Four people including a child have been killed in an Israeli air strike near the main government hospital in southern Beirut, the Lebanese health ministry says.

The strike appeared to hit the car park of the Rafik Hariri University Hospital, a hospital source told Reuters news agency. The health ministry said 24 people had been injured.

It was among 13 air strikes that hit south Beirut on Monday evening. The Israeli military said it was attacking facilities linked to Hezbollah.

An Israeli spokesman had earlier warned people to move away from several locations in southern Beirut, however Rafik Hariri hospital was not among the locations mentioned.

Videos from the Dahiyeh neighbourhood in southern Beirut, where seven locations to be targeted were announced in advance, showed locals fleeing in vehicles and on foot as the strikes began hitting.

One location identified as a target by the Israeli army was roughly 400m from Beirut airport, the only international airport serving Lebanon.

Local media shared images of some windows in an airport building that were blown in the blast.

Israel has not commented since issuing the earlier evacuation warnings.

Separately, the Israeli military said earlier on Monday that it had identified a Hezbollah bunker concealed under a different hospital in southern Beirut, which has since been evacuated.

IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said without providing evidence that the bunker under the Sahel hospital in Haret Hreik held hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold that was being used to fund Hezbollah’s attacks on israel.

The director of Sahel hospital denied there was a bunker underneath and called on the Lebanese army to inspect the site.

Israel appears to have expanded its war against Hezbollah beyond military infrastructure and says it is targeting the group’s financial networks.

On Sunday night Israel carried out air strikes targeting branches of a financial association linked with Hezbollah in the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital Beirut, as well as the south and east of the country.

The Israeli military said it targeted money held by Al-Qard Al-Hassan Association (AQAH). It offers financial services to civilians in areas where Hezbollah has strong support, but Israel and the US accuse it of being a cover for the Iran-backed group to fund its activities.

There was no immediate comment from AQAH or Hezbollah.

Also on Monday, US President Joe Biden’s special envoy to the Middle East arrived in Beirut to explore the possibility of a negotiated end to the war.

Amos Hochstein said the US wanted to see an end to the war in Lebanon end “as soon as possible”.

He said that UN resolution 1701 – which calls for the Lebanese state to be the only armed force in southern Lebanon – was “not enough” and the US was looking into what more needed to be done.

Hezbollah fighters meanwhile continued to fire rockets into northern Israel, with the military reporting that 170 projectiles had crossed the border by late Monday evening.

Israel began an intense air campaign and ground invasion against Hezbollah after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza, saying it wanted to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of Israeli border areas displaced by rocket attacks.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Palestinians on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel.

More than 2,400 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 1,800 in the past five weeks, according to the country’s health ministry. Israeli authorities say 59 people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.

The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) says Israel is continuing to prevent humanitarian missions from reaching northern Gaza with critical supplies, including food and medicine.

“Hospitals have been hit and are left without power while injured people are left without care,” Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X.

He also said Unrwa’s remaining shelters were so overcrowded that displaced people were “forced to live in the toilets”, and cited reports that people trying to flee were being killed.

The Israeli military has been intensifying a weeks-long offensive in parts of northern Gaza against what it said were Hamas fighters who had regrouped there. On Monday residents and medics said Israeli forces were besieging hospitals and shelters for displaced people.

The Israeli military said it was facilitating evacuations of civilians and ensuring hospitals remained operational while it continued “operating against terrorists and terrorist infrastructure”.

Medics at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza told Reuters that Israeli troops stormed a school and detained the men before setting the building ablaze.

Palestinian media also reported on Monday that at least 10 people had been killed by Israeli artillery fire that hit a camp for displaced people at a school in Jabalia refugee camp, a densely-populated urban area to the north of Gaza City.

Israel does not allow the BBC and other international media into Gaza to report independently, making it difficult to verify facts on the ground, so we rely on information from video footage and testimonies.

Graphic videos of the aftermath of the Israeli strike posted online by Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency and local journalists appeared to show at least four bodies, including a child and a woman, lying on the ground inside a tented camp.

One of the videos was filmed by a paramedic called Nabila as she ran between the dead and wounded.

“Calm down,” she is heard screaming at a badly hurt woman sitting in a pool of blood, “I swear I don’t have anything to stop the bleeding”.

In a passage pockmarked by shrapnel, she comes across a woman sitting with a baby, who says: “My children are gone, look at them.”

The Israeli military said it was checking the reports.

The Israeli military body responsible for managing crossings into Gaza, Cogat, also announced that 41 aid lorries and six fuel tankers had been transferred to the north over the past day, and that a Unicef mission had been able to deliver polio vaccines to the north.

Cogat said there were also 600 lorry loads of aid waiting to be picked up and distributed at various crossings, most of it by UN agencies.

The UN said no aid was allowed into northern Gaza during the first two weeks of October, when the Israeli military began its offensive in and around Jabalia.

The UN’s acting humanitarian chief said a “trickle” of aid was allowed through last week, after the US warned Israel in a letter to urgently boost access within 30 days or risk having some military assistance cut off.

On Monday, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said it had been asking Israeli authorities for four days to access to the Falouja area of Jabalia but had been denied.

The OCHA also shared a video showing an appeal for help from a Jabalia resident who said he was one of 32 people buried underneath a building destroyed in an air strike on Friday.

“Eighteen of us got out. Fourteen people remain under rubble, including little kids. They are two, three and four-year-olds, as well as women. They’re under rubble. Alive. They begged for me to rescue them but I couldn’t,” Shamekh al-Dibes said.

Meanwhile, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) who recently visited Gaza City said the suffering for the estimated 400,000 people in the north was “unimaginable”.

“Heavy fighting and evacuation orders are tearing communities apart. While some are desperate to leave, many, especially the elderly, sick, and people with disabilities, are unable to leave. Other stay, believing nowhere is safe,” Stephanie Eller said in a video.

“Hospitals are overwhelmed, struggling with too many patients and lack of fuel, electricity, and water supplies,” she added. “People need food, water, medical care and, above all, a respite from the ongoing hostilities.”

Hadeel Obeid, the chief nurse at the Indonesian hospital, also near Jabalia, said its water supply had been cut off and that was no food for the fourth consecutive day. She also said that the hospital needed permission from the Israeli military to operate its generator.

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 42,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

South Korea has summoned the Russian ambassador, seeking the “immediate withdrawal” of North Korean troops which it says are being trained to fight in Ukraine.

About 1,500 North Korean soldiers, including those from the special forces, have already arrived in Russia, according to Seoul’s spy agency.

In a meeting with the ambassador Georgiy Zinoviev, South Korea’s vice-foreign minister Kim Hong-kyun denounced the move and warned that Seoul will “respond with all measures available”.

Mr Zinoviev said he would relay the concerns, but stressed that the cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang is “within the framework of international law”.

It is unclear what cooperation he was referring to. The ambassador did not confirm allegations that North Korea has sent troops to fight with Russia’s military.

Later on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters the cooperation between the two nations is “not directed against third countries”.

He added it “should not worry anyone”, according to Russian state news agency Tass.

Pyongyang has not commented on the allegations.

South Korea has long accused the North of supplying weapons to Russia for use in the war against Ukraine, but it says the current situation has gone beyond the transfer of military materials.

Some South Korean media reports have suggested as many as12,000 North Korean soldiers are expected to be deployed.

“[This] not only gravely threatens South Korea but the international community,” Kim said on Monday.

Moscow and Pyongyang have stepped up cooperation after their leaders Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un signed a security pact in June, which pledges that their countries will help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.

Last week, Putin introduced a bill to ratify the pact.

Pyongyang’s deployment of troops to fight with Russia “would mark a significant escalation” in the conflict, Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on Monday.

In a phone call with Rutte on Monday, South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol urged the alliance to explore “concrete countermeasures”, adding that he will take steps to strengthen security cooperation between South Korea, Ukraine and Nato.

British Foreign Minister David Lammy, who is visiting Seoul, called Russia’s actions “reckless and illegal”, adding that London would work with Seoul to respond, according to Yoon’s office.

The United States and Japan have also condemned the deepening military ties between North Korea and Russia.

Meanwhile, in response to a BBC question about the alleged North Korea-Russia cooperation, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said that China hopes all parties will work to de-escalate the situation and aim for a political solution to the Ukraine crisis.

Some defence experts told BBC Korean that North Korea’s involvement could complicate the war.

“North Korea’s involvement could open the door for greater international participation in the conflict, potentially drawing in more countries,” said Moon Seong-mok from the Korea National Strategy Institute.

“The international community will likely increase sanctions and pressure on both Russia and North Korea, but it remains to be seen whether North Korea’s involvement will truly benefit either country,” Dr Moon said.

But others believe the Russian military units will have difficulties incorporating North Korean troops into their frontlines.

Apart from the language barrier, the North Korean army has no recent combat experiences, they said.

Valeriy Ryabykh, editor of the Ukrainian publication Defence Express, said the North Korean soldiers could be asked to guard sections of the Russian-Ukrainian border, which will free up Russian units to fight elsewhere.

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

India and China have agreed on patrolling arrangements to de-escalate tensions along a disputed Himalayan border which has seen deadly hand-to-hand clashes in recent years, India’s top diplomat has said.

Vikram Misri said on Monday the two sides have agreed on “disengagement and resolution of issues in these [border] areas that had arisen in 2020”.

He was referring to the Galwan Valley clashes – the first fatal confrontation between the two sides since 1975, in which both sides suffered casualties.

Relations between the neighbours have been strained since then.

“An agreement has been arrived at on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the India-China border areas, leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020,” Mr Misri said.

Mr Misri, however, did not give any details about the disengagement process and whether it would cover all points of conflict along the disputed border.

The Indian foreign secretary’s statement comes just a day before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi travels to Russia for a meeting of Brics nations which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Mr Misri didn’t confirm if a bilateral meeting between Mr Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping was on the agenda.

His remarks on Monday mark a major development between the two nuclear-armed nations since the Galwan clashes.

Troops in the Galwan Valley fought with clubs and sticks because of 1996 agreement between the two countries that prohibited the use of guns and explosives near the border.

Several rounds of talks between their diplomats and military leaders in the last four years had not resulted in a major breakthrough.

• India-China clash: An extraordinary escalation ‘with rocks and clubs’
• China says Indian troops fired ‘provocative’ shots in border dispute

Troops from the two sides clashed in the northern Sikkim area in 2021 and again in the Tawang sector of the border in 2022.

Border tensions have cast a long shadow on India-China relations for decades. The two countries fought a war in 1962 in which India suffered a heavy defeat.

Business relations between the two Asian giants have also suffered due to the tensions.

The root cause is an ill-defined, 3,440km (2,100-mile)-long disputed border. Rivers, lakes and snowcaps along the frontier mean the line often shifts, bringing soldiers face to face at many points, sparking a confrontation.

The two nations have been also competing to build infrastructure along the border, which has sparked further tensions.

Some Indigenous leaders have criticised an Australian senator’s heckling of King Charles, as she faces a backlash over a violent image of the monarch briefly posted to her social media account.

Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal woman, made global headlines when she shouted “you are not my king” and “this is not your land” before being escorted away from a royal event in Canberra on Monday.

The independent senator’s protest has been praised by some activists as brave, but condemned by other prominent Aboriginal Australians as “embarrassing” and disrespectful.

Thorpe has defended her actions at the event, but said a cartoon later posted to her Instagram account was inappropriate.

The drawing – which depicted the King beheaded alongside his crown – was shared by a staff member without her knowledge, the senator said.

“I deleted it as soon as I saw. I would not intentionally share anything that could be seen to encourage violence against anyone.”

The image, which has drawn condemnation, adds to heavy scrutiny of her actions on Monday.

Aunty Violet Sheridan, an Aboriginal elder who formally welcomed the King and Queen Camilla to Ngunnawal country, told the Guardian Australia: “Lidia Thorpe does not speak for me and my people, and I’m sure she doesn’t speak for a lot of First Nations people.”

Nova Peris – a former senator who was the first Aboriginal woman in parliament and is a long-time republican – also called Thorpe’s actions “embarrassing and disappointing”.

“Australia is moving forward in its journey of reconciliation… as hard as that journey is, it requires respectful dialogue, mutual understanding, and a shared commitment to healing – not divisive actions that draw attention away from the progress we are making as a country,” she wrote on X.

However, other prominent Indigenous activists have lauded Thorpe’s stand.

Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, a Bundjalung lawyer and author, said there was “nothing more harmful or disrespectful” than inviting the monarchy to tour the country in the first place, given its history.

“When Thorpe speaks, she’s got the ancestors right with her.”

Speaking on Tuesday, Thorpe said she disrupted the King’s parliamentary welcome ceremony after repeated written requests for a meeting and a “respectful conversation” with the monarch were ignored.

She told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation she “wanted the world to know the plight of our people in this country” and for the King to apologise.

“Why doesn’t he say, ‘I am sorry for the many, many thousands of massacres that happened in this country and that my ancestors and my kingdom are responsible for that’?” she said.

A chorus of Australian politicians including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have also criticised her protest, and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has defended the monarch.

When asked by reporters if it was “disgraceful” for Australian politicians to shout at the King, Sir Keir replied: “Look, I think the King is doing a fantastic job, an incredible ambassador, not just for our country, but across the Commonwealth.”

“He is out there doing his public service notwithstanding the health challenges he himself has had.”

Albanese said Thorpe had not met “the standard behaviour Australians rightly expect of parliamentarians”, while opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Thorpe to resign.

“I really don’t care what Dutton says,” Thorpe told ABC radio in response.

“I’ll be here for the next three years so get used to truth-telling.”

An Aboriginal protester has been arrested at the Sydney Opera House as crowds await a glimpse of the King and Queen on the final day of their tour in Australia.

Throngs of people have packed the harbourside forecourt, where the royal couple are due to visit on Tuesday afternoon.

Wayne Wharton, a prominent Indigenous activist from Brisbane, was arrested after shouting anti-monarchist slogans and refusing a police order to move on.

It comes as backlash over an Aboriginal senator’s heckling of King Charles in Canberra on Monday intensifies, with politicians and some Indigenous leaders condemning Lidia Thorpe’s behaviour.

Mr Wharton had shouted “he’s not my King”, echoing the words of Thorpe the day before.

The crowd waiting for the royals – many clutching mini union jack flags – shouted back “God save the King”.

Mr Wharton had also protested outside the church service the royals attended on Sunday.

When the Kooma man was arrested and placed into a police van on Tuesday, the gathered crowd applauded officers.

Many of the hundreds there had been queuing since early on Tuesday, a few draped in British flags. Others had accessorised with royal-themed jewellery and handbags.

“We want to celebrate our country and all the people in it,” says Karen Clark, with her little boys Benjamin and Harrison who were both wearing crowns and capes with a fake fur trim.

“We were brought up with the King, we celebrate the King’s birthday with the boys – it’s fun to have high tea and dress up in our best outfits.”

“My father was from Liverpool and I’ve always been interested in the Royals,” says Bettina Bethuel who came with her friend Taja Shephard.

Taja saw the heckling by Thorpe on TV and wasn’t impressed.

“Ï thought it was a little rude but I suppose she makes her point for Indigenous people,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s appropriate how she behaved.”

On the other side of the city on Tuesday, King Charles visited the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence in Redfern, where he met with Aboriginal elders.

The independent senator’s protest has been praised by some Indigenous activists as brave, but condemned by other prominent Aboriginal Australians as “embarrassing” and disrespectful.

It has also been roundly criticised by her parliamentary peers.

The tiny villages of Haryana state in India’s rural north-west find themselves in an unlikely spotlight these days.

Farmers’ homes in hamlets around the industrial town of Rohtak are suddenly in demand, doubling up as movie sets.

Alongside the mooing of cows, it isn’t unusual to hear a director shouting “lights, camera, action” here.

A new start-up, called STAGE, has spawned a nascent film industry in this hinterland.

“Batta”, a high-octane drama about power and injustice, is just the latest in half-a-dozen movies under production in the area, Vinay Singhal, founder of STAGE , told the BBC on the film’s sets.

“There were just a dozen odd Haryanvi films made in India’s history before we came in. Since 2019, we’ve made more than 200,” says Mr Singhal.

STAGE makes content for largely under-served provincial audiences, keeping hyper-local tastes, dialectical quirks and the rural cultural syntax in mind.

There are 19,500 different dialects in India, and STAGE has identified 18 that are spoken by a large enough population to merit their own film industry.

The app currently offers content in two languages – Rajasthani and Haryanvi. It has three million paying subscribers and is planning to expand and include other dialects like Maithili and Konkani, which are spoken in north-east and coastal-west India, respectively.

“We’re also on the verge of closing a funding round from an American venture capitalist firm to expand into these territories,” says Mr Singhal, who appeared along with his co-founders on the Indian version of Shark Tank, a business reality show, a year ago.

STAGE is one among a growing number of Indian start-ups that are betting big on the rural market opportunity as the next growth frontier. Others include players like Agrostar and DeHaat.

While a bulk of India’s 1.4 billion people still live in its 650,000 villages, they’ve hardly been a market for its booming tech start-ups so far.

Asia’s third-largest economy has been a hotbed for innovation, birthing several dozen unicorns – or tech companies valued at over $1bn – but they’ve all largely built for the “top 10%” of urban Indians, according to Anand Daniel, partner at Accel Ventures, which has funded some of the country’s most successful ventures, from Flipkart to Swiggy and Urban Company.

While there have been notable exceptions like online marketplace Meesho, or a few farm technology players, the start-up boom has largely bypassed India’s villages.

That’s now changing as more founders successfully cater to rural consumers and get funded for their ideas.

