off from what the Atlantic would typically see during an entire year.

Mike is one of a number of content creators on social media platforms, including Kick and TikTok, who have been livestreaming and making money from pulling reckless stunts and risking their lives in hurricanes.

Livestreaming content is Mike’s full-time job, he says.

Previous stunts posted on his profile include setting fireworks off inside a bedroom and winding up staff in fast-food restaurants.

His plan for livestreaming Hurricane Milton was: “Get some nice clips, and then, if things get too wild, I can, just, you know, track my little five, 10-minute walk back home,” he added.

This wasn’t the first time he’d exposed himself to danger.

A few weeks before Milton struck, he went out into Hurricane Helene – which also hit Florida – carrying a tent as a prop and livestreamed for more than five hours.

He filmed himself on his phone holding up the tent in an underpass, saying he was “going to survive the hurricane. Why? To entertain the people”.

Just metres away, the ocean was crashing over barriers.

“It’s my job just to entertain and think of creative things to entertain my chat. And if people want to, you know, if they’re inspired by what I do, I respect it,” he said, adding you have to gauge and “do things at your own risk”.

Platforms like Kick offer incentives: money for the number of views streamers get and donations from people who like what they’re doing.

Smalls Jr did not specify how much money he earned from this particular livestream, but said the metrics vary from streamers, with some making $300 to $400 per hour. He added he made enough from his latest stream to pay a few bills.

• No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’
• Explainer: Why is Hurricane Milton causing so many tornadoes in Florida

It might appear, Mike says, that he’s doing anything for views, but he says he takes safety very seriously. Despite not knowing how to swim, he insists that he assessed the risks.

He speaks with bravado after surviving the natural disaster: “I stayed here, and I didn’t die and I’m chilling.”

When asked to respond to specific questions on Smalls Jr and the platform’s responsibility, Kick said it is “a fiercely creator-first platform, and we do not influence the content our creators chose to stream. However, if that content breaches our Terms of Service, or is in any way illegal, then we can impose a ban or suspension”.

They did not comment when asked about whether Smalls Jr’s action breach their specific community guidelines which detail: “Safety First: Prioritise safety for yourself, your audience, the public and anyone else involved.”

TikTok told the BBC that their monetisation guidelines lay out how some content is not eligible to earn money through LIVE features, including “content that tricks or manipulates others… exploits controversial issues to bait engagement, or exploits the suffering of vulnerable people”.

Mike’s profile – and his hurricane content – is still available.

When asked about endangering the lives of emergency workers, Smalls Jr said he knows what he’s getting himself into.

“Don’t save me,” he said. “If I do another hurricane? All right. You ain’t got to say nothing. I do not want to put your life at risk. No.”

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

It was the call the family of a young British climber who went missing on Everest 100 years ago had given up hope of ever getting.

Last month, a team of climbers filming a National Geographic documentary stumbled on a preserved boot, revealed by melting ice on a glacier.

This boot was believed to belong to Andrew Comyn “Sandy” Irvine, who disappeared while attempting to climb Everest in June 1924 with his partner George Mallory.

What’s more, it could potentially help solve one of mountaineering’s biggest mysteries: whether or not the pair succeeded in becoming the first people to summit Everest, 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top.

Well-known adventurer Jimmy Chin, who led the team for National Geographic, hailed the discovery of the boot – with a foot inside it – as a “monumental and emotional moment”.

But for Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers it was simply “extraordinary”.

“I just froze…. We had all given up any hope any trace of him would be found,” she told the BBC.

A number of people have searched for Irvine’s body over the years, partly because the 22-year-old is said to have been carrying a camera with an undeveloped film inside, potentially with a photograph of the pair at the summit.

Could the discovery of the boot be the first step to finding his body – and the camera?

The family have now given a DNA sample to help confirm the foot is indeed Irvine – but the filmmaking team is fairly confident it belongs to the mountaineer. The sock found inside the boot being has a name tag stitched into it with the words “A.C. Irvine”.

