Commonwealth heads of government are preparing to defy the United Kingdom and agree plans to examine reparatory justice for the transatlantic slave trade, the BBC has learned.

Downing Street insists the issue is not on the agenda for the summit of 56 Commonwealth countries, which begins in the Pacific island nation of Samoa on Friday.

But diplomatic sources said officials were negotiating an agreement to conduct further research and begin a “meaningful conversation” about an issue which could potentially leave the UK owing billions of pounds in reparations.

Frederick Mitchell, foreign minister of the Bahamas, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Once you broach the subject it may take a while for people to come around but come around they will.”

Reparatory justice for slavery can come in many forms, including financial reparations, debt relief, an official apology, educational programmes, building museums, economic support, and public health assistance.

The current text of the draft summit communique – made known to the BBC – says: “Heads, noting calls for discussions on reparatory justice with regard to the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement… agreed that the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity.”

It says the heads of government would play “an active role in bringing about such inclusive conversations addressing these harms” and that they agreed “to prioritise and facilitate further and additional research on the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel slavery that encourages and supports the conversations and informs a way forward”.

The text – which could still change once Commonwealth leaders arrive – has been hammered out by diplomats ahead of the summit. British officials succeeded in blocking a plan for an entirely separate declaration on the subject.

The UK did not want any language in the communique about reparatory justice, but at the moment it is having to accept it will include three full paragraphs setting out the Commonwealth’s detailed position.

Officials from Caricom, the body that represents Caribbean countries, have sought to broaden the issue so that it encompasses not just the slave trade across the Atlantic but also the Pacific.

The draft communique says a majority of member states “share common historical experiences in relation to this abhorrent trade, chattel enslavement, the debilitation and dispossession of indigenous people”.

It also refers directly to practices known as “blackbirding”, where Pacific islanders were tricked or kidnapped into slave or cheap labour in colonies throughout the region.

Diplomats said the expectation now was that reparatory justice would be a central focus of the agenda for the next Commonwealth summit in two years’ time in the Caribbean, possibly Antigua and Barbuda.

In the run-up to this year’s summit, there have been growing calls from Commonwealth leaders for the UK to apologise and make reparations worth trillions of pounds for the country’s historic role in the slave trade.

A report published last year by the University of West Indies – backed by Patrick Robinson, a judge who sits on the International Court of Justice – concluded the UK owed more than £18tn in reparations for its role in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries.

Last weekend the prime minister of the Bahamas, Philip Davis, used a visit by Foreign Office minister Baroness Chapman to tell her the fight for reparations was far from over.

Bahamas foreign minister Frederick Mitchell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The word is apologise, that’s the word.”

He said for the Commonwealth gathering, “it’s a simple matter – it can be done, one sentence, one line.”

Asked how much reparations should amount to, Mr Mitchell said it was not just a matter of money but of “respect, acknowledging the past was a wrong that needs to be corrected”.

He said member countries “want the conversation to start” but “there appears to be even a reluctance to have the conversation”.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the UK had heard calls for slavery reparations “loud and clear” but that prime minister was “right” to “focus on the future”.

A UK government spokesperson said they would not comment on the leak to the BBC, but added: “Reparations are not on the agenda for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. The government’s position has not changed – we do not pay reparations.

“We are focused on using the summit at [the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting] to discuss the shared opportunities which we can unlock across the Commonwealth – including securing more economic growth.”

It is understood the Downing Street position – that reparatory justice is not on the agenda – while technically correct, has angered some Caribbean ministers when it was obvious the issue would be discussed at the summit.

The BBC understands that the tenor and tone of language from the UK government has contributed to “irritating even more” some members who might not have expected the UK to change its view and “suddenly start shelling out a lot of money”.

Sir Keir Starmer landed in Samoa late on Wednesday UK time, becoming the first sitting prime minister to visit a Pacific island nation.

Speaking to reporters en route, he said he wanted to discuss current challenges with Commonwealth leaders, especially climate change, rather than issues of the past.

“What they’re most interested in is, can we help them working with, for example, international financial institutions on the sorts of packages they need right now in relation to the challenges they’re facing,” he said.

“That’s where I’m going to put my focus – rather than what will end up being very, very long endless discussions about reparations on the past.

“Of course, slavery is abhorrent to everybody; the trade and the practice, there’s no question about that. But I think from my point of view… I’d rather roll up my sleeves and work with them on the current future-facing challenges than spend a lot of time on the past.”

King Charles arrived in Samoa for a four-day visit on Wednesday and is due to formally open the summit.

On a visit to Kenya last year, the King expressed the “greatest sorrow and regret” over the “wrongdoings” of the colonial era, but stopped short of issuing an apology, which would have required the agreement of ministers.

Some non-Caribbean countries are not unsympathetic towards the British position and want the summit to focus more on existing challenges – such as climate change, which is adversely affecting many Commonwealth countries, about half of whom are small island states.

But Caribbean countries seem determined to keep pressing the issue.

All three candidates hoping to be elected this weekend as the next secretary general of the Commonwealth – Shirley Botchwey of Ghana, Joshua Setipa of Lesotho and Mamadou Tangara of Gambia – have made clear they support reparatory justice.

The British government and the monarchy were prominent participants in the centuries-long slave trade from 1500, alongside other European nations, with millions of Africans forced to work on plantations.

Britain also had a key role in ending the trade through Parliament’s passage of a law to abolish slavery in 1833.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant, former UK ambassador to the UN, said it would be “quite wrong in principle to pay reparations for something that happened hundreds of years ago”.

“Who should you pay reparations to?,” he said on BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme, asking if West African countries, Caribbean nations or the Windrush generation should be involved.

Labour MP Clive Lewis said the UK needed to “start a conversation” with Commonwealth leaders, adding: “We can do better by them.”

His colleague Dawn Butler said the UK should pay reparations because “it’s the right thing to do”.

Speaking during a Black History month debate in the Commons, she pointed out that the slave owners were paid £20m in compensation – £100bn in today’s money.

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Authorities in India are evacuating nearly 1.5 million people from the path of an approaching cyclone in the eastern states of Odisha (formerly Orissa) and West Bengal.

Thousands of relief workers have been deployed to minimise damage from Cyclone Dana, which is expected to make landfall in the next 24 hours.

Transportation services have already been affected, with scores of trains and flights cancelled.

India’s weather department has said a depression over the Bay of Bengal is expected to turn into a severe cyclonic storm by Thursday evening.

The storm is expected to hit the coastal areas with wind speeds of 100-120 km/h (62-74 mph).

On Wednesday, Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi said arrangements were in place to ensure the safety of residents in districts along the cyclone’s path.

State officials said they had prepared temporary relief camps with food, water and health facilities.

“We are fully prepared to deal with the storm. Don’t panic, be safe and be careful,” Majhi told the media.

Odisha is evacuating more than a million people from 14 districts, while West Bengal is evacuating over 300,000 people from coastal areas.

Officials from the two states and rescue teams are on alert. Schools in the coastal regions have been shut.

Flight operations from Bhubaneswar and Kolkata city airports have been suspended from Thursday evening to Friday morning and more than 200 trains have been cancelled as authorities brace for the storm.

Fishermen have been warned against venturing into the sea and contingency plans have been made for Paradip port in Odisha to ensure safety of the staff and people living nearby.

The weather department has said “heavy to very heavy” rainfall is expected along the coast for the next 24 hours.

Odisha and West Bengal experience severe storms and cyclones every year.

In 1999, more than 10,000 people were killed in a cyclone in Odisha.

Last year, at least 16 people lost their lives when a cyclone lashed India and Bangladesh.

On Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris stood in front of the vice-presidential residence in Washington DC, and delivered a short but withering attack on her Republican presidential opponent.

Calling Donald Trump “increasingly unhinged and unstable”, she cited critical comments made by John Kelly, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, in a New York Times interview.

The vice-president quoted Kelly describing Trump as someone who “certainly falls into the general definition of fascists” and who had spoken approvingly of Hitler several times.

She said her rival wanted “unchecked power” and later, during a CNN town hall event, was asked point-blank if she believed he was a “fascist”. “Yes, I do,” she replied.

Shortly after the town hall finished, Trump posted on X and Truth Social that Harris’s comments were a sign that she was losing. He said she was “increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind”.

In the home stretch of political campaigns – particularly one as tight and hard-fought as the 2024 presidential race – there is a natural tendency for candidates to turn negative. Attacks tend to be more effective in motivating supporters to head to the polls and disrupting the opposing campaigns.

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For Harris, however, the heavier hand toward Trump stands in contrast to the more optimistic, “joyful” messaging of the early days of her campaign.

While she did warn at the Democratic convention of a Trump presidency without the guardrails, Harris largely stepped back from President Joe Biden’s core campaign message that Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy.

According to political strategist Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, however, it is clear why Harris was quick this time to amplify Kelly’s dark portrait of Trump as a man with authoritarian tendencies.

“Everything she does now is tactical,” he said. “The imperative was to make sure as many voters as possible know about what Kelly said.”

The vice-president’s latest remarks come on the heels of a multi-week strategy by her campaign to appeal to independent voters and moderate Republicans who could be open to supporting the Democratic ticket. Polls suggest the race is extremely tight, with neither candidate having a decisive lead in any of the battleground states.

The suburbs around the biggest cities in key battleground states – Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Phoenix, for instance – are populated by college-educated professionals who have traditionally voted for Republicans but who polls indicate have doubts about returning Trump to the White House.

“Her case for how she wins this thing is to create as broad a coalition as possible and bring over disaffected Republicans – people who just don’t feel that they can vote for Trump again,” Mr Bennett said.

Devynn DeVelasco, a 20-year-old independent from Nebraska, is one of those who had already been convinced by the long list of senior Republicans who worked for then-President Trump but now say he is unfit for office.

Although she hopes some Republicans will join her in supporting Harris, she worries there is fatigue around the claims made about the former president.

“When these reports [about Kelly’s comments] came out I wasn’t shocked, it didn’t change much,” Ms DeVelasco told the BBC.

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Republican strategist Denise Grace Gitsham said voters have been hearing similar rhetoric about Trump since 2016, so any new allegations were unlikely to move the dial.

“If you’re voting against Donald Trump because you don’t like his personality, you’re already a decided voter,” she told the BBC. “But if you’re somebody who’s looking at the policies and that matters more to you than a vibe or a personality, then you’re going to go with the person who you felt you did best under while they were in the White House.”

Both Harris and Trump have been sharpening their barbs in recent days. During a swing through Midwest battleground states on Monday, Harris repeatedly warned of the consequences of a Trump presidency – on abortion rights, on healthcare, on the economy and on US foreign policy.

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On Friday, she will hold a rally in Texas – the state she has said most dramatically represents the anti-abortion future if Trump is back in power. Next Tuesday, she will shift focus to Washington DC, with a rally reportedly planned by the National Mall, where Trump spoke before some of his supporters attacked the US Capitol.

Trump, meanwhile, has continued his drumbeat of attacks on his Democratic counterpart. At a town hall forum in North Carolina, he said Harris was “lazy” and “stupid” and only became her party nominee because of her ethnicity and gender.

He also issued his own warning, saying that “we may not have a country anymore” if Harris wins.

None of these lines are a particular departure for Trump, however, as he has spent most of his campaign attacking Democrats and sticking to his core message on immigration, trade and the economy.

Harris’s closing pitch, meanwhile, directed toward winning over anti-Trump Republicans and independents, isn’t without its risks, said Democratic strategist Bennett.

“You are always shorting one thing to try to help promote something else,” he said. “The candidate’s time and the time spent on advertising are the two most precious commodities. And how you spend those matters.”

Trump has been a polarising figure in American politics for more than eight years now. Most Americans have strongly held, and deeply ingrained, opinions about the man by now.

If anti-Trump sentiment puts Harris over the top on election day, her latest strategic emphasis will have paid off. If not, the second-guessing will come fast and furious.

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

Four years after Chinese and Indian soldiers engaged in a brutal and deadly clash along a disputed Himalayan border, the nations’ leaders have finally met formally.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in Russia.

The meeting came days after the two sides announced they had reached an agreement on “disengagement and resolution of issues in these areas”.

On Wednesday, Modi and Xi welcomed the step and pledged to resume dialogue between their nations.

The leaders have agreed to set an “early date” for a meeting between their top officials to resolve the issues.

India-China relations have been affected by tensions for decades – the root cause being 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, at times sparking a confrontation.

The two countries fought a war in 1962 in which India suffered a heavy defeat. Since then, there have been several skirmishes between the two sides.

When India repealed Article 370 of its constitution in 2019, taking away guaranteed autonomy for Indian-administered Kashmir, China denounced the move at the UN Security Council. Kashmir included the high-altitude Ladakh, parts of which China claims.

The clash in Galwan Valley in 2020 was their worst confrontation in decades. At least 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese troops were killed.

Later that year, the two countries pulled back troops from some parts of the disputed border and pledged to de-escalate tensions – but the situation remained tense.

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

The military standoff also affected business ties between the two as Delhi increased its scrutiny of Chinese investments in the country and banned several popular Chinese mobile apps, including TikTok. It also stopped direct passenger flights to China.

While Wednesday’s meeting between Modi and Xi saw their first formal talks since October 2019, the leaders had a pull-aside meeting at the G20 summit in Bali in 2022. Months later, China said they had reached a “consensus” during the meeting to restore bilateral ties.

The two leaders also met informally on the sidelines of the 2023 Brics summit in Johannesburg, where they agreed to intensify efforts to disengage and de-escalate, Reuters reports.

The same year, Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Kazakhstan and agreed to step up talks.

Last month, Jaishankar said about 75% of the “disengagement” at the border had been sorted out.

A few days later, civil aviation authorities from the two sides also met and discussed early resumption of direct passenger flights.

Several media organisations, including Bloomberg, have reported that the Indian businesses have put pressure on the government to relax restrictions on China saying they hurt India’s high-end manufacturing, such as the chipmaking sector.

But Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Tuesday that India would be cautious while easing restrictions on Chinese businesses.

On Monday, Jaishankar said the two countries had agreed to resume border patrols and go back to the situation that existed before the 2020 clash.

“With that we can say the disengagement with China has been completed,” he added.

The Indian Army chief said the countries were now trying to restore trust. “That will happen once we are able to see each other and we are able to convince and reassure each other that we are not creeping into buffer zones that have been created,” General Upendra Dwivedi said.

China’s foreign ministry did not comment on specifics regarding the deal, but confirmed the two sides had “reached resolutions on relevant issues”.

“China commends the progress made and will continue working with India for the sound implementation of these resolutions,” spokesperson Lin Jian said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Modi and Xi have announced that their special representatives will meet to find solutions “to explore a fair, reasonable and mutually-acceptable solution to the boundary question”, India’s external affairs ministry said in a statement.

It added that their ministers and other officials would also work to stabilise and rebuild bilateral relations.

The leaders talked about the importance of maintaining good ties, with PM Modi saying their relationship was vital for global peace.

“Maintaining peace and stability on the border should remain our priority. Mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual sensitivity should remain the basis of our relations,” he said.

The Brics summit was attended by leaders of 36 countries who discussed ways to reduce Global South’s dependence on dollar as currency for trade between countries. The summit was also attended by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres.

President Xi told Modi that the international community was watching the meeting closely. He said Delhi and Beijing must set an example for boosting the unity of developing countries and “to contribute to promoting multi-polarisation and democracy in international relations”.

“China and India are both ancient civilisations, major developing countries and important members of the Global South. We are both at a crucial phase in our respective modernisation endeavours,” he added.

Director Tim Burton has revealed that being on the internet makes him feel “quite depressed”.

Ahead of the opening of a major career retrospective in London, he told BBC News: “Anybody who knows me knows I’m a bit of a technophobe.

“If I look at the internet, I found that I got quite depressed,” the 66-year-old said. “It scared me because I started to go down a dark hole. So I try to avoid it, because it doesn’t make me feel good.”

The World of Tim Burton at the Design Museum features 600 items which organisers say give “a rare private glimpse into his creative process” and goes on display in the UK for the first time on Friday.

Burton is best-known for directing films such as Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland, as well as Beetlejuice and its recent sequel.

Reflecting on his use of the internet, Burton said: “I get depressed very quickly, maybe more quickly than other people. But it doesn’t take me much to start to click and start to short circuit.”

The film-maker said keeping busy and doing simple things such as looking at clouds helps him feel better. As does his collection of ten giant dinosaur models that he keeps in his backyard including a 20ft T-Rex.

Burton pulls out his mobile phone and proudly shows us a picture of a 50-foot Brontosaurus. He buys the ones you find at amusement parks, adding that actor Nicolas Cage has “real ones”.

Burton was born in a California suburb just outside of Los Angeles but has lived in London for the past 20 years.

“I was a foreigner in my own country,” he told the BBC when asked about adopting the UK capital. “When I came here, even as a foreigner, I felt more at home, because that’s where I feel comfortable”.

Burton has long been considered a “tortured outcast” and self-declared “weirdo”. As a child, he channelled his creativity into art and grew up watching classic horror movies and creature features which developed his love for monsters.

“It was very clear from King Kong to Frankenstein to Creature from the Black Lagoon that all the monsters were the most emotional. The humans were the ones that scared me,” he said.

“They were the angry villagers in Frankenstein – like the internet – these nameless faces [Burton makes monster roaring noises] and the monster always had the most emotion and most feeling even though they’re looked upon as a certain way.

“Every monster usually has some kind of pathos and some kind of humanity” that the humans lacked he added.

