Japan’s prime minister Shigeru Ishiba has vowed to continue ruling the country despite a bruising loss suffered by his party at the general election.

The country now faces an uncertain political future as the coalition led by the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has lost its majority in parliament, its worst result in over a decade.

Ishiba was sworn in as prime minister just this month after winning the leadership of his party. He had called a snap election to seal his mandate.

But in a speech on Monday, he admitted the LDP received “severe judgement” from voters, and added his party would “humbly accept” this.

“The Japanese people expressed their strong desire for the LDP to do some reflection and become a party that acts in line with the people’s will,” Ishiba told national broadcaster NHK.

The LDP and its much smaller coalition partner Komeito, have altogether taken 215 seats, falling short of the 233-seat majority needed to govern.

It is the first time the LDP has lost its parliamentary majority since 2009. The party has ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955.

The result comes after a tumultuous few years for the LDP which saw a cascade of scandals, widespread voter apathy and record-low approval ratings.

The party had seen approval ratings of below 20% earlier in the year, in the wake of a political fundraising corruption scandal.

Ishiba on Monday pledged to “enact fundamental reform regarding the issue of money and politics”.

“We need to answer to the people’s criticism. That is how I will take responsibility for the loss of the election,” he said.

He also promised to revitalise rural Japan and tackle inflation.

Japan’s parliament now has 30 days to convene and choose a prime minister. The chosen PM’s party or coalition, will form the government and can do so even without a majority of seats.

Ishiba said there are no plans to expand his political coalition at this stage. This raises the likely possibility that he will retain his premiership and his coalition will continue to rule Japan without a majority. But it also means they will no longer have the power to pass laws unilaterally.

Another possibility is that the opposition parties unite to form the government – the largest one, the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), won 148 seats up from 98 previously.

But that is a more unlikely scenario as Japan’s opposition parties historically have faced difficulty in uniting or convincing voters they are a viable option to govern.

The CDP had an approval rating of just 6.6% before parliament was dissolved.

Politics in Japan has been moving at a fast pace in recent months.

Ishiba took over as the country’s leader early this month following party elections held after his predecessor Fumio Kishida – who had been in the role since 2021 – made 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.

Chief among the series of scandals that have dogged the LDP is its 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 slush funds scandal, with dozens of LDP lawmakers accused of pocketing proceeds from political fundraising events.

Those allegations, running into the millions of dollars, has led to the dissolution of powerful factions.

A comedian at a Donald Trump rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, sparking fury from Republicans and Democrats and accusations of racism.

The comic, Tony Hinchcliffe, was among the speakers at the Madison Square Garden in New York on Sunday. He also made a series of jokes that leant on racist stereotypes.

A Trump adviser distanced the former president from the Puerto Rico joke, which was also denounced by Trump’s Democratic rival, Kamala Harris. Harris herself was the target of another Trump warm-up speaker who also sparked controversy.

The furore came as one of the world’s top Latin celebrities, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, endorsed Harris for president.

In his joke, Hinchcliffe, known as Kill Tony, said: “There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The line appeared to meet a mixed reception. Two Republicans in the state of Florida, which has a prominent Puerto Rican population, were among those who called out the joke.

US congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar said she was “disgusted” by the “racist comment”. She said on X that it did not “reflect the GOP values”, referring to the Republican Party, and noted thousands of Puerto Ricans served in the military.

US Senator Rick Scott said: “The joke bombed for a reason. It’s not funny and it’s not true.” He added that “Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans”.

Puerto Rico is a US island territory in the Caribbean. Its residents are unable to vote in US presidential elections, but there is a large diaspora across the US who can.

Hinchcliffe also suggested Latinos “loved making babies”.

He drew on racist tropes about black people and watermelons, which prompted groans from the audience – and he called Palestinians rock-throwers while in the same sentence suggested Jews would not spend money – invoking an antisemitic trope.

The comedian later defended his material. “These people have no sense of humour,” he wrote on X in response to criticism from Democratic lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz.

He added: “I love Puerto Rico and vacation there. I made fun of everyone… watch the whole set.”

Ocasio-Cortez responded, saying: “You don’t ‘love Puerto Rico’. You like drinking piña coladas. There’s a difference.”

She had earlier said Hinchcliffe’s comments were “super upsetting”, noting that her family was from Puerto Rico.

The night’s other speakers courted controversy with their own remarks. David Rem, a childhood friend of Trump, called Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist”.

And Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani falsely claimed the Democratic candidate was “on the side of the terrorists” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Although much of the focus was on the comments by his guest speakers, Trump used the occasion to announce a plan for tax credits for those who take care of a parent or a loved one. “It’s about time that they were recognised,” he said.

He also reiterated plans for a mass deportation for illegal migrants, speaking of his wish to “rescue” places that had been “invaded and conquered” by “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals”.

