Japanese voters are today heading to the polls in a snap election, following a tumultuous few years for the ruling party which saw a “cascade” of scandals, widespread voter apathy and record-low approval ratings.

The election was announced by Shigeru Ishiba three days after he was selected as the leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) – before he had been officially sworn in as prime minister.

The decision was made despite the LDP seeing approval ratings of below 20% earlier in the year, in the wake of a political fundraising corruption scandal.

Yet the LDP still remains the strongest contender against opposition parties which have failed to unite, or convince voters they are a viable option to govern.

The main opposition party had an approval rating of just 6.6% before parliament was dissolved.

“It is so hard to make decisions to choose parties, I think people are losing interest,” Miyuki Fujisaki, a long-time LDP supporter who works in the care-home sector, told the BBC ahead of polls opening.

The LDP, she said, has its problems with alleged corruption, “but the opposition also does not stand out at all”.

“They sure complain a lot, but it’s not at all clear on what they want to do,” the 66-year-old said.

For all the apathy, politics in Japan has been moving at a fast pace in recent months.

Shigeru Ishiba took over as prime minister after being voted in by the ruling party following his predecessor Fumio Kishida – who had been in the role since 2021 – making a surprise decision to step down in August.

The move to call the election came at a time when the LDP is desperate to restore its tarnished image among the public. Ishiba – a long-time politician who previously served as defence minister – has described it as the “people’s verdict”.

But whether it’s enough to restore trust in the LDP – which has been in power almost continuously since 1955 – is uncertain.

A series of scandals has tarnished the ruling party’s reputation. Chief among them is the party’s relationship with the controversial Unification Church – described by critics as a “cult” – and the level of influence it had on lawmakers.

Then came the revelations of the political funding corruption scandal. Japan’s prosecutors have been investigating dozens of LDP lawmakers accused of pocketing proceeds from political fundraising events. Those allegations – running into the millions of dollars – led to the dissolution of powerful factions, the backbone of its internal party politics.

“What a wretched state the ruling party is in,” said Michiko Hamada, who had travelled to Urawa station, on outskirts of Tokyo, for an opposition campaign rally.

“That is what I feel most. It is tax evasion and it’s unforgivable.”

It strikes her as particularly egregious at a time when people in Japan are struggling with high prices. Wages have not changed for three decades – dubbed “the lost 30 years” – but prices have risen at the fastest rate in nearly half a century in the last two years.

This month, as voters were getting ready to go to the polls, saw more price hikes on thousands of food products as well as other day-to-day provisions like mail, pharmaceuticals, electricity and gas.

“I pay 10,000 yen or 20,000 yen ($65 – $130; £50 – £100) more for the food per month (than I used to),” Ms Hamada said.

“And I’m not buying the things I used to buy. I am trying to save up but it still costs more. Things like fruit are very expensive.”

She is not the only one concerned with high prices. Pensioner Chie Shimizu says she now must work part-time to make ends meet.

“Our hourly wage has gone up a bit but it does not match the prices,” she told the BBC as she picked up some food from a stand at Urawa station. “I come to places like this to find something cheaper and good because everything in regular shops is expensive.”

Ms Shimizu has not voted for years but might this time – although she is not sure which candidate or which party to vote for.

“I can’t find anyone that I want to vote for. I feel like there’s no one who I can trust to be our leader. I wonder about those who become an MP for their own greed.”

Against this backdrop, it might look like Ishiba has taken a political gamble. His party had held 247 of 465 seats in the lower house, while its coalition partner, Komeito, had 32. A party needs 233 seats to control the house, known as the Diet.

There are now fears Komeito may fail to reach that number again, while the main opposition – which had 98 seats in the previous parliament – began to pick up momentum with voters ahead of Sunday’s election.

“I think the LDP has dug itself a very deep hole to climb out of. It does not enjoy public trust, and why should it? There’s just been a cascade of scandals,” Jeff Kingston, professor of Asian studies and history at Temple University Japan, told the BBC.

But he does not think any of this will necessarily lead to the party losing the elections.

“I think they (LDP) are worried they’re going to lose some marginal seats, and there are questions hanging over Komeito and how effective a coalition partner they will be,” Prof Kingston said.

Should they pull off a win, Miyuki Fujisaki, the care-home sector worker, warns they will have to do more than just pay lip service to change.

“I want them to show us what they are going to do so this [the scandals] doesn’t happen again,” she said. “They need to prove it – not just say it like they often do in the election time.”

Israel’s attack on Iran deepens the war in the Middle East. Avoiding, or risking, an even worse escalation is at the heart of decisions being taken by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his key advisors.

They must decide on the least bad of a series of difficult choices. At one end of the spectrum is hitting back with another wave of ballistic missiles. Israel has already threatened to retaliate again if that happens.

At the other is deciding to draw a line under the destructive exchanges of direct strikes on their respective territories. The risk for Iran if it holds its fire is that looks weak, intimidated and deterred by Israel’s military power and political determination, backed up by the United States.

In the end, the supreme leader and his advisers are likely to take the decision that, in their view, does least harm to the survival of Iran’s Islamic regime.

Iran’s official media in the hours before and after Israel’s attacks carried defiant statements that, at face value, suggest the decision to respond had already been taken. Its language resembles Israel’s, citing its right to defend itself against attack. But the stakes are so high that Iran might decide to walk its threats back.

That is the hope of Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who fell in behind America’s insistence that Israel has acted in self-defence.

“I am clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against Iranian aggression,” he said. “I’m equally clear that we need to avoid further regional escalation and urge all sides to show restraint. Iran should not respond.”

Iran’s own statements have been consistent since its ballistic missile on Israel on 1 October. A week ago, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Turkey’s NTV network that “any attack on Iran will be considered crossing a red line for us. Such an attack will not go unanswered.”

Hours before the Israeli strikes, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baqai said: “Any aggression by the Israeli regime against Iran will be met with full force.” It was, he said, “highly misleading and baseless” to suggest that Iran would not respond to a limited Israeli attack.

As the Israeli aircraft were heading back to base Iran’s foreign ministry invoked its right to self defence “as enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter”. A statement said Iran believed it was both entitled and obligated to respond to foreign acts of aggression.

Israel has set the pace of escalation since the spring. It sees Iran as the crucial backer of the Hamas attacks that killed about 1,200 people – Israelis and more than 70 foreign nationals – on 7 October last year. Fearing that Israel was looking for a chance to strike, Iran signalled repeatedly that it did not want a full-on war with Israel.

That did not mean it was prepared to stop its constant, often deadly, but lower-level pressure on Israel and its allies.

The men in Tehran thought they had a better idea than all-out war. Instead, Iran used the allies and proxies in its so-called “axis of resistance” to attack Israel. The Houthis in Yemen blocked and destroyed shipping in the Red Sea. Hezbollah rocket fire from Lebanon forced at least 60,000 Israelis from their homes.

Six months into the war, Israel’s retaliation forced perhaps twice as many Lebanese from their homes in the south, but Israel was prepared to do much more. It warned that if Hezbollah did not hold its fire into Israel and move back from the border it would take action.

When that did not happen, Israel decided to break out of a battlefield that had been shaped by Iran’s limited, but attritional war. It landed a series of powerful blows that threw the Islamic regime in Tehran off balance and left its strategy in tatters. That is why, after the latest Israeli strikes, Iranian leaders have only hard choices.

Israel interpreted Iran’s reluctance to fight an all-out war as weakness, and upped the pressure both on Iran and its axis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s commanders could afford to take risks. They had President Joe Biden’s unequivocal support, a safety net that came not just in the shape of massive deliveries of munitions, but with his decision to send significant American sea and air reinforcements to the Middle East to back up the US commitment to defend Israel.

On 1 April an Israeli airstrike destroyed part of Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, the Syrian capital. It killed a top Iranian commander, Brig Gen Mohammed Reza Zahedi, along with other senior officers from the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The Americans were furious that they had not been warned and given time to put their own forces on alert. But Joe Biden’s support did not waver as Israel faced the consequences of its actions. On 13 April Iran attacked with drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. Most were shot down by Israel’s defences, with considerable help from armed forces of the US, UK, France and Jordan.

Biden apparently asked Israel to “take the win” hoping that might stop what had become the most dangerous moment in the widening Middle East war. When Israel confined its response to a strike on an air defence site, Biden’s plan seemed to be working.

But since the summer, Israel has repeatedly escalated the war with Iran and its axis of allies and proxies. The biggest blows were landed in a major offensive against Iran’s most important ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran had spent years building up Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons as a key part of its forward defence. The idea was an Israeli attack on Iran would be deterred by the knowledge that Hezbollah would hammer Israel from just over the border in Lebanon.

But Israel moved first, implementing plans it had developed since Hezbollah fought it to a standstill in the 2006 war. It blew up booby trapped pagers and walkie talkies it had deceived Hezbollah into buying, invaded south Lebanon and killed Hezbollah’s leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah, a man who had been a symbol of defiant resistance to Israel for decades. The authorities in Beirut say that Israel’s offensive in Lebanon has so far killed more than 2,500 people, displaced more than 1.2 million and caused enormous damage to a country already on its knees after its economy largely collapsed.

Hezbollah is still fighting and killing Israeli soldiers inside Lebanon and firing large numbers of rockets. But it is reeling after losing its leader and much of its arsenal.

Faced with the near collapse of its strategy, Iran concluded it had to hit back. Allowing its allies to fight and die without responding would destroy its position as the leader of the anti-Israeli and anti-western forces in the region. Its answer was a much bigger ballistic missile attack on Israel on 1 October.

The airstrikes on Friday 25 October were Israel’s response. They took longer to come than many expected. Leaks of Israeli plans could have been a factor.

Israel is also carrying out a major offensive in northern Gaza. The UN human rights chief Volker Turk has called it the darkest moment of Gaza’s war, with the Israeli military subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and the risk of starvation.

It’s impossible for an outsider to know whether the timing of Israel’s attacks on Iran was designed to draw international attention away from northern Gaza. But it might have been part of the calculation.

It is hard to stop successive rounds of strikes and counter strikes when the countries concerned believe they will be seen as weak, and deterred, if they don’t respond. That is how wars spin out of control.

The question now is whether Iran is prepared to give Israel the last word, at least on this stage of the war. President Biden backed Israel’s decision to retaliate after 1 October. But once again he tried to head off an even deadlier escalation, telling Israel publicly not to bomb Iran’s most important assets, its nuclear, oil and gas installations. He augmented Israel’s defences by deploying the THAAD anti-missile system to Israel, and prime minister Netanyahu agreed to take his advice.

The American elections on 5 November are part of both Israel and Iran’s calculations about what happens next. If Donald Trump gets his second term, he might be less concerned than Biden about answering Iranian retaliation, if it happens, with strikes on nuclear, oil and gas facilities.

Once again, the Middle East is waiting. Israel’s decision not to hit Iran’s most valuable assets might, perhaps, give Tehran the chance to postpone a response, at least long enough for diplomats to do their work. At the UN General Assembly last month, the Iranians were suggesting that they were open to a new round of nuclear negotiations.

All this should matter greatly to the world outside the Middle East. Iran has always denied it wants a nuclear bomb. But its nuclear expertise and enrichment of uranium have put a weapon within its reach. Its leaders must be looking for a new way to deter their enemies. Developing a nuclear warhead for their ballistic missiles might be on their agenda.

The Prince of Wales says “inspiration and guidance” from his mother, Diana, has been a driving force behind his personal commitment to tackle homelessness.

In a forthcoming ITV documentary, Prince William talks about the profound impact of visits he made to The Passage homelessness shelter with his mother when he was a child – and how it helped him see “outside the palace walls”.

The prince admits he sometimes feels guilty about not being able to do more – and wants to share with his own children a sense of empathy for those facing hardship.

“When I was very small, my mother started talking about homelessness, much like I do now with my children on the school run,” says the prince.

If passion projects reveal something about what drives someone, then perhaps his support for The Passage charity is key to unlocking Prince William’s character.

The Westminster-based charity provides assistance and friendship for London’s homeless and helps them into secure accommodation.

Forged by childhood memories of visits with his mother, the prince’s longtime support for the charity has provided the foundation for his current Homewards project, set up to tackle homelessness across the UK.

“My mother took me to The Passage. She took Harry and I both there. I must have been about 11, I think, probably, at the time. Maybe 10. I’d never been to anything like that before. And I was a bit anxious as to what to expect,” he says in the ITV documentary, Prince William: We Can End Homelessness.

“My mother went about her usual part of making everyone feel relaxed, and having a laugh and joking with everyone.

“I remember at the time, kind of thinking, well, if everyone’s not got a home, they’re all going to be really sad.

“But it was incredible how happy an environment it was,” recalls Prince William.

The Passage has revealed four previously unseen photos of the prince visiting their London base with his mother, the princess, in June and December 1993.

“I remember having some good conversations – just playing chess and chatting,” says the prince, of his childhood visits to The Passage.

“That’s when it dawned on me that there are other people out there who don’t have the same life as you do.”

Prince William became the charity’s official patron in 2019, but those visits have continued both publicly and privately throughout his life, often for hours longer than scheduled.

In the ITV documentary, the prince is filmed serving food and clearing up at The Passage’s Christmas dinner, hugging some of the regular visitors there. He is even seen being bossed around by the charity’s head chef, Claudette Dawkins, as she organises her royal helper.

He speaks about his concern for some of the homeless he encounters “who are in really bad place… It’s like you want to just protect them”.

Over the years, the prince says he has spent a lot of time gathering information about homelessness – now he wants to do something practical to prevent it.

The prince addresses the question of his own privileged status – and argues that the point of having such a big public platform is to put it to good use, by taking action on issues such as reducing homelessness.

“I feel, with my position and my platform, I should be delivering change,” he says.

“I’ve spent enough time learning and listening to what people have been through that I feel almost guilty every time I leave that I’m not doing more to help.

“I feel compelled to act, because I don’t want to just talk about it. I don’t want to just listen. I actually want to see someone smile because their life has been made better,” says the prince.

“Building a project is the only way I can see, at the moment, to try and alleviate [the problem], and help people who are in a much less fortunate, or in a very difficult, situation.”

Mick Clarke, chief executive of The Passage, says of Prince William’s visits: “I think he feels most at home when he’s just chatting away with our clients and hearing their stories.

“People can get very nervous, but he’s very good at putting people at ease.”

Prince William’s Homewards project, which has six flagship locations across the UK, aims to show homelessness is not inevitable.

“The ultimate ambition is to prove that we can prevent homelessness in these regions, so then others will come along and go, well, if they can do it, why can’t we?” says the prince.

It draws on the experience of Finland, where homelessness was effectively reduced by a policy of providing secure accommodation for people, with wrap-around support for contributory issues such as mental health problems and addiction.

Among those William speaks to over the course of the film is Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, who went from being a rough sleeper to becoming a chief fire officer. She has used her own lived experience to advise the prince’s current project.

Lord John Bird, the forthright founder of the Big Issue, has warned of decades of failed initiatives to tackle homelessness, but has nonetheless backed the prince’s intervention.

“I am very impressed that a young man who has got young children and could go and live the life of Riley, has decided to make a stand for the work that he wants to do, and the work that his mother did.

“Princess Diana was probably the only personality who shone a light on homelessness.

“What she was saying is, these are human beings and I’m going to address myself to it. And I think that her son, William, has said, this is the legacy.”

Georgia’s ruling party is leading a pivotal election focused on the country’s future path in Europe, according to preliminary results.

The Georgian Dream party of billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili is on 53%, based on a count of more than 70% of the vote, the central election commission says.

The initial results were dramatically different from exit polls conducted by Western pollsters and the head of one of the opposition parties said they believed the vote had been “stolen from the Georgian people”.

“We do not accept the results of these falsified elections,” said Tina Bokuchava, head of the United National Movement.

Another opposition leader, Nika Gvaramia, said Georgian Dream had mounted a “constitutional coup”.

Georgia’s increasingly authoritarian ruling party and the four pro-EU opposition groups trying to end its 12 years in power had earlier both claimed victory based on competing exit polls.

Voters turned out in big numbers on Saturday in this South Caucasus state bordering Russia, and there were numerous reports of vote violations and violence outside polling stations.

One opposition official in a town south of the capital Tbilisi told the BBC that he was beaten up first by a local Georgian Dream councillor, and then “another 10 men came and I didn’t know what was happening to me”.

The opposition has described this high-stakes vote as a choice between Europe or Russia. Many saw the vote as the most crucial since Georgians backed independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

As soon as voting ended, two exit polls by Edison and HarrisX for pro-opposition TV channels gave Georgian Dream 40.9% and 42% of the vote, with the total for the combined four opposition groups put at 51.9% and 48%. But a poll for the big, government-supporting Imedi TV channel gave Georgian Dream 56%.

Some time later, the central election commission (CEC) came out with initial preliminary results.

The commission had said that 90% of the vote would be released within two hours of the polls closing, but four hours afterwards it was still at only 72%.

The CEC has come under criticism for being too close to the government and for rushing through electoral reform ahead of the election without sufficient consultation.

“The onus is on a government body to provide transparency required in an electoral process,” said Dritan Nesho of HarrisX.

“We analysed the data from these precincts and there’s a wide discrepancy from the data we have. In some cases they have districts in Tbilisi where Georgian Dream are winning by 45% of the vote, whereas we know most of the opposition vote came from Tbilisi.”

Georgian Dream has already claimed an outright majority in parliament, as the combined four opposition blocs can only muster about 38% between them, according to the contested preliminary results.

Under Georgia’s new system of proportional representation, whoever wins half the vote wins half of the 150 seats. None of the other parties fighting the election reached the 5% threshold to get into parliament.

Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, told supporters it was a “rare occasion in the world for the same party to achieve such success in such a difficult situation”.

However, opposition leaders and supporters had a very different take.

Tina Bokuchava said her party would not accept Georgia’s European future being stolen and she hoped the other main opposition groups would be able to agree on their next steps.

“This is the moment. In future there may be no such moment,” opposition voter Levan Benidze, 36, told the BBC. “I know there are a lot of geopolitical risks – from Russia – but this could be the pivotal moment, a turning point.”

Although Georgia was made a candidate to join the European Union last December, that move has since been frozen by the EU because of “democratic backsliding – in particular a Russian-style “foreign influence” law targeting groups receiving Western funding.

The USSR may have ceased to exist more than three decades ago, but Moscow still considers much of the old Soviet empire its own backyard and Russia’s sphere of influence.

It will have appreciated Georgian Dream’s campaign promise of a “pragmatic” Russia policy, not to mention Brussels’ decision earlier this year to halt Georgia’s EU accession process.

Georgian Dream has promised voters they are still on course to join the EU, but it has also accused the opposition of helping the West to open a new front in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Georgia’s Russian neighbour still occupies 20% of its territory after a five-day war in 2008.

Bidzina Ivanishvili’s rhetoric has become increasingly anti-Western, indicating that a fourth term for Georgian Dream might pull the country back into Russia’s orbit.

Georgians had a simple choice, the party’s founder said after voting in Tbilisi: either a government that served them, or an opposition of “foreign agents, who will carry out only the orders of a foreign country”.

He has repeatedly spoken of a “global war party” pushing the opposition towards joining the war in Ukraine, with Georgian Dream (GD) cast as the party of peace. For many voters the message has worked.

“The most important thing – for me, my family, my grandchildren – is peace that I wish for all Georgians,” GD voter Tinatin Gvelesiani, 55, told the BBC at a polling station in Kojori, south-west of the capital. “Only Georgian Dream” would bring peace, she added.

Election observers reported a string of violations across the country, from ballot stuffing inside polling stations to intimidation of voters outside.

With less than an hour to go before the polls closed, pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili appealed to opposition voters not to be intimidated.

“Don’t get scared. All this is just psychological pressure on you,” she said in a live address on social media.

The intimidation turned into violence for Azat Karimov, 35, the local chair of the biggest opposition party United National Movement in Marneuli south of Tbilisi.

He told the BBC how he was set upon when his team tried to investigate votes being falsified by Georgian Dream officials. He also alleged that voters were being bribed to back the governing party.

“[A Georgian Dream councillor]came with 10-20 people… before police could come I told him to calm down. Right away the councillor started beating me.”

On the eve of the vote, a Georgian monitoring group highlighted a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at the election.

The Kremlin has denied meddling in Georgia’s domestic affairs and alleged instead that the West had made “unprecedented attempts” at interference.

Earlier this year Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, accused the United States of planning a “Colour Revolution” in Georgia.

In her first appearance on the campaign trail alongside Vice-President Kamala Harris, former First Lady Michelle Obama urged Americans to cast their votes to protect the country from the “dangers” of Donald Trump.

In a fiery speech in Michigan – a key battleground state – Obama said the election was “too close” for her liking.

At another event in Michigan, Donald Trump vowed to breathe fresh life into the state’s automotive industry and met with Arab-Americans he said could “turn the election”.

Polls show the two locked in a tight race in Michigan, with Harris holding an extremely narrow lead 10 days before the 5 November election.

The state, with 15 electoral college votes, could lend a deciding edge to either candidate.

President Joe Biden won Michigan by a narrow margin of 2.78% in 2020 – about 150,000 votes – helping to propel him to the presidency.

In 2016, the state went to Trump by an even narrower margin of 0.23% against Hillary Clinton.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

Speaking to a crowd of thousands at an events centre in Kalamazoo, Obama made repeated jabs at Trump, pointing to what she termed his “erratic behaviour” and “obvious mental decline”.

The bulk of her speech, however, focused on a “genuine fear” of how a Trump administration could impact abortion rights, telling an enthusiastic crowd of voters that she believes a failure to elect Kamala Harris could have deadly consequences.

Many abortion rights advocates have raised concerns that abortion bans have threatened women’s lives by denying them life-saving medical treatment.

• She was denied an abortion in Texas – then she almost died

“I’m deeply concerned that so many people are buying into the lies of people who don’t have our best interests at heart,” Obama said, adding that “ugliness will touch all of our lives”.