“I mean, dude… there’s a label on it,” Chin, who is known for making Oscar-winning climbing documentary Free Solo alongside his wife, was quoted as saying in a National Geographic report.

The team made the discovery as they descended the Central Rongbuk Glacier by the north face of Everest in September.

Along the way, they found an oxygen bottle marked with the date 1933. An Everest expedition that year had found an item belonging to Irvine.

Energised by this possible sign that Irvine’s body could be nearby, the team searched the glacier for several days, before one of them saw the boot emerging from melting ice.

It was a fortuitous find – they estimated the ice had only melted a week before their discovery.

The foot has since been removed from the mountain because of concerns that ravens were disturbing it, according to reports, and passed to the Chinese mountaineering authorities who govern the north face of Everest.

For Irvine’s descendants, the discovery has been emotional – especially in this, the centenary year of his disappearance.

Summers had grown up hearing stories of her grandmother’s adventurous, Oxford-educated younger brother, who they knew as “Uncle Sandy”.

“My grandmother had a photo of him by her bed until the day she died,” she recalled. “She said he was a better man than anyone would ever be.”

Birkenhead-born Irvine was just 22 when he disappeared, the youngest member of an expedition that has intrigued the mountaineering world for a century.

He and Mallory were last seen alive on 8 June 1924 as they set off for the peak.

Mallory’s body would not be found until 1999 by an American climber. In recent decades, the search for the climbers’ remains has been mired in controversy amid suspicions that the bodies were moved.

Summers has always dismissed those stories and suspicions, revealing her feeling of “relief” following the Chin’s call that “he was still there on the mountain”.

But what if it could now be proved that Irvine and Mallory reached the summit, becoming the first to do so – an idea which, Summers acknowledged, would “turn mountaineering history onto its head”?

“It would be nice – we would all feel very proud,” she said. “But the family has always maintained the mystery, and the story of how far they got and how brave they were, was really what it was about.”

And anyway, she said, “the only way we will ever know is if we find a picture in the camera he was believed to be carrying”.

The search, she suspects, will now continue for that camera. “I think it will be irresistible,” she said.

Whether it will be found remains to be seen.

Chin, meanwhile, is hoping that the boot’s discovery – “a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground” – will “finally bring peace of mind to his relatives and the climbing world at large”.

For Summers, it is a chance to remind the world about a young man “who took life and lived it”, embracing every opportunity – and above all, was “having fun”.

But perhaps surprisingly, she and her cousins are grateful the older generation were not here for this discovery.

“For them, Everest is his grave,” she explained.

Boeing will axe its workforce by a tenth – cutting 17,000 jobs – and delay production as the aeroplane maker deals with issues across its business.

Chief executive Kelly Ortberg said in an email to staff that “executives, managers, and employees'” jobs are all at risk.

The business also warned of losses in its weapons and military equipment manufacturing arm, and pushed back the delivery date of its 777X plane.

The news comes as the business grapples with staff striking and mounting concerns around the quality of its planes.

Mr Ortberg said in the email that the company will reduce its headcount “over the coming months”.

“Next week, your leadership team will share more tailored information about what this means for your organization,” he said, adding that it will not proceed with the next cycle of furloughs.

“The state of our business and our future recovery require tough actions,” said Mr Ortberg.

As well as cutting jobs, the company also is delaying production of its 777X due to “the challenges we have faced in development, as well as from the flight test pause and ongoing work stoppage”, a possible reference to the ongoing strike that has been going on for several weeks.

“We have notified customers that we now expect first delivery in 2026,” he said.

A month-long union strike at Boeing has grown contentious, as approximately 33,000 workers sought a better pay package.

Talks appeared to fall apart this week, and the union’s lead negotiator, John Holden, told Reuters, “We’re in this for the long haul and our members understand that.”

The global credit ratings agency S&P has put Boeing on CreditWatch, a sign that they could downgrade the aeroplane manufacturer’s rating if the strike drags out.

