North Korea has accused South Korea of flying drones into its capital, ratcheting up tensions that have been simmering for months.

The drones allegedly scattered propaganda leaflets over Pyongyang in what the North described as a provocation that could lead to “armed conflict and even war”.

After levelling these allegations at the South on Friday, Pyongyang said it had ordered border troops to be prepared to fire. South Korea in turn said it was ready to respond, and warned that if the safety of its citizens was threatened it would signal the “end of the North Korean regime.”

Then, on Tuesday, the North blew up sections of two roads that connected it to South Korea, making good on an earlier threat. The next day, it claimed that 1.4 million young North Koreans had applied to join or return to the army.

These flare-ups are the latest in a string of exchanges between the two Koreas, which have seen tensions rise to their highest point in years since the North’s leader Kim Jong Un declared in January that the South is his regime’s number one enemy.

On 11 October, North Korea’s foreign ministry accused the South of sending drones to Pyongyang at night over the course of two weeks. It said that leaflets dispersed by the drones contained “inflammatory rumours and rubbish”.

Kim’s influential sister, Kim Yo Jong, warned Seoul of “horrible consequences” if the alleged drone flights happened again. She later said there was “clear evidence” that “military gangsters” from the South were behind the alleged provocations.

North Korea has released blurry images of what it said were the drones flying in the sky, as well as pictures allegedly showing the leaflets, but there is no way of independently verifying their claims.

While South Korea initially denied flying drones into the North, its Joint Chiefs of Staff later said that it could neither confirm nor deny Pyongyang’s allegation.

There has been local speculation that the drones were flown by activists, who have been sending the same materials to the North using balloons.

Park Sang-hak, the leader of the Free North Korea Movement Coalition, denied North Korea’s claim about the drone incursion, stating, “We did not send drones to North Korea”.

On Monday, Kim met the head of the army, military chiefs, the ministers of state security and defence, and top officials, the North’s official news agency KCNA said.

There, Kim set the “direction of immediate military action” and tasked officials with the “operation of the war deterrent and the exercise of the right to self-defence”.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff public relations officer, Lee Sung-joon, said the North could mount “small-scale provocations” such as small explosions on roads connecting the Koreas.

Then came the explosions at the symbolic Gyeongui and Donghae roads.

While both roads have long been shuttered, destroying them sends a message that Kim does not want to negotiate with the South, according to analysts.

Following the explosions, the South Korean military said it had fired weapons on its side of the border as a show of force, and had heightened surveillance of the North.

Hours later, the government of Gyeonggi Province, which surrounds Seoul, designated 11 inter-Korean border areas as “danger zones” in a bid to stop people from sending anti-North propaganda leaflets across the border.

“Gyeonggi Province has determined that the act of scattering leaflets toward North Korea is an extremely dangerous act that could trigger a military conflict,” Kim Sung-joong, vice governor of Gyeonggi Province, said in a media briefing.

The scattering of such leaflets could threaten the “lives and safety of our residents”, Kim added, as “inter-Korean relations are rapidly deteriorating”.

Analysts say the drone incident suggests that North Korea is shoring up internal support by making it appear as though threats against the country are escalating.

Using terms like “separate states” in reference to the South, and dropping words like “compatriots” and “unification”, is part of this strategy, said Professor Kang Dong-wan, who teaches political science and diplomacy at Dong-a University in Busan.

“The North Korean regime relies on the politics of fear and needs an external enemy,” Prof Kang said. “Whenever tensions rise, North Korea emphasises external threats to boost loyalty to the regime.”

Analysts say the tit-for-tat between the two Koreas shows how they are locked in a “chicken game”, with both sides unwilling to blink first.

“Neither side is willing to make concessions at this point,” said Professor Kim Dong-yup from the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

As there is mutual distrust, Seoul “needs to strategically consider how to manage the crisis”, Prof Kim added.

Not at the moment, analysts say.

“I doubt that the situation would escalate to the level of war. North Korea is exploiting military confrontation to strengthen internal cohesion,” Prof Kang said.

“I question North Korea’s ability to initiate a full-scale war. The regime is well aware of the severe consequences such a conflict would bring,” Prof Kim said.

The most recent spat over alleged drone flights will most likely remain a “verbal fight”, said Prof Nam Sung-wook, who teaches North Korean studies at Korea University in Seoul.

Because Seoul and Pyongyang know that they can’t bear the cost of a full-blown war, Prof Nam said, “the likelihood of actually using nuclear weapons is low”.

The two Koreas are technically still at war since they did not sign a peace treaty when the Korean War ended in 1953.

Reuniting with the South had always been a key, if increasingly unrealistic, part of the North’s ideology since the inception of the state – until Kim abandoned reunification with the South in January.

Kim has brought North Korea closer to Russia under Vladimir Putin, placing him at odds with the US and the West, which are South Korea’s key allies.

Also significant are North Korea’s long-standing ties with China, arguably its most important ally. In the wake of the drone incident, a spokesperson from China’s foreign ministry on Tuesday called on all parties “to avoid further escalation of conflicts” on the peninsula.

Tensions in the Korean peninsula are rising as the US presidential campaign enters the home stretch.

Members of a Malaysian religious group accused of human trafficking and child sexual abuse continued committing crimes even after a large-scale police crackdown, according to authorities.

The Islamic Global Ikhwan Group (GISB) made international headlines in September after police rescued 402 minors suspected of being abused across 20 care homes.

Authorities arrested 171 suspects at the time, including teachers and caretakers – but hundreds more have been arrested since, as further details emerge of the group’s alleged crimes.

Among those are allegations that, until 1 October, five GISB members trafficked people for the purpose of exploitation by forced labour through threats.

Two of the accused were managers of a GISB-owned resort in the southern state of Johor. They were charged on Sunday with four counts of human trafficking involving three women and a man aged between 30 and 57. The third, a worker at the same resort, was charged with two counts of sexually abusing a 16-year-old.

At least two other suspects in the incident, which took place between August 2023 and 1 October 2024, are still at large.

Hundreds of other victims, aged between one and 17, are said to have endured various forms of abuse at care homes linked to GISB, with some allegedly sodomised by their guardians and forced to perform sexual acts on other children, according to police.

In a press conference on Monday, lawyers representing GISB denied allegations of illegal business activities and organised crime, asking for a “fair investigation” as police investigations continue.

However, its CEO, Nasiruddin Mohd Ali, had earlier admitted there were “one or two cases of sodomy” at the care homes.

“Indeed, there were one or two cases of sodomy, but why lump them (the cases) all together?” Nasiruddin said in a video posted to the company’s Facebook page.

GISB has hundreds of businesses across 20 countries, operating across sectors including hospitality, food and education. It has also been linked to Al-Arqam, a religious sect that was banned by the Malaysian government in 1994 due to concerns about deviant Islamic teachings.

Khaulah Ashaari, the daughter of Al-Arqam founder Ashaari Muhammad, is a member of GISB, and has denied that the group still follows her late father’s teachings.

The lower house of Malaysia’s parliament on Tuesday held a special motion discussing issues relating to GISB, where government ministers flagged a number of findings made since the children were rescued from the care homes last month.

The Home Minister, Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail, told the hearing that some children from as young as two years old were separated from their families and instructed to work under the pretence of “practical training”.

He also said they were occasionally forced to perform hundreds of squats as punishment for “disciplinary breaches”.

“If they did any wrongdoings, for something as simple as not queuing up properly, they would be punished with not 100 but 500 ketuk ketampi (squats),” Saifuddin said, according to a report by local outlet The Star.

“According to assessments by psychologists – either through the police’s D11 unit or the Welfare Department – these children missed their parents,” he added. “Some don’t even know them.”

To date, the police operation against GISB has resulted in 415 arrests and the rescue of 625 children, according to Saifuddin.

The Malaysian authorities have also expanded their investigations into GISB internationally, seeking the assistance of Interpol.

Visit BBC Action Line for details of organisations that can provide advice, information and support for people affected by sexual abuse.

With a night of bottomless drinks, a three-course dinner and an auction packed with royal memorabilia, the University of Queensland Monarchist League’s annual ball is a sell-out.

Billed as a celebration of the Crown, a rendition of God Save The King followed by Australia’s national anthem kicks off the event. When dinner is done, the bidding starts.

First up, a limited-edition Royal Doulton plate with a hand-decorated portrait of the King to mark his 60th birthday. Also on the ticket – an oil painting of King George V and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon signed by monarchist and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

For the 200 students and their guests, the fact that King Charles is travelling over 16,000 km (10,000 miles) across 10 different time zones, to tour the country from 18 to 26 October – all while going through cancer treatment – is a testament to his love of Australia. And for that they are grateful.

“He’s such a big part of our history and our traditions, it’s wonderful we get to celebrate it,” says student Eliza Kingston.

“He’s just as much the King of Australia as he is the King of England,” Jeremy Bazley adds enthusiastically.

But amid a cost-of-living crisis, many Australians have failed to take notice of the trip at all – while some campaigners have tried to frame it as the royal family’s “farewell tour”, in a bid to reinvigorate the decades-old republican debate.

It’s a question that the government has, for now at least, put on ice – while King Charles earlier this week reiterated longstanding palace policy that the matter should be left for the “public to decide”.

Last year’s unsuccessful vote on the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has stalled momentum for another referendum – which is the only way to change Australia’s constitution. The bruising campaign divided the nation at times, while leaving many of its first inhabitants feeling silenced.

It’s a backdrop that will no doubt impact the tone of this royal tour, which includes events in Sydney and Canberra, and is the first in over a decade.

This will be King Charles’s 17th visit to Australia. His first was in 1966, when he came as a teenage prince to spend two terms at Timbertop – a campus of a boarding school in the mountains of Victoria. His time there was, he said, “by far the best” experience of his education.

He’s since returned 15 times for official tours, including a trip with Princess Diana to one of the country’s most famous landmarks, Uluru. Most recently, he opened the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.

So, what sort of welcome will he receive since becoming King? The data suggests the nation is split.

A snapshot survey after his coronation, conducted by Roy Morgan Research, indicated 60% of Australians wanted the country to remain a constitutional monarchy.

But last year, a poll by YouGov suggested that number had dwindled to 35%, and that 32% of people appeared to favour becoming a republic as soon as possible.

A further 12% felt that should only happen when the King died, and 21% just didn’t know.

And while just over a third of those questioned thought the monarchy was good for the country, about 20% thought it was bad – while 38% were indifferent.

At the Royal Hotel Darlington pub, opposite the University of Sydney, students who have finished classes and are headed for a pint had no idea that a visit from the King was imminent.

“To be honest, not that many people would know about it or think too much about it,” says 19-year-old Charlotte Greatrex. “We all get very swept up in uni or whatever’s going on in our own lives that it doesn’t seem to influence us that much.”

Her friend Gus Van Aanholt agrees: “I feel older generations, like my parents and my grandparents, would have much more of a stronger connection to the monarchy.”

Polling has often pointed to a generational gap – indicating increased support for the monarchy among older Australians.

Ahead of the King’s visit the Australian Republic Movement (ARM) wants to capitalise on what it sees as a growing indifference to the monarchy. It recently released a tongue-in-cheek media campaign depicting King Charles, Queen Camilla and the Prince of Wales as ageing rock stars delivering their final show, while encouraging people to “wave goodbye to royal reign”.

Although a 1999 referendum on becoming a republic was resoundingly defeated, the ARM would like to see the question put to the people again.

“We’ve been independent for a long time now but that last little step of independence for us is splitting away from the monarchy,” says co-chair Nathan Hansford.

“Regardless of whatever connotations you want to put towards the British royal family in the past, it’s really a story about us moving forward as a nation.”

When the King and Queen fly into Sydney on Friday, they will be greeted by one of Australia’s most prominent republicans, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

He has long made it clear that his country’s future should be one without a monarchy. He even appointed an assistant minister for the republic.

But in recent months, a cabinet reshuffle and the removal of the republican portfolio revealed that plans to hold a vote on the issue had been shelved.

Like much of the world, Australians are struggling to keep up with the rising costs of everyday essentials, and the government knows it’s not going to win a referendum when there isn’t the appetite for what many would see as an expensive distraction.

In short, Albanese has assessed that a republican vote is not a priority for the general public right now.

For their part, many Indigenous Australians feel last year’s referendum result was a clear indication the country still has a lot of work to do to grapple with the ongoing impacts of its colonial past, before it can debate its future.

“I think if we do end up going to another referendum, we have to make sure that we deal with First Nations issues… we still have people experiencing intergenerational trauma, so understanding the history of what has happened in this country is really key,” says Allira Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman and co-chair of the Uluru Youth Dialogue.

She’s proud, though, of how much more diverse the nation has become, since King Charles first touched down as a 17-year-old.

“We’re not white Australia anymore, we’re a brown Australia.

“We have multicultural, diverse backgrounds coming from all nations, and it’d be very interesting to see a brown head of state, or a black head of state but before we do that, we need to include our First Nations and recognise that.”

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has adopted a ‘click to cancel’ rule, which aims to make it easier for people to end subscriptions.

It will force companies to make subscription sign-ups and cancellations equally straightforward.

Businesses, including retailers and gyms, will also have to get consent from customers before renewing subscriptions or converting free trials into paid memberships.

The new rule is due to come into effect in around six months time.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” said FTC chair Lina Khan.

“The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

Under the new rule, businesses will be banned from forcing customers to go though a chatbot or an agent to cancel subscriptions that were originally signed up to using an app or website

For memberships that customers signed up to in person, businesses will have to offer the option to terminate them by calling by phone or online.

Last year, the FTC took legal action against technology giant Amazon on a related issue.

The lawsuit accused the firm of tricking customers into signing up for Prime subscriptions that renewed automatically and made it difficult for people to cancel.

It also said Amazon’s website designs pushed customers into agreeing to enrol in Prime and have the subscription automatically renewed as they were making purchases.

Amazon has rejected the claims.

The FTC has also taken legal action against software giant Adobe for similar reasons.

It sued the company for allegedly violating consumer protection laws with “hidden” termination fees and a convoluted cancellation process.

The FTC said Adobe had failed to clearly disclose its terms to customers, including the year-long length of a subscription and charges that would be triggered for cancelling early.

Adobe has disputed the allegations.

A law introduced in the UK in May also takes aim at so-called subscriptions traps.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 requires businesses to provide clear information to consumers before they enter a subscription agreement.

It forces sellers to remind customers that a free or low-cost trial is coming to an end.

It also requires companies to ensure customers can easily end a contract.

Chinese communities are being targeted by scammers who trick older women out of their valuables by persuading them their loved ones are in danger.

After a wave of cases on the streets of the UK, US, Australia and Canada, police are investigating and victims’ families are trying to find the perpetrators.

The blessing scam is an elaborate piece of criminal street theatre. A gang of usually three women act out a well-rehearsed script in Cantonese for an audience of one – the unsuspecting victim.

Mungnee is a Chinese Malaysian Londoner in her sixties. She was approached on Harrow Road in West London while on her way to yoga, by a crying woman. The woman asked in Cantonese if Mungnee knew a specific Chinese traditional healer in the area, as her husband was sick.

Quickly, a second Cantonese-speaking stranger appeared, claiming she knew the healer, and offering to take them to him. Mungnee was swept along, keen to help the woman who was so upset. On a quieter side street, a third woman joined the group, claiming to be related to the healer and went to see if he could help.

When she returned from speaking to the healer for 15 minutes, she had troubling news. Through his mystical powers, he had apparently discovered Mungnee was also in danger. He miraculously seemed to know all about her marriage problems, the shooting pain in her right leg – things Mungnee had not shared with them.

But the next revelation was what shocked Mungnee.

“Your son is going to have an accident in the next three days and he’s going to die.”

The woman told Mungnee the healer could bestow a blessing that would protect her adult son.

The ladies told her: “You need to take a handful of rice, and put in as much gold and cash in a bag as you can”. They would say a blessing over the valuables.

Mungnee says she felt reassured by the promise her items would be returned to her after the blessing.

One of the women rushed Mungnee home to collect her jewellery, then to the bank to withdraw £4,000 in cash from her savings. The valuables were placed in a plastic bag.

Mungnee thinks this must have been the moment the bags were exchanged.

“It was quick as a flash – her hands are so nimble. I didn’t see anything.”