Objects connected to films ranging from Catwoman to Corpse Bride have been loaned to the new exhibition from Burton’s personal archives, film studios, and private collections of collaborators such as the designer Colleen Atwood.

What still scares Burton are the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.

“It’s something I can’t even quite fathom,” he said, before referring to an incident last year where AI was used to transform Disney characters into Burton-style characters.

“Until it happens to you, really don’t understand it. But it was quite disturbing: intellectually and emotionally disturbing. It felt like my soul had been taken from me.

“It’s like when other cultures say, ‘oh, don’t take my picture, because you’re taking away my soul’. And that’s how it is. It’s something that’s robbing you of humanity.

“All I can say is, like, I understand these other cultures when they feel like your soul is being sucked”.

Burton first began working as an apprentice animator at Disney and made immense contributions to stop-motion animation before going on to direct blockbusters such as Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).

When asked whether he would return to directing a film from the superhero genre, his response was a quick “no”.

“It felt new at the time,” he reflects. “There was pressure because it was a big movie and it was a different interpretation of comic books. So that was a pressure, but it wasn’t the pressure that you would experience now.”

Burton demurs when asked about what he wants to shoot next. Perhaps the horror classic Frankenstein?

“No, no,” he laughs. “I’ve done my version with a dog [referring to his 2012 film Frankenweenie]. That’s fine.”

He admits to feeling invigorated with recent successes of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the Netflix series Wednesday, of which he directed four episodes.

“The Hollywood journey is an Alice in Wonderland kind of journey. You go up, you go down, you go sideways. That’s the way it is,” he said.

“What I realize now, maybe because I’m older as well, is OK I’m just gonna do what I want. And if you want to do it, fine. If not, then you don’t have to go on this journey with me”.

More than 32,000 people bought advance tickets to The World of Tim Burton, making this the biggest ever ticket pre-sale in the Design Museum’s 35-year history.

The exhibition has been staged in 14 cities in 11 countries since 2014. But the London version displays more than 90 items that are new.

Visitors will also be able to see a recreation of Burton’s private studio which includes a miniature version of Godzilla on his work desk, reflecting his love of Japanese Kaiju films.

But Burton had initially resisted allowing the exhibition to come to London.

“It’s a strange thing, to put 50 years of art and your life on view for everyone to see,” he said.

“However, collaborating with the Design Museum for this final stop was the right choice. They understand the art”.

Tim Marlow, CEO of the Design Museum, said: “During his extraordinary career, Tim Burton has harnessed a compelling mixture of gothic horror and black comedy, of melancholy and enchantment, of oddball whimsy and visionary range in the creation of fantastical filmic worlds.”

However when discussing his success, Burton tells us that he rejects the term “Burtonesque” even though it’s widely used in popular culture to describe his oeuvre.

“I never liked that,” he says firmly. “I don’t want to become a thing. It’s taken me my whole life to try to be something like resembling human”.

A tropical storm has dumped one month’s worth of rains over large swathes of the northern Philippines, leaving more than 20 people dead and forcing 150,000 others to evacuate.

Trami made landfall Thursday on the northeast coast of Luzon, the country’s most populous island, and caused widespread flooding and landslides.

The Bicol peninsula was worst-hit, where floodwaters chased people and their pets to the second storey of their homes.

Typhoons are common in the Philippines at this time of the year, but Trami’s rains were unusually heavy, the state weather bureau told BBC News.

People trapped on their roofs posted photos of their ordeal on social media to appeal for rescue, prompting the coast guard to deploy rubber boats.

“It’s getting dangerous. We’re waiting for rescuers,” Karen Tabagan from the flooded municipality of Bato told AFP News agency.

The rains also triggered volcanic mudslides or lahar in villages surrounding Mount Mayon, an active volcano in Bicol. Photos showed the tyres of cars and the front doors of houses partially buried in dark grey mud.

The storm, known locally as Kristine, had dumped one month’s worth of rain over 24 hours in Bicol, Ana Claren, a forecaster at the state weather bureau in Manila, told BBC News.

The rainfall amount also exceeded what the weather bureau considers “normal” over 30 years of observation, she said.

“The rains were really severe. We did not expect this,” Glenda Bonga, the acting governor of Albay province, told local broadcaster ANC.

The storm, which was packing winds of up to 95 km/h (59 mph), was forecast to leave the country’s north-west coast late Thursday evening.

Rescuers were also searching for a missing fisherman after a boat sunk in the waters off Bulacan province, west of Manila, the local disaster agency told AFP news agency.

Rescue work has been difficult as the winds were causing a strong current, said Geraldine Martinez, a rescue officer in Bulacan’s Obando municipality.

At least a dozen flights across the country had been cancelled.

Even as it was on its way out of the Philippines, officials have continued to warn of heavy rainfall, flooding, landslides and storm surges.

Another low pressure area off Bicol could intensify into a tropical depression by the end of the week, Ms Claren said.

The Philippines is hit by an average of four typhoons annually, some of them deadly.

However, recent years have seen typhoons with stronger, more destructive winds and heavier rains.

A video purportedly showing popular Cameroonian singer Simon Longkana Agno, widely known as Longue Longue, being tortured has led to widespread outrage in the country.

The artist, renowned for making hits about bad governance, colonialism, and other social ills, said the video was taken after he was arrested in 2019, but this is the first time it has been seen by the public.

Longue Longue shared it himself, but it is unclear why it is only coming out now or how he obtained it.

The Cameroonian authorities are yet to comment.

In the video, Longue Longue’s hands are cuffed behind his back, and he is sitting on the floor in his underwear as the soles of his bare feet are beaten with a flat machete.

Despite his desperate pleas for the beating to stop, the men, alleged by Longue Longue to be security agents, continue.

The BBC has been unable to verify the video. We have tried to contact the singer without success.

On his Facebook page, he said he was arrested for his “freedom of thought”, and promised to file legal complaints in both Cameroon and France.

He was arrested in 2019 after posting a video saying that long-time President Paul Biya had rigged the 2018 election.

The artist said opposition leader, Maurice Kamto of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM), was the rightful winner of the polls.

At the time, the Constitutional Council rejected Kamto’s demand for a re-run because of alleged rigging.

The opposition leader is among those to have denounced the apparent torture and called for an investigation into the incident.

“The CRM strongly condemns this state barbarity and demands the urgent opening of an enquiry to arrest and immediately bring before the courts the perpetrators of these inhuman acts,” Kamto said in a statement on X.

He added that the video was “reminiscent of the horrific treatment” opposition activists faced during the crackdown in 2019 when hundreds of his supporters were detained.

Renowned Cameroonian human rights lawyer Akere Muna said Longue Longue’s treatment was a “stark reminder of the depths of depravity to which humanity can descend”.

Rights groups have criticised the government for creating an atmosphere of impunity for members of the country’s security forces.

They have also accused the authorities of cracking down on dissent ahead of next year’s presidential election.

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Mozambique’s ruling party, Frelimo, has won the country’s divisive, violence-marred election, extending its 49-year grip on power in the southern African nation, the election commission has announced.

Daniel Chapo, Frelimo’s relatively unknown presidential candidate who has been seen as an agent of change, will replace Filipe Nyusi, who has served two terms.

At 47 years old, Chapo, who gained 71% of the vote, will be the first president born after Mozambique’s independence in 1975. His closest challenger, Venancio Mondlane got 20%.

The election has been marred by allegations of rigging and the killing of opposition supporters, prompting protests across the country.

Zimbabwe’s President Mnangagwa, who has also been hit by allegations of election fraud over the years, prematurely congratulated Chapo on his “resounding victory”, even before the results were announced.

Former rebel group Renamo, which was previously the main opposition party, came in third.

The electoral commission says 43% of the more than 17 million registered voters took part in the elections.

Parliamentary and provincial elections were held simultaneously.

The atmosphere in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, is tense, local media report. Footage shows empty streets and closed businesses.

The main opposition candidate, Mondlane, has called for a national strike on Thursday in protest at the alleged rigging.

He added that the protests would honour his lawyer and a party official who were shot dead last week in what he described as politically motivated killings.

He claims that he won the election despite preliminary polls showing that Chapo was well ahead.

On Monday, he organised nationwide protests, which were dispersed by police firing live rounds and tear gas.

The election has also been criticised by EU election observers, who said some results may have been doctored.

They said there were “irregularities during counting and unjustified alteration of election results”.

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Turkey’s government says its military has struck sites in Iraq and Syria linked to Kurdish militant group the PKK, after blaming it for an attack near Ankara that killed at least five people.

The Turkish government said that the strikes since Wednesday had killed 59 people it described as “terrorists”. A Kurdish-led militia in Syria said 12 civilians died in the north and east of the country.

Various videos from the attack earlier on Wednesday show at least two people firing guns around the entrance of Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), which is located some 40km (25 miles) outside the capital.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, in which 22 people were injured.

The Turkish defence ministry said that since Wednesday night and Thursday morning, its strikes had “successfully eliminated” 47 targets including caves, shelters, warehouses and other facilities in northern Iraq and Syria.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the attack on TAI “heinous” in a post on X.

Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said shortly after the attack that the two perpetrators, a woman and a man, had been “neutralised”.

On Thursday, Yerlikaya said the attackers had been identified as PKK members Ali Orek and Mine Sevjin Alcicek.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is banned as a terrorist organisation in Turkey, the US and UK, and has been fighting against the Turkish state since the 1980s for greater rights for the country’s significant Kurdish minority.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said on Thursday morning that Turkey had launched a “new wave” of attacks, including on “civilian gatherings”, killing 12 people.

According to the the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Turkish warplanes and drones targeted infrastructure in northern and eastern Syria.

It added that the region had seen “intensive raids” in the cities of Hasakah, Raqqa, Kobani, Manbaj and Tal Rifaat.

The watchdog said Turkish forces resumed attacks on Thursday morning, with targets including a checkpoint near a train station, a bakery and power station.

The Turkish defence ministry said earlier that “all kinds of precautions were taken to prevent harm to innocent civilians, friendly elements, historical and cultural assets and the environment”.

Turkish Vice-President Cevdet Yilmaz said four of the victims of Wednesday’s attack near Ankara were TAI employees, while the fifth was a taxi driver.

The victims were named by Turkey’s state-run news agency as Cengiz Coskun, a quality control officer, Zahide Guclu, a mechanical engineer, security guard Atakan Sahin Erdogan, another employee called Huseyin Canbaz and Murat Arslan, the taxi driver.

Local media had earlier reported that the attackers killed the cab driver before taking his vehicle to carry out the attack.

The blast took place around the time of a shift change, and staff had to be directed to shelters, they said.

Yerlikaya also confirmed that seven special ops forces members were among the 22 who were injured in the attack.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he was “appalled” by the attack in Ankara.

In a post on X, he wrote: “We stand shoulder to shoulder with Turkey as a Nato ally and close friend.”

President Erdogan – who at the time was in Russia for the Brics summit – condemned what he called a “vile terror attack” during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in remarks broadcast live on TV.

He later posted a lengthy statement on X, saying that security forces acted quickly to neutralise the threat, and that “no terrorist organisation, no evil focus targeting our security will be able to achieve their goals”.

Turkish authorities have imposed a media blackout on details of the attack, and users in large areas of the country have reported not being able to use social media sites like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.

The president of Turkey’s Radio and TV Supreme Council, Ebubekir Sahin, warned that all images relating to the incident should be removed from social media, and urged users not to share images which “will serve the purpose of terrorism”.

TAI is a key player in Turkey’s aerospace industry, designing, developing and manufacturing various aircraft for commercial and military use.

It is the company designated by the Nato member to be the licensed manufacturer for the US-designed F-16 fighter jets. TAI also plays a role in modernising older aircraft for use by the Turkish military.

The firm’s two principal owners are the Turkish Armed Forces and a civilian arm of Turkey’s government charged with improving its defence capabilities and managing military procurement.

The blast took place as a major trade fair for defence and aerospace industries was going on in Istanbul this week.

Israel’s intensified bombing campaign of Lebanon has caused more damage to buildings in two weeks than occurred during a year of cross-border fighting with Hezbollah, according to satellite-based radar data assessed by the BBC.

Data shows that more than 3,600 buildings in Lebanon appear to have been damaged or destroyed between 2 and 14 October 2024. This represents about 54% of the total estimated damage since cross-border hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah broke out just over a year ago.

The damage data was gathered by Corey Scher of City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. They compared radar satellite images to reveal sudden changes in the height or structure of buildings which indicate damage.

Wim Zwijnenburg, an environmental expert from the Pax for Peace organisation, reviewed the satellite-based radar data and warned of the impact of Israel’s bombing.

“The Israeli military campaign seems to be creating a ‘dead zone’ in the south of Lebanon to drive out the population, and making it difficult for Hezbollah to re-establish positions, at the cost of the civilian population,” he said.

Cross-border hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah broke out after the armed Lebanese group started firing rockets in and around northern Israel in support of Palestinians on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel.

Israel invaded southern Lebanon in a dramatic escalation on 30 September to destroy, it said, Hezbollah weapons and infrastructure in “limited, localised, targeted raids”.

Satellite photos, radar imagery, and military records show recent Israeli bombardment in Lebanon has focused on the southern border region. It has also expanded to central and northern areas, including the Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The Israeli army said it hit thousands of Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut.

Most of the strikes on Beirut have targeted Dahieh, a southern suburb that is home to thousands of civilians. The Israeli military claims the area is home to Hezbollah’s command headquarters.

A series of Israeli strikes on buildings in the area killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September.

Separate data from the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), which has been analysed by the BBC, indicates at least 2,700 attacks by the Israeli military on Lebanese areas from 1 September until 11 October 2024. While these attacks primarily focus on southern border areas, they have also extended to northern and central regions. Each Israeli attack can also include several bombings.

Hezbollah has carried out around 540 attacks against Israel in the same timeframe, according to Acled. Each Hezbollah attack can include a barrage of rockets, missiles and drones.

The Israeli military says air strikes in Lebanon are targeting Hezbollah infrastructure.

It regularly adds it wants to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of Israeli border areas displaced by attacks from the Iran-backed group.

About 60,000 people have been evacuated from northern Israel because of near-daily attacks by Hezbollah. But some rockets have reached further south and damaged homes in and around the coastal city of Haifa.

Hezbollah reiterated it would continue sending rockets into Israel unless a ceasefire is reached. The group’s deputy secretary general claimed rockets would focus on military targets, but warned Hezbollah had the right to attack anywhere in Israel in response to strikes across Lebanon.

On the Lebanese side, many Israeli air strikes targeted the city of Tyre, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut, according to the BBC’s analysis of the latest monthly data collected by Acled.

Lebanon’s government says up to 1.3 million people have been internally displaced, whilst Prime Minister Najib Mikati warned of the “largest displacement” in the country’s history.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been issuing evacuation orders to residents across the country, including areas of Beirut.

In the south, the army instructed residents of several villages to leave their homes and “immediately head north of the Awali River,” which meets the coast about 50 km (30 miles) from the Israeli border.

“This is a humanitarian catastrophe,” Gabriel Karlsson, Middle East Manager at the British Red Cross in Beirut, told the BBC.

He said there are insufficient shelters to accommodate so many evacuees.

“I saw children sleeping in the streets,” Karlsson added, urging humanitarian organisations to coordinate their efforts to address the escalating crisis.

Lebanese officials say at least 2,350 have been killed and over 10,000 injured in Israeli attacks. The Lebanon health minister said many casualties were civilians.

On the Israeli side, 60 people have been killed and more than 570 wounded by Hezbollah attacks, Israeli authorities say.

“Collateral damage is inevitable in war”, Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, told the BBC.

The retired major-general blamed Hezbollah for the war and claimed Israel’s ground offensive would force the group out from the border areas.

Zwijnenburg, from the Pax for Peace organisation, however, has warned of the impact of Israel’s military campaign on civilians and the populated areas.

“The heavy blast radius kills and maims civilians nearby”, he said, in reference to Israeli air strikes.

“Open-source data combined with satellite imagery also showed that civilian infrastructure such as irrigation channels, gas stations and electricity grids were damaged, which is worsening the humanitarian situation,” he added.

As someone who served four Israeli prime ministers and was deputy head of the country’s National Security Council, Eran Etzion’s judgement was trusted at the highest levels of the state.

A longstanding critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he is also someone whose years of public service earned him widespread respect.

But now Mr Etzion, a former soldier himself, is warning that Israel’s military – the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) – might be committing war crimes in northern Gaza. And he is suggesting that officers and troops should reject illegal orders.

“They should refuse. If a soldier or an officer is expected to commit something that might be suspected as a war crime, they must refuse. That’s what I would do if I were a soldier. That’s what I think any Israeli soldier should do,” he tells me.

We are sitting on the balcony of his home in Shoresh in central Israel.

Here there is the quiet sunshine of an autumn morning. A peaceful neighbourhood where some builders are working on house improvements.

Less than 40 miles down the road is the Gaza neighbourhood of Jabalia.

As Mr Etzion and I are speaking, doctors and medical staff at the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia are sending desperate voice notes to the international community begging for aid.

One senior nurse – in a message heard by the BBC – speaks in an exhausted voice of relentless privations allegedly imposed by the Israelis besieging Jabalia.

“My friend, I’m so so tired,” he says. “I can’t explain how tired I am. The water is empty. We don’t have water. We contacted the Israeli force to allow us to charge water to the tank, but they don’t accept that…. And we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. The situation is very very bad.”