“Investors don’t show you the door anymore,” says Mr Singhal.

“Five years ago, I didn’t get any money at all. I had to bootstrap the company.”

Accel itself is now cutting more cheques to entrepreneurs solving for the rural market, recently announcing it will invest up to $1m in rural start-ups through its pre-seed accelerator programme.

Unicorn India Ventures, another local VC fund, says 50% of their investments are now in start-ups based in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. And in July this year, the Japanese auto giant Suzuki announced a $40m India fund to invest in start-ups building for rural markets.

So what’s driving this shift?

The untapped market opportunity is large, says Mr Daniel, and there’s a growing realisation among investors and founders that rural doesn’t necessarily mean poor.

Two-thirds of India’s population live in the hinterland and spend about $500bn annually. In fact, the top 20% of this demographic spends more money than half of those that live in the cities, according to Accel’s own estimates.

“As India adds $4tn to GDP over the next decade, at least 5% of that will be digitally influenced, and coming from ‘Bharat’ or rural India,” says Mr Daniel.

That’s a $200bn incremental opportunity.

Giving tailwind to this is the growing penetration of smartphones among middle-income rural families.

Some 450 million Indians now use one outside its cities – which is more than the entire US population.

And click-of-a-button digital payments through the much-touted UPI interface has been a game-changer for companies looking beyond the metros to expand their offering.

“Five or seven years ago, the ability to reach this target group – be it digitally, logistically or in terms of getting payments – wasn’t easy. But the timing right now is much better for this generation of start-ups trying to address this market,” says Mr Daniel.

Also, while most innovation was happening in cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru a decade ago, a growing number of entrepreneurs are now emerging from smaller towns, driven by factors such as lower operating costs, availability of local talent, and government initiatives aimed at promoting entrepreneurship in non-metro areas, according to a report from Primus Ventures.

Being close to the ground may have also contributed to exposing founders to the potential of the vast non-metro market.

But cracking rural India is easier said than done.

The small town consumer is price-conscious and geographically dispersed. The number of addressable consumers in any given postcode is far smaller than the cities.

Infrastructure also continues to lag, so “distribution isn’t easy, and operating costs are high”, says Gautam Malik, chief revenue officer at Frontier Markets, a rural e-commerce start-up that does last-mile deliveries to villages with populations below 5,000.

Besides, those using urban templates and force-fitting them to the village context will fail, says Mr Malik.

His company quickly realised why traditional e-commerce wasn’t able to penetrate the very last mile. The village customer simply didn’t trust her money with a third party that didn’t have local presence.

To build that trust factor, Mr Malik and his team had to tie up with village-level women entrepreneurs to act as their sales and delivery agents.

Such differentiation and a commitment for the long haul will be critical, he says, to winning rural India and cracking that incremental $200bn market opportunity.

Questions have been raised about the legality of cash incentives offered by tech billionaire Elon Musk to swing-state voters who sign his petition before the US election on 5 November.

The petition was created by Mr Musk’s campaign group America PAC, which was set up to support Donald Trump in the presidential contest.

Voters in Pennsylvania are being offered cash sums for simply signing the petition. And one random swing-state signatory a day is being given a million-dollar prize.

But legal experts have suggested that it may break American law to offer money for an act requiring someone to be signed up as a voter. BBC News has contacted Mr Musk’s team and America PAC for comment.

The petition created by America PAC encourages voters in six swing states – Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina – to sign a “petition in favour of free speech and the right to bear arms”.

Those who refer another voter who signs up are promised a sum of $47 (£36) each.

Higher sums of $100 for signing or referring are offered in Pennsylvania, the battleground state that both the Trump and Harris campaigns believe could potentially decide the race’s eventual victor.

America PAC says those who sign the petition are signalling their support for the First and Second amendments of the US Constitution.

Each day until polling day on 5 November, a $1m prize will be randomly awarded to any signatory in one of the seven swing states.

The first lottery-style jumbo cheque was handed out to a surprised attendee at a town hall event in Pennsylvania on 19 October.

“I believe [Elon] Musk’s offer is likely illegal,” said Paul Schiff Berman, the Walter S. Cox professor of law at the George Washington University.

He pointed to the US Code on electoral law, which states that anyone who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting” faces a potential $10,000 fine or a five-year prison sentence.

“His offer is only open to registered voters, so I think his offer runs afoul of this provision,” Mr Berman told the BBC.

The US Department of Justice declined to comment. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has been approached for comment.

The strategy may be covered by a loophole, because no-one is being directly paid to register or vote, a former chairman of the FEC suggested.

Brad Smith told the New York Times the giveaway was “something of a grey area” but “not that close to the line.”

“He’s not paying them to register to vote. He’s paying them to sign a petition – and he wants only people who are registered to vote to sign the petition. So I think he comes out OK here,” he said.

But an election law professor at Northwestern University told the BBC that the context is important.

“I understand some analysis that it’s not illegal, but I think here combined with the context it’s clearly designed to induce people to register to vote in a way that is legally problematic,” Michael Kang said.

Adav Noti of the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center said Mr Musk’s scheme “violates federal law and is subject to civil or criminal enforcement by the Department of Justice”.

“It is illegal to give out money on the condition that recipients register as voters,” Mr Noti told the BBC.

Constitutional law professor Jeremy Paul, with Northeastern University School of Law, said in an email to the BBC that Mr Musk is taking advantage of a legal loophole.

He said that, while there is an argument that the offer could be illegal, it is “targeted and designed to get around what’s supposed to be the law” and he believes the case would be difficult to make in court.

• Harris or Trump: Who is ahead in US election polls?
• Musk offers prize of $1m a day to swing states voters
• Who is Elon Musk and what is his net worth?

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, described the move as “deeply concerning” and called for law enforcement agencies to investigate.

In response, Mr Musk said it was “concerning that he would say such a thing”.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who has campaigned in recent weeks for Kamala Harris, said the offer was both “innovative and desperate”.

“You only do that because you think you have to, but using a sweepstake is not a bad idea. Whether or not it will work is another whole thing. It could just as easily backfire,” he told CNBC.

Mr Musk has pushed back against the criticism, arguing that Democrats and their donors have funded similar initiatives in the past.

On X, he shared a post which said the boss of Meta, Mark Zuckerburg “did the same thing in 2020”.

Mr Zuckerburg donated $400m in the 2020 election – but this was given to two non-partisan organisations to help with the logistics around postal ballots. It was not given directly to voters.

The Democratic Party has invested in initiatives in the past elections to mobilise supporters, such as a $25m voter registration campaign in the 2022 US midterm elections.

However, this money also was not given directly to voters. The funding went toward initiatives that encouraged voters to register, such as employing people to knock on doors and television and digital advertising.

“It’s legal to pay people to go out to register voters, but you can’t pay people directly to register,” said Prof Kang.

The world’s richest man had an uneven relationship with Trump when Trump was president, but Mr Musk increasingly has voiced his displeasure with Democrats in recent years.

Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, he announced that he had left the party and encouraged his followers to vote Republican.

This year, he has involved himself in American politics like never before, making donations and supportive social media posts on behalf of several Republicans.

In comments last week, he described much of the US-Mexico border as tantamount to the film World War Z.

Mr Musk launched America PAC in July with the aim of supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign for president. He has so far donated at least $75m to the group.

America PAC’s website says it wants “secure borders”, “safe cities”, “free speech”, “sensible spending”, a “fair justice system” and “self-protection”.

Trump said on Sunday that he had not followed Mr Musk’s giveaway, but described him as a friend.

In recent weeks, Mr Musk has appeared on the campaign trail for the first time, first by Trump’s side and more recently in town hall appearances by himself.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win a US election
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Harris or Trump? What Chinese people want
• ON THE GROUND: Democrats take fight deep into Trump country
• FACT-CHECK: What the numbers really say about crime
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Imagine you’re Vladimir Putin.

The West has dubbed you a pariah for invading Ukraine. Sanctions are aiming to cut off your country’s economy from global markets.

And there’s an arrest warrant out for you from the International Criminal Court.

How can you show the pressure is not working? Try hosting a summit.

This week in the city of Kazan President Putin will greet more than 20 heads of state at the Brics summit of emerging economies. Among the leaders invited are China’s Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

The Kremlin has called it one of the “largest-scale foreign policy events ever” in Russia.

“The clear message is that attempts to isolate Russia have failed,” thinks Chris Weafer, founding partner of consultancy firm Macro-Advisory.

“It’s a big part of the messaging from the Kremlin that Russia is withstanding sanctions. We know there are severe cracks beneath the surface. But at a geopolitical level Russia has all these friends and they’re all going to be Russia’s partners.”

So, who are Russia’s friends?

Brics stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The grouping, often referred to as a counterweight to the Western-led world, has expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Saudi Arabia, too, has been invited to join.

The Brics nations account for 45% of the global population. Added together, members’ economies are worth more than $28.5tn (£22tn). That’s around 28% of the global economy.

Russian officials have indicated that another 30 countries want to join Brics or seek closer ties with the club. Some of these nations will take part in the summit. In Kazan this week expect a lot of talk about Brics representing the “global majority”.

But apart from providing Vladimir Putin his moment on the geopolitical stage, what is the event likely to achieve?

Keen to ease the pressure from Western sanctions, the Kremlin leader will hope to convince Brics members to adopt an alternative to the dollar for global payments.

“A lot of the problems Russia’s economy is facing are linked to cross-border trade and payments. And a lot of that is linked to the US dollar,” says Mr Weafer.

“The US Treasury has enormous power and influence over global trade simply because the US dollar is the main currency for settling that. Russia’s main interest is in breaking the dominance of the US dollar. It wants Brics countries to create an alternative trade mechanism and cross-border settlement system that does not involve the dollar, the euro or any of the G7 currencies, so that sanctions won’t matter so much.”

But critics point to differences within Brics. “Likeminded” is not a word you would use to describe the current membership.

“In some ways it’s a good job for the West that China and India can never agree about anything. Because if those two were really serious, Brics would have enormous influence,” notes Jim O’Neill, former Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs.

“China and India are doing their best to avoid wanting to attack each other a lot of the time. Trying to get them to really co-operate on economic things is a never-ending challenge.”

It was Mr O’Neill who, at the turn of the century, dreamt up the acronym “Bric” for four emerging economies he believed should be “brought into the centre of global policy making”.

But the four letters would take on a life of their own, after the corresponding nations formed their own Bric group – later Brics, when South Africa joined. They would attempt to challenge the dominance of the G7: the world’s seven largest “advanced” economies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US).

It’s not just India and China who have their differences. There is tension between two of the newest Brics members, Egypt and Ethiopia. And, despite talk of detente, Iran and Saudi Arabia have long been regional rivals.

“The idea that they’re all going to fundamentally agree on something of great substance is bonkers really,” believes Mr O’Neill.

And while Russia, fuelled by anti-Western sentiment, talks about creating a “new world order”, other Brics members, like India, are keen to retain good political and economic relations with the West.

In Kazan, Vladimir Putin’s task will be to skim over the differences and paint a picture of unity, while showing the Russian public – and the international community – that his country is far from isolated.

Tributes have been made to a surfer who died after reportedly being impaled by a swordfish in Indonesia.

Giulia Manfrini, 36, from Turin in northern Italy, had been surfing in the waters of the Mentawai Islands Regency, West Sumatra Province, before the incident on Friday, according to reports.

Two witnesses are said to have tried to provide first aid to Ms Manfrini – who was later taken to a medical centre – after a swordfish struck her in the chest.

James Colston, who set up a travel agency with Ms Manfrini, said on Instagram: “Even with the brave efforts of her partner, local resort staff and doctors, Giulia couldn’t be saved.”

“The information we received from the Head of Southwest Siberut District was that an accident occurred with an Italian citizen while surfing,” Lahmudin Siregar, acting head of the Mentawai Islands Regency Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD), reportedly told news agency Antara.

He added: “Unexpectedly, a swordfish jumped towards Manfrini and stuck her right in the chest”.

Mr Colston said his former colleague had suffered “a freak accident”, adding that “we believe she died doing what she loved, in a place that she loved”.

“Giulia was the lifeblood of this company and her infectious enthusiasm for surf, snow and life will be remembered by all that came in contact with her,” he said.

Fabio Giulivi, the mayor of Ms Manfrini’s hometown Venaria Reale, said: “The news of her death has left us shocked and makes us feel powerless in front of the tragedy that took her life so prematurely.”

He added that surfing and opening a travel agency had been her “double dream”.

Previous research has suggested attacks by swordfish are rare but they can be dangerous when provoked.

A huge meteorite first discovered in 2014 caused a tsunami bigger than any in known human history and boiled the oceans, scientists have discovered.

The space rock, which was 200 times the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, smashed into Earth when our planet was in its infancy three billion years ago.

Carrying sledge hammers, scientists hiked to the impact site in South Africa to chisel off chunks of rock to understand the crash.

The team also found evidence that massive asteroid impacts did not bring only destruction to Earth – they helped early life thrive.

“We know that after Earth first formed there was still a lot of debris flying around space that would be smashing into Earth,” says Prof Nadja Drabon from Harvard university, lead author of the new research.

“But now we have found that life was really resilient in the wake of some of these giant impacts, and that it actually bloomed and and thrived,” she says.

The meteorite S2 was much larger than the space rock we are most familiar with. The one that led to the dinosaurs’ extinction 66 million years ago was about 10km wide, or almost the height of Mount Everest.

But S2 was 40-60km wide and its mass was 50-200 times greater.

It struck when Earth was still in its early years and looked very different. It was a water world with just a few continents sticking out of the sea. Life was very simple – microorganisms composed of single cells.

The impact site in Eastern Barberton Greenbelt is one of the oldest places on Earth with remnants of a meteorite crash.

Prof Drabon travelled there three times with her colleagues, driving as far as possible into the remote mountains before hiking the rest of the way with backpacks.

Rangers accompanied them with machine guns to protect them against wild animals like elephants or rhinos, or even poachers in the national park.

They were looking for spherule particles, or tiny fragments of rock, left behind by impact. Using sledge hammers, they collected hundreds of kilograms of rock and took them back to labs for analysis.

Prof Drabon stowed the most precious pieces in her luggage.

“I usually get stopped by security, but I give them a big spiel about how exciting the science is and then they get really bored and let me through,” she says.

The team have now re-constructed just what the S2 meteorite did when it violently careened into Earth. It gouged out a 500km crater and pulverised rocks that ejected at incredibly fast speeds to form a cloud that circled around the globe.

“Imagine a rain cloud, but instead of water droplets coming down, it’s like molten rock droplets raining out of the sky,” says Prof Drabon.

A huge tsunami would have swept across the globe, ripped up the sea floor, and flooded coastlines.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami would have paled in comparison, suggests Prof Drabon.

All that energy would have generated massive amounts of heat that boiled the oceans causing up to tens of metres of water to evaporate. It would also have increased air temperatures by up to 100C.

The skies would have turned black, choked with dust and particles. Without sunlight penetrating the darkness, simple life on land or in shallow water that relied on photosynthesis would have been wiped out.

These impacts are similar to what geologists have found about other big meteorite impacts and what was suspected for S2.

But what Prof Drabon and her team found next was surprising. The rock evidence showed that the violent disturbances churned up nutrients like phosphorus and iron that fed simple organisms.

“Life was not only resilient, but actually bounced back really quickly and thrived,” she says.

“It’s like when you brush your teeth in the morning. It kills 99.9% of bacteria, but by the evening they’re all back, right?” she says.

The new findings suggest that the big impacts were like a giant fertiliser, sending essential ingredients for life like phosphorus around the globe.

The tsunami sweeping the planet would also have brought iron-rich water from the depths to the surface, giving early microbes extra energy.

The findings add to a growing view among scientists that early life was actually helped by the violent succession of rocks striking Earth in its early years, Prof Drabon says.

“It seems that life after the impact actually encountered really favourable conditions that allowed it to bloom,” she explains.

The findings are published in the scientific journal PNAS.

Two hitmen have pleaded guilty in a Canadian court over the shooting of a man acquitted of the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight.

Tanner Fox and Jose Lopez pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of Sikh businessman Ripudaman Singh Malik in 2022.

They entered their pleas in British Columbia Supreme Court on the eve of their trial for first-degree murder.

In a shocking development, a ferocious fist fight then broke out between Fox and Lopez in the courtroom in New Westminster.

According to the Vancouver Sun, they “punched and clawed at each other” for a couple of minutes before sheriffs broke up the brawl, forcing them to the ground, applying handcuffs and leading them away.

Other sheriffs cleared the public gallery.

The case is due to return to court on 31 October for a sentencing hearing. The second-degree murder pleas mean they will automatically receive life sentences with the only question being how long they have to serve before they can apply for parole, Canadian public broadcaster CBC reports.

Malik was shot several times in his car outside his family business in Surrey, British Columbia, on the morning of 14 July 2022. Police found a burnt-out vehicle nearby.

The businessman had been acquitted in 2005 of a devastating double bomb attack:

• On 23 June 1985, Air India flight 182 from Canada to India blew up off the Irish coast, killing all 329 people on board, most of them Canadian citizens visiting relatives in India

• About the same time, a second bomb exploded prematurely in Japan, killing two baggage handlers

The bombings – widely believed to have been carried out by Canadian-based Sikhs in retaliation for India’s deadly 1984 storming of the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion – remain Canada’s deadliest terror attack.

Following a two-year trial, Malik and his co-accused, Ajaib Singh Bagri, were both acquitted of mass murder and conspiracy charges related to the two bombings.