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Earlier on Sunday, Harris unveiled policies aimed at helping those in Puerto Rico – garnering support from Jennifer Lopez, who has Puerto Rican parents, as well as Bad Bunny. Numerous other big-name celebrities have already backed her.

Bad Bunny posted multiple videos of Harris talking about the island, her ideas to help residents, and her attacks on how Trump handled Hurricane Maria as president when the deadly storm killed nearly 3,000 people there in 2017.

A source close to Bad Bunny confirmed to the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that this represented an endorsement of Harris, breaking his longstanding tradition of not weighing in on national politics.

In the last seven years, there has been an exodus from Puerto Rico, whose inhabitants have moved to the mainland US including Florida and swing states such as North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Puerto Ricans are now reportedly the second largest Latino subgroup in those states.

Bad Bunny’s comments appeared to be pre-planned, and he did not address the remarks by Hinchcliffe. But fellow Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin did, telling his fans “this is what they think of us” and urging them to vote for Harris.

There are around 36 million Hispanic voters eligible to vote this year, according to the Pew Research centre. They have generally formed a key plank of the Democratic coalition but Republicans have been eating into that support.

Madison Square Garden, near the heart of the city, is one of the most famous venues in the world and capable of seating about 20,000.

It is also in Trump’s hometown, and the city in which he landed a historic criminal conviction earlier this year.

New York – viewed by some as a curious choice for the final week of campaigning – is a solid blue state and will not be decisive in the race for the White House.

Tony Hinchcliffe is a stand-up comedian based in Austin, Texas, known for his podcast Kill Tony, which offers stand up comedians the opportunity to audition for 60 seconds before Hinchcliffe and his co-host, Brian Redban.

The podcast has 1.89 million subscribers on YouTube.

The comedian grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, and described himself as “the class clown”. He got his start in the comedy world working for Joe Rogan and writing jokes for celebrities on Comedy Central Roast.

This is not the fist time some of his comments have made headlines for their offensive nature.

In 2021, he used a racial slur when referring to American-Chinese comedian Peng Deng during a comedy set and refused to apologise.

“I knew that what I had done was not wrong,” Hinchcliffe said when asked by Vanity Fair about that controversy. “It was so dumbfounding to me because it was a joke, and my stance is that comedians should never apologise for a joke.”

Hinchcliffe was one of the comedians who appeared on former NFL star Tom Brady’s Netflix comedy roast earlier this year.

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• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter.

Readers in the US can sign up here. Those in the UK can sign up here.

Georgia’s pro-Western president has appealed to the international community to stand behind her country’s population after a disputed election that she says was “totally falsified”.

Salome Zourabichivili, who has sided with the opposition, called on Georgians to rally outside parliament, telling the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg that this is a “crucial moment”.

The ruling Georgian Dream party and the election commission are adamant the result, giving the government almost 54% of the vote, was free and fair.

However, Zourabichvili urged Georgia’s partners needed to see what was happening, adding that the government’s victory was “not the will of the Georgian people” who wanted to keep their European future.

Zourabichvili made clear the protest would be “very peaceful”, adding that she did not believe Georgia’s authorities wanted confrontation.

It is not entirely clear what she and the four opposition groups hope to achieve by bringing Georgians on to the main avenue in front of the parliament on Monday.

“The main thing we want here is to get what we deserve – legal elections. No-one had any idea this would happen. At first we were frustrated, then we realised what happened and now we’re angry,” said Lasha, 22.

The president said it was up to the people and the political parties to decide what happened next.

“My call was to have a demonstration but where does the Georgian population stand? It’s what we’re going to see tonight.”

“Maybe we won’t be able to achieve it today or tomorrow,” she said.

“There are a number of things that can be done. There can be an international review of some of the elements of the election, there can be a call for new elections. In what period of time I don’t know.”

The European Union, Nato and the US have called for a full investigation into allegations by monitoring missions of vote fraud before and on the day of Saturday’s vote.

The call for protest echoes weeks of demonstrations that brought Tbilisi’s central Rustaveli Avenue to a standstill for weeks earlier this year.

There were clashes with riot police, who responded with water cannon, tear gas and force, as Georgians tried to stop the government pushing through a Russian-style “foreign agents” law targeting media and civil society groups that have foreign funding.

Ultimately the protests failed and the EU froze Georgia’s bid to join the 27-country union, accusing it of democratic backsliding.

The government has clearly prepared for further protests. Last week it emerged that the interior minister had bought new water cannon vehicles and other equipment for riot police, including lethal weapons, for use “when it becomes necessary”.

Georgian Dream Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has told the BBC that alleged violations ahead and during the vote were confined to “just a couple” of polling stations. He said that “the general content of the elections was in line with legal principles and the principle of democratic elections.”

But President Zourabichvili said the scale of election fraud was unprecedented: “Everything was used that we’ve ever heard of in this country in a parallel way.”