Harris largely echoed Obama’s comments, and told young Generation Z voters she understands why they might be “impatient” for change.

“I want to tell you that I see you and I see your power,” she said.

At his own rally in Novi, Michigan, Trump largely stuck to frequent campaign promises about immigration, energy and the economy.

He was also joined on stage by a number of Arab-American and Muslim community leaders, including Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi.

“We are supporting Donald Trump because he promised to end war in the Middle East and Ukraine,” Mr Bazzi said. “The bloodshed has to stop all over the world, and I think this man can make it happen.”

Trump said he believes that the Arab-American voters can “turn the election” one way or another.

The state is home to the ‘Uncommitted’ movement, which does not support Trump, but has refused to endorse Harris for what they see as a failure to take a more firm stance against Israel during the war in Gaza, such as committing to a weapons ban.

At the Democratic rally in Kalamazoo, however, some voters said they were much more preoccupied with abortion rights and perceptions that Trump is “undemocratic”, than they were about conflicts abroad.

Kelly Landon, a resident of Canton, Michigan, said that her primary motivation in this election was allowing female relatives to be safe and be in charge of their bodies and their own futures.”

Ms Landon said, in her view, other issues are secondary to the health and safety of women, as well as “their right to live the way they want to live”.

National polling averages tracked by the BBC show Harris with a slight lead nationally, although with Trump narrowly ahead in five of the seven battleground states that could decide the election.

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When an Aboriginal Australian senator heckled King Charles moments after he delivered a speech in the nation’s Parliament House, it caught the world’s attention.

Lidia Thorpe’s cries of “not my King” and “this is not your land” shone a light on a country that is still grappling with its colonial past.

But in the debate that followed on the “appropriateness” of the protest, something else became clear: a split within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community itself.

In the wake of an unsuccessful referendum on their constitutional recognition – which left many feeling silenced – the question Australia’s first inhabitants are now grappling with is how to achieve the self-determination they have fought so long for.

Indigenous Australians are classed as the oldest living culture on earth, and have inhabited the continent for at least 65,000 years.

For more than 200 years though – since the 1770 arrival of Captain James Cook and subsequent British settlement – they have endured long chapters of colonial violence, including the theft of their lands, livelihoods, and even children.

As a result, today, they still face acute disadvantages in terms of health, wealth, education, and life expectancy compared to non-Indigenous Australians.

But, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up less than 4% of the national population, their struggles rarely translate into national voting issues, experts say.

Last year’s Voice to Parliament referendum – which asked whether Australia should recognise its first inhabitants in the constitution and allow them a body to advise the parliament – was a key exception.

The result was a resounding ‘No’, with one major analysis of the data suggesting many voters found the proposal divisive and ineffective.

And while the figures indicate a majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people voted ‘Yes’, support wasn’t unanimous. Thorpe herself was a leading ‘No’ campaigner, having criticised the measure as tokenistic and “an easy way to fake progress”.

But Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, a Widjabul Wia-bal woman and activist, says the ‘No’ outcome left most Indigenous Australians with “a sense of humiliation and rejection”. She adds that the debate itself – which saw countless examples of misinformation and disinformation – unleashed a wave of “racist rhetoric” that their communities are still recovering from.

The big-picture impact of the Voice, Ms Baldwin-Roberts argues, has been a growing sentiment that traditional reconciliation efforts are “dead”. Those approaches have long tried to bridge the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians through polite dialogue and education.

It was against this backdrop that Thorpe made her protest in parliament.

“You can’t reconcile with a country that doesn’t see you,” Ms Baldwin-Roberts tells the BBC. “You can’t reconcile with a country that doesn’t think that you deserve justice.”

Ms Baldwin-Roberts says “new strategies” are needed to disrupt the status quo. She sees Thorpe’s action as “incredibly brave” and reflective of conversations many First Nations people are having.

“There are Indigenous communities around the country talking about our stolen children, our stolen histories – but she had access to that room. As an Australian senator she knows she’s going to get media, and it’s important to make this a talking point.”

Daniel Williams, who is of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, agrees.

“After the [referendum] last year, what do Indigenous people have left? How can we find [an] audience with the monarch to effect change?” he asked a political panel on the ABC.

“We’re talking about 200 years of pain that is continuing to be unanswered and unresolved.”

Others see it differently though: there is a long history of Indigenous leaders petitioning the Royal Family to recognise their peoples’ struggle, but the independent’s senator’s act – for some – went too far.

Nova Peris, a former senator who was the first Aboriginal woman in parliament, described it as an “embarrassing” move which didn’t “reflect the manners, or approach to reconciliation, of Aboriginal Australians at large”.

Both sides of parliament dismissed it as disrespectful and a failed attempt at grandstanding.

Prof Tom Calma, a Kungarakan and Iwaidja man who was in the room, said it risked alienating “the other 96%” of Australia’s population who may not “see or understand the enduring impacts of colonisation”.

“I don’t think the protest – the way that Senator Thorpe went about it – brings people along with us. And in the spirit of reconciliation, we need allies.”

Mr Calma also felt that Thorpe’s demand that King Charles “give [Indigenous people] a treaty” was misplaced, given that those negotiations would be handled by Australia’s government, not the Crown.

As it stands, Australia is one of the only Commonwealth countries to have never signed a treaty, or treaties, with its first inhabitants, or to have recognised them in its founding document.

And with a general election expected before mid-next year, both sides of politics have sought to move on swiftly from the Voice debate, leaving much uncertainty over future policy.

For Ms Baldwin-Roberts, this week’s juxtaposition between the crowds of royal supporters decked out in regalia, and those engaging in protest nearby, reflects “a large separation and social reality between Australia’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations” that exists today.

And in order to bridge that gap, she believes “there has to be some level of reckoning”.

“We live in different spaces, it’s still a largely separated nation. So where do we go from here?”

Kim* is a young professional who started using cannabis when family life became messy. Things improved, but her drug habit stuck – and by then, her social circle was primarily made up of people who also used. With a reliable local supplier of weed, Kim’s friends asked her if she would get some for them.

“That’s what I did,” Kim says. “I never marked up the price in any way, because this was friendship… It’s like, I’m helping you to purchase something we both use anyway.”

Singapore, where Kim lives, has some of the harshest drugs laws in the world.

If you sell, give, deliver, administer, transport or distribute narcotics, that’s drug trafficking. And the law also presumes you’re a trafficker if you possess drugs in quantities that cross certain weight thresholds.

Kim’s life unravelled very fast when one of the friends she sourced cannabis for was caught by the state’s Central Narcotics Bureau.

Kim was named as the supplier of the marijuana, and picked up too. After the authorities trawled through her phone, another friend was arrested – and Kim was charged with drug trafficking.

“I was wracked with horror,” she says. “To have charges of trafficking levelled at me? That was just overwhelming. I felt complete and utter fear of what was going to pan out for me.”

Cannabis for recreational use has been decriminalised in many places around the world. In the US, 24 states have legalised it. While cannabis is illegal In the UK, punishments for its possession have plummeted in recent years.

In Singapore, if you’re found with 15g you’re assumed to be trafficking – and with 500g or more, the death penalty is mandatory.

It’s a controversial policy and there have been several recent cases. The most recent execution – of a 64-year-old on a heroin charge – took place on 16 October.

The Singaporean government won’t tell the BBC how many people are currently on death row.

Singapore’s death penalty becomes mandatory in drug cases involving

• 15g diamorphine (heroin)
• 30g cocaine
• 500g cannabis
• 250g methamphetamine

Kim’s not facing execution, but she could be looking at a lengthy prison term.

“The minimum sentence would be five years,” she says. “The worst-case could be up to 20 years.”

While Kim awaits judgement on trafficking charges, her friends have already been dealt with. But they weren’t prosecuted. Classed as drug consumers – not traffickers – they faced very different treatment.

They were sent to the state-run Drug Rehabilitation Centre for six months each.

When anyone’s caught using an illicit substance in Singapore, they’re assessed as low, medium or high risk. Only those deemed at low risk of reoffending are allowed to stay at home, where they are monitored in the community.

Everyone else – even a first-time offender – is sent for compulsory rehabilitation.

There’s no private, residential rehab in Singapore – no mooching around in fluffy bathrobes and then retreating to your own en-suite room.

The Drug Rehabilitation Centre (DRC) is a vast complex run by Singapore’s Prison Service, which makes sense because this is incarceration by any other name. There’s barbed wire, a control room, and CCTV everywhere. Guards patrol the walkways.

In December 2023, 3,981 Singaporeans were inmates – about 1 in 8 of them women.

Institution S1 houses around 500 identically-dressed male inmates, most first or second-time drug offenders.

A cell accommodates seven or eight men. There are two toilets, and a shower behind a waist-high wall. There are no beds. The men sleep on thin, rush mats on the concrete floor. And a detainee will spend at least six months here – even if they’re a casual, rather than addicted, drug user.

“While it is rehabilitation, it’s still a very deterrent regime,” says Supt Ravin Singh. “We don’t want to make your stay too comfortable.”

The men spend up to six hours a day in a classroom on psychology-based courses.

“The aim is to motivate inmates to want to stay away from drugs, to renew their lives without them, and to address negative thinking regarding drugs,” says Lau Kuan Mei, Deputy Director for the Correctional Rehabilitation Service.

“They teach us a lot about how to manage our triggers for using drugs,” says Jon*, who’s in his late 20s and close to the end of a six-month stay.

Jon has a history of using methamphetamine and is one of the inmates prison authorities have selected to talk to the BBC.

Meth (also known as crystal or ice) is a powerful, highly addictive stimulant, and the most commonly abused drug in Singapore and the region.

Earlier this year, on a weekday afternoon, Central Narcotics Bureau officers arrived at Jon’s house where he lives with his parents. Before they took him away, he spoke to his shocked mother.

“She said, ‘learn your lesson, pay your dues, and come back clean,” Jon remembers.

And that’s what he’s aiming to do – but he knows it won’t be easy.

“It’s exciting leaving,” he says. “But I’m also nervous… In here you’re locked up and not faced with drugs.”

Jon’s worried he might be tempted to take meth again. His rehab programme has been obligatory, not voluntary as it might have been if he lived in North America or Europe. Even so, it might not impact his chances of staying drug-free.

“If you look at evidence-based policies in drug addiction… it doesn’t really matter whether the treatment offered is voluntary or non-voluntary,” says Dr Muni Winslow, an addiction psychiatrist who worked in Singapore’s government institutions.

He believes the treatment offered to drug users has improved.

“It’s much better now because the whole criminal justice system has a lot of psychologists and counsellors who are trained in addictions.”

Historically, drugs have been viewed as a criminal justice issue, rather than a health issue in Singapore.

While the state execution of traffickers still sets the tone for how the government and most Singaporeans view narcotics, it hasn’t prevented changes to how drug users are treated. For example, no-one who spends time in the rehab centre gets a criminal record.

“We talked to psychologists and addiction specialists and our thinking evolved,” explains Minister for Home Affairs and Law, K Shanmugam. “If they’re not a threat to society, we don’t need to treat them as criminals.”

Singapore commits huge resources to enabling people to stay clean once they leave the DRC. Most importantly, they’re helped to find work.

But although authorities say the system has changed, critics believe it’s still humane.

The Transformative Justice Collective, a group which campaigns against the death penalty, describes the DRC as a form of mandatory detention where prisoners face “humiliation” and “loss of liberties”.

The group says programmes in the centre are superficial and focused on “shame” – failing to tackle the root causes of drug dependence.

“We’ve seen a lot of lives disrupted and a lot of trauma inflicted from being arrested, from being thrown into prison, from having to share a cell,” says Kirsten Han.

“It causes a lot of stress and instability. And these are not harms caused by drugs. These are harms caused by the war on drugs.”

Surveillance remains a critical part of the country’s mission to keep former inmates clean.

At a supervision centre, a neat-looking man in his 50s arrives. He’s been in and out of the Drug Rehabilitation Centre six times, struggling with heroin. But for the last 26 months he’s been drug-free, living at home, monitored by an electronic tag. Now his sentence is over.

When the tag’s snipped off, he’s delighted, and leaves quickly after exchanging a few words with Karen Lee, the director of the Community Corrections Command.

“He looks healthy,” she says. “And that’s what we hope for all our supervisees… While three out of 10 do come back as repeat drug abusers, we shouldn’t forget there are seven supervisees out there, successfully living their lives as reintegrated citizens of Singapore.”

While tagged, the ex-heroin user had another incentive to stay clean: regular urine analysis. Singapore’s state-of-the-art Urine Supervision Cubicles are the first of their kind in the world.

Once a supervisee enters a cubicle, the door locks behind him. After he pees into the urinal the technology tests for drugs including cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin. It takes about seven minutes.

“It’s not so boring – we’ve also prepared videos for him to watch, like Mr Bean!” says Karen Lee.

If the test is negative, a green light goes on, and the man’s free to go. A red light indicates a positive test result – and the supervisee will be re-arrested.

Singapore’s zero-tolerance policy doesn’t distinguish between casual drug users and those with an addiction. And although punishment is no longer front and centre of the system, Singapore retains draconian practices – including a legal requirement for doctors to report patients to the authorities if they disclose use of narcotics. This may well deter people from getting help with problematic drug dependency.

But the harshest treatment is reserved for those convicted of trafficking. Kim – who sourced cannabis for her friends – is trying to keep busy while she waits for the court’s decision about the charges against her.

“Once I heard there was very little possibility of me not serving a sentence, I took some time,” Kim says, “to mourn almost, for the period of my life I would lose. I think I’ve accepted prison on a deeper level. It just never gets easier as the day draws nearer.”

If Kim’s incarcerated – as she expects – she won’t be unusual. In December 2023, around half of the country’s convicted prison population – 2,299 people – were serving time for drug offences.

If you, or someone you know, have been affected by addiction, there are details of organisations who may be able to help at BBC Action Line.

Singapore: Drugs, rehab, execution

The laws against illegal narcotics are notoriously severe in Singapore. Penalties for trafficking include the death penalty, but the government argues its zero-tolerance policy is effective.

If you are caught using any illicit narcotic, including cannabis, you may find yourself in compulsory rehab. The BBC’s Linda Pressly approached Singapore’s authorities and was granted access to the state’s austere Drug Rehabilitation Centre.

She speaks to drug users who have to spend months at the facility before being released back into the community under surveillance.

Israeli strikes on Iran, in retaliation for Iran’s missile attacks earlier this month, have killed four Iranian soldiers, Iran’s army said.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it targeted missile factories and other sites near Tehran and western Iran early on Saturday.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said it has a responsibility to defend itself, but added that Iran “recognises its responsibilities towards regional peace and security,” a statement viewed as relatively conciliatory.

Israeli retaliation for an Iranian barrage of almost 200 ballistic missiles fired towards Israel on 1 October had been widely expected for weeks.

Tehran had said the attack was in retaliation for the killing of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil in July. Many missiles were shot down by Israel and its allies but a small number struck central and southern Israel.

Iranian authorities said sites in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces were attacked. The military claimed that the attacks had been successfully countered, although there was “limited damage” in some locations.

Following the Israeli strikes, Iranian state media carried footage showing traffic flowing normally in several cities, while school and sports activities were reportedly being held as scheduled.

The Israeli military announced Saturday’s operation shortly after explosions were reported in Iran. IDF spokesperson Rear Adm Daniel Hagari said the military had demonstrated its preparedness “to defend the state of Israel”.

He also warned if Iran started a new round of escalation, Israel would be “obliged to respond”.

The US and Britain have both urged Iran not to strike back following the latest strikes, with President Joe Biden’s administration calling for an end to the cycle of violence.

Senior US administration officials said the US was informed of Israel’s strikes beforehand, and that Washington had no involvement in them.

The attacks did not include Iranian oil infrastructure or nuclear facilities – targets the Biden administration had urged Israel not to hit – an official said.

The official said the US had encouraged Israel for weeks to conduct a response that was “targeted and proportional with low risk of civilian harm” and suggested that was “precisely what transpired” on Saturday evening.

However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issued a statement saying Israel chose its targets “in accordance with its national interests, and not according to American dictates”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Israel had the right to defend itself against “Iranian aggression” and echoed calls for Iran to avoid retaliation, saying the UK would work to “de-escalate the situation across the region”.

But Russia and other countries in the region, including US allies Jordan and Saudi Arabia, accused Israel of escalating the conflict.

Qatar expressed “deep concern about the serious repercussions that may result from this escalation”, while Jordan described the attack as a “dangerous escalation”.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said “what is needed is to stop provoking Iran to retaliate, and to get out of the spiral of uncontrollable escalation”.

• Iran’s missile attack on Israel

The extent of the Israeli strikes and their precise targets were still unclear on Saturday morning.

Iran’s aviation authority briefly suspended flights but announced that they would restart from 09:00 local time (06:30 BST).

Hooman, a 42-year-old factory employee, was working in Tehran when he heard the blasts, he told news agency AFP.

“It was an echoing sound… terrible and horrifying,” the agency quoted him as saying. “Now that there is war in the Middle East, we are afraid that we will be dragged into it.”

Israeli air strikes also targeted sites in central and southern Syria, Syrian state media reported.

Following the Israeli strikes, Hezbollah fired 80 projectiles across the border into Israel on Saturday afternoon, according to the IDF.

Later, AFP news agency reported the Iran-backed group fired a series of rockets at five residential areas in northern Israel, including the outskirts of Krayot near Haifa.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump‘s three-hour interview with America’s number one podcaster, Joe Rogan, has been released.

In the wide-ranging sit-down, the former president discusses everything from the “biggest mistake” of his White House tenure, what he told North Korea’s leader and whether extraterrestrial life exists.

Two years ago Rogan described Trump as “an existential threat to democracy” and refused to have him on his show. But the pair seemed friendly on Friday as they chatted about their shared interest in Ultimate Fighting Championship and mutual friends like Elon Musk.

The Republican’s campaign hopes the interview will consolidate his influence with male voters, who make up the core of listeners to the Joe Rogan Experience, which has 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers.

Trump took a major detour to visit Rogan in Austin, Texas, causing him to show up almost three hours late to a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, a crucial swing state where both he and his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, have been campaigning hard.

Trump told Rogan the “biggest mistake” of his 2017-21 presidency was “I picked a few people I shouldn’t have picked”.

“Neocons or bad people or disloyal people,” he told Rogan, referring to neoconservatives, policy-makers who champion an interventionist US foreign policy.

“A guy like Kelly, who was a bully but a weak person,” Trump added, mentioning his former White House chief-of-staff John Kelly, who told the New York Times this week that he thought his former boss had “fascist” tendencies.

Trump also described his former US National Security Adviser John Bolton as “an idiot”, but useful at times.

“He was good in a certain way,” said Trump. “He’s a nutjob.

“And everytime I had to deal with a country when they saw this whack job standing behind me they said: ‘Oh man, Trump’s going to go to war with us.’ He was with Bush when they went stupidly into the Middle East.”

Trump said he got to know North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “very well” despite some nuclear sabre-rattling between the two initially when Trump said he told him: “Little Rocket Man, you’re going to burn in hell.”

“By the time I finished we had no problem with North Korea,” Trump said.

Trump said he urged Kim to stop building up his “substantial” weapons stockpile.

“I said: ‘Do you ever do anything else? Why don’t you go take it easy? Go to the beach, relax.

“I said: ‘You’re always building nuclear, you don’t have to do it. Relax!’ I said: ‘Let’s build some condos on your shore.’”

Trump also argued that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he had been president.

“I said, ‘Vladimir, you’re not going in,’” he told Rogan, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I used to talk to him all the time.

“I can’t tell you what I told him, because I think it would be inappropriate, but someday he’ll tell you, but he would have never gone in.”

Trump said Putin invaded Ukraine because “number one, he doesn’t respect Biden at all”. The White House has previously accused Trump of cozying up to foreign autocrats.

Asked for proof to back up his false claims that the 2020 presidential was stolen from him by mass voter fraud, Trump told Rogan: “We’ll do it another time.

“I would bring in papers that you would not believe, so many different papers. That election was so crooked, it was the most crooked.”

Rogan pressed him for evidence.

Trump alleged irregularities with the ballots in Wisconsin and that Democrats “used Covid to cheat”.

“Are you going to present this [proof] ever?” asked Rogan.

“Uh…,” said Trump before pivoting to talk about how 51 former intelligence agents aligned with Joe Biden had falsely suggested that stories about his son Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation.

“I lost by, like, I didn’t lose,” said Trump, quickly correcting himself.

Trump lashed out at his political opponents and praised his allies, many of whom are likely to appeal to Rogan’s fanbase.

He called his rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris, a “very low IQ person” and described California’s Gavin Newsom as “one of the worst governors in the world”.

Trump said that Elon Musk, who has appeared on Rogan’s podcast in the past, was “the greatest guy”.

He also said he is “completely” committed to bringing Robert F Kennedy Jr into a potential new Trump administration.

The former independent presidential candidate, who has a close friendship with Rogan, dropped out in August and endorsed the Republican nominee.

Trump said he disagrees with Kennedy on environmental policy so would instead ask the vaccine critic to “focus on health, do whatever you want”.

Trump said that he hadn’t ruled out there being life in space.

“There’s no reason not to think that Mars and all these planets don’t have life,” he said, referring to discussions he’d had with jet pilots who’d seen “very strange” things in the sky.

“Well, Mars – we’ve had probes there, and rovers, and I don’t think there’s any life there,” Rogan said.

“Maybe it’s life that we don’t know about,” said Trump.

Trump said that some senior figures at NBC had tried to talk him out of running for president to keep his show The Apprentice on air.

”They wanted me to stay,” he said. “All the top people came over to see me, try and talk me out of it, because they wanted to have me extend.”

Trump featured in 14 series of The Apprentice from 2004, but NBC cut ties with him after he launched his 2015 bid for the presidency, citing his “derogatory” comments about immigrants.