According to the agreed statement of facts on Monday, Fox and Lopez were contracted to kill Malik but the evidence did not establish who had hired them.

Police recovered two handguns used in the attack in residences linked to the two men as well as the sum of C$16,485 (US $11,943; £9,148) in cash in Lopez’s New Westminster apartment, the Vancouver Sun reports.

Malik’s family issued a statement urging them to co-operate with police to bring to justice whoever had directed the killing.

“Until the parties responsible for hiring them and directing this assassination are brought to justice, the work remains incomplete,” the family said.

When contacted by the BBC, Fox’s lawyer declined to comment on the case.

Lawyers for Lopez said he had a “long road ahead of him”, adding: “We are hopeful for his prospects of rehabilitation given his youth and his remorse, as shown by his decision to accept responsibility today.”

US investigators are trying to find out how a pair of highly classified intelligence documents were leaked online.

The documents, which appeared on the messaging app Telegram on Friday, contain an alleged US assessment of Israeli plans to attack Iran.

The assessment is based on interpretation of satellite imagery and other intelligence.

On Monday White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said President Joe Biden was “deeply concerned” about the leak.

Officials have not determined whether the documents were released due to a hack or a leak, Mr Kirby said.

For three weeks now, Israel has been vowing to hit Iran hard in retaliation for Iran’s massed ballistic missile attack on Israel on 1 October.

Iran says that was in response to Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on 27 September.

Military analysts say the phrasing used in the headings looks credible and is consistent with similar classified documents revealed in the past.

Headed “Top Secret”, they include the acronym “FGI”, standing for “Foreign Government Intelligence”.

The documents appear to have been circulated to intelligence agencies in the Five Eyes alliance, the five Western nations that regularly share intelligence, namely the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The acronym “TK” in the documents refers to “Talent Keyhole”, a codeword covering satellite-based Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Imagery Intelligence (IMINT).

Taken together, the two documents are a classified US assessment of Israel’s preparations to hit targets in Iran, based on intelligence analysed on 15-16 October by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

What features prominently is the mention of two Air Launched Ballistic Missile (ABLM) systems: Golden Horizon and Rocks.

Rocks is a long-range missile system made by the Israeli company Rafael and designed to hit a variety of targets both above and below ground. Golden Horizon is thought to refer to the Blue Sparrow missile system with a range of around 2,000km (1,240 miles).

The significance of this is that it would indicate that the Israeli Air Force is planning to carry out a similar but greatly expanded version of its ABLM attack on an Iranian radar site near Isfahan in April.

By launching these weapons from long range and far from Iran’s borders it would avoid the need for Israeli warplanes to overfly certain countries in the region like Jordan.

The documents also report no sign of any preparations by Israel to activate its nuclear deterrent.

At the request of Israel, the US government never publicly acknowledges that its close ally Israel even possesses nuclear weapons, so this has caused some embarrassment in Washington.

Glaringly absent from these documents is any mention of what targets Israel intends to hit in Iran, or when.

The US has made no secret of its opposition to the targeting of either Iran’s nuclear research facilities or its oil installations.

That leaves military bases, most likely those belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its affiliated Basij militia as these two institutions are seen as the backbone of the Islamic Republic, projecting its military reach abroad and suppressing popular protest at home.

As regards timing, many had expected Israel to have carried out its promised retaliation by now. But back in April, Iran waited 12 days before hitting back at Israel with a barrage of 300 drones and missiles after an Israeli air strike hit its diplomatic buildings in Damascus, killing several senior IRGC commanders.

Part of the current delay in Israel’s response is likely due to US concerns at escalation with less than a month to go before the US presidential elections.

Possibly yes, by someone who wanted to derail Israel’s plans.

Iran has a large and sophisticated cyber-warfare capability so the possibility of a hostile hack is also being investigated.

These documents, if genuine as thought highly likely, show that despite the close defence relationship between the US and Israel, Washington still spies on its ally in case it is not being given the full picture.

They show that plans by the Israeli Air Force to carry out some kind of long-range retaliation against Iran are well advanced and that mitigation is being put in place against an expected Iranian response.

In short: if and when Israel does carry out these plans then the Middle East will once again experience a period of extreme tension.

President Joe Biden is “deeply concerned” about a leak of classified documents that contain the US’s assessment of Israeli plans to attack Iran, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.

Officials have not determined whether the documents were released due to a hack or a leak, Mr Kirby said.

House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed the publication of the documents over the weekend. They are said to contain the movements of Israeli military assets in preparation for a response to Iran’s 1 October missile attack.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said the country was prepared to counter any Israeli attack.

The documents, marked top secret, were shareable within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the US, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, CBS, the BBC’s US partner, reported.

There is no “indication” that additional documents will “[find] their way into the public domain”, Mr Kirby said Monday.

He added that President Biden “will be actively monitoring” the investigation to uncover how the documents were released, and he intends to hear measures that will be taken “to prevent it happening again”.

• What leaked US assessment of Israeli plans to strike Iran shows

For weeks Israel has been deciding how and when to respond to Iran’s latest missile attack. Israel’s defence minister has warned it will be “deadly, precise and surprising”.

The two documents reportedly appear to be attributed to the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency (NSA), and were published on an Iranian-aligned Telegram account on Friday.

Johnson, the highest-ranking member of Congress, told CNN on Sunday that “the leak is very concerning”.

“There’s some serious allegations being made, there’s an investigation under way, and I’ll get a briefing on that in a couple of hours,” the Louisiana Republican lawmaker said.

The Pentagon confirmed in a statement that it was aware of reports about the documents, but did not comment further.

The US agencies involved, as well as the Israeli government, have not publicly commented.

CNN and Axios first reported the alleged leak, which appears to confirm once again that the US spies on its close ally Israel.

One document makes a reference to Israel’s nuclear capabilities – which neither the US nor Israel ever officially acknowledge – apparently ruling out the use of such an option in any planned strike.

One former American intelligence official told the BBC the unauthorised release was probably an attempt to expose the scale of the planned retaliation, possibly to disrupt it.

The US is investigating whether the information was intentionally leaked by a US agent, or whether it was stolen, possibly through hacking, officials told the Associated Press (AP).

The two documents appear to be based on satellite information obtained from 15-16 October.

The first is titled: “Israel: Air Force Continues Preparations for Strike on Iran and Conducts a Second Large-Force Employment Exercise,” according to Reuters news agency. It describes ballistic and air-to-surface missile handling.

The second is titled: “Israel: Defense Forces Continue Key Munitions Preparations and Covert UAV Activity Almost Certainly for a Strike on Iran”. It discusses Israeli drone movements.

On Friday, US President Joe Biden said he had a “good understanding” of what Israel was planning.

“Do you have a good understanding of what Israel is going to do right now in response to Iran… and when they will actually respond?” a reporter asked him.

“Yes, and yes,” Biden replied.

“Can you tell us?” asked the reporter.

“No, and no.”

Israel has carried out air strikes targeting branches of a financial association linked with Hezbollah in the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital Beirut, as well as the south and east of the country.

There were chaotic scenes in parts of Beirut late on Sunday, as people tried to get to areas that they thought would be safer and multiple explosions were heard.

The Israeli military said it targeted money held by Al-Qard Al-Hassan Association (AQAH). It offers financial services to civilians in areas where Hezbollah has strong support, but Israel and the US accuse it of being a cover for the Iran-backed group to fund its activities.

There was no immediate comment from AQAH or Hezbollah.

The attacks appeared to mark an expansion of Israel’s war against Hezbollah, going beyond military infrastructure used by the group.

They took place hours before US President Joe Biden’s special envoy to the Middle East arrived in Beirut to explore the possibility of a negotiated end to the war.

Israel began an intense air campaign and ground invasion against Hezbollah after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza, saying it wanted to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of Israeli border areas displaced by rocket attacks.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Palestinians on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel.

More than 2,400 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 1,800 in the past five weeks, according to the country’s health ministry. Israeli authorities say 59 people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.

The Israeli air strikes targeting branches of AQAH happened about 20 minutes after the Israeli military issued evacuation orders, at around 21:30 local time (18:30 GMT) on Sunday.

According to the Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA), there were 11 attacks on Dahieh, in southern Beirut.

Videos posted on social media showed one AQAH branch on fire in the Laylaki area, only 500m (1,800ft) away from the runway of Lebanon’s only functioning commercial airport, and another just to the north in Burj al-Barajneh. A third video showed a multi-storey building where there was an AQAH branch collapsing in the Chiyah area.

The NNA also said that strikes hit branches in Nabatieh, Tyre and Shehabieh in southern Lebanon, as well as those in the eastern Bekaa Valley towns of Baalbek, Hermel and Rayak – areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

“Our store and our livelihood are gone,” business owner Ahmed told Reuters news agency outside a severely damaged AQAH branch in Zahrani. “This neighbourhood is all civilian, with nothing here.”

It was not clear whether the strikes targeting AQAH caused any casualties. But the NNA reported on Monday that six women and children were killed in an air strike on a home in Baalbek, and that two bodies were recovered from a destroyed building in the southern town of Srifa.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it had struck “dozens of facilities and sites” across Lebanon that were used by Hezbollah to “finance its terrorist activities”.

It alleged that Hezbollah stored billions of dollars at branches of AQAH, and that it used the money to purchase weapons and pay members of its military wing.

“The purpose of these strikes is to target the ability of Hezbollah to function both during the war but also afterwards, to rebuild and to rearm the organisation on the day after, and [to target] the grip Hezbollah has on large parts of the Lebanese society,” an Israeli intelligence official told reporters.

Hezbollah – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the UK, US and others – is more than just a Shia Islamist armed group. It is also a political party with representation in parliament, and a social movement, engrained in Lebanese society, with significant support.

AQAH is a key part of Hezbollah’s social services network. Before the Israeli strikes, it had more than 30 branches, often located on the ground floor of residential buildings.

Many people came to depend on AQAH after Lebanon sank into a deep economic crisis five years ago, causing the local currency to lose 90% of its value and commercial banks to restrict foreign currency withdrawals. The association allowed people to take out small, interest-free loans in dollars backed by gold or a guarantor, and to open savings accounts.

Hezbollah’s late leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a speech in 2021 that AQAH had provided $3.7bn (£2.8bn) in loans to 1.8 million people in Lebanon since it was founded in the early 1980s, and that around 300,000 people had loans with it at that time.

Nasrallah also claimed that AQAH had been strengthened by the US sanctions imposed since 2007, when American officials said the association was being used by Hezbollah as a cover to manage its financial activities and to gain access to the international financial system.

A Hezbollah press officer told the BBC on Monday afternoon that neither the group nor AQAH had issued any statements regarding the air strikes.

Earlier, a statement attributed to AQAH was circulated on social media which said people’s deposits with the association were “safe”.

The Israeli military also announced on Monday that its troops were continuing to carry out operations in southern Lebanon to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure and weaponry.

Hezbollah fighters meanwhile continued to fire rockets into northern Israel, with the military reporting that 60 projectiles had crossed the border by Monday afternoon.

About 200 projectiles were detected on Sunday, when the military said its warplanes had conducted “an intelligence-based strike on a command centre of Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters and an underground weapons workshop in Beirut”.

Also on Sunday, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) accused Israeli forces of deliberately demolishing an observation tower and perimeter fence of a UN peacekeeping position in the southern town of Marwahin. It followed similar incidents in recent weeks.

In a separate development, the Lebanese army said three of its soldiers were killed after a military vehicle was hit by an Israeli air strike in Nabatieh, southern Lebanon.

Lebanon’s army has historically stayed out of cross-border clashes between Israel and Hezbollah – but a number of its troops have been killed in Israeli attacks since fighting escalated last month.

The Israeli military has not yet commented on the two incidents.

The air strike that killed the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah shook the earth for hundreds of metres in every direction.

A few blocks away, in the Beirut suburb known as the Dahieh, Mehdi Moussawi thought his own building was falling down.

From his balcony, the 45-year-old taxi driver and his wife Zahraa – who asked that their names be changed for this story – watched as a thick blanket of smoke and dust enveloped everything around them. In the distance, they could hear debris raining down, and overhead the familiar buzz of an Israeli drone.

The drones had become so common over Dahieh in the previous few days that they barely noticed them anymore. A majority Shia suburb in the south of Beirut, Dahieh was once again under Israel’s watchful eye; its more than half a million residents again under threat of death from above.

“The missiles come down from the sky,” Mehdi said, gesturing the arc of a projectile falling to earth, “and suddenly everything you have is gone.”

He was sitting on a dirty, sun-baked patch of pavement on the edge of Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut – now home for the couple and their teenage boys. Around them were hundreds of others in similar circumstances, many from Dahieh. The suburb has borne the brunt of the recent Israeli bombing of Beirut, prompting a mass exodus of virtually its entire population.

Dahieh is largely under the control of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and paramilitary group that is a powerful force across Lebanon.

Hezbollah refused requests from the BBC for permission to enter the suburb for this story, to see the bomb damage, but a BBC analysis of video footage, Israeli evacuation warnings and recent satellite imagery shows at least 65 air strikes which have severely damaged or completely destroyed buildings. Some of those strikes have comprised dozens of individual bombs, and many have levelled not only the apparent target building but destroyed or severely damaged several adjacent buildings too.

This was the fate of Mehdi and Zahraa’s apartment – to be next door to an Israeli strike. Zahraa wept when she saw footage of their blackened and mangled building. “Look at us,” she pleaded. “Our home is gone. We have no hygiene, we cannot wash. We have nothing.”

Dahieh is often described as a Hezbollah stronghold. The term does not reflect the totality of the suburb – a densely packed residential area where other political parties operate and where not everyone supports Hezbollah – but the group is certainly the strongest force there. Above ground, it is woven through the suburb’s social and political fabric, and provides services like welfare and education. Below, it has bunkers and tunnels from which it can operate.

The IDF has targeted Dahieh in order to assassinate Hezbollah leaders, and says the group uses its bunkers to store weapons among the civilian population. It says it is targeting Hezbollah in order to safely return 60,000 of its own citizens to the north of Israel, which has come under rocket fire from Lebanon over the past year.

Unlike other parts of Beirut, Dahieh doesn’t have its own name, as such – the word simply means ‘suburb’. It is one of the most densely populated residential areas in all of Lebanon – a place of narrow streets and alleyways, where buildings seem to jostle for available space. It was heavily bombed in the previous war, back in 2006, and still bears scars from it.

“Dahieh was originally a very beautiful place but all the wars have taken their toll,” said Rasha al-Ameer, a novelist and publisher who was born and raised in the suburb and still lives there. Her brother, a prominent critic of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Lebanon in 2021.

“It is still a very vivid place and a diverse place. We have a cultural institution there and a lot of political activity,” she said. “It would be a terrible thing if Dahieh was destroyed. Though the bombing has destroyed much already.”

As well as homes, the Israeli air strikes have destroyed or damaged shops, businesses, restaurants and clinics. “Destruction on destruction,” said Mohaned Khalaf, a 45-year-old Sunni Muslim bakery worker, of his street in Burj El Brajneh, the most heavily targeted part of the suburb.

Khalaf, already a refugee once, from Syria, has gone back into Dahieh periodically to check on the apartment he shares with his two brothers and their mother, to see if his furniture remains. “The buildings around ours have been destroyed,” he said. “There is no life left there, not a person to be seen.”

The destruction has tested some Dahieh residents’ patience with Hezbollah – particularly Sunnis and other non-Shias. “This war is hurting everyone,” said Khalaf’s mother, Sameera, who wept on the street. “I am 63 years old,” she said. “I just want a place where I can wash.”

Sameera does not want to return to Dahieh, even after the war. “Yes, we could go back and rebuild, but Hezbollah and Israel will fight this war over and over again,” she said. “And Dahieh will suffer again.”

Shia Muslims, Hezbollah’s more natural support base, took a more supportive view – even those whose lives had been completely upended by the conflict. Members of Hezbollah had handed out food and $100 bills to displaced Shia families on the streets in central Beirut, several families said, and helped assist with shelter places.

“We used to support Hezbollah and we still support Hezbollah,” said Gharib Ali, a 61-year-old janitor who fled the suburb. Around him, his family nodded in agreement. The effect of the war on their lives “changes nothing for the Shia community,” he said. “If anything, it only increases our support. Every Shia feels the same.”

In this way, Mehdi and Zahraa may be something of an outlier – a Lebanese Shia couple, residents of Dahieh for decades, who were critical of Hezbollah for its role in the conflict.

“Dahieh is not Hezbollah, we are not Hezbollah, our building was not Hezbollah,” Zahraa said, angrily. “We went to sleep one night and woke up in someone else’s war.”

The family’s apartment is now uninhabitable, though the building may be salvageable. The Israeli army has sometimes issued social media warnings ahead of its air strikes, but there was no warning for the strike that hit Mehdi and Zahraa’s building. Their eldest son had gone home that day to shower, taking advantage of a seemingly quiet moment, and was knocked over and cut by flying glass when the bomb hit.

International humanitarian law generally requires an effective advance warning ahead of a strike that might affect civilians. But the BBC has found evidence of repeated Israeli strikes against Dahieh and other parts of Beirut where no warning was issued. And where there were warnings, some have been sent as little as 30 minutes beforehand, sometimes in the middle of the night.

“That timeframe is not an effective advance warning for someone who lives in Dahieh,” said Ramzi Keiss, a Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. “These are people are sleeping, they’re in their beds. They are not looking at social media.”

Hezbollah was also possibly violating international humanitarian law, Keiss said, by placing its military commanders in and around the civilian population. “But that doesn’t give you a free pass to bomb as heavily as you can,” he added, referring to Israel.