When she got home, Mungnee was shocked to look inside the black bag and find only a brick, a piece of cake, and two bottles of water. She says: “That’s when I just turned cold.. and then I just told my son. ‘I think I’ve been conned. I’ve been scammed.’”

Some of the items stolen had been in the family for generations, passed down by her mother.

Mungnee’s experience is a textbook example of a blessing scam. The BBC has spoken to multiple victims who all tell similar stories – from the distraught stranger, to the claims evil spirits are threatening a relative. Even the name of the fictional healer is the same in many cases – ‘Mr Koh’.

All the victims are scammed within a few hours, in Mungnee’s case the whole con only took about three hours from beginning to end.

Anqi Shen is a law professor at Northumbria University and a former Chinese police officer. She believes the blessing scam is the latest example of a centuries old tradition of street crime that exploits spiritual beliefs.

“Chinese people tend to keep some valuable jewellery especially pieces made of gold, silver, jade, believed to hold protective powers,” Shen explains.

She says it’s believable to victims that after such items are blessed, they could offer even greater protection.

Tuyet van Huynh has started a social media campaign to raise awareness about the blessing scam, after her mother was scammed out of tens of thousands of pounds in May.

Her mum was shopping in Upton in East London when three women playing the same roles persuaded her that her son was threatened by evil spirits.

Police in the US, Canada, and Australia have issued warnings about blessing scams over the past year.

In the UK, Mungnee and Tuyet’s mother have both reported their cases to the Metropolitan Police, who have also revealed they are investigating a number of cases in the Islington area of London.

Tuyet has received reports of other incidents in Lewisham, Romford, Liverpool and, Manchester.

She began to investigate what happened by gathering CCTV recordings from the area where her mother was approached. Tuyet says the footage showed her mother “followed every instruction to the point where she was like a zombie”.

Tuyet’s mother can’t explain how the crooks pulled her in with the story of the healer, as she is adamantly not superstitious nor spiritual.

Tuyet wondered if something else might have been involved. She began to research if there was a drug that could have put her mum under somebody’s influence, but also leave her lucid enough to gather her valuables from hiding places around her home.

She has a theory: “It’s a possibility that this is a drug called the Devil’s Breath.”

Scopolamine, colloquially known as Devil’s Breath, is used to treat motion sickness. In the right dose it can reportedly make people highly suggestable – temporarily compromising a person’s free will. It can be administered to victims in the street, without them realising they have been drugged.

Tuyet has no evidence that this medication was used in her mother’s or any other case. It is one of very few drugs that could have such a lucid effect, and it has been used in robberies in Ecuador, France and Vietnam, as well as murders and sexual assaults in Colombia.

While it’s not known if this drug is involved in blessing scams in the UK, even if it was it would be difficult to establish.

The drug passes through the body very quickly, so when Tuyet tried to get her mum tested for the drug the next day, it was already too late.

Lisa Mills, a fraud expert from the charity Victim Support, says there may be other reasons the scam is so effective, and the set-up is designed to reel victims in quickly.

“You are getting people that mirror you in terms of you know they look like you. They’re female, similar age, speaking your language,” she explains.

At the moment the scammers are still at large, but some victims’ families are determined to find them

Mungnee says: “I told the police, I’m willing to do anything to catch these people”.

What also upsets her is that the scammers are Chinese: “They are conning their own people”.

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The neighbourhood of Brahmapuri in India’s Jodhpur city stands at the foot of a famous fort that’s perched atop a hill.

Built in 1459 by the Rajput king Rao Jodha – after whom the city is named – the walled, fortified settlement came up in the Mehrangarh Fort’s shadow, and was eventually recognised as the old or original city of Jodhpur, with azure-coloured homes.

Esther Christine Schmidt, assistant professor at Jindal School of Art and Architecture, says that the iconic blue colour likely wasn’t adopted before the 17th Century.

But since then, the area’s blue-coloured homes have become a distinct marker of Jodhpur’s identity and garnered attention from around the world.

In fact, Jodhpur, in Rajasthan state, is called the ‘Blue City’ because Brahmapuri remains its heart, despite expansions over the last 70 years, explains Sunayana Rathore, the curator of the Mehrangarh Museum.

Brahmapuri – which roughly translates to “the town of Brahmins” in Sanskrit – was built as a colony of upper-caste families who adopted the colour blue as a symbol of their sociocultural piety in the Hindu caste system.

They set themselves apart, much like the Jews of Chefchaouen – or the blue city of Morocco – who settled in the older part of town known as Medina, in the 15th Century, while fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They are believed to have coloured their homes, mosques and even public offices in a rinse of blue, considered a divine hue in Judaism, signifying the holy skies.

Eventually, the colour proved to be beneficial in more ways than one. The blue paint mixed with limestone plaster – also used in the homes of Brahmapuri – cooled the interiors of the structures, besides bringing in tourists drawn by the neighbourhood’s striking appearance.

But unlike in Chefchaouen, the blue colour in Jodhpur has begun to fade. There are several reasons for this.

Historically, blue was a viable option for the residents of Brahmapuri because of the easy availability of natural indigo in the region – the town of Bayana in eastern Rajasthan was then one of the major indigo-producing centres in the country. But over the years, indigo fell out of favour because growing the crop damaged the soil excessively.

Moreover, temperatures have risen so much now that the blue paint is not enough to keep the homes cool. An increase in disposable incomes has also led to a gradual shift to modern amenities like air conditioners that help people cope with the searing heat.

“Temperatures have risen gradually over the years,” says Udit Bhatia, assistant professor of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Gandhinagar, who works on resilience infrastructure and the impacts of climatic extremes on built and natural systems.

A trend analysis done by IIT Gandhinagar showed that the average temperature of Jodhpur rose from 37.5C in the 1950s to 38.5C by 2016.

Apart from keeping houses cool, Mr Bhatia says the paint also had pest-repelling qualities as natural indigo was mixed with bright blue copper sulphate, a popular antifouling agent commonly used in paints from the 20th Century.

While Mr Bhatia doesn’t think that urbanisation is evil, he points out that it can lead to the rather unscientific abandonment of traditions that were designed to serve systems and ecologies.

“Yesterday, if someone was walking down an alley in Jodhpur with blue homes on either side, and today they are walking down the same alley where the homes are now painted in a darker colour, even the lightest breeze will make them feel hotter than what they felt earlier,” he says.

It’s called the heat island effect, where the effect of rising temperatures is worsened when the heat and sunlight are amplified and reflected back into the environment by the concrete, cement and glass used to build structures. With darker paints, the impact is magnified further.

Moreover, with cities increasingly opening up to newer cultures and people, indigenous methods of building – like using lime plaster in hotter climes – are being replaced with newer techniques like using cement or concrete, which do not absorb the blue pigment well.

Aditya Dave, a 29-year-old civil engineer from Brahmapuri, says that his 300-year-old family home has held on to blue for the most part, though, occasionally, they repaint the outer walls in other colours now.

That’s mainly because the scarcity of indigo has driven up costs in recent years. Repainting houses blue would cost around 5,000 rupees ($60; £45) up until a decade ago, while today, it would be more than 30,000 rupees.

“Today, there are also open drains lining homes which dirties the blue paint and damages the walls,” says Mr Dave.

That’s why when he built his own house in Brahmapuri five years ago, he chose a tile facade which doesn’t need to be refurbished frequently.

“It’s simply more cost-effective that way,” he says.

But this transformation leaves visitors feeling cheated, says Deepak Soni, a garments seller who works with local authorities to preserve the existing blue homes of Brahmapuri, and restore the ones that have abandoned the hue.

“We should feel embarrassed that when someone comes looking for the homes that formed the identity of our city, they don’t find them. So many foreigners compare Jodhpur to Chefchaouen. If Chefchaouen has managed to keep their homes blue for centuries, why can’t we?” he asks.

In 2018, Mr Soni, originally a resident of Brahmapuri who now lives beyond the walled part of Jodhpur, negotiated with local authorities and communities to save the unique heritage of their hometown. Since 2019, he has also raised funds locally from Brahmapuri residents to have the outer walls of 500 homes painted blue each year.

Over the years, he has convinced nearly 3,000 homeowners in Brahmapuri to revert to blue for the outer walls and the roofs of their homes, “so that at least when someone takes a picture in Brahmapuri, the background appears blue”, he says.

Mr Soni estimates that about half of the roughly 33,000 homes in Brahmapuri are currently blue.

He is working with local officials and lawmakers on a plan to apply lime plaster, so more homes can be painted in the colour.

It’s the least he can do for the city he calls home, he says.

“Why will people from outside Jodhpur care about our city if we don’t care about its heritage, and do something to save it?”

The first aid in two weeks has gone into northern Gaza following a letter from the US that gave Israel 30 days to boost humanitarian access, or risk having some military assistance cut off.

The letter is the Biden administration’s most detailed public criticism yet of the way Israel has blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza. It was signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and was supposed to be private, until it was leaked to Israeli journalists.

It is a blueprint for an entirely different approach by Israel to the aid operation in Gaza – expediting it, rather than imposing restrictions. The letter is a line-by-line examination of Israel’s obstruction of aid deliveries – and the way its forcible relocation of civilians has exposed 1.7 million Palestinians to serious risk of disease.

It even challenges Israel’s long-standing attack on UNRWA, the UN agency that looks after Palestinian refugees.

The US is “very concerned” about proposed new laws that would “remove certain privileges and immunities”. An Israeli government minister wants to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem to use the land for a Jewish settlement.

The US says it acknowledges Israeli concerns about UNRWA, but that restrictions on it would “devastate” the humanitarian effort in Gaza and the education and welfare of tens of thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

The letter cannot have made easy reading for its two recipients, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, and Ron Dermer, its minister of strategic affairs, who is one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest advisers.

That is not just because the letter details the “US government’s deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza”. It also contains a reminder, that is also a threat, that US laws restrict arms transfers to countries that block the distribution of American aid.

Gallant set the tone of Israel’s approach to humanitarian aid flows to Gaza two days after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. He announced a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip. No fuel or food would be allowed in, he said. “Everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Pressure, not least by the Americans, forced Israel to moderate Gallant’s plan, but the aid coming in has never been consistent or adequate. In recent months, though, restrictions have been tightened, which seems to have prompted the letter. It is a sign of the exasperation and anger inside the Biden administration that Israel has not kept its promises to keep aid flowing into Gaza.

The European Union’s chief diplomat and leading human rights groups have already accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. In May, Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, accused Prime Minister Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant of starvation of civilians as part of his application for the court to issue arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Both men rejected the allegation.

When Netanyahu spoke at the UN General Assembly in New York on 27 September, he dismissed accusations that Israel was starving Gazans as “an absurdity”. He presented a version of Israel’s role in the Gaza aid operation that is diametrically opposed to the one described in Blinken and Austin’s letter.

For Netanyahu, the accusations were another sign of antisemitism at the UN and its institutions.

Israel, he said, was beset by “lies and slanders”.

“Good is portrayed as evil, and evil is portrayed as good.”

“We help bring in 700,000 tonnes of food into Gaza. That’s more than 3,000 calories a day for every man, woman, and child in Gaza.”

The hard facts in the US letter are a stark contrast to his emotive rhetoric. Some of them focus on restrictions Israel imposed in September, while Netanyahu made his claims in New York.

• “The amount of assistance entering Gaza in September was the lowest of any month during the past year” – in other words, since before Hamas’s 7 October attacks last year
• The US is particularly concerned by “recent actions by the Israeli government – including halting commercial imports, denying or impeding nearly 90% of humanitarian movements between northern and southern Gaza in September”

The Americans also criticise the way Israel slows the delivery of aid by imposing onerous rules, and make a number of specific demands:

• They want the removal of the restrictions on the use of closed lorries and containers, and to increase the number of vetted drivers to 400. UN agencies say that a shortage of drivers and lorries has made getting aid into Gaza much harder
• Israel must tighten and speed up security and customs checks. Aid organisations say cumbersome rules are used to slow deliveries down
• The Americans want aid to be funnelled through the port of Ashdod in an “expedited” route to the Gaza Strip. Ashdod is a modern Israeli container port a short drive north of Gaza. After Israel refused to let it be used, the US spent an estimated $230m (£174m) on a floating pier for aid deliveries into Gaza that broke up in bad weather before it could make a difference
• Israel should also remove restrictions on deliveries from Jordan

Israel argues that Hamas steals aid and sells it at inflated prices. The Americans do not directly engage with that, except in a single sentence that acknowledges there has been “increased lawlessness and looting”. Front and centre in the letter is Israel’s squeeze on Gaza.

Their criticism extends way beyond the mechanics of getting aid into Gaza. It demands an end to the isolation of northern Gaza, where ultra-nationalists in Netanyahu’s cabinet want to replace Palestinians with Jewish settlers.

Concern about northern Gaza has increased since Israel started its current offensive there.

The army’s actions have resembled parts of a plan put forward by a group of retired officers, led by Giora Eiland, a major-general who used to be Israel’s national security adviser. Eiland says he wanted a deal to get the hostages back and end the war early on. But as that didn’t happen, he believes more radical action is necessary.

Israel has already separated northern Gaza from the south with a corridor along Wadi Gaza that bisects the territory. Eiland told me that his plan was to open evacuation routes for a week to 10 days so that as many of the 400,000 or so civilians left in the north leave. Then the territory would be sealed, all aid supplies cut, and everyone left inside would be considered a legitimate military target.

A version of the plan appeared to be in place at Jabalia camp in the north, after it was sealed off by Israeli troops, tanks and drones.

The Blinken-Austin letter insists that there can be “no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza”. Aid agencies should have “continuous access to northern Gaza” and should be able to enter it direct from Israel rather than taking the hazardous and often deadly route from the south. Orders to evacuate must be cancelled “when there is no operational need”.

Israel has forced 1.7 million civilians, many of whom fled northern Gaza, into a narrow strip of land along the coast between al-Mawasi and the town of Deir al-Balah, where the letter says “extreme overcrowding exposed the civilians to a high risk of contracting serious diseases”.

The Americans want the pressure to be eased, for civilians to be allowed to move inland before the winter. BBC Verify has established that Israel has also bombed what it says are Hamas targets in an area it calls a humanitarian zone.

The letter had immediate results. For the first time since the beginning of October, Israel has allowed in convoys of lorries carrying aid, though not yet on the scale requested by the US. Whether the letter can end the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, particularly in the absence of ceasefire, is another matter.

Israel has been given 30 days to remedy matters. The US presidential election happens within that time frame. Before polling day, the US would not restrict weapons shipments to Israel, especially given the fact that the Israelis are on the brink, potentially, of a much wider war with Iran.

If Vice-President Kamala Harris wins, the Biden administration will be able to keep up the pressure on Israel until the inauguration in January.

It is likely to be a different story if former President Donald Trump gets his second term. Based on Trump’s previous four years in office, Netanyahu is likely to feel he has much more freedom to do what he wants as he runs down the clock on Joe Biden’s time in the White House.

Biden has been widely criticised, in his own Democratic Party and further afield, for not using the leverage that should come with America’s position as Israel’s most vital ally. Without US military and diplomatic support Israel would struggle to fight its wars. The letter looks like a serious attempt to impose pressure. In the last year of war, Netanyahu has often ignored US wishes.

A turning point came at the UN General Assembly in late September, when the US, UK and other allies of Israel believed they had talked Israel into accepting a 21-day truce in Lebanon to make time for diplomacy.

Instead, Netanyahu’s speech doubled down, rejecting a truce and escalating the regional war. From his hotel in New York, he ordered the assassination of the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Some senior Western officials complain that the Biden administration has been “played” by Netanyahu.

The letter is a belated attempt to redress the balance. Biden has been convinced he can best influence Israel by offering unconditional support. He advised Israel after 7 October not to be blinded by rage, as he said America was after the al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks.

But his wishes have often been ignored by Netanyahu. Whether or not Israel listens to America’s demands on Gaza, as Biden enters his last lap as president, it is clear that his attempt to stop the spread of the Gaza war across the Middle East has failed.

And as for the letter, it will be too little, too late for all those civilians in Gaza who have suffered, and for those who have died, as the result of months of restrictions in humanitarian aid imposed by Israel.

Workers at Samsung Electronics’ factory in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu have called off a labour strike that went on for more than a month.