Trump has been under pressure from Democrats to release his medical records after Harris released hers earlier this month, which concluded she was in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency.

Trump’s team said at the time that his doctor described him as being in “perfect and excellent health”, without sharing his records.

Trump didn’t address the topic directly on Friday’s podcast.

But he told Rogan that during one physical, for which he didn’t give a date, doctors had described his ability to run on a steep treadmill as “unbelievable”.

“I was never one that could, like, run on a treadmill. When passing a physical, they asked me to run on a treadmill and then they make it steeper and steeper and steeper and the doctors said, it was at Walter Reed [hospital], they said: ‘It’s unbelievable!’ I’m telling you, I felt I could have gone all day.”

But he said treadmills are “really boring” so he prefers to stay healthy by playing golf.

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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.

It’s well past the August holiday peak, but anger against over-tourism in Spain is spilling into the off-season, as holiday-makers continue to seek winter sun.

On Sunday locals in the Basque city of San Sebastian plan to take to the streets under the banner: “We are in danger; degrow tourism!”

And in November anti-tourism protesters will gather in Seville.

Thousands turned out last Sunday in the Canary Islands, so the problem is clearly not going away.

This year appears to have marked a watershed for attitudes to tourism in Spain and many other parts of Europe, as the post-Covid travel boom has seen the industry equal and often surpass records set before the pandemic.

Spain is expected to receive more than 90 million foreign visitors by the end of the year. The consultancy firm Braintrust estimates that the number of arrivals will rise to 115 million by 2040, well ahead of the current world leader, France.

This year’s protests began in April, in the Canary Islands, and included a hunger strike by six protesters in Tenerife in an attempt to halt two major tourism projects on the island.

They continued in many of the country’s most popular tourist destinations, such as the Balearic Islands, the Mediterranean city of Alicante, cities on the southern coast and Barcelona, where some protesters squirted foreign visitors with water pistols and shouted: “Tourists go home!”.

The grievances driving the upcoming protests are similar to those in the summer.

“Tourism, which for a few is the golden goose, is an economic model which is choking the rest of us,” said Bizilagunekin (or “with the neighbours”, in the Basque language), the civic association which is organising Sunday’s demonstration in San Sebastian.

The protest is the culmination of a series of debates, talks and other events in the city called “October against touristification”.

“What we’ve been seeing over the last eight or 10 years has been a huge acceleration of the process of ‘touristification’,” said Asier Basurto, a member of the platform. “All our city’s services have been put at the orders of the tourism industry.”

He insists the numbers of arrivals themselves are not the problem, it is the way the city caters to visitors rather than residents.

Public spaces are adapted for short-term visits and the tourism industry creates precarious jobs, he says.

Mr Basurto believes tourists are pushing up rentals, largely because of short-stay accommodation, sending local residents further and further away from San Sebastian’s historic centre.

“We’ve had a way of living for generations and generations – in which people are connected to each other and those who arrive are integrated,” he added.

“If we have a model whereby people just visit for five days and then leave then it becomes a soulless theme park, without culture, without a community.”

The complaint about tourism’s impact on rental rates is a common theme and feeds into a broader housing crisis across Spain. The country’s central bank has reported that nearly half of families who rent at market prices are at risk of poverty or social exclusion.

However, with tourism representing 13% of Spain’s GDP and directly providing around three million jobs, its supporters insist that the industry is essential to the economy and that it drove the country’s recovery in the wake of the pandemic.

They are particularly concerned by scenes such as that on Playa de las Américas in Tenerife on October 20, where one video showed two tourists sunbathing on the beach while protesters chanted just metres away from them.

There have also been reports in the Spanish media of more hostile behaviour, such as the locks of tourist apartments in Seville being covered in faeces.

Such incidents prompted David Morales, head of tourism for the conservative People’s Party (PP) in the Canary Islands, to insist on “the right of tourists to enjoy their holidays without being the target of interruptions or gestural or verbal attacks, and certainly not physical attacks”.

As the protests continue beyond the summer, there are particular concerns in destinations like the Canary Islands, where the climate means they receive large numbers of visitors during the winter months.

The president of the Circle of Impresarios and Professionals in Southern Tenerife (CEST), Javier Cabrera, warned that “under an umbrella of legitimate grievances, tourism-phobia is being cultivated”.

There has been an attempt to defuse the backlash, with a range of measures being implemented.

Barcelona city hall has announced that short-term tourist apartments will be banned from 2028.

Local authorities in Palma de Mallorca have put a cap on the number of cruise liners which can dock in its port.

In Tenerife, a new limit has been introduced on the number of visitors to some natural parks.

And in Seville, a new charge is planned for those entering the city’s popular Plaza de España square.

Yet Asier Basurto is not convinced and says the protests must continue.

“Those who advocate tourism can no longer say that everything is rosy,” he said.

“Either we change this now or it’s going to be too late.”

King Charles is expected to return to a “normal” schedule of overseas trips next year after his visits to Australia and Samoa proved a “perfect tonic”, a Buckingham Palace official has said.

The positive message about his health and spirits comes at the end of his biggest overseas trip since he began cancer treatment – with a more regular diary of events expected at home and abroad in 2025.

“We’re now working on a pretty normal looking, full overseas tour programme for next year, which is a high for us to end on,” the palace aide said.

Heckling by an Australian senator was said to have left the King “completely unruffled”, with him seeing free speech as the “cornerstone of democracy”.

The King was said to be a great believer in a holistic approach – of “mind, body and soul” – with his recent trip having a positive impact for all three.

Continuing to work seems to be how the King wants to respond to his cancer diagnosis. That could include overseas visits in the spring and autumn of 2025, subject to his doctors’ approval.

“He has genuinely loved this tour. He has genuinely thrived on the programme. It’s lifted his spirits, his mood and his recovery. In that sense, the tour – despite its demands – has been the perfect tonic,” said the palace official.

“It is hard to overstate the joy that he takes from duty and service and being in public and seeing those crowds engaging with communities across the spectrum. That really does lift the spirits. You can see that.”

His cancer treatment had been paused during his travels but is expected to begin again as he returns home. On doctors’ advice, the trip did not include a further leg to New Zealand.

King Charles, who left Samoa on Saturday morning, appeared to cope well with the busy schedules of the visits, with multiple engagements on many of the days, including some controversial moments.

After a speech to parliamentarians in the Australian capital Canberra he was heckled by an independent senator, Lidia Thorpe, who shouted “You are not my King”, in a protest about Indigenous people’s rights.

That was said to have left the King untroubled.

“He was completely unruffled. He’s been around a long time. As always, [he] kept calm, carried on. He believes free speech is the cornerstone of democracy, and so everyone is entitled to their views,” the royal official said.

At the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, there was an ongoing debate over whether there should be reparations or an apology from the UK over the slave trade.

But such decisions depend on the government rather than the monarch – and the King’s speech talked of learning the lessons of history.

The King was also said to have been greatly supported by Queen Camilla accompanying him on the tour.

“The King gets great strength from the Queen being there, not least when she keeps it real,” said a palace official.

A month-long Vatican summit has ended with a call for women to have more leadership roles in the Catholic Church, but not a call for women to be ordained as priests, as some progressives had hoped at the start of the process.

The synod was the end of a four-year consultation aimed at gauging the views of every church-going Catholic globally, and Pope Francis opened up what is usually a bishops conference to some lay people, including nearly 60 women of 368 voting delegates.

All of the synod members voted on each of 151 proposals.

Although all proposals were passed by the required two-thirds majority, the most “no” votes were given to the proposal about women assuming more leadership roles in the Church, which has an all-male clergy.

Advocates for greater roles for women in the Church had hoped the synod might call for women to serve as deacons. The synod did not move forward on this move, but its final document said “there is no reason or impediment that should prevent women from carrying out leadership roles in the Church”.

Currently the Catholic Church only allows men to become deacons – ordained ministers who can officiate baptisms, weddings and funerals but not mass, unlike priests.

Although reform groups had also hoped for concrete ways to better welcome gay people in the Church, the final document did not mention the LGBT+ community, except for a passing reference to those who feel “excluded or judged” because of their “marital status, identity or sexuality”.

The Reverend James Martin, a prominent American Jesuit priest who ministers to the LGBT community and was a synod member, said it was “not a surprise” the new text did not specifically mention the group.

Progressives may be disappointed but some conservatives were upset about the whole summit from the beginning.

This has been a massive exercise, and the Pope, 87, has called the final text a “gift” to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, but a lot of traditionalists were opposed to opening up this consultation process – a personal project of his – to lay people and questioned the idea of gauging the views of non-clergy.

But it fits Pope Francis’ view that it is grassroots Catholics that should play a greater role in shaping the future of the Church and not just cardinals and bishops – just one of many reasons traditionalists have given him a hard time.

Commonwealth leaders have agreed the “time has come” for a conversation about reparations for the slave trade, despite the UK’s desire to keep the subject off the agenda at a two-day summit in Samoa.

A document signed by 56 heads of government, including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, acknowledges calls for “discussions on reparatory justice” for the “abhorrent” transatlantic slave trade.

The statement says it is time for a “meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation”.

Sir Keir said there had been no discussions about money at the meeting, and that the UK is “very clear” in its position that it would not pay reparations.

The UK has faced growing calls from Commonwealth leaders to apologise and pay reparations for the country’s historical role in the slave trade.

Reparations for the benefit of those who suffered as a result of slavery could take many forms, from financial to symbolic.

Ahead of the summit, Downing Street had insisted the issue would not be on the agenda.

Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, Sir Keir said Commonwealth leaders had a “positive two days” in Samoa and downplayed the prominence of reparations at the summit.

“The dominant theme of the two days has been resilience and climate,” he said, adding that the section of the joint statement discussing reparations amounts to “one paragraph in 20-something paragraphs”.

“None of the discussions have been about money. Our position is very, very clear in relation to that,” he said.

Last week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves told the BBC the UK would not pay reparations for slavery.

Before the statement was released, the leaders’ conclave – where commonwealth prime ministers and presidents meet without advisers – went on for about six hours.

The prime minister said it was not the conversation about reparations that had caused it to run on for so long.

One Downing Street source told the BBC: “We’ve been clear on our position and it’s not changing.”

And they have and it hasn’t – in fact the direct nature of their remarks about reparations on the way to the summit irritated some of those countries campaigning on it.

Half of the art of diplomacy is to keep things you want to talk about being talked about – keeping the conversation going, even if the prospect of imminent change is unlikely.

For those who think the time has come for countries like the UK to face up to their pasts, the communique allows them to say the conversation continues.

For the UK and others, they can say their position isn’t changing and also point to a range of other topics – trade, climate change and security for instance – that, they argue, the Commonwealth offers a vital forum for.

However, the prime minister did appear to leave the door open for further discussions about some form of reparatory justice, saying the “next opportunity to look at this” would be at the UK-Caribbean forum.

Frederick Mitchell, the foreign minister of the Bahamas, said leaders hoped to come up with a “comprehensive report” on the issue at that forum, to be held in London next March.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he expected the UK would eventually pay financial reparations to Caribbean countries.

Challenged on whether the wording of the joint statement was too vague, he said: “Behind the language is an attempt to go in a particular direction.”

Diplomats have said they expect reparatory justice to be a central focus of the agenda for the next Commonwealth summit in two years’ time.

Last year, a UN judge said the UK likely owed more than £18tn in reparations for its role in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries.

But reparatory justice could also take the form of a formal apology, educational programmes or public health assistance.

One person who supports reparations is the incoming Commonwealth secretary general, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, who was appointed on Friday.

She is currently serving as Ghana’s foreign minister, and has also backed the drafting of a Commonwealth free trade agreement, according to AFP.

In a statement, Botchwey said she was “truly humbled” but emphasised that “work indeed lies ahead”.

Israel has carried out what it described as “precise and targeted” airstrikes on Iran in retaliation for the barrage of missile strikes launched by Tehran against Israel earlier this month.

It is the latest in a series of exchanges between the two countries that for months have sparked fears of an all-out regional war.

But while Iran says Saturday’s strikes against military sites killed four soldiers, early indications suggest the attacks were more limited than had been feared.

Here’s what we know.

Around 02:15 local time (22:45 GMT on Friday), Iranian media reported explosions in and around the capital, Tehran.

Video uploaded to social media and verified by the BBC showed projectiles in the sky over the city, while residents in some areas reported hearing loud booms.

Shortly after, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed it was carrying out “precise” strikes on “military targets” in Iran.

The attacks involved scores of aircraft, including jets and drones. The targets included Iran’s air defences, as well as missile and drone production, and launch facilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant followed the operation from the IDF’s command and control centre in Tel Aviv.

The strikes came in several waves, over a three-hour period. Just after 06:00 (03:00 GMT), the IDF said the strikes had concluded.

The White House described the strikes as an “exercise of self-defence”. A senior administration official said the US had worked with Israel to encourage a “targeted and proportional” response.

The extent of the attacks – and the damage caused – remains unclear at this stage.

The IDF said it hit around 20 targets, including missile manufacturing facilities, surface-to-air-missiles and other military sites.

The Iranian military confirmed that two soldiers had died “while battling projectiles”.

Iranian authorities said sites in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces were targeted. The country’s air defence said it had “successfully intercepted” the attacks, but that “some areas sustained limited damage”.

BBC Verify has identified damage at a defence ministry base to the east of Tehran, and at an air defence base to the south.

A senior US administration official said the attacks did not damage Iranian oil infrastructure or nuclear facilities, targets President Joe Biden had urged Israel not to hit.

Syrian state media also reported strikes on military sites in central and southern Syria, though Israel has not confirmed striking the country.

Iran is the primary backer of a range of groups across the Middle East – often described as proxy groups – that are hostile to Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah, which Israel is currently at war with.

In April, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel, with about 300 missiles and drones, in retaliation for an Israeli air strike on an Iranian embassy compound in Syria that killed several top commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Israel responded with a “limited” strike on a missile defence system in the Iranian region of Isfahan, which Iran chose not to respond to.

Later, in July, Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander in an airstrike on Beirut. The next day, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an explosion in Tehran. Iran blamed Israel, though Israel did not comment.

In late September, Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Brig-Gen Abbas Nilforoushan, a high-ranking Iranian official, in Beirut.

On October 1, Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, which it said was in response to the deaths of Haniyeh, Nasrallah and Nilforoushan.

• Read more: Why did Israel attack Iran?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office denied a report by US outlet Axios that prior to the attacks, Israel sent Iran a message revealing certain details about the strikes, and warning Tehran not to respond.

“Israel did not inform Iran before the attack – not about the time, not about the targets, not about the strength of the attack,” the prime minister’s spokesperson said.

Still, early signs indicate this attack was not as serious as some had feared.

The IDF said in a statement that “we are focused on our war objectives in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. It is Iran that continues to push for a wider regional escalation”.

A senior US official said “this should be the end of this direct exchange of fire between Israel and Iran”.

Iran’s foreign ministry said it was “entitled and obligated to defend itself” and described the attack as a violation of international law.

But it also said that Tehran recognises its “responsibilities towards regional peace and security”.

Images published by Iranian state media show life continuing in relative normality – with busy streets, people exercising in parks, and fruit and vegetable markets open as usual.

Iran closed its airspace for a few hours overnight, but it later reopened and there are several commercial flights in the air across the country.

But there are signs the Iranian government are keen to play down the impact of the attacks.

The IRGC has announced that it is a criminal offense to send “images or news” related to the attack to outlets that it deems “Israel-affiliated” or “hostile”. Usually, Iran refers to Western media as hostile.

Iranian media reported today that Tehran’s Prosecutor Office has filed charges against an unnamed website for “covering issues counter to national security”.

US National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said Israel’s response “avoided populated areas and focused solely on military targets, contrary to Iran’s attack against Israel that targeted Israel’s most populous city”.

But Washington’s aim, he added, is “to accelerate diplomacy and de-escalate tensions in the Middle East region”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Israel had the right to defend itself, but urged all sides to “show restraint” and called for Iran not to respond.

Saudi Arabia condemned the attack, and warned against any action that “threatens the security and the stability” of the region.

Egypt’s foreign ministry echoed those concerns, saying it was “gravely concerned” by the strikes.

Hamas described them as “a flagrant violation of Iranian sovereignty, and an escalation that targets the security of the region and the safety of its peoples”.

Ivana’s family was about to flee their home in southern Lebanon. An Israeli missile got there first. Now the two-year-old has third-degree burns on almost half her body. Her head and arms are encased in bandages.

Ivana looks lost lying a full-size bed in the burns unit of Geitaoui Hospital in Beirut. She is tiny and doll-like, but her cries are all too real. As she winces in pain, her father Mohammed Skayki fans her face, trying to distract her.

He recounts how his daughter’s skin and flesh was melted away.

It was noon, on 23 September – the day Israel began a massive bombardment of southern Lebanon, paving the way for its invasion a week later. There was no specific evacuation order for his area from the Israeli army, but the explosions were getting closer.

“We were ready to move, we had our stuff packed,” says Mohammed.

“The strike was close, around 10 metres from our house, right by the front door. The house shook. My daughters were playing on the balcony. I saw the little one – she was all black because of the missile dust. I carried her, something was exploding in the house and the ceiling was falling.”

In an instant the family was ripped from its roots in the town of Deir Qanoun En Nahr. “We left our house and only took the phones, and fifty dollars,” he says.

Rescuers rushed Ivana to hospital, with her older sister Rahaf. The seven-year-old’s injuries were less severe. She has already been discharged and is sheltering with relatives.

Mohammed shows me a photo of Ivana before the strike – her brown eyes open wide, a pink soother in her mouth, her face framed by brown curls. What’s left of her hair is now invisible beneath the bandages. Her scars may be with her for life.

But she is making a good recovery according to Dr Ziad Sleiman, one of two plastic surgeons on the unit.

And Ivana has brought some healing to the healers.

“She’s so kind. She’s so cute, so calm,” he says, smiling warmly. “Even when we change the dressings, she does not shout and cry. She is staring at everything around her. So, she sees everybody, and I think she knows everything. Really, she’s a special, special baby. She’s so brave, so strong.”

She is being closely monitored by the staff on the burns unit. It’s arranged in a circle – with nurses in the centre, so they can see directly into each of the eight rooms. There’s a queue of patients waiting for admission.

“Every day we are receiving phone calls to transfer patients,” says Dr Sleiman. “We cannot take everybody. We try to take the babies, the ladies, the heavily burned and traumatized patients, to give them the best chance to be treated.”

Most patients come with third-degree burns. For fourth-degree burns he says “you will see a black limb, like a piece of wood” and there is no treatment, only amputation.

Lebanon’s health system is itself a casualty of war, under attack by Israel. The UN’s World Health Organisation has verified 23 attacks on health care in the past month, leading to 72 deaths.

The Lebanese health ministry has recorded “55 enemy attacks on hospitals and 201 on emergency medical technicians”. It says Israeli attacks on healthcare workers, facilities, and institutions are “a flagrant violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the Geneva Conventions.”

In recent days we reported from the scene of an Israeli air strike just across the road from Lebanon’s biggest public hospital, Rafik Hariri, in Beirut. A few residential buildings were flattened, and 18 people were killed, four of them children. No warning was given.

The Israeli Defense Forces told the BBC that they are “targeting Hezbollah, a terrorist organisation” which, they claim, “exploits ambulances and other medical infrastructure.” They deny targeting medical personnel.

So far, the more than 30 staff in the burns unit are still getting to work every day. None of them have been displaced, but there is a new normal in Beirut – traffic jams by day, bombs by night. That’s taking a toll.

“Honestly, it’s very hard to deal with patients having traumas and burns due to war,” says Dr Sleiman. “We do not have soldiers here; all the victims are civilians. We have ladies, we have girls, we have babies. It’s not their affair, their war. We, as doctors, must stay strong. But we have hearts. We have kids.”

Before leaving I asked Ivana’s father if he had anything to say to those responsible for maiming his little girl. He thought for an instant before replying in a measured and weary voice.

“I am not happy. A soldier for a soldier, not a civilian. These are children, a baby”, he said, referring to Ivana. “I am not happy but what can I do? I don’t want to be a murderer like them.”

Ivana has already had a skin graft – from her lower limbs – and is due to be discharged in about 10 days’ time. Her family are still displaced. They cannot return home to the south, which is under heavy Israeli bombardment.

Dr Sleiman fears there will be many more Ivanas.

He can’t see an end to the war. If it comes, he believes there will be no victory. For anyone.

“There’s no war that ends with a winner,” he says. “Every war ends with so many losers. Everybody will lose.”

Three Lebanese journalists have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a building known to be housing reporters in south-eastern Lebanon, witnesses have told the BBC.

The attack was carried out on a guesthouse in a compound in Hasbaya being used by more than a dozen journalists from at least seven media organisations – with a courtyard containing cars clearly marked with “press”.

The men worked for broadcasters Al-Manar TV and Al Mayadeen TV, which issued statements paying tribute to their killed employees.

Lebanon’s information minister said the attack was deliberate and described it as a “war crime”.

The Israeli military says it targeted a Hezbollah structure, but is reviewing the incident.

Those killed were camera operator Ghassan Najjar and engineer Mohamed Reda from pro-Iranian news channel Al Mayadeen, as well as camera operator Wissam Qassem from the Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar.

The Lebanese ministry of health said three others were injured in the blast.

Five reporters had been killed in prior Israeli strikes in Lebanon, including Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah.

Footage broadcast by Al-Jadeed TV – whose journalists were also sharing the house – showed a bombed-out building with a collapsed roof and floors covered in rubble.

A vehicle used for TV broadcasts was overturned on its side, its satellite dish mangled with cabling nearby.

“All official parties were told that this house was being used as a stay-house for journalists. We coordinated with them all,” an Al-Jadeed journalist, caked in concrete dust, said in a live broadcast while panting and coughing.

Lebanese journalists covering the conflict in the south of the country had to relocate from nearby Marj’youn to Hasbaya, as the former became too dangerous.