The company was already under congressional scrutiny after a January incident, during which a defect caused a panel to blow out on a Boeing 737-MAX jet shortly after takeoff.

No-one was injured, and Boeing’s then-chief executive Dave Calhoun said the company was “acknowledging our mistake”.

Virginia McCullough knew why the police had smashed through her front door, but part of her wondered why it took them so long to discover she had murdered her parents. “Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy,” she calmly told the officers handcuffing her. Neighbours thought John and Lois McCullough had retired to the seaside, but the reality was they were callously poisoned by their daughter. Why did she do it?

The goings-on inside the McCullough family home in Great Baddow near Chelmsford, Essex, were becoming increasingly secretive in 2019.

Relatives were asked to stay away and friends were told Mr and Mrs McCullough had retired to the Clacton area on Essex’s sunshine coast.

The gruesome reality was very different. It would be four years before anyone found out the horrors that took place behind closed doors on Pump Hill.

John McCullough, a retired business studies lecturer, had been fatally poisoned and the 70-year-old’s body was hidden in a crudely-built tomb made out of breeze blocks and blankets.

The corpse of his 71-year-old wife, Lois, was stashed behind sleeping bags and duvets in an upstairs wardrobe.

Mrs McCullough had been battered with a hammer and stabbed, but she too had also been poisoned with prescription medication administered by her daughter.

Virginia McCullough, 36, was handed a life sentence at Chelmsford Crown Court for their murders, to serve a minimum of 36 years, on Friday.

“The curtains were always drawn and you couldn’t see if anybody was in the house,” said Phil Sargeant, who lived next door to the McCulloughs for 20 years.

“They were just like shadows, they’d move very quickly from A to B.”

Mr Sargeant now knows why there was such secrecy at his neighbours’ house.

“I find it quite difficult even to say that Virginia murdered her parents or killed her parents,” he added.

“She’d come across as quite pleasant; she was funny, she was irreverent as well. She had a dark sense of humour.”

In September 2023, Essex Police took a call from Essex County Council’s safeguarding team.

A GP at Mr and Mrs McCullough’s registered practice had raised a concern for their welfare, having not seen them for some time.

Their absences had been explained by their daughter, who offered a range of excuses for each appointment she cancelled on her parents’ behalf.

Conveniently for her, the country had been in Covid-enforced lockdowns for a large period of time they had not been seen.

But when police spoke to McCullough, it became clear something was not adding up – why were her parents always out of the area?

Alan Thomson, who rented a television to the McCulloughs, also had his suspicions.

It followed a phone call from McCullough, abruptly cancelling the rental on her parents’ behalf.

When Mr Thomson’s staff arrived at the family home to pick it up, they were told they could not enter the property – and the TV was already prepared by the front door.

“I got the feeling perhaps she was a bit of a fantasist, but no way would I have thought she’d be a murderer,” he said.

When police raided the property, it was not the first time they had visited.

Weeks prior to the discovery of the bodies, McCullough invited officers inside to discuss an allegation of an assault against her.

Only she knew the intent of this call, but some believed she was testing the water.

Ultimately, the assault allegation came to nothing.

McCullough was more forthcoming when officers returned in September 2023.

“I did know that this day would come eventually,” she confessed.

“I deserve to get what’s coming, sentence-wise, because that’s the right thing to do and then that might give me a bit of peace.”

Documents recovered inside the property painted a picture of a woman desperately trying to keep her parents from discovering a financial black hole she had dug.

Abusing their goodwill, she had been living rent free, spending their money and racking up large credit card debts in their names.

Forged letters showed McCullough had been tricking her parents into thinking they had lost money through scams. In reality, it was money “frittered away” by their daughter.

To them, she was well-qualified, suitably employed and working hard towards becoming an artist – a future she claimed would also bring financial benefits for her parents.

Instead, she was reaping the financial rewards of manipulating, abusing and taking advantage of her parents’ kindness.

In total, McCullough benefited from £149,697 as a result of murdering her parents – combined from their pensions and spending on their credit cards, as well as selling assets.