Around 1,500 workers in Chennai city had participated in the strike to demand better pay, working facilities and recognition of a newly-formed union.

A labour activist who supported the workers told the BBC that while Samsung hadn’t recognised the union yet, it had agreed to engage with the other demands.

The strike was one of the largest the South Korean technology giant had seen in recent years.

It also threatened to cast a shadow over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to position India as a viable alternative to China for manufacturing activities.

On Wednesday, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (Citu), a politically-backed national labour union which led the protests, announced the workers’ decision to call off the strike after a meeting.

“During the meeting it was decided that the workers would return to their jobs on Thursday,” E Muthukumar told the BBC.

He added that the issue of registration of the new union – called the Samsung India Labour Welfare Union (SILWU) – will be decided by a court.

“We have decided to call off the protest as the Samsung management has decided to engage with workers on all key demands like higher wages, medical insurance and better facilities. So those discussions will continue,” he said.

On Tuesday, representatives of the protesting workers met with officials from the Tamil Nadu labour department.

After the meeting, the state’s Minister for Industries TRB Rajaa said that the striking workers had decided to return to work immediately and that Samsung had agreed to “not to victimise the workers only for having participated in the strike”.

He also said that the workers had agreed to cooperate with the management fully and that Samsung would file a written reply to the charter of demands filed by them.

Later, Samsung released a statement saying that it welcomed Citu’s decision to call off the strike.

“We will not take action against workers who merely participated in the illegal strike. We are committed to work closely with our workers to make the Chennai factory a great place to work,” the statement said.

The workers had begun their protest on 9 September near the factory in Chennai city, which employs nearly 2,000 workers and is one of its two plants in India.

The factory produces home appliances, contributing about a third to the company’s annual $12bn (£9bn) revenue in India.

One of the workers’ key demands was for Samsung to recognise their union, as they said that only that could help them negotiate better wages and working hours with the management.

Akriti Bhatia, a labour rights activist, told the BBC that multinational companies which set up factories in India often don’t follow Indian labour laws, which allow workers the right to association and collective bargaining.

These firms, she said, often side-step this by setting up internal unions, which are led by workers only on paper as the management continues to exert control over their decisions. They stridently oppose external, politically-backed unions.

A source in Samsung had told the BBC earlier that the organisation “fully supports unions but not ones backed by a third-party”.

Earlier this year, hundreds of workers at a manufacturing plant of an Apple supplier in Tamil Nadu also went on a one-day strike, demanding recognition of their union.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said the bloc could “draw lessons” from the contested Italian policy of processing migrants offshore in Albania ahead of an EU summit focusing on migration.

She made the remarks in a letter to member states ahead of the meeting in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, where she said the European Commission would present a new proposal for legislation to increase deportations of migrants.

Von der Leyen – who is just starting a second five-year term as European Commission chief – appears to be responding to pressure on migration from across Europe.

In her letter to member states, she said the return rate of irregular migrants from EU countries is currently only about 20% – meaning the vast majority of people who are ordered to leave an EU member state do not.

Many simply stay put or move to another country within the bloc, she said.

Member states should all recognise the decisions taken by other EU countries to ensure that “migrants who have a return decision against them in one country cannot exploit cracks in the system to avoid return elsewhere”, Von der Leyen wrote.

Her comments come as Italy kicks off its long-awaited scheme, under which some of the migrants rescued in the Mediterranean will be sent to Albania for processing.

Earlier this week, 16 men of Bangladeshi and Egyptian origin were moved from the migrant hotspot of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily, to one of two purpose-built centres on the Albanian coast where their asylum claims will be examined.

The centres, which cost about €650m (£547m), were due to open last spring but were plagued by long delays, have been paid for by the Italian government and will be operated under Italian law.

They will house migrants while Italy examines their asylum requests. Pregnant women, children and vulnerable people will be excluded from the plan.

Political opponents of right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as well as several NGOs have criticised Italy’s deal with Albania.

Riccardo Magi, an MP with the left-wing +Europa party, said the Albania scheme was “cruel, useless and expensive”, while NGO Doctors Without Borders said it was “likely to result in further harm and violation of human rights”.

However, addressing MPs on Tuesday, Meloni argued that the plan was “a new, courageous, unprecedented path” which “perfectly reflected the European spirit”.

The implementation and the results of the Albania agreement will be watched closely by many EU member states, several of whom have attempted to respond to a surge in support for far-right parties by hardening their rhetoric and their approach to migration.

In the last few weeks alone, Germany reintroduced land border checks, the French government said it would look into tightening immigration legislation and Poland announced a plan to temporarily suspend the right to asylum for people crossing the border.

Polish PM Donald Tusk said the controversial move was meant to stop Belarus from “destabilising” Poland by allowing large numbers of migrants into the country.

In France and Germany, it was grisly murders which prompted calls for tougher action on immigration. A Syrian failed asylum seeker stabbed three people to death in Solingen, while a young student was murdered by a Moroccan national near Paris. In both cases, the killings were carried out by men who had been given expulsion orders that had not been enforced.

Last month, 15 member states signed a proposal by Austria and the Netherlands to improve the “efficiency” of the deportations system.

Russia’s army is forming a unit of some 3,000 North Koreans, a Ukrainian military intelligence source has told the BBC, in the latest report suggesting that Pyongyang is forming a close military alliance with the Kremlin.

So far the BBC has yet to see any sign of such a large unit being formed in Russia’s Far East, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has dismissed reports of North Korean involvement.

“This is not only British intelligence, it is also American intelligence. They report it all the time, they don’t provide any evidence,” he said.

There is no doubt Moscow and Pyongyang have deepened their levels of cooperation in recent months. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent Vladimir Putin a birthday message only last week calling him his “closest comrade”.

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has spoken of North Korea joining the war, and South Korea’s defence minister said this month that the chance of a North Korean deployment in Ukraine was “highly likely”.

The biggest question mark is over the numbers involved.

A military source in Russia’s Far East confirmed to BBC Russian that “a number of North Koreans have arrived” and were stationed in one of the military bases near Ussuriysk, to the north of Vladivostok. But the source refused to give a precise number, other than that they were “absolutely nowhere near 3,000”.

Military experts have told us they doubt Russian army units can successfully incorporate North Korean soldiers in their thousands.

“It wasn’t even that easy to include hundreds of Russian prisoners at first – and all those guys spoke Russian,” one analyst – who is in Russia so didn’t want to be named – told the BBC.

Even if they did number 3,000, it would not be big in a battlefield sense, but the US is as concerned as Ukraine.

“It would mark a significant increase in their relationship,” said US state department spokesman Matthew Miller, who saw it as “a new level of desperation by Russia” amid battlefield losses.

It was back in June that Vladimir Putin toasted a “peaceful and defensive” pact with Kim Jong Un.

And there is mounting evidence that North Korea is supplying Russia with ammunition, as recently demonstrated by the recovery of a missile in Ukraine’s Poltava region.

In fact, reports of mines and shells supplied by Pyongyang date back to December 2023 in Telegram chats involving Russia’s military communities.

Russian soldiers, stationed in Ukraine, have often complained about the standard of ammunition and that dozens of soldiers have been wounded.

Kyiv suspects that a unit of North Korean soldiers is preparing in the Ulan-Ude region close to the Mongolian border ahead of deployment to Russia’s Kursk province, where Ukrainian forces launched an incursion back in August.

“They could guard some sections of the Russian-Ukrainian border, which would free Russian units for fighting elsewhere,” said Valeriy Ryabykh, editor of the Ukrainian publication Defence Express.

“I would rule out the possibility that these units will immediately appear on the front line.”

Ryabakh is not alone in this thought.

North Korea may have some 1.28 million active soldiers but its army has no recent experience of combat operations, unlike Russia’s military.

Pyongyang has pursued the old Soviet model in its armed forces but it is unclear how its main force of motorised infantry units might fit into the war in Ukraine.

Then there is the obvious language barrier and an unfamiliarity with Russian systems that would complicate any fighting roles.

That does not preclude North Korea’s military taking part in Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, but they are most recognised by experts for their engineering and construction abilities, not for fighting.

What they do both have are shared incentives.

Pyongyang needs money and technology, Moscow needs soldiers and ammunition.

“Pyongyang would be paid well and maybe get access to Russian military technology, which otherwise Moscow would have been reluctant to transfer to North Korea,” says Andrei Lankov, director of the Korea Risk Group.

“It would also give their soldiers real combat experience, but there is also the risk of exposing North Koreans to life in the West, which is a considerably more prosperous place.”

For Putin, there is an urgent need to make up for significant losses during more than two and half years of war.

Valeriy Akimenko from the UK’s Conflict Studies Research Centre believes deploying North Koreans would help the Russian leader deal with the previous round of mandatory mobilisation not going well.

“So he thinks, as the Russian ranks are thinned out by Ukraine, what a brilliant idea – why not let North Koreans do some of the fighting?”

President Zelensky is clearly concerned about how this hostile alliance could evolve.

There have not been Western boots on the ground in Ukraine for fear of escalation.

However, if reports of hundreds of North Koreans preparing for deployment are borne out, the idea of foreign boots on the ground in this war would appear to be less of a concern for Vladimir Putin.

The hand was covered in dust, streaked with blood on the fingers and wrist, all that could be seen of the person who was killed.

Like many other victims of the Israeli air strikes they lie buried under the rubble – this time in Gaza City, in the north.

A teenage boy was pulled from the first floor of a collapsed building. As his feet and legs emerged it looked as if he might be alive.

But then the whole body was lifted free, and flopped lifelessly in the arms of the rescuers.

They leaned across and passed the boy through a window below, and into the waiting arms of another group of men.

In the narrow streets men dug with their hands. But there were no sounds coming from the rubble now. Whoever lay there was beyond help.

Ramez Abu Nasr was digging for hours. His mother, father and brothers were entombed by the falling masonry.

Ramez managed to save his youngest brother. The boy told him that he had heard his parents nearby, reciting the Shehada, the Muslim prayer of faith.

Soon after they were silent.

“I took out my younger brother at the last moment. I don’t know how we can go back to our home… without my mother, or father, or brothers,” says Ramez.

The family fled here from Jabalia when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began their renewed offensive against Hamas in the north twelve days ago.

The IDF issued an evacuation order affecting an estimated 400,000 people in the northern Gaza Strip, telling them to move to the south.

But many thousands stayed behind, exhausted by constant displacement, fearful of heading to a place where they had no access to supplies.

Inside a house that is still standing, a young man kneels in front of his dead sister. She looks to be in her thirties. “Oh God, my sister, my sister,” he calls out.

Civil Defence volunteers are gathering bodies from inside buildings. They find a badly wounded man and race to the ambulance.

They are trying to save a life, but also are afraid of being bombed themselves.

Ahmed al Kahlout from the local Civil Defence looked around him at the carnage. Behind him, a colleague tries to give CPR to a woman. It is hopeless.

“This is the al-Sayyed family house,” Ahmed says. “There are bodies, torn parts in this area… It is a horrible crime.”

Several ambulances are lined up in the streets. Most of those inside them are dead. Bodies are piled up. All ages.

Blood seeps from the forehead of a small child. A woman, wrapped in a brightly coloured blanket is loaded beside her. Next to the ambulance a dead man, middle aged, is lying on a hospital trolley.

Many of the casualties are taken to Jabalia’s Kamal Adwan hospital. It’s director, Dr Hussam Abu Safiyyah, told me by phone that his hospital faced a dire humanitarian crisis and accused Israel of imposing collective punishment.

“We urge the world to intervene and impose their humanity over the Israeli army, to open humanitarian corridors that allow the entrance of medical tools, delegations, fuel, and food so that we can provide humanitarian services for the children, newborn babies, and patients who are in need,” he said.

The United States has accused Israel of refusing or impeding up to 90% of aid to northern Gaza in the last month – and threatened to cut arms shipments unless there is change.

Israel says it is taking American concerns seriously and is “addressing the issue”.

International journalists from media organisations, including the BBC, are not given independent access to Gaza by Israel.

The IDF says it only targets “terror cells” and released a video of what it said was Hamas firing from within a clinic in Jabalia. The army also said they’d found weapons and boobytraps in a medical facility.

In the video an officer, his face blurred, points to booby traps and weapons and speaks to the camera: “Everything here is a cynical exploitation of the civilian population, inside a clinic, inside a civilian compound. We will pursue these terrorists and find them in every corner.”

In Jabalia, a heavily pregnant woman is sitting in the dust outside a house. The Civil Defence workers arrive and help her onto a stretcher. Her father is there and tells her, “You are going to be ok. You are going to give birth, my heart.”

Then a shell explodes nearby. The small group rushes to the ambulance and escapes.

Every day they plead for peace in Jabalia. For food, and medicine, for schools to open.

They plead, but know their voices cannot make it stop.

The UN’s special coordinator for Lebanon has criticised Israel after air strikes on municipal buildings in the southern city of Nabatieh killed the mayor and 15 other people.

Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert called the killing of mayor Ahmad Kahil “alarming” and said any violations of international humanitarian law were “completely unacceptable”.

At least five of those killed in Wednesday’s strike were municipal staff co-ordinating aid for civilians remaining in the area, Nabatiyeh Governor Howaida Turk told the BBC.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati condemned the attack, saying it had “intentionally” targeted a council meeting.

The attack was the most significant against a Lebanese state building since the latest escalation in fighting, which began about two weeks ago, and has raised concerns about the safety of the country’s state infrastructure.

A spokesman for the Israeli military said its forces had launched raids targeting dozens of Hezbollah targets in the area and destroyed a tunnel used by the Iran-backed group.

“We know that Hezbollah many times takes advantage of civilian facilities,” Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon said at a meeting of the UN in New York City on Wednesday.

Turk, the governor, said that while the majority of Nabatieh residents had already left the area following heavy Israeli air strikes, the mayor and other municipal employees had stayed behind to help those who remained.

“This is just like strikes all over Lebanon,” she said.

“They [Israel] have hit civilians, Red Cross, civil defence. Now they have targeted a government building. It is unacceptable. It is a massacre.”

Previous strikes on Nabatieh over the past few days have destroyed historic buildings, including an Ottoman-era market dating to 1910.

Israel also launched at least one air strike against Beirut on Wednesday.

The strike, which hit the southern suburb of Dahieh, was the first on the Lebanese capital in five days. It came after a reported intervention by the US in which it urged restraint over the bombing of the capital.

Residents of Dahieh had begun to return to the area over the past few days, taking advantage of the apparent pause in bombing to check on their homes and retrieve clothes and other possessions.

Several told the BBC on Wednesday that the area resembled a ghost town, with rubble and debris from buildings littering the streets.

The strike on Dahieh came just hours after a US state department spokesman Matthew Miller publicly expressed concern over the “scope and nature” of Israel’s bombing of Beirut.

Mr Miller said the state department’s concerns had been “made clear to the government of Israel”.

An Israeli military spokesman said that prior to striking Beirut, “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including advancing warnings to the population in the area”.

Israel has faced criticism this week over its warnings, which Amnesty International has called “inadequate” and “misleading”.

The human rights charity said the warnings did “not absolve Israel of its obligations under international humanitarian law”.

Israel has expanded its air campaign in recent days, launching an unexpected strike in the far north of the country on Monday.

The strike, which destroyed a large residential home that had been rented by a displaced family in the Christian village of Aitou, killed 23 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

Twelve of the dead were women and two children, the ministry said.

The UN human rights office called for an investigation into the Aitou strike, saying it raised “real concerns” with respect to international humanitarian law.

Israel has denied obstructing humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza, after the US warned its ally in a letter to urgently boost humanitarian access or risk having some military assistance cut off.

The first aid in two weeks was allowed into northern Gaza following the letter, but the UN’s acting humanitarian chief Joyce Msuya described it as a “trickle”.

In the letter sent on Sunday, the US expressed deep concern at the humanitarian situation and said Israeli actions had contributed to it.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, told the Security Council that it had “flooded Gaza with as much aid as possible” and accused the Palestinian armed group Hamas of stealing and selling shipments.

Ms Msuya warned that essential supplies are running out for about 400,000 Palestinians in the north, amid an Israeli ground offensive against what the military says are regrouping Hamas fighters in and around the Jabalia area.