“When you’re using 2000lbs in densely populated areas, you’re going to put civilians at the risk of great harm.”

Lebanese officials estimate that more than 2,400 people have been killed in the country over the past year and more than 1.2 million been displaced. Israel says 59 people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights over the same period.

Back in the 2006 war, after Israel had pounded Dahieh and heavily bombed Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure, a senior IDF officer, Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot, sketched out what would become known as the “Dahieh doctrine”. It called for applying “disproportionate force” against civilian areas, with the goal of pressuring the people of Lebanon to turn on Hezbollah.

The recent escalation by Israel had gone “beyond Dahieh doctrine”, said Prof Amal Saad, an expert on Hezbollah and lecturer in politics at Cardiff University. “This is more like Gaza doctrine, which is similar, but has the goal of specifically targeting and displacing a community.”

In Dahieh, Israel’s actions were currently “somewhere between its Dahieh and Gaza doctrines”, she said.

The destruction would not bring about, as the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly expressed hope for, a reduction in support for Hezbollah in places like Dahieh, Prof Saad said.

“Whenever Israel invades like this, it only increases support for Hezbollah among Shias,” she said. “After 2006, support skyrocketed. I don’t know much higher it can go now than 90%, but this will solidify it.”

Two weeks after the bombing of Dahieh began, the air strikes ceased unexpectedly, following pressure from the US government, which said it had made it clear to Israel it was unhappy with the “scope and nature” of the targeting of Beirut.

One day passed without any strikes, then another, then another. After three days, residents began returning on Monday and Tuesday to check on their apartments and retrieve possessions. Among them was Mehdi, who took his eldest son’s scooter and headed back into the devastated area around their building to grab clothes for the boys.

Then, early on Wednesday morning, Israel began bombing Dahieh again.

“We knew it was only a matter of time,” said Mehdi. He was sitting with Zahraa and the boys, a few hours after the strikes resumed, on the street by their makeshift tent, which was really just two rugs thrown over an improvised frame.

Towering over them was an upscale, new, and completely empty apartment building. It bore a similar name to their apartment building, Zahraa said. “But for the cost of one of these apartments you could buy an entire neighbourhood in Dahieh,” she said.

They would go back and rebuild, she said. She raised her arms in a mock bicep curl, to demonstrate the strength of the people from the Dahieh. “We have no choice,” Mehdi said. “Some people have choices, we don’t.”

They would return the moment the ceasefire was announced, he said. He knew that there would be no electicity, no water, and no windows in the buildings. But it was still better than being on the street. Overhead, an Israeli drone was buzzing. Mehdi looked up at the empty apartments across the street, and down at the tent they were sleeping under. “God willing, the ceasefire will come before the rain,” he said.

Two Hamas officials told the BBC discussions to choose a successor for the group’s leader Yahya Sinwar, whose killing was confirmed on Thursday, will begin very soon.

The officials said that Khalil al-Hayya, Sinwar’s deputy and the group’s most senior official outside Gaza, is considered a strong candidate.

Al-Hayya, who is based in Qatar, currently leads the Hamas delegation in ceasefire talks between the group and Israel, and possesses a deep knowledge, connection and understanding of the situation in Gaza.

On Monday, a Hamas official told the BBC that the movement is likely to keep the identity of its new leader secret for security reasons.

The movement did the same thing in 2003 following the assassination of then Hamas chief, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, by Israel and that of his successor, Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi.

Hamas intends to elect a new leader in March of next year but until then it will be run by a five-member committee.

The committee will be made up of Khalil al-Hayya, Khaled Meshaal, Zaher Jabarin, Muhammad Darwish, head of the Shura Council, and a fifth individual whose identity remains undisclosed.

The official indicated that Khalil al-Hayya has assumed responsibility for most political and foreign affairs in addition to his direct oversight of Gaza-related matters and is effectively the acting head of the movement.

The official added that Hamas had been surprised by the way Yahya Sinwar had been killed last week as their understanding had been that he was in a much more secure location at the time of his assassination.

Sinwar’s death came just two months after the killing of former leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

A senior Hamas official had described Sinwar as the architect of the 7 October attacks, emphasising that his appointment was intended as a bold message of defiance against Israel.

Since July, ceasefire negotiations have stalled, and many believe that Sinwar’s leadership was a significant obstacle to any ceasefire deal.

Despite the killing of Sinwar, a senior Hamas official reiterated to the BBC that the movement’s conditions for accepting a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages have not changed.

Hamas continues to demand a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, an end to hostilities, the transfer of humanitarian aid, and the reconstruction of the war-torn territory – conditions that Israel has categorically rejected, insisting that Hamas must surrender.

When questioned about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for Hamas to give up its weapons and surrender, officials from the movement responded: “It is impossible for us to surrender.

“We are fighting for the freedom of our people, and we will not accept surrender. We will fight until the last bullet and the last soldier, just as Sinwar did.”

The assassination of Sinwar was one of the most significant losses for the organisation in decades. However, despite the challenges of replacing him, Hamas has a history of enduring leadership losses since the 1990s.

While Israel has succeeded in killing most of Hamas’s leaders and founders, the movement has proven resilient in its capacity to find new ones.

Amid this crisis, questions linger regarding the fate of Israeli hostages held in Gaza and who will be responsible for their safety and protection. On Monday the Hamas official told the BBC that the group still had the ability to hold the hostages.

In this context, Mohammed Sinwar, Yahya Sinwar’s brother, has emerged as a pivotal figure. He is believed to be leading the remaining armed groups of Hamas and may play a crucial role in shaping the future of the movement in Gaza.

Lidia Thorpe is no stranger to controversy and it’s not the first time she’s voiced her views on the British monarchy.

The Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung woman has been a senator for Victoria since 2020, the first Aboriginal senator from that state.

Prior to that, she had a history of Indigenous activism – she also worked as the chairperson of Naidoc (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) for the state of Victoria, an organisation that works to recognise and teach Australians about First Nations cultures and their histories.

In 2022, while being sworn in to parliament after a re-election, she called the late Queen a coloniser.

“I sovereign, Lidia Thorpe, do solemnly and sincerely swear that I will be faithful and I bear true allegiance to the colonising her majesty Queen Elizabeth II,” she said, as she was being sworn in.

After criticism from other senators, she then repeated the oath as printed.

So Monday’s incident wouldn’t have come as much surprise to anyone who follows Australian politics. Lidia Thorpe has made her views clear – that British settlement saw huge numbers of Indigenous people massacred and the scars of colonisation are still very apparent for many First Nations people in Australia.

Whether or not you agree with Lidia Thorpe’s approach – and some prominent Indigenous leaders have made it clear that they don’t – the fact is that there are deep disparities between First Nations people and non-Indigenous Australians when it comes to indicators such as education, health, and life expectancy.

Last year Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said a young Indigenous man was more likely to go to jail than university, which is borne out by statistics, as ABC showed.

And between 2020 and 2022, the life expectancy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was estimated to be eight years shorter than non-Indigenous Australians.

“I wanted to send a clear message to the King of England that he’s not the King of this country, he’s not my king, he’s not sovereign,” Thorpe told the BBC after being removed from the Great Hall after heckling. “To be sovereign you have to be of this land. He’s not of this land.”

She went on.

“How can he stand up there and say he’s the King of our country – he’s stolen so much wealth from our people and from our land and he needs to give that back. And he needs to entertain a conversation for a peace treaty in this country,” she said.

“We can lead that, we can do that – we can be a better country but we cannot bow to the coloniser whose ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder, for mass genocide.”

One of Lidia Thorpe’s biggest grievances is the fact that Australia is the only Commonwealth nation that has never signed a treaty with its Indigenous people. She’s been pushing for that as a priority.

For her, last year’s referendum on a Voice to Parliament – which would have recognised First Nations people in the constitution and allowed them to form a body to advise the parliament – was a distraction from that goal.

Australians resoundingly voted against the proposal and she was one of a minority of First Nations people who also voted no.

She told the BBC at the time that the Voice was about “assimilating us into the colonial constitution to make us nice, neat little Indigenous Australians that will continue to be oppressed by the coloniser”.

But she was in the minority among First Nations people to do so. Regions with a high proportion of Indigenous Australians overwhelmingly voted yes but Aboriginal people make up close to 4% of Australia’s population. Nationally, just over 60% of voters across Australia voted against.

Not all Indigenous leaders appear as troubled by royal visits as Lidia Thorpe.

Allira Davis, co-chair of the Uluru Youth Dialogue, said she respected the late Queen, even describing her as “beautiful”.

What about the current visit by King Charles?

“I don’t think it’s that important. We’re our own country,” Allira Davis told the BBC, speaking before Lidia Thorpe heckled him in Canberra.

“Understanding the history of what has happened in this country is really, really key. We’re not just a white country anymore. We’re a very brown country. We’re a very multicultural country.

“So I’m all for becoming a republic, but we need to deal with recognising our First Nations people.”

So although Lidia Thorpe reflects a view shared by many about the damage that colonisation did – and still does – not everyone agrees with her approach.

Local media have reported that former co-workers have found her difficult to work with.

But Lidia Thorpe – who is now an independent after leaving the Greens over the party’s support for the Yes vote in the referendum – is unlikely to change tack. She thinks the King needs to play a bigger role in making good the ills of the past.

Piece of advice for you – never buy a huge amount of champagne unless you’re absolutely certain it’s worth celebrating.

In November 2016, Russian ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky was so excited by Donald Trump’s victory, and so sure that it would transform US-Russian relations, he splashed out on 132 bottles of bubbly down at the Duma, Russia’s parliament, and partied away (in his party offices) in front of the TV cameras.

He wasn’t the only one celebrating.

The day after Trump’s surprise White House win, Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of state channel RT, tweeted her intention to drive around Moscow with an American flag in her car window.

And I’ll never forget the moment a Russian official told me she had smoked a cigar and drunk a bottle of champagne (yes, MORE champagne) to toast Trump winning.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump winning?

In Moscow, expectations were high that Trump would scrap sanctions against Russia; perhaps, even, recognise the Crimean Peninsula, annexed from Ukraine, as part of Russia.

“The value of Trump was that he never preached on human rights in Russia,” explains Konstantin Remchukov, the owner and editor-in-chief of newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

It didn’t take long for all that fizz to go flat.

“Trump introduced the heaviest sanctions against Russia at that time,” recalls Remchukov.

“By the end of his term, a lot of people were disappointed in his presidency.”

Which is why, eight years on – publicly at least – Russian officials are more cautious about the prospect of a second Trump term.

President Vladimir Putin has even come out and backed the Democratic Party candidate, although that “endorsement” was widely interpreted as a Kremlin joke (or Kremlin trolling).

Putin claimed he liked Kamala Harris’s “infectious” laugh.

But you don’t need to be a seasoned political pundit to understand that out on the campaign trail it’s what Trump has been saying, not Harris, that’s guaranteed to put a smile on Putin’s face.

For instance, Trump’s criticism of the scale of US military assistance for Ukraine, his apparent reluctance to blame Putin for Russia’s full-scale invasion and, during the presidential debate, his refusal to say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war.

By contrast, Kamala Harris has argued that support for Ukraine is in America’s “strategic interest” and she has referred to Putin as “a murderous dictator”.

Not that Russian state TV has been particularly complimentary about her either. A few weeks ago one of Russia’s most acerbic news anchors was completely dismissive of Harris’s political abilities. He suggested she would be better off hosting a TV cookery show.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• POLICIES: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• ON THE GROUND: Democrats take fight deep into Trump country
• FACT-CHECK: What the numbers really say about crime

There’s another possible outcome that may well suit the Kremlin – a super tight election, followed by a contested result. An America consumed by post-election chaos, confusion and confrontation would have less time to focus on foreign affairs, including the war in Ukraine.

US-Russian relations soured under Barack Obama, grew worse under Donald Trump and, in the words of the recently departed Russian ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov, they are “falling apart” under Joe Biden.

Washington lays the blame fully on Moscow.

It was just eight months after Putin and Biden met for a summit in Geneva that the Kremlin leader ordered the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Not only did the Biden administration send a tsunami of sanctions Russia’s way, but US military aid has been crucial in helping Kyiv survive more than two-and-a-half years of Russia’s war. Amongst the advanced weaponry America has supplied Ukraine are Abrams tanks and HIMARS rocket systems.

It’s hard to believe now that there was a time, not so long ago, when Russia and the US pledged to work as partners to strengthen global security.

In the late 1980s Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev formed a geo-political double-act to slash their countries’ respective nuclear arsenals.

If there was one thing Reagan seemed to enjoy as much as nuclear disarmament it was reciting Russian proverbs to Gorbachev in broken Russian (“Never buy 132 bottles of champagne unless you’re certain it’s worth celebrating” would have been a good one).

In 1991 the First Ladies of the USSR and America, Raisa Gorbacheva and Barbara Bush, unveiled an unusual monument in Moscow – a mother duck with eight ducklings.

It was a replica of a sculpture in Boston Public Gardens and was presented to Moscow as a symbol of friendship between Soviet and American children.

It’s still popular with Muscovites today. Russians flock to Novodevichy Park to pose for photos with the bronze birds, although few visitors know the back story of superpower “duck diplomacy”.

Like US-Russian relations themselves, the ducks have taken a few knocks. On one occasion some of them were stolen and had to be replaced.

It’s to the Moscow mallard and her ducklings I head to find out what Russians think of America and of the US election.

“I want America to disappear,” says angry angler Igor who’s fishing in a nearby pond. “It has started so many wars in the world. The US was our enemy in Soviet times and it still is. It doesn’t matter who’s president.”

America as Russia’s eternal enemy – that’s a worldview often reflected here in the state media. Is Igor so angry because he gets his news from Russian TV? Or perhaps it’s because he hasn’t caught many fish.

Most of the people I chat to here do not see America as an evil adversary.

“I’m all for peace and friendship,” says Svetlana. “But my friend in America is scared to call me now. Maybe there’s no free speech there. Or, perhaps, it’s here in Russia that there’s no freedom of speech. I don’t know.”

• Book claims Trump secretly sent Covid tests to Putin
• WATCH: Trump sidesteps question on Putin phone calls

“Our countries and our two peoples should be friends,” says Nikita, “without wars and without competing to see who has more missiles. I prefer Trump. When he was president there weren’t any big wars.”

Despite the differences between Russia and America there is one thing the two countries have in common – they have always had male presidents.

Can Russians ever see that changing?

“I think it would be great if a woman became president,” says Marina.

“I would be happy to vote for a woman president here [in Russia]. I’m not saying it would be better or worse. But it would be different.”

• Harris or Trump? What Chinese people want
• What the world thought of Harris-Trump debate

A dramatic and unprecedented surge in hoax bomb threats targeting Indian airlines is wreaking havoc on flight schedules, diverting planes and causing widespread disruption.

A video posted on social media last week showed passengers draped in woollens, walking down the icy ladder of an Air India plane into the frigid air of Iqaluit, a remote city in Canada.

The 211 passengers on the Boeing 777, originally en route from Mumbai to Chicago, had been diverted early on 15 October due to a bomb threat.

“We have been stuck at the airport since 5am with 200 passengers… We have no idea what’s happening or what we are supposed to do next… We are completely stranded,” Harit Sachdeva, a passenger, posted on social media. He praised the “kind airport staff” and alleged Air India was not doing enough to inform the passengers.

Mr Sachdeva’s post captured the frustration and anxiety of passengers diverted to an unknown, remote destination. Hours later, a Canadian Air Force plane ended their ordeal by ferrying the stranded passengers to Chicago. Air India confirmed that the flight had been diverted to Iqaluit due to a “security threat posted online”.

The threat was false, mirroring scores of similar hoaxes targeting India’s airlines so far this year. Last week alone, there were at least 90 threats, resulting in diversions, cancellations and delays. In June, 41 airports received hoax bomb threats via email in a single day, prompting heightened security.

For context, between 2014 and 2017, authorities recorded 120 bomb hoax alerts at airports, with nearly half directed at Delhi and Mumbai, the country’s largest airports. This underscores the recurring nature of such threats in recent years, but this year’s surge has been sensational. (It’s hard to know how India compares to other countries as data is not readily available.)

“I am deeply concerned over the recent disruptive acts targeting Indian airlines, affecting domestic and international operations. Such mischievous and unlawful actions are a matter of grave concern. I condemn attempts to compromise safety, security and operational integrity of our aviation sector,” federal aviation minister, Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu, said.

So what is going on?

Hoax bomb threats targeting airlines are often linked to malicious intent, attention-seeking, mental health issues, disruption of business operations or a prank, experts say. In 2018, a rash of jokes about bombs by airplane passengers in Indonesia led to flight disruptions. Even fliers have proved to be culprits: last year, a frustrated passenger tried to delay a SpiceJet flight by calling in a bomb hoax alert after missing his check-in at an airport in India’s Bihar.

These hoaxes end up wreaking havoc in one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets. More than 150 million passengers flew domestically in India last year, according to the civil aviation ministry. More than 3,000 flights arrive and depart every day in the country from more than 150 operational airports, including 33 international airports.

Last week’s hoaxes peaked even as India’s airlines carried 484,263 passengers on 14 October, a record on a single day for the country. India has just under 700 commercial passenger planes in service, and an order backlog of more than 1,700 planes, according to Rob Morris of Cirium, a consultancy. “All this would certainly render India the fastest growing commercial aircraft market today,” says Mr Morris.

Consider the consequences of a bomb threat alert on an airline.