She alleged that, before the elections, families who were dependent on state funds had seen their identity cards taken away.

At the time it was difficult to tell why, she said, but it then became clear the identity cards were being used for so-called carousel voting in Georgia’s new electronic voting system – “when one person can vote 10, 15, 17 times with the same ID”.

She has also described the result of the vote as a “Russian special operation”, stopping short of accusing the Kremlin of direct intervention. Instead, she accused the government of using a “very sophisticated” Russian-inspired propaganda strategy.

The government has vehemently denied having anything to do with Russia, pointing out it is the only country in the region not to have diplomatic ties with Moscow.

Russia fought a five-day war with its southern neighbour in 2008 and still occupies 20% of Georgian territory.

The Kremlin has has denied having anything to with the election and ridiculed Georgia’s pro-EU president, whose term in office comes to an end in December.

A handful of international leaders have congratulated Georgian Dream for securing a fourth term in office in the contested election, including Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban.

Orban was due to arrive in Tbilisi on Monday on a two-day visit that has annoyed several of his European partners because of the message it sends the Georgian government.

Germany’s foreign ministry spokesman said the Hungarian leader could travel where he wanted, although it was clear he was not speaking on behalf of the EU.

Hungary currently holds the presidency of the EU, but foreign policy chief Josep Borrell stressed that it had “no authority in foreign policy”.

“Whatever Mr Orban says in his visit to Georgia, he does not represent the European Union,” Borrell told Spanish radio.

This month, two states ruled by India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced plans to impose hefty fines and imprisonment for contaminating food with spit, urine and dirt.

The northern state of Uttarakhand will fine offenders up to 100,000 rupees ($1,190; £920), while neighbouring Uttar Pradesh is set to introduce stringent laws to address the issue.

The government directives followed the circulation of unverified videos on social media showing vendors spitting on food at local stalls and restaurants – and one video depicting a house-help mixing urine into food she was preparing.

While the videos sparked outrage among users, with many expressing concern about food safety in these states, some of the videos also became the subject of blame campaigns targeting Muslims, which were later debunked by fact-checking websites.

They pointed out that many on social media had alleged that the woman adding urine to food was Muslim, but police later identified her as a Hindu.

Officials say strict laws are necessary and are aimed at deterring people from indulging in unhygienic practices around food, but opposition leaders and legal experts have questioned the efficacy of these laws and allege that they could also be misused to vilify a specific community.

The Indian Express newspaper criticised the ordinances proposed by Uttar Pradesh state, saying that they “act as a communal [sectarian] dog whistle that preys on the majority’s notions of purity and pollution and targets an already insecure minority”.

Food and food habits are sensitive subjects in culturally-diverse India as they are deeply intertwined with religion and the country’s hierarchical caste system. Norms and taboos around food sometimes lead to clashes between communities, sparking feelings of distrust. Consequently, the notion of “food safety” has also become entangled with religion, which is sometimes used to ascribe motive to alleged incidents of contamination.

Food safety is also a major concern in India, with the Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSAI) estimating that unsafe food causes around 600 million infections and 400,000 deaths annually.

Experts cite various reasons for poor food safety in India, including inadequate enforcement of food safety laws and a lack of awareness. Cramped kitchens, dirty utensils, contaminated water, and improper transport and storage practices further compromise food safety.

So, when videos of vendors spitting in food came out, people were shocked and outraged. Soon after, Uttarakhand announced hefty fines on offenders and made it mandatory for police to verify hotel staff and for CCTVs to be installed in kitchens.

In Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said to stop such incidents, police should verify every employee. The state also plans to make it mandatory for food centres to display the names of their owners, for cooks and waiters to wear masks and gloves and for CCTVs to be installed in hotels and restaurants.

According to reports, Adityanath is planning to bring in two ordinances that will penalise spitting in food with imprisonment up to 10 years.

In July, India’s Supreme Court had stayed directives issued by the Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh governments asking people running food stalls along the route of Kanwar yatra – an annual Hindu pilgrimage – to prominently display the names and other identity details of their owners. Petitioners told the top court that the directives unfairly targeted Muslims and would negatively impact their businesses.

On Wednesday, police in the state’s Barakanki town arrested restaurant owner Mohammad Irshad for allegedly spitting on a roti (flat bread) while preparing it. Mr Irshad was charged with disturbing peace and religious harmony, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.

Earlier this month, police in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, arrested two men – Naushad Ali and Hasan Ali – for allegedly spitting in a saucepan while making tea, and accused them of causing public outrage and jeopardising health, reported The Hindu.

The videos of the men spitting, which found their way onto social media days before they were arrested, were given a religious spin after many Hindu nationalist accounts began calling them incidents of “thook-jihad” or “spit-jihad”.

The term is a spin on “love-jihad” which has been coined by radical Hindu groups, who use it to accuse Muslim men of converting Hindu women by marriage. By extension, “thook-jihad” accuses Muslims of trying to defile Hindus by spitting in their food.