In a statement hours after the incident, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had struck a Hezbollah military structure in Hasbaya from where “terrorists were operating”.

The incident showed that proximity to “terrorist infrastructure poses a danger”, the force said.

It added: “Several hours after the strike, reports were received that journalists had been hit during the strike. The incident is under review.”

Youmna Fawwaz, a reporter for broadcaster MTV Lebanon, told the BBC that journalists in the compound were awoken at around 03:00 local time (01:00 BST) by the strike.

She said ceilings had fallen in on them, and they were surrounded by rubble and dust, with the sound of fighter jets overhead.

Each news organisation had their own building in the compound, she said, and the building housing the Al Mayadeen reporters was “obliterated” while Al-Manar employees were inside.

Ms Fawwaz said it was a media compound known as such to both Israel and Hezbollah.

“The airstrike was carried out on purpose. Everyone knew we were there. All the cars were labelled as press and TV. There wasn’t even a warning given to us.”

She added: “They are trying to terrorise us just like they do in Gaza. Israelis are trying to prevent us from covering the story.”

Lebanon’s information minister accused Israel of intentionally targeting journalists, in contravention of international law.

“The Israeli enemy waited for the journalists’ nighttime break to betray them in their sleep,” Ziad Makary wrote in a post on X.

“This is an assassination, after monitoring and tracking, with prior planning and design, as there were 18 journalists there representing seven media institutions.”

• ‘Whole neighbourhood wiped out’ in air strike
• Satellite imagery reveals intensity of bombing in Lebanon
• The suburbs bearing the brunt of Beirut strikes

Hasbaya, about five miles (eight kilometres) from the Israeli border, is inhabited by Muslims, Christians, as well as people from the Druze ethnic and religious minority.

It has seen attacks on its peripheries in recent weeks, but this was the first strike on the settlement itself.

The attack comes as part of an expanding conflict in Lebanon, where Israel has been intensifying air strikes for weeks – as well as launching a ground invasion on border towns and villages in the south.

On Friday UN peacekeepers said they were forced to withdraw from an observation post in Zahajra, in the south-west, after it was fired on by Israeli forces earlier this week.

Unifil has accused Israel of targeting its bases several times in recent weeks, causing injuries to peacekeepers. Israel denies this and has blamed previous incidents on clashes with nearby Hezbollah fighters.

In the northern Bekaa area, the Israeli military has confirmed it attacked the Jousieh border crossing between Syria and Lebanon overnight – which it said was being used by Hezbollah and Syrian security forces to smuggle weapons.

Lebanese authorities have recorded over 1,700 air strikes across the country in the past three weeks.

Hostilities broke out between Israel and Hezbollah on 8 October last year, the day after Hamas’s attack on Israel that killed around 1,200 people. The Iran-backed armed group has since been firing rockets and drones into Israel in what it described as “solidarity” with Palestinians in Gaza.

Nearly 2,600 people in Lebanon have been killed in the current conflict, according to the country’s health ministry – many of the deaths occurring since Israel began escalating its attacks on 23 September.

Around 60,000 people in northern Israel have been displaced by Hezbollah rocket fire, and the Israeli government has declared returning them to their homes to be a key objective.

Two people were killed on Friday in a Hezbollah rocket attack on Majd al-Krum, a town near Karmiel in Israel’s north, according to a statement from the country’s foreign ministry.

In southern Lebanon, satellite imagery examined by the BBC shows Israel’s intensified bombing campaign has caused more damage to buildings in two weeks than occurred during a year of cross-border fighting.

Data shows that more than 3,600 buildings in Lebanon appear to have been damaged or destroyed between 2 and 14 October – about 54% of the total damage.

The attack on journalists in Lebanon comes days after the Israeli military accused six Al Jazeera journalists working in northern Gaza of being affiliated with Hamas or other armed Palestinian groups.

The Qatari broadcaster said it denies and “vehemently condemns” the allegations.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 123 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a war in the territory last year.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health authority has reported more than 42,000 people killed since.

Two Israeli journalists have also been killed in the conflict.

The UN human rights chief has said the Gaza war’s “darkest moment” is unfolding in the north of the territory, where Israel has said it is carrying out a ground offensive to stop Hamas fighters from regrouping.

“As we speak, the Israeli military is subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and risk of starvation,” Volker Türk said.

He called on world leaders to act, saying states had a duty under the Geneva Conventions to ensure respect for international humanitarian law.

There was no immediate response from the Israeli military, but it has said its troops have killed “hundreds of terrorists” and evacuated 45,000 civilians in Jabalia since going back into the area on 6 October.

It comes as the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said he was deeply disturbed by reports that Israeli troops had raided one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the WHO had lost contact with Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia, which was overflowing with almost 200 patients amid the offensive in nearby Jabalia.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said Israeli troops had detained patients, staff and displaced people, while Israel’s military said its forces were operating “in the area” based on intelligence “regarding the presence of terrorists”.

Hundreds of Palestinians have reportedly been killed and tens of thousands displaced since Israeli forces went back into Jabalia.

Residents unwilling or unable to comply with Israeli evacuation orders are said to be living in increasingly desperate conditions, with food and other essential supplies running out.

The UN human rights chief warned on Friday that the entire population of northern Gaza was being subjected to “non-stop” bombing, with hundreds of thousands ordered to move with no guarantees of return.

“Unimaginably, the situation is getting worse by the day,” Türk said.

“The Israeli government’s policies and practices in northern Gaza risk emptying the area of all Palestinians. We are facing what could amount to atrocity crimes, including potentially extending to crimes against humanity.”

He also said it was totally unacceptable that Palestinian armed groups were reportedly operating among civilians, including inside shelters for the displaced, and putting them in harm’s way.

Türk said countries around the world – all of them parties to the Geneva conventions – had to act now to uphold them.

“These are universally accepted and binding norms developed to preserve the very bare minimum of humanity. I implore you to put the protection of civilians and human rights first and not to abandon that minimum of humanity,” he said.

Significantly, Türk added that where there was a risk of genocide, all states were legally bound to prevent it. Until now, senior UN figures have mostly avoided the word genocide in relation to Gaza.

Israel has long accused the UN of bias and rejected accusations that its forces have committed war crimes. It has also vehemently denied that they are committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

On Friday morning, Gaza’s health ministry said in a statement Israeli forces had “stormed” Kamal Adwan hospital and were detaining hundreds of patients, medical staff and displaced people inside.

In the afternoon, the ministry said displaced men had been forced to take off their clothes and that some had been arrested.

A number of medical staff, including the director of the hospital Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, had also not been heard from since they were summoned to see Israeli forces stationed in the courtyard, it added.

A video posted on social media late on Thursday showed Dr Abu Safiya speaking on the telephone while walking through a busy ward with what appeared to be a shatter window and a damaged ceiling.

“Instead of receiving aid we receive tanks. Tanks that are shelling the building,” he says.

Eid Sabbah, the director of nursing, said in a voice note to Reuters news agency early Friday: “At midnight, the occupation army tanks and bulldozers reached the hospital. The terrorising of civilians, the injured and children began as [the Israeli forces] started opening fire on the hospital.”

He said the Israeli forces retreated when a delegation from the WHO arrived with an ambulance and evacuated some patients. However, tanks later returned to the surrounding area and opened fire at the hospital, hitting its oxygen stores, before troops began a raid and ordered staff and patients to leave, he added.

The ministry said two children had died in the intensive care unit after the hospital’s generators stopped and the oxygen station was hit, but there were no similar reports from medics or the WHO.

The Israeli military said it was not aware of a tank firing at the hospital.

Dr Tedros confirmed that a WHO team had reached the hospital on Thursday night “amid hostilities in the vicinity”, and transferred 23 patients and 26 caregivers to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. They also delivered units of blood, trauma and surgical supplies.

But he added that the UN agency had lost touch with staff at the hospital since the reports of the raid emerged.

“Kamal Adwan Hospital has been overflowing with close to 200 patients – a constant stream of horrific trauma cases. It is also full of hundreds of people seeking shelter,” he warned.

“We call for an immediate ceasefire; and protection of hospitals, patients, health professionals and humanitarians.”

The Israeli military said in a statement that its forces were “operating in the area of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabalia, based on intelligence information regarding the presence of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure in the area”.

“In the weeks preceding the operation, the [forces] facilitated the evacuation of patients from the area while maintaining emergency services,” it added.

On Friday, the Israeli military’s chief of staff also visited Jabalia and told troops they were beating Hamas.

General Herzi Halevi said: “Because we are better, we are more justified and also because we are stronger – another achievement Jabalia is falling.”

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi urged US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to put pressure on Israel over the deteriorating humanitarian situation and the mass displacement of civilians in the north.

“We look at northern Gaza and we do see ethnic cleansing taking place, and that has got to stop,” he said at the start of a meeting in London.

Many Palestinians believe the Israeli military is implementing out the so-called “Generals’ Plan” in the north, which would see the forced displacement of all of the estimated 400,000 civilians there to the south followed by a siege of any remaining Hamas fighters.

The Israeli military has denied having such a plan and that it is making sure that civilians get out of harm’s way.

Safadi also warned that the Middle East stood on the “brink of regional war”, adding that every time he met Blinken the situation was getting worse, “not for lack of us trying but because we do have an Israeli government that is not listening to anybody, and that has got to stop”.

“The only path to save the region from that is for Israel to stop the aggressions on Gaza, on Lebanon, stop unilateral measures, illegal measures in the West Bank, that is also pushing the situation to the abyss,” he stated.

Blinken met with Arab leaders and foreign ministers in the UK following a diplomatic tour of the Middle East.

The US is believed to be working on a plan for post-conflict Gaza, trying to get buy-in from Arab countries even though progress on a ceasefire and hostage deal for Gaza has been stalled for weeks.

Blinken said he was having important conversations “on ending the war in Gaza and charting a path for what comes next”. He also said there was a “sense of real urgency in getting a diplomatic resolution” to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

On Thursday, Israel said it would send the head of its Mossad intelligence agency to Doha on Sunday to meet the CIA director and Qatar’s prime minister amid renewed efforts to restart the Gaza ceasefire and hostage release talks.

It came after a Hamas delegation met Egyptian security officials in Cairo. Hamas said there had been no change in its conditions for a deal, which include the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

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 42,840 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

For years, Western critics have dismissed Brics as a relatively inconsequential entity.

But this past week, at its annual summit in Russia, the group triumphantly showcased just how far it has come.

Top leaders from 36 countries, as well as the UN Secretary General, attended the three-day event, and Brics formally welcomed four new members – Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. More membership expansions could soon follow. Brics had previously added only one new member – South Africa in 2010 – since its inception (as the Bric states) in 2006.

There’s a growing buzz around Brics, which has long projected itself as an alternative to Western-led models of global governance. Today, it’s becoming more prominent and influential as it capitalises on growing dissatisfaction with Western policies and financial structures.

Ironically, India – perhaps the most Western-oriented Brics member – is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the group’s evolution and expansion.

India enjoys deep ties with most new Brics members. Egypt is a growing trade and security partner in the Middle East. The UAE (along with Saudi Arabia, which has been offered Brics membership but hasn’t yet formally joined) is one of India’s most important partners overall. India’s relationship with Ethiopia is one of its longest and closest in Africa.

Brics’ original members continue to offer important benefits for India too.

Delhi can leverage Brics to signal its continued commitment to close friend Russia, despite Western efforts to isolate it. And working with rival China in Brics helps India in its slow, cautious effort to ease tensions with Beijing, especially on the heels of a border patrolling deal announced by Delhi on the eve of the summit. That announcement likely gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi the necessary diplomatic and political space to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the summit’s sidelines.

Additionally, Brics enables India to advance its core foreign policy principle of strategic autonomy, whereby it aims to balance relations with a wide spectrum of geopolitical players, without formally allying with any of them.

Delhi has important partnerships, both bilateral and multilateral, inside and outside the West. In that sense, its presence in an increasingly robust Brics and relations with its members can be balanced with its participation in a revitalised Indo-Pacific Quad and its strong ties with the US and other Western powers.

More broadly, Brics’ priorities are India’s priorities.

The joint statement issued after the recent summit trumpets the same principles and goals that Delhi articulates in its own public messaging and policy documents: engaging with the Global South (a critical outreach target for Delhi), promoting multilateralism and multipolarity, advocating for UN reform (Delhi badly wants a permanent seat on the UN Security Council), and criticising the Western sanctions regime (which impacts Delhi’s trade with Russia and infrastructure projects with Iran).

And yet, all this may appear to pose a problem for India.

With Brics gaining momentum, inducting new members, and attracting global discontents, the group is seemingly poised to begin implementing its longstanding vision – articulated emphatically by Beijing and Moscow – of serving as a counter to the West.

Additionally, Brics’ new members include Iran and, possibly further down the road, Belarus and Cuba – suggesting the future possibility of an outright anti-West tilt.

While India aims to balance its ties with the Western and non-Western worlds, it would not want to be part of any arrangement perceived as avowedly anti-West.

However, in reality, such fears are unfounded.

Brics is not an anti-West entity. Aside from Iran, all the new members have close ties with the West. Additionally, the many countries rumoured as possible future members don’t exactly constitute an anti-West bloc; they include Turkey, a Nato member, and Vietnam, a key US trade partner.

And even if Brics were to gain more anti-West members, the grouping would likely struggle to implement the types of initiatives that could pose an actual threat to the West.

The joint statement issued after the recent summit identified a range of plans, including an international payment system that would counter the US dollar and evade Western sanctions.

But here, a longstanding criticism of Brics – that it can’t get meaningful things done – continues to loom large. For one thing, Brics projects meant to reduce reliance on the US dollar likely aren’t viable, because many member states’ economies cannot afford to wean themselves off of it.

Additionally, the original Brics states have often struggled to see eye to eye, and cohesion and consensus will be even more difficult to achieve with an expanded membership.

India may get along well with most Brics members, but many new members don’t get along well with each other.

Iran has issues with both Egypt and the UAE, and Egypt-Ethiopia relations are tense.

One might hope that the recent easing of tensions between China and India could bode well for Brics.

But let’s be clear: despite their recent border accord, India’s ties with China remain highly strained.

An ongoing broader border dispute, intensifying bilateral competition across South Asia and in the Indian Ocean region, and China’s close alliance with Pakistan rule out the possibility of a détente anytime soon.

Brics today offers the best of all worlds for Delhi. It enables India to work with some of its closest friends in an expanding organisation that espouses principles close to India’s heart, from multilateralism to embracing the Global South.

It affords India the opportunity to stake out more balance in its relations with the West and non-Western states, in an era when Delhi’s relations with the US and its Western allies (with the notable exception of Canada) have charted new heights.

At the same time, Brics’ continuing struggles to achieve more internal cohesion and to get more done on a concrete level ensure that the group is unlikely to pose a major threat to the West, much less to become an anti-West behemoth – neither of which India would want.

The most likely outcome to emerge from the recent summit, as suggested by the joint statement, is a Brics commitment to partner on a series of noncontroversial, low-hanging-fruit initiatives focused on climate change, higher education, public health, and science and technology, among others.

Such cooperation would entail member states working with each other, and not against the West – an ideal arrangement for India.

These collaborations in decidedly safe spaces would also demonstrate that an ascendant Brics need not make the West uncomfortable. And that would offer some useful reassurance after the group’s well-attended summit in Russia likely attracted some nervous attention in Western capitals.

It’s been 10 months since my family left Gaza but we continue to live with the loss, the pain, the impact of the war in all its excruciating detail.

This month – just before the anniversary of the beginning of the conflict – we saw the most harrowing eight hours we’ve experienced in that time.

We received a video message from my wife’s cousin in Gaza, saying: “The tanks are surrounding us and firing at us. These could be the last moments of our lives.

“Pray for us and do anything to save us.”

My wife collapsed, she even lost consciousness: her uncle, aunts and their families – 26 people in total- were all under attack.

Israeli raids and advances into cities and villages all over Gaza – targeting Hamas – have been common for most of this year now.

We didn’t hear anything from them for several hours. They were under bombardment the whole time. Then, finally, a voice note: “Four people have been injured. Your aunt Wafaa is bleeding, her condition is critical.”

I made countless calls, to the Red Cross, the Palestinian Red Crescent, anyone who could help.

After eight hours, the Israeli army finally allowed them to evacuate and move the wounded on foot.

But it was too late for Wafaa – she succumbed to her injuries shortly after reaching the hospital.

We still have so many relatives in Gaza. My father is there, living in a tent in the southern city of Khan Younis, which was bombed again this week.

I’m often overwhelmed by guilt when I call him from Istanbul, where I’ve fled to with my wife and two children.

There are so many people like me, in Turkey, in Egypt, and further afield around the world – the UK, the US, Europe – where we’ve had to go to find safety.

Not everyone can get out, only those with enough money to pay the high fees for passage elsewhere.

But in Egypt alone, more than 100,000 Gazans have crossed south into the country since November.

They’re not under immediate threat there from Israel’s bombs. But many are struggling to feed their families, provide education for their children, and just re-establish the basics of a normal life.

In an open-air, bustling café in Nasr City in Cairo, dozens of newly arrived refugees huddle in small groups, puffing on hookahs, sharing stories about their homeland.

They’re trying to alleviate the pangs of longing for those not currently with them. They cling to hope that the war will end soon, that they can return. But there’s a constant thrum of anxiety.

A loud traditional Palestinian song plays over the speakers – a hit by Palestinian singer Mohammed Assaf, who won the Arab Idol competition a few years ago.

58-year-old Abu Anas Ayyad is among those sitting there, listening. In his past life he had been known as the “King of Gravel”, a successful businessman who had supplied building materials to constructions sites all over Gaza.

He and his family – including four children – escaped. But: “Every missile that hits a building in Gaza feels like a piece of my heart shattering.

“I still have family and friends there,” he says.

“All of this could have been avoided. But Hamas has a different opinion.”

He rues the Iran-backed group’s attack in Israel on 7 October 2023 and the consequences now.

“Despite my love for Gaza, I will not return if Hamas remains in power,” he says. He doesn’t want his children to be “used as pawns in a dangerous game played by reckless leaders for the sake of Iran.”

Sitting nearby is Mahmoud Al Khozondr, who before the war had run his family’s renowned hummus and falafel shop in Gaza. It’s an institution in the territory – known for its food and celebrity clientele. The late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat had been a frequent patron, often spotted at its tables.

Mahmoud shows me pictures of his former well-appointed family home on his phone. They now live in a cramped two-room apartment. His children can’t go to school.

“It’s a miserable life,” he says. “We lost everything back home. But we must rise again,” he says.

“We need food for our children, and assistance for our people still in Gaza.”

Living in exile in Egypt is not easy. The authorities have allowed Palestinians to stay temporarily, but they don’t grant official residency. They limit access to education and other key services.

Many Gazans try and send money back to support relatives still in Gaza – but remittance fees are steep and war merchants take a 30% cut.

“It’s heart-breaking to see profits being made from our loved ones’ suffering,” Mahmoud Saqr tells me.

He used to own an electronics store in Gaza. These days he has to take a bundle of cash to a shop in Cairo to transfer money to his sister.

“There’s no receipt, no proof—just a message hours later confirming they’ve received the money,” he tells me, describing the process.

“It’s risky, because we don’t know who is involved in this transaction but we have no choice.”

These are desperate times for everyone.

Over the past year in Turkey, I’ve tried in vain to create a peaceful living environment for my family.

But every time we go to a restaurant, my children reminisce about their favourite spots in Gaza, their large home, their games shop, their friends at the horse club, their classmates.

Some of those classmates have been killed in the Israeli air strikes, which continue.

But since October 7, time has stood still for us. We have yet to move on from that day.

We may have escaped physically, but our souls and hearts remained tethered to our loved ones in Gaza.

Pixies frontman Black Francis wouldn’t be your first pick to read the CBeebies Bedtime Story.

Over the course of his band’s wildly influential career, his fractured, often abstract songs have referenced Biblical violence, mutilation, incest, torture and death.

“Sliced up eyeballs” and “goats of lust” aren’t traditionally the sort of images that help your toddler drift off to sleep.

Luckily, he didn’t recite his own lyrics when he popped into CBeebies earlier this month. The book he chose did have a distinct Pixies flavour, though. It’s called There Was A Young Zombie Who Swallowed A Worm

“I usually don’t do things like that, but I enjoyed it,” the 59-year-old says.

“My girlfriend sort of insisted, so I did it with feeling and, you know, I raised five kids, so I’m pretty good at bedtime stories.”

It’s hard to imagine Pixies appearing on children’s television at any other point in their career.

The abrasive riffs and intertwining harmonies of songs like Debaser, Monkey Gone To Heaven, and Where Is My Mind signposted the future of alternative rock in the late 1980s; and they were cited as inspirations by everyone from Nirvana and Radiohead to… er, James Blunt. (“They’d be furious to hear that, wouldn’t they?” he recently said).

Just as the artists they inspired began to hit the mainstream, the band broke up – but their reputation grew in their absence.

In 2003, the NME named their 1989 album Doolittle (recorded for $40,000 in the basement of a hair salon) the second-best record of all time.

Twelve years later, it sold its 300,000th copy in the UK, gaining the band their first ever platinum record, 30 years after they formed.

By that point, they’d reunited for a first-rate second phase. When we speak, they’re about to set off on an Australian stadium tour with Pearl Jam.

“Our audience just seems to get bigger all the time,” Francis says… Hence the cameo on CBeebies.

Pixies formed in 1986, when Francis (born Charles Thompson IV) dropped out of university and persuaded his guitarist room-mate Joey Santiago to do the same. A local newspaper ad brought in bassist Kim Deal and, through her, drummer Dave Lovering.

A buzzy demo tape won them a contract with British label 4AD, and they were quickly embraced by the indie music press, where one writer described their corrosive sound as “a wild new shock”.

But the secret to their success, Francis says, is simplicity.