Another nurse says: “I am sorry for my language, I can’t talk well. I am very fatigued and dizzy. I haven’t eaten since yesterday. We try to give the food that we found to the patients and families and we don’t eat ourselves.”

Tens of thousands of people are now fleeing Jabalia as the Israeli army continues its offensive against what it says is an attempt by Hamas to regroup.

Mr Etzion is worried for the civilians of Jabalia and his country. “There is a very dangerous erosion of norms. There is a very widespread sense of revenge, of rage,” he says.

This is because, Mr Etzion says, Israel is in the grip of trauma after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks in which around 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 200 taken hostage into Gaza.

“The will to revenge could be understood. It’s human, but we’re not a gang, we’re not a terror organisation, and we’re not a militia. We’re a sovereign country. We have our history, we have our morals, we have our values, and we must operate under international law and under international standards if we want to continue to be a member of the international community, which we do.”

He is speaking out as a former soldier, as someone whose children served in the IDF, and whose family and friends still serve. “I’m just a concerned citizen trying to raise my voice. So that’s what I’m doing. I want to make sure that no soldier is involved in anything that could be constituted as a war crime.”

Israel has faced mounting international criticism over its conduct during the war. The United States has threatened to cut arms shipments if Israel does not surge aid into Gaza.

The UN has accused the Israelis of repeatedly blocking or impeding the transfer of aid, most recently into northern Gaza.

The IDF has consistently rejected allegations that it is implementing a deliberate policy of starvation to force residents to flee from Jabalia. Israel has long accused Hamas of using the civilian population as human shields, launching attacks from schools and medical facilities.

“Hamas does not hesitate to abuse Gazans, exploit them, steal aid from them, and forcefully prevent them from evacuating when it is necessary for them to do so,” the IDF said in May.

One of Britain’s most prominent war crimes lawyers, Prof Philippe Sands KC, told me that while Israel had a right to self defence after the 7 October attacks, it was now violating international law.

“It has to be proportionate. It has to meet the requirements of international humanitarian law. It must distinguish between civilians and military targets.

“It doesn’t allow you to use famine as a weapon of war. It doesn’t allow you to forcibly deport or evacuate large numbers of people.

“So it’s impossible to see what is going on now in Gaza, as it’s impossible to see what happened on 7 October, and not say crimes are screaming out.”

Prof Sands has led the genocide case against Myanmar, and the case for Palestinian statehood at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

His book East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. The book also details his own Jewish family’s experience of the Holocaust.

I ask if the crisis in Gaza makes him worry about the survival of international law.

He points to the fact that the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister.

The prosecutor also sought warrants for three Hamas leaders. All three, including Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, are now dead.

“It [international law] is not working on the ground in relation to Russia and Ukraine. It’s not working on the ground in relation to Sudan. It’s not working on the ground in relation to Palestine and Israel.

“There’s just no ifs and buts. We just have to, we have to recognize that. But that is not a reason to tear up the entire system.

“If you ask yourself what the alternative is, which is basically no pieces of paper with the words Treaties written on it, you’re back to the 1930s, and at least what we have now is a system of rules which allows people to stand up and say: ‘This is a violation of a treaty’.”

We asked the IDF for an interview but they said no spokesperson was available today, and referred us to an earlier statement which says: “The IDF will continue to act, as it always has done, according to international law.”

And today the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the army’s humanitarian relief wing, said it was their policy to facilitate the entrance of aid into Gaza “without limits”.

This is Israel’s narrative. But as scenes of civilian suffering continue to emerge from Jabalia it is being widely challenged.

Israel has carried out at least four air strikes on the historic Lebanese port city of Tyre, hours after expanding its evacuation orders to cover several central neighbourhoods.

Videos showed huge clouds of black smoke rising from a seafront area that is only a few hundred metres from Unesco World Heritage-listed Roman ruins.

Lebanon’s state news agency said the strikes caused “massive destruction” to homes and infrastructure, but there were no reports of any casualties.

The Israeli military said it targeted command-and-control centres of Hezbollah, including its Southern Front headquarters.

The military’s Arabic spokesman had earlier issued a map of the neighbourhoods where he said it was going to act “forcefully” against the Iran-backed armed group.

Tens of thousands of residents had already fled the city in recent weeks in response to Israel’s intense air campaign and ground invasion.

But before the strikes began, a spokesman for a disaster management unit said about 14,000 people were still living in the city, including those displaced from elsewhere in the south.

“You could say that the entire city of Tyre is being evacuated,” Bilal Kashmar told AFP news agency, adding that many people were heading towards the suburbs.

Wael Farraj said he and his family had fled in response to the evacuation order and that they were sitting by the sea when they heard that their home had been destroyed.

“We took the children, grabbed what we could,” he told Reuters news agency as he inspected the damage. “We came back and looked, and our house had collapsed.”

“We are staying here and we are steadfast. We will remain here… among the rubble.”

Another man, Issam Awad, said: “Just like everyone else, we were sitting, and suddenly, without warning, the bombing started.”

“Thank God, we’re all fine, and no-one got hurt by the explosions.”

The Israeli military said the strikes were part of its efforts to target Hezbollah’s activities and obstruct its attempts to rebuild its military capabilities.

It also accused the group of systematically taking over civilian and religious areas to carry out attacks in a way that endangered the Lebanese population.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that Israeli aircraft carried out multiple air strikes elsewhere in southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley on Wednesday.

The regions were also targeted overnight along with the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut, where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

The Israeli military said the strikes in Beirut targeted weapons storage and manufacturing facilities, as well as command centres belonging to Hezbollah.

On Wednesday evening the pro-Hezbollah TV channel al-Mayadeen said its bureau in the city had been hit by an Israeli strike.

The military also said it had killed the Hezbollah sector commanders for the southern areas of Jibchit, Jouaiya and Qana in air strikes over the past several days, and that its troops had killed about 70 Hezbollah fighters during operations inside southern Lebanon to dismantle the group’s infrastructure and weapons caches.

There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah.

However, the group did say its fighters had launched barrages of rockets into Israel on Wednesday, including one in the morning that targeted the Gilot intelligence base, which is north of the central city of Tel Aviv.

Rocket alert sirens sounded in Tel Aviv, prompting senior US officials travelling with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to be ushered to a safe room in their hotel. It is not known whether or not Blinken himself was also forced to shelter.

Another rocket barrage hit two factory buildings in the northern Israeli towns of Acre and Kiryat Bialik, causing damage but no injuries.

Later, Hezbollah confirmed that Hashem Safieddine, who had been expected to become the group’s next leader, was killed in an Israeli air strike in southern Beirut on 4 October.

Safieddine was the cousin of Hezbollah’s late leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in another strike in the capital the previous week.

Israel’s launched its full-scale military campaign 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 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 1,900 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.

At least 19 people, including six women and five children, were killed in an Israeli strike on a house in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, a local official has said.

Suad Hammoud told the BBC that the dead included former school principal Ahmed Ezzedine and three generations of his family, who all lived in the three-storey building in the village of Teffahta.

The village’s imam, Sheikh Abdo Abo Rayya, was killed while walking near the house at the time of the strike along with two passers-by, she added.

The Israeli military has not yet commented on the incident, but it has repeatedly said it takes measures to mitigate harm to civilians.

It has carried out thousands of air strikes across Lebanon over the past four weeks, targeting what it has said are the armed group Hezbollah’s operatives, infrastructure and weapons.

Ms Hammoud said Wednesday’s strike in Teffahta happened after the funeral for Ahmed Ezzedine’s cousin and brother-in-law, Khodr, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in the neighbouring village of Marwanieh on Monday.

But she said a report by the state-run National News Agency (NNA) that the strike had targeted a wake for mourners to express their condolences was incorrect.

“Only the house’s residents were there. They came back after the funeral. There were no strangers there,” she said.

“People are aware that the circumstances do not allow them offering condolences in person, so there are no wakes in the village anymore.”

Also inside the house with Mr Ezzedine were his wife, sister, daughters, daughter-in-law, sons-in-law and his grandchildren, she said.

Mr Ezzedine lived on the ground floor, while his children and their families lived on the upper floors. But everyone is believed to have been on the ground floor when the house was hit.

A video posted on social media showed shortly afterwards showed a huge plume of smoke rising from a hillside in Teffahta where the house was located.

On Wednesday morning, Lebanese TV broadcast footage of a pile of rubble and twisted metal that once made up the upper floors.

The Lebanese health ministry has not reported how many people were killed in the strike. But Ms Hammoud and Teffahta’s community Facebook account put the death toll at 19.

The Facebook account named the five children as Mohammed Yassin, Ahmed and Malak Ezzedine, and Sara and Mohammed Kinyar, and the six women as Zaineb, Malak, Hadiya, Fadiya and Fatima Ezzedine and Zaina Taleb.

Sheikh Abo Rayya was walking near the house at the time of the strike, according to Ms Hammoud.

“The houses in the village aren’t isolated, they’re very close to one another,” she said, adding that another two men identified by the Facebook account as Rabih Younes and Hussein Saleh were also likely to have been passers-by killed by the explosion.

A relative of Sheikh Abo Rayya told the BBC that strike happened at about 17:10 local time, about 15 minutes after the funeral.

They insisted that the sheikh was not the target, noting that the house had been “obliterated”.

“Sheikh Abdo was just passing by the house. He wasn’t inside the house. He was on his way to the mosque with his companion. They were going to prayers,” they said.

“The imam was going down the hill and the pressure wave blew him away. He didn’t die immediately. He was injured and died at the hospital around five hours later.”

Last week, the UN human rights office received reports that 12 women and two children were among 23 people killed in an Israeli air strike on a four-storey residential building in the northern Lebanese town of Aitou.

It called for an investigation into the attack, expressing concerns with respect to international humanitarian law, including the principles of distinction and proportionality.

The Israeli military said it “struck a target belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organisation”.

Israel’s launched an 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 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 1,900 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.

Mohammed Sukayneh picked his way through slabs of rubble and twisted metal, clutching a few plastic bags – all he could recover from his home of 45 years.

It was brought down on top of him and his family last night by an Israeli airstrike, that killed at 18 people, four of them children, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

The attack happened without warning in a place where people thought they would be safe – about 150 metres from the entrance to Lebanon’s largest public hospital, the Rafik Hariri hospital in southern Beirut.

Mohammed and his family were asleep in their beds.

“We didn’t recognise what is happening,” he said.

“After the strike we hear the sound like ‘boom, boom, boom, boom’ like this. And everything is thrown on us. Stones, metal, steel, fresh blood, fresh meat on us. You couldn’t speak, you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t take your oxygen.”

He names five neighbours who are still under the rubble of their home. And there were others, killed in an instant, in their own neighbourhood – including two 19-year-old girls who were sitting outside his door.

Mohammed, 54, survived with a grazed arm, but his 20-year-old nephew is now in intensive care. “Half of his brain is crushed,” he said.

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A civil defence worker at the scene told us six residential buildings had been brought down, most of them three or four stories high.

A veiled woman sat on the ground, with her hands on her head, rocking back and forth in distress. “There are no Hezbollah here,” she said, “we are all civilians”.

A neighbour said, “everyone flew through the air”.

Minutes later more remains were recovered from the rubble and carried away in a black body bag.

I asked Mohammed what he thought Israel could have been targeting, in this heavily populated area.

“They are hitting everything randomly,” he replied, his voice strengthened by anger.

“Without seeing there is children. Where are the guns here? Where are the rockets here? Blind, Israeli enemies. Blind.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says it struck a “Hezbollah terrorist target near the hospital” without providing any information about what the target was. It says the hospital itself was not targeted or hit.

Rafik Hariri hospital director Jihad Saadeh said it was struck by shrapnel but is functioning normally and will not be evacuated.

Not so for the Al Sahel private hospital, about 2km away, which was emptied out last night.

“We evacuated instantly, like crazy,” says Dr Mazen Alameh, the general manager.

“We cannot risk anyone’s lives. We cannot take it as granted that they (Israel) will not bomb.”

The hurried evacuation of 10 patients and 50 staff came after a public claim by the Israeli military that the hospital was sitting on top of a Hezbollah bunker, full of riches.

The IDF gave no proof but produced a 3D animation, claiming to show a bunker beneath the building. “There are hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold inside the bunker, right now,” said the IDF spokesman Rear Adm Daniel Hagari.

It sounded like an invitation to a heist.

At the hospital today management and doctors gathered to deny “Israel’s false allegation” and give us a tour, including the two floors below ground. The hospital is in the southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold, but staff insist strongly that it is not linked with any group.

“It’s really shocking to say that Sahel Hospital is affiliated with any party in Lebanon,” says Dr Alameh. “It’s a private hospital. It’s a teaching hospital for doctors, physicians and other medical students.”

He dismissed Israel’s claim of a hidden bunker. “The hospital was founded 40 years ago on an old house,” he said.

“It’s impossible to have any tunnel or infrastructure underneath. Any person in the world can come here and see everything they want.”

We were encouraged to check in every corner. Nowhere was off limits, not even the morgue. Bundles of surgical scrubs, and packets of surgical instruments were opened to show there was nothing concealed.

After the tour, we were allowed to move around freely. We saw empty wards and anxious staff, but no hint of a bunker.

Israel claimed the entrance was in a neighbouring building. We went there too and had free access to the parking lot underneath. If there was an entrance to a secret bunker, we did not find it.

The only door we saw led to a lift, which we could not open. But that door was not concealed, and seemed an unlikely access point to a hidden chamber full of gold.

As we left the hospital as an Israeli drone circled overhead in the sunshine. Israel says its air force is “monitoring the compound but it will not strike the hospital itself.”

For now, Al Sahel remains closed, but doctors want to get back to treating the sick.

“We are an institution helping people,” said Dr Walid Alameh, the medical director, and a cousin of Dr Mazen.

“The founder of this hospital is my father,” he said, becoming emotional. “This is my home. Hopefully tomorrow we will open.”

But Israel is imposing its own wartime schedule here.

This afternoon it bombed Beirut again, a short drive from the hospital, and on Hezbollah’s doorstep.

A spokesman for the armed group had called a rare press conference.

As it was underway, the IDF issued a warning, telling residents of two nearby buildings to leave as they were “located near Hezbollah facilities.”

Half an hour later two more multi story buildings vanished from the skyline in seconds, reduced to dark clouds of smoke and ash.

In homes, and in hospitals here, many are stricken by fear.

Palestinians who fled from the Israeli ground offensive on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza have given harrowing accounts of the situation there.

One man told the BBC that he saw streets strewn with bodies after being ordered to leave a shelter by Israeli forces, while a woman said some people left in such panic that they left their children behind.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees called for a temporary truce to enable safe passage for families still wishing to flee, while two local hospitals warned that they were running out of supplies.

The Israeli military said its troops were continuing operations against Hamas fighters while enabling the secure evacuation of civilians.

More than 400 people are reported to have been killed and tens of thousands have been displaced since the military said it was launching a third offensive in the Jabalia area on 6 October, saying it was rooting out Hamas fighters who had regrouped there.

It came as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel to try to revive the stalled diplomatic process for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal in the wake of last week’s killing by Israeli troops of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

After meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he told reporters that he wanted “to make sure that this is a moment of opportunity to move forward”.

Mr Blinken also emphasized the need for Israel to take additional steps to increase and sustain the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

BBC Arabic’s Gaza Today programme interviewed several displaced people who had recently fled Jabalia camp and sought refuge in the nearby Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City.

A man called Saleh said he had “endured a siege for 16 days” while sheltering with his family at Abu Hussein Primary School for Boys.

Medics and rescue workers said more than 20 people were killed in an Israeli air strike there last week. The Israeli military named on Tuesday 18 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters who it said were among the dead.

“The shelling grew closer and intensified each day, with Israeli forces advancing towards us. Today, we heard bombings very near… We feared for our lives,” Saleh said.

“We received messages via [Israeli] quadcopters urging us to evacuate, so we began to move under the watch of Israeli soldiers, who demanded we go towards either the south or west of Gaza… I had my grandmother with me, she was unable to move, like many others.”

Another man, Mohammed al-Danani, said he was at the same school and that he had “witnessed the bodies of martyrs on the streets” after complying with the evacuation order.

Engy Abdel Aal said she had been in the Abu Rashid Pond area when quadcopters broadcast orders directing people to move towards the town of Beit Lahia, just north of the camp.

“The situation was incredibly difficult, no-one knew where to go. It’s tragic and catastrophic in every sense,” she said. “Some people had to flee without their children, leaving them behind in the school while they escaped with others.”

The Israeli military announced on Tuesday that it troops were “continuing combat in the Jabalia area, while enabling the secure evacuation of civilians from the combat zone”.

“As a result, thousands of civilians have been evacuated. Dozens of terrorists were arrested from among the civilians,” it said in a post on X that included a video showing crowds walking through damaged streets.

The military also said that troops “eliminated 10 terrorists that posed a threat and operated adjacent to them” in a single strike, without giving any details.

The Palestinian Red Crescent meanwhile posted a video that it said showed an ambulance transporting the bodies of five people, including children, killed by shelling in Jabalia town on Monday.

Another graphic video filmed on the same day showed paramedic Nevin al-Dawasah trying to help dead and wounded men, women and children at a tented camp next to Jabalia Preparatory School for Boys.

After fleeing the area on Tuesday, Ms Dawasah told AFP news agency that people had been complying with an evacuation order when “suddenly there was shelling”.