This is not the first time that the Muslim community has become targets of spitting accusations. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a series of fake videos showing Muslims spitting, sneezing or licking objects to infect people with the virus went viral on social media. The videos heightened religious polarisation, with Hindu hardline accounts posting anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Opposition leaders in the two BJP-ruled states have criticised the new directives, saying they could be used to target Muslims and that the government was using such orders as a smokescreen to divert attention from other key problems like unemployment and sky-rocketing inflation.

But Manish Sayana, a food safety officer in Uttarakhand, says the government’s orders are solely aimed at making food safe for consumption. He told the BBC that the food safety officers and the police have started conducting surprise checks at eateries and that they “urge people to wear masks and gloves and install CCTVs” wherever they go for checks.

Legal expert and journalist V Venkatesan says there is a need for new ordinances and laws around food safety to be properly debated on the assembly floor.

“According to me, the existing laws [under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006] are sufficient to take care of any offences connected to food safety. So, one needs to ask why the need for these new laws and directives?” he asks.

“Governments seem to think that laws prescribing harsh punishments will deter people from committing crimes, but research has shown that it is the proper implementation of laws that deter people from committing crimes. So, have the existing laws not been properly implemented in these states yet?”

A prolific Vietnamese people smuggler, who entered the UK illegally this year in a small boat, has told the BBC he forges visa documents for other Vietnamese who plan to make the same crossing.

The man, whom we are calling Thanh, is now claiming UK asylum and told us he has spent almost 20 years – his entire adult life – in the smuggling industry.

He has been in prison, led a gang working on the northern coast of France, and claims to have helped more than 1,000 people to risk their lives to cross the Channel.

The self-confessed criminal met the BBC at a secret location to share detailed information about the mechanics of the international smuggling industry.

Thanh walks into the room cautiously, dark eyes moving fast as if searching for possible exit routes. A small, neat, quietly authoritative figure in a black polo neck.

There are handshakes and he says “hello” in a soft, strongly accented voice. Beyond that, we speak almost exclusively through a Vietnamese translator.

After months of phone calls and one brief meeting, the interview takes place on a grey day in a small hotel room, in a northern English town that we are choosing not to name here.

We decided there was a strong public interest in hearing about Thanh’s life in the smuggling trade, which could only be secured in return for agreeing to keep his identity confidential. He fears being recognised not only by the British authorities but by Vietnamese criminals in the UK.

Vietnam emerged in the first months of this year – suddenly and unexpectedly – as the largest single source of migrants seeking to cross the Channel to the UK illegally in small boats.

Many Vietnamese migrants have cited failing businesses and debts at home for their decision to seek work in the UK. Their first step, experts have suggested, is often to access Europe by taking advantage of a legal work visa system in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe.

This is where Thanh’s forgery operation comes in, he says. He helps create the fake paperwork needed to get the legitimate work visas.

“I can’t justify breaking the law. But it’s a very lucrative business,” Thanh said calmly, insisting he doesn’t provide forgeries for people seeking UK visas.

We know from our interviews with Vietnamese smugglers and their clients that people pay between $15,000 (£11,570) and $20,000 (£15,470) to travel from Vietnam to mainland Europe and then to cross the Channel.

It is a dangerous business. More than 50 people have been killed crossing the Channel in small boats already this year, making 2024 the deadliest on record. For the first time, the figures include one Vietnamese.

When our team first made contact with Thanh in mainland Europe earlier this year, we knew he was going to attempt to get to the UK with other Vietnamese. He later let us know he had crossed the Channel from northern France, in a small boat.

Thanh told us he had first flown from Vietnam to Hungary on a legitimate visa – although he had acquired it using forged documents.

• How many people cross the Channel in small boats and how many claim asylum?

He had then flown on to Paris and stayed for a few days in a “safe house”, organised by a Vietnamese smuggling gang on the city’s outskirts. Soon after then, he was taken in a group by minibus to the coast and, finally, put in the hands of one of the Kurdish gangs that control the small boat crossings.

“Once you’re on the boat, you get treated like everyone else,” he said. “It’s overcrowded.”

But the Vietnamese passengers pay three or four times more money to the gangs handling the crossing routes, he told us, “so we get the advantage of being given a place more quickly”.

In fact, our sources suggest the Vietnamese pay roughly twice the usual rate.

The journey Thanh described is now an established route from Vietnam to the UK – a path heavily promoted by smugglers on Facebook, who charge clients for forged documents, flights, buses, and a place on a flimsy rubber boat. Payment for a successful Channel crossing is only made after arrival in the UK.

And Thanh had been lucky, he told us, evading French police patrolling the beaches near Calais, and crossing in an inflatable boat on his first attempt.