If the plane is in the air, it must divert to the nearest airport – like the Air India flight that diverted last week to Canada or a Frankfurt-bound Vistara flight from Mumbai that diverted to Turkey in September. Some involve fighter jets to be scrambled to escort planes reporting threats like what happened with a Heathrow-bound Air India flight over Norfolk and a Singapore-bound Air India Express last week.

Once on the ground, passengers disembark, and all baggage and cargo and catering undergo thorough searches. This process can take several hours, and often the same crew cannot continue flying due to duty hour limitations. As a result, a replacement crew must be arranged, further prolonging the delay.

“All of this has significant cost and network implications. Every diverted or delayed flight incurs substantial expenses, as grounded aircraft become money-losing assets. Delays lead to cancellations, and schedules are thrown off balance.” says Sidharath Kapur, an independent aviation expert.

The dramatic rise in bomb threats on social media from anonymous accounts has complicated efforts to identify perpetrators. The motives remain unclear, as does whether the threats come from a single individual, a group, or are simply copycat acts.

Last week, Indian authorities arrested a 17-year-old school dropout for creating a social media account to issue such threats. His motivations remain unclear, but he is believed to have targeted four flights – three international – resulting in two delays, one diversion and one cancellation. Investigators suspect that some posts may have originated from London and Germany after tracing IP addresses.

Clearly, tracking down hoaxers presents a significant challenge. While Indian law mandates life imprisonment for threats to airport safety or service disruption, this punishment is too severe for hoax calls and would likely not withstand legal scrutiny. Reports suggest the government is considering placing offenders on a no-fly list and introducing new laws that could impose a five-year prison term.

Ultimately, such hoax threats can cause serious anxiety for passengers. “My aunt called to ask if she should take her booked flight given these threats. ‘Should I take a train?’ she asked. I told her, ‘Please continue to fly’,” says an aviation consultant, who preferred to remain unnamed. The threats continue to disrupt lives and sow fear.

Alcohol smuggler Guled Diriye is exhausted.

He has just returned from his trip transporting contraband from the Ethiopian border.

The 29-year-old slumps in his chair inside a colonial-style villa battered by years of fighting in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu – a city once known as the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.

His sandals are covered in a potent orange dust – the residue from the desert.

Mr Diriye’s dark eyes droop. The bags underneath speak of sleepless nights, the hours of tension traversing the dangerous roads and negotiating checkpoints with armed men.

There is also the haunting memory of a fellow smuggler who was shot dead.

“In this country, everyone is struggling and looking for a way out. And I found my way by making regular trips by road from the Ethiopian border to Mogadishu,” he says, explaining that smuggling was a means to support his family in a tough economic climate.

The use and distribution of alcohol is illegal. Somalia’s laws must comply with Sharia (Islamic law), which forbids alcohol, but it has not stopped a growing demand, particularly among young people in many parts of the country.

Mr Diriye’s neighbour Abshir, knowing he had fallen on hard times as a minibus-taxi driver, introduced him to the precarious world of alcohol smuggling.

Rickshaws began to take over the city, pushing minibus drivers out of business.

Both were childhood friends who had sheltered together in the same camp in 2009 during the height of the insurgency in Mogadishu – he was someone he could trust.

“I began picking up boxes of alcohol at designated drop points in Mogadishu on [his] behalf and manoeuvring through the city and offloading them at designated locations. I didn’t realise it at first but this was my introduction into smuggling.”

His involvement snowballed and Mr Diriye soon found himself navigating from the porous frontier with Ethiopia through Somalia’s rural hinterlands.

He understands that he is breaking the law, but says the poverty that he finds himself in overrides that.

The smuggling journey begins in Somali border towns such as Abudwak, Balanbale, Feerfeer and Galdogob.

“Alcohol mostly originates in [Ethiopia’s capital] Addis Ababa and makes it to the city of Jigjiga, in the Ogaden region,” Mr Diriye says.

The Ogaden or, as it is officially known in Ethiopia, the Somali region, shares a 1,600km (990-mile) border with Somalia. People on both sides share ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious ties.

Once the alcohol is loaded, it is moved across the plains of the Somali region, and then smuggled across the border into Somalia.

The border town of Galdogob is a major hub for trade and travel and has been hit hard by the flow of alcohol being smuggled from Ethiopia.

Tribal elders have raised concerns over alcohol-related violence.

“Alcohol causes so many evils [such as shootings],” says Sheikh Abdalla Mohamed Ali, the chairman of the local tribal council in the town.

“[It] has been seized and destroyed on multiple occasions but it’s like living next to a factory. It keeps putting out more and more, no matter what we do.”

“Our town will always be in the midst of danger.”

But for the smugglers the goal is to get the alcohol to the capital.

“I drive a truck that transports vegetables, potatoes and other food products. When the truck is loaded up it’s filled with whatever I’m transporting, but I make the most money from the alcohol on board,” Mr Diriye says.

Sometimes smugglers cross into Ethiopia to pick it up and at other times they receive it at the border. But whichever approach is taken, concealment is a crucial part of the profession as the risks from being caught are immense.

“The loader’s job is the most important. Even more important than driving. He’s tasked with concealing the alcohol in our truck, with whatever we have on board. Without him, I wouldn’t be able to move around so easily — at least not without getting caught.

“The average box of alcohol I move has 12 bottles. I usually transport anywhere from 50 to 70 boxes per trip. Usually half the load on my truck is filled with alcohol.”

Large swathes of south-central Somalia are run by armed groups, where the government has little to no control: militias, bandits and the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabab roam with impunity.

“You can never travel on your own. It’s too risky. Death is always on our minds,” Mr Diriye says. But that concern does not get in the way of business and there is a brutal pragmatism to thinking about the make-up of the team.

“If I get wounded in an attack on the road, there has to be a back-up who can continue the journey. Everyone knows how to drive and knows the roads well.”

Smugglers drive on dirt tracks and roads that have not been renovated in decades. Landmines and unexploded ordnances left behind from previous conflicts are also an issue.

“I travel through at least eight to 10 towns to reach Mogadishu. But we don’t count the towns, we count the checkpoints and who mans them,” Mr Diriye says.

They encounter various clan militias with different allegiances, either lingering in the distance or at roadblocks.

“In case we get jammed up by a clan militia, if one of us is from the same clan as that militia or even a similar sub-clan, it increases our chances of survival. This is why all three of us are from different clans.”

He painfully recalls: “I’ve encountered numerous attacks.

“One of the guys that works with me is relatively new. He replaced my last helper who was killed two years ago.”

Mr Diriye had been driving in suffocating heat for six hours, so decided to nap, passing the wheel to his helper.

“While I was sleeping in the back, I heard a large burst of gunfire that suddenly woke me up. We where surrounded by militiamen. My loader was screaming as he ducked in the passenger seat.” The substitute driver was killed.

Once the commotion ceased, the loader and Mr Diriye picked up their dead colleague from the front seat and put him in the back of the truck.

“I’ve never seen so much blood in my life. I had to wipe [it] away from the steering wheel and keep on driving. In all my years, nothing prepared me for what I saw that day.”

As the pair drove off and got a good distance away from the militiamen, they pulled over to the side of the road and laid his body there.

“We didn’t even have a sheet to cover his body, so I took off my long-sleeved buttoned-up shirt and made do with it.

“It was a difficult decision but I knew I couldn’t keep driving around smuggling alcohol with a dead body in the truck. We had a few government checkpoints up ahead and I couldn’t jeopardise my load or my freedom.”

Two years later he says the guilt of leaving the body by the road still haunts him.

He left behind a family, and Mr Diriye is unsure they even know the truth surrounding the circumstances of his disappearance and death.

The danger that Mr Diriye faces is a recurring reality that many smugglers endure while illicitly ferrying alcohol from Ethiopia to Mogadishu, in order to quench the growing demand.

Dahir Barre, 41 has a slim build with noticeable scars on his face that appear to tell a story on their own. He has a dark sense of humour and seems hardened by the near-decade of smuggling that enables him to bypass the possible consequences of what he does.

“We face a lot of problems and dangers but still continue to drive despite the risk due to the poor living conditions in Somalia,” he says.

Mr Barre has been smuggling alcohol from Ethiopia since 2015 and says lack of opportunity made worse by years of poverty pushed him into the dangerous trade.

“I used to do security for a hotel in the city centre. I was armed with an AK-47 and was tasked with patting people down at the entrance.”

Long nights in a dangerous job with meagre pay did not feel worth it.

“One hundred dollars a month to stand in the way of potential car bombs that might plough through the front entrance sounds crazy now that I think of it.”

One of the day-shift guards then put him in touch with friends from the border region and “I’ve been travelling these roads ever since”.

“Back in 2015 I was only getting $150 per trip, compared to $350 per trip now and those days it was far riskier because al-Shabab had control over more territory, so you risked more encounters with them.

“Even the bandits and militias were more dangerous back then.

“If you had red or brown stained teeth, the militias would assume you chewed khat and smoked cigarettes, meaning you had money so they would abduct you and hold you for ransom.

“As drivers we’ve been through a lot and the danger still exists,” Mr Barre says.

If they are caught by al-Shabab fighters then it can be most dangerous since the armed group has a zero-tolerance policy on contraband, especially alcohol. The Islamist insurgents set the vehicle on fire and then detain the smugglers before fining them.

Other armed men can be more easily bribed with money or liquor.

It takes an average of seven to nine days to reach Mogadishu from the Ethiopian border. The smugglers then make their way to a pre-arranged drop-off point.

“When we arrive, a group of men will show up and unload the regular food products into a separate truck, then leave. Afterwards, once that’s done, another individual will arrive, sometimes accompanied by more than one vehicle and they’ll take the boxes of alcohol,” Mr Diriye says.

“But it doesn’t end there. Once it leaves my possession, it’ll pass through more hands, eventually ending up with local dealers in the city, who can be reached with a simple phone call.”

Mr Diriye often thinks about his entry into smuggling, and where his future may lie.

“My neighbour Abshir who initially got me into smuggling alcohol, stopped doing it himself three years ago.”

Abshir offered his nephew, an unemployed graduate at the time, a job in smuggling. But he was killed on his third trip in an ambush by bandits.

“Afterwards Abshir quit smuggling. He became religious and turned to God. I rarely see him any more.”

Despite the dangers, Mr Diriye says it will not deter him.

“Death is something that is predestined. I can’t let fear come in the way of making a living. Sure, sometimes I want to throw the keys on the table and start afresh but it’s not that easy. Temptation is everywhere and so is poverty.”

• PODCAST: The impact of secret drinking in Somali border towns
• Inside Somalia’s beauty pageant
• Ground-breaking Somali TV drama shatters taboos
• Somalia’s hidden world of sex work
• Why Somalia’s once-banned boxing thrives in the former warzone
• A quick guide to Somalia

Yulia Navalnaya intends to be president of Russia, she tells me. She looks me straight in the eye. No hesitation or wavering.

This, like so many of the decisions she made with her husband, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, is unambiguous.

Navalnaya knows she faces arrest if she returns home while President Putin is still in power. His administration has accused her of participating in extremism.

This is no empty threat. In Russia, it can lead to death.

Her husband, President Putin’s most vocal critic, was sentenced to 19 years for extremism, charges that were seen as politically motivated. He died in February in a brutal penal colony in the Arctic Circle. US President Joe Biden said there was “no doubt” Putin was to blame. Russia denies killing Navalny.

Yulia Navalnaya, sitting down for our interview in a London legal library, looks and sounds every inch the successor to Navalny, the lawyer turned politician who dreamt of a different Russia.

As she launches Patriot, the memoir her husband was writing before his death, Yulia Navalnaya restated her plans to continue his fight for democracy.

When the time is right, “I will participate in the elections… as a candidate,” she told the BBC.

“My political opponent is Vladimir Putin. And I will do everything to make his regime fall as soon as possible”.

For now, that has to be from outside Russia.

She tells me that while Putin is in charge she cannot go back. But Yulia looks forward to the day she believes will inevitably come, when the Putin era ends and Russia once again opens up.

Just like her husband, she believes there will be the chance to hold free and fair elections. When that happens, she says she will be there.

Her family has already suffered terribly in the struggle against the Russian regime, but she remains composed throughout our interview, steely whenever Putin’s name comes up.

Her personal grief is channelled into political messaging, in public anyway. But she tells me, since Alexei’s death, she has been thinking even more about the impact the couple’s shared political beliefs and decisions have had on their children, Dasha, 23, and Zakhar, 16.

“I understand that they didn’t choose it”.

But she says she never asked Navalny to change course.

He was barred from standing for president by Russia’s Central Election Commission.

His investigations through his Anti-Corruption Foundation were viewed by millions online, including a video posted after his last arrest, claiming that Putin had built a one-billion dollar palace on the Black Sea.

The president denied it.

Yulia says: “When you live inside this life, you understand that he will never give up and that is for what you love him”.

Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020.

He was flown to Germany for treatment and the German chancellor demanded answers from Putin’s regime.

Navalny worked with open-source investigators Bellingcat and traced the poisoning to Russia’s security service, the FSB.

He began writing his memoir as he recovered.

He and Yulia returned to Russia in January 2021 where he was arrested after landing.

Many ask why they returned.

“There couldn’t be any discussion. You just need to support him. I knew that he wants to come back to Russia. I knew that he wants to be with his supporters, he wanted to be an example to all these people with his courage and his bravery to show people that there is no need to be afraid of this dictator.

“I never let my brain think that he might be killed… we lived this life for decades and it’s about you share these difficulties, you share these views. You support him”.

After his jailing, Navalny continued his book in notebook entries, posts on social media and prison diaries, published for the first time. Some of his writing was confiscated by the prison authorities, he said.

Patriot is revealing – and devastating. We all know Navalny’s final chapter, which makes the descriptions of his treatment – and his courage in the face of it – even more poignant.

Navalny spent 295 days in solitary confinement, punished, according to the book, for violations including the top button of his fatigues being unbuttoned. He was deprived of phone calls and visits.

Yulia Navalnaya told me: “Usually, the normal practice is banishment just for two weeks and it’s the most severe punishment. My husband spent there almost one year.”

In a prison diary from August 2022, Navalny writes from solitary confinement:

Navalnaya says she was prevented from visiting or speaking to her husband for two years before he died. She says Alexei was tortured, starved and kept in “awful conditions”.

After his death, the US, EU and UK announced new sanctions against Russia. These included freezing the assets of six prison bosses who ran the Arctic Circle penal colony and other sanctions on judges involved in criminal proceedings against Navalny.

Yulia calls the reaction to his death by the international community “a joke” and urges them to be “a little less afraid” of Putin. She wants to see the president locked up.

“I don’t want him to be in prison, somewhere abroad, in a nice prison with a computer, nice food… I want him to be in a Russian prison. And it’s not just that – I want him to be in the same conditions like Alexei was. But it’s very important for me”.

The Russians claim Navalny died of natural causes. Yulia believes President Putin ordered the killing.

“Vladimir Putin is answering for the death and for the murder of my husband”.

She says the Anti-Corruption Foundation she now leads in her husband’s place already has “evidence” which she will reveal when they have “the whole picture”.

The book is as much a political work as a memoir, a rallying cry to anyone who believes in a free Russia. It is also being published in Russian, as an ebook and audiobook. But the publishers won’t send hard copies to Russia or Belarus, because they say they can’t guarantee the book would get through customs.

How many Russians will dare to buy it, even in electronic form, is unclear – and how much impact it could have remains questionable.

The message etched on every page is that Navalny never gave up. His arch wit shines through.

He says, in the punishment cell, he is getting “for free” the experience of staying silent, eating scant food and getting away from the outside world that “rich people suffering from a midlife crisis” pay for.

Only once does he share feeling “crushed”, during the hunger strike he undertook in 2021 in order to demand medical care from civilian doctors. “For the first time, I’m feeling emotionally and morally down,” he writes in one entry.

But Yulia says she never worried that he would actually be broken by the regime.

“I’m absolutely confident that is the point why finally they decided to kill him. Because they just realised that he will never give up”.

Even the day before he died, when he appeared in court, Navalny was filmed joking with the judge.

Yulia says laughter was his “superpower”.

“He really, truly laughed at this regime and at Vladimir Putin. That’s why Vladimir Putin hated him so much”.

The writing is laced with a great deal of irony.

The book will sell better if he dies, Navalny writes:

In the end, Patriot is also a love story about two people fully committed to a cause they believed in.

A cause for which Yulia has now become the figurehead.

After a visit from her, Navalny writes:

“The last words I heard him say were, ‘Did you know that you are the best mum in the world?’”

Gelvana Rodrigues’s son, Thiago, was seven years old when toxic mud flooded into their home and killed him.

He was one of 19 people that died after the Mariana dam collapse in Minas Gerais, Brazil on 5 November 2015.

It is remembered as the worst ever environmental disaster in Brazil.

The dam was owned by Samarco, a joint venture between the mining giants Vale and BHP.

It was used to store waste from iron ore mining. When it burst, it unleashed tens of millions of cubic metres of toxic waste and mud.

The sludge swept through communities, destroying hundreds of people’s homes and poisoning the river.

Gelvana was at work when the disaster happened, while her son was staying at home with his grandmother.

After she heard the news, she ran back to find “everything destroyed”.

“I spent three days not eating or sleeping, I just wanted to find my son,” she said.

After seven days, she heard that rescuers had found Thiago’s body.

“That day my life ended, because I lived for him.”

Gelvana is one of the 620,000 people who are taking BHP to court in the UK over the disaster.

A civil trial beginning in London on 21 October will determine whether the Anglo-Australian company was responsible.

The claimants’ lawyers argued successfully that the trial should be held in London because BHP headquarters “were in the UK at the time of the dam collapse”.