“We had martyrs and wounded and there was no safe passage for the ambulances to come,” she said.

The Israeli military has not yet commented on the reports.

The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), Philippe Lazzarini, said its staff in northern Gaza were reporting that they could not find food, water or medical care.

“The smell of death is everywhere as bodies are left lying on the roads or under the rubble,” he wrote on X. “People are just waiting to die. They feel deserted, hopeless and alone.”

Mr Lazzarini called for “an immediate truce, even if for few hours, to enable safe humanitarian passage for families who wish to leave the area and reach safer places”.

A UN spokesman said Israeli authorities were continuing to deny requests from its Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to help rescue civilians trapped under the rubble and to deliver desperately needed supplies to hospitals.

The director of the Indonesian hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals near Jabalia, told BBC Arabic’s Gaza Today programme that Israeli troops were stationed outside its gates and that there was constant gunfire in the vicinity.

“This has created an atmosphere of fear and confusion among patients and medical staff,” Dr Marwan al-Sultan said. “We are also facing a critical shortage of fuel, medical supplies, personnel, food, and water.”

“Additionally, ongoing power outages force the hospital to rely on alternative energy sources that last only eight to 10 hours. During the remaining time, the medical staff cannot operate the electric generators, which endangers patients who require oxygen.”

Dr Sultan also denied reports that there had been a fire at the hospital on Monday, saying there had been a blaze inside an adjacent school, near several generators.

The Israeli military has said it is ensuring hospitals remain operational during the offensive.

It has also said that more than 230 lorries carrying food, water, medical supplies and shelters have been transferred to northern Gaza via the Erez West crossing since last week, following a two-week period when the UN said there were no deliveries.

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 42,710 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

An Indian climate activist who ended a 16-day-long hunger strike this week says his fight to save the ecology of his hometown – an icy cold desert in the northernmost part of India – is far from over.

Sonam Wangchuk, 58, became a familiar name in India when Bollywood star Aamir Khan played a character inspired by him in the 2009 blockbuster 3 Idiots.

Mr Wangchuk has also had a long career as an engineer and innovator. But in recent months, he has made headlines for holding protests seeking more autonomy for people in his home region of Ladakh, which is at the centre of border disputes between India and China.

Ladakh was part of Indian-administered Kashmir until 2019, when Prime Minister Narenda Modi’s government removed the state’s special status and split it into two federally governed territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

Earlier this month, assembly elections were held in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time since the abrogation. But Ladakh continues to be a federal territory without legislative powers.

People in Ladakh say this is unfair, and that they need their own representatives. They are also worried about the pace of infrastructural activities in the region, which they say is harming its fragile environment.

• The thousands of Indians protesting in freezing cold

Before beginning his hunger strike, Mr Wangchuk and his supporters walked for hundreds of kilometres from Ladakh to reach capital Delhi. They argued that more autonomy to Ladakh – under a constitutional provision called the Sixth Schedule -would help prevent exploitation of natural resources.

Their march on foot came after months-long talks between locals in Ladakh and federal government officials failed.

At Delhi’s borders, the protesters were detained for hours after which Mr Wangchuk began his hunger strike. He ended it on Monday after the government promised that talks would resume soon.

With his protests and interviews, Mr Wangchuk has ensured that the demands of the people of Ladakh have remained part of mainstream media discourse in India for weeks now.

Mr Wangchuk has a long history of challenging the status quo.

As a child, he studied for three years in Srinagar city (then the capital of Jammu and Kashmir state) where lessons were taught in English, Urdu and Hindi. In an interview, he recalled being the “butt of jokes” in class.

“In Srinagar, I was a dumb boy from Ladakh who could not speak Hindi or English,” he said.

In the 1980s, his experiences led him to question the education system in Ladakh, which he said did not address local needs. He protested against the use of textbooks in English and Urdu in a region where most people spoke the Ladakhi language.

“All the textbooks, even in early primary classes, came from Delhi. The examples were of unfamiliar cultures and environments like ships, oceans, coconut trees and monsoon rains,” says a note on the website of a school co-founded by him. “These alien examples in alien languages only confused Ladakhi children.”

Since then, he has worked with local authorities and communities to ensure that the education system addresses the unique needs of children in Ladakh.

His innovations have also made news.

Mr Wangchuk studied mechanical engineering after a relative noticed his experiments with concave mirrors to brighten dark buildings and cook food.

In recent years, he has developed a low-cost mud house that maintains a temperature of 15C even in -15C conditions.

He has also designed an artificial spring in the shape of an ice stupa – a hemispherical structure common in Buddhist cultures – that stores downstream water for use during late spring when farmers need water.

Earlier this year, Mr Wangchuk sat on a 21-day protest in the freezing cold “to remind the government of its promises to safeguard Ladakh’s environment and tribal indigenous culture”.

He was joined by thousands who fasted with him and held demonstrations.

It was when those protests didn’t yield the desired results that Mr Wangchuk walked to Delhi.

In the capital, he has continued his demands for the sixth schedule in Ladakh – this provision, which has been implemented in India’s northeastern states, gives special powers to tribal populations to safeguard their interests in matters including natural resources and infrastructure. Ladakh has a majority tribal population.

“The sixth schedule gives locals not just a right but a responsibility to conserve their climate, forests, rivers and glaciers,” he told reporters.

Mr Wangchuk and his supporters say that the fragile Himalayan ecology is in danger in the absence of constitutional safeguards.

The concerns stem from the fact that the government has accelerated infrastructure development in border regions.

Ladakh is strategically significant for India as it shares borders with both China and Pakistan.

The federal government has sanctioned several highways, power projects and military-related infrastructure in Ladakh, which Mr Wangchuk says will harm the region, especially in the absence of consultation with local representatives.

“We don’t oppose development. We want sustainable growth,” he said.

Mr Wangchuk and his supporters say that Ladakh’s ecology means that it can’t follow the development models of other Indian states. They say that people in cities are not mindful of the unique needs of Himalayan regions.

“You don’t get to see this in your cities but in Ladakh, there are proper winter, summer, and spring seasons, just like you read in books,” said Haji Mustafa, who had walked with Mr Wangchuk to Delhi.

Protesters have also complained about locals not benefiting from the projects in Ladakh.

“Our natural resources are getting exploited. Unemployment is very high. Local businessmen are unhappy. So, who is this development for?” Mr Mustafa asked.

The BBC has sent questions to Tashi Gyalson, who heads the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council.

In the meantime, protesters say they will continue their fight until they have a say in what happens in Ladakh.

Earlier this week, as the government agreed to resume talks, Mr Wangchuk expressed hope that a solution would emerge soon.

“I hope the talks will be held in mutual trust and will result in a happy ending for all,” he said. “And that I will not have to sit on fast again or march 1,000km to the capital.”

There aren’t many world leaders who’ve been in power for 30 years.

Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus has been accused of stealing elections, crushing dissent and dismantling democracy.

The UK, the EU and the US do not recognise him as the legitimate president of Belarus.

There’s something else you should know about him: if there’s any leader who knows Vladimir Putin inside out, it is Lukashenko. The two men have known each other for years and meet regularly.

Alexander Lukashenko met me on the sidelines of the Brics summit of emerging economies. He wants Belarus to become a member.

I asked him to comment on claims that North Korea had sent troops to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine.

“Rubbish,” Lukashenko replied. “Knowing his character Putin would never try to persuade another country to involve its army in Russia’s special operation in Ukraine.”

“And if the reports are confirmed?” I asked.

“It would be a step towards the escalation of the conflict if the armed forces of any country, even Belarus, were on the contact line,” replied Alexander Lukashenko.

“Even if we got involved in the war this would be a path to escalation. Why? Because you, the Anglo-Saxons, would immediately say that another country had got involved on one side… so Nato troops would be deployed to Ukraine.”

I ask him whether Vladimir Putin has ever asked Lukashenko to provide Belarussian troops for the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.

“Never. Neither he, nor [former Defence Minister] Sergei Shoigu, nor the current Defence Minister Andrei Belousov has ever raised that question.”

But Belarus has played a part in Russia’s war. In February 2022 Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched, partly, from Belarusian territory. Why did the country’s leader allow the Kremlin to do that?

“How do you know I gave permission for Belarusian territory to be used?” Lukashenko asks me.

“Because Belarusian territory was used [for the invasion].”

“There were exercises going on involving several thousand Russian soldiers. Putin started withdrawing these troops from where they were in southern Belarus, down a road, along the border with Ukraine.

“At one point he redirected some of these troops to Kyiv. I’m sure they’d been provoked. It’s up to Putin how he withdraws his troops. Via Kyiv. Or he could have gone through Minsk.”

“Didn’t you call Putin to ask what was going on?” I ask.

“No. He didn’t call me. And I didn’t call him. These are his troops and he has the right to move them out whichever way he likes.”

That comment reflects the degree of influence the Kremlin has in neighbouring Belarus.

Another example: Russia has stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

“Is Putin ready to use those weapons in the war in Ukraine?” I ask.

“Putin will never use the weapons stationed in Belarus without the Belarusian president’s consent,” Lukashenko tells me.

“Are you ready to allow the use of nuclear weapons?”

“I’m completely ready, otherwise why have these weapons? But only if the boot of one [foreign] soldier steps into Belarus. We have no plans to attack anyone.”

Human rights groups estimate there are currently 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus.

Alexander Lukashenko had previously told me there were none.

But speaking to me today (perhaps inadvertently) he used the phrase “political prisoner”, when speaking about the small number freed in recent months.

Some commentators have interpreted the releases as a message from Lukashenko to the West that he seeks better relations.

He denies that.

“We freed political prisoners on humanitarian grounds,” he says. “They were mostly elderly people and the sick. That’s all.

“This is no step towards improving relations with you. If you don’t want relations with us, that’s fine. We’ll get by without you.”

As the Arctic warms, polar bears face a growing risk of contracting viruses, bacteria and parasites that they were less likely to encounter just 30 years ago, research has revealed.

In a study that has provided clues about how polar bear disease could be linked to ice loss, scientists examined blood samples from bears in the Chukchi Sea – between Alaska and Russia.

They analysed samples that had been gathered between 1987 and 1994, then collected and studied samples three decades later – between 2008 and 2017.

The researchers found that significantly more of the recent blood samples contained chemical signals that bears had been infected with one of five viruses, bacteria or parasites.

It is difficult to know, from blood samples, how the bears’ physical health was affected, but wildlife biologist Dr Karyn Rode from the US Geological Survey said it showed that something was changing throughout the whole Arctic ecosystem.

The researchers tested for six different pathogens in total – viruses, bacteria or parasites that are primarily associated with land-based animals but have been recorded before in marine animals, including species that polar bears hunt.

The study covered three decades, Dr Rode said, “when there had been a substantial loss of sea ice and there’s been increased land use in [this population of polar bears]”.

“So we wanted to know if exposure had changed – particularly for some of these pathogens that we think are primarily land-oriented.”

The five pathogens, as disease-causing agents are collectively called, that have become more common in polar bears, are two parasites that cause toxoplasmosis and neosporosis, two types of bacteria that cause rabbit fever and brucellosis, and the virus that causes canine distemper.

“Bears in general are pretty robust to disease,” explained Dr Rode. “It’s not typically been known to affect bear population, but I think what it just highlights is that things [in the Arctic] are changing.”

• There are about 26,000 polar bears left in the world, with the majority in Canada. Populations are also found in the US, Russia, Greenland and Norway
• Polar bears are listed as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with climate change a key factor in their decline
• Adult males can grow to be around 3m long and can weigh close to 600kg
• Polar bears can eat up to 45kg of blubber in one sitting
• These bears have a powerful sense of smell and can sniff out prey from up to 16km away
• They are strong swimmers and have been spotted up to 100km offshore. They can swim at speeds of around 10km per hour, due in part to their paws being slightly webbed

In the US, polar bears are classified as a threatened species; scientists say the biggest threat to their future is the continuing loss of sea ice habitat, which they depend on as a platform from which to pounce on their marine prey.

Previous research using collar cameras on bears has shown that, as they spend more of the year on land – when there is no available sea ice to hunt from – the bears are unable to find enough calories.

Dr Rode explained that polar bears are top predators: “Our study suggested that they’re getting their exposure to some pathogens primarily through their prey species.

“So what we saw as changes in pathogen exposure for polar bears is indicative of changes that other species are also experiencing.”

The findings are published in the scientific journal PLOS One.

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Shaped and coloured like the country’s rare gemstone, tanzanite, the sparkling new railway terminal in Dar es Salaam is a symbol of Tanzania’s transport ambitions.

The glass panels gleam in the sun, like an outsize version of the prismatic bluish-purple gem that glitters in the light.

The trains – powered by electricity, a first for the region – carry passengers from the commercial hub to the capital, Dodoma, in less than four hours, half the time it takes by road.

It marks the starting point of one of the country’s strategic projects – the building of a 2,560km (1,590-mile) Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) envisaged to connect key cities and link up with neighbours Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The 460km (285-mile) Dar es Salaam to Dodoma leg has been open since August, when President Samia Suluhu described the railway as “a pathway to our future” that would “enhance our standing in the region”.

In Dodoma, the station is another grand building, resembling the rocky hills around the city – an effort to blend the country’s natural heritage with modernity.

It is a reluctant capital. In the middle of the country, it was first designated the centre of power 50 years ago, but it took the strong-willed late President John Magufuli to force government bodies to relocate.

But as most commercial activity, and even some government work, continues in Dar es Salaam, a fast and efficient transport link between the cities has been seen as vital.

The electric train has also made it smooth and convenient for the ordinary Tanzanian. A far cry from the experience on the road or the older slower, narrower train that this service replaces.

Inside the train carriage, the seats are clean, comfortable and reclinable. There is a foldable tray table attached to each one. A member of the train crew is on hand to sell hot and cold drinks as well as snacks.

In economy class there are five seats in each row, three on one side of the aisle and two on the other. In the business and luxury (royal) classes there are two seats on either side of the row, offering more comfort and legroom.

“We are grateful, we are not tired,” Gloria Sebastian who lives in Dar es Salaam, tells the BBC during a trip to visit her family in Dodoma. She is happy about the convenience that the train provides.

And she is not alone.

The man who is overseeing the building and operation of the SGR service says at least 7,000 passengers travel on the eight daily services on the line, which is already approaching capacity.

Machibya Masanja tells the BBC that the demand has been so high that “we cannot meet it with those trips we are making per day. We expect the number [of passengers] will double or triple.” There are plans afoot to add more journeys.

The popularity means that advance planning is essential as services can be fully booked several days in advance.

Payment must be made within an hour of booking in order to reserve a seat. An economy class trip to Dodoma costs a reasonable 40,000 Tanzanian shillings ($15; £11), while going business class will set you back 70,000 shillings ($26).

The early morning service leaves Dar es Salaam at 06:00 but people are required to turn up two hours earlier for security checks.

• Tanzanite: The hidden treasure of Tanzania
• The Freedom Railway: A 1,860km journey across Africa

The inside of the tanzanite-shaped building resembles an airport terminal. Passengers queue up and go through thorough checks just like in an airport. The luggage is scanned and people are sometimes frisked before accessing the boarding lounge.

One man later told the BBC that he felt the intense scrutiny seemed unnecessary, and there does not seem to have been any direct security threat, but the atmosphere is good-natured.

Nevertheless, there is an edginess from officials evidenced by the fact that a police officer questioned the BBC team who were taking pictures at the terminal – but they were quickly cleared after some checks.

The boarding was calm and orderly and the train pulled away on time.

Gathering speed – the trains currently hit a maximum of 120km/h (75mph) but can go faster – it was soon whizzing through the outskirts of Dar es Salaam as the early morning sun began to illuminate the panoramic view.

We cross a vast countryside – scrub and grassland plains interspersed with views of lush farms – and pass a meandering river, craggy terrain and undulating hills.

There were also the tunnels, causing some discomfort in the eardrum.

“You are advised to be chewing something, yawn or keep your mouth open,” the announcer said, to the amusement of some passengers.

For first-timers, the excitement was evident.

Bernice Augustine was with her daughter for a weekend vacation in Dodoma.

“It is awesome,” she says. “You cannot compare it with the old train: it’s convenient, it’s clean, it’s easy.”

Hilaly Mussa Maginga has bad memories of going on the old line. After the trip to Kigoma he vowed never to get on a train again as he was so tired and his lower back was in pain.

But his curiosity was piqued when he heard about the SGR.

“When you are used to travel for long distances, you sit until it hurts, so when you have this option to travel for a shorter time, there is a lot to enjoy. We’ve come from far, thank God,” he says.

For Mr Maginga the journey on the SGR is a zen-like voyage, a calm, unperturbed travel experience.

The project’s journey to reach this point has not been entirely smooth.

From the initial groundbreaking in 2017, the first section had been scheduled for completion in 2019. But it faced lengthy delays which the railway company attributes to Covid and construction costs as well as labour issues.

There have also been questions about its huge cost, estimated at $10bn (£8bn) upon completion.

Turkish firm Yapi Merkezi is the main contractor for the route’s first four sections, including the Dar es Salaam to Dodoma segment, while Chinese firms are building the other two.

Funding has come from the Tanzanian government and lenders, including from Denmark and Sweden, the Chinese Exim bank and the African Development Bank.

But Mr Masanja says it is too soon to be worried about profitability, saying this will only be realisable once the entire network is complete. He adds that the service is generating enough passenger income to offset operation costs, and that from January the company plans to introduce freight trains.