Or perhaps he tried several times. Over the months that we were in contact with him, he changed elements of the story he told us – perhaps to cover his tracks and to avoid giving potential clues about his identity to the UK authorities.

Thanh asked for asylum when he was interviewed by a British immigration official – explaining he had left Vietnam because he had got into debt to gangsters when his business failed. His life, he said, was in danger.

He told the official he had been trafficked to the UK in order to work for a gang to pay off his debt.

We had heard similar stories from the Vietnamese we encountered in northern France.

When we first established contact with Thanh, he portrayed himself as a desperate migrant, first stuck in France, and then trapped in the UK’s asylum system, living in a crowded hotel, unable to work, and waiting to learn his fate.

But over time, we began to learn the truth. Or rather, Thanh began to reveal the extent to which his extraordinary life story has been built on a series of elaborate, even outrageous, lies.

Sitting opposite me on a sofa, Thanh admitted that he had not been trafficked to the UK. He had made up that story as part of his asylum claim. And he went much further, claiming that all the Vietnamese migrants he knew of had been told to offer a version of the same lie.

“Yes. A lie. I was not trafficked,” he said.

Migration experts and NGOs have a range of views about the scale of trafficking from Vietnam.

One French prosecutor told us that many Vietnamese were in debt to the smugglers and ended up working in UK cannabis farms. But he played down the idea of an organised supply chain, insisting the smuggling system was more like a haphazard series of stepping stones, with each stage controlled by separate gangs. Finding work in the UK was, he said, about luck and opportunism.

Other experts insist that many, if not most, Vietnamese migrants are victims of trafficking, and that those being taken across the Channel are in fact a cheap and easy source of labour for criminal gangs in the UK. A government registry of people suspected of being victims of modern slavery has consistently shown a high number of Vietnamese.

“It is often not possible, or helpful, to differentiate when a person has been trafficked or smuggled, especially as exploitation can happen at any time,” said Jamie Fookes, UK and Europe advocacy manager at Anti-Slavery International.

“Those crossing will often have to pay either through extortion, or from being exploited in some form of forced labour or criminality on the other side.”

Safe migration routes, he added, would be the only way to prevent traffickers taking advantage of people’s desperation.

But Thanh maintains that most Vietnamese migrants aren’t trafficked, and that it is just a line used to claim asylum.

“That’s the way it’s done. [People lie about being trafficked] in order to continue the asylum process safely,” he said.

Thanh clearly has a motive to lie about this. If he were to be caught forging documents for people who went on to be trafficked, the penalties would be far more serious than for smuggling.

In our reporting we have sought to corroborate the details of Thanh’s story – and in many instances have done so successfully. But a cloud of doubt hangs, inevitably, over elements of it.

Thanh says he first left Vietnam in 2007. He was in his late teens or early twenties. He had already dropped out of school to work in a textile factory in the south of the country. But his family wanted him to head abroad, to Europe, in search of higher wages.

“I borrowed $6,000 (£4,624) from relatives and neighbours [to pay for the trip]. A lot of people had already made the same journey. We Vietnamese have always travelled like this – to wherever it is easier to make money,” he told me.

That journey first took him to a farm outside Prague, in the Czech Republic. He spent more than a year picking spring onions and other vegetables before deciding he could do better in Germany. Crossing the border illegally in a minibus, Thanh says he threw away his passport and other documents, and chose a new name.

And he went a step further.

When he arrived in Berlin, he told the authorities he was 14 years old.

The smugglers who had charged him $1,000 (£771) to get him into Germany had advised him it would be easier if he claimed he was under 16.

“I looked young in those days. Nobody challenged me on that.”

And so, the German authorities promptly sent a man they took to be a boy to a children’s home 45 minutes’ drive from the German capital, where Thanh quickly got to work, selling black-market cigarettes in the local town.

Thanh says he stayed in Germany for about two years. He left the children’s home, found a girlfriend, and soon became a father. But a police crackdown started to affect his income from selling cigarettes. And so, in 2010, he decided to try to reach the UK.

Crossing into France without his new family, he tells us, he threw away his German documents and invented yet another false identity.

By then, thousands of migrants were trying to cross the Channel to the UK by hiding in lorries and shipping containers. Thanh says he made several attempts but was unsuccessful.

“I had bad luck. The patrols were very strict. They used dogs to detect us hiding in a container.” He claims to have reached Dover at one point, only for the truck to be returned with him and a group of other migrants still inside.

Stuck in France, camping in a forest near Dunkirk, Thanh was offered work by Vietnamese people smugglers. It was a job at which, he says, he soon excelled.

“I had to provide food and supplies and arrange to send people to the lorries at particular times. I did not recruit people, but I was paid €300 (£250) for each successful crossing,” said Thanh, insisting that none of his passengers were being trafficked or exploited.

“We just provided a service. No-one was forced. It was illegal, but it was very, very profitable.”