The strongly worded letter sent by the Biden administration accuses Israel of halting commercial imports to Gaza, denying or impeding nearly 90% of humanitarian movements between the north and south in September, placing excessive restrictions on dual-use goods, and instituting new vetting and customs requirements for humanitarian staff.

The letter says Israel “must, starting now and within 30 days” act on a series of concrete measures to boost aid supplies, citing US laws which can prohibit military assistance to countries that impede delivery of US humanitarian aid.

It says Israel must “surge all forms of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza” before winter, including by enabling a minimum of 350 lorries a day to enter through all four major crossings and a new fifth crossing, as well as allowing the 1.7 million displaced people crowded in the coastal al-Mawasi “humanitarian area” to move inland.

It also calls on Israel to ensure deliveries via the Jordanian land corridor are not impeded and to end the “isolation of northern Gaza”.

The Israeli government has not responded to the letter since it was leaked on Tuesday, but Mr Danon told the UN Security Council on Wednesday that “the issue in Gaza is not a lack of aid”.

“More than enough aid has entered to sustain every civilian in Gaza, with over one million tonnes delivered since the war began. Yet, the challenges continue – yes, we admit that. And it’s not due to Israel’s efforts of failure to deliver humanitarian assistance,” he said.

“The real issue is Hamas. This terrorist organisation has hijacked the aid, saving it for their own purposes. They steal and even sell the aid that is intended for Gazan civilians, turning humanitarian relief into a profit machine.”

Hamas has previously denied stealing aid and said Israel is to blame for shortages.

Israel is not allowing international journalists from media organisations, including the BBC, independent access to Gaza making it difficult to verify facts on the ground.

Earlier, the Israeli military body responsible for managing crossings into Gaza, Cogat, said aid had been delivered to northern Gaza for the third consecutive day following a two-week period when the UN said no aid was allowed in. Fifty lorries carrying food, water, medical supplies and shelter equipment from Jordan crossed via the Erez West crossing, it added.

The UN meanwhile confirmed that almost 30 lorry loads of aid had entered the north on Monday and another 12 lorry loads the following day.

Ms Msuya said that constituted a “trickle” and that “all essential supplies for survival are running out”.

“There is now barely any food left to distribute, and most bakeries will be forced to shut down again in the next several days without additional fuel,” she said.

“Given the abject conditions and intolerable suffering in north Gaza, the fact that humanitarian access is nearly non-existent is unconscionable.”

The US envoy, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said the Biden administration had made it clear that “food and supplies must be surged into Gaza immediately”.

She also warned that a “policy of starvation” in northern Gaza would be “horrific and unacceptable”.

“The government of Israel has said that this is not their policy, that food and other essential supplies will not be cut off, and we will be watching to see that Israel’s actions on the ground match this statement,” she added.

Ms Msuya also warned that the three hospitals still partially operational in and around Jabalia were facing dire shortages of fuel, blood, trauma treatment and medications.

They have been overwhelmed by casualties caused by the intense Israeli bombardment and fighting on the ground between Israeli troops and Hamas fighters over the past 11 days.

More than 50,000 people have fled their homes in response, but others remain stranded with water and food running out.

Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the group’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

More than 42,400 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

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

Witnesses to an Israeli air strike and resulting fire at a tent camp in a Gaza hospital compound have shared with the BBC their horror and helplessness at seeing people injured and killed in the flames.

One mother called it “one of the worst scenes we’ve witnessed”, while an injured girl said she heard screaming as people tore down their tent to get them out. A man said he had “broken down” as he was “unable to do anything” to help those who burned to death.

The strike hit the al-Aqsa Hospital compound in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in the early hours of Monday, igniting a fire that burned makeshift shelters for displaced people.

At least four people were killed and dozens injured, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The BBC has verified the location of a video that shows what appears to be a person on fire. Other footage captures people rushing to extinguish the flames amid screams and explosions sending fireballs into the night sky.

The Israeli military said it had targeted Hamas fighters operating inside a command centre in the car park, after which a fire broke out “likely due to secondary explosions”. The military said the incident was under review.

Charity Doctors without Borders (MSF), which has staff working at al-Aqsa, told the BBC “it had no knowledge“ of a Hamas centre and said “the hospital functions as a hospital”.

The UN’s humanitarian affairs agency said in a statement that “people burned to death” and “atrocities must end”, while a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council called the footage “disturbing”.

“The images and video of what appear to be displaced civilians burning alive following an Israeli air strike are deeply disturbing and we have made our concerns clear to the Israeli government,” the spokesperson told the BBC’s partner CBS.

“Israel has a responsibility to do more to avoid civilian casualties — and what happened here is horrifying, even if Hamas was operating near the hospital in an attempt to use civilians as human shields.”

Witnesses said the strike happened at about 01:15 local time on Monday (23:15 BST on Sunday).

It hit an area between buildings filled with makeshift shelters, next to an outdoor outpatient waiting area that had no one there at night, Anna Halford, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Gaza who was not at the hospital during the strike, said in a phone call from Deir al-Balah.

Hiba Radi, a mother who was living in a tent behind the hospital, told a BBC freelancer in Gaza she woke up to the sound of “explosions and fires erupting around the tents”.

“There were explosions everywhere, and we were shocked at whether this was gas or weapons,” she said.

“This is one of the worst scenes we’ve witnessed and lived through,” she added. “We’ve never seen destruction like this before. It’s hard, really hard.”

Atia Darwish, a photographer who recorded some of the verified videos, told the BBC it was a “big shock” and he was “unable to do anything” watching people burn.

“I was so broken down,” he said.

Um Yaser Abdel Hamid Daher, who also lives at the hospital, told the BBC “we’ve seen so many people burning that we started feeling like we might burn like them”.

The injured included her son, and his wife and children. Her granddaughter Lina, 11, who had shrapnel in her hand and leg injuries, said she had heard people screaming.

”Our neighbour’s daughter was injured in her head and her dad was killed. And our other neighbours were killed. The people next to us tore down the tent to get us out,” she said.

Her grandmother said the family “lost their tent and everything they had; they have nothing left”.

The health ministry reported on Monday that more than 40 people were injured and four killed.

MSF on Tuesday shared a higher toll, saying five people had died, their bodies burned by the time they were recovered, and 65 injured.

Forty of the injured – 22 men, eight women and 10 children – stayed at al-Aqsa. The others were transferred to different hospitals, with eight going to a specialist burns unit.

Ms Halford said her colleagues were treating burns victims ”who will almost certainly not survive”, saying “there is very little you can do for burn victims of that severity”.

“You come home with the smell of it on your clothes. It’s a viscerally affecting experience. It stays with you,” she said.

Monday’s strike was the seventh on the hospital site since March, and the third in two weeks, Ms Halford said.

When she arrived at the hospital after the most recent hit, she said she found people picking through twisted metal and burned debris to salvage any belongings.

Another mother the BBC spoke to whose children suffered burns injuries had already evacuated from north Gaza – and now has nothing.

The acting chief of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the strike occurred in an area where north Gaza residents had been told to relocate.

“There really is no safe place in Gaza for people to go,” the statement read.

The UN’s human rights office has called for an investigation into an Israeli air strike that killed 23 people in northern Lebanon on Monday.

Spokesman Jeremy Laurence said the strike, on the Christian-majority village of Aitou, raised “real concerns” with respect to international humanitarian law.

Laurence said that 12 women and two children were understood to be among the dead from the bombing, which destroyed a residential building that had been recently rented out to a family displaced from the south.

Rescue workers were still pulling bodies from the rubble in Aitou on Tuesday – far from the focus of the conflict to date in the south of Lebanon, Beqaa Valley and parts of Beirut.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is yet to comment on the strike.

Elie Alwan, the owner of the house in Aitou, told reporters that it had been rented to a family of around 10 people, who were later joined by around 10 more.

Alwan said there had been no problems with the tenants until a car came to the house on Monday – the driver apparently delivering cash – when the air strike hit.

Israeli air strikes on members of Hezbollah in the areas where the group usually operates have pushed its members to other parts of the country, creating fears across Lebanon that Israeli targets could be anywhere.

An Aitou resident, Sarkis Alwan, told the AFP news agency that the village “maybe… won’t welcome” displaced people anymore. “And villagers who have taken in displaced people, I think they will ask them to leave,” he said.

Israel has demonstrated a willingness during its recent escalation to strike residential buildings without warning as it attempts to degrade Hezbollah, which has been sporadically firing rockets into Israel for a year since the day after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.

On Thursday night, an Israeli strike hit a residential building in central Beirut killing 22 people, according to figures from the Lebanese health ministry.

Unconfirmed reports said that the strike, which came with no warning and wounded 117, targeted Wafiq Safa, a senior member of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that is a powerful force in Lebanon.

The reports said that the strike failed to kill him and Hezbollah has not commented on his status.

Israel says it is necessary to take on Hezbollah in order for people in the north of the country to be able to return to their homes.

A drone attack launched by Hezbollah on a military base in northern Israel killed four Israeli soldiers on Sunday and severely wounded seven more – the deadliest strike by the group since Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon two weeks ago.

Also on Tuesday, the UN refugee agency said that more than a quarter of Lebanon was now covered by Israeli military evacuation orders.

“People are heeding these calls to evacuate, and they’re fleeing with almost nothing,” the agency’s Middle East director Rema Jamous Imseis told a press briefing.

The evacuation orders, coupled with Israel’s ground invasion and bombing campaign, have driven a massive exodus of Lebanese people from the affected areas.

More than 1.2 million people have been displaced, according to the Lebanese government. They have fled villages and major cities in the south, and moved north to Beirut, Tripoli and other cities.

Many have ended up in unsafe and unsanitary conditions in shelters in and around the capital, where schools and shops have been closed to house people.

The sheer volume of displaced people has overwhelmed welfare services, the mayor’s office told the BBC, leaving thousands of displaced people on the streets.

Using plans made for the previous invasion, in 2006, the municipality had prepared for just 10% of the actual number of people, mayor Abdallah Darwich told the BBC last week.

“We did not imagine it could be this huge,” he said. “Every day our calculations have become larger and larger.”

The Israeli strikes on Beirut, focused on the southern suburb of Dahieh, had become a daily and nightly occurrence over the past three weeks, but the capital has not been hit for nearly five days.

On Tuesday, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Washington had raised “concerns” with the Israeli government over the “scope and nature” of its bombing of Beirut in recent weeks.

“Israel does have a right to defend itself against those terrorists who pose a threat to the state of Israel, but we’ve had real concerns about the nature of the campaign that we saw roll out across Beirut over the past few weeks,” he said.

“We’ve seen [the number of strikes] come down over the past few days,” he added.

Following the Hezbollah drone strike on Sunday, Netanyahu threatened on Monday night that he would continue striking the group in Lebanon “without mercy”, including Beirut.

On Tuesday evening, Netanyahu said in a phone call with President Emmanuel Macron that he was opposed to “a unilateral ceasefire, which would not change the security situation in Lebanon and would return the country to its previous state”.

Earlier in the day, the deputy leader of Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, issued his own threat to Israel, saying the group had “a new calculation” to inflict pain on its enemy.

At the same time, Qassem, speaking in a televised address, called for a ceasefire, saying that it was the only solution to the current conflict. “If the Israelis do not want that, we will continue,” he added.

Israeli strikes have killed at least 2,309 people over the last year, according to figures from the Lebanese government, which does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

Israel has said around 50 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed.

Singer Liam Payne has died at the age of 31.

Payne rose to stardom in the group One Direction, before going on to have a solo career.

He had a son, Bear, with the former Girls Aloud singer Cheryl.

Here, we take a look at his life in pictures.

Liam Payne first registered on the pop radar as a fresh-faced 14-year-old, trying out for The X Factor in 2008.

“I should really be concentrating on my [school] work but I just think about singing too much,” he said before his first audition, his Wolverhampton accent and thick fringe front and centre.

“It’s a dream and I’d love to do it.”

His rendition of Fly Me To the Moon impressed the judges, as did his boyish charm – he showed a cheeky streak when he flashed a mid-song wink at Girls Aloud star Cheryl.

But Simon Cowell wasn’t quite convinced he was ready, so told him to do his GCSEs and come back in two years.

When Liam did just that, auditioning with another classic song, Cry Me A River, in 2010, the missing pieces were all now in place.

As he started singing, Cowell’s eyes lit up as he registered Liam’s newfound maturity and charisma.

Whatever the X factor is, Liam had it.

The judges still faced a tough decision that year – so during a discussion about whom to save, they decided they could keep five boys by putting them together in a group.

Liam, Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Harry Styles were informed they were now a boy band – and One Direction were born.

They didn’t actually win The X Factor that year, coming third behind Matt Cardle and Rebecca Ferguson in a final watched by 17 million people.

But Cowell knew a good thing when he saw it. He signed them to his label and, after waiting nine months to release their debut single, they soon outpaced their rivals.

That single was What Makes You Beautiful, an instant pop classic that went straight to number one – the first of four UK chart-toppers over the next four years.

Liam was cast as the sensible one, and told the Guardian in 2019 about one of the group’s early hotel stays.

“We’ve got plates being thrown out the window, mattresses being ridden down the stairs, and I’m getting calls from the manager saying: ‘You need to sort it out’.”

Sudden fame was a lot to take in, and he told Scott Mills on BBC Radio 1 in 2020 that he was “really quite uptight about a lot of everything that was going on” at that time.

“It was hard to have fun sometimes in that circumstance when there was so much pressure loaded on to it.”

But after about a year, he learned to relax. “And the more fun we had, the more successful it got.”

One Direction inspired full-on pop mania – stadiums full of screaming teenage fans, thousands camping outside their hotels, 70 million records sold.

“I was very confused about fame when it all happened,” he told the BBC in 2019, “and learning to be a person outside of your job was difficult. But now I feel like I get it. I’m a lucky boy.”

As time went on, Liam discovered a talent for songwriting as well as singing, with writing credits on half of the band’s final two albums, on songs like History, Steal My Girl and Story Of My Life.

Tensions in the band bubbled up, though, as the pressure returned.

In 2022, Liam told Logan Paul’s podcast that things had almost come to blows. “There was one moment where there was an argument backstage, and one member in particular threw me up a wall,” he said, without naming the bandmate in question.

It became clear that the end for One Direction was nigh. “It was so touch and go at every single show,” he said. “I was slowly losing the plot.”

Liam turned to alcohol, and continued drinking after the band went on “hiatus” in 2016.

“It was very erratic behaviour on my part – I was partying too hard,” he told the BBC.

In the post-1D world, Liam launched a solo career, with his 2017 debut single Strip That Down, featuring US rapper Quavo, peaking at number three and being nominated for two Brit Awards.

His collaboration with Rita Ora on the song For You – from the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack – reached number eight and earned another Brit nomination.

And eight years after he flirted with Cheryl as a 14-year-old in the X Factor audition room, the pair began a relationship. They had a son, Bear, in 2017, but split up in 2018.

He got engaged to model Maya Henry in 2020, but they later called it off. Earlier this month, she said on social media that the singer had recently been repeatedly sending her unwanted messages.

Following their relationship, he had been together with US influencer Kate Cassidy since 2022.

He suffered health troubles in recent years, being in hospital twice in 2023, reportedly with kidney problems.

And his solo career struggled to maintain momentum.

A comeback single Teardrops, released this March, missed the charts, and there were reports that a second solo album and a documentary about his life had been put on hold.

That life story included more than he could have imagined in those original teenage dreams.

India and Canada have expelled their top diplomats amid escalating tensions over the assassination of a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil, marking a new low in a historically cordial relationship. While past disagreements have strained ties, none have reached this level of open confrontation.

In 1974, India shocked the world by detonating a nuclear device, drawing outrage from Canada, which accused India of extracting plutonium from a Canadian reactor, a gift intended solely for peaceful use.

Relations between the two nations cooled considerably – Canada suspended support to India’s atomic energy programme.

Yet neither expelled their top diplomats like they did on Monday as the row intensified over last year’s assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canada-based Sikh leader labelled a terrorist by India.

The tit-for-tat expulsions followed PM Justin Trudeau’s claim that Canadian police were investigating allegations of Indian agents’ – and the Indian government’s – direct involvement in the June 2023 killing.