For now, he says, “its social contribution is much more profitable”.

The service has occasionally been disrupted by power failure but Mr Masanja says they are building a dedicated power transmission line, tapping into the country’s vast power generation capacity to eliminate the risk of unstable power.

Using electricity has reduced the cost of operations to about a third of what would have been spent on diesel, which neighbouring Kenya uses to power its own SGR line, he tells the BBC.

“We are the cheapest in the region, and in Africa, in terms of the cost,” he says.

Not everyone is entirely happy, though.

Adam Ally Mwanshinga, chairman of the Dodoma Bus Terminal Agents’ Union, says his members have lost a significant part of their business because of the railway.

The modern bus station in the capital was not so long ago a bustling terminal, he says, adding there are now 4-500 fewer passengers each day.

While it is cheaper to travel by bus, the convenience of the train has been more attractive for many.

“Business is down and life is difficult,” Mr Mwanshinga says.

“The buses can’t fill up and the many businesses here that used to benefit from the many people coming here are suffering,” he says.

However he seems resigned to the situation, saying that the SGR development “has done well for the majority of the people”.

“It is the nature of life – there are those who benefit and those who will suffer.”

• An exhilarating train journey across the Sahara
• From Africa to tea with the Queen
• The great train safari from Tanzania to Zambia
• Zimbabwe’s stunning 80km safari train

Three days before Georgians vote in an election billed as a decisive moment in their country’s future, the founder of the governing Georgian Dream party has told thousands of supporters “we choose peace, not war”.

After 12 years in government, Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream faces a close race against four opposition groups to cling on to power in this Caucasus state.

His party accuses the opposition of aiming to drag Georgia into involvement in the war in Ukraine, but the opposition argues the election is a choice between Russia under Georgian Dream, or Europe.

Ivanishvili, seen as Georgia’s most powerful figure, told the crowd in Liberty Square that they should have “a dignified European future based on equality”.

Georgians overwhelmingly back joining the European Union, but the EU froze that process this year amid stinging accusations from Brussels that the government was backsliding on democracy.

The party is accused by the opposition of sabotaging Georgia’s bid to join the EU, even though Georgian Dream insists they are still on course to do so by 2030.

Opinion polls in Georgia are not considered reliable, but the latest survey suggests that Georgian Dream will win the race, but that the four opposition parties combined would beat them.

Last Sunday, the opposition filled Liberty Square and surrounding streets with supporters waving Georgian and EU flags.

This time it was Georgian Dream’s turn, as a group of supporters waving Georgian and party flags marched towards the stage chanting “Long live Georgian Dream”.

Ivanishvili, the party’s billionaire founder and honorary chairman, addressed the crowd behind protective glass.

Tbilisi Mayor and Georgian Dream general secretary Kakha Kaladze echoed his message, accusing “so-called friends of Georgia” of directly interfering in Saturday’s forthcoming elections: “We refuse to be anyone’s vassal, following the wishes of others.”

Those words may not win hearts and minds in Tbilisi or the other main cities of Georgia – a country of about 3.7 million people. But it is a different story in the regions and rural areas.

“I don’t like Georgian Dream, but I hate the [former governing party] National Movement – and at least we’ll be at peace,” said Lali, a 68-year-old voter north of Tbilisi.

Georgians remember vividly a five-day war with Russia in 2008, when the National Movement was in power, and 20% of the country remains occupied.

However, concerns have been raised about fairness in this election. There have been reports of public servants, teachers and firefighters being intimidated into voting for the government.

“They’re threatened that they might lose their job… saying everybody will find out who voted for whom,” said Vano Chkhikvadze, EU Integration Program Manager at the Civil Society Foundation. “This works especially in the regions – these are small communities and everyone knows everyone there.”

The National Movement (UNM) makes up the biggest of the four opposition groups and Ivanishvili has called for it to be banned, along with anyone else in the opposition seen as “the enemy of the people and the enemy of the country”.

Georgian Dream (GD) has already pushed through two big laws widely criticised by the West. Earlier this month, the party’s speaker of parliament signed into law an anti-LGBT law, defying pro-Western president Salome Zourabichvili who had refused to do so.

And in May a Russia-style “foreign agents” law targeted foreign funding of media and civil rights groups, in the face of mass protests in Liberty Square and nearby parliament.

Zourabichvili has called on Georgians not to “be afraid”. Speaking on opposition-supporting Formula TV, she said they should vote for opposition parties who had all signed up to an action plan to join the EU.

Georgia has become so polarised that bigger, government-supporting TV channels give one story, and the opposition channels tell another.

Georgian Dream maintains it is still on course to join the EU. It has even adapted the EU’s 12 golden stars into its own blue star logo, regardless of the EU freezing Georgia’s application to join.

But one of its election posters is far more sinister, showing six opposition leaders, all held on a leash above the message: “No to war, no to agents.”

It fits in with the overall GD rhetoric of shady figures in the West – described as “the global war party” – pushing Georgia to war, and the opposition doing the West’s bidding.

Georgian ex-ambassador to the EU Natalie Sabadnadze has suggested the governing party appears to be pursuing a Viktor Orban-style Hungarian model with the message of peace with them – or war with the opposition.

“Georgian Dream wants an absolute majority to dismantle the system and do it legally – like Hungary. But they shouldn’t get one,” she believes.

Four years after Chinese and Indian soldiers engaged in a brutal and deadly clash along a disputed Himalayan border, the nations’ leaders have finally met formally.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in Russia.

The meeting came days after the two sides announced they had reached an agreement on “disengagement and resolution of issues in these areas”.

On Wednesday, Modi and Xi welcomed the step and pledged to resume dialogue between their nations.

The leaders have agreed to set an “early date” for a meeting between their top officials to resolve the issues.

India-China relations have been affected by tensions for decades – the root cause being 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, at times sparking a confrontation.

The two countries fought a war in 1962 in which India suffered a heavy defeat. Since then, there have been several skirmishes between the two sides.

When India repealed Article 370 of its constitution in 2019, taking away guaranteed autonomy for Indian-administered Kashmir, China denounced the move at the UN Security Council. Kashmir included the high-altitude Ladakh, parts of which China claims.

The clash in Galwan Valley in 2020 was their worst confrontation in decades. At least 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese troops were killed.

Later that year, the two countries pulled back troops from some parts of the disputed border and pledged to de-escalate tensions – but the situation remained tense.

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

The military standoff also affected business ties between the two as Delhi increased its scrutiny of Chinese investments in the country and banned several popular Chinese mobile apps, including TikTok. It also stopped direct passenger flights to China.

While Wednesday’s meeting between Modi and Xi saw their first formal talks since October 2019, the leaders had a pull-aside meeting at the G20 summit in Bali in 2022. Months later, China said they had reached a “consensus” during the meeting to restore bilateral ties.

The two leaders also met informally on the sidelines of the 2023 Brics summit in Johannesburg, where they agreed to intensify efforts to disengage and de-escalate, Reuters reports.

The same year, Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Kazakhstan and agreed to step up talks.

Last month, Jaishankar said about 75% of the “disengagement” at the border had been sorted out.

A few days later, civil aviation authorities from the two sides also met and discussed early resumption of direct passenger flights.

Several media organisations, including Bloomberg, have reported that the Indian businesses have put pressure on the government to relax restrictions on China saying they hurt India’s high-end manufacturing, such as the chipmaking sector.

But Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Tuesday that India would be cautious while easing restrictions on Chinese businesses.

On Monday, Jaishankar said the two countries had agreed to resume border patrols and go back to the situation that existed before the 2020 clash.

“With that we can say the disengagement with China has been completed,” he added.

The Indian Army chief said the countries were now trying to restore trust. “That will happen once we are able to see each other and we are able to convince and reassure each other that we are not creeping into buffer zones that have been created,” General Upendra Dwivedi said.

China’s foreign ministry did not comment on specifics regarding the deal, but confirmed the two sides had “reached resolutions on relevant issues”.

“China commends the progress made and will continue working with India for the sound implementation of these resolutions,” spokesperson Lin Jian said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Modi and Xi have announced that their special representatives will meet to find solutions “to explore a fair, reasonable and mutually-acceptable solution to the boundary question”, India’s external affairs ministry said in a statement.

It added that their ministers and other officials would also work to stabilise and rebuild bilateral relations.

The leaders talked about the importance of maintaining good ties, with PM Modi saying their relationship was vital for global peace.

“Maintaining peace and stability on the border should remain our priority. Mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual sensitivity should remain the basis of our relations,” he said.

The Brics summit was attended by leaders of 36 countries who discussed ways to reduce Global South’s dependence on dollar as currency for trade between countries. The summit was also attended by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres.

President Xi told Modi that the international community was watching the meeting closely. He said Delhi and Beijing must set an example for boosting the unity of developing countries and “to contribute to promoting multi-polarisation and democracy in international relations”.

“China and India are both ancient civilisations, major developing countries and important members of the Global South. We are both at a crucial phase in our respective modernisation endeavours,” he added.

American voters will face a clear choice for president on election day, between Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.

Here’s a look at what they stand for and how their policies compare on different issues.

Harris has said her day-one priority would be trying to reduce food and housing costs for working families.

She promises to ban price-gouging on groceries, help first-time home buyers and provide incentives to increase housing supply.

Inflation soared under the Biden presidency, as it did in many western countries, partly due to post-Covid supply issues and the Ukraine war. It has fallen since.

Trump has promised to “end inflation and make America affordable again” and when asked he says more drilling for oil will lower energy costs.

He has promised to deliver lower interest rates, something the president does not control, and he says deporting undocumented immigrants will ease pressure on housing. Economists warn that his vow to impose higher tax on imports could push up prices.

• US election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?
• Comparing Biden’s economy to Trump’s

Harris wants to raise taxes on big businesses and Americans making $400,000 (£305,000) a year.

But she has also unveiled a number of measures that would ease the tax burden on families, including an expansion of child tax credits.

She has broken with Biden over capital gains tax, supporting a more moderate rise from 23.6% to 28% compared with his 44.6%.

Trump proposes a number of tax cuts worth trillions, including an extension of his 2017 cuts which mostly helped the wealthy.

He says he will pay for them through higher growth and tariffs on imports. Analysts say both tax plans will add to the ballooning deficit, but Trump’s by more.

• Where Kamala Harris stands on 10 issues
• Where Donald Trump stands on 10 issues

Harris has made abortion rights central to her campaign, and she continues to advocate for legislation that would enshrine reproductive rights nationwide.

Trump has struggled to find a consistent message on abortion.

The three judges he appointed to the Supreme Court while president were pivotal in overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, a 1973 ruling known as Roe v Wade.

Harris was tasked with tackling the root causes of the southern border crisis and helped raise billions of dollars of private money to make regional investments aimed at stemming the flow north.

Record numbers of people crossed from Mexico at the end of 2023 but the numbers have fallen since to a four-year low. In this campaign, she has toughened her stance and emphasised her experience as a prosecutor in California taking on human traffickers.

Trump has vowed to seal the border by completing the construction of a wall and increasing enforcement. But he urged Republicans to ditch a hardline, cross-party immigration bill, backed by Harris. She says she would revive that deal if elected.

He has also promised the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history. Experts told the BBC this would face legal challenges.

• What Harris really did about the border crisis
• Could Trump really deport a million migrants?

Harris has vowed to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes”. She has pledged, if elected, to ensure the US and not China wins “the competition for the 21st Century”.

She has been a longtime advocate for a two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians, and has called for an end to the war in Gaza.

Trump has an isolationist foreign policy and wants the US to disentangle itself from conflicts elsewhere in the world.

He has said he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours through a negotiated settlement with Russia, a move that Democrats say would embolden Vladimir Putin.

Trump has positioned himself as a staunch supporter of Israel but said little on how he would end the war in Gaza.

Harris has criticised Trump’s sweeping plan to impose tariffs on imports, calling it a national tax on working families which will cost each household $4,000 a year.

She is expected to have a more targeted approach to taxing imports, maintaining the tariffs the Biden-Harris administration introduced on some Chinese imports like electric vehicles.

Trump has made tariffs a central pledge in this campaign. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.

He has also promised to entice companies to stay in the US to manufacture goods, by giving them a lower rate of corporate tax.

Harris, as vice-president, helped pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which has funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars to renewable energy, and electric vehicle tax credit and rebate programmes.

But she has dropped her opposition to fracking, a technique for recovering gas and oil opposed by environmentalists.

Trump, while in the White House, rolled back hundreds of environmental protections, including limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and vehicles.

In this campaign he has vowed to expand Arctic drilling and attacked electric cars.

Harris has been part of a White House administration which has reduced prescription drug costs and capped insulin prices at $35.

Trump, who has often vowed to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, has said that if elected he would only improve it, without offering specifics. The Act has been instrumental in getting health insurance to millions more people.

He has called for taxpayer-funded fertility treatment, but that could be opposed by Republicans in Congress.

Harris has tried to contrast her experience as a prosecutor with the fact Trump has been convicted of a crime.

Trump has vowed to demolish drugs cartels, crush gang violence and rebuild Democratic-run cities that he says are overrun with crime.

He has said he would use the military or the National Guard, a reserve force, to tackle opponents he calls “the enemy within” and “radical left lunatics” if they disrupt the election.

• Trump’s legal cases, explained

Harris has made preventing gun violence a key pledge, and she and Tim Walz – both gun owners – often advocate for tighter laws. But they will find that moves like expanding background checks or banning assault weapons will need the help of Congress.

Trump has positioned himself as a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, the constitutional right to bear arms. Addressing the National Rifle Association in May, he said he was their best friend.

Harris has called for the decriminalisation of marijuana for recreational use. She says too many people have been sent to prison for possession and points to disproportionate arrest numbers for black and Latino men.

Trump has softened his approach and said it’s time to end “needless arrests and incarcerations” of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• GLOBAL: A third election outcome on minds of Moscow
• ON THE GROUND: Democrats take fight deep into Trump country
• WWE: Why Trump is courting old friends from the ring

The message was addressed to “REAL AMERICAN PATRIOTS” to ensure a victory “TOO BIG TO RIG!”

Sent out to a mailing list by the Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, it combined two of the biggest themes of Donald Trump’s campaign: immigration and alleged election fraud.

“Experts are saying that as many as 2.7 million illegals could vote in November,” read the email from Ms Trump – the former president’s daughter-in-law.

But the number cited is derived from a decade-old survey that has been heavily disputed.

And while there is some clear evidence that some immigrants are registered to vote, it’s equally clear that the 2.7 million figure is a major exaggeration.

The roots of the statistic are found in an article, “Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?”, published in the journal Electoral Studies in 2014.

Written by three academics led by Jesse Richman, an associate professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, the paper says the “number of non-citizen voters… could range from just over 38,000 at the very minimum to nearly 2.8 million at the maximum”.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

Mr Richman and his colleagues did not comb through voter rolls or personally survey immigrants to come to that conclusion, but instead relied on a data set from a long-running Harvard-backed survey called the Cooperative Election Study (CES).

The CES is conducted every year, and Mr Richman examined a number of respondents who self-identified as non-citizens and indicated that they had voted in the 2008 and 2010 elections.

But the people behind CES have repeatedly rejected the conclusions of Mr Richman’s paper, which attracted controversy and attention before and after the 2016 presidential election.

Brian Schaffner, a Tufts University professor who is one of the CES co-principal investigators, told the BBC that it’s not possible to draw statistical conclusions from a relatively small number of survey participants.

The CES is intended to be a survey of legal voters, and few respondents say they are non-citizens. For example, in 2008, 339 out of the nearly 34,000 survey participants said they were not US citizens. The proportion was similar in 2010.

That does not constitute a representative sample of the population, Schaffner said, and it’s a commonly known issue in large surveys – a small proportion of people click wrong or untrue answers.

In recent years, the CES has included more detailed questions about citizenship and registration with the aim of increasing accuracy.

Mr Richman, the author of the Electoral Studies article, drew on that more recent CES data to conclude in 2023 that 1% of non-citizens were registered to vote. That would be approximately 117,000 people based on official estimates of how many undocumented immigrants are in the US.

In an interview with the BBC, he said he stood by his findings – but noted that a substantial uncertainty about non-citizen voting registration and voting remained.

“Predictably, according to what tends to happen in American politics, each side focuses on the edge of that uncertainty that is most convenient,” Mr Richman said.

“Democrats would like there to be absolutely none. Republicans would like it to be a monster that is about to eat democracy. Both of those interpretations are not likely.”

But Mr Schaffner, the CES official, is equally adamant about his argument, that the study he administers is simply not suitable for extrapolation to the population at large to create an estimate of non-citizen voting.

The non-citizen voter claims were given new life in May 2024, when a conservative fact-checking organisation, Just Facts, which describes itself as non-partisan, published an article headlined: “Study: 10% to 27% of Non-Citizens Are Illegally Registered to Vote”.

The post asserted that “roughly 1.0 million to 2.7 million [immigrants] will illegally vote” in November’s election.

The claim went viral in right-wing spaces online, and were spread by news sites and conservative influencers. Elon Musk, who has repeatedly posted misleading messages about immigrants and voting to millions of his followers, shared this post as well.

Lara Trump mentioned the figure in two emails sent out to supporters in early October.

When contacted by the BBC, Just Facts founder James Agresti said he stood by his conclusions, although he characterised the Trump campaign claim as a “half truth, because the study has sizable margins of uncertainty” – and that the email from Lara Trump had used the highest possible number.