The court also heard she spent £21,000 on online gambling between 2019 and 2023.

Her lies – and the fear of being exposed – ultimately led to her cruelly killing her parents.

Paul Hastings, a greengrocer at the Vineyards shopping centre near their home, had also noticed their disappearance.

He was told by McCullough that her parents, who used to purchase goods from his shop, were no longer living in Great Baddow.

Mr Hastings said her peculiar nature meant she could say things without arousing much suspicion.

“She came in to the shop and said ‘The police are after me, they think I killed my mum and dad’,” Mr Hastings said.

“I thought ‘That’s a bit odd’ but didn’t think anything else of it, I just thought it was her eccentric nature.”

He explained McCullough would sometimes visit his shop four times a day, before disappearing for the next fortnight.

Debbie Pollard said McCullough would visit the flower shop she ran and bombard her with food and presents.

“We knew she was odd but I would never have dreamt she would ever be capable of doing what she actually did,” she said.

“She’s actually lived in that house all those years with her mum and dad’s remains in there – that horrifies me. Horrifies me.”

Both Mr Hastings and Ms Pollard both said McCullough had also pretended to be pregnant, even creating a fake bump under her clothing.

Throughout her sentencing on Friday, McCullough stared at the floor, emotionless.

It was only when she listened back to her interview with police, describing how she murdered her mother, that she began to weep.

“She looked so innocent; she was just sat there listening to the radio,” McCullough told the officers.

“I did go in three times to build up some gumption but I knew I had to get it done and can’t hesitate.

“She was just staring at me in disbelief.”

Det Supt Rob Kirby, from Essex Police, said her otherwise composed reaction in court was typical of the “considered, meticulous” murderer she was.

“Throughout the course of our investigation, we have built a picture of the vast levels of deceit, betrayal and fraud she engaged in,” he said.

“It was on a shocking and monumental scale.

“McCullough lied about almost every aspect of her life, maintaining a charade to deceive everyone close to her and clearly taking advantage of her parents’ good will.

“She is an intelligent and adept manipulator who chose to kill her parents callously and without a thought for them or those who continue to suffer as a result of their loss.”

Voters in the US go to the polls on 5 November to elect their next president.

The election was initially a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris.

The big question now is – will America get its first woman president or a second Donald Trump term?

As election day approaches, we’ll be keeping track of the polls and seeing what effect the campaign has on the race for the White House.

Harris has been ahead of Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July, as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

The two candidates went head to head in a televised debate in Pennsylvania on 10 September that just over 67 million people tuned in to watch.

A majority of national polls carried out in the week after suggested Harris’s performance had helped her make some small gains, with her lead increasing from 2.5 percentage points on the day of the debate to 3.3 points just over a week later.

That marginal boost was mostly down to Trump’s numbers though. His average had been rising ahead of the debate, but it fell by half a percentage point in the week afterwards.

You can see those small changes in the poll tracker chart below, with the trend lines showing how the averages have changed and the dots showing the individual poll results for each candidate.

While these national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, they’re not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election.

That’s because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.

There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.

• What is the electoral college?

Right now, the polls are very tight in the seven states considered battlegrounds in this election with just one or two percentage points separating the candidates.

That includes Pennsylvania, which is key as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven states and therefore winning it makes it easier to reach the 270 votes needed.

In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day Biden quit the race he was trailing Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in these seven states.

One thing to note is that there are fewer state polls than national polls being carried out at the moment so we have less data to go on and every poll has a margin of error that means the numbers could be higher or lower.

But looking at the trends since Harris joined the race does help highlight the states in which she seems to be in a stronger position, according to the polling averages.

In the chart below you can see that Harris has been leading in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin since the start of August – but the margins are still small.

All three had all been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his path to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden retook them in 2020 and if Harris can do the same this year then she will be on course to win the election.

The figures we have used in the graphics above are averages created by polling analysis website 538, which is part of American news network ABC News. To create them, 538 collects the data from individual polls carried out both nationally and in battleground states by lots of polling companies.