Canadian police further accused Indian agents of involvement in “homicides, extortion and violent acts” targeting pro-Khalistan supporters advocating a separate Sikh homeland in India. Delhi rejected the allegations as “preposterous”.

There are some 770,000 Sikhs living in Canada, home to the largest Sikh diaspora outside the Indian state of Punjab. Sikh separatism – rooted in a bloody insurgency in India during the 1980s and early ’90s – continues to strain relations between the two countries. Canada has faced sharp criticism from Delhi for failing to oppose the pro-Khalistan movement within its borders. Canada, says India, is aware of local Khalistani groups and has been monitoring them for years.

“This relationship has been on a downward trajectory for several years, but it’s now hit rock bottom,” Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center, an American think-tank, told the BBC.

“Publicly laying out extremely serious and detailed allegations, withdrawing ambassadors and top diplomats, releasing diplomatic statements with blistering language. This is uncharted territory, even for this troubled relationship.”

Other analysts agree that this moment signals a historic shift.

“This represents a significant slide in Canada-India relations under the Trudeau government,” added Ryan Touhey, author of Conflicting Visions, Canada and India in the Cold War World.

A history professor at St Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Mr Touhey notes that a key success of former prime minister Stephen Harper’s government was fostering a “prolonged period of rapprochement” between Canada and India, moving past grievances related to Khalistan and nuclear proliferation.

“Instead, a focus was placed on the importance of trade and education ties and people-to-people links given the significant Indian diaspora in Canada. It is also worth noting that the Khalistan issue had seemed to have disappeared since the beginning of the millennium. Now it has suddenly erupted all over again.”

Still, Harper was not faced with allegations from Canadian security services of a potential link between agents of India’s government and the killing of a Canadian citizen.

On Monday, Canadian police said they had approached at least a dozen people over the past few months, specifically members of the pro-Khalistan movement, because they believed they faced credible and imminent threats.

They alleged subsequent investigations uncovered “a significant amount of information about the breadth and depth of criminal activity orchestrated” by India agents, and consequential threats to Canadians.

“No country, particularly not a democracy that upholds the rule of law, can accept this fundamental violation of its sovereignty,” Trudeau said.

Canada’s allegations have come at a time when Trudeau appears to be battling anti-incumbency at home with elections barely a year away. A new poll by Ipsos reveals only 28% overall think Trudeau deserves re-election and only 26% would vote for the Liberals. India’s foreign ministry, in bruising remarks on Monday, ascribed Canada’s allegations to the “political agenda of the Trudeau government that is centred around vote bank politics”.

In 2016, Trudeau told reporters that he had more Sikhs – four – in his cabinet than Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s in India. Sikhs exert considerable influence in Canadian politics, occupying 15 seats in the House of Commons – over 4% – while representing only about 2% of the population. Many of these seats are in key battlegrounds during national elections. In 2020, Trudeau had expressed his concern over protests by farmers in India, drawing sharp criticism by Delhi.

“I think broadly speaking this crisis will give a feeling that this is a prime minister who is seeming to go from one debacle to another. More specifically, within the Indo-Canadian community it may well hurt more than ever,” says Mr Touhey.

He explains that the Indian diaspora in Canada, once predominantly Punjabi and Sikh, has become more diverse, now including a significant number of Hindus and immigrants from southern India and the western state of Gujarat.

“They are proud of India’s economic transformation since the 1990s and will not be sympathetic to Sikh separatism. Historically, the Liberals have been quite politically successful with the Sikh vote, especially in British Columbia.”

However, Mr Touhey doesn’t feel that the crisis with India has to do with vote bank politics.

Instead, he believes this is more about the Canadian government “repeatedly missing signals from Delhi regarding Indian concerns over pro-Khalistani elements in Canada”.

“My strong sense is that after decades of pleading with Canadian governments to take Indian concerns over pro-Khalistani elements in Canada, they feel that they’re back to square one – except this time you have a much more different government in Delhi that is willing to act forcefully, right or wrong, to rein in perceived domestic threats,” says Mr Touhey.

Mr Kugelman echoes a similar sentiment.

“There’s a lot at play that explains the rapid deterioration in bilateral ties. This includes a fundamental disconnect: what India views, or projects, as a dangerous threat is seen by Canada as mere activism and dissent protected by free speech. And neither is willing to make concessions,” he says.

All may not be lost. The two countries have a long relationship. Canada hosts one of the largest Indian-origin communities, with 1.3 million residents, or about 4% of its population. India is a priority market for Canada, ranking as its 10th largest trading partner in 2022. India has also been Canada’s top source of international students since 2018.

“On the one hand, the relationship is far more broad-based than ever thanks to the size of the diaspora, the diversity of that diaspora and the increase in bilateral trade, increased student exchanges – albeit this last point has become a problematic issue for the Trudeau government as well,” says Mr Touhey.

“So, I think those people-to-people links will be okay. At the high bilateral level, I don’t think there is much the current Canadian government can do as it pretty much enters the final year with an election to be held at the latest by the autumn of 2025.”

For the moment, though, things look pretty bad, experts say.

“Delhi now levels the same allegations against Canada that it has regularly levelled against Pakistan. It accuses Ottawa of sheltering and sponsoring anti-India terrorists. But of late, the language making these allegations against Canada has been stronger than it has been against Pakistan. And that’s saying something,” says Mr Kugelman.

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The government says it is allowing some “eligible” Afghan special forces soldiers who fought alongside the British military to resettle in the UK, after they were previously rejected.

Under the previous government, about 2,000 Afghans who served with specialist units – known at the “Triples” – were denied permission to relocate to the UK after the Taliban takeover in 2021.

Armed forces minister Luke Pollard told the House of Commons a review had now found some applications were wrongly turned down.

Pollard said there was no evidence of “malicious intent” in the initial decision-making process, instead blaming poor record-keeping for any errors.

The so-called “Triples” were elite units of Afghan soldiers set up, funded and run by the UK.

On Monday, Pollard said the government has so far overturned 25% of the rejections.

He said a review had found new evidence that some of the Afghan soldiers had been directly paid by the UK government, meaning they were eligible for resettlement – and this evidence had been “overlooked” during the initial resettlement applications.

These errors were caused by a “failure to access and share the right digital records, and challenges with information flows across departmental lines”, he said.

He criticised the previous government for a “critical failure” in locating the correct paperwork.

The defence minister said the government had reviewed many of the cases as a matter of urgency because many of the Afghan troops “remain at risk” under Taliban rule.

Some of the Triples are reported to have been targeted and killed by the Taliban.

The review into the rejected applications was announced by the previous Conservative government in February, after former armed forces minister James Heappey said the decision-making process behind some rejections had not been “robust”.

Pollard said the review’s findings did not mean that all Triples would be eligible for relocation, adding officials were still re-assessing some of the applications.

Shadow veterans minister Andrew Bowie welcomed the continuation of the review.

He said the Conservatives wanted the correct decisions made on the “very important and highly sensitive applications as speedily and fairly as possible”.

With a night of bottomless drinks, a three-course dinner and an auction packed with royal memorabilia, the University of Queensland Monarchist League’s annual ball is a sell-out.

Billed as a celebration of the Crown, a rendition of God Save The King followed by Australia’s national anthem kicks off the event. When dinner is done, the bidding starts.

First up, a limited-edition Royal Doulton plate with a hand-decorated portrait of the King to mark his 60th birthday. Also on the ticket – an oil painting of King George V and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon signed by monarchist and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

For the 200 students and their guests, the fact that King Charles is travelling over 16,000 km (10,000 miles) across 10 different time zones, to tour the country from 18 to 26 October – all while going through cancer treatment – is a testament to his love of Australia. And for that they are grateful.

“He’s such a big part of our history and our traditions, it’s wonderful we get to celebrate it,” says student Eliza Kingston.

“He’s just as much the King of Australia as he is the King of England,” Jeremy Bazley adds enthusiastically.

But amid a cost-of-living crisis, many Australians have failed to take notice of the trip at all – while some campaigners have tried to frame it as the royal family’s “farewell tour”, in a bid to reinvigorate the decades-old republican debate.

It’s a question that the government has, for now at least, put on ice – while King Charles earlier this week reiterated longstanding palace policy that the matter should be left for the “public to decide”.

Last year’s unsuccessful vote on the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has stalled momentum for another referendum – which is the only way to change Australia’s constitution. The bruising campaign divided the nation at times, while leaving many of its first inhabitants feeling silenced.

It’s a backdrop that will no doubt impact the tone of this royal tour, which includes events in Sydney and Canberra, and is the first in over a decade.

This will be King Charles’s 17th visit to Australia. His first was in 1966, when he came as a teenage prince to spend two terms at Timbertop – a campus of a boarding school in the mountains of Victoria. His time there was, he said, “by far the best” experience of his education.

He’s since returned 15 times for official tours, including a trip with Princess Diana to one of the country’s most famous landmarks, Uluru. Most recently, he opened the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.

So, what sort of welcome will he receive since becoming King? The data suggests the nation is split.

A snapshot survey after his coronation, conducted by Roy Morgan Research, indicated 60% of Australians wanted the country to remain a constitutional monarchy.

But last year, a poll by YouGov suggested that number had dwindled to 35%, and that 32% of people appeared to favour becoming a republic as soon as possible.

A further 12% felt that should only happen when the King died, and 21% just didn’t know.

And while just over a third of those questioned thought the monarchy was good for the country, about 20% thought it was bad – while 38% were indifferent.

At the Royal Hotel Darlington pub, opposite the University of Sydney, students who have finished classes and are headed for a pint had no idea that a visit from the King was imminent.

“To be honest, not that many people would know about it or think too much about it,” says 19-year-old Charlotte Greatrex. “We all get very swept up in uni or whatever’s going on in our own lives that it doesn’t seem to influence us that much.”

Her friend Gus Van Aanholt agrees: “I feel older generations, like my parents and my grandparents, would have much more of a stronger connection to the monarchy.”

Polling has often pointed to a generational gap – indicating increased support for the monarchy among older Australians.

Ahead of the King’s visit the Australian Republic Movement (ARM) wants to capitalise on what it sees as a growing indifference to the monarchy. It recently released a tongue-in-cheek media campaign depicting King Charles, Queen Camilla and the Prince of Wales as ageing rock stars delivering their final show, while encouraging people to “wave goodbye to royal reign”.

Although a 1999 referendum on becoming a republic was resoundingly defeated, the ARM would like to see the question put to the people again.

“We’ve been independent for a long time now but that last little step of independence for us is splitting away from the monarchy,” says co-chair Nathan Hansford.

“Regardless of whatever connotations you want to put towards the British royal family in the past, it’s really a story about us moving forward as a nation.”

When the King and Queen fly into Sydney on Friday, they will be greeted by one of Australia’s most prominent republicans, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

He has long made it clear that his country’s future should be one without a monarchy. He even appointed an assistant minister for the republic.

But in recent months, a cabinet reshuffle and the removal of the republican portfolio revealed that plans to hold a vote on the issue had been shelved.

Like much of the world, Australians are struggling to keep up with the rising costs of everyday essentials, and the government knows it’s not going to win a referendum when there isn’t the appetite for what many would see as an expensive distraction.

In short, Albanese has assessed that a republican vote is not a priority for the general public right now.

For their part, many Indigenous Australians feel last year’s referendum result was a clear indication the country still has a lot of work to do to grapple with the ongoing impacts of its colonial past, before it can debate its future.

“I think if we do end up going to another referendum, we have to make sure that we deal with First Nations issues… we still have people experiencing intergenerational trauma, so understanding the history of what has happened in this country is really key,” says Allira Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman and co-chair of the Uluru Youth Dialogue.

She’s proud, though, of how much more diverse the nation has become, since King Charles first touched down as a 17-year-old.

“We’re not white Australia anymore, we’re a brown Australia.

“We have multicultural, diverse backgrounds coming from all nations, and it’d be very interesting to see a brown head of state, or a black head of state but before we do that, we need to include our First Nations and recognise that.”

In the past 24 hours I’ve written more than 100 WhatsApp messages.

None of them were very exciting. I made plans with my family, discussed work projects with colleagues, and exchanged news and gossip with some friends.

Perhaps I need to up my game, but even my most boring messages were encrypted by default, and used WhatsApp’s powerful computer servers, housed in various data centres around the world.

It’s not a cheap operation, and yet neither I nor any of the people I was chatting with yesterday, have ever parted with any cash to use it. The platform has nearly three billion users worldwide.

So how does WhatsApp – or zapzap, as it’s nicknamed in Brazil – make its money?

Admittedly, it helps that WhatsApp has a massive parent company behind it – Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram as well.

Individual, personal WhatsApp accounts like mine are free because Whatsapp makes money from corporate customers wanting to communicate with users like me.

Since last year firms have been able to set up channels for free on Whatsapp, so they can send out messages to be read by all who choose to subscribe.

But what they pay a premium for is access to interactions with individual customers via the app, both conversational and transactional.

The UK is comparatively in its infancy here, but in the Indian city of Bangalore for example, you can now buy a bus ticket, and choose your seat, all via Whatsapp.

“Our vision, if we get all of this right, is a business and a customer should be able to get things done right in a chat thread,” says Nikila Srinivasan, vice president of business messaging at Meta.

“That means, if you want to book a ticket, if you want to initiate a return, if you want to make a payment, you should be able to do that without ever leaving your chat thread. And then just go right back to all of the other conversations in your life.”

Businesses can also now choose to pay for a link that launches a new WhatsApp chat straight from an online ad on Facebook or Instagram to a personal account. Ms Srinivasan tells me this is alone is now worth “several billions of dollars” to the tech giant.

Other messaging apps have gone down different routes.

Signal, a platform renowned for its message security protocols which have become industry-standard, is a non-profit organisation. It says it has never taken money from investors (unlike the Telegram app, which relies on them).

Instead, it runs on donations – which include a $50m (£38m) injection of cash from Brian Acton, one of the co-founders of WhatsApp, in 2018.

“Our goal is to move as close as possible to becoming fully supported by small donors, relying on a large number of modest contributions from people who care about Signal,” wrote its president Meredith Whittaker in a blog post last year.

Discord, a messaging app largely used by young gamers, has a freemium model – it is free to sign-up, but additional features, including access to games, come with a pricetag. It also offers a paid membership called Nitro, with benefits including high-quality video streaming and custom emojis, for a $9.99 monthly subscription.

Snap, the firm behind Snapchat, combines a number of these models. It carries ads, has 11 million paying subscribers (as of August 2024) and also sells augmented reality glasses called Snapchat Spectacles.

And it has another trick up its sleeve – according to the website Forbes, between 2016-2023 the firm made nearly $300m from interest alone. But Snap’s main source of revenue is from advertising, which brings in more than $4bn a year.

The UK-based firm Element charges governments and large organisations to use its secure messaging system. Its customers use its tech but run it themselves, on their own private servers. The 10-year old firm is in “double digit million revenue” and “close to profitability”, its co-founder Matthew Hodgson tells me.

He believes the most popular business model for messaging apps remains that perennial digital favourite – advertising.

“Basically [many messaging platforms] sell adverts by monitoring what people do, who they talk to, and then targeting them with the best adverts,” he says.

The idea is that even if there is encryption and anonymity in place, the apps don’t need to see the actual content of the messages being shared to work out a lot about their users, and they can then use that data to sell ads.

“It’s the old story – if you the user, aren’t paying, then the chances are that you are the product,” adds Mr Hodgson.

23 September, 2024. Packing day.

Marea Stamper, aka DJ extraordinaire The Blessed Madonna, is cramming her belongings into well-worn suitcases, ahead of a forthcoming Australian tour.

There’s no stress. She’s done this thousands of times before, playing everywhere from Berlin’s legendary nightclub Berghain to the Coachella Festival, where she headlined the Mojave stage in 2022.

Sipping on an iced coffee (“if I could have this intravenously, I would”), Stamper is upbeat and fighting fit, despite a recent stay in hospital.

“I’ve been struggling with persistent anaemia for some time, and they finally decided to figure out why, so I had some outpatient surgery last week,” she explains.

“They really fixed me up. Otherwise, I would have died on this next tour.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that would have been a huge loss.

Stamper is one of the most celebrated DJs of her generation, spreading the gospel of dance music through her uplifting festival sets, while consistently breaking glass ceilings (in 2016, she became the first woman to be named DJ of the year by Mixmag).