If BHP loses this case, a second stage will take place to determine who is entitled to further damages payments, and how much.

A separate trial against Samarco’s second parent company, Brazilian mining company Vale, is taking place in the Netherlands, with about 70,000 plaintiffs.

Both companies have agreed that if either is found liable for damages, they will split the costs.

Marcos Muniz, known as Marquinhos, moved to one of the towns that was hit – Bento Rodrigues – in 1969, when he was six years old, to the same house where his father was born. Later, as an adult, he built his own house on some more land his father had bought there.

Marquinhos worked for Samarco for almost 30 years before he retired. He had livestock, pigs, and orange trees that he looked forward to tending to in retirement.

“I never imagined this could happen,” he said. “If I had known that in the future this would happen, that the place and the community where I was raised would be destroyed, I would definitely have stopped working there.”

Bento Rodrigues now resembles a ghost town. The houses lie in ruins and are still covered in thick mud. Marquinhos’s house was washed into the nearby lake, and only the very tip of it is now visible.

BHP and Vale have set up an organisation called the Renova Foundation tasked with compensating victims.

It has offered them either cash compensation, or a house in a new city that the foundation has built to replace this town called Novo Bento.

The Renova Foundation says it has disbursed more than $7.7bn (£5.9bn) in repair and compensation actions to date, to more than 445,000 people, with about 50% of that being paid directly to affected people.

But the companies say this does not mean they accept liability for the disaster.

The community were given a say in where the city was built, and the design of their new homes.

Marquinhos has been offered a house there but fears, in this modern city, his way of life and community will be lost.

The new city is still being constructed. It is up on the hills, as opposed to down by a lake, and it has a more modern, urban feel to it.

Darliza das Graças moved there a year ago. She owned a small bar in the “old” Bento Rodrigues and runs a restaurant now.

“Life here is wonderful, it’s good. But at the beginning it was very difficult, there were few residents,” she said.

“Now they are coming, it’s much better.”

More than 100 people have been resettled there so far, but – nine years on – there are still some who have not yet moved in because their house is not ready, or because they have chosen not to.

While Darliza is happy here, she says she preferred her old life because “the community there was more united”. Not everyone from her old community has chosen to live here.

BHP and Vale deny claims of liability in their entirety and argue the UK legal action is “unnecessary as it duplicates matters already covered by the existing and ongoing work of the Renova Foundation and other legal proceedings in Brazil”.

All companies involved say they remain “committed” to repairing the damage caused. BHP and Vale have made a fresh offer to the Brazilian government, expected to be signed on Friday, to pay out more than 170bn reais ($45bn) in compensation.

Samarco added the Renova Foundation has compensated 18 of the 19 families of victims who died and continue to contact families and lawyers in cases that have not been resolved.

Fernanda Lavarello, head of corporate affairs at BHP Brasil, said: “What happened in 2015 was a tragedy. We are sorry about what happened. Since then, BHP never abandoned the country and is doing everything it can to repair the environment and life of those families.”

“Some processes are taking longer than expected, because it is quite complex, but for the families that chose quickly to have their houses built here, their houses are ready, and they have already moved in.”

The UK legal case against BHP began in 2018 when residents and some local companies and authorities decided to seek what their lawyers describe as “fair and full compensation” for the damage suffered.

The claimants’ lawyers – Pogust Goodhead – argue BHP is liable because Samarco was a “legal entity for their production of Iron Ore and BHP were operationally in control of the company and their decisions. This means that BHP knew or ought to have known when key decisions were made which resulted in the collapse of the dam.”

If they win, they expect that the compensation could reach $44bn (£34bn) in what has been described as one of the largest collective environmental lawsuits in the world.

For some, like Marquinhos, this is about trying to receive more compensation than previously offered, so that he can afford to rebuild his life in a place of his choosing.

For some, no amount of money can compensate for what they lost.

“Nothing can bring a life back,” Gelvana says about her son Thiago. “There is no money in the world that can buy a life. I just want justice so that no mother will be sitting here in the same place as me.”

A new international airport will soon open in Greenland’s capital Nuuk, allowing larger aircraft to land for the first time – paving the way for direct flights from the US and Europe.

It’s the first of three airport projects that officials hope will boost the local economy, by making the Arctic territory more accessible than ever before.

Covered by an ice cap and sparsely populated, Greenland is a vast autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.

Its capital Nuuk, on the southwestern coast, is a small town of 18,000 residents. Modern apartment blocks and colourful wooden cottages look out over a wide sea fjord.

Sitting on a hillside above the city, small 35-seat propeller planes take off and land from a tarmac airstrip. Currently anyone wishing to fly overseas first has to take one of these aircraft 200 miles (319km) north to a remote former military airport at Kangerlussuaq, and then change to a larger plane.

Built by the Americans during World World II, Kangerlussuaq is currently one of only two runways on Greenland long enough for big jets. The other is Narsarsuaq in the far south of the country, and that was also a former US military base.

But from the end of November, large planes will be able to land at Nuuk for the first time, thanks to a new longer runway, and a sleek new terminal building.

“I think it will be a big impact,” says Jens Lauridsen, the chief executive of operator Greenland Airports. “I’m sure we will see a lot of tourism, and we’ll see a lot of change.”

As I visit, diggers are shifting piles of rubble along the edge of the extended runway, and the finishing touches are being applied to the new terminal.

From 28 November, direct flights to Nuuk will operate from Copenhagen, carrying more than 300 passengers. And next summer, United Airlines will begin flying from New York, as Nuuk becomes Greenland’s main travel hub.

“We have been shut from the whole world, and now we’re going to open to the world,” says one young Nuuk resident. “It’s so exciting that we’re going to have the opportunity to travel from here to another country.”

In 2026, a second international airport will open in Greenland’s most popular tourist destination, the town of Ilulissat, 350 miles north of Nuuk. Ilulissat is renowned for the huge icebergs that float just off its coastline. A new regional airport, in Qaqartoq, the biggest town in the south of Greenland, will then follow.

Another young Greenlander from Nuuk, Isak Finn, says he won’t miss having to change planes at Kangerlussuaq. “It takes a long time. You have to wait, and then if there’s bad weather or not enough planes, you get stuck there. It’s so annoying.”

Jacob Nitter Sorensen, chief executive of national carrier Air Greenland, says that the new international airport in Nuuk is “going to be a big game changer for us”. “It’s going to shorten the travel time, and it’s going to decrease the cost of producing the flight.

Ticket prices are already lower, he says, and as demand grows, the airline hopes to add new European and North American routes, and potentially invest in new aircraft. But stiff competition is expected as bigger international airlines enter the market.

“A flight from Europe to Nuuk is a little more than four hours,” says Jens Lauridsen. “From the US East Coast is also four hours. So we’re placed right in the middle. There is a very, very big interest from all major carriers in Europe.”

To make way for Nuuk International Airport’s longer runway, six million cubic meters of rock were blasted and leveled. The airport is also now equipped with advanced technology that allows planes to land in the town’s notoriously bad weather.

Cold conditions and the short summer season have been a challenge for construction work. The cost of obtaining explosives also ballooned after war broke out in Ukraine.

The three airports are together costing more than $800m (£615m). This has been partly financed by the Danish, who stepped in with a sweetened loan package after interest from Chinese investors.

“There were concerns about whether this type of investments should be in Chinese hands,” explains Javier Arnaut, who’s the head of Arctic social science at Greenland University. “Denmark offered more affordable and attractive rates for these loans.”

Initially there was public scepticism over costs and the environmental impact, says Mr Arnaut, but now there’s mostly support. Not everyone welcomes the noisy aeroplanes, however.

“With big infrastructure it always divides people,” Nuuk resident Karen Motzfeldt tells the BBC. “There is always a group who is against, and always a group with who loves it. So it’s the same in Nuuk.”

“This is an airport for a modern Greenland,” she adds. “l look forward to having a shorter route for Copenhagen, Iceland, or maybe London Heathrow, who knows?”

Greenland’s economy is largely dependent on the public sector and fishing, and most goods have to be imported, but there are efforts to diversify. Politicians hope this new infrastructure will be a shot in the arm for sectors like mining and tourism.

“In all these cases, infrastructure is key. It makes everything easier,” says Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s Minister of Business, Trade and Mineral Resources, adding that, the ease of travel will also help the government grow bilateral relations.

With larger cargo planes soon to be able to land in Nuuk, more goods can come in, and exports can more easily go out.

Inside a harbourside factory in the capital, a huge catch of prawns is being steamed, shelled and frozen. For its owner, Greenlandic company Polar Seafoods, which sells shrimps, crab and halibut, shorter and direct flights mean new business possibilities.

“We’re looking into doing more fresh seafood,” says chairperson, Michael Binzer.

Currently their products are exported in frozen form by container ship, destined for markets like China, Scandinavia and the UK. But the company has been trialling airfreight ahead of the new airport opening.

However, it’s tourism that will be the big winner. Foreign visitors came to Greenland in record numbers last year, rising 36.5% from 2022, to more than 140,000. That’s still modest, but with more flight options it is projected to grow.

“We are already in a tourist boom, and feeling how tourism can affect smaller places in a good way, but also negatively,” says Ms Nathanielsen, who’s overseeing a new tourism law that will be introduced this autumn.

“We really want to try to welcome the tourists in the bigger cities, but we also want to spread them out more.”

In Nuuk, many tourism businesses are eagerly preparing. “Everyone is very excited about how it’s going to be,” says Maren-Louise Paulsen Kristensen, co-owner and manager of Inuk Hostel.

The business has invested in new glass igloo huts to attract tourists year-round.

Elsewhere, new hotel plans are slowly emerging, but a shortage of accommodation could still put the brakes on efforts to expand tourism. Ms Kristensen says Nuuk needs more rooms, local guides and workers.

Yet she is also concerned that Greenland may “develop tourism too fast… that happened in Iceland, so I think we have a lot of things we can learn from them.”

Business Minister Naaja Nathanielsen says the new airports will have a “profound” impact on the local society. “I sense that it’s going to really change the map of Greenland.

“This will bring a lot of good, but also some changes we’ll probably need to adjust to.”

News presenter Andrea Byrne has said she feared her husband would be “better off” without her during the couple’s seven-year experience of infertility.

Byrne, 45, who is married to former Wales rugby international Lee Byrne, 44, has presented Welsh and network news for ITV since 2008.

“You feel so guilty,” recalled Byrne, who was told by doctors that she would likely never be able to carry her own pregnancy.

“I remember those feelings all the time of thinking [Lee] would be better off without me.”

The couple gave birth to their daughter Jemima, who “defied science” by being conceived naturally, in 2019.

“I feel very conscious when I’m telling my story, that maybe it’s easier to tell because we did get the ending that we had,” said Byrne.

“But I still feel it’s important to talk about, because I know how lonely we were during that journey.”

After getting married on New Year’s Day in 2012, Byrne said she and her husband began trying to get pregnant straight away.

“We were both at the start of our 30s,” she said. “I didn’t have any reason to think there would be issues.”

After a while, they went to a fertility clinic for tests.

An ultrasound revealed an issue with the thickness of Byrne’s womb lining, which she described in her new book Desperate Rants and Magic Pants as an “unfixable rare genetic defect”.

“It’s the kind of news that you don’t expect to hear,” Byrne told the BBC.

Years of intrusive tests and procedures followed, including multiple rounds of IVF.

“To be honest, the number of cycles, I couldn’t even tell you,” she said.

“We also tried lots of different things on top of the IVF, things that we were advised might work from different specialists.

“We also had some positive pregnancy tests and thought we were pregnant, but unfortunately we had losses as well.

“So it was a real rollercoaster of emotion.”

Byrne said the years of trying to conceive also took a toll on her relationship with her husband.

“I like to think that we’re really strong because of it, but boy, at the time it’s really difficult,” she said.

“There are times when we wondered how we would stay together,” added Byrne, “because it’s so difficult emotionally”.

“I remember I used to say to Lee, and he used to get quite cross with me, because I used to say ‘oh just go and find somebody else, somebody else could do this more easily, just go and find another woman’.

“And he would say to me ‘goodness, we are in this together’.”

Doctors eventually told the couple their only hope was surrogacy and, in 2018, they began exploring the possibility of finding a surrogate in the USA.

In her book, Byrne describes finding out just minutes before she was due to present the evening news that none of the embryos they hoped to use for a surrogate were viable.

She wrote: “I look at my tear-streaked reflection in the mirror, patch up the damaged foundation, breathe deeply, walk out of the dressing room, put on a smile and walk through a busy newsroom, and on to the set.”

Byrne said that moment felt like the end of the road.

“We had a conversation after that news and decided we’d move on and build another life together,” she said.

“I get really emotional about it, because I felt so guilty about not being able to do what every other woman could do.”

But just a few months later, against all the odds, Byrne fell pregnant naturally.

“Amazingly, we fell pregnant again, and this time it was Jemima. It was unbelievable really,” said Byrne.

“We were without hope and they said the chances are you will never be able to carry your own pregnancy.

“So she [Jemima] really did defy everybody, all the medical advice we’d been given, she came along and said ‘nope, I’m going to make it through’.”

Byrne, who also hosts the Making Babies fertility podcast, said writing her book was “emotional” and “in a way cathartic”.

“I know it’s a bit of a cliched word but it does provide a little bit of closure too, I guess,” she said.

The book includes chapters reflecting the fertility experiences of a number of other celebrities who have appeared on Byrne’s podcast, including presenter Gabby Logan and comedian Geoff Norcott.

“I look at Jemima every single day and I’m just so grateful,” said Byrne.

“I’m glad that I am able, hopefully, to use my platform to hopefully have a positive effect and maybe help other people feel less isolated.”

Asked if she had any advice for others experiencing infertility, Byrne said she wished she had been kinder to herself.

“I think it’s very easy when you get some bad news about a cycle, or you’re having a bad time dealing with it, that you catastrophise and think 10 steps ahead,” she said.

“And before you know it you’ve written off any chance of anything, which is very easy to do because it feels so hopeless.

“Nobody know what’s going to happen 10 steps down the road, so just try and deal with what’s happening in that moment. I wish I’d done that more.

“And also been a bit kinder to ourselves, and yourself in the process. Take that time to find little bits of joy where you can and take time out if you need to from it.

“Because it can be all consuming, friendships-wise, family-wise, it affects everything. So you really need to be kind to yourself.”

JK Rowling has revealed she turned down two offers of a peerage in the House of Lords and would turn down a third.

The author’s remarks came after Conservative Party leader hopeful Kemi Badenoch said she would give Rowling a peerage for her stance on gender – a position critics have described as being transphobic.

The Harry Potter author said in a post on X that she had been offered peerages “once under Labour and once under the Tories”, adding she “still wouldn’t take it” if offered the honour for a third time.

Most peers sitting in the House of Lords are appointed by the monarch on the prime minister’s advice, with nominations vetted by the House of Lords Appointments Commission.

Badenoch praised Rowling in an interview with the Talk TV online streaming service, saying they both believed protections for women should be based not on self-identified gender but rather biological sex.

The MP for North West Essex said of Rowling: “I don’t know whether she would take it, but I certainly would give her a peerage.”

The former equalities minister went on to praise Baroness Cass for her review of NHS children’s gender services – work Badenoch “managed to get” the doctor a peerage for.

Writing on X, Rowling said: “It’s considered bad form to talk about this but I’ll make an exception given the very particular circumstances.

“I’ve already turned down a peerage twice, once under Labour and once under the Tories. If offered one a third time, I still wouldn’t take it.”

She said in an apparent reference to Badenoch: “It’s not her, it’s me.”

Rowling was awarded an OBE in 2001, and was made a Companion of Honour in 2017 by Prince William, then the Duke of Cambridge, for her work.

While the precise dates the author was offered the two peerages are unclear, the first would have come in the New Labour years, when Rowling was still writing the Harry Potter series.

The final book in Rowling’s best-selling wizard series was published in 2007. In the years since, she has written articles, plays and a series of crime books for adults under the pen name Robert Galbraith.

The crime series, known collectively under the title Cormoran Strike, were published throughout the 2010s – during which time Rowling was presumably offered a peerage for the second time.

If she had taken up a seat in the House of Lords, the author would most likely have been given the title of Baroness Rowling – and if she found the time to attend sessions, she would have a say in the work of Parliament’s second chamber, considering draft laws and potentially participating in select committees.

Sign up for our Politics Essential newsletter to read top political analysis, gain insight from across the UK and stay up to speed with the big moments. It’ll be delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.

Former military general Prabowo Subianto has been sworn in as Indonesia’s president, as he announced the country’s largest cabinet since the 1960s.

The 73-year-old, who had been dogged by allegations of human rights abuse for decades, was inagurated on Sunday as the country’s eighth president.

This spells the end of an era under former leader Joko Widodo, known locally as Jokowi, who presided over a decade of economic growth and infrastructure development.

Having failed twice to become president, Prabowo finally clawed his way to the highest office after winning over 58% of the vote in February’s elections, against two rivals.

Prabowo was sworn in with his running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka, Jokowi’s eldest son.

More than 30 leaders attended the inauguration, including British foreign minister David Lammy, Chinese Vice President Han Zheng, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong.

He named 48 ministers and 58 vice-ministers in his new cabinet, compared with 34 ministers and 30 vice-ministers under Jokowi. They were officially sworn in on Monday afternoon.

Some observers believe Prabowo’s cabinet make-up – with 17 of the 48 ministers re-appointed from Jokowi’s cabinet – was a “political reward” to his predecessor, whose tacit support is said to have propelled Prabowo’s electoral victory.