Mr Agresti said his calculations – which are based on CES data but with a modified methodology to Mr Richman’s and additional studies and data sets – had found the minimum number of non-citizens registered to vote was around 10 times higher at roughly a million.

Beyond the dispute over methodology, there is another problem with the argument that large numbers of immigrants are voting illegally: there are very few confirmed cases of it.

The right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank compiled a database that includes decades of voting fraud cases. But only about 100 include a reference to non-citizens voting.

Criminal prosecution of illegal voters – not just non-citizens, but felons and other ineligible voters – is also extremely rare.

Despite nearly a decade of attention on illegal voting driven by Trump and Republicans, those numbers have not dramatically risen. Investigations into voter rolls show very few non-citizens registered to vote and even fewer voting.

Conservatives, and some scholars such as Mr Richman, allege that there are so few prosecutions because illegal voting is considered to be a minor crime by many. They say that authorities have spent few resources investigating it in the past.

Still, recent searches of active voter rolls – largely inspired by Trump and Republican Party officials – have turned up a relatively small number of illegal voters.

Mr Richman conducted a survey of Arizona’s four million voter records and found between 1,934 and 6,480 non-citizens registered to vote.

Earlier this year, the office of Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose – a Trump supporter – examined around eight million registrations and found around 600 people on the state’s voter rolls who could not prove their US citizenship.

Meanwhile, the state also struck an additional 155,000 registrations from the rolls, largely because of address changes.

Other states, including New Jersey and Virginia, have also removed hundreds of voters from their rolls in recent years – but the totals have not come close to the 10-to-27% figure cited in the Just Facts blog post.

Databases of criminal cases and official investigations of voter rolls have failed to find evidence of large proportions of immigrant non-citizens who are registered to vote.

The proportion of those who actually vote are, by definition, smaller still. Generally about half to two-thirds of registered American voters turn out to vote in presidential elections.

And the subset of those immigrants who do not have legal permission to be in the US – the “illegals” in Lara Trump’s email – is by definition even smaller.

While it’s clear that there are some non-citizens who are registered to vote, there’s a lack of real-world evidence that those numbers are very large when compared to the overall voting population.

The BBC contacted the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee for comment.

• 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?

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

Vice-President Kamala Harris and her team are prepared if her opponent, Donald Trump, declares victory in the presidential election before all ballots are counted, she told NBC News.

The interview between Harris and Hallie Jackson was taped at the US Naval Observatory and aired Tuesday evening.

The Democratic US presidential nominee answered questions about President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance before dropping out of the race, whether she would pardon former president Trump and the historic significance of her candidacy as a woman.

Here are some key moments:

Ms Jackson asked Harris if she had been honest about Biden when she endorsed his re-election bid.

“You never saw anything like what happened at the debate night behind closed doors with him?” Ms Jackson asked.

“It was a bad debate. People have bad debates,” Harris replied, referring to the face-off between Trump and Biden in June.

Ms Jackson then followed up, saying Biden’s poor debate performance was the reason Harris is now the Democratic party’s nominee.

“Well, you’d have to ask him if that’s the only reason why (he stood down),” Harris said.

Ms Jackson again asked about Biden.

“I am running for president of the United States. Joe Biden is not – and my presidency will be about bringing a new generation of leadership to America,” Harris said.

She then vouched for the president’s political achievements and leadership.

“I speak with not only sincerity, but with a real, first-hand account of watching him do this work. I have no reluctance of saying that,” she said.

Ms Jackson asked Harris what she would do if her Republican opponent declares himself the winner in the presidential race before all votes are counted.

“We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that as well,” Harris said.

In the hours after election day in 2020, Trump falsely declared himself the winner in the race against Biden, while votes still were being counted. The election was not decided until days later.

He currently faces allegations that he pressured officials to reverse the 2020 results and knowingly spread lies about election fraud.

When asked if the Harris team had considered a similar scenario on election day next month, the vice-president responded “of course”.

“This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo a free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people, who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol… this is a serious matter,” she said.

Ms Jackson asked Harris if she’d pardon Trump if she becomes president.

“I’m not going to get into those hypotheticals. I’m focused on the next 14 days,” she answered.

Asked if pardoning the former president would help unify the country, she said:

“Let me tell you what’s going to help us move on – I get elected president of the United States.”

Harris also was asked whether the US is ready for a woman of colour to be its next president.

“Absolutely,” she said, without hesitating. “…I think part of what is important in this election is not only turning the page, but closing the page and the chapter on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.”

Ms Jackson then pressed Harris on why she has been reluctant to lean into talking about the historic nature of her candidacy on the campaign trail. Harris would be the first female president if elected.

“I’m clearly a woman…. the point that most people really care about is, can you do the job and do you have a plan to actually focus on them,” she said.

When asked if she’s concerned about sexism, Harris said she doesn’t view her candidacy that way. Instead, she said her challenge on the campaign trail is making sure she can talk and listen to as many voters as possible.

“I will never assume that anyone in our country should elect a leader based on their gender or their race, instead that that leader needs to earn the vote based on substance and what they will do to address challenges,” she said.

Harris later went on to discuss her agenda focusing on reproductive rights and abortion access.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• GLOBAL: A third election outcome on minds of Moscow
• ON THE GROUND: Democrats take fight deep into Trump country
• WWE: Why Trump is courting old friends from the ring
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Voters in the US go to the polls on 5 November to elect their next president.

The election was initially a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris.

The big question now is – will America get its first woman president or a second Donald Trump term?

As election day approaches, we’ll be keeping track of the polls and seeing what effect the campaign has on the race for the White House.

Harris has had a small lead over Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July and she remains ahead – as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

Harris saw a bounce in her polling numbers in the first few weeks of her campaign, building a lead of nearly four percentage points towards the end of August.

The numbers were relatively stable through September, even after the only debate between the two candidates on 10 September, which was watched by nearly 70 million people.

In the last few days the gap between them has tightened, as you can see in the poll tracker chart below, with the trend lines showing the averages and the dots showing the individual poll results for each candidate.

While these national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, they’re not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election.

That’s because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.

There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.

• What is the electoral college?

Right now the polls are very tight in the seven states considered battlegrounds in this election and neither candidate has a decisive lead in any of them, according to the polling averages.

If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does help highlight some differences between the states – but it’s important to note that there are fewer state polls than national polls so we have less data to go on and every poll has a margin of error that means the numbers could be higher or lower.

In Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has had a small lead for a few weeks now. It’s a similar story in Nevada but with Harris the candidate who has been slightly ahead.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris has been leading since the start of August, sometimes by two or three points, but in recent days the polls have tightened significantly and Trump now has a very small lead in Pennsylvania.

All three of those states had been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his path to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden retook them in 2020 and if Harris can do the same then she will be on course to win the election.

In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day that Biden quit the race he was trailing Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in the seven swing states.

In Pennsylvania, Biden was behind by nearly 4.5 percentage points when he dropped out, as the chart below shows. It is a key state for both campaigns as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven and therefore winning it makes it easier to reach the 270 votes needed.

The figures we have used in the graphics above are averages created by polling analysis website 538, which is part of American news network ABC News. To create them, 538 collects the data from individual polls carried out both nationally and in battleground states by lots of polling companies.

As part of its quality control, 538 only includes polls from companies that meet certain criteria, like being transparent about how many people they polled, when the poll was carried out and how the poll was conducted (telephone calls, text message, online, etc).

You can read more about the 538 methodology here.

At the moment, the polls suggest that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are within a couple of percentage points of each other in all of the swing states – and when the race is that close, it’s very hard to predict winners.

Polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Polling companies will be trying to fix that problem in a number of ways, including how to make their results reflect the make-up of the voting population.

Those adjustments are difficult to get right and pollsters still have to make educated guesses about other factors like who will actually turn up to vote on 5 November.

• Listen: How do election polls work?

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• 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
• Read more about: Kamala Harris | Donald Trump | US election

Mech Dara, an award-winning Cambodian journalist who was arrested and charged with incitement earlier this month, has been released on bail.

Mr Dara, who has reported for the BBC, was released after a pro-government news outlet published a prison video of him asking the country’s leaders for forgiveness.

Mr Dara was charged on 1 October over accusations that five social media posts could “incite social unrest”. The Phnom Penh Municipal Court accused Dara of “provocative” and “false” posts about a rock quarry on a sacred mountain.

Human rights groups and governments including the United States have spoken out over his arrest.

Upon leaving jail in Kandal province on Thursday, Mr Dara told reporters: “I thank everyone who helped get me out of jail on bail.”

He added he needed to take time to recover from his time in detention.

“My health is weak. My brain is not working yet,” he said.

His release comes a day after a video was released on pro-government Fresh News, showing Mr Dara in orange prison uniform.

In the video, Mr Dara apologises to Cambodia’s former leader Hun Sen and his son Hun Manet, the current prime minister, saying his posts contained “false information that is harmful to the leaders and the country”.

The video was released on the same day USAID administrator Samantha Power told reporters in Phnom Penh that she raised Mr Dara’s arrest with the prime minister.

One of Cambodia’s most prominent journalists, Mr Dara was honoured by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken last year for his work exposing online scam operations based in Cambodia, which are staffed mostly by trafficked workers.

Often victims are lured by adverts promising easy work and extravagant perks. Once they arrive in the country, they are held prisoner and forced to work in online scam centres. Those who do not comply face threats to their safety. Many have been subject to torture and inhuman treatment.

Mr Dara was arrested on the vague charge of incitement, which is often used in Cambodia against government critics.

Cambodia’s independent media landscape has been hit hard in recent years, with publications including the Cambodia Daily and Voice of Democracy – both of which Mr Dara worked for – closed down by authorities.

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 welcomed 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 knows 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.”

A McDonald’s sandwich has been making people sick in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

E. coli, a type of bacteria that can cause serious stomach problems, has been found in McDonald’s Quarter Pounder sandwiches, the CDC announced on Tuesday.

So far, the CDC has recorded 49 cases of illness across 10 states. Ten cases resulted in patients being admitted to hospital and one person has died.

Most of the cases were recorded in western and Midwest states, according to the CDC.

The fast-food restaurant is working with investigators to determine which ingredients caused the outbreak, according to a statement from the CDC.

“McDonald’s has pulled ingredients for these burgers, and they won’t be available for sale in some states,” the agency said.

“It is not yet known which specific food ingredient is contaminated,” the CDC added, noting that McDonald’s has already “stopped using fresh slivered onions and quarter-pound beef patties in several states”.

The CDC said that the slivered onions are believed to be the likely source of contamination, and investigators with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are working to determine if the onions were sold to any other business.

No recalls have been issued yet by the CDC or by other health and food regulators.

The first case was recorded on 27 September, investigators say. Victims have ranged in age from 13 to 88.

Of the 10 people taken to hospital, one person developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a serious condition that can cause kidney failure.

Another person, who the CDC described as “an older adult in Colorado” died after eating at McDonald’s.

Cases have been reported in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

McDonald’s shares fell by about 9% on the New York Stock Exchange after the news broke on Tuesday.

In a statement, McDonald’s said that a preliminary investigation found “that a subset of illnesses may be linked to slivered onions used in the Quarter Pounder and sourced by a single supplier that serves three distribution centers”.

The Chicago-based company added that it has instructed all local restaurants “to remove this product from their supply” and have paused shipments of slivered onions to the region.

The sandwich is also being temporarily removed from the menu in several states, the company said, adding: “We take food safety extremely seriously and it’s the right thing to do.”

Other beef products remain on the menu, McDonald’s USA President Joe Erlinger said in a video message.

“At McDonald’s, you can count on us to do the right thing,” he said.

E. coli are a diverse group of bacteria that normally live in the intestines of humans and animals.

Although many are harmless, some produce toxins that can make you sick.

Symptoms include severe and sometimes bloody diarrhoea, stomach cramps, vomiting and fever.

It usually takes a few days after being infected for symptoms to show.

This is not the first E. coli outbreak to affect McDonald’s in recent years.

In 2022, six children in Alabama were sickened with E. coli after eating chicken McNuggets.

Four children were admitted to hospital. Health inspectors later visited the affected restaurant and found several violations, including improper hand-washing and a lack of gloves.

A twelfth monkey died at a Hong Kong zoo, with tests underway to determine if it succumbed to the same bacterial infection that killed 11 other monkeys in the past 10 days.

The De Brazza’s monkey had been isolated since 13 October when the first eight deaths were reported.

Autopsies have found a large amount of sepsis-inducing bacteria that likely came from contaminated soil near the primates’ enclosures, authorities said.

Workers who were digging up soil near the cages were believed to have brought in contaminated soil through their shoes, Hong Kong’s Culture, Sports and Tourism Secretary told local broadcaster RTHK.

The risk of the infection spreading to humans is “fairly low”, said Dirk Pfeiffer, a veterinary epidemiologist at the City University of Hong Kong.

He added that soil contamination is often underreported in Asia but “it is always worrying if multiple mortalities suddenly occur in captive animal populations where this has not happened before”.

The 11 monkeys found dead earlier include the critically endangered cotton-top tamarins, as well as white-faced sakis, common squirrel monkeys, and a De Brazza’s monkey.

Authorities said they died due to melioidosis, an infectious disease that can spread through contact with contaminated soil, air or water.

It is caused by Burkholderia pseudomallei, a soil-dwelling bacteria strain endemic in tropical and sub-tropical regions.

The twelfth monkey died on Tuesday and early results indicated that it too had “similar lesions… in the tissues of its organs”, officials said.

While authorities said the health of the remaining 78 mammals in the zoo was “normal”, the mammals section has been closed since 14 October for disinfection and cleaning.

The Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens is the city’s oldest park and sits at its centre, spread over 14 acres.

Animal rights group Peta has said it is concerned about the risk of zoonotic diseases like monkeypox, which can spread from animals to humans.

“The only way to ensure the emotional and physical health of animals and prevent further deaths and the spread of zoonotic diseases is to stop imprisoning them for ‘entertainment’ and instead focus on protecting their natural habitats,” Peta’s campaign manager Abigail Forsyth told the BBC.

The earliest report of melioidosis in Hong Kong dates back to the mid-1970s, when 24 dolphins suddenly died of the disease in Ocean Park, a theme park.

King Charles has arrived in Samoa for a four-day state visit where he will preside for the first time over a gathering of Commonwealth presidents and prime ministers.

Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa greeted the King and Queen Camilla at Faleolo International Airport where a red carpet had been rolled out amid high winds and last-minute vacuum cleaning.

The Royal Samoan Police Band began playing as the couple alighted and met local officials.

The King and Queen, who ended their six-day tour of Australia on Tuesday, posted a message on social media saying they “couldn’t wait” to arrive in Samoa and experience the “warmth” of the country’s ancient traditions.

The tweet included a few words in Samoan which loosely translated as “looking forward to meeting the Samoan people”.

Samoa, a small country in the central South Pacific Ocean made up of an archipelago of nine islands, is hosting a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) which has the theme “One Resilient Common Future”.

The King, as head of the Commonwealth, will formally open the event that will also be attended by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

Charles deputised for Queen Elizabeth II during the last CHOGM staged by Rwanda in 2022, and in Samoa will be joined by Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

The route from the airport to Apia – Samoa’s capital – had been spruced up for the royal visit on Wednesday.

Each village along the road had adopted a country, with residents decorating their houses and adorning their lawns with the corresponding flags.

Flashing lights were put in trees, bushes and on roof tops, while car tyres were repurposed as flower pots and painted bright colours.

Climate change, a subject close to the King’s heart, is expected to top the agenda at the meeting held in a part of the world very vulnerable to rising sea levels.

While reparations are not officially on the table, the subject is likely to come up as this group of countries was brought together by British colonisation.

The UK government has said there will no official apology or reparations.

The King and Queen wrapped up the Australian leg of their tour on Tuesday after completing a long list of engagements.

Between them, on Tuesday alone the royal couple visited the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence, a food bank, a social housing project, a literacy initiative and a community barbecue.

They met two leading cancer researchers and celebrated the Sydney Opera House’s 50th anniversary.

An Australian arm of the King’s Foundation was officially launched, expanding a charity which promotes sustainability and provides training in traditional craft skills.

But it was not an entirely straightforward trip.

On Monday, an Australian senator defended heckling the King and accusing him of genocide after he addressed Parliament House, telling the BBC “he’s not of this land”.

Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal Australian woman, interrupted the ceremony in the capital Canberra by shouting for about a minute before she was escorted away by security.

After making claims of genocide against “our people”, she could be heard yelling: “This is not your land, you are not my King.”

But Aboriginal elder Aunty Violet Sheridan, who had earlier welcomed the King and Queen, said Thorpe’s protest was “disrespectful”, adding: “She does not speak for me.”

The ceremony concluded without any reference to the incident, and the royal couple proceeded to meet hundreds of people who had waited outside to greet them.

US actor Ron Ely, best known for playing the role of Tarzan in the 1960s television show of the same name, has died aged 86.

“The world has lost one of the greatest men it has ever known – and I have lost my dad,” the actor’s daughter, Kirsten Casale Ely, said in an Instagram post.

Tarzan originally aired on NBC television network from 1966 to 1968, during which time the actor broke a number of bones and was reported to have been attacked by animals while performing his own stunts.

After retiring from acting in 2001, Ely became an author and published two mystery novels.

Ely made a brief return to acting for one television film, Expecting Amish, in 2014, where he played an Amish elder.

In the 1980s, he appeared in other hit television programmes including cruise ship-based comedy The Love Boat, as well as Wonder Woman with star Lynda Carter.