Her Australian tour marks the fulfilment of a promise. Her last trip Down Under was cut short by Covid-19.

“I sprinted out of a hotel room to get onto a flight and come home,” she says, recalling both her last-minute panic, and the surprise of a heavily-discounted first class ticket on an empty plane.

With nightclubs shut down, she spent the pandemic remixing Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia album in her pyjamas; then scored a surprise hit when Fred Again sampled one of their conversations on his song (Marea) We Lost Dancing.

“,” Stamper says over the track’s bubbling synths.

“”

Serendipitously, the song helped Stamper secure a record deal with Warner Records. This Friday, she releases a star-studded debut album, Godspeed, which features Kylie Minogue, Joy Crookes and Jamie Principle.

It’s fair to say it’s been a long time coming.

Stamper was born in 1977 and grew up in rural Kentucky, the first generation of her family to live outside of the Appalachian mountains.

Her father was the well-regarded blues musician Mike Stamper, and her mum, Louise Renee, was a librarian – but with little money coming into the household, Stamper was a high school outcast.

She once got detention for failing to show up with lunch money, and her appearance – “butch” attire, with her hair dyed purple and piled into a beehive – made her a target for bullies.

“I would get the crap kicked out of me every day,” she recalls, “so I was not particularly interested in going to school.”

Salvation came from (where else?) an episode of Beverly Hills 90210, where the cast visited a rave. Inspired, Stamper snuck into her first house party at the age of 14, and found her true calling.

“They had to peel me off the speakers,” she later recalled.

But her father was furious. A heavy drinker, he was in the middle of a seven-year stretch of sobriety and “aggressively wanted me to adopt the values of whatever rehab programme he was in,” Stamper recalls.

“He just said, ‘You can’t go to raves, you’re too young. All these people, you think they’re going to be your buddies, and you think they’re going to be there for you – but they won’t.'”

Looking back, she’s happy to confirm he was wrong.

“When my dad’s wife died a couple of years back, it was those rave degenerates who were there for me,” she says.

“They stuck with me and they fed me and put me back together. Our bond is deep, spiritual, forever.”

She’s known some of them since she dropped out of school aged 16 to sell mixtapes out of the back of her car across the American Midwest.

Others helped her secure her first DJ sets in Chicago, initially as Lady Foursquare, then The Black Madonna.

Under that moniker, she started releasing music in 2012, gaining widespread acclaim for tracks like Exodus and the mountainous house anthem He Is The Voice I Hear.

By 2017, she had a 13-week, sold out residency at London’s XOYO club, and her own radio station in the video game Grand Theft Auto V.

Work on her album started around the same time. Stamper confesses it’s been scrapped and rewritten several times.

But one track has survived every incarnation: We Still Believe, a tribute to sweat-soaked warehouse raves that she wrote in her attic more than a decade ago.

“The first version has my little voice recorded on a BlackBerry, to give you a sense of how long ago it was.”

Before she could include it on the album, she had to reclaim the rights from the independent label who’d originally released it in 2013.

“They’d given me a really outstanding deal of, you know, ‘We’re going to control this in perpetuity for $300′ or whatever,” Stamper says, “but, at the time, I was just excited that anyone wanted to put my music out.”

After buying it back, she enlisted one of her heroes, Jamie Principle, to re-record the vocals – a love letter to the unifying power of dance music.

Principle, whose 1984 anthem Your Love is ground zero for Chicago house, also appears in a spoken-word interlude on the album, describing how the scene “went all to hell when the money came into it”.

Over the years, there have been accusations of unpaid royalties and ripped off songs. Stamper is disgusted.

“The guys who made these foundational records can’t get medical care,” she says.

“They have to have fundraisers to get a car fixed. Jamie Principle never made a dollar from any of his records.”

The impact of money on music is a theme she hammers on the album which opens, pointedly, with a Quincy Jones quote.

“”

“That’s not an anti-money stance,” Stamper explains. “But you can’t go into the studio and try to make a record that you think is going to have a financial impact on you later.”

In a year where production-line projects from Katy Perry and Jennifer Lopez have failed to connect, she believes the charts are on the cusp of a “Nirvana moment”, where the old guard are swept away by new, authentic voices.

“There’s been a period of cheerleading for nothing,” she says, “a kind of sad populism that isn’t even about what’s populist.

“And suddenly there’s all this incredible pop music coming out, you know? Charli XCX and Chappell Roan, who have personal investment, personal storytelling, personal risk in their music.

“I think Brat is a genre-resetting moment in pop music.”

That’s why her album avoids the bland platitudes of most superstar DJ projects. You can hear Stamper’s roots, her personal struggles, and even her religious faith woven into the heart-pounding beats.

On the title track, she pays emotional tribute to the people she’s loved and lost, from Chicago underground legend Jojo Baby to the trailblazing female DJ Kelli Hand.

“Hand to God, I wrote those lyrics, completely asleep, on a notepad on tour,” she says, “and I completely forgot about them until we were two days away from handing the album in.”

Knowing she wanted to honour her heroes, á la Daft Punk’s Teachers, she flicked through her phone ’til she re-discovered that late-night stream-of-consciousness.

“And on the very last day, at the very last hour, it became the title track for the album,” Stamper says.

“And I swear to God, what day was it? Quincy Jones’s birthday!

“Sometimes when you’re making art, God just winks at you.”

Italy has made it illegal for couples to go abroad to have a baby through surrogacy.

The move extends a ban on the practice inside the country to also include those who seek it out in places where it is legal, like the US or Canada. Those who break the law could face up to two years in prison and fines of up to €1m (£835,710).

The law, proposed by the Italy’s far-right governing party, is seen by critics to target LGBT couples – who are not allowed to adopt or use IVF in the country.

Surrogacy is when a woman carries a pregnancy for another couple or individual, usually due to fertility issues or because they are men in a same-sex relationship.

The law passed by 84 votes to 58 in Italy’s senate on Wednesday.

In a protest ahead of the vote, the law’s opponents said it made it harder for people to become parents – despite the country’s declining birth rate.

“If someone has a baby they should be given a medal”, LGBT activist Franco Grillini told the Reuters news agency at the demonstration.

“Here instead you are sent to jail… if you don’t have children in the traditional way.

“This is a monstrous law. No country in the world has such a thing.”

The move is part of the socially conservative agenda of Giorgia Meloni – Italy’s first female prime minister and leader of the Brothers of Italy party.

She has described herself as a Christian mother and believes children should only be raised by a man and a woman.

Meloni has previously spoken out against surrogacy involving LGBT couples, and anti-LGBT rhetoric was a key feature of her election campaign.

In a speech in 2022, she said “yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby”.

In 2023, her government instructed Milan’s city council to stop registering the children of same-sex parents.

Meloni has described surrogacy as “a symbol of an abominable society that confuses desire with rights and replaces God with money”.

Her deputy, Matteo Salvini, has also called the practice an “aberration” that treats women like an “ATM”.

The MP that drafted Wednesday’s ban previously denied that it was designed to harm LGBT people: “Most people who use surrogacy are heterosexual.”

It would “protect women and their dignity”, said Carolina Varchi.

Experts told the BBC that 90% of the couples who use surrogacy in Italy are straight, and many of them hide the fact that they have gone abroad to have a baby.

But same-sex families returning to Italy with a child cannot hide in the same way.

LGBT couples previously told the BBC of their fears surrounding the law.

• Italy, Spain, France and Germany are among the European countries which outlaw all forms of surrogacy.
• In the UK, it is illegal to pay for surrogacy beyond the surrogate’s reasonable expenses. The surrogate will be registered on the birth certificate until parenthood is transferred via a parental order.
• In Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic, it’s not possible to get a court to enforce a surrogacy agreement. This is the same in the UK, where a court will decide what is in the best interest of the child if there is a disagreement.
• Greece accepts foreign couples and provides legal protection to the intended parents – the surrogate has no legal rights over the child – however Greece insists there should be a woman in the relationship (thus excluding gay couples or single men).
• The US and Canada allow surrogacy for same-sex couples, and recognise them as the legal parents from birth.

At least 10 Indian flights have received hoax bomb threats over the past 48 hours, leading to long delays and diversions.

On Tuesday, Singapore’s Air Force sent two fighter jets to escort an Air India Express plane away from populated areas following a bomb threat.

Hours before that, an Air India plane from Delhi to Chicago had to land at a Canadian airport as a precuationary measure.

Hoax bomb threats to airlines are not unusual in India but it’s not clear what triggered the sudden surge since Monday.

Officials from the government’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation and Bureau of Civil Aviation Security did not respond to the BBC’s emails for comment.

Apart from Air India, IndiGo, SpiceJet and Akasa Air flights also received threats.

On Monday, three international flights that took off from Mumbai were diverted or delayed after an X (formerly Twitter) handle posted threats. Police have detained a teenager in connection with this.

On Tuesday, seven flights, including the two Air India planes, were affected by the threats issued by another X handle which has now been suspended. Screenshots of some of the posts show the user had tagged the airline and local police and mentioned the flight number.

Air India said in a statement that it was co-operating with authorities to identify the people behind the threats and would consider legal action to recover damaged incurred.

Every Indian airport has a Bomb Threat Assessment Committee which assesses the gravity of the threat and takes action accordingly. A threat can lead to the involvement of the bomb disposal squad, sniffer dogs, ambulances, police and doctors.

Passengers are off-loaded from the plane along with cabin baggage, check-in baggage and cargo, and they are all screened again. Engineering and security teams also search the plane before it is cleared for flying again.

The resultant delay can cost thousands of dollars in damages to airlines and security agencies.

For flights heading for other countries, it can also lead to international agencies getting involved, like in Singapore and Canada.

On Tuesday, Singapore’s defence minister said that two of the city state’s fighter jets “scrambled and escorted” the Air India Express plane before it landed safely at Changi airport. The plane was flying from Madurai in India to Singapore.

“Once on the ground, the plane was handed to the Airport Police. Investigations are ongoing,” Ng Eng Hen wrote.

The aircraft later landed safely at Changi.

In Canada – where the Air India flight to Chicago had landed at Iqaluit airport as a precautionary measure – the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said it was investigating the threat.

Air India said on Wednesday that a Canadian Air Force plane was taking the passengers to Chicago. It’s not clear yet when the Air India plane will be allowed to take off.

Models and pop stars took to the catwalk as the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show made its comeback, five years after being cancelled.

The lingerie brand’s catwalk show was scrapped after its 2018 edition drew low ratings as well as criticism that it was sexist, outdated and lacked diversity.

It returned on Tuesday in New York, where British supermodel Kate Moss, 50, made her debut at the event, with her 22-year-old daughter Lila also appearing on the runway.

The show also featured musical performances from Cher, Tyla and Blackpink’s Lisa.

The fashion show, which was launched in 1995, would ordinarily attract millions of viewers each year and big-name performers like Rihanna and Taylor Swift.

But ratings dropped and controversies plagued the brand. Its chief executive departed shortly after its 2018 show, which was watched on US TV by three million people – down from nine million four years earlier.

At the time, the New York Times declared Victoria’s Secret a name in “steady decline”, while the Wall Street Journal said it had “lost its appeal”.

In 2017, the event had been held in Shanghai, China, but hit problems when Katy Perry and Gigi Hadid were reportedly denied visas.

Marketing head Ed Razek apologised in 2018 for comments he made about why transgender and plus-sized models were not featured on the runway.

This year’s comeback promised to “celebrate all women”, with the company’s British chief design and creative officer Janie Schaffer telling WWD Victoria’s Secret had “moved on as a business so much over the last three years”.

Those on the catwalk on Tuesday included Brazilian model Valentina Sampaio, who became the first transgender model to represent Victoria’s Secret in 2019.

There was also an appearance from another transgender model, Alex Consani.

Plus-sized models including Ashley Graham and Paloma Elsesser also walked the famous runway, but some saw this as a token gesture considering the company’s history.

While Kate Moss’s appearance in a black lace dress and trademark angel wings was unexpected, a few familiar faces made their runway returns.

Gigi and Bella Hadid showcased a number of looks including matching red lingerie, with fan favourites Barbara Palvin and Candice Swanepoel also walking.

Former America’s Next Top Model host Tyra Banks, 50, appeared at the event for the first time since 2009.

Another model to make her return was Adriana Lima, who walked in 2018 before the show was scrapped.

Reaction to this year’s show has been mixed, with Harper’s Bazaar’s Dani Maher writing: “Were there any moments burned into my brain with similar urgency [to previous shows]? I’m not so sure.”

Schaffer highlighted its diversity, saying there were 50 models from 25 different countries.

But Maher wrote that despite this, “the runway was still overwhelmingly dominated by thin conventionally attractive models”.

This was echoed by Teen Vogue associate editor Aiyana Ishmael, who wrote: “As I watched thin model after thin model take the runway, I was catapulted right back to my childhood living room, watching women who didn’t look like me set a beauty standard most women will never meet.”

France football captain Kylian Mbappé is “astonished” to see his name linked in media reports to a rape inquiry in Sweden, but his lawyer says the player is calm because he has nothing to be sorry about.

Swedish authorities have confirmed that a senior prosecutor is investigating a report of a suspected rape in Stockholm, without naming anyone in connection with the case.

However, Swedish media report that the French footballer is being linked to the allegations which involve an incident at a hotel in central Stockholm last Thursday.

Kylian Mbappé has also reacted, summing up the reports as “FAKE NEWS”, to his 14 million followers on X.

Swedish media said the footballer had stayed in Stockholm for two days last week, visiting a restaurant on Thursday evening before moving on to a nightclub. He was pictured walking in the centre of the capital with three other people.

Swedish prosecutors clarified on Monday that according to a “criminal report” submitted to police, the incident under investigation took place on 10 October at a hotel.

Police were seen visiting the Bank hotel he had stayed at on Monday, with officers later leaving with bags. One report said they had taken clothing from the hotel in evidence.

“The investigation is being led by senior prosecutor Marina Chirakova, who is unable to provide more information at this time,” the Swedish prosecution authority said.

Mbappé was not called up for France’s Uefa Nations League matches over the past week and has returned to training with his team Real Madrid.

Lawyer Petra Eklund, who is acting for the complainant in the case, has said she cannot comment on the case at the moment because of legal constraints.

However, Sweden’s SVT and other media outlets reported the allegation involved reasonable suspicion of rape, considered a lower level of suspicion under Swedish law.

Kylian Mbappé’s lawyers have condemned the media reports as defamatory, and on Tuesday night lawyer Marie-Alix Canu-Bernard appeared on the main evening news programme on TF1, saying nothing was known of the complaint or even if it had been made against her client, who she said was “stunned” by the media frenzy.

“[Kylian Mbappé] is never alone. He is never put in a position where he ends up in a situation that would lead to him taking a risk,” she insisted.

“As a result that totally rules out any possibility of reprehensible actions on his part. I can tell you that with absolutely certainty.”

She said a complaint proved nothing and that she was preparing to hit back with a claim for defamation.

Meanwhile, in his social media post on Monday night, the footballer appeared to connect the reports emerging from Sweden to a case with his previous French club Paris Saint-Germain over €55m (£46m) that he alleges was unpaid in wages and bonuses.

“It’s becoming so predictable, on the eve of the hearing, as if by chance,” he said.

Kylian Mbappé was the top goalscorer in PSG’s history but he left the club over the summer after months of dispute. Tuesday’s hearing was before a French football league (LFP) appeals committee. PSG denies the player’s allegations and another of Mbappé’s lawyers said a decision was expected on 25 October.

Sweden’s rape laws were reformed in 2018, so a perpetrator can be convicted of negligent assault or rape if they “should have realised the other person was not participating voluntarily”.

Liam Payne, the former One Direction star, has died aged 31 in Argentina after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, police say.

In a statement, police said they discovered Payne’s body after an emergency crew responded to an emergency call in the upscale neighbourhood of Palermo.

Payne had risen to global fame as part of the much-loved boyband created on the X Factor TV show in 2010, along with Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik.

Earlier this month, Payne had attended the Argentina concert of his former One Direction bandmate Niall Horan.

• Follow live: Tributes to Liam Payne
• His life in pictures
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According to police in Buenos Aires, officers at the scene were initially responding to reports “of an aggressive man who may have been under the effects of drugs and alcohol”.