A few years later, the same gang – no longer linked to Thanh, he says – would be involved in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants who were discovered, suffocated, inside a lorry trailer in Essex.

We need to gloss over some details of what Thanh says happened to him over the next few years in order to continue to hide his identity. He rose within a gang to become one of its senior members. But eventually, after being arrested, tried, and imprisoned for several years in Europe, he returned to Vietnam.

At which point, he might have left the smuggling world behind him. But, as he puts it now, his own reputation pulled him back in.

“People in Europe contacted me asking for help,” he told us.

“I’d already helped about 1,000 people to get to the UK successfully, so I was well known for that success.”

In 2017, he says he re-entered the smuggling trade – only this time, Thanh wasn’t smuggling people, he was forging documents for them.

Bank statements, payslips, tax invoices, anything that European embassies required to prove that people applying for student, or work, or business visas had the necessary funds to ensure they planned to return to Vietnam.

“I had a lot of clients. Depending on which embassy it was, we would provide forged bank statements or other documents.

“First, we would submit these online. If certain embassies needed to check with banks, then we’d put real cash into a bank account. We had arrangements with staff at certain banks,” Thanh explained.

“The clients couldn’t access the money themselves, but the bank staff would show the [falsified] details to embassy staff. We worked with lots of different types of Vietnamese banks.”

An expert in Vietnam told us that banking fraud is “quite common”, and there were instances of bank staff colluding with criminals to forge documents.

Thanh tells us he is not proud of his work as a forger – that he had known it was illegal and that he had done it simply to support his family. But at times he sounds boastful, observing that “people trust me, I have never failed”, and insisting his work was “not a serious crime in Vietnam”.

By now, Thanh had a new family in Vietnam. But earlier this year, he decided to leave.

It is not entirely clear why. At one point, he tells us his business had been struggling. He also mentions problems with the Vietnamese police – but he plays them down. Perhaps it is caution. But it strikes us that a lifetime of deception might have affected his ability, or his desire, to distinguish truth from fiction.

So why talk to us? Why risk blowing his cover in the UK? And why continue with his forgery business here, even now?

Thanh portrays himself as a repentant figure who now regrets his life of crime and wants to speak out to prevent other Vietnamese people from making the same mistakes. Above all, he wants to warn them against coming to the UK illegally, saying it is simply not worth it.

“I just want people in Vietnam to understand that it’s not worth borrowing lots of money to travel here. It’s not so easy for illegal arrivals to find work or make money.

“And when they do make money it’s less than in the past. It’s no better than in Germany or other European countries. I’ve been trying to find work in the grey economy, but I’ve not been successful,” he told us.

“If you want to work on a cannabis farm, there are opportunities, but I don’t want to get involved in more illegal activities now. I don’t want to land up in prison.”

Thanh urges the UK and European governments to make a bigger effort to publicise the fact there are no jobs here for illegal migrants. He also blames smuggling gangs for lying to their clients about the realities and opportunities.

• Home Office launches ‘stop the boats’ ad campaign in Vietnam

But he says people back in Vietnam are hard to dissuade, suspecting those trying to warn against travelling to Europe are “being selfish and trying to keep the job opportunities for themselves”.

When we confront Thanh, repeatedly, about his hypocrisy and his own continued involvement in the elements of smuggling industry, he shrugs. It is just business.

“We don’t force anyone to do what they do. They ask us for help, as they would from any business. There’s no trafficking involved. If you have a good reputation, the clients come to you, without threats or violence.”

But what about the dangers involved – the surging number of deaths in the Channel?

“My role is just a small one in a much bigger process.”

Thanh acknowledges that his life, and that of his family back in Vietnam, would be in danger if the smuggling gangs found out he had been talking to us. When pushed, he admits to some regrets.

“If I could start again, I would not leave Vietnam. I think my life would be much better if I had stayed at home. I’ve faced so many struggles. I don’t have a bright future.”

Was he telling the truth?

At the end of our interview, he stands up, ready to leave, and for the first time, a flicker of concern, or perhaps irritation, seems to flit across his face.

Perhaps he had said too much.

North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia and are operating in the Kursk border region where Ukrainian troops have a foothold, Nato has said for the first time.

The alliance’s Secretary General, Mark Rutte, said he could confirm the deployment after weeks of intelligence reports, following a meeting with South Korean security and defence officials on Monday.

The newly installed Nato chief said the deployment represented a “significant escalation” and a “dangerous expansion” of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Last week, President Vladimir Putin refused to deny that North Korean troops had arrived in Russia, following reports that Pyongyang was preparing to send thousands of troops to aid its ally.

“This is our sovereign decision,” Putin said, sidestepping the question during a news conference. “Whether we use it or not, where, how, or whether we engage in exercises, training, or transfer some experience. It’s our business.”