The re-appointments include that of Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati and chief economic minister Airlangga Hartarto.

“It seems that Prabowo wants to repay those who supported him politically rather than prioritising institutional reforms,” public policy scholar Lina Miftahul Jannah told BBC Indonesian.

A “bloated cabinet” can complicate bureaucracy and lengthen the policy-making process, she said, adding that re-organising the different ministries would also be resource intensive.

“That costs a lot, in the sense that it’s not just the money spent, but the energy as well,” Dr Jannah.

Some see the lineup as a sign of policy continuity in South East Asia’s largest economy.

The re-appointments also show that Prabowo “does not want to take further risks”, political scientist Burhanuddin Muhtadi told Reuters.

“That’s why he chose key figures that served under Jokowi,” he said. Prabowo had promised during his campaign to continue Jokowi’s development and infrastructure-focussed policies.

In his inauguration speech on Sunday, Prabowo vowed to eradicate corruption, poverty, and said he would be president for all Indonesians.

“We must always realise that a free nation is where the people are free,” said the president in a fiery speech that lasted almost an hour.

“They must be freed of fear, poverty, hunger, ignorance, oppression, suffering.”

On the foreign policy front, he affirmed Indonesia’s longstanding policy of non alignment – where the country does not ally itself with major power blocs.

“We will stand against all colonialism and we will defend the interests of oppressed people worldwide,” he said.

Prabowo’s new cabinet will kick off their term with a three-day retreat at a military academy in central Java.

The ministers and their deputies will sleep in tents, and the retreat is aimed at bonding the cabinet and helping members understand Prabowo’s vision, Reuters cited the migrant protection minister Abdul Kadir Karding as saying.

Prabowo will make his first global appearances at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit happening next month and at the G20 summit right after.

The premiere of a new film about Pharrell Williams was briefly disrupted by animal rights protesters at the London Film Festival on Sunday.

A screening of Piece By Piece, a biopic of the musician told using Lego, closed the festival, but was delayed after campaigners shouted and hung banners over the balcony in the Royal Festival Hall.

They shouted “stop the torture, stop the pain”, in reference to the use of animal skins and fur by fashion house Louis Vuitton, where Williams serves as men’s creative director.

The singer and producer, who was on stage at the time, remained calm and applauded the activists, telling them: “God bless you.”

Addressing the rest of the audience as the protesters were being removed, he added: “The changes they seek don’t happen overnight, it takes a lot of planning, and we are working on those things.

“But they want to be heard, so we heard them.”

Williams has been creative director of the Louis Vuitton men’s collection since February 2023.

BBC News has asked Louis Vuitton for comment.

This is the second major screening of the singer’s biopic to be disrupted, after animal rights groups also targeted the movie’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last month.

After the London screening, animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) claimed responsibility.

They said: “We are calling him out for using wild-animal skins and fur in his Louis Vuitton designs. It’s time for him to stop supporting cruelty!”

At the previous screening in Toronto, a woman ran on stage and shouted: “Pharrell, stop supporting killing animals for fashion.”

The singer replied: “You know what? You’re right. God bless you. It’s OK. Everybody give her a round of applause please.”

Once she was removed, Williams told the audience: “You know, Rome wasn’t made in a day and sometimes when you have plans to change things and situations, you have to get in a position of power and influence where you can change people’s minds and help progression.”

Williams is known for hits such as Happy and for being one half of production duo the Neptunes, who worked on some of the biggest hits of the last two decades.

Piece by Piece, directed by Morgan Neville, uses Lego bricks to depict Williams’s early life in Virginia through to his rise to fame.

The film, released in the UK next month, has received generally positive reviews from critics, with many praising the “inventive” take on the traditional biopic.

Cameroon’s 91-year-old President Paul Biya has been seen in public for the first time in six weeks amid speculation about his ailing health.

His absence from the public eye led to unfounded rumours of his death.

But on Monday afternoon state television showed footage of the president’s arrival at the airport in the capital, Yaoundé, on a flight from Switzerland.

The government had banned the media from discussing the health of Biya – in power since 1982 – classifying it as a matter of national security.

Rumours of his death have been circulating on and off for the past two decades.

Monday’s broadcast pictures show the president dressed in his usual neat, conservative suit and looking visibly strong.

The last time Biya had been seen was on 8 September attending a China-Africa summit in Beijing.

Since then, the government has been under immense pressure to prove that the long-serving leader was alive.

Government officials eventually denied claims that he had died, saying that Biya was in good health and on a private visit to Geneva. He is known for frequent visits to the Swiss city.

After landing, Biya was welcomed by state officials and members of the ruling party.

The unusual mobilisation of people on some streets in the capital suggests the clear intention of the government is to put to rest the speculation about his wellbeing.

His re-appearance could spark calls from within his CPDM party for him to seek another seven-year term at next year’s election.

While the “Lion Man”, as he is called by his backers, is yet to openly state if he will run, his critics say his recent political moves signal an attempt to tighten the governing party’s firm grip on power.

• The 91-year-old African president who keeps defying death rumours
• Why African leaders maintain secrecy around their health
• Cameroon country profile

TikTok owner, ByteDance, says it has sacked an intern for “maliciously interfering” with the training of one of its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

But the firm rejected claims about the extent of the damage caused by the unnamed individual, saying they “contain some exaggerations and inaccuracies”.

It comes after reports about the incident spread over the weekend on social media.

The Chinese technology giant’s Doubao ChatGPT-like generative AI model is the country’s most popular AI chatbot.

“The individual was an intern with the [advertising] technology team and has no experience with the AI Lab,” ByteDance said in a statement.

“Their social media profile and some media reports contain inaccuracies.”

Its commercial online operations, including its large language AI models, were unaffected by the intern’s actions, the company added.

ByteDance also denied reports that the incident caused more than $10m (£7.7m) of damage by disrupting an AI training system made up of thousands of powerful graphics processing units (GPU).

As well as firing the person in August, ByteDance said it had informed the intern’s university and industry bodies about the incident.

ByteDance operates some of the world’s most popular social media apps, including TikTok and its Chinese-equivalent Douyin.

It is widely seen as a leader when it comes to algorithm development due to how appealing its apps are to users.

Like many of its peers in China and around the world, the social media giant is investing heavily in AI.

It uses the technology to power its Doubao chatbot as well as many other applications, including a text-to-video tool called Jimeng.

US investigators are trying to find out how a pair of highly classified intelligence documents were leaked online.

The documents, which appeared on the messaging app Telegram on Friday, contain an alleged US assessment of Israeli plans to attack Iran.

The assessment is based on interpretation of satellite imagery and other intelligence.

On Monday White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said President Joe Biden was “deeply concerned” about the leak.

Officials have not determined whether the documents were released due to a hack or a leak, Mr Kirby said.

For three weeks now, Israel has been vowing to hit Iran hard in retaliation for Iran’s massed ballistic missile attack on Israel on 1 October.

Iran says that was in response to Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on 27 September.

Military analysts say the phrasing used in the headings looks credible and is consistent with similar classified documents revealed in the past.

Headed “Top Secret”, they include the acronym “FGI”, standing for “Foreign Government Intelligence”.

The documents appear to have been circulated to intelligence agencies in the Five Eyes alliance, the five Western nations that regularly share intelligence, namely the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The acronym “TK” in the documents refers to “Talent Keyhole”, a codeword covering satellite-based Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Imagery Intelligence (IMINT).

Taken together, the two documents are a classified US assessment of Israel’s preparations to hit targets in Iran, based on intelligence analysed on 15-16 October by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

What features prominently is the mention of two Air Launched Ballistic Missile (ABLM) systems: Golden Horizon and Rocks.

Rocks is a long-range missile system made by the Israeli company Rafael and designed to hit a variety of targets both above and below ground. Golden Horizon is thought to refer to the Blue Sparrow missile system with a range of around 2,000km (1,240 miles).

The significance of this is that it would indicate that the Israeli Air Force is planning to carry out a similar but greatly expanded version of its ABLM attack on an Iranian radar site near Isfahan in April.

By launching these weapons from long range and far from Iran’s borders it would avoid the need for Israeli warplanes to overfly certain countries in the region like Jordan.

The documents also report no sign of any preparations by Israel to activate its nuclear deterrent.

At the request of Israel, the US government never publicly acknowledges that its close ally Israel even possesses nuclear weapons, so this has caused some embarrassment in Washington.

Glaringly absent from these documents is any mention of what targets Israel intends to hit in Iran, or when.

The US has made no secret of its opposition to the targeting of either Iran’s nuclear research facilities or its oil installations.

That leaves military bases, most likely those belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its affiliated Basij militia as these two institutions are seen as the backbone of the Islamic Republic, projecting its military reach abroad and suppressing popular protest at home.

As regards timing, many had expected Israel to have carried out its promised retaliation by now. But back in April, Iran waited 12 days before hitting back at Israel with a barrage of 300 drones and missiles after an Israeli air strike hit its diplomatic buildings in Damascus, killing several senior IRGC commanders.

Part of the current delay in Israel’s response is likely due to US concerns at escalation with less than a month to go before the US presidential elections.

Possibly yes, by someone who wanted to derail Israel’s plans.

Iran has a large and sophisticated cyber-warfare capability so the possibility of a hostile hack is also being investigated.

These documents, if genuine as thought highly likely, show that despite the close defence relationship between the US and Israel, Washington still spies on its ally in case it is not being given the full picture.

They show that plans by the Israeli Air Force to carry out some kind of long-range retaliation against Iran are well advanced and that mitigation is being put in place against an expected Iranian response.

In short: if and when Israel does carry out these plans then the Middle East will once again experience a period of extreme tension.

Some Indigenous leaders have criticised an Australian senator’s heckling of King Charles, as she faces a backlash over a violent image of the monarch briefly posted to her social media account.

Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal woman, made global headlines when she shouted “you are not my king” and “this is not your land” before being escorted away from a royal event in Canberra on Monday.

The independent senator’s protest has been praised by some activists as brave, but condemned by other prominent Aboriginal Australians as “embarrassing” and disrespectful.

Thorpe has defended her actions at the event, but said a cartoon later posted to her Instagram account was inappropriate.

The drawing – which depicted the King beheaded alongside his crown – was shared by a staff member without her knowledge, the senator said.

“I deleted it as soon as I saw. I would not intentionally share anything that could be seen to encourage violence against anyone.”

The image, which has drawn condemnation, adds to heavy scrutiny of her actions on Monday.

Aunty Violet Sheridan, an Aboriginal elder who formally welcomed the King and Queen Camilla to Ngunnawal country, told the Guardian Australia: “Lidia Thorpe does not speak for me and my people, and I’m sure she doesn’t speak for a lot of First Nations people.”

Nova Peris – a former senator who was the first Aboriginal woman in parliament and is a long-time republican – also called Thorpe’s actions “embarrassing and disappointing”.

“Australia is moving forward in its journey of reconciliation… as hard as that journey is, it requires respectful dialogue, mutual understanding, and a shared commitment to healing – not divisive actions that draw attention away from the progress we are making as a country,” she wrote on X.

However, other prominent Indigenous activists have lauded Thorpe’s stand.

Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, a Bundjalung lawyer and author, said there was “nothing more harmful or disrespectful” than inviting the monarchy to tour the country in the first place, given its history.

“When Thorpe speaks, she’s got the ancestors right with her.”

Speaking on Tuesday, Thorpe said she disrupted the King’s parliamentary welcome ceremony after repeated written requests for a meeting and a “respectful conversation” with the monarch were ignored.

She told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation she “wanted the world to know the plight of our people in this country” and for the King to apologise.

“Why doesn’t he say, ‘I am sorry for the many, many thousands of massacres that happened in this country and that my ancestors and my kingdom are responsible for that’?” she said.

A chorus of Australian politicians including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have also criticised her protest, and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has defended the monarch.

When asked by reporters if it was “disgraceful” for Australian politicians to shout at the King, Sir Keir replied: “Look, I think the King is doing a fantastic job, an incredible ambassador, not just for our country, but across the Commonwealth.”

“He is out there doing his public service notwithstanding the health challenges he himself has had.”

Albanese said Thorpe had not met “the standard behaviour Australians rightly expect of parliamentarians”, while opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Thorpe to resign.

“I really don’t care what Dutton says,” Thorpe told ABC radio in response.

“I’ll be here for the next three years so get used to truth-telling.”

South Korea has summoned the Russian ambassador, seeking the “immediate withdrawal” of North Korean troops which it says are being trained to fight in Ukraine.

About 1,500 North Korean soldiers, including those from the special forces, have already arrived in Russia, according to Seoul’s spy agency.

In a meeting with the ambassador Georgiy Zinoviev, South Korea’s vice-foreign minister Kim Hong-kyun denounced the move and warned that Seoul will “respond with all measures available”.

Mr Zinoviev said he would relay the concerns, but stressed that the cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang is “within the framework of international law”.

It is unclear what cooperation he was referring to. The ambassador did not confirm allegations that North Korea has sent troops to fight with Russia’s military.

Later on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters the cooperation between the two nations is “not directed against third countries”.

He added it “should not worry anyone”, according to Russian state news agency Tass.

Pyongyang has not commented on the allegations.

South Korea has long accused the North of supplying weapons to Russia for use in the war against Ukraine, but it says the current situation has gone beyond the transfer of military materials.

Some South Korean media reports have suggested as many as12,000 North Korean soldiers are expected to be deployed.

“[This] not only gravely threatens South Korea but the international community,” Kim said on Monday.

Moscow and Pyongyang have stepped up cooperation after their leaders Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un signed a security pact in June, which pledges that their countries will help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.

Last week, Putin introduced a bill to ratify the pact.

Pyongyang’s deployment of troops to fight with Russia “would mark a significant escalation” in the conflict, Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on Monday.

In a phone call with Rutte on Monday, South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol urged the alliance to explore “concrete countermeasures”, adding that he will take steps to strengthen security cooperation between South Korea, Ukraine and Nato.

British Foreign Minister David Lammy, who is visiting Seoul, called Russia’s actions “reckless and illegal”, adding that London would work with Seoul to respond, according to Yoon’s office.

The United States and Japan have also condemned the deepening military ties between North Korea and Russia.

Meanwhile, in response to a BBC question about the alleged North Korea-Russia cooperation, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said that China hopes all parties will work to de-escalate the situation and aim for a political solution to the Ukraine crisis.

Some defence experts told BBC Korean that North Korea’s involvement could complicate the war.

“North Korea’s involvement could open the door for greater international participation in the conflict, potentially drawing in more countries,” said Moon Seong-mok from the Korea National Strategy Institute.

“The international community will likely increase sanctions and pressure on both Russia and North Korea, but it remains to be seen whether North Korea’s involvement will truly benefit either country,” Dr Moon said.

But others believe the Russian military units will have difficulties incorporating North Korean troops into their frontlines.

Apart from the language barrier, the North Korean army has no recent combat experiences, they said.

Valeriy Ryabykh, editor of the Ukrainian publication Defence Express, said the North Korean soldiers could be asked to guard sections of the Russian-Ukrainian border, which will free up Russian units to fight elsewhere.

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

Imagine you’re Vladimir Putin.

The West has dubbed you a pariah for invading Ukraine. Sanctions are aiming to cut off your country’s economy from global markets.

And there’s an arrest warrant out for you from the International Criminal Court.

How can you show the pressure is not working? Try hosting a summit.

This week in the city of Kazan President Putin will greet more than 20 heads of state at the Brics summit of emerging economies. Among the leaders invited are China’s Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

The Kremlin has called it one of the “largest-scale foreign policy events ever” in Russia.

“The clear message is that attempts to isolate Russia have failed,” thinks Chris Weafer, founding partner of consultancy firm Macro-Advisory.

“It’s a big part of the messaging from the Kremlin that Russia is withstanding sanctions. We know there are severe cracks beneath the surface. But at a geopolitical level Russia has all these friends and they’re all going to be Russia’s partners.”

So, who are Russia’s friends?

Brics stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The grouping, often referred to as a counterweight to the Western-led world, has expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Saudi Arabia, too, has been invited to join.

The Brics nations account for 45% of the global population. Added together, members’ economies are worth more than $28.5tn (£22tn). That’s around 28% of the global economy.

Russian officials have indicated that another 30 countries want to join Brics or seek closer ties with the club. Some of these nations will take part in the summit. In Kazan this week expect a lot of talk about Brics representing the “global majority”.

But apart from providing Vladimir Putin his moment on the geopolitical stage, what is the event likely to achieve?

Keen to ease the pressure from Western sanctions, the Kremlin leader will hope to convince Brics members to adopt an alternative to the dollar for global payments.

“A lot of the problems Russia’s economy is facing are linked to cross-border trade and payments. And a lot of that is linked to the US dollar,” says Mr Weafer.

“The US Treasury has enormous power and influence over global trade simply because the US dollar is the main currency for settling that. Russia’s main interest is in breaking the dominance of the US dollar. It wants Brics countries to create an alternative trade mechanism and cross-border settlement system that does not involve the dollar, the euro or any of the G7 currencies, so that sanctions won’t matter so much.”

But critics point to differences within Brics. “Likeminded” is not a word you would use to describe the current membership.

“In some ways it’s a good job for the West that China and India can never agree about anything. Because if those two were really serious, Brics would have enormous influence,” notes Jim O’Neill, former Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs.

“China and India are doing their best to avoid wanting to attack each other a lot of the time. Trying to get them to really co-operate on economic things is a never-ending challenge.”

It was Mr O’Neill who, at the turn of the century, dreamt up the acronym “Bric” for four emerging economies he believed should be “brought into the centre of global policy making”.