When they arrived at the hotel, officials were told a loud sound had been heard in an interior courtyard. Soon after, they discovered the body there. A police investigation has been launched.

Emergency medical services director Alberto Crescenti told local media that Payne had suffered “serious injuries” and that an autopsy will be carried out.

Mr Crescenti declined to answer questions about the circumstances of Payne’s fall from the balcony.

The UK Foreign Office confirmed it was in touch with authorities in Argentina “regarding reporters of the death of a British man”. No further details were given.

Payne appeared to post on Snapchat just hours before the incident, saying: “It’s a lovely day here in Argentina.”

Once news of his death broke, fans began gathering outside the Buenos Aires hotel where the death took place, prompting police to cordon off the entrance. Some lit candles in his memory.

“I was in my living room and my sister told me Liam died,” a young fan named Violeta Antier told Reuters news agency. “We couldn’t believe it. We came here directly to confirm it was true.”

Ms Antier said she saw Payne at the Niall Horan concert just two weeks ago.

Another woman cried as she explained why she had come to the hotel, telling Reuters in Spanish: “This is the only way I have to say goodbye to him”.

Tributes have also been pouring in online.

Max George, from boyband The Wanted, said he met Payne while he was competing on The X Factor with One Direction, and described his death as “absolutely devastating”.

“Over the last few years I had the pleasure of getting to know him personally and spent some treasured time with him,” he said on Instagram.

George said Payne had been “wonderful” in terms of support when his bandmate Tom Parker fell ill with a brain tumour.

When Parker died in 2022 at the age of 33, Payne attended the funeral.

Singer Olly Murs, who was on The X Factor a year before One Direction, said he was “lost for words”.

“Liam shared the same passions as me, the same dreams so to see his life now end so young hits hard, I’m truly gutted and devastated for his family and of course his son Bear losing a dad,” he wrote on Instagram.

On Instagram, presenter Dermot O’Leary said he remembered Payne fondly.

“I remember him as a 14-year-old turning up to audition on the X factor and blowing us away singing Sinatra,” he wrote alongside a picture of the pair.

“He was always a joy, had time for everyone, polite, grateful and was always humble.”

“Sending love and condolences to his family [and] loved ones,” socialite Paris Hilton wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “RIP my friend.”

Payne, who was born in Wolverhampton in the UK, first tried for stardom when he auditioned for ITV talent show The X Factor in 2008 – but judge Simon Cowell told him to “come back in two years”.

He did, impressing the judges more in 2010, and was put together with four other solo hopefuls at the boot camp stage and One Direction were born.

The group had four UK number one albums and four number one singles as well as topping charts around the world, before announcing they were going on a hiatus in 2015.

In 2017, Payne’s debut solo single Strip That Down, which peaked at number three on the Official UK Chart, and his collaboration with Rita Ora on the song For You – from the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack – also reached the top 10.

He began a relationship with Girls Aloud star Cheryl Tweedy in 2016 and they had a son, Bear, the following year. The couple split in 2018.

Earlier this week Maya Henry, another former partner, said to media through her lawyers that she had issued a cease and desist letter against the singer.

She had posted on social media accusing him of repeatedly contacting her. Payne did not respond to the accusations.

South Korean football player Hwang Ui-jo has apologised for secretly filming sexual encounters with his partners.

Prosecutors say the 31-year-old striker filmed sexual encounters with two of his partners without their consent on four occasions between June and September 2022.

In his first court appearance in Seoul on Wednesday, Hwang said he was “deeply sorry” for causing “disappointment”.

The former striker had just last month left England’s Nottingham Forest for Turkey’s Alanyaspor.

The videos came to light after Hwang’s sister-in-law shared them on social media last June, in an attempt to blackmail him.

She was sentenced to three years in prison in September for the blackmail after Hwang sued her.

However, the charges against him proceeded as prosecutors said he filmed the videos illegally.

Prosecutors refused to provide details on the women in the videos to prevent further harm.

“I will not do anything wrong in the future and will do my best as a footballer,” Hwang told the court in Seoul.

“I sincerely apologise to the victims who have been affected by my actions, and I am deeply sorry for the disappointment I have caused to all those who have cared and supported me,” he added.

Democratic White House nominee Kamala Harris has conducted her first-ever interview with Fox News, clashing repeatedly with the host on transgender prisoners, illegal immigration and President Biden’s mental fitness.

During the combative 25-minute sit-down, the US vice-president and Bret Baier frequently interrupted each other, with Harris at one point saying: “I’m in the middle of responding to the point you’re raising and I’d like to finish.”

Her foray on to a network that hosts some of her most vocal media critics comes as opinion polls show a majority of male voters back her Republican rival, Donald Trump, ahead of next month’s election and that this gender gap is even eating into her core electoral coalition, including younger voters, blacks and Hispanics.

Trump, meanwhile, appeared on Fox on Wednesday, in a town hall-style event with an all-female audience as he worked to tackle his own political vulnerability with women voters.

The vice-president’s interview began on the subject of immigration, with Baier playing her an emotional clip showing the mother of Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl killed by a migrant who had illegally crossed the border into the US and was released from detention.

Asked whether she should apologise to the families of Americans who were killed by illegal migrants, Harris responded: “I’m so sorry for her loss.”

“Those are tragic cases,” she added. “There’s no question about that.”

Baier also asked about her 2019 stance that border crossings should be decriminalised. This is one of several issues where the vice-president has been accused of flip-flopping.

Harris said: “I do not believe in decriminalising border crossings and I have not done that as vice-president, and I would not do that as president.”

She went on to blame Trump for persuading Republicans in Congress to vote down a border deal earlier this year, saying: “He preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

• US election polls: Who is ahead – Harris or Trump?

Harris was asked about taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgery for prisoners, a policy she has in the past said she supports.

Asked if she would as president advocate for taxpayer dollars to be used to that end, she responded: “I will follow the law.”

When pressed for more details, she said such surgeries had been available to prisoners during while Trump was in office.

However, no transgender surgeries took place in the federal prison system while Trump was president.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons told BBC Verify that two federal inmates have had gender reassignment operations – the first in 2022 and the second in 2023.

When Harris was running as a Democratic candidate for president in 2019, she checked a box in a questionnaire from a civil rights group saying that as president, she would use her authority to ensure that transgender-identifying detainees in prison and immigration facilities would have access to “treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care”.

The Harris campaign has said this “is not what she is proposing or running on” in the 2024 election.

After Fox played a clip from an interview she gave last week saying that there’s “not a thing” she would change about the actions of the Biden-Harris administration, Harris went further than she has gone before in trying to place some distance between herself and her boss.

“Let me be very clear, my presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” she said on Wednesday, without elaborating.

Baier pressed Harris on her belief that American voters do not want to “go back” to Trump, and whether people that continue to support the former president are “stupid” or “misinformed”.

“I would never say that about the American people,” Harris responded.

Baier also pressed her on why one of her campaign promises is to “turn the page” when she has been vice-president for more than three years.

Harris turned to criticising Trump.

Harris deflected questions from Baier concerning Biden’s mental state.

Asked when she first noticed that Biden’s mental faculties “appeared diminished”, Harris said: “Joe Biden, I have watched in from the Oval Office to the Situation Room, and he has the judgment… and experience to do exactly what he has done in making very important decisions on behalf of the American people.”

When pressed further on the issue, Harris responded: “Joe Biden is not on the ballot, and Donald Trump is.”

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has accused India of making a “massive mistake” that Canada could not ignore if Delhi was behind the death of a Sikh separatist leader last year on Canadian soil.

Trudeau made the comments two days after Canadian officials accused India of being involved in homicides, extortions and other violent acts targeting Indian dissidents on Canadian soil.

After Canada levelled the accusations on Monday, both countries expelled top envoys and diplomats, ramping up already strained tensions.

India has rejected the allegations as “preposterous”, and accused Trudeau of pandering to Canada’s large Sikh community for political gain.

In his remarks on Wednesday before a public inquiry looking into foreign interference in Canadian politics, the prime minister criticised India’s response to the investigation into Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s killing in June 2023.

According to Trudeau, he was briefed on the murder later that summer and received intelligence that made it “incredibly clear” that India was involved in the killing.

He said Canada had to take any alleged violation of its sovereignty and the international rule of law seriously.

Mr Nijjar was shot and killed in Surrey, British Columbia. He had been a vocal supporter of the Khalistan movement, which demands a separate Sikh homeland, and publicly campaigned for it.

At the time, however, Canada’s intelligence did not amount to hard evidence or proof, Trudeau told the inquiry.

Police have since charged four Indian nationals over the Mr Nijjar’s death.

Trudeau said he had hoped to handle the matter “in a responsible way” that didn’t “blow up” the bilateral relationship with a significant trade partner, but that Indian officials rebuffed Canada’s requests for assistance into the probe.

“It was clear that the Indian government’s approach was to criticise us and the integrity of our democracy,” he said.

Shortly after he made the allegations public, saying in that September that Canada had “credible allegations” linking Indian government agents to the murder.

The prime minister also added on Wednesday more detail to further allegations released this week by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

The police force took the rare step of publicly disclosing information about multiple ongoing investigations “due to significant threat to public safety” in Canada.

RCMP said on Monday there had been “over a dozen credible and imminent threats to life” which “specifically” focused on members of the pro-Khalistan movement.

Subsequent investigations had led to police uncovering alleged criminal activity orchestrated by government of India agents, according to the RCMP.

Trudeau said the force made the announcement with “a goal of disrupting the chain of activities that was resulting in drive-by shootings, home invasions, violent extortion and even murder” in the South Asian community across Canada.

India has vehemently denied all allegations and maintained that Canada has provided no evidence to support its claims.

The RCMP and national security advisers travelled to Singapore last weekend to meet with Indian officials – a meeting the RCMP said was not fruitful.

Following Monday’s allegations from Canadian officials, the UK and US urged India to co-operate with Canada’s legal process.

On Wednesday, the British Foreign Office said in a statement that it is in contact with Ottawa “about the serious developments outlined in the independent investigations in Canada”.

The UK has full confidence in Canada’s judicial system,” the statement added.

“The Government of India’s cooperation with Canada’s legal process is the right next step.”

The US, another close Canadian ally, said that India was not co-operating with Canadian authorities as the White House had hoped it would.

“We have made clear that the allegations are extremely serious and they need to be taken seriously and we want to see the government of India co-operate with Canada in its investigation,” said spokesperson Matthew Miller at a US State Department briefing on Tuesday.

“Obviously, they have not chosen that path.”

Canada’s foreign minister, Melanie Joly, has said that Ottawa is in close contact with the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – on the matter.

In the past 24 hours I’ve written more than 100 WhatsApp messages.

None of them were very exciting. I made plans with my family, discussed work projects with colleagues, and exchanged news and gossip with some friends.

Perhaps I need to up my game, but even my most boring messages were encrypted by default, and used WhatsApp’s powerful computer servers, housed in various data centres around the world.

It’s not a cheap operation, and yet neither I nor any of the people I was chatting with yesterday, have ever parted with any cash to use it. The platform has nearly three billion users worldwide.

So how does WhatsApp – or zapzap, as it’s nicknamed in Brazil – make its money?

Admittedly, it helps that WhatsApp has a massive parent company behind it – Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram as well.

Individual, personal WhatsApp accounts like mine are free because Whatsapp makes money from corporate customers wanting to communicate with users like me.

Since last year firms have been able to set up channels for free on Whatsapp, so they can send out messages to be read by all who choose to subscribe.

But what they pay a premium for is access to interactions with individual customers via the app, both conversational and transactional.

The UK is comparatively in its infancy here, but in the Indian city of Bangalore for example, you can now buy a bus ticket, and choose your seat, all via Whatsapp.

“Our vision, if we get all of this right, is a business and a customer should be able to get things done right in a chat thread,” says Nikila Srinivasan, vice president of business messaging at Meta.

“That means, if you want to book a ticket, if you want to initiate a return, if you want to make a payment, you should be able to do that without ever leaving your chat thread. And then just go right back to all of the other conversations in your life.”

Businesses can also now choose to pay for a link that launches a new WhatsApp chat straight from an online ad on Facebook or Instagram to a personal account. Ms Srinivasan tells me this is alone is now worth “several billions of dollars” to the tech giant.

Other messaging apps have gone down different routes.

Signal, a platform renowned for its message security protocols which have become industry-standard, is a non-profit organisation. It says it has never taken money from investors (unlike the Telegram app, which relies on them).

Instead, it runs on donations – which include a $50m (£38m) injection of cash from Brian Acton, one of the co-founders of WhatsApp, in 2018.

“Our goal is to move as close as possible to becoming fully supported by small donors, relying on a large number of modest contributions from people who care about Signal,” wrote its president Meredith Whittaker in a blog post last year.

Discord, a messaging app largely used by young gamers, has a freemium model – it is free to sign-up, but additional features, including access to games, come with a pricetag. It also offers a paid membership called Nitro, with benefits including high-quality video streaming and custom emojis, for a $9.99 monthly subscription.

Snap, the firm behind Snapchat, combines a number of these models. It carries ads, has 11 million paying subscribers (as of August 2024) and also sells augmented reality glasses called Snapchat Spectacles.

And it has another trick up its sleeve – according to the website Forbes, between 2016-2023 the firm made nearly $300m from interest alone. But Snap’s main source of revenue is from advertising, which brings in more than $4bn a year.

The UK-based firm Element charges governments and large organisations to use its secure messaging system. Its customers use its tech but run it themselves, on their own private servers. The 10-year old firm is in “double digit million revenue” and “close to profitability”, its co-founder Matthew Hodgson tells me.

He believes the most popular business model for messaging apps remains that perennial digital favourite – advertising.

“Basically [many messaging platforms] sell adverts by monitoring what people do, who they talk to, and then targeting them with the best adverts,” he says.

The idea is that even if there is encryption and anonymity in place, the apps don’t need to see the actual content of the messages being shared to work out a lot about their users, and they can then use that data to sell ads.

“It’s the old story – if you the user, aren’t paying, then the chances are that you are the product,” adds Mr Hodgson.

With a night of bottomless drinks, a three-course dinner and an auction packed with royal memorabilia, the University of Queensland Monarchist League’s annual ball is a sell-out.

Billed as a celebration of the Crown, a rendition of God Save The King followed by Australia’s national anthem kicks off the event. When dinner is done, the bidding starts.

First up, a limited-edition Royal Doulton plate with a hand-decorated portrait of the King to mark his 60th birthday. Also on the ticket – an oil painting of King George V and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon signed by monarchist and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

For the 200 students and their guests, the fact that King Charles is travelling over 16,000 km (10,000 miles) across 10 different time zones, to tour the country from 18 to 26 October – all while going through cancer treatment – is a testament to his love of Australia. And for that they are grateful.

“He’s such a big part of our history and our traditions, it’s wonderful we get to celebrate it,” says student Eliza Kingston.

“He’s just as much the King of Australia as he is the King of England,” Jeremy Bazley adds enthusiastically.

But amid a cost-of-living crisis, many Australians have failed to take notice of the trip at all – while some campaigners have tried to frame it as the royal family’s “farewell tour”, in a bid to reinvigorate the decades-old republican debate.

It’s a question that the government has, for now at least, put on ice – while King Charles earlier this week reiterated longstanding palace policy that the matter should be left for the “public to decide”.

Last year’s unsuccessful vote on the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has stalled momentum for another referendum – which is the only way to change Australia’s constitution. The bruising campaign divided the nation at times, while leaving many of its first inhabitants feeling silenced.

It’s a backdrop that will no doubt impact the tone of this royal tour, which includes events in Sydney and Canberra, and is the first in over a decade.

This will be King Charles’s 17th visit to Australia. His first was in 1966, when he came as a teenage prince to spend two terms at Timbertop – a campus of a boarding school in the mountains of Victoria. His time there was, he said, “by far the best” experience of his education.

He’s since returned 15 times for official tours, including a trip with Princess Diana to one of the country’s most famous landmarks, Uluru. Most recently, he opened the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.

So, what sort of welcome will he receive since becoming King? The data suggests the nation is split.

A snapshot survey after his coronation, conducted by Roy Morgan Research, indicated 60% of Australians wanted the country to remain a constitutional monarchy.

But last year, a poll by YouGov suggested that number had dwindled to 35%, and that 32% of people appeared to favour becoming a republic as soon as possible.