It is unclear exactly how many North Korean soldiers have been sent. South Korea’s spy agency said earlier this month that at least 1,500 North Korean troops had already arrived in Russia, prompting Seoul to issue Moscow with a stern diplomatic rebuke.

But Rutte’s intervention on Monday marked the first time Nato had formally acknowledged that Pyongyang’s forces were operating in Russia. He added that North Korea had already sent ballistic missiles and millions of rounds of ammunition to Moscow for use in Ukraine.

In return, President Putin has agreed to send military technology and other support to help North Korea evade international sanctions, Rutte said. The partnership, he added, was “undermining global peace and security”.

His warning that North Korean troops are operating in Kursk will cause concern in Western capitals. Fighting has continued between Moscow and Kyiv’s forces more than two months after Ukrainian troops first entered Russia’s western region in a shock operation.

Russia is said to have redeployed thousands of troops into the region, helping to stall Ukraine’s advance. The operation has seen Kyiv’s forces claim about 250sq km of territory, but it appears to have failed in its primary objective of diverting Moscow’s momentum in the east of Ukraine.

The arrival of North Korean forces in Kursk could heap further pressure on Kyiv’s embattled troops.

A senior Ukrainian official told the New York Times that about 5,000 elite North Korean troops were set to have joined the Russian detachment in the border region by Monday. President Volodymyr Zelensky also said on Friday that his government had information that those troops could be on the battlefield within days.

Western leaders have warned for weeks that such a move would risk an intensification of the conflict.

Last week, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko – a loyal ally to President Putin – appeared to echo that assessment. He told the BBC that such a move would mark “a step towards the escalation of the conflict”.

North Korea and Russia have grown increasingly close since Moscow found itself largely isolated after its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this year, North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un struck an agreement with President Putin pledging to help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.

The US has repeatedly accused Pyongyang of sending vast amounts of military hardware to Russia, including ballistic missiles and launchers.

But some experts have questioned the degree to which Pyongyang’s troops will be able to aid the Russian war effort. Apart from the language barrier, the North Korean army has no recent combat experiences, they said.

Footage obtained by Ukrainian defence intelligence officials has also showed Russian troops expressing doubts as to how the North Korean troops will be commanded and supplied.

Moscow’s full-scale invasion has now raged for more than two-and-a-half years, with Rutte claiming that more than 600,000 Russian troops have now been killed or wounded in the war. He said the Kremlin was “unable to sustain his assault on Ukraine without foreign support”.

Separately, President Zelensky said on Monday that about 650,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded. “They [Russians] are not collecting the bodies… their people are rotting on the ground,” he said in an interview with The Times of India.

Official casualty updates from either side are rare.

But according to an analysis by BBC Russian, more than 70,000 Russian troops have been confirmed killed in combat.

In February, Zelensky said about 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Estimates by several Western media outlets suggest that number is much higher.

A heavy police response has stifled Halloween celebrations in Shanghai, in what many have viewed as an attempt by authorities to crack down on large public gatherings and freedom of expression.

Witnesses have told the BBC they saw police dispersing crowds of costumed revellers on the streets of Shanghai, while photos of apparent arrests have spread on social media.

Authorities have yet to comment. While there has been no official notice prohibiting Halloween celebrations, rumours of a possible crackdown began circulating online earlier this month.

It comes a year after Halloween revellers in Shanghai went viral for donning costumes poking fun at the Chinese government and its policies.

Pictures from last year’s Halloween event showed people dressing up as a giant surveillance camera, Covid testers, and a censored Weibo post.

This year, footage posted to social media showed people dressed in seemingly uncontroversial costumes, including those of comic book characters such as Batman and Deadpool, being escorted into the back of police vans. Some party-goers said online they were forced to remove make-up at a police station.

But it remains unclear what – if any – types of costumes police were targeting, as many other revellers were left alone.

Eyewitnesses have told BBC Chinese that on Friday a large number of police officers and vehicles gathered on Julu Road in downtown Shanghai, and people dressed in costumes were asked to leave the scene.

On Saturday, police were seen dispersing revellers from the city’s Zhongshan Park.

The BBC spoke to a Shanghai resident who was at the park with friends that night. “Every time someone new showed up on the scene, everyone would go, ‘Wow that’s cool’ and laugh. There were policemen on the sidelines, but I felt they also wanted to watch,” the person said.

But the festive mood ended around 22:00 local (14:00 GMT) when a new group of policemen arrived and began cordoning off the park, according to the eyewitness. “As we left the park, we were told to take off all our headgear. We were told everyone leaving from that exit could not be costumed.”

The person added that they saw a man clash with police officers when he tried to enter.

Another Shanghai resident said the number of police officers taking down the details of people dressed in costumes appeared to exceed the number of revellers themselves.

“Shanghai is not supposed to be like this,” the person said. “It has always been very tolerant.”

The BBC has asked the Shanghai police for a response.

Rumours of a crackdown have been circulating in recent days.