He describes the first time Pixies headlined Reading festival in 1990. Further down the bill was a group whose show was a “very Vegas kind of affair”.

“They had lights and confetti and balloons,” he recalls. “A lot of schtick going on.

“Their tour manager turned to our manager, Chas Banks, and said, ‘So what do you have prepared for your set?”

“And he replied, ’25 good songs'”.

“I was very proud that that’s how he responded, because that is literally all we had. We had no dance moves, we had no balloons, we literally just had our music.

There’s a tussle in the music, too, which vacillates between blood-curdling punk and what the band called “dust-bowl songs” – country-tinged, heartland folk ballads.

Lovering has said the album is “more traditional” than earlier Pixies records. Francis says those seeds were sown in his 1990s solo work.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here, and I’ll say something that I’ve not said in an interview before,” he says.

“When the Pixies broke up, I began to allow myself to stand outside of so-called underground music. I even went and made a couple of records at Nashville.

“And when we got back together, there was a lot of reticence from the producers and, quietly, behind-the-scenes, the managers, who were trying to make sure that Charles didn’t turn it into some sort of ‘country thing’.

“I think I deferred to that somewhat, but I didn’t feel like the results were necessarily notable. So I started to allow more of that stuff into the mix.

“And I think everyone around me has, consciously or unconsciously, relaxed and allowed me to do it.”

He warms to the theme, saying it’s unreasonable to expect a band in their fifth decade to re-capture the spittle-flecked anger of youth.

“It gets harder to do those kind of things, because when you’re young, there’s so much naïvete driving the bus. Even if the song compositionally is flimsy, you make up for it with all that energy.

“But what happens is you get better at playing guitar, better at composing, and that naïve energy is gone. It’s very hard to tap into it. It’s much easier to tap into the I-know-what-the-hell-I’m-doing energy.

“And maybe that’s not what people want to hear but, you know what? I can’t be 19 years old again. And the harder you try, the sillier it sounds.”

One of his new songs disproves that theory.

Oyster Beds is two minutes of lean, vigorous riffs coupled with what, on the surface, appear to be some of Francis’s most surreal lyrics to date: “A musketeer and her two deers / A country house in Dadasphere.”

In fact, he wrote the song in his art studio, and the lyrics are “a little laundry list of things I’ve painted in the last few years”.

“I was kind of like, ‘I just need some words here’, and it’s a punky song, so I wasn’t feeling strongly about the message.

What does he get from painting that music doesn’t provide?

“Solace [from] other people,” he laughs. “Not that playing with people is bad, because it gives you companionship, but sometimes it can get laborious.

“With painting, I realised, ‘Oh, I can do this and have all of the debates and fights in my head, and there’s no one to answer to’.”

He proceeds to describe that process at entertaining length.

“So if the brushes are driving the bus, I’ll be like, ‘Don’t forget about your narrative’. But then my inner monologue will go, ‘Screw the narrative, because right now big brush is in charge and big brush is making a big mess’.

“Then it’ll be like, ‘Alright, you’ve ruined the painting enough, it’s time to think about what this painting is about. We’ve got to let figurative take over for a while to bring some order to all this chaos’.

“And so it becomes this argument between the different elements of the painting. They’re all professors at the Black Francis art school, and I really enjoy that.

“It’s crazy, even insane, what’s going on in my head, but I do it for hours.”

Crazy, maybe, but the most compelling art comes from creative chaos – and that’s why, after all these years, Pixies are still a thrill.

“Google essentially disappeared us from the internet.”

Launch days. They’re equal parts thrilling and terrifying for many start-up business founders, but they don’t get much worse than the one Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, experienced.

It was June 2006 and the couple’s trailblazing price comparison website Foundem – one they had sacrificed well-paid jobs for and built from scratch – had just gone fully live.

They didn’t know it at the time but that day, and those that followed, would mark the beginning of the end for their company.

Foundem had been hit by a Google search penalty, prompted by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the website way down the lists of search results for relevant queries like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping”.

It meant the couple’s website, which charged a fee when customers clicked on their product listings through to other websites, struggled to make any money.

“We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately, ” says Adam.

While the launch day for Foundem didn’t go to plan, it would lead to the start of something else – a 15-year legal battle that culminated in a then record €2.4bn (£2bn) fine for Google, which was deemed to have abused its market dominance.

The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in the global regulation of Big Tech.

Google spent seven years fighting that verdict, issued in June 2017, but in September this year Europe’s top court – the European Court of Justice – rejected its appeals.

Speaking to Radio 4’s The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that at first, they thought their website’s faltering start had simply been a mistake.

“We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been false positive detected as spam,” says Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned.”

“If you’re denied traffic, then you have no business,” adds Adam, 58.

The couple sent Google numerous requests to have the restriction lifted but, more than two years later, nothing had changed and they said they received no response.

Meanwhile, their website was “ranking completely normally” on other search engines, but that didn’t really matter, according to Shivaun, as “everyone’s using Google”.

The couple would later discover that their site was not the only one to have been put at a disadvantage by Google – by the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017 there were around 20 claimants, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.

Adam, who had built a career in supercomputing, says he had the “eureka moment” for Foundem while smoking a cigarette outside the offices of his previous employer.

Then, price comparison websites were in their infancy, and each specialised in one particular product. But Foundem was different because it let customers compare a large range of products – from clothes to flights.

“No-one else was anywhere close to this,” beams Shivaun, who herself had been a software consultant for several major global brands.

In its 2017 judgement, the European Commission found that Google had illegally promoted its own comparison shopping service in search results, whilst demoting those of competitors.

Ten years before that, though – when Foundem launched – Adam says he had no reason to assume Google was being deliberately anti-competitive over online shopping. “They weren’t really serious players,” he says.

But by the end of 2008, the couple had started to suspect foul play.

It was three weeks before Christmas and the pair received a message warning that their website had suddenly become slow to load. They thought it was a cyber attack, “but actually it was just that everyone had started visiting our website”, Adam laughs.

Channel 5’s The Gadget Show had just named Foundem the best price comparison website in the UK.

“And that was really important,” Shivaun explains, “because we then reached out to Google and said, look, surely it’s not benefiting your users to make it impossible for them to find us.

“And that still got from Google, not a complete ignore, but a basically ‘bog off’.”

“That was the moment we knew, OK, we need to fight,” says Adam.

The couple went to the press, with limited success, and took their case to regulators in the UK, US, and Brussels.

It was in the latter – with the European Commission (EC) – that the case eventually took off, with the launch of an antitrust investigation in November 2010. The couple’s first meeting with the regulators took place in a portable cabin in Brussels.

“One of the things they said was if this is a systemic issue, why are you the first people we’re seeing?” Shivaun recalls. “We said we’re not 100% sure, but we suspect people are afraid, because all businesses on the internet essentially rely on Google for the lifeblood that is their traffic.”

The couple were in a hotel room in Brussels, only a few hundred yards from the commission building, when competition commissioner Margarethe Vestager finally announced the verdict that they, and other shopping websites, had been waiting for.

But there was no popping of champagne corks. Their focus then turned to making sure the EC enforced its decision.

“I guess it was unfortunate for Google that they did it to us,” Shivaun says. “We’ve both been brought up maybe under the delusion that we can make a difference, and we really don’t like bullies.”

Even Google’s final defeat in the case last month did not spell the end for the couple.

They believe Google’s conduct remains anti-competitive and the EC is looking into it. In March this year, under its new Digital Markets Act, the commission opened an investigation into Google’s parent company, Alphabet, over whether it continues to preference its own goods and services in search results.

A spokesperson for Google said: “The CJEU [European Court of Justice] judgment [in 2024] only relates to how we showed product results from 2008-2017.

“The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s Shopping decision have worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services.

“For this reason, we continue to strongly contest the claims made by Foundem and will do so when the case is considered by the courts.”

The Raffs are also pursuing a civil damages claim against Google, which is due to begin in the first half of 2026. But when, or if, a final victory comes for the couple it will likely be a Pyrrhic one – they were forced to close Foundem in 2016.

The long fight against Google has been gruelling for them, too. “I think if we had known it was going to be quite as many years as it turned out to be we might not have made the same choice,” Adam admits.

Desperate for a break from office drudgery but scared of not making ends meet? France has an idea that might interest you: part-time farming.

A new tribe has been identified that wants the best of both worlds: city and country; laptop and the land; the digital and the manual.

These young mould-breakers use the opportunities of technology and workplace flexibility for a hybrid lifestyle that – they say – fits today’s desire for meaning as well as money.

Working the soil brings the rewards of physical labour, and a sense of purpose too often missing from their spreadsheets and tabulations.

But by edging in gently to farming, they keep the financial assurance of a back-up city salary, as well as the intellectual sustenance of their urban social circle.

“In the corporate world, there are more and more people questioning the meaning of what they are doing. There’s an awful lot of burn-out and anxiety,” says Julien Maudet, data-engineer and cider-maker.

“On the farm, you don’t have to ask. It’s obvious why you’re doing it. It’s to produce food for people. But you’re doing it in conditions that are often very uncertain and risky.

“These two worlds – the farm and the office – are in crisis. And it dawned on me that each is the solution to the other. What we need to do is bring the two worlds together.”

Maudet is one of the founders of Slasheurs-cueilleurs, an organisation that seeks to promote these new cross-over careers.

The name is a wordplay in French, because it sounds like the expression chasseurs-cueilleurs (hunter-gatherers). The slasheur part comes from the slash key on a computer, and denotes someone with more than one job (as in “I’m a chef-slash-football coach).

The idea came to Maudet during the Covid lockdowns, when he went to ground at his grandparents’ farm in Normandy. When he began looking a year ago, he realised that there were already hundreds of people doing what he was advocating. “We invented nothing. We just shone a light,” he says.

A classic example is Matthew Charlton, an English-born teacher at Sorbonne university who now spends more than half his week growing watercress in a smallholding 64km (40 miles) south of Paris.

This part of the Essonne department was once famous for its “green gold”, but many cressonnières were abandoned from the 1970s and are only now being resurrected.

“The beauty of watercress is that you don’t need machinery or massive investment. It’s just you and a pair of gumboots and a knife,” says Charlton, who harvests around 30,000 bunches every year for sale to farm shops and restaurants in Paris.

“Today I am at the university on Mondays and Thursdays. The other days I am here at the farm or else delivering the cress in Paris – which is where I live.

“It’s a lifestyle that suits me perfectly. I get a lot of outdoors, then I can recharge my batteries two days a week in Paris. Eventually I want to do the cress full time, but this way I’ve been able to ease my way in, without taking on too much of a financial gamble.”

Some of those who have become slasheurs have inherited family land; others rent it, or buy it, or have arrangements with farmers to pool resources. Some live in the country for a couple of days a week; some make a reverse commute to fields in the city hinterland; some work seasonally.

In the city they are lawyers, engineers and consultants. In the country they are market-gardeners, winegrowers or labourers. Only a few work with livestock, which demands a more permanent presence.

What seems to unite them is a yearning for spiritual fulfilment, as well as an attachment to the idea of cleaner, organic production. All agree that office-based careers have left them at times feeling redundant and pointless.

Marie Paitier, a cider-maker and human resources consultant, says she and her husband both suffered “burn out” – by which she means emotional breakdowns – because of their city jobs.

“It wasn’t just my employer’s fault. It was me,” she says. “I was working too hard. But now I share my time between Normandy, where we live and the children go to school, and Paris where I work part-time.

“I didn’t want to leave everything behind. I liked my job in Paris – and the money is important. But this way we have the right balance.”

City types have always dreamed of a simpler rural life, and there have been previous waves of emigration to the country – notably in the post-May ‘68 generation. What is different now are the possibilities opened up by technology – remote working, artificial intelligence, flexible careers – as well as the growing importance of ecology as a factor in the choices we make.

“This isn’t about rich people from the city playing at being farmers,” says Maudet. “Our vision is that this will be part of a fundamental change.

“Our farms need more hands if they’re to produce the kind of quality food which we should be eating. If we don’t get people into the fields, then farms will get bigger and bigger and more and more industrial.

“And office workers, under threat from A.I., are looking for new outlets. We would be so much more resilient as a society, if we all went in to something more hybrid.”

On a summer afternoon in 2019, nurse Charlotte Lay got ready for her night shift as normal but “wasn’t feeling quite right”.

Within a short space of time she had decided to end her own life close to a West Yorkshire railway station.

But thanks to the kindness of the train driver who found her in crisis, she did not go through with it.

Three years later they married each other and went on to have children.

“I’d struggled with my mental health since my teens and I’d been in and out of the system since,” Charlotte, now 33, says.

Her memories of that day five years ago are “quite blurry” but she says she remembers seeing a train pulling up on the tracks where she was, close to Crossflatts Station, near Bradford.

“I remember seeing a man getting off the train and starting to panic and thinking he was going to tell me off,” she recalls.

“He approached me and said ‘Hi, my name is Dave, are you having a bad day?’

“I said ‘yeah, just a bit’. He went ‘OK’, we can sit and talk until it feels better.”

Dave, who works for train operator Northern, remembers getting out of his cab, “kneeling down” in front of Charlotte and introducing himself.

He told her they would talk things through “until you feel comfortable enough” to get onto the train, where she could be taken to safety.

The pair talked for half an hour, by which time Charlotte, though still distressed, agreed to get into the cab. She was taken to Skipton Station and left in the care of the police.

The following day, Charlotte was desperate to find the man who had been so kind to her and issued an appeal on a local Facebook group for anyone who worked for Northern who might be able to put her in touch.

“I’d have understood if he didn’t want to hear from me, but I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ for giving me the time and for treating me like I was human being,” she says.

Her plea was successful and after Charlotte was given Dave’s number by one of his colleagues who had seen the appeal, she sent him a text.

Dave, who is now 47, was equally relieved to hear from her.

He says he had “never had the opportunity” to get off the train and talk to someone in crisis before.

“I needed to know she was all right,” he explains. “I’d contacted police to try to find out what happened to her and just wanted to make sure she was safe.

“I felt like I’d had a duty to make sure she was all right. We’d had that rapport built by the side of the track. It was just nice to be able to make that difference to somebody.”

After Dave returned Charlotte’s text telling her he was available whenever she needed to speak to someone, they began exchanging messages on a daily basis.

They then met for a coffee two months later and the rest was history.

In 2022, the couple, who live in nearby Wilsden, got married, with Charlotte 22 weeks pregnant.

But before then, there was one more twist to their story.

In July 2020, Dave was diagnosed with testicular cancer, after he went to his GP with a bad back.

He is adamant that he would never have gone to the doctors were it not for Charlotte’s insistence.

“It’s because I’m a bloke,” he says.

“I’d done 12 or 13 years in the motor trade working on cold floors and out in the elements, lifting and carrying silly things. I just put it down to a bad back.

“Charlotte kept saying ‘Go to the doctors’. I said it was just me getting old.”

Weeks after his diagnosis, Dave was given the all clear.

A consultant at St James’ Hospital in Leeds last year told him he would no longer have been alive had he not had been diagnosed when he was.

“Charlotte may say I saved her life, which I don’t know about really, but she saved my life as well,” Dave says.

The couple say they wanted to share their story in the hope that anyone who is struggling can know better times are around the corner.

“Life does get better,” Charlotte, who is now a mum of three, says. “You just have to be here to see it.”

Charlotte says that it is often too difficult for people who are struggling to “reach out” and ask for help, so suggests people around them “reach in” instead. She continues to receive ongoing support for her mental health.

She believes asking someone if they are OK more than once can help them open up.

“We owe it to each other to be checking in with people around us,” she says.

“You don’t have to offer life-changing advice or say anything profound. Just sitting down with a cuppa can make all the difference.

“Because of what I’ve been through, I had a duty to talk about it and I’m hoping it’s going to be a conversation starter.”

West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds

Botswana’s governing party – in power for almost six decades – is trying to pull off a trick in Wednesday’s general election by using a phrase normally associated with long-suffering opposition groups.

In its manifesto, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) is calling for “change”.

“Let’s change together and build prosperity for all,” President Mokgweetsi Masisi – in charge of the country since 2018 – writes in the introduction.

It is an acknowledgement that things need to be done differently – the opposition argues that the president’s party is not in a position to do that.

Though analysts say the outcome of the election is hard to predict this time, the BDP has won handsome parliamentary majorities at the 11 elections since independence in 1966.

It subsequently secured the presidency every time as MPs elect the head of state.

The BDP has been credited with overseeing a peaceful and dramatic transformation of a poor country, with only a few kilometres of tarred roads at independence, into a place where average living standards are among the highest on the continent.

Underpinning this transformation has been Botswana’s huge diamond reserves – measured by their value, the country is the world’s largest producer of the gemstone.

And yet all is not well.

Botswana is facing big economic challenges – hence Masisi’s talk of change.

More than one in four of the working population is unemployed, with an even higher proportion among younger people, according to the World Bank.

Politics professor at the University of Botswana Zibani Maundeni described it as a “jobless economy”.

“We are producing graduates every year and the economy is not producing enough jobs for them,” he told the BBC’s Africa Daily podcast.

In addition, Botswana’s wealth is not evenly spread around among its 2.3 million people.

By a measure known as the Gini index, researchers say it is one of the most unequal countries in the world.

And the diamond industry appears to be under pressure globally as demand has been falling.

But Masisi and his party continue to project confidence.

At a campaign rally in an opposition stronghold in central Botswana, the president arrived in style in an electric vehicle assembled in the country.

Getting out, the 63-year-old former teacher danced towards the stage greeting supporters in red-and-white party colours.

Laughter rang through the crowd as Masisi’s humour and charisma electrified the audience.

The area – home to the previous President, Ian Khama – elected three opposition MPs in 2019.

This was after Khama defected from the BDP to help form the Botswana Patriotic Front (BPF), saying he regretted picking Masisi as his successor.

The dramatic fall-out between the two men led to Khama leaving the country, accusing the government of trying to poison him.

Khama was then charged with money laundering, among other crimes, all of which he denies.

It also ended the political dominance of his family – his father, Sir Seretse Khama, was the country’s first president and served for 14 years from 1966.

“I am sorry, please come back home and also call others over,” Masisi told the rally pleading to voters to return to the BDP.

Hair-salon owner, Thandiwe Potso, 32, seemed convinced.

“Masisi truly understands our challenges and brought better programmes to fund our businesses,” she told the BBC, her eyes shining with conviction.

Kabelo Selemo, 45, agreed.

“His policies have helped us grow as you can see we no longer import vegetables. I believe in his vision for our future,” said the small-business owner.

• How friends became foes in Africa’s diamond state

But according to an opinion poll, many others may not be so easy to convince.

Respected non-partisan polling organisation Afrobarometer released a damming report earlier this year.

It said that despite the country ranking highly in good governance on the continent, people in Botswana had a negative view of the government believing there were high levels of corruption.

“Strong majorities express little or no trust in the incumbent and disapprove of the way he has performed his job,” it said.

BDP spokesperson Kagelelo Banks Kentse questioned the credibility of the poll.

He argued that Afrobarometer had in previous elections underestimated support for the BDP and thought it would be no different this time. Though the party is not taking anything for granted.

“I would be very wrong to say that we are over-confident,” Kentse told the BBC.

“I always hear people saying: ‘This is the toughest election we’ve come across’, but we say that in every election year. You never win before the actual vote.”

He admitted that the unemployment rate did not paint a good picture, but argued that every nation on the continent was experiencing similar problems, adding that his party was pledging to create 300,000 more jobs.

Kentse also touted the toughly negotiated deal that Masisi struck with diamond firm De Beers last year for Botswana to benefit more from its natural resources.

Initially the state will get a 30% share of the rough diamonds mined in the country, an increase on the 25% it got previously, rising to 50% within 10 years.

But Dumelang Saleshando, leader of one of the largest opposition parties, argued that the government has just copied others’ ideas.

He said his Botswana Congress Party (BCP) had first set a jobs target, which the BDP had previously rejected saying it was better to leave things to the free market.

One of the slogans Saleshando is deploying is: “Save Botswana”.

“I think people have seen the BDP for what it is,” he told the BBC.

“It certainly cannot argue that it is an agent of change. In the past it has always tried to say it’s about keeping stability – more of the same – and out of panic they are trying to preach what they don’t believe in.”

Supporters of another opposition party – the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), which got the second largest share of the vote in 2019, came out in their numbers in the north of the capital, Gaborone.

Dressed in blue-and-white T-shirts and sun hats, they cheered leader Duma Boko.

Unlike Masisi, Boko generally remained serious, in order to emphasise how much the people were suffering under the BDP.

He alleged that there were attempts to rig the poll.

“I urge you all to be vigilant and after voting out the BDP you remain at the polling station to guard your vote,” he said.

Thapelo Dimpe, a 45-year-old former teacher, has no doubts about why he wants to see the president’s party defeated.

“Masisi has let us down on education reform. The UDC plans to invest in our schools and empower our youth with the education they deserve,” he said.

Although the government has a host of problems that could dent its support, opposition divisions could enable the BDP to stay in power.

Every MP is elected on a first-past-the-post basis, meaning that to win a seat, the BDP only needs the largest number of votes in a constituency rather than more than 50%.

In a seat where the UDC, BCP or BPF – or a number of other parties – are running, it could mean that the opposition vote is split, allowing the BDP to get in.

“These parties seem to have factionalism within themselves, they keep taking internal issues to the media – they are not really united,” political analyst Lesole Machacha told the BBC.

But he also pointed out that the BDP had its own problems.

“The ruling party is not 100% intact – it is also having issues. In some constituencies BDP politicians who were not happy with the primary process are running as independent candidates, which could divide that vote,” Mr Machacha said.

All this makes for a closely fought and unpredictable election, he added.

For one of Africa’s most successful political parties, the question now is whether enough people are convinced that it can oversee the change that the country needs.