A further 12% felt that should only happen when the King died, and 21% just didn’t know.

And while just over a third of those questioned thought the monarchy was good for the country, about 20% thought it was bad – while 38% were indifferent.

At the Royal Hotel Darlington pub, opposite the University of Sydney, students who have finished classes and are headed for a pint had no idea that a visit from the King was imminent.

“To be honest, not that many people would know about it or think too much about it,” says 19-year-old Charlotte Greatrex. “We all get very swept up in uni or whatever’s going on in our own lives that it doesn’t seem to influence us that much.”

Her friend Gus Van Aanholt agrees: “I feel older generations, like my parents and my grandparents, would have much more of a stronger connection to the monarchy.”

Polling has often pointed to a generational gap – indicating increased support for the monarchy among older Australians.

Ahead of the King’s visit the Australian Republic Movement (ARM) wants to capitalise on what it sees as a growing indifference to the monarchy. It recently released a tongue-in-cheek media campaign depicting King Charles, Queen Camilla and the Prince of Wales as ageing rock stars delivering their final show, while encouraging people to “wave goodbye to royal reign”.

Although a 1999 referendum on becoming a republic was resoundingly defeated, the ARM would like to see the question put to the people again.

“We’ve been independent for a long time now but that last little step of independence for us is splitting away from the monarchy,” says co-chair Nathan Hansford.

“Regardless of whatever connotations you want to put towards the British royal family in the past, it’s really a story about us moving forward as a nation.”

When the King and Queen fly into Sydney on Friday, they will be greeted by one of Australia’s most prominent republicans, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

He has long made it clear that his country’s future should be one without a monarchy. He even appointed an assistant minister for the republic.

But in recent months, a cabinet reshuffle and the removal of the republican portfolio revealed that plans to hold a vote on the issue had been shelved.

Like much of the world, Australians are struggling to keep up with the rising costs of everyday essentials, and the government knows it’s not going to win a referendum when there isn’t the appetite for what many would see as an expensive distraction.

In short, Albanese has assessed that a republican vote is not a priority for the general public right now.

For their part, many Indigenous Australians feel last year’s referendum result was a clear indication the country still has a lot of work to do to grapple with the ongoing impacts of its colonial past, before it can debate its future.

“I think if we do end up going to another referendum, we have to make sure that we deal with First Nations issues… we still have people experiencing intergenerational trauma, so understanding the history of what has happened in this country is really key,” says Allira Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman and co-chair of the Uluru Youth Dialogue.

She’s proud, though, of how much more diverse the nation has become, since King Charles first touched down as a 17-year-old.

“We’re not white Australia anymore, we’re a brown Australia.

“We have multicultural, diverse backgrounds coming from all nations, and it’d be very interesting to see a brown head of state, or a black head of state but before we do that, we need to include our First Nations and recognise that.”

The first aid in two weeks has gone into northern Gaza following a letter from the US that gave Israel 30 days to boost humanitarian access, or risk having some military assistance cut off.

The letter is the Biden administration’s most detailed public criticism yet of the way Israel has blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza. It was signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and was supposed to be private, until it was leaked to Israeli journalists.

It is a blueprint for an entirely different approach by Israel to the aid operation in Gaza – expediting it, rather than imposing restrictions. The letter is a line-by-line examination of Israel’s obstruction of aid deliveries – and the way its forcible relocation of civilians has exposed 1.7 million Palestinians to serious risk of disease.

It even challenges Israel’s long-standing attack on UNRWA, the UN agency that looks after Palestinian refugees.

The US is “very concerned” about proposed new laws that would “remove certain privileges and immunities”. An Israeli government minister wants to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem to use the land for a Jewish settlement.

The US says it acknowledges Israeli concerns about UNRWA, but that restrictions on it would “devastate” the humanitarian effort in Gaza and the education and welfare of tens of thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

The letter cannot have made easy reading for its two recipients, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, and Ron Dermer, its minister of strategic affairs, who is one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest advisers.

That is not just because the letter details the “US government’s deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza”. It also contains a reminder, that is also a threat, that US laws restrict arms transfers to countries that block the distribution of American aid.

Gallant set the tone of Israel’s approach to humanitarian aid flows to Gaza two days after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. He announced a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip. No fuel or food would be allowed in, he said. “Everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Pressure, not least by the Americans, forced Israel to moderate Gallant’s plan, but the aid coming in has never been consistent or adequate. In recent months, though, restrictions have been tightened, which seems to have prompted the letter. It is a sign of the exasperation and anger inside the Biden administration that Israel has not kept its promises to keep aid flowing into Gaza.

The European Union’s chief diplomat and leading human rights groups have already accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. In May, Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, accused Prime Minister Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant of starvation of civilians as part of his application for the court to issue arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Both men rejected the allegation.

When Netanyahu spoke at the UN General Assembly in New York on 27 September, he dismissed accusations that Israel was starving Gazans as “an absurdity”. He presented a version of Israel’s role in the Gaza aid operation that is diametrically opposed to the one described in Blinken and Austin’s letter.

For Netanyahu, the accusations were another sign of antisemitism at the UN and its institutions.

Israel, he said, was beset by “lies and slanders”.

“Good is portrayed as evil, and evil is portrayed as good.”

“We help bring in 700,000 tonnes of food into Gaza. That’s more than 3,000 calories a day for every man, woman, and child in Gaza.”

The hard facts in the US letter are a stark contrast to his emotive rhetoric. Some of them focus on restrictions Israel imposed in September, while Netanyahu made his claims in New York.

• “The amount of assistance entering Gaza in September was the lowest of any month during the past year” – in other words, since before Hamas’s 7 October attacks last year
• The US is particularly concerned by “recent actions by the Israeli government – including halting commercial imports, denying or impeding nearly 90% of humanitarian movements between northern and southern Gaza in September”

The Americans also criticise the way Israel slows the delivery of aid by imposing onerous rules, and make a number of specific demands:

• They want the removal of the restrictions on the use of closed lorries and containers, and to increase the number of vetted drivers to 400. UN agencies say that a shortage of drivers and lorries has made getting aid into Gaza much harder
• Israel must tighten and speed up security and customs checks. Aid organisations say cumbersome rules are used to slow deliveries down
• The Americans want aid to be funnelled through the port of Ashdod in an “expedited” route to the Gaza Strip. Ashdod is a modern Israeli container port a short drive north of Gaza. After Israel refused to let it be used, the US spent an estimated $230m (£174m) on a floating pier for aid deliveries into Gaza that broke up in bad weather before it could make a difference
• Israel should also remove restrictions on deliveries from Jordan

Israel argues that Hamas steals aid and sells it at inflated prices. The Americans do not directly engage with that, except in a single sentence that acknowledges there has been “increased lawlessness and looting”. Front and centre in the letter is Israel’s squeeze on Gaza.

Their criticism extends way beyond the mechanics of getting aid into Gaza. It demands an end to the isolation of northern Gaza, where ultra-nationalists in Netanyahu’s cabinet want to replace Palestinians with Jewish settlers.

Concern about northern Gaza has increased since Israel started its current offensive there.

The army’s actions have resembled parts of a plan put forward by a group of retired officers, led by Giora Eiland, a major-general who used to be Israel’s national security adviser. Eiland says he wanted a deal to get the hostages back and end the war early on. But as that didn’t happen, he believes more radical action is necessary.

Israel has already separated northern Gaza from the south with a corridor along Wadi Gaza that bisects the territory. Eiland told me that his plan was to open evacuation routes for a week to 10 days so that as many of the 400,000 or so civilians left in the north leave. Then the territory would be sealed, all aid supplies cut, and everyone left inside would be considered a legitimate military target.

A version of the plan appeared to be in place at Jabalia camp in the north, after it was sealed off by Israeli troops, tanks and drones.

The Blinken-Austin letter insists that there can be “no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza”. Aid agencies should have “continuous access to northern Gaza” and should be able to enter it direct from Israel rather than taking the hazardous and often deadly route from the south. Orders to evacuate must be cancelled “when there is no operational need”.

Israel has forced 1.7 million civilians, many of whom fled northern Gaza, into a narrow strip of land along the coast between al-Mawasi and the town of Deir al-Balah, where the letter says “extreme overcrowding exposed the civilians to a high risk of contracting serious diseases”.

The Americans want the pressure to be eased, for civilians to be allowed to move inland before the winter. BBC Verify has established that Israel has also bombed what it says are Hamas targets in an area it calls a humanitarian zone.

The letter had immediate results. For the first time since the beginning of October, Israel has allowed in convoys of lorries carrying aid, though not yet on the scale requested by the US. Whether the letter can end the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, particularly in the absence of ceasefire, is another matter.

Israel has been given 30 days to remedy matters. The US presidential election happens within that time frame. Before polling day, the US would not restrict weapons shipments to Israel, especially given the fact that the Israelis are on the brink, potentially, of a much wider war with Iran.

If Vice-President Kamala Harris wins, the Biden administration will be able to keep up the pressure on Israel until the inauguration in January.

It is likely to be a different story if former President Donald Trump gets his second term. Based on Trump’s previous four years in office, Netanyahu is likely to feel he has much more freedom to do what he wants as he runs down the clock on Joe Biden’s time in the White House.

Biden has been widely criticised, in his own Democratic Party and further afield, for not using the leverage that should come with America’s position as Israel’s most vital ally. Without US military and diplomatic support Israel would struggle to fight its wars. The letter looks like a serious attempt to impose pressure. In the last year of war, Netanyahu has often ignored US wishes.

A turning point came at the UN General Assembly in late September, when the US, UK and other allies of Israel believed they had talked Israel into accepting a 21-day truce in Lebanon to make time for diplomacy.

Instead, Netanyahu’s speech doubled down, rejecting a truce and escalating the regional war. From his hotel in New York, he ordered the assassination of the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Some senior Western officials complain that the Biden administration has been “played” by Netanyahu.

The letter is a belated attempt to redress the balance. Biden has been convinced he can best influence Israel by offering unconditional support. He advised Israel after 7 October not to be blinded by rage, as he said America was after the al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks.

But his wishes have often been ignored by Netanyahu. Whether or not Israel listens to America’s demands on Gaza, as Biden enters his last lap as president, it is clear that his attempt to stop the spread of the Gaza war across the Middle East has failed.

And as for the letter, it will be too little, too late for all those civilians in Gaza who have suffered, and for those who have died, as the result of months of restrictions in humanitarian aid imposed by Israel.

Russia’s army is forming a unit of some 3,000 North Koreans, a Ukrainian military intelligence source has told the BBC, in the latest report suggesting that Pyongyang is forming a close military alliance with the Kremlin.

So far the BBC has yet to see any sign of such a large unit being formed in Russia’s Far East, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has dismissed reports of North Korean involvement.

“This is not only British intelligence, it is also American intelligence. They report it all the time, they don’t provide any evidence,” he said.

There is no doubt Moscow and Pyongyang have deepened their levels of cooperation in recent months. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent Vladimir Putin a birthday message only last week calling him his “closest comrade”.

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has spoken of North Korea joining the war, and South Korea’s defence minister said this month that the chance of a North Korean deployment in Ukraine was “highly likely”.

The biggest question mark is over the numbers involved.

A military source in Russia’s Far East confirmed to BBC Russian that “a number of North Koreans have arrived” and were stationed in one of the military bases near Ussuriysk, to the north of Vladivostok. But the source refused to give a precise number, other than that they were “absolutely nowhere near 3,000”.

Military experts have told us they doubt Russian army units can successfully incorporate North Korean soldiers in their thousands.

“It wasn’t even that easy to include hundreds of Russian prisoners at first – and all those guys spoke Russian,” one analyst – who is in Russia so didn’t want to be named – told the BBC.

Even if they did number 3,000, it would not be big in a battlefield sense, but the US is as concerned as Ukraine.

“It would mark a significant increase in their relationship,” said US state department spokesman Matthew Miller, who saw it as “a new level of desperation by Russia” amid battlefield losses.

It was back in June that Vladimir Putin toasted a “peaceful and defensive” pact with Kim Jong Un.

And there is mounting evidence that North Korea is supplying Russia with ammunition, as recently demonstrated by the recovery of a missile in Ukraine’s Poltava region.

In fact, reports of mines and shells supplied by Pyongyang date back to December 2023 in Telegram chats involving Russia’s military communities.

Russian soldiers, stationed in Ukraine, have often complained about the standard of ammunition and that dozens of soldiers have been wounded.

Kyiv suspects that a unit of North Korean soldiers is preparing in the Ulan-Ude region close to the Mongolian border ahead of deployment to Russia’s Kursk province, where Ukrainian forces launched an incursion back in August.

“They could guard some sections of the Russian-Ukrainian border, which would free Russian units for fighting elsewhere,” said Valeriy Ryabykh, editor of the Ukrainian publication Defence Express.

“I would rule out the possibility that these units will immediately appear on the front line.”

Ryabakh is not alone in this thought.

North Korea may have some 1.28 million active soldiers but its army has no recent experience of combat operations, unlike Russia’s military.

Pyongyang has pursued the old Soviet model in its armed forces but it is unclear how its main force of motorised infantry units might fit into the war in Ukraine.

Then there is the obvious language barrier and an unfamiliarity with Russian systems that would complicate any fighting roles.

That does not preclude North Korea’s military taking part in Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, but they are most recognised by experts for their engineering and construction abilities, not for fighting.

What they do both have are shared incentives.

Pyongyang needs money and technology, Moscow needs soldiers and ammunition.

“Pyongyang would be paid well and maybe get access to Russian military technology, which otherwise Moscow would have been reluctant to transfer to North Korea,” says Andrei Lankov, director of the Korea Risk Group.

“It would also give their soldiers real combat experience, but there is also the risk of exposing North Koreans to life in the West, which is a considerably more prosperous place.”

For Putin, there is an urgent need to make up for significant losses during more than two and half years of war.

Valeriy Akimenko from the UK’s Conflict Studies Research Centre believes deploying North Koreans would help the Russian leader deal with the previous round of mandatory mobilisation not going well.

“So he thinks, as the Russian ranks are thinned out by Ukraine, what a brilliant idea – why not let North Koreans do some of the fighting?”

President Zelensky is clearly concerned about how this hostile alliance could evolve.

There have not been Western boots on the ground in Ukraine for fear of escalation.

However, if reports of hundreds of North Koreans preparing for deployment are borne out, the idea of foreign boots on the ground in this war would appear to be less of a concern for Vladimir Putin.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has adopted a ‘click to cancel’ rule, which aims to make it easier for people to end subscriptions.

It will force companies to make subscription sign-ups and cancellations equally straightforward.

Businesses, including retailers and gyms, will also have to get consent from customers before renewing subscriptions or converting free trials into paid memberships.

The new rule is due to come into effect in around six months time.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” said FTC chair Lina Khan.

“The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

Under the new rule, businesses will be banned from forcing customers to go though a chatbot or an agent to cancel subscriptions that were originally signed up to using an app or website

For memberships that customers signed up to in person, businesses will have to offer the option to terminate them by calling by phone or online.

Last year, the FTC took legal action against technology giant Amazon on a related issue.

The lawsuit accused the firm of tricking customers into signing up for Prime subscriptions that renewed automatically and made it difficult for people to cancel.

It also said Amazon’s website designs pushed customers into agreeing to enrol in Prime and have the subscription automatically renewed as they were making purchases.

Amazon has rejected the claims.

The FTC has also taken legal action against software giant Adobe for similar reasons.

It sued the company for allegedly violating consumer protection laws with “hidden” termination fees and a convoluted cancellation process.

The FTC said Adobe had failed to clearly disclose its terms to customers, including the year-long length of a subscription and charges that would be triggered for cancelling early.

Adobe has disputed the allegations.

A law introduced in the UK in May also takes aim at so-called subscriptions traps.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 requires businesses to provide clear information to consumers before they enter a subscription agreement.

It forces sellers to remind customers that a free or low-cost trial is coming to an end.

It also requires companies to ensure customers can easily end a contract.

Singer Liam Payne has died at the age of 31.

Payne rose to stardom in the group One Direction, before going on to have a solo career.

He had a son, Bear, with the former Girls Aloud singer Cheryl.

Here, we take a look at his life in pictures.