Born in Texas in 1938, Ely went on to marry his high school sweetheart in 1959, before divorcing two years later.

He was also known for hosting the Miss America pageant in the early 1980s, where he met his second wife Valerie Lundeen. The couple went on to have three children.

Lundeen was stabbed to death aged 62 by their son, Cameron, at their California home in 2019. He was then shot dead by police after being deemed a threat by attending officers.

Ron Ely filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the force, though the judge ruled the officers had acted in self-defence.

The Tarzan star died at his home in Los Alamos in Santa Barbara, California on 29 September.

Announcing the death in an Instagram post on Wednesday, the actor’s daughter said: “My father was someone that people called a hero. He was an actor, writer, coach, mentor, family man and leader.”

She added: “I knew him as my dad – and what a heaven sent honour that has been. To me, he hung the moon.”

Four years after Chinese and Indian soldiers engaged in a brutal and deadly clash along a disputed Himalayan border, the nations’ leaders have finally met formally.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in Russia.

The meeting came days after the two sides announced they had reached an agreement on “disengagement and resolution of issues in these areas”.

On Wednesday, Modi and Xi welcomed the step and pledged to resume dialogue between their nations.

The leaders have agreed to set an “early date” for a meeting between their top officials to resolve the issues.

India-China relations have been affected by tensions for decades – the root cause being 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, at times sparking a confrontation.

The two countries fought a war in 1962 in which India suffered a heavy defeat. Since then, there have been several skirmishes between the two sides.

When India repealed Article 370 of its constitution in 2019, taking away guaranteed autonomy for Indian-administered Kashmir, China denounced the move at the UN Security Council. Kashmir included the high-altitude Ladakh, parts of which China claims.

The clash in Galwan Valley in 2020 was their worst confrontation in decades. At least 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese troops were killed.

Later that year, the two countries pulled back troops from some parts of the disputed border and pledged to de-escalate tensions – but the situation remained tense.

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

The military standoff also affected business ties between the two as Delhi increased its scrutiny of Chinese investments in the country and banned several popular Chinese mobile apps, including TikTok. It also stopped direct passenger flights to China.

While Wednesday’s meeting between Modi and Xi saw their first formal talks since October 2019, the leaders had a pull-aside meeting at the G20 summit in Bali in 2022. Months later, China said they had reached a “consensus” during the meeting to restore bilateral ties.

The two leaders also met informally on the sidelines of the 2023 Brics summit in Johannesburg, where they agreed to intensify efforts to disengage and de-escalate, Reuters reports.

The same year, Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Kazakhstan and agreed to step up talks.

Last month, Jaishankar said about 75% of the “disengagement” at the border had been sorted out.

A few days later, civil aviation authorities from the two sides also met and discussed early resumption of direct passenger flights.

Several media organisations, including Bloomberg, have reported that the Indian businesses have put pressure on the government to relax restrictions on China saying they hurt India’s high-end manufacturing, such as the chipmaking sector.

But Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Tuesday that India would be cautious while easing restrictions on Chinese businesses.

On Monday, Jaishankar said the two countries had agreed to resume border patrols and go back to the situation that existed before the 2020 clash.

“With that we can say the disengagement with China has been completed,” he added.

The Indian Army chief said the countries were now trying to restore trust. “That will happen once we are able to see each other and we are able to convince and reassure each other that we are not creeping into buffer zones that have been created,” General Upendra Dwivedi said.

China’s foreign ministry did not comment on specifics regarding the deal, but confirmed the two sides had “reached resolutions on relevant issues”.

“China commends the progress made and will continue working with India for the sound implementation of these resolutions,” spokesperson Lin Jian said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Modi and Xi have announced that their special representatives will meet to find solutions “to explore a fair, reasonable and mutually-acceptable solution to the boundary question”, India’s external affairs ministry said in a statement.

It added that their ministers and other officials would also work to stabilise and rebuild bilateral relations.

The leaders talked about the importance of maintaining good ties, with PM Modi saying their relationship was vital for global peace.

“Maintaining peace and stability on the border should remain our priority. Mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual sensitivity should remain the basis of our relations,” he said.

The Brics summit was attended by leaders of 36 countries who discussed ways to reduce Global South’s dependence on dollar as currency for trade between countries. The summit was also attended by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres.

President Xi told Modi that the international community was watching the meeting closely. He said Delhi and Beijing must set an example for boosting the unity of developing countries and “to contribute to promoting multi-polarisation and democracy in international relations”.

“China and India are both ancient civilisations, major developing countries and important members of the Global South. We are both at a crucial phase in our respective modernisation endeavours,” he added.

Commonwealth heads of government are preparing to defy the United Kingdom and agree plans to examine reparatory justice for the transatlantic slave trade, the BBC has learned.

Downing Street insists the issue is not on the agenda for the summit of 56 Commonwealth countries, which begins in the Pacific island nation of Samoa on Friday.

But diplomatic sources said officials were negotiating an agreement to conduct further research and begin a “meaningful conversation” about an issue which could potentially leave the UK owing billions of pounds in reparations.

Frederick Mitchell, foreign minister of the Bahamas, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Once you broach the subject it may take a while for people to come around but come around they will.”

Reparatory justice for slavery can come in many forms, including financial reparations, debt relief, an official apology, educational programmes, building museums, economic support, and public health assistance.

The current text of the draft summit communique – made known to the BBC – says: “Heads, noting calls for discussions on reparatory justice with regard to the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement… agreed that the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity.”

It says the heads of government would play “an active role in bringing about such inclusive conversations addressing these harms” and that they agreed “to prioritise and facilitate further and additional research on the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel slavery that encourages and supports the conversations and informs a way forward”.

The text – which could still change once Commonwealth leaders arrive – has been hammered out by diplomats ahead of the summit. British officials succeeded in blocking a plan for an entirely separate declaration on the subject.

The UK did not want any language in the communique about reparatory justice, but at the moment it is having to accept it will include three full paragraphs setting out the Commonwealth’s detailed position.

Officials from Caricom, the body that represents Caribbean countries, have sought to broaden the issue so that it encompasses not just the slave trade across the Atlantic but also the Pacific.

The draft communique says a majority of member states “share common historical experiences in relation to this abhorrent trade, chattel enslavement, the debilitation and dispossession of indigenous people”.

It also refers directly to practices known as “blackbirding”, where Pacific islanders were tricked or kidnapped into slave or cheap labour in colonies throughout the region.

Diplomats said the expectation now was that reparatory justice would be a central focus of the agenda for the next Commonwealth summit in two years’ time in the Caribbean, possibly Antigua and Barbuda.

In the run-up to this year’s summit, there have been growing calls from Commonwealth leaders for the UK to apologise and make reparations worth trillions of pounds for the country’s historic role in the slave trade.

A report published last year by the University of West Indies – backed by Patrick Robinson, a judge who sits on the International Court of Justice – concluded the UK owed more than £18tn in reparations for its role in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries.

Last weekend the prime minister of the Bahamas, Philip Davis, used a visit by Foreign Office minister Baroness Chapman to tell her the fight for reparations was far from over.

Bahamas foreign minister Frederick Mitchell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The word is apologise, that’s the word.”

He said for the Commonwealth gathering, “it’s a simple matter – it can be done, one sentence, one line.”

Asked how much reparations should amount to, Mr Mitchell said it was not just a matter of money but of “respect, acknowledging the past was a wrong that needs to be corrected”.

He said member countries “want the conversation to start” but “there appears to be even a reluctance to have the conversation”.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the UK had heard calls for slavery reparations “loud and clear” but that prime minister was “right” to “focus on the future”.

A UK government spokesperson said they would not comment on the leak to the BBC, but added: “Reparations are not on the agenda for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. The government’s position has not changed – we do not pay reparations.

“We are focused on using the summit at [the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting] to discuss the shared opportunities which we can unlock across the Commonwealth – including securing more economic growth.”

It is understood the Downing Street position – that reparatory justice is not on the agenda – while technically correct, has angered some Caribbean ministers when it was obvious the issue would be discussed at the summit.

The BBC understands that the tenor and tone of language from the UK government has contributed to “irritating even more” some members who might not have expected the UK to change its view and “suddenly start shelling out a lot of money”.

Sir Keir Starmer landed in Samoa late on Wednesday UK time, becoming the first sitting prime minister to visit a Pacific island nation.

Speaking to reporters en route, he said he wanted to discuss current challenges with Commonwealth leaders, especially climate change, rather than issues of the past.

“What they’re most interested in is, can we help them working with, for example, international financial institutions on the sorts of packages they need right now in relation to the challenges they’re facing,” he said.

“That’s where I’m going to put my focus – rather than what will end up being very, very long endless discussions about reparations on the past.

“Of course, slavery is abhorrent to everybody; the trade and the practice, there’s no question about that. But I think from my point of view… I’d rather roll up my sleeves and work with them on the current future-facing challenges than spend a lot of time on the past.”

King Charles arrived in Samoa for a four-day visit on Wednesday and is due to formally open the summit.

On a visit to Kenya last year, the King expressed the “greatest sorrow and regret” over the “wrongdoings” of the colonial era, but stopped short of issuing an apology, which would have required the agreement of ministers.

Some non-Caribbean countries are not unsympathetic towards the British position and want the summit to focus more on existing challenges – such as climate change, which is adversely affecting many Commonwealth countries, about half of whom are small island states.

But Caribbean countries seem determined to keep pressing the issue.

All three candidates hoping to be elected this weekend as the next secretary general of the Commonwealth – Shirley Botchwey of Ghana, Joshua Setipa of Lesotho and Mamadou Tangara of Gambia – have made clear they support reparatory justice.

The British government and the monarchy were prominent participants in the centuries-long slave trade from 1500, alongside other European nations, with millions of Africans forced to work on plantations.

Britain also had a key role in ending the trade through Parliament’s passage of a law to abolish slavery in 1833.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant, former UK ambassador to the UN, said it would be “quite wrong in principle to pay reparations for something that happened hundreds of years ago”.

“Who should you pay reparations to?,” he said on BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme, asking if West African countries, Caribbean nations or the Windrush generation should be involved.

Labour MP Clive Lewis said the UK needed to “start a conversation” with Commonwealth leaders, adding: “We can do better by them.”

His colleague Dawn Butler said the UK should pay reparations because “it’s the right thing to do”.

Speaking during a Black History month debate in the Commons, she pointed out that the slave owners were paid £20m in compensation – £100bn in today’s money.

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On Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris stood in front of the vice-presidential residence in Washington DC, and delivered a short but withering attack on her Republican presidential opponent.

Calling Donald Trump “increasingly unhinged and unstable”, she cited critical comments made by John Kelly, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, in a New York Times interview.

The vice-president quoted Kelly describing Trump as someone who “certainly falls into the general definition of fascists” and who had spoken approvingly of Hitler several times.

She said her rival wanted “unchecked power” and later, during a CNN town hall event, was asked point-blank if she believed he was a “fascist”. “Yes, I do,” she replied.

Shortly after the town hall finished, Trump posted on X and Truth Social that Harris’s comments were a sign that she was losing. He said she was “increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind”.

In the home stretch of political campaigns – particularly one as tight and hard-fought as the 2024 presidential race – there is a natural tendency for candidates to turn negative. Attacks tend to be more effective in motivating supporters to head to the polls and disrupting the opposing campaigns.

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For Harris, however, the heavier hand toward Trump stands in contrast to the more optimistic, “joyful” messaging of the early days of her campaign.

While she did warn at the Democratic convention of a Trump presidency without the guardrails, Harris largely stepped back from President Joe Biden’s core campaign message that Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy.

According to political strategist Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, however, it is clear why Harris was quick this time to amplify Kelly’s dark portrait of Trump as a man with authoritarian tendencies.

“Everything she does now is tactical,” he said. “The imperative was to make sure as many voters as possible know about what Kelly said.”

The vice-president’s latest remarks come on the heels of a multi-week strategy by her campaign to appeal to independent voters and moderate Republicans who could be open to supporting the Democratic ticket. Polls suggest the race is extremely tight, with neither candidate having a decisive lead in any of the battleground states.

The suburbs around the biggest cities in key battleground states – Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Phoenix, for instance – are populated by college-educated professionals who have traditionally voted for Republicans but who polls indicate have doubts about returning Trump to the White House.

“Her case for how she wins this thing is to create as broad a coalition as possible and bring over disaffected Republicans – people who just don’t feel that they can vote for Trump again,” Mr Bennett said.

Devynn DeVelasco, a 20-year-old independent from Nebraska, is one of those who had already been convinced by the long list of senior Republicans who worked for then-President Trump but now say he is unfit for office.

Although she hopes some Republicans will join her in supporting Harris, she worries there is fatigue around the claims made about the former president.

“When these reports [about Kelly’s comments] came out I wasn’t shocked, it didn’t change much,” Ms DeVelasco told the BBC.

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Republican strategist Denise Grace Gitsham said voters have been hearing similar rhetoric about Trump since 2016, so any new allegations were unlikely to move the dial.

“If you’re voting against Donald Trump because you don’t like his personality, you’re already a decided voter,” she told the BBC. “But if you’re somebody who’s looking at the policies and that matters more to you than a vibe or a personality, then you’re going to go with the person who you felt you did best under while they were in the White House.”

Both Harris and Trump have been sharpening their barbs in recent days. During a swing through Midwest battleground states on Monday, Harris repeatedly warned of the consequences of a Trump presidency – on abortion rights, on healthcare, on the economy and on US foreign policy.

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On Friday, she will hold a rally in Texas – the state she has said most dramatically represents the anti-abortion future if Trump is back in power. Next Tuesday, she will shift focus to Washington DC, with a rally reportedly planned by the National Mall, where Trump spoke before some of his supporters attacked the US Capitol.

Trump, meanwhile, has continued his drumbeat of attacks on his Democratic counterpart. At a town hall forum in North Carolina, he said Harris was “lazy” and “stupid” and only became her party nominee because of her ethnicity and gender.

He also issued his own warning, saying that “we may not have a country anymore” if Harris wins.

None of these lines are a particular departure for Trump, however, as he has spent most of his campaign attacking Democrats and sticking to his core message on immigration, trade and the economy.

Harris’s closing pitch, meanwhile, directed toward winning over anti-Trump Republicans and independents, isn’t without its risks, said Democratic strategist Bennett.

“You are always shorting one thing to try to help promote something else,” he said. “The candidate’s time and the time spent on advertising are the two most precious commodities. And how you spend those matters.”

Trump has been a polarising figure in American politics for more than eight years now. Most Americans have strongly held, and deeply ingrained, opinions about the man by now.

If anti-Trump sentiment puts Harris over the top on election day, her latest strategic emphasis will have paid off. If not, the second-guessing will come fast and furious.

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

Striking Boeing workers have rejected a new offer from the plane-making giant, which included a 35% pay rise over four years.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union said 64% of its members voted against the proposed deal.

More than 30,000 of Boeing’s employees have joined the walkout, which started on 13 September, after an initial offer was rejected.

Hours earlier Boeing’s boss Kelly Ortberg warned that the company is at a “crossroads” as losses at the firm surged to roughly $6bn (£4.6bn).

“After 10 years of sacrifices, we still have ground to make up, and we’re hopeful to do so by resuming negotiations promptly,” union representatives said in a statement.

“This is workplace democracy – and also clear evidence that there are consequences when a company mistreats its workers year after year,” it added.

Boeing has declined to comment on its latest offer being rejected.

It is the second time that the striking workers have rejected a proposed deal in a formal vote. The previous offer was turned down last month by 95% of workers.

Earlier, Mr Ortberg, who took over as chief executive in August, said he had been working “feverishly” to stabilise the firm, as it worked to repair its reputation, which has been hit by manufacturing and safety concerns.

“This is a big ship that will take some time to turn, but when it does, it has the capacity to be great again,” he said.

The latest crisis at Boeing erupted in January with a dramatic mid-air blowout of a piece of one of its passenger planes.

Its space business also suffered a reputational hit after its Starliner vessel was forced to return to Earth without carrying astronauts.

The strike has compounded the problems, leading to a dramatic slowdown in production.

Mr Ortberg said the firm was “saddled with too much debt” and had disappointed customers with lapses in performance across the business.

Boeing’s commercial aircraft business reported operating losses of $4bn in the last three months, while its defence unit lost nearly $2.4bn.

The strike “is costing them $100m a day so the cash burn is really significant… This is getting to a pretty severe situation for Boeing,” said Anna McDonald from Aubrey Capital Management.

Mr Ortberg argued the firm was in a strong position, with a backlog of roughly 5,400 orders for its planes.

But he warned investors that restar7ting the firm’s factories, whenever the strike does end, will be tricky.

“It’s much harder to turn this on than it is to turn it off. So it’s critical, absolutely critical, that we do this right,” he said.

“We have a detailed return-to-work plan in place and I’m really looking forward to getting everybody back and getting to work on that plan.”

The company announced plans earlier this month to cut roughly 10% of its workforce. Thousands of other staff are already on a rolling furlough due to the strike, which has also hit suppliers.

Mr Ortberg told investors that his first priority was a “fundamental culture change”.

“We need to prevent the festering of issues and work better together to identify, fix and understand root cause,” he said.

Boeing’s suppliers are also feeling the impact of the strike.

Spirit AeroSystems, which makes plane bodies, has already announced a 21-day furlough for 700 of its workers.

It has also warned it could have to lay off staff if the Boeing strike continues beyond next month.