• World’s second-largest diamond found in Botswana
• Botswana welcomes Tebogo home with stadium spectacular
• Botswana threatens to send 20,000 elephants to Germany

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

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, Nevada and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has a small lead in all of them at the moment.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris had led 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

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

As people across the UK roll their clocks back to GMT on Sunday, there’s one well-loved Scottish clock that will remain at the wrong time.

Ever since the Balmoral Hotel clock tower was built in Edinburgh 122 years ago, its time has deliberately been set fast.

The peculiar tradition began after intervention by railway officials at Edinburgh Waverley Station, below the clock tower.

In the era before mobile phones, when watches were expensive, the clock was well-used by train passengers to watch their time.

Officials thought three extra minutes would give travellers more time to collect their tickets, reach their carriages and unload their luggage before the whistle blew.

It has been set three minutes fast ever since.

Brian Duncan, chief engineer of the Balmoral Hotel, said the tradition would endure.

At 02:00 the clock will be stopped for an hour, and set running again the usual three minutes ahead of time.

“Passersby don’t seem to notice as we’ve never had a complaint about the time being wrong during that hour,” he told BBC Scotland.

“I think it’s because it’s happening in the middle of the night.”

The Scottish Baronial-style clock tower was manually changed for daylight savings before it was automated in 2014 – just a few months after Brian took the job of looking after the clock.

The change was prompted after it stopped three times over a six week period.

Brian said one of the hundreds of cogs inside the original mechanism was slipping.

“I had to make a very big decision – do we continue with the clock being faulty or do we go for a small gear box controlled by a computer,” he said.

“We now have a very small gear box compared to the original mechanism and a computer controls it.”

So Brian will be sleeping in his bed when the clocks change.

The hands on the four faces of the clock tower cannot be wound, so instead the clock is stopped for one hour in autumn and for 11 hours when the clocks go forward in the spring.

“It’s always a Saturday night, so people on Princes Street at that time have usually had a few drinks so no-one really notices,” he said.

The only day the clock tells the true time is during the countdown to the midnight bells during Edinburgh’s big Hogmanay celebrations on 31 December.

The hotel pays for specialists from Smith of Derby to change the time for just one day to see in the New Year. Then it is set three minutes fast again.

The 62-year-old also explained how the clock keeps its time during the year despite the forces of gravity on the minute hand.

“I was told the weight of gravity makes it faster for the first 30 seconds but then gravity makes it slower on the way back up so it equals out,” he said.

The last time the clock broke down was for more than a month in the summer of 2020 during the Covid lockdown.

He now always looks up at it in the morning from his tram journey to work to make sure it is still working.

The clock tower, which was designed by William Hamilton Beattie, rises 190ft (58m) into the capital’s skyline.

The original mechanism, although not used any more, is still in the clock tower.

Brian said he hopes one day to have it moved into a more public area of the hotel so visitors can see it.

“It’s a massive operation to take it out of the clock tower due to its sheer weight. It’s made of steel and weighs at least half a ton.”

The Balmoral is the second most famous clock in the UK after Big Ben.

“I love the clock and I’m very proud to be in charge of looking after it,” said Brian.

“It’s quite an achievement to be the chief engineer of such a clock.

“And it gives me a wee bit of excitement when I look up at it, it’s beautiful.”

The Balmoral Hotel is itself a landmark in Edinburgh. It opened originally as the North British Station Hotel.

It was re-named the Balmoral – a name derived from Gaelic which means “majestic dwelling” – in June 1991, in a ceremony led by actor Sir Sean Connery.

Since then it has hosted many celebrities, including JK Rowling, who finished the last book in her Harry Potter series in one of the hotel’s suites.

Saturday marks the 10th anniversary of the end of British combat operations in Afghanistan – a conflict in which 457 British servicemen and women were killed. BBC News spoke to the mother of Pte Gregg Stone, who was shot dead on a rescue mission in Helmand Province in June 2012.

“I had to fight back tears when I heard that song on the car radio yesterday,” says Angie Moore.

Her son Gregg Stone, 20, idolised Mumford & Sons, she explains. And the 2009 song, Little Lion Man, was a favourite.

Gregg’s big sister, Jennie, had booked tickets to see them in concert when he came home on leave from Helmand Province.

Neither sibling would see the band. Gregg would also never hold his daughter.

On 3 June 2012, Gregg, of 3rd Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment, was shot and killed attempting to free an Afghan policeman who had been kidnapped by Taliban fighters.

At the time of his death, his wife and childhood sweetheart, Samantha, was expecting their first child.

As the family tried to come to terms with the loss of Gregg, they endured further heartbreak when Jennie, 28, a mother-of-one, was killed in a car crash near Bridlington, in East Yorkshire, on 18 February 2013.

Ms Moore, 68, searches for words to capture the enormity of the loss.

“It was a nightmare to lose Gregg, but then to lose Jennie eight months after, it was… unbelievable,” she says.

“Every morning I used to wake up and think I’d dreamt it. Things would be different today. But things were never different. It was a nightmare and some days it still is.

“I still put this mask on. Some days it fits better than others. A record will come on and I’ll think of them.

“There’s all kind of triggers. Photographs. When I go places, I remember Jennie doing this, Gregg doing that. But luckily most of them are happy memories.”

Ms Moore brought up Gregg, Jennie and her four other children in Atwick, near the East Yorkshire seaside town of Hornsea, where Gregg’s name is listed on the war memorial.

She feels Afghanistan is being forgotten.

“People don’t remember it,” says Ms Moore. “The world is forgetting.”

She now lives near Scarborough, but still has a view of the North Sea.

Outside is a bench dedicated to “Jennie Wren” – the family’s pet name for her daughter – where Ms Moore often sits to reflect and allow memories from happier times to return.

Indoors hang Pte Stone’s Army dog tags – the identification discs he was wearing when he died.

His Afghanistan medals and photographs sit on a cabinet, with a picture of a wren adorning a wall.

“Afghanistan changed us,” confesses Ms Moore. “We all became different people. Me especially. I became empty. Not whole. Like there’s a part of me missing.

“It caused rifts. Some of them have been mended, some of them haven’t. I suppose we like to blame it on other things but we all changed when we lost Gregg and Jennie.

“We’re a jigsaw and there will always be a part missing. It will never be complete.”

Ten years ago, when the end of British combat operations was announced, a BBC poll found 68% of respondents thought involvement was not worthwhile.

In August 2021, the Taliban regained control of the country after the US announced the final withdrawal of troops.

Ms Moore listens to those who criticised sending British troops to Afghanistan.

But she says: “Gregg emailed me from Shaparak [a checkpoint in Nahr-e Saraj].

“He said, ‘Mum, if anyone tells you we shouldn’t be here, take no notice.

“Gregg told me those people have a dreadful life. ‘We’re doing good’, he told me. That was from the horse’s mouth, so I won’t let anyone tell me we shouldn’t have been there.”

Ms Moore glances towards a clock on the wall, which displays a photograph of her son in uniform superimposed on to a union flag. It is the same image as the one that was issued at the time of his death.

“What hurts me is when people say it was a waste of time,” she says. “That’s like saying my son died for nothing, that it was a waste of time his life being taken from him.

“It wasn’t a waste of time. Maybe things have gone back and are not much better. But, for a time, they were. For a time, they made progress.

“My son’s life was not a waste at all. He knew what he was doing. He knew why he was there.”

The clock shows 11:00. Gregg is looking stern-faced.

“That really isn’t Gregg,” says Ms Moore, laughing. “It’s the only photo of Gregg I’ve seen where he isn’t smiling.”

It was the “death photo”, she explains.

“All soldiers, before deploying, had their pictures taken, in the event of their death.”

Ms Moore says her son was a “comic”.

“He was my laughing boy,” she says. “He smiled all the time. He joked about everything. He found fun in everything. He liked to entertain people. He was irritating.

“But he was a funny boy, very empathetic. Very mature in lots of ways. Very, very immature in many other ways. He was a good kid and he became a really nice man.”

And he would have been a great father, says his mother.

“Gregg was looking forward to becoming a dad. It was all he would talk about when he was out there [in Afghanistan]. He told everyone.”

Dealing with her loss has been difficult.

“You get through because you have to get through,” she says, looking out to sea.

“You don’t get a choice. You have to get through for the rest of your family, and for your own sanity.

“But you don’t have to let it define you. I don’t like to be known as Angie, the woman who lost two kids. I’m me. Yes, I did lose two kids, but I’m me.”

With Remembrance Day approaching, Ms Moore has a simple message: “Remember everybody, from every conflict, from every country – every son, every daughter, every husband, every wife. It’s not just about World War One and World War Two.”

Hull and East Yorkshire on BBC Soundslatest episode of Look North here.

Phil Lesh, bassist and co-founder of the US rock group The Grateful Dead, has died aged 84.

The musician’s official Instagram account said he “passed peacefully this morning”. He was surrounded by his family.

The psychedelic band, which formed in California in 1965, split 30 years later following the death of frontman Jerry Garcia.

Lesh was with them from the beginning – and also joined the group’s other surviving members for reunion US tour in 2003 and a final series of concerts in 2015.

Lesh’s Instagram account said that he “brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.”

With a distinctive trippy blend of rock, folk, and jazz, The Grateful Dead are arguably one of the most influential bands in American history, and wrote the soundtrack for the countercultural generation of the sixties.

Lesh was born in Berkeley, California, in 1940. He started out as a violin player before switching to trumpet, and later to bass guitar when he joined The Grateful Dead in 1965.

For the next three decades his improvisational skills complemented the melodies of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia and bandmates Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan.

He was best known for the song Unbroken Chain, about the band’s connection with its audience.

Lesh also sang the wistful Box Of Rain, which he wrote while his father was dying.

Loyal fans, known as “Deadheads”, would often follow the band from city to city across the US to hear them play at packed-out concerts.

The band always made it easy for its fans to record its concerts and distribute tapes to their peers around the world.

Despite their massive following, they notched up only one top 10 hit in the US with Touch of Grey in 1987.

Although the cause of Lesh’s death is unknown, he had a series of health issues over the years.

In 2015, he announced he was being treated for bladder cancer in the US. Nine years before that he had surgery for prostate cancer and made a full recovery.

He also underwent a liver transplant in 1998, becoming a passionate advocate of organ donations.

Lesh is survived by his wife, Jill, and their two sons.

Archaeologists have found the remains of two medieval cities in the grassy mountains of eastern Uzbekistan, a discovery that could shift our understanding of the fabled Silk Road.

Known for the exchange of goods and ideas between the East and West, the trade routes were long believed to have linked lowland cities.

But using remote sensing technology, archeologists have now found at least two highland cities that sat along a key crossroad of the trade routes.

One of the cities – Tugunbulak, a metropolis spanning at least 120 hectares – sat more than 2,000m (6,600 ft) above sea level.

“The history of Central Asia is now changing with this finding,” said archaeologist Farhod Maksudov, who was part of the research team.

The team believes Tugunbulak and the smaller city, Tashbulak, were bustling settlements between the 8th and 11th centuries, during the Middle Ages, when the area was controlled by a powerful Turkic dynasty.

Only 3% of the world’s population live above this altitude today. Lhasa in Tibet and Cusco in Peru are among the rare examples.

The discovery led by Mr Maksudov, director of Uzbekistan’s National Center of Archaeology and Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St Louis, was made possible with drones and a remote-sensing tool known as lidar, which uses reflected light to create three-dimensional mappings of the environment.

Their research was published in the scientific journal Nature this week, and experts who are not involved in it have hailed its significance in shedding light on the lifestyles of nomadic communities.

The team first discovered Tashbulak, the smaller city, in 2011 while trekking in the mountains. They found burial sites, thousands of pottery shards and other signs that the territory was populated.

Historical records allude to cities in the region, he said, but the team did not expect to find a 12-hectare medieval city some 2,200m above sea level.

“We were kind of blown away,” Mr Frachetti told the BBC.

Even trekking up there was rough, he added, as they encountered strong winds, storms and logistical challenges.

Four years later, a local forestry administrator tipped off the team to study another site close to Tashbulak.

“The official said, ‘I think I have some of those kinds of ceramics in my backyard.’

“So we went to his house… And discovered his house was built on a medieval citadel. He was like living on a huge city,” Mr Frachetti said.

The most challenging part in these discoveries was in convincing the academic community that these cities existed.

“We would say to people that we found this amazing site, and we would get scepticism, that maybe it’s not so big, or it’s just a mound, or a castle… That was the big challenge, how to document this city scientifically to actually illustrate what it was,” Mr Frachetti said.

In 2022, the team returned with a drone equipped with a lidar sensor, which helped peel back the surfaces to unveil walls, guard towers, intricate architectural features and other fortifications in Tugunbulak.

The researchers suggest that communities may have chosen to settle in Tugunbulak and Tashbulak to tap strong winds to fuel fires needed to smelt iron ores – which the region was rich in. Preliminary excavations have also uncovered production kilns.

“Whoever had iron in their hands in medieval time was very powerful,” Mr Maksudov said.

But this could also have led to the communities’ downfall, he said. This area used to be covered by a thick juniper forest, but these could have been cut to facilitate iron production. “The area became environmentally very unstable because of the flash floods, because of the avalanches,” he said.

Typically, scholars have expected to find evidence of settlements lower down in the valley, “so these finds are remarkable”, said Peter Frankopan, a global history professor at Oxford University.

“What an amazing treasure trove… that shows the deep interconnections criss-crossing Asia, as well as the links between exploitation of natural resources more than a millennium ago,” he said.

High-altitude urban sites are “extraordinarily rare” in the archaeological record because communities face unique challenges in settling there, said Zachary Silvia, an archaeologist at Brown University.

The team’s work provides an “immense contribution to the study of medieval urbanism in Central Asia”, he wrote in a commentary on Nature.

Outrage has erupted on social media after Somalia’s Family Minister Gen Bashir Mohamed Jama shared photos on X of himself and another male delegate representing Somalia at a UN meeting about women’s issues.

“It is tone-deaf for the Somali government to have men on the frontline, representing women at the conference,” Fathiya Absie, a well-known Somali author and human rights activist, told the BBC.

A senior civil servant has told the BBC that two women also made up Somalia’s four-member delegation to the Women, Peace and Security Focal Points Network event in New York, but were not included in the photo.

Out of 197 delegates registered for the event from 57 countries, just 21 were men.

The group photo from the event – held earlier this week – has provoked further ridicule from Somalis online, with many saying the government does not take women’s issues seriously.

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Several photos were tweeted from the conference, one showing Gen Jama with his adviser, former MP Abdullahi Godah Barre; another showed them in the meeting room with another man, who the BBC was told was an aide.

“He was not the only male minister present – there were a lot of other male ministers, such as Japan and China,” Mohamed Bashir, a senior civil servant at Somalia’s Ministry of Family and Human Development, told the BBC.

The two female Somali delegates were Iman Elman, a prominent military officer, and Sadia Mohammed Nur, a civil servant from the ministry, he said.

The online backlash has reignited criticism of the government’s decision in July to rename what was the Ministry of Women and Human Rights Development to the Ministry of Family and Human Rights Development.

This is when Gen Jama, a senior military officer who has held posts including heading the spy agency and prisons service, was appointed to lead the ministry.

“Removing the word ‘women’ from the ministry’s title is an erasure of the struggles and specific needs of women. It generalises their issues under the broader term ‘family,'” Ms Absie said.

Women’s rights in Somalia have been under scrutiny for many years.

Women in Somalia – which has suffered a long civil war and a more recent Islamist insurgency – have long played a vital role in peacebuilding, often stepping into leadership roles and pushing for greater political participation.

Despite this, there are not many women in positions of political influence.

“Women were always the minority in leadership and now they have given the remaining ministries to men,” Ms Absie said.

Some did defend the government, saying they did not see anything wrong with having a man with experience fronting the family ministry.

But the voices of those calling for a stronger female presence are growing louder – and Mr Bashir said the ministry would be striving to give women a more significant role in future.

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A man who was twice homeless as a teenager before becoming a multimillionaire entrepreneur has topped a list celebrating influential black Britons.

Dean Forbes, who, after failing to make it as a professional footballer, began his career in a call centre, is now the boss of a software company.

He worked his way up from “abject poverty” on an estate in south-east London to become chief executive of Forterro, a Swedish software firm.

Forbes said topping the Powerlist 2025 was a “professional and career high”.

He told the BBC that although he grew up in a single-parent family on a housing estate in Lewisham, his disabled mum always encouraged her children to be positive, and gave them hope.

He said he had a “whale of a time” growing up despite having little money, living in a local community which “looked after each other”.

His said his mum taught him and his two brothers to “raise our expectations”, “never to be victims” and not dwell on misfortunes.

He twice became homeless as a teenager, but said he and his family always saw these as temporary challenges to be overcome.

He managed to get a place at Crystal Palace Academy, but it didn’t work out.

He points to that failure as a key moment in his eventual success, because it made him more determined.

“Thanks to that disappointment and rejection, it put me on this path which is beyond my wildest dreams,” he said.

He had been borrowing money to “keep up appearances” with friends like then-footballer Rio Ferdinand who were being “paid well”, but he was eventually left with an £88,000 debt pile.

To start to clear that, he got a job in a Motorola call centre, and he quickly worked his way up.

He moved to a software firm called Primavera which he helped build up, and made his first millions after it was sold to Oracle: he had taken an equity stake.

Forbes moved from there and was chief executive of two software firms, KDS and CoreHR, each time taking equity stakes, and making millions more.

He also has an equity stake in Forterro, which he said was a firm which makes more than €300m (£250m) in revenue per year and earnings of €130m.

Despite his wealth, he said he never wanted “to lose the value of a pound”.

He was able to buy his mum a home, and his children “have never had to deal with anything I had to deal with” in terms of poverty.

He now describes celebrities like Ferdinand and actor Idris Elba as close friends.

But he told the BBC his roots remained very important to him and he wanted to inspire and give opportunities to others who have not started out with advantages in life.

Forbes and his wife Danielle set up the Forbes Family Group, a philanthropic organisation for people in underserved communities.

They are working to try to break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage, and give people positive role models.

“My experience has made me painfully aware that there is so much talent in these communities – you just need to open the door a crack” to give people a chance, he said.

Forbes said that as he was growing up the only black people he could see who were successful seemed to be in entertainment, sport, or “doing unsavoury things” in criminal gangs.

He said he wanted to make success in business more “relatable” in part through mentoring and networking projects.

He has now been named number one on the Powerlist 2025, after being number two last year.

The annual Powerlist was first published in 2007, with its aim to provide role models for young black people, according to Powerful Media.

Forbes takes the place of British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful at the head of the list.

The top 10 of the Powerlist for 2025 is:

1. Dean Forbes, chief executive at software firm Forterro

2. Bernard Mensah, president of international at Bank of America

3. Afua Kyei, chief financial officer at the Bank of England

4. Emma Grede, chief executive at fashion brand Good American

5. Joshua Siaw, partner at law firm White & Case

6. Tunde Olanrewaju, senior partner at consultancy McKinsey

7. Alexander and Oliver Kent-Braham, founders of insurance firm Marshmallow

8. Adejoke Bakare, chef-owner at Michelin-starred restaurant Chishuru

9. Justin Onuekwusi, fund manager at St. James’s Place

10. Pamela Maynard, chief AI transformation officer at Microsoft

In her first appearance on the campaign trail alongside Vice-President Kamala Harris, former First Lady Michelle Obama urged Americans to cast their votes to protect the country from the “dangers” of Donald Trump.

In a fiery speech in Michigan – a key battleground state – Obama said the election was “too close” for her liking.

At another event in Michigan, Donald Trump vowed to breathe fresh life into the state’s automotive industry and met with Arab-Americans he said could “turn the election”.

Polls show the two locked in a tight race in Michigan, with Harris holding an extremely narrow lead 10 days before the 5 November election.

The state, with 15 electoral college votes, could lend a deciding edge to either candidate.

President Joe Biden won Michigan by a narrow margin of 2.78% in 2020 – about 150,000 votes – helping to propel him to the presidency.

In 2016, the state went to Trump by an even narrower margin of 0.23% against Hillary Clinton.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

Speaking to a crowd of thousands at an events centre in Kalamazoo, Obama made repeated jabs at Trump, pointing to what she termed his “erratic behaviour” and “obvious mental decline”.

The bulk of her speech, however, focused on a “genuine fear” of how a Trump administration could impact abortion rights, telling an enthusiastic crowd of voters that she believes a failure to elect Kamala Harris could have deadly consequences.

Many abortion rights advocates have raised concerns that abortion bans have threatened women’s lives by denying them life-saving medical treatment.

• She was denied an abortion in Texas – then she almost died

“I’m deeply concerned that so many people are buying into the lies of people who don’t have our best interests at heart,” Obama said, adding that “ugliness will touch all of our lives”.

Harris largely echoed Obama’s comments, and told young Generation Z voters she understands why they might be “impatient” for change.

“I want to tell you that I see you and I see your power,” she said.

At his own rally in Novi, Michigan, Trump largely stuck to frequent campaign promises about immigration, energy and the economy.

He was also joined on stage by a number of Arab-American and Muslim community leaders, including Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi.

“We are supporting Donald Trump because he promised to end war in the Middle East and Ukraine,” Mr Bazzi said. “The bloodshed has to stop all over the world, and I think this man can make it happen.”

Trump said he believes that the Arab-American voters can “turn the election” one way or another.

The state is home to the ‘Uncommitted’ movement, which does not support Trump, but has refused to endorse Harris for what they see as a failure to take a more firm stance against Israel during the war in Gaza, such as committing to a weapons ban.

At the Democratic rally in Kalamazoo, however, some voters said they were much more preoccupied with abortion rights and perceptions that Trump is “undemocratic”, than they were about conflicts abroad.

Kelly Landon, a resident of Canton, Michigan, said that her primary motivation in this election was allowing female relatives to be safe and be in charge of their bodies and their own futures.”

Ms Landon said, in her view, other issues are secondary to the health and safety of women, as well as “their right to live the way they want to live”.