But the four letters would take on a life of their own, after the corresponding nations formed their own Bric group – later Brics, when South Africa joined. They would attempt to challenge the dominance of the G7: the world’s seven largest “advanced” economies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US).

It’s not just India and China who have their differences. There is tension between two of the newest Brics members, Egypt and Ethiopia. And, despite talk of detente, Iran and Saudi Arabia have long been regional rivals.

“The idea that they’re all going to fundamentally agree on something of great substance is bonkers really,” believes Mr O’Neill.

And while Russia, fuelled by anti-Western sentiment, talks about creating a “new world order”, other Brics members, like India, are keen to retain good political and economic relations with the West.

In Kazan, Vladimir Putin’s task will be to skim over the differences and paint a picture of unity, while showing the Russian public – and the international community – that his country is far from isolated.

Questions have been raised about the legality of cash incentives offered by tech billionaire Elon Musk to swing-state voters who sign his petition before the US election on 5 November.

The petition was created by Mr Musk’s campaign group America PAC, which was set up to support Donald Trump in the presidential contest.

Voters in Pennsylvania are being offered cash sums for simply signing the petition. And one random swing-state signatory a day is being given a million-dollar prize.

But legal experts have suggested that it may break American law to offer money for an act requiring someone to be signed up as a voter. BBC News has contacted Mr Musk’s team and America PAC for comment.

The petition created by America PAC encourages voters in six swing states – Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina – to sign a “petition in favour of free speech and the right to bear arms”.

Those who refer another voter who signs up are promised a sum of $47 (£36) each.

Higher sums of $100 for signing or referring are offered in Pennsylvania, the battleground state that both the Trump and Harris campaigns believe could potentially decide the race’s eventual victor.

America PAC says those who sign the petition are signalling their support for the First and Second amendments of the US Constitution.

Each day until polling day on 5 November, a $1m prize will be randomly awarded to any signatory in one of the seven swing states.

The first lottery-style jumbo cheque was handed out to a surprised attendee at a town hall event in Pennsylvania on 19 October.

“I believe [Elon] Musk’s offer is likely illegal,” said Paul Schiff Berman, the Walter S. Cox professor of law at the George Washington University.

He pointed to the US Code on electoral law, which states that anyone who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting” faces a potential $10,000 fine or a five-year prison sentence.

“His offer is only open to registered voters, so I think his offer runs afoul of this provision,” Mr Berman told the BBC.

The US Department of Justice declined to comment. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has been approached for comment.

The strategy may be covered by a loophole, because no-one is being directly paid to register or vote, a former chairman of the FEC suggested.

Brad Smith told the New York Times the giveaway was “something of a grey area” but “not that close to the line.”

“He’s not paying them to register to vote. He’s paying them to sign a petition – and he wants only people who are registered to vote to sign the petition. So I think he comes out OK here,” he said.

But an election law professor at Northwestern University told the BBC that the context is important.

“I understand some analysis that it’s not illegal, but I think here combined with the context it’s clearly designed to induce people to register to vote in a way that is legally problematic,” Michael Kang said.

Adav Noti of the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center said Mr Musk’s scheme “violates federal law and is subject to civil or criminal enforcement by the Department of Justice”.

“It is illegal to give out money on the condition that recipients register as voters,” Mr Noti told the BBC.

Constitutional law professor Jeremy Paul, with Northeastern University School of Law, said in an email to the BBC that Mr Musk is taking advantage of a legal loophole.

He said that, while there is an argument that the offer could be illegal, it is “targeted and designed to get around what’s supposed to be the law” and he believes the case would be difficult to make in court.

• Harris or Trump: Who is ahead in US election polls?
• Musk offers prize of $1m a day to swing states voters
• Who is Elon Musk and what is his net worth?

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, described the move as “deeply concerning” and called for law enforcement agencies to investigate.

In response, Mr Musk said it was “concerning that he would say such a thing”.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who has campaigned in recent weeks for Kamala Harris, said the offer was both “innovative and desperate”.

“You only do that because you think you have to, but using a sweepstake is not a bad idea. Whether or not it will work is another whole thing. It could just as easily backfire,” he told CNBC.

Mr Musk has pushed back against the criticism, arguing that Democrats and their donors have funded similar initiatives in the past.

On X, he shared a post which said the boss of Meta, Mark Zuckerburg “did the same thing in 2020”.

Mr Zuckerburg donated $400m in the 2020 election – but this was given to two non-partisan organisations to help with the logistics around postal ballots. It was not given directly to voters.

The Democratic Party has invested in initiatives in the past elections to mobilise supporters, such as a $25m voter registration campaign in the 2022 US midterm elections.

However, this money also was not given directly to voters. The funding went toward initiatives that encouraged voters to register, such as employing people to knock on doors and television and digital advertising.

“It’s legal to pay people to go out to register voters, but you can’t pay people directly to register,” said Prof Kang.

The world’s richest man had an uneven relationship with Trump when Trump was president, but Mr Musk increasingly has voiced his displeasure with Democrats in recent years.

Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, he announced that he had left the party and encouraged his followers to vote Republican.

This year, he has involved himself in American politics like never before, making donations and supportive social media posts on behalf of several Republicans.

In comments last week, he described much of the US-Mexico border as tantamount to the film World War Z.

Mr Musk launched America PAC in July with the aim of supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign for president. He has so far donated at least $75m to the group.

America PAC’s website says it wants “secure borders”, “safe cities”, “free speech”, “sensible spending”, a “fair justice system” and “self-protection”.

Trump said on Sunday that he had not followed Mr Musk’s giveaway, but described him as a friend.

In recent weeks, Mr Musk has appeared on the campaign trail for the first time, first by Trump’s side and more recently in town hall appearances by himself.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win a US election
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Harris or Trump? What Chinese people want
• ON THE GROUND: Democrats take fight deep into Trump country
• FACT-CHECK: What the numbers really say about crime
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

A huge meteorite first discovered in 2014 caused a tsunami bigger than any in known human history and boiled the oceans, scientists have discovered.

The space rock, which was 200 times the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, smashed into Earth when our planet was in its infancy three billion years ago.

Carrying sledge hammers, scientists hiked to the impact site in South Africa to chisel off chunks of rock to understand the crash.

The team also found evidence that massive asteroid impacts did not bring only destruction to Earth – they helped early life thrive.

“We know that after Earth first formed there was still a lot of debris flying around space that would be smashing into Earth,” says Prof Nadja Drabon from Harvard university, lead author of the new research.

“But now we have found that life was really resilient in the wake of some of these giant impacts, and that it actually bloomed and and thrived,” she says.

The meteorite S2 was much larger than the space rock we are most familiar with. The one that led to the dinosaurs’ extinction 66 million years ago was about 10km wide, or almost the height of Mount Everest.

But S2 was 40-60km wide and its mass was 50-200 times greater.

It struck when Earth was still in its early years and looked very different. It was a water world with just a few continents sticking out of the sea. Life was very simple – microorganisms composed of single cells.

The impact site in Eastern Barberton Greenbelt is one of the oldest places on Earth with remnants of a meteorite crash.

Prof Drabon travelled there three times with her colleagues, driving as far as possible into the remote mountains before hiking the rest of the way with backpacks.

Rangers accompanied them with machine guns to protect them against wild animals like elephants or rhinos, or even poachers in the national park.

They were looking for spherule particles, or tiny fragments of rock, left behind by impact. Using sledge hammers, they collected hundreds of kilograms of rock and took them back to labs for analysis.

Prof Drabon stowed the most precious pieces in her luggage.

“I usually get stopped by security, but I give them a big spiel about how exciting the science is and then they get really bored and let me through,” she says.

The team have now re-constructed just what the S2 meteorite did when it violently careened into Earth. It gouged out a 500km crater and pulverised rocks that ejected at incredibly fast speeds to form a cloud that circled around the globe.

“Imagine a rain cloud, but instead of water droplets coming down, it’s like molten rock droplets raining out of the sky,” says Prof Drabon.

A huge tsunami would have swept across the globe, ripped up the sea floor, and flooded coastlines.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami would have paled in comparison, suggests Prof Drabon.

All that energy would have generated massive amounts of heat that boiled the oceans causing up to tens of metres of water to evaporate. It would also have increased air temperatures by up to 100C.

The skies would have turned black, choked with dust and particles. Without sunlight penetrating the darkness, simple life on land or in shallow water that relied on photosynthesis would have been wiped out.

These impacts are similar to what geologists have found about other big meteorite impacts and what was suspected for S2.

But what Prof Drabon and her team found next was surprising. The rock evidence showed that the violent disturbances churned up nutrients like phosphorus and iron that fed simple organisms.

“Life was not only resilient, but actually bounced back really quickly and thrived,” she says.

“It’s like when you brush your teeth in the morning. It kills 99.9% of bacteria, but by the evening they’re all back, right?” she says.

The new findings suggest that the big impacts were like a giant fertiliser, sending essential ingredients for life like phosphorus around the globe.

The tsunami sweeping the planet would also have brought iron-rich water from the depths to the surface, giving early microbes extra energy.

The findings add to a growing view among scientists that early life was actually helped by the violent succession of rocks striking Earth in its early years, Prof Drabon says.

“It seems that life after the impact actually encountered really favourable conditions that allowed it to bloom,” she explains.

The findings are published in the scientific journal PNAS.

Tributes have been made to a surfer who died after reportedly being impaled by a swordfish in Indonesia.

Giulia Manfrini, 36, from Turin in northern Italy, had been surfing in the waters of the Mentawai Islands Regency, West Sumatra Province, before the incident on Friday, according to reports.

Two witnesses are said to have tried to provide first aid to Ms Manfrini – who was later taken to a medical centre – after a swordfish struck her in the chest.

James Colston, who set up a travel agency with Ms Manfrini, said on Instagram: “Even with the brave efforts of her partner, local resort staff and doctors, Giulia couldn’t be saved.”

“The information we received from the Head of Southwest Siberut District was that an accident occurred with an Italian citizen while surfing,” Lahmudin Siregar, acting head of the Mentawai Islands Regency Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD), reportedly told news agency Antara.

He added: “Unexpectedly, a swordfish jumped towards Manfrini and stuck her right in the chest”.

Mr Colston said his former colleague had suffered “a freak accident”, adding that “we believe she died doing what she loved, in a place that she loved”.

“Giulia was the lifeblood of this company and her infectious enthusiasm for surf, snow and life will be remembered by all that came in contact with her,” he said.

Fabio Giulivi, the mayor of Ms Manfrini’s hometown Venaria Reale, said: “The news of her death has left us shocked and makes us feel powerless in front of the tragedy that took her life so prematurely.”

He added that surfing and opening a travel agency had been her “double dream”.

Previous research has suggested attacks by swordfish are rare but they can be dangerous when provoked.

Two hitmen have pleaded guilty in a Canadian court over the shooting of a man acquitted of the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight.

Tanner Fox and Jose Lopez pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of Sikh businessman Ripudaman Singh Malik in 2022.

They entered their pleas in British Columbia Supreme Court on the eve of their trial for first-degree murder.

In a shocking development, a ferocious fist fight then broke out between Fox and Lopez in the courtroom in New Westminster.

According to the Vancouver Sun, they “punched and clawed at each other” for a couple of minutes before sheriffs broke up the brawl, forcing them to the ground, applying handcuffs and leading them away.

Other sheriffs cleared the public gallery.

The case is due to return to court on 31 October for a sentencing hearing. The second-degree murder pleas mean they will automatically receive life sentences with the only question being how long they have to serve before they can apply for parole, Canadian public broadcaster CBC reports.

Malik was shot several times in his car outside his family business in Surrey, British Columbia, on the morning of 14 July 2022. Police found a burnt-out vehicle nearby.

The businessman had been acquitted in 2005 of a devastating double bomb attack:

• On 23 June 1985, Air India flight 182 from Canada to India blew up off the Irish coast, killing all 329 people on board, most of them Canadian citizens visiting relatives in India

• About the same time, a second bomb exploded prematurely in Japan, killing two baggage handlers

The bombings – widely believed to have been carried out by Canadian-based Sikhs in retaliation for India’s deadly 1984 storming of the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion – remain Canada’s deadliest terror attack.

Following a two-year trial, Malik and his co-accused, Ajaib Singh Bagri, were both acquitted of mass murder and conspiracy charges related to the two bombings.

According to the agreed statement of facts on Monday, Fox and Lopez were contracted to kill Malik but the evidence did not establish who had hired them.

Police recovered two handguns used in the attack in residences linked to the two men as well as the sum of C$16,485 (US $11,943; £9,148) in cash in Lopez’s New Westminster apartment, the Vancouver Sun reports.

Malik’s family issued a statement urging them to co-operate with police to bring to justice whoever had directed the killing.

“Until the parties responsible for hiring them and directing this assassination are brought to justice, the work remains incomplete,” the family said.

When contacted by the BBC, Fox’s lawyer declined to comment on the case.

Lawyers for Lopez said he had a “long road ahead of him”, adding: “We are hopeful for his prospects of rehabilitation given his youth and his remorse, as shown by his decision to accept responsibility today.”

India and China have agreed on patrolling arrangements to de-escalate tensions along a disputed Himalayan border which has seen deadly hand-to-hand clashes in recent years, India’s top diplomat has said.

Vikram Misri said on Monday the two sides have agreed on “disengagement and resolution of issues in these [border] areas that had arisen in 2020”.

He was referring to the Galwan Valley clashes – the first fatal confrontation between the two sides since 1975, in which both sides suffered casualties.

Relations between the neighbours have been strained since then.

“An agreement has been arrived at on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the India-China border areas, leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020,” Mr Misri said.

Mr Misri, however, did not give any details about the disengagement process and whether it would cover all points of conflict along the disputed border.

The Indian foreign secretary’s statement comes just a day before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi travels to Russia for a meeting of Brics nations which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Mr Misri didn’t confirm if a bilateral meeting between Mr Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping was on the agenda.

His remarks on Monday mark a major development between the two nuclear-armed nations since the Galwan clashes.

Troops in the Galwan Valley fought with clubs and sticks because of 1996 agreement between the two countries that prohibited the use of guns and explosives near the border.

Several rounds of talks between their diplomats and military leaders in the last four years had not resulted in a major breakthrough.

• India-China clash: An extraordinary escalation ‘with rocks and clubs’
• China says Indian troops fired ‘provocative’ shots in border dispute

Troops from the two sides clashed in the northern Sikkim area in 2021 and again in the Tawang sector of the border in 2022.

Border tensions have cast a long shadow on India-China relations for decades. The two countries fought a war in 1962 in which India suffered a heavy defeat.

Business relations between the two Asian giants have also suffered due to the tensions.

The root cause is an ill-defined, 3,440km (2,100-mile)-long disputed border. Rivers, lakes and snowcaps along the frontier mean the line often shifts, bringing soldiers face to face at many points, sparking a confrontation.

The two nations have been also competing to build infrastructure along the border, which has sparked further tensions.

Four people including a child have been killed in an Israeli air strike near the main government hospital in southern Beirut, the Lebanese health ministry says.

The strike appeared to hit the car park of the Rafik Hariri University Hospital, a hospital source told Reuters news agency. The health ministry said 24 people had been injured.

It was among 13 air strikes that hit south Beirut on Monday evening. The Israeli military said it was attacking facilities linked to Hezbollah.

An Israeli spokesman had earlier warned people to move away from several locations in southern Beirut, however Rafik Hariri hospital was not among the locations mentioned.

Videos from the Dahiyeh neighbourhood in southern Beirut, where seven locations to be targeted were announced in advance, showed locals fleeing in vehicles and on foot as the strikes began hitting.

One location identified as a target by the Israeli army was roughly 400m from Beirut airport, the only international airport serving Lebanon.

Local media shared images of some windows in an airport building that were blown in the blast.

Israel has not commented since issuing the earlier evacuation warnings.

Separately, the Israeli military said earlier on Monday that it had identified a Hezbollah bunker concealed under a different hospital in southern Beirut, which has since been evacuated.

IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said without providing evidence that the bunker under the Sahel hospital in Haret Hreik held hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold that was being used to fund Hezbollah’s attacks on israel.

The director of Sahel hospital denied there was a bunker underneath and called on the Lebanese army to inspect the site.

Israel appears to have expanded its war against Hezbollah beyond military infrastructure and says it is targeting the group’s financial networks.

On Sunday night Israel carried out air strikes targeting branches of a financial association linked with Hezbollah in the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital Beirut, as well as the south and east of the country.

The Israeli military said it targeted money held by Al-Qard Al-Hassan Association (AQAH). It offers financial services to civilians in areas where Hezbollah has strong support, but Israel and the US accuse it of being a cover for the Iran-backed group to fund its activities.

There was no immediate comment from AQAH or Hezbollah.

Also on Monday, US President Joe Biden’s special envoy to the Middle East arrived in Beirut to explore the possibility of a negotiated end to the war.

Amos Hochstein said the US wanted to see an end to the war in Lebanon end “as soon as possible”.

He said that UN resolution 1701 – which calls for the Lebanese state to be the only armed force in southern Lebanon – was “not enough” and the US was looking into what more needed to be done.

Hezbollah fighters meanwhile continued to fire rockets into northern Israel, with the military reporting that 170 projectiles had crossed the border by late Monday evening.

Israel began an intense air campaign and ground invasion against Hezbollah after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza, saying it wanted to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of Israeli border areas displaced by rocket attacks.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Palestinians on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel.

More than 2,400 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 1,800 in the past five weeks, according to the country’s health ministry. Israeli authorities say 59 people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.