Voters in the US go to the polls on 5 November to elect their next president.

The election was initially a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris.

The big question now is – will America get its first woman president or a second Donald Trump term?

As election day approaches, we’ll be keeping track of the polls and seeing what effect the campaign has on the race for the White House.

Harris has had a small lead over Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July and she remains ahead – as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

Harris saw a bounce in her polling numbers in the first few weeks of her campaign, building a lead of nearly four percentage points towards the end of August.

The numbers were relatively stable through September, even after the only debate between the two candidates on 10 September, which was watched by nearly 70 million people.

In the last few days the gap between them has tightened, as you can see in the poll tracker chart below, with the trend lines showing the averages and the dots showing the individual poll results for each candidate.

While these national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, they’re not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election.

That’s because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.

There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.

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Right now the polls are very tight in the seven states considered battlegrounds in this election and neither candidate has a decisive lead in any of them, according to the polling averages.

If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does help highlight some differences between the states – but it’s important to note that there are fewer state polls than national polls so we have less data to go on and every poll has a margin of error that means the numbers could be higher or lower.

In Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has had a small lead for a few weeks now. It’s a similar story in Nevada but with Harris the candidate who has been slightly ahead.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris has been leading since the start of August, sometimes by two or three points, but in recent days the polls have tightened significantly and Trump now has a very small lead in Pennsylvania.

All three of those states had been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his path to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden retook them in 2020 and if Harris can do the same then she will be on course to win the election.

In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day that Biden quit the race he was trailing Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in the seven swing states.

In Pennsylvania, Biden was behind by nearly 4.5 percentage points when he dropped out, as the chart below shows. It is a key state for both campaigns as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven and therefore winning it makes it easier to reach the 270 votes needed.

The figures we have used in the graphics above are averages created by polling analysis website 538, which is part of American news network ABC News. To create them, 538 collects the data from individual polls carried out both nationally and in battleground states by lots of polling companies.

As part of its quality control, 538 only includes polls from companies that meet certain criteria, like being transparent about how many people they polled, when the poll was carried out and how the poll was conducted (telephone calls, text message, online, etc).

You can read more about the 538 methodology here.

At the moment, the polls suggest that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are within a couple of percentage points of each other in all of the swing states – and when the race is that close, it’s very hard to predict winners.

Polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Polling companies will be trying to fix that problem in a number of ways, including how to make their results reflect the make-up of the voting population.

Those adjustments are difficult to get right and pollsters still have to make educated guesses about other factors like who will actually turn up to vote on 5 November.

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Authorities in India are evacuating nearly 1.5 million people from the path of an approaching cyclone in the eastern states of Odisha (formerly Orissa) and West Bengal.

Thousands of relief workers have been deployed to minimise damage from Cyclone Dana, which is expected to make landfall in the next 24 hours.

Transportation services have already been affected, with scores of trains and flights cancelled.

India’s weather department has said a depression over the Bay of Bengal is expected to turn into a severe cyclonic storm by Thursday evening.

The storm is expected to hit the coastal areas with wind speeds of 100-120 km/h (62-74 mph).

On Wednesday, Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi said arrangements were in place to ensure the safety of residents in districts along the cyclone’s path.

State officials said they had prepared temporary relief camps with food, water and health facilities.

“We are fully prepared to deal with the storm. Don’t panic, be safe and be careful,” Majhi told the media.

Odisha is evacuating more than a million people from 14 districts, while West Bengal is evacuating over 300,000 people from coastal areas.

Officials from the two states and rescue teams are on alert. Schools in the coastal regions have been shut.

Flight operations from Bhubaneswar and Kolkata city airports have been suspended from Thursday evening to Friday morning and more than 200 trains have been cancelled as authorities brace for the storm.

Fishermen have been warned against venturing into the sea and contingency plans have been made for Paradip port in Odisha to ensure safety of the staff and people living nearby.

The weather department has said “heavy to very heavy” rainfall is expected along the coast for the next 24 hours.

Odisha and West Bengal experience severe storms and cyclones every year.

In 1999, more than 10,000 people were killed in a cyclone in Odisha.

Last year, at least 16 people lost their lives when a cyclone lashed India and Bangladesh.

Director Tim Burton has revealed that being on the internet makes him feel “quite depressed”.

Ahead of the opening of a major career retrospective in London, he told BBC News: “Anybody who knows me knows I’m a bit of a technophobe.

“If I look at the internet, I found that I got quite depressed,” the 66-year-old said. “It scared me because I started to go down a dark hole. So I try to avoid it, because it doesn’t make me feel good.”

The World of Tim Burton at the Design Museum features 600 items which organisers say give “a rare private glimpse into his creative process” and goes on display in the UK for the first time on Friday.

Burton is best-known for directing films such as Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland, as well as Beetlejuice and its recent sequel.

Reflecting on his use of the internet, Burton said: “I get depressed very quickly, maybe more quickly than other people. But it doesn’t take me much to start to click and start to short circuit.”

The film-maker said keeping busy and doing simple things such as looking at clouds helps him feel better. As does his collection of ten giant dinosaur models that he keeps in his backyard including a 20ft T-Rex.

Burton pulls out his mobile phone and proudly shows us a picture of a 50-foot Brontosaurus. He buys the ones you find at amusement parks, adding that actor Nicolas Cage has “real ones”.

Burton was born in a California suburb just outside of Los Angeles but has lived in London for the past 20 years.

“I was a foreigner in my own country,” he told the BBC when asked about adopting the UK capital. “When I came here, even as a foreigner, I felt more at home, because that’s where I feel comfortable”.

Burton has long been considered a “tortured outcast” and self-declared “weirdo”. As a child, he channelled his creativity into art and grew up watching classic horror movies and creature features which developed his love for monsters.

“It was very clear from King Kong to Frankenstein to Creature from the Black Lagoon that all the monsters were the most emotional. The humans were the ones that scared me,” he said.

“They were the angry villagers in Frankenstein – like the internet – these nameless faces [Burton makes monster roaring noises] and the monster always had the most emotion and most feeling even though they’re looked upon as a certain way.

“Every monster usually has some kind of pathos and some kind of humanity” that the humans lacked he added.

Objects connected to films ranging from Catwoman to Corpse Bride have been loaned to the new exhibition from Burton’s personal archives, film studios, and private collections of collaborators such as the designer Colleen Atwood.

What still scares Burton are the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.

“It’s something I can’t even quite fathom,” he said, before referring to an incident last year where AI was used to transform Disney characters into Burton-style characters.

“Until it happens to you, really don’t understand it. But it was quite disturbing: intellectually and emotionally disturbing. It felt like my soul had been taken from me.

“It’s like when other cultures say, ‘oh, don’t take my picture, because you’re taking away my soul’. And that’s how it is. It’s something that’s robbing you of humanity.

“All I can say is, like, I understand these other cultures when they feel like your soul is being sucked”.

Burton first began working as an apprentice animator at Disney and made immense contributions to stop-motion animation before going on to direct blockbusters such as Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).

When asked whether he would return to directing a film from the superhero genre, his response was a quick “no”.

“It felt new at the time,” he reflects. “There was pressure because it was a big movie and it was a different interpretation of comic books. So that was a pressure, but it wasn’t the pressure that you would experience now.”

Burton demurs when asked about what he wants to shoot next. Perhaps the horror classic Frankenstein?

“No, no,” he laughs. “I’ve done my version with a dog [referring to his 2012 film Frankenweenie]. That’s fine.”

He admits to feeling invigorated with recent successes of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the Netflix series Wednesday, of which he directed four episodes.

“The Hollywood journey is an Alice in Wonderland kind of journey. You go up, you go down, you go sideways. That’s the way it is,” he said.

“What I realize now, maybe because I’m older as well, is OK I’m just gonna do what I want. And if you want to do it, fine. If not, then you don’t have to go on this journey with me”.

More than 32,000 people bought advance tickets to The World of Tim Burton, making this the biggest ever ticket pre-sale in the Design Museum’s 35-year history.

The exhibition has been staged in 14 cities in 11 countries since 2014. But the London version displays more than 90 items that are new.

Visitors will also be able to see a recreation of Burton’s private studio which includes a miniature version of Godzilla on his work desk, reflecting his love of Japanese Kaiju films.

But Burton had initially resisted allowing the exhibition to come to London.

“It’s a strange thing, to put 50 years of art and your life on view for everyone to see,” he said.

“However, collaborating with the Design Museum for this final stop was the right choice. They understand the art”.

Tim Marlow, CEO of the Design Museum, said: “During his extraordinary career, Tim Burton has harnessed a compelling mixture of gothic horror and black comedy, of melancholy and enchantment, of oddball whimsy and visionary range in the creation of fantastical filmic worlds.”

However when discussing his success, Burton tells us that he rejects the term “Burtonesque” even though it’s widely used in popular culture to describe his oeuvre.

“I never liked that,” he says firmly. “I don’t want to become a thing. It’s taken me my whole life to try to be something like resembling human”.

Israel’s intensified bombing campaign of Lebanon has caused more damage to buildings in two weeks than occurred during a year of cross-border fighting with Hezbollah, according to satellite-based radar data assessed by the BBC.

Data shows that more than 3,600 buildings in Lebanon appear to have been damaged or destroyed between 2 and 14 October 2024. This represents about 54% of the total estimated damage since cross-border hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah broke out just over a year ago.

The damage data was gathered by Corey Scher of City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. They compared radar satellite images to reveal sudden changes in the height or structure of buildings which indicate damage.

Wim Zwijnenburg, an environmental expert from the Pax for Peace organisation, reviewed the satellite-based radar data and warned of the impact of Israel’s bombing.

“The Israeli military campaign seems to be creating a ‘dead zone’ in the south of Lebanon to drive out the population, and making it difficult for Hezbollah to re-establish positions, at the cost of the civilian population,” he said.

Cross-border hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah broke out after the armed Lebanese group started firing rockets in and around northern Israel in support of Palestinians on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel.

Israel invaded southern Lebanon in a dramatic escalation on 30 September to destroy, it said, Hezbollah weapons and infrastructure in “limited, localised, targeted raids”.

Satellite photos, radar imagery, and military records show recent Israeli bombardment in Lebanon has focused on the southern border region. It has also expanded to central and northern areas, including the Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The Israeli army said it hit thousands of Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut.

Most of the strikes on Beirut have targeted Dahieh, a southern suburb that is home to thousands of civilians. The Israeli military claims the area is home to Hezbollah’s command headquarters.

A series of Israeli strikes on buildings in the area killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September.

Separate data from the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), which has been analysed by the BBC, indicates at least 2,700 attacks by the Israeli military on Lebanese areas from 1 September until 11 October 2024. While these attacks primarily focus on southern border areas, they have also extended to northern and central regions. Each Israeli attack can also include several bombings.

Hezbollah has carried out around 540 attacks against Israel in the same timeframe, according to Acled. Each Hezbollah attack can include a barrage of rockets, missiles and drones.

The Israeli military says air strikes in Lebanon are targeting Hezbollah infrastructure.

It regularly adds it wants to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of Israeli border areas displaced by attacks from the Iran-backed group.

About 60,000 people have been evacuated from northern Israel because of near-daily attacks by Hezbollah. But some rockets have reached further south and damaged homes in and around the coastal city of Haifa.

Hezbollah reiterated it would continue sending rockets into Israel unless a ceasefire is reached. The group’s deputy secretary general claimed rockets would focus on military targets, but warned Hezbollah had the right to attack anywhere in Israel in response to strikes across Lebanon.

On the Lebanese side, many Israeli air strikes targeted the city of Tyre, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut, according to the BBC’s analysis of the latest monthly data collected by Acled.

Lebanon’s government says up to 1.3 million people have been internally displaced, whilst Prime Minister Najib Mikati warned of the “largest displacement” in the country’s history.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been issuing evacuation orders to residents across the country, including areas of Beirut.

In the south, the army instructed residents of several villages to leave their homes and “immediately head north of the Awali River,” which meets the coast about 50 km (30 miles) from the Israeli border.

“This is a humanitarian catastrophe,” Gabriel Karlsson, Middle East Manager at the British Red Cross in Beirut, told the BBC.

He said there are insufficient shelters to accommodate so many evacuees.

“I saw children sleeping in the streets,” Karlsson added, urging humanitarian organisations to coordinate their efforts to address the escalating crisis.

Lebanese officials say at least 2,350 have been killed and over 10,000 injured in Israeli attacks. The Lebanon health minister said many casualties were civilians.

On the Israeli side, 60 people have been killed and more than 570 wounded by Hezbollah attacks, Israeli authorities say.

“Collateral damage is inevitable in war”, Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, told the BBC.

The retired major-general blamed Hezbollah for the war and claimed Israel’s ground offensive would force the group out from the border areas.

Zwijnenburg, from the Pax for Peace organisation, however, has warned of the impact of Israel’s military campaign on civilians and the populated areas.

“The heavy blast radius kills and maims civilians nearby”, he said, in reference to Israeli air strikes.

“Open-source data combined with satellite imagery also showed that civilian infrastructure such as irrigation channels, gas stations and electricity grids were damaged, which is worsening the humanitarian situation,” he added.

An Indian PhD student says she was “forcibly transferred” to a masters course without her consent by the University of Oxford.

Lakshmi Balakrishnan, from Tamil Nadu in southern India, has two masters degrees and spent nearly £100,000 to study and live at the world-leading university.

Ms Balakrishnan said the university’s English faculty had “not acted in good faith” after her thesis idea had been accepted at the application stage, and in her first year, but was then rejected in the fourth year.

The University of Oxford said all students were made aware that a “successful outcome would depend on their academic progress”.

“They forcibly removed me from the PhD program and moved me to a masters level course without my consent,” Ms Balakrishnan said.

“I feel a sense of betrayal and I feel like I have been let down by an institution that I held in high regard.

“I already have two masters degrees from India and I paid £100,000 at Oxford to get my PhD, not another masters course”

Having lost her mum at a young age she was brought up in South India by her father, before studying for two masters degrees in her home country.

“I am the first person in my family to come abroad for studies and I hail from an underprivileged background, I made immense sacrifices to come and study at Oxford.”

During her fourth year, she had an assessment, in which two different assessors failed her, saying her Shakespeare research did not have scope for PhD level.

She has disputed the English Faculty’s decision and has taken them through an appeals process, but has been unsuccessful.

“I believe that the university’s strategy is to force me to wade through endless appeals and complaints procedures in the hope that I will eventually give up and go.”

The university confirmed the appeals process has concluded.

The Queen’s College, where Ms Balakrishnan studied, wrote to the University to express concern at her treatment.

It pointed out that despite failing her two assessments, no serious concerns were raised about her work in her reports each term.

The college also believed there were errors in the appeal process, in the way the rules have been applied, and it questioned the process which saw Ms Balakrishnan transferred to a Masters course.

Two professors specialising in this area of Shakespeare also said her research had potential and merits a PhD.

But the OIA, the independent adjudicator for higher education, supported the university’s view.

In a statement, the University of Oxford said: “To achieve Confirmation of Status, progress must sufficiently demonstrate a strong likelihood of successful completion of a doctoral thesis. Unfortunately, not all students achieve this.”

“Where a student disagrees with the outcome of an assessment they have the right to appeal under the university’s appeal procedure, which ensures fairness and transparency.”

“There is a further internal route of appeal of that decision and a subsequent right to complain to the OIA.”

A tropical storm has dumped one month’s worth of rains over large swathes of the northern Philippines, leaving more than 20 people dead and forcing 150,000 others to evacuate.

Trami made landfall Thursday on the northeast coast of Luzon, the country’s most populous island, and caused widespread flooding and landslides.

The Bicol peninsula was worst-hit, where floodwaters chased people and their pets to the second storey of their homes.

Typhoons are common in the Philippines at this time of the year, but Trami’s rains were unusually heavy, the state weather bureau told BBC News.

People trapped on their roofs posted photos of their ordeal on social media to appeal for rescue, prompting the coast guard to deploy rubber boats.

“It’s getting dangerous. We’re waiting for rescuers,” Karen Tabagan from the flooded municipality of Bato told AFP News agency.

The rains also triggered volcanic mudslides or lahar in villages surrounding Mount Mayon, an active volcano in Bicol. Photos showed the tyres of cars and the front doors of houses partially buried in dark grey mud.

The storm, known locally as Kristine, had dumped one month’s worth of rain over 24 hours in Bicol, Ana Claren, a forecaster at the state weather bureau in Manila, told BBC News.

The rainfall amount also exceeded what the weather bureau considers “normal” over 30 years of observation, she said.

“The rains were really severe. We did not expect this,” Glenda Bonga, the acting governor of Albay province, told local broadcaster ANC.

The storm, which was packing winds of up to 95 km/h (59 mph), was forecast to leave the country’s north-west coast late Thursday evening.

Rescuers were also searching for a missing fisherman after a boat sunk in the waters off Bulacan province, west of Manila, the local disaster agency told AFP news agency.

Rescue work has been difficult as the winds were causing a strong current, said Geraldine Martinez, a rescue officer in Bulacan’s Obando municipality.

At least a dozen flights across the country had been cancelled.

Even as it was on its way out of the Philippines, officials have continued to warn of heavy rainfall, flooding, landslides and storm surges.

Another low pressure area off Bicol could intensify into a tropical depression by the end of the week, Ms Claren said.

The Philippines is hit by an average of four typhoons annually, some of them deadly.

However, recent years have seen typhoons with stronger, more destructive winds and heavier rains.