National polling averages tracked by the BBC show Harris with a slight lead nationally, although with Trump narrowly ahead in five of the seven battleground states that could decide the election.

• 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?

Kim* is a young professional who started using cannabis when family life became messy. Things improved, but her drug habit stuck – and by then, her social circle was primarily made up of people who also used. With a reliable local supplier of weed, Kim’s friends asked her if she would get some for them.

“That’s what I did,” Kim says. “I never marked up the price in any way, because this was friendship… It’s like, I’m helping you to purchase something we both use anyway.”

Singapore, where Kim lives, has some of the harshest drugs laws in the world.

If you sell, give, deliver, administer, transport or distribute narcotics, that’s drug trafficking. And the law also presumes you’re a trafficker if you possess drugs in quantities that cross certain weight thresholds.

Kim’s life unravelled very fast when one of the friends she sourced cannabis for was caught by the state’s Central Narcotics Bureau.

Kim was named as the supplier of the marijuana, and picked up too. After the authorities trawled through her phone, another friend was arrested – and Kim was charged with drug trafficking.

“I was wracked with horror,” she says. “To have charges of trafficking levelled at me? That was just overwhelming. I felt complete and utter fear of what was going to pan out for me.”

Cannabis for recreational use has been decriminalised in many places around the world. In the US, 24 states have legalised it. While cannabis is illegal In the UK, punishments for its possession have plummeted in recent years.

In Singapore, if you’re found with 15g you’re assumed to be trafficking – and with 500g or more, the death penalty is mandatory.

It’s a controversial policy and there have been several recent cases. The most recent execution – of a 64-year-old on a heroin charge – took place on 16 October.

The Singaporean government won’t tell the BBC how many people are currently on death row.

Singapore’s death penalty becomes mandatory in drug cases involving

• 15g diamorphine (heroin)
• 30g cocaine
• 500g cannabis
• 250g methamphetamine

Kim’s not facing execution, but she could be looking at a lengthy prison term.

“The minimum sentence would be five years,” she says. “The worst-case could be up to 20 years.”

While Kim awaits judgement on trafficking charges, her friends have already been dealt with. But they weren’t prosecuted. Classed as drug consumers – not traffickers – they faced very different treatment.

They were sent to the state-run Drug Rehabilitation Centre for six months each.

When anyone’s caught using an illicit substance in Singapore, they’re assessed as low, medium or high risk. Only those deemed at low risk of reoffending are allowed to stay at home, where they are monitored in the community.

Everyone else – even a first-time offender – is sent for compulsory rehabilitation.

There’s no private, residential rehab in Singapore – no mooching around in fluffy bathrobes and then retreating to your own en-suite room.

The Drug Rehabilitation Centre (DRC) is a vast complex run by Singapore’s Prison Service, which makes sense because this is incarceration by any other name. There’s barbed wire, a control room, and CCTV everywhere. Guards patrol the walkways.

In December 2023, 3,981 Singaporeans were inmates – about 1 in 8 of them women.

Institution S1 houses around 500 identically-dressed male inmates, most first or second-time drug offenders.

A cell accommodates seven or eight men. There are two toilets, and a shower behind a waist-high wall. There are no beds. The men sleep on thin, rush mats on the concrete floor. And a detainee will spend at least six months here – even if they’re a casual, rather than addicted, drug user.

“While it is rehabilitation, it’s still a very deterrent regime,” says Supt Ravin Singh. “We don’t want to make your stay too comfortable.”

The men spend up to six hours a day in a classroom on psychology-based courses.

“The aim is to motivate inmates to want to stay away from drugs, to renew their lives without them, and to address negative thinking regarding drugs,” says Lau Kuan Mei, Deputy Director for the Correctional Rehabilitation Service.

“They teach us a lot about how to manage our triggers for using drugs,” says Jon*, who’s in his late 20s and close to the end of a six-month stay.

Jon has a history of using methamphetamine and is one of the inmates prison authorities have selected to talk to the BBC.

Meth (also known as crystal or ice) is a powerful, highly addictive stimulant, and the most commonly abused drug in Singapore and the region.

Earlier this year, on a weekday afternoon, Central Narcotics Bureau officers arrived at Jon’s house where he lives with his parents. Before they took him away, he spoke to his shocked mother.

“She said, ‘learn your lesson, pay your dues, and come back clean,” Jon remembers.

And that’s what he’s aiming to do – but he knows it won’t be easy.

“It’s exciting leaving,” he says. “But I’m also nervous… In here you’re locked up and not faced with drugs.”

Jon’s worried he might be tempted to take meth again. His rehab programme has been obligatory, not voluntary as it might have been if he lived in North America or Europe. Even so, it might not impact his chances of staying drug-free.

“If you look at evidence-based policies in drug addiction… it doesn’t really matter whether the treatment offered is voluntary or non-voluntary,” says Dr Muni Winslow, an addiction psychiatrist who worked in Singapore’s government institutions.

He believes the treatment offered to drug users has improved.

“It’s much better now because the whole criminal justice system has a lot of psychologists and counsellors who are trained in addictions.”

Historically, drugs have been viewed as a criminal justice issue, rather than a health issue in Singapore.

While the state execution of traffickers still sets the tone for how the government and most Singaporeans view narcotics, it hasn’t prevented changes to how drug users are treated. For example, no-one who spends time in the rehab centre gets a criminal record.

“We talked to psychologists and addiction specialists and our thinking evolved,” explains Minister for Home Affairs and Law, K Shanmugam. “If they’re not a threat to society, we don’t need to treat them as criminals.”

Singapore commits huge resources to enabling people to stay clean once they leave the DRC. Most importantly, they’re helped to find work.

But although authorities say the system has changed, critics believe it’s still humane.

The Transformative Justice Collective, a group which campaigns against the death penalty, describes the DRC as a form of mandatory detention where prisoners face “humiliation” and “loss of liberties”.

The group says programmes in the centre are superficial and focused on “shame” – failing to tackle the root causes of drug dependence.

“We’ve seen a lot of lives disrupted and a lot of trauma inflicted from being arrested, from being thrown into prison, from having to share a cell,” says Kirsten Han.

“It causes a lot of stress and instability. And these are not harms caused by drugs. These are harms caused by the war on drugs.”

Surveillance remains a critical part of the country’s mission to keep former inmates clean.

At a supervision centre, a neat-looking man in his 50s arrives. He’s been in and out of the Drug Rehabilitation Centre six times, struggling with heroin. But for the last 26 months he’s been drug-free, living at home, monitored by an electronic tag. Now his sentence is over.

When the tag’s snipped off, he’s delighted, and leaves quickly after exchanging a few words with Karen Lee, the director of the Community Corrections Command.

“He looks healthy,” she says. “And that’s what we hope for all our supervisees… While three out of 10 do come back as repeat drug abusers, we shouldn’t forget there are seven supervisees out there, successfully living their lives as reintegrated citizens of Singapore.”

While tagged, the ex-heroin user had another incentive to stay clean: regular urine analysis. Singapore’s state-of-the-art Urine Supervision Cubicles are the first of their kind in the world.

Once a supervisee enters a cubicle, the door locks behind him. After he pees into the urinal the technology tests for drugs including cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin. It takes about seven minutes.

“It’s not so boring – we’ve also prepared videos for him to watch, like Mr Bean!” says Karen Lee.

If the test is negative, a green light goes on, and the man’s free to go. A red light indicates a positive test result – and the supervisee will be re-arrested.

Singapore’s zero-tolerance policy doesn’t distinguish between casual drug users and those with an addiction. And although punishment is no longer front and centre of the system, Singapore retains draconian practices – including a legal requirement for doctors to report patients to the authorities if they disclose use of narcotics. This may well deter people from getting help with problematic drug dependency.

But the harshest treatment is reserved for those convicted of trafficking. Kim – who sourced cannabis for her friends – is trying to keep busy while she waits for the court’s decision about the charges against her.

“Once I heard there was very little possibility of me not serving a sentence, I took some time,” Kim says, “to mourn almost, for the period of my life I would lose. I think I’ve accepted prison on a deeper level. It just never gets easier as the day draws nearer.”

If Kim’s incarcerated – as she expects – she won’t be unusual. In December 2023, around half of the country’s convicted prison population – 2,299 people – were serving time for drug offences.

If you, or someone you know, have been affected by addiction, there are details of organisations who may be able to help at BBC Action Line.

Singapore: Drugs, rehab, execution

The laws against illegal narcotics are notoriously severe in Singapore. Penalties for trafficking include the death penalty, but the government argues its zero-tolerance policy is effective.

If you are caught using any illicit narcotic, including cannabis, you may find yourself in compulsory rehab. The BBC’s Linda Pressly approached Singapore’s authorities and was granted access to the state’s austere Drug Rehabilitation Centre.

She speaks to drug users who have to spend months at the facility before being released back into the community under surveillance.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump‘s three-hour interview with America’s number one podcaster, Joe Rogan, has been released.

In the wide-ranging sit-down, the former president discusses everything from the “biggest mistake” of his White House tenure, what he told North Korea’s leader and whether extraterrestrial life exists.

Two years ago Rogan described Trump as “an existential threat to democracy” and refused to have him on his show. But the pair seemed friendly on Friday as they chatted about their shared interest in Ultimate Fighting Championship and mutual friends like Elon Musk.

The Republican’s campaign hopes the interview will consolidate his influence with male voters, who make up the core of listeners to the Joe Rogan Experience, which has 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers.

Trump took a major detour to visit Rogan in Austin, Texas, causing him to show up almost three hours late to a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, a crucial swing state where both he and his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, have been campaigning hard.

Trump told Rogan the “biggest mistake” of his 2017-21 presidency was “I picked a few people I shouldn’t have picked”.

“Neocons or bad people or disloyal people,” he told Rogan, referring to neoconservatives, policy-makers who champion an interventionist US foreign policy.

“A guy like Kelly, who was a bully but a weak person,” Trump added, mentioning his former White House chief-of-staff John Kelly, who told the New York Times this week that he thought his former boss had “fascist” tendencies.

Trump also described his former US National Security Adviser John Bolton as “an idiot”, but useful at times.

“He was good in a certain way,” said Trump. “He’s a nutjob.

“And everytime I had to deal with a country when they saw this whack job standing behind me they said: ‘Oh man, Trump’s going to go to war with us.’ He was with Bush when they went stupidly into the Middle East.”

Trump said he got to know North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “very well” despite some nuclear sabre-rattling between the two initially when Trump said he told him: “Little Rocket Man, you’re going to burn in hell.”

“By the time I finished we had no problem with North Korea,” Trump said.

Trump said he urged Kim to stop building up his “substantial” weapons stockpile.

“I said: ‘Do you ever do anything else? Why don’t you go take it easy? Go to the beach, relax.

“I said: ‘You’re always building nuclear, you don’t have to do it. Relax!’ I said: ‘Let’s build some condos on your shore.’”

Trump also argued that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he had been president.

“I said, ‘Vladimir, you’re not going in,’” he told Rogan, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I used to talk to him all the time.

“I can’t tell you what I told him, because I think it would be inappropriate, but someday he’ll tell you, but he would have never gone in.”

Trump said Putin invaded Ukraine because “number one, he doesn’t respect Biden at all”. The White House has previously accused Trump of cozying up to foreign autocrats.

Asked for proof to back up his false claims that the 2020 presidential was stolen from him by mass voter fraud, Trump told Rogan: “We’ll do it another time.

“I would bring in papers that you would not believe, so many different papers. That election was so crooked, it was the most crooked.”

Rogan pressed him for evidence.

Trump alleged irregularities with the ballots in Wisconsin and that Democrats “used Covid to cheat”.

“Are you going to present this [proof] ever?” asked Rogan.

“Uh…,” said Trump before pivoting to talk about how 51 former intelligence agents aligned with Joe Biden had falsely suggested that stories about his son Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation.

“I lost by, like, I didn’t lose,” said Trump, quickly correcting himself.

Trump lashed out at his political opponents and praised his allies, many of whom are likely to appeal to Rogan’s fanbase.

He called his rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris, a “very low IQ person” and described California’s Gavin Newsom as “one of the worst governors in the world”.

Trump said that Elon Musk, who has appeared on Rogan’s podcast in the past, was “the greatest guy”.

He also said he is “completely” committed to bringing Robert F Kennedy Jr into a potential new Trump administration.

The former independent presidential candidate, who has a close friendship with Rogan, dropped out in August and endorsed the Republican nominee.

Trump said he disagrees with Kennedy on environmental policy so would instead ask the vaccine critic to “focus on health, do whatever you want”.

Trump said that he hadn’t ruled out there being life in space.

“There’s no reason not to think that Mars and all these planets don’t have life,” he said, referring to discussions he’d had with jet pilots who’d seen “very strange” things in the sky.

“Well, Mars – we’ve had probes there, and rovers, and I don’t think there’s any life there,” Rogan said.

“Maybe it’s life that we don’t know about,” said Trump.

Trump said that some senior figures at NBC had tried to talk him out of running for president to keep his show The Apprentice on air.

”They wanted me to stay,” he said. “All the top people came over to see me, try and talk me out of it, because they wanted to have me extend.”

Trump featured in 14 series of The Apprentice from 2004, but NBC cut ties with him after he launched his 2015 bid for the presidency, citing his “derogatory” comments about immigrants.

Trump has been under pressure from Democrats to release his medical records after Harris released hers earlier this month, which concluded she was in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency.

Trump’s team said at the time that his doctor described him as being in “perfect and excellent health”, without sharing his records.

Trump didn’t address the topic directly on Friday’s podcast.

But he told Rogan that during one physical, for which he didn’t give a date, doctors had described his ability to run on a steep treadmill as “unbelievable”.

“I was never one that could, like, run on a treadmill. When passing a physical, they asked me to run on a treadmill and then they make it steeper and steeper and steeper and the doctors said, it was at Walter Reed [hospital], they said: ‘It’s unbelievable!’ I’m telling you, I felt I could have gone all day.”

But he said treadmills are “really boring” so he prefers to stay healthy by playing golf.

SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose

EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election

GLOBAL: The 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

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

Israel’s attack on Iran deepens the war in the Middle East. Avoiding, or risking, an even worse escalation is at the heart of decisions being taken by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his key advisors.

They must decide on the least bad of a series of difficult choices. At one end of the spectrum is hitting back with another wave of ballistic missiles. Israel has already threatened to retaliate again if that happens.

At the other is deciding to draw a line under the destructive exchanges of direct strikes on their respective territories. The risk for Iran if it holds its fire is that looks weak, intimidated and deterred by Israel’s military power and political determination, backed up by the United States.

In the end, the supreme leader and his advisers are likely to take the decision that, in their view, does least harm to the survival of Iran’s Islamic regime.

Iran’s official media in the hours before and after Israel’s attacks carried defiant statements that, at face value, suggest the decision to respond had already been taken. Its language resembles Israel’s, citing its right to defend itself against attack. But the stakes are so high that Iran might decide to walk its threats back.

That is the hope of Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who fell in behind America’s insistence that Israel has acted in self-defence.

“I am clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against Iranian aggression,” he said. “I’m equally clear that we need to avoid further regional escalation and urge all sides to show restraint. Iran should not respond.”

Iran’s own statements have been consistent since its ballistic missile on Israel on 1 October. A week ago, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Turkey’s NTV network that “any attack on Iran will be considered crossing a red line for us. Such an attack will not go unanswered.”

Hours before the Israeli strikes, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baqai said: “Any aggression by the Israeli regime against Iran will be met with full force.” It was, he said, “highly misleading and baseless” to suggest that Iran would not respond to a limited Israeli attack.

As the Israeli aircraft were heading back to base Iran’s foreign ministry invoked its right to self defence “as enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter”. A statement said Iran believed it was both entitled and obligated to respond to foreign acts of aggression.

Israel has set the pace of escalation since the spring. It sees Iran as the crucial backer of the Hamas attacks that killed about 1,200 people – Israelis and more than 70 foreign nationals – on 7 October last year. Fearing that Israel was looking for a chance to strike, Iran signalled repeatedly that it did not want a full-on war with Israel.

That did not mean it was prepared to stop its constant, often deadly, but lower-level pressure on Israel and its allies.

The men in Tehran thought they had a better idea than all-out war. Instead, Iran used the allies and proxies in its so-called “axis of resistance” to attack Israel. The Houthis in Yemen blocked and destroyed shipping in the Red Sea. Hezbollah rocket fire from Lebanon forced at least 60,000 Israelis from their homes.

Six months into the war, Israel’s retaliation forced perhaps twice as many Lebanese from their homes in the south, but Israel was prepared to do much more. It warned that if Hezbollah did not hold its fire into Israel and move back from the border it would take action.

When that did not happen, Israel decided to break out of a battlefield that had been shaped by Iran’s limited, but attritional war. It landed a series of powerful blows that threw the Islamic regime in Tehran off balance and left its strategy in tatters. That is why, after the latest Israeli strikes, Iranian leaders have only hard choices.

Israel interpreted Iran’s reluctance to fight an all-out war as weakness, and upped the pressure both on Iran and its axis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s commanders could afford to take risks. They had President Joe Biden’s unequivocal support, a safety net that came not just in the shape of massive deliveries of munitions, but with his decision to send significant American sea and air reinforcements to the Middle East to back up the US commitment to defend Israel.

On 1 April an Israeli airstrike destroyed part of Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, the Syrian capital. It killed a top Iranian commander, Brig Gen Mohammed Reza Zahedi, along with other senior officers from the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The Americans were furious that they had not been warned and given time to put their own forces on alert. But Joe Biden’s support did not waver as Israel faced the consequences of its actions. On 13 April Iran attacked with drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. Most were shot down by Israel’s defences, with considerable help from armed forces of the US, UK, France and Jordan.

Biden apparently asked Israel to “take the win” hoping that might stop what had become the most dangerous moment in the widening Middle East war. When Israel confined its response to a strike on an air defence site, Biden’s plan seemed to be working.

But since the summer, Israel has repeatedly escalated the war with Iran and its axis of allies and proxies. The biggest blows were landed in a major offensive against Iran’s most important ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran had spent years building up Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons as a key part of its forward defence. The idea was an Israeli attack on Iran would be deterred by the knowledge that Hezbollah would hammer Israel from just over the border in Lebanon.

But Israel moved first, implementing plans it had developed since Hezbollah fought it to a standstill in the 2006 war. It blew up booby trapped pagers and walkie talkies it had deceived Hezbollah into buying, invaded south Lebanon and killed Hezbollah’s leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah, a man who had been a symbol of defiant resistance to Israel for decades. The authorities in Beirut say that Israel’s offensive in Lebanon has so far killed more than 2,500 people, displaced more than 1.2 million and caused enormous damage to a country already on its knees after its economy largely collapsed.

Hezbollah is still fighting and killing Israeli soldiers inside Lebanon and firing large numbers of rockets. But it is reeling after losing its leader and much of its arsenal.

Faced with the near collapse of its strategy, Iran concluded it had to hit back. Allowing its allies to fight and die without responding would destroy its position as the leader of the anti-Israeli and anti-western forces in the region. Its answer was a much bigger ballistic missile attack on Israel on 1 October.

The airstrikes on Friday 25 October were Israel’s response. They took longer to come than many expected. Leaks of Israeli plans could have been a factor.

Israel is also carrying out a major offensive in northern Gaza. The UN human rights chief Volker Turk has called it the darkest moment of Gaza’s war, with the Israeli military subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and the risk of starvation.

It’s impossible for an outsider to know whether the timing of Israel’s attacks on Iran was designed to draw international attention away from northern Gaza. But it might have been part of the calculation.

It is hard to stop successive rounds of strikes and counter strikes when the countries concerned believe they will be seen as weak, and deterred, if they don’t respond. That is how wars spin out of control.

The question now is whether Iran is prepared to give Israel the last word, at least on this stage of the war. President Biden backed Israel’s decision to retaliate after 1 October. But once again he tried to head off an even deadlier escalation, telling Israel publicly not to bomb Iran’s most important assets, its nuclear, oil and gas installations. He augmented Israel’s defences by deploying the THAAD anti-missile system to Israel, and prime minister Netanyahu agreed to take his advice.

The American elections on 5 November are part of both Israel and Iran’s calculations about what happens next. If Donald Trump gets his second term, he might be less concerned than Biden about answering Iranian retaliation, if it happens, with strikes on nuclear, oil and gas facilities.

Once again, the Middle East is waiting. Israel’s decision not to hit Iran’s most valuable assets might, perhaps, give Tehran the chance to postpone a response, at least long enough for diplomats to do their work. At the UN General Assembly last month, the Iranians were suggesting that they were open to a new round of nuclear negotiations.

All this should matter greatly to the world outside the Middle East. Iran has always denied it wants a nuclear bomb. But its nuclear expertise and enrichment of uranium have put a weapon within its reach. Its leaders must be looking for a new way to deter their enemies. Developing a nuclear warhead for their ballistic missiles might be on their agenda.

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, Nevada and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has a small lead in all of them at the moment.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris had led 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

“Google essentially disappeared us from the internet.”

Launch days. They’re equal parts thrilling and terrifying for many start-up business founders, but they don’t get much worse than the one Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, experienced.

It was June 2006 and the couple’s trailblazing price comparison website Foundem – one they had sacrificed well-paid jobs for and built from scratch – had just gone fully live.

They didn’t know it at the time but that day, and those that followed, would mark the beginning of the end for their company.

Foundem had been hit by a Google search penalty, prompted by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the website way down the lists of search results for relevant queries like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping”.

It meant the couple’s website, which charged a fee when customers clicked on their product listings through to other websites, struggled to make any money.

“We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately, ” says Adam.

While the launch day for Foundem didn’t go to plan, it would lead to the start of something else – a 15-year legal battle that culminated in a then record €2.4bn (£2bn) fine for Google, which was deemed to have abused its market dominance.

The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in the global regulation of Big Tech.