As part of its quality control, 538 only includes polls from companies that meet certain criteria, like being transparent about how many people they polled, when the poll was carried out and how the poll was conducted (telephone calls, text message, online, etc).

You can read more about the 538 methodology here.

At the moment, the polls suggest that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are within a couple of percentage points of each other in swing states – and when the race is that close, it’s very hard to predict winners.

Polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Polling companies will be trying to fix that problem in a number of ways, including how to make their results reflect the make-up of the voting population.

Those adjustments are difficult to get right and pollsters still have to make educated guesses about other factors like who will actually turn up to vote on 5 November.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• ANALYSIS: Harris goads Trump into flustered performance
• EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election
• IMMIGRATION: Could Trump really deport a million migrants?
• FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger or weaker under Trump?
• Read more about: Kamala Harris | Donald Trump | US election

Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors, has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

Known as hibakusha, the survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been recognised by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Nobel Committee Chair Joergen Watne Frydnes said the group had “contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo”.

Mr Frydnes warned the “nuclear taboo” was now “under pressure” – and praised the group’s use of witness testimony to ensure nuclear weapons must never be used again.

Founded in 1956, the organisation sends survivors around the world to share their testimonies of the “atrocious damage” and suffering caused by the use of nuclear weapons, according to its website.

Their work began almost a decade after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On 6 August 1945, a US bomber dropped the uranium bomb above the city of Hiroshima, killing around 140,000 people.

Three days later a second nuclear weapon was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan’s surrender, announced by Emperor Hirohito shortly afterwards, ended World War Two.

Speaking to reporters in Japan, a tearful Toshiyuki Mimaki, the co-head of the group, said: “Never did I dream this could happen,” the AFP news agency quotes him as saying.

Mr Mimaki criticised the idea that nuclear weapons bring peace. “It has been said that because of nuclear weapons, the world maintains peace. But nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists,” Mr Mimaki said, according to reports by AFP.

In a BBC interview last year, he said despite only being three years old at the time the nuclear bomb hit Hiroshima – he could still remember dazed and burnt survivors fleeing past his home.

The prize – which consist of a diploma, a gold medal and a sum of $1m (£765,800) – will be presented at a ceremonies in Oslo in December, marking the anniversary of the death of the scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.

The group has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize “many times” in the past, including in 2005 when it received a special mention by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, its website says.

The decision to recognise Nihon Hidankyo means the Nobel committee has steered away from more controversial nominees for the peace prize.

There had been widespread speculation the United Nations agency supporting Palestinians – UNRWA – was being considered for the prize.

Although the organisation is the main provider of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, nine of its members were fired for alleged involvement in the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year.

More than 12,000 people had signed a petition urging the committee not to award UNRWA the prize.

There were equal concerns about the nomination of the International Court of Justice.

The UN’s main judicial organ is currently considering allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and has already issued a statement urging the Israeli authorities to refrain from genocidal acts.

But while giving the prize to Nihon Hidankyo may be a non-controversial choice, it could also focus global attention on the threat of nuclear conflict which overshadows the fighting in both Ukraine and the Middle East.

Throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its leaders have repeatedly hinted that they may be ready to use tactical nuclear weapons if western allies increase their support for Ukraine in a way Russia considers unacceptable.

These threats have succeeded in restraining western support for fear of escalation.

In the Middle East, the subtext for much of Israel’s strategy is the fear that Iran is seeking nuclear capability, something Tehran denies.

The Nobel committee’s decision may renew a debate about the use of nuclear weapons at a time when some countries look enviously at their deterring power.

This year’s peace prize had 286 nominations, a number comprising 197 individuals and 89 organisations.

Nominations can be made by people in positions of significant authority, including members of national assemblies, governments and international courts of law.

Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi won the prize in 2023, when she was honoured for her work fighting the oppression of women in Iran.

Ms Mohammadi is currently being held in Evin prison in Tehran, having already spent 12 years in jail serving multiple sentences related to her activism.