Google spent seven years fighting that verdict, issued in June 2017, but in September this year Europe’s top court – the European Court of Justice – rejected its appeals.

Speaking to Radio 4’s The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that at first, they thought their website’s faltering start had simply been a mistake.

“We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been false positive detected as spam,” says Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned.”

“If you’re denied traffic, then you have no business,” adds Adam, 58.

The couple sent Google numerous requests to have the restriction lifted but, more than two years later, nothing had changed and they said they received no response.

Meanwhile, their website was “ranking completely normally” on other search engines, but that didn’t really matter, according to Shivaun, as “everyone’s using Google”.

The couple would later discover that their site was not the only one to have been put at a disadvantage by Google – by the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017 there were around 20 claimants, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.

Adam, who had built a career in supercomputing, says he had the “eureka moment” for Foundem while smoking a cigarette outside the offices of his previous employer.

Then, price comparison websites were in their infancy, and each specialised in one particular product. But Foundem was different because it let customers compare a large range of products – from clothes to flights.

“No-one else was anywhere close to this,” beams Shivaun, who herself had been a software consultant for several major global brands.

In its 2017 judgement, the European Commission found that Google had illegally promoted its own comparison shopping service in search results, whilst demoting those of competitors.

Ten years before that, though – when Foundem launched – Adam says he had no reason to assume Google was being deliberately anti-competitive over online shopping. “They weren’t really serious players,” he says.

But by the end of 2008, the couple had started to suspect foul play.

It was three weeks before Christmas and the pair received a message warning that their website had suddenly become slow to load. They thought it was a cyber attack, “but actually it was just that everyone had started visiting our website”, Adam laughs.

Channel 5’s The Gadget Show had just named Foundem the best price comparison website in the UK.

“And that was really important,” Shivaun explains, “because we then reached out to Google and said, look, surely it’s not benefiting your users to make it impossible for them to find us.

“And that still got from Google, not a complete ignore, but a basically ‘bog off’.”

“That was the moment we knew, OK, we need to fight,” says Adam.

The couple went to the press, with limited success, and took their case to regulators in the UK, US, and Brussels.

It was in the latter – with the European Commission (EC) – that the case eventually took off, with the launch of an antitrust investigation in November 2010. The couple’s first meeting with the regulators took place in a portable cabin in Brussels.

“One of the things they said was if this is a systemic issue, why are you the first people we’re seeing?” Shivaun recalls. “We said we’re not 100% sure, but we suspect people are afraid, because all businesses on the internet essentially rely on Google for the lifeblood that is their traffic.”

The couple were in a hotel room in Brussels, only a few hundred yards from the commission building, when competition commissioner Margarethe Vestager finally announced the verdict that they, and other shopping websites, had been waiting for.

But there was no popping of champagne corks. Their focus then turned to making sure the EC enforced its decision.

“I guess it was unfortunate for Google that they did it to us,” Shivaun says. “We’ve both been brought up maybe under the delusion that we can make a difference, and we really don’t like bullies.”

Even Google’s final defeat in the case last month did not spell the end for the couple.

They believe Google’s conduct remains anti-competitive and the EC is looking into it. In March this year, under its new Digital Markets Act, the commission opened an investigation into Google’s parent company, Alphabet, over whether it continues to preference its own goods and services in search results.

A spokesperson for Google said: “The CJEU [European Court of Justice] judgment [in 2024] only relates to how we showed product results from 2008-2017.

“The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s Shopping decision have worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services.

“For this reason, we continue to strongly contest the claims made by Foundem and will do so when the case is considered by the courts.”

The Raffs are also pursuing a civil damages claim against Google, which is due to begin in the first half of 2026. But when, or if, a final victory comes for the couple it will likely be a Pyrrhic one – they were forced to close Foundem in 2016.

The long fight against Google has been gruelling for them, too. “I think if we had known it was going to be quite as many years as it turned out to be we might not have made the same choice,” Adam admits.

The Prince of Wales says “inspiration and guidance” from his mother, Diana, has been a driving force behind his personal commitment to tackle homelessness.

In a forthcoming ITV documentary, Prince William talks about the profound impact of visits he made to The Passage homelessness shelter with his mother when he was a child – and how it helped him see “outside the palace walls”.

The prince admits he sometimes feels guilty about not being able to do more – and wants to share with his own children a sense of empathy for those facing hardship.

“When I was very small, my mother started talking about homelessness, much like I do now with my children on the school run,” says the prince.

If passion projects reveal something about what drives someone, then perhaps his support for The Passage charity is key to unlocking Prince William’s character.

The Westminster-based charity provides assistance and friendship for London’s homeless and helps them into secure accommodation.

Forged by childhood memories of visits with his mother, the prince’s longtime support for the charity has provided the foundation for his current Homewards project, set up to tackle homelessness across the UK.

“My mother took me to The Passage. She took Harry and I both there. I must have been about 11, I think, probably, at the time. Maybe 10. I’d never been to anything like that before. And I was a bit anxious as to what to expect,” he says in the ITV documentary, Prince William: We Can End Homelessness.

“My mother went about her usual part of making everyone feel relaxed, and having a laugh and joking with everyone.

“I remember at the time, kind of thinking, well, if everyone’s not got a home, they’re all going to be really sad.

“But it was incredible how happy an environment it was,” recalls Prince William.

The Passage has revealed four previously unseen photos of the prince visiting their London base with his mother, the princess, in June and December 1993.

“I remember having some good conversations – just playing chess and chatting,” says the prince, of his childhood visits to The Passage.

“That’s when it dawned on me that there are other people out there who don’t have the same life as you do.”

Prince William became the charity’s official patron in 2019, but those visits have continued both publicly and privately throughout his life, often for hours longer than scheduled.

In the ITV documentary, the prince is filmed serving food and clearing up at The Passage’s Christmas dinner, hugging some of the regular visitors there. He is even seen being bossed around by the charity’s head chef, Claudette Dawkins, as she organises her royal helper.

He speaks about his concern for some of the homeless he encounters “who are in really bad place… It’s like you want to just protect them”.

Over the years, the prince says he has spent a lot of time gathering information about homelessness – now he wants to do something practical to prevent it.

The prince addresses the question of his own privileged status – and argues that the point of having such a big public platform is to put it to good use, by taking action on issues such as reducing homelessness.

“I feel, with my position and my platform, I should be delivering change,” he says.

“I’ve spent enough time learning and listening to what people have been through that I feel almost guilty every time I leave that I’m not doing more to help.

“I feel compelled to act, because I don’t want to just talk about it. I don’t want to just listen. I actually want to see someone smile because their life has been made better,” says the prince.

“Building a project is the only way I can see, at the moment, to try and alleviate [the problem], and help people who are in a much less fortunate, or in a very difficult, situation.”

Mick Clarke, chief executive of The Passage, says of Prince William’s visits: “I think he feels most at home when he’s just chatting away with our clients and hearing their stories.

“People can get very nervous, but he’s very good at putting people at ease.”

Prince William’s Homewards project, which has six flagship locations across the UK, aims to show homelessness is not inevitable.

“The ultimate ambition is to prove that we can prevent homelessness in these regions, so then others will come along and go, well, if they can do it, why can’t we?” says the prince.

It draws on the experience of Finland, where homelessness was effectively reduced by a policy of providing secure accommodation for people, with wrap-around support for contributory issues such as mental health problems and addiction.

Among those William speaks to over the course of the film is Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, who went from being a rough sleeper to becoming a chief fire officer. She has used her own lived experience to advise the prince’s current project.

Lord John Bird, the forthright founder of the Big Issue, has warned of decades of failed initiatives to tackle homelessness, but has nonetheless backed the prince’s intervention.

“I am very impressed that a young man who has got young children and could go and live the life of Riley, has decided to make a stand for the work that he wants to do, and the work that his mother did.

“Princess Diana was probably the only personality who shone a light on homelessness.

“What she was saying is, these are human beings and I’m going to address myself to it. And I think that her son, William, has said, this is the legacy.”

Georgia’s ruling party is leading a pivotal election focused on the country’s future path in Europe, according to preliminary results.

The Georgian Dream party of billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili is on 53%, based on a count of more than 70% of the vote, the central election commission says.

The initial results were dramatically different from exit polls conducted by Western pollsters and the head of one of the opposition parties said they believed the vote had been “stolen from the Georgian people”.

“We do not accept the results of these falsified elections,” said Tina Bokuchava, head of the United National Movement.

Another opposition leader, Nika Gvaramia, said Georgian Dream had mounted a “constitutional coup”.

Georgia’s increasingly authoritarian ruling party and the four pro-EU opposition groups trying to end its 12 years in power had earlier both claimed victory based on competing exit polls.

Voters turned out in big numbers on Saturday in this South Caucasus state bordering Russia, and there were numerous reports of vote violations and violence outside polling stations.

One opposition official in a town south of the capital Tbilisi told the BBC that he was beaten up first by a local Georgian Dream councillor, and then “another 10 men came and I didn’t know what was happening to me”.

The opposition has described this high-stakes vote as a choice between Europe or Russia. Many saw the vote as the most crucial since Georgians backed independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

As soon as voting ended, two exit polls by Edison and HarrisX for pro-opposition TV channels gave Georgian Dream 40.9% and 42% of the vote, with the total for the combined four opposition groups put at 51.9% and 48%. But a poll for the big, government-supporting Imedi TV channel gave Georgian Dream 56%.

Some time later, the central election commission (CEC) came out with initial preliminary results.

The commission had said that 90% of the vote would be released within two hours of the polls closing, but four hours afterwards it was still at only 72%.

The CEC has come under criticism for being too close to the government and for rushing through electoral reform ahead of the election without sufficient consultation.

“The onus is on a government body to provide transparency required in an electoral process,” said Dritan Nesho of HarrisX.

“We analysed the data from these precincts and there’s a wide discrepancy from the data we have. In some cases they have districts in Tbilisi where Georgian Dream are winning by 45% of the vote, whereas we know most of the opposition vote came from Tbilisi.”

Georgian Dream has already claimed an outright majority in parliament, as the combined four opposition blocs can only muster about 38% between them, according to the contested preliminary results.

Under Georgia’s new system of proportional representation, whoever wins half the vote wins half of the 150 seats. None of the other parties fighting the election reached the 5% threshold to get into parliament.

Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, told supporters it was a “rare occasion in the world for the same party to achieve such success in such a difficult situation”.

However, opposition leaders and supporters had a very different take.

Tina Bokuchava said her party would not accept Georgia’s European future being stolen and she hoped the other main opposition groups would be able to agree on their next steps.

“This is the moment. In future there may be no such moment,” opposition voter Levan Benidze, 36, told the BBC. “I know there are a lot of geopolitical risks – from Russia – but this could be the pivotal moment, a turning point.”

Although Georgia was made a candidate to join the European Union last December, that move has since been frozen by the EU because of “democratic backsliding – in particular a Russian-style “foreign influence” law targeting groups receiving Western funding.

The USSR may have ceased to exist more than three decades ago, but Moscow still considers much of the old Soviet empire its own backyard and Russia’s sphere of influence.

It will have appreciated Georgian Dream’s campaign promise of a “pragmatic” Russia policy, not to mention Brussels’ decision earlier this year to halt Georgia’s EU accession process.

Georgian Dream has promised voters they are still on course to join the EU, but it has also accused the opposition of helping the West to open a new front in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Georgia’s Russian neighbour still occupies 20% of its territory after a five-day war in 2008.

Bidzina Ivanishvili’s rhetoric has become increasingly anti-Western, indicating that a fourth term for Georgian Dream might pull the country back into Russia’s orbit.

Georgians had a simple choice, the party’s founder said after voting in Tbilisi: either a government that served them, or an opposition of “foreign agents, who will carry out only the orders of a foreign country”.

He has repeatedly spoken of a “global war party” pushing the opposition towards joining the war in Ukraine, with Georgian Dream (GD) cast as the party of peace. For many voters the message has worked.

“The most important thing – for me, my family, my grandchildren – is peace that I wish for all Georgians,” GD voter Tinatin Gvelesiani, 55, told the BBC at a polling station in Kojori, south-west of the capital. “Only Georgian Dream” would bring peace, she added.

Election observers reported a string of violations across the country, from ballot stuffing inside polling stations to intimidation of voters outside.

With less than an hour to go before the polls closed, pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili appealed to opposition voters not to be intimidated.

“Don’t get scared. All this is just psychological pressure on you,” she said in a live address on social media.

The intimidation turned into violence for Azat Karimov, 35, the local chair of the biggest opposition party United National Movement in Marneuli south of Tbilisi.

He told the BBC how he was set upon when his team tried to investigate votes being falsified by Georgian Dream officials. He also alleged that voters were being bribed to back the governing party.

“[A Georgian Dream councillor]came with 10-20 people… before police could come I told him to calm down. Right away the councillor started beating me.”

On the eve of the vote, a Georgian monitoring group highlighted a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at the election.

The Kremlin has denied meddling in Georgia’s domestic affairs and alleged instead that the West had made “unprecedented attempts” at interference.

Earlier this year Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, accused the United States of planning a “Colour Revolution” in Georgia.

Israel has carried out what it described as “precise and targeted” airstrikes on Iran in retaliation for the barrage of missile strikes launched by Tehran against Israel earlier this month.

It is the latest in a series of exchanges between the two countries that for months have sparked fears of an all-out regional war.

But while Iran says Saturday’s strikes against military sites killed four soldiers, early indications suggest the attacks were more limited than had been feared.

Here’s what we know.

Around 02:15 local time (22:45 GMT on Friday), Iranian media reported explosions in and around the capital, Tehran.

Video uploaded to social media and verified by the BBC showed projectiles in the sky over the city, while residents in some areas reported hearing loud booms.

Shortly after, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed it was carrying out “precise” strikes on “military targets” in Iran.

The attacks involved scores of aircraft, including jets and drones. The targets included Iran’s air defences, as well as missile and drone production, and launch facilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant followed the operation from the IDF’s command and control centre in Tel Aviv.

The strikes came in several waves, over a three-hour period. Just after 06:00 (03:00 GMT), the IDF said the strikes had concluded.

The White House described the strikes as an “exercise of self-defence”. A senior administration official said the US had worked with Israel to encourage a “targeted and proportional” response.

The extent of the attacks – and the damage caused – remains unclear at this stage.

The IDF said it hit around 20 targets, including missile manufacturing facilities, surface-to-air-missiles and other military sites.

The Iranian military confirmed that two soldiers had died “while battling projectiles”.

Iranian authorities said sites in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces were targeted. The country’s air defence said it had “successfully intercepted” the attacks, but that “some areas sustained limited damage”.

BBC Verify has identified damage at a defence ministry base to the east of Tehran, and at an air defence base to the south.

A senior US administration official said the attacks did not damage Iranian oil infrastructure or nuclear facilities, targets President Joe Biden had urged Israel not to hit.

Syrian state media also reported strikes on military sites in central and southern Syria, though Israel has not confirmed striking the country.

Iran is the primary backer of a range of groups across the Middle East – often described as proxy groups – that are hostile to Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah, which Israel is currently at war with.

In April, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel, with about 300 missiles and drones, in retaliation for an Israeli air strike on an Iranian embassy compound in Syria that killed several top commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Israel responded with a “limited” strike on a missile defence system in the Iranian region of Isfahan, which Iran chose not to respond to.

Later, in July, Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander in an airstrike on Beirut. The next day, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an explosion in Tehran. Iran blamed Israel, though Israel did not comment.

In late September, Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Brig-Gen Abbas Nilforoushan, a high-ranking Iranian official, in Beirut.

On October 1, Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, which it said was in response to the deaths of Haniyeh, Nasrallah and Nilforoushan.

• Read more: Why did Israel attack Iran?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office denied a report by US outlet Axios that prior to the attacks, Israel sent Iran a message revealing certain details about the strikes, and warning Tehran not to respond.

“Israel did not inform Iran before the attack – not about the time, not about the targets, not about the strength of the attack,” the prime minister’s spokesperson said.

Still, early signs indicate this attack was not as serious as some had feared.

The IDF said in a statement that “we are focused on our war objectives in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. It is Iran that continues to push for a wider regional escalation”.

A senior US official said “this should be the end of this direct exchange of fire between Israel and Iran”.

Iran’s foreign ministry said it was “entitled and obligated to defend itself” and described the attack as a violation of international law.

But it also said that Tehran recognises its “responsibilities towards regional peace and security”.

Images published by Iranian state media show life continuing in relative normality – with busy streets, people exercising in parks, and fruit and vegetable markets open as usual.

Iran closed its airspace for a few hours overnight, but it later reopened and there are several commercial flights in the air across the country.

But there are signs the Iranian government are keen to play down the impact of the attacks.

The IRGC has announced that it is a criminal offense to send “images or news” related to the attack to outlets that it deems “Israel-affiliated” or “hostile”. Usually, Iran refers to Western media as hostile.

Iranian media reported today that Tehran’s Prosecutor Office has filed charges against an unnamed website for “covering issues counter to national security”.

US National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said Israel’s response “avoided populated areas and focused solely on military targets, contrary to Iran’s attack against Israel that targeted Israel’s most populous city”.

But Washington’s aim, he added, is “to accelerate diplomacy and de-escalate tensions in the Middle East region”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Israel had the right to defend itself, but urged all sides to “show restraint” and called for Iran not to respond.

Saudi Arabia condemned the attack, and warned against any action that “threatens the security and the stability” of the region.

Egypt’s foreign ministry echoed those concerns, saying it was “gravely concerned” by the strikes.

Hamas described them as “a flagrant violation of Iranian sovereignty, and an escalation that targets the security of the region and the safety of its peoples”.

Japanese voters are today heading to the polls in a snap election, following a tumultuous few years for the ruling party which saw a “cascade” of scandals, widespread voter apathy and record-low approval ratings.

The election was announced by Shigeru Ishiba three days after he was selected as the leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) – before he had been officially sworn in as prime minister.

The decision was made despite the LDP seeing approval ratings of below 20% earlier in the year, in the wake of a political fundraising corruption scandal.

Yet the LDP still remains the strongest contender against opposition parties which have failed to unite, or convince voters they are a viable option to govern.

The main opposition party had an approval rating of just 6.6% before parliament was dissolved.

“It is so hard to make decisions to choose parties, I think people are losing interest,” Miyuki Fujisaki, a long-time LDP supporter who works in the care-home sector, told the BBC ahead of polls opening.

The LDP, she said, has its problems with alleged corruption, “but the opposition also does not stand out at all”.

“They sure complain a lot, but it’s not at all clear on what they want to do,” the 66-year-old said.

For all the apathy, politics in Japan has been moving at a fast pace in recent months.

Shigeru Ishiba took over as prime minister after being voted in by the ruling party following his predecessor Fumio Kishida – who had been in the role since 2021 – making a surprise decision to step down in August.

The move to call the election came at a time when the LDP is desperate to restore its tarnished image among the public. Ishiba – a long-time politician who previously served as defence minister – has described it as the “people’s verdict”.

But whether it’s enough to restore trust in the LDP – which has been in power almost continuously since 1955 – is uncertain.

A series of scandals has tarnished the ruling party’s reputation. Chief among them is the party’s relationship with the controversial Unification Church – described by critics as a “cult” – and the level of influence it had on lawmakers.

Then came the revelations of the political funding corruption scandal. Japan’s prosecutors have been investigating dozens of LDP lawmakers accused of pocketing proceeds from political fundraising events. Those allegations – running into the millions of dollars – led to the dissolution of powerful factions, the backbone of its internal party politics.

“What a wretched state the ruling party is in,” said Michiko Hamada, who had travelled to Urawa station, on outskirts of Tokyo, for an opposition campaign rally.

“That is what I feel most. It is tax evasion and it’s unforgivable.”

It strikes her as particularly egregious at a time when people in Japan are struggling with high prices. Wages have not changed for three decades – dubbed “the lost 30 years” – but prices have risen at the fastest rate in nearly half a century in the last two years.

This month, as voters were getting ready to go to the polls, saw more price hikes on thousands of food products as well as other day-to-day provisions like mail, pharmaceuticals, electricity and gas.

“I pay 10,000 yen or 20,000 yen ($65 – $130; £50 – £100) more for the food per month (than I used to),” Ms Hamada said.

“And I’m not buying the things I used to buy. I am trying to save up but it still costs more. Things like fruit are very expensive.”

She is not the only one concerned with high prices. Pensioner Chie Shimizu says she now must work part-time to make ends meet.

“Our hourly wage has gone up a bit but it does not match the prices,” she told the BBC as she picked up some food from a stand at Urawa station. “I come to places like this to find something cheaper and good because everything in regular shops is expensive.”

Ms Shimizu has not voted for years but might this time – although she is not sure which candidate or which party to vote for.

“I can’t find anyone that I want to vote for. I feel like there’s no one who I can trust to be our leader. I wonder about those who become an MP for their own greed.”

Against this backdrop, it might look like Ishiba has taken a political gamble. His party had held 247 of 465 seats in the lower house, while its coalition partner, Komeito, had 32. A party needs 233 seats to control the house, known as the Diet.

There are now fears Komeito may fail to reach that number again, while the main opposition – which had 98 seats in the previous parliament – began to pick up momentum with voters ahead of Sunday’s election.

“I think the LDP has dug itself a very deep hole to climb out of. It does not enjoy public trust, and why should it? There’s just been a cascade of scandals,” Jeff Kingston, professor of Asian studies and history at Temple University Japan, told the BBC.

But he does not think any of this will necessarily lead to the party losing the elections.

“I think they (LDP) are worried they’re going to lose some marginal seats, and there are questions hanging over Komeito and how effective a coalition partner they will be,” Prof Kingston said.

Should they pull off a win, Miyuki Fujisaki, the care-home sector worker, warns they will have to do more than just pay lip service to change.

“I want them to show us what they are going to do so this [the scandals] doesn’t happen again,” she said. “They need to prove it – not just say it like they often do in the election time.”