Earlier this month, some business owners who run coffeeshops, bookshops and bars in Shanghai received government notices discouraging Halloween events, the BBC understands.

Around the same time, messages from what appeared to be a government work chat group spread online, suggesting there would be a ban on large-scale Halloween activities. The BBC could not verify these messages.

Some universities issued warnings to their students.

One student at the prestigious Fudan University said they were told by school authorities recently not to participate in gatherings. On Sunday evening, the student received a call from a school counsellor.

“They called me to ask if I had gone out, if I had taken part [in activities]. And if I did participate, I could not reveal I was a student [of the university],” the person told the BBC.

The BBC has also seen a notice from another university in Shanghai issued to students in mid-October discouraging them to “reduce participation in big and small gatherings in the near future”.

This is not the first time Chinese authorities have cracked down on fancy dress. In 2014, Beijing police said people wearing Halloween-themed costumes on the city’s metro system could face arrest, claiming costumes could cause crowds to gather and create “trouble”.

But this year comes on the back of the White Paper Protest movement, which began in November 2022 when large groups of people, mostly youths, gathered spontaneously one night on a street in Shanghai to mourn the victims of a fire.

That gathering soon turned into brief – but widespread – demonstrations against the country’s Covid policies, in one of the biggest challenges to the Chinese government’s authority since the Tiananmen protests.

Air quality in India’s capital Delhi has deteriorated to severe and extremely poor levels in the past few days, data shows.

Pollution levels crossed 25-30 times the World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommended safe limit at several locations in the city last week.

Experts have warned that the situation will worsen in the coming days due to weather conditions, use of firecrackers during the festival of Diwali on Thursday and burning of crop remains in neighbouring states.

Delhi and several northern Indian cities report extreme levels of air pollution between October and January every year, causing disruption to businesses, shutting down of schools and offices.

The levels of tiny particulate matter (known as PM 2.5), which can enter deep into the lungs and cause a host of diseases, reached as high as 350 micrograms per cubic metre in some areas on Monday, data from government-run Safar website shows.

According to the website, air quality is categorised as very poor when PM 2.5 levels reach 300 to 400, and it’s termed severe when the limit reaches 400-500.

Delhi gets enveloped in a thick blanket of smog every winter due to smoke, dust, low wind speed, vehicular emissions and crop stubble burning.

In November and December, farmers in the neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana burn crop stubble to clear their fields.

Farming groups say they need financial and technical help to find alternative ways of clearing crop remains but government schemes have so far not been effective.

The smoke from firecrackers set off during Diwali adds to the problem.

Like every year, the Delhi government has announced a complete ban on the manufacturing, storage and sale of fireworks ahead of the festival, which falls later this week.

But such bans have not been completely effective in the past as people source fireworks from other states.

The Delhi government has also enacted its Graded Response Action Plan, known as GRAP, to tackle pollution.

It bans all activities which involve the use of coal and firewood, as well as diesel generator use for non-emergency services.

Authorities in Delhi have warned residents to stay indoors as much as possible and have curbed construction activity in the city.

They have also urged people to use public transport to cut vehicular emissions.

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McDonald’s is resuming sales of its Quarter Pounder burgers in all of its US restaurants after ruling out its beef patties as the source of an E. coli outbreak that left at least one person dead and dozens of others ill.

The fast food giant said samples of its beef patties that were taken by the Colorado Department of Agriculture (CDA) had tested negative for the bacteria.

The company added that the CDA had no plans for further testing.

McDonald’s suspended sales of Quarter Pounder last week in around a fifth of its US restaurants in response to the outbreak.

“The issue appears to be contained to a particular ingredient and geography, and we remain very confident that any contaminated product related to this outbreak has been removed from our supply chain,” Cesar Piña, McDonald’s North America Chief Supply Chain Officer said in a statement.

Earlier, the US Food and Drug administration singled out the slivered onions in Quarter Pounders as another potential source of the outbreak.

McDonald’s said it had stopped working with the supplier of the onions and had removed them from its supply chain.

“The 900 restaurants that historically received slivered onions from Taylor Farms’ Colorado Springs facility will resume sales of Quarter Pounders without slivered onions,” McDonald’s said.

McDonald’s is facing lawsuits from several people who fell ill.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advised people who had eaten a Quarter Pounder and showed symptoms such as diarrhoea, fever and vomiting, to see a doctor.

Symptoms can develop up to four days after contaminated food is consumed.

Most people will recover on their own within five to seven days but, some cases may require hospital care.

McDonald’s shares have lost more than 7.5% of their value since the CDC reported the outbreak last week.

In July, McDonald’s posted a surprise drop in global sales, its first quarterly sales decline in more than three years.

Fast food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King have had to focus on offering more attractive value meals, as lower income customers feel the pinch from surging prices in recent years.

A woman missing for six days in Australia’s Snowy Mountains has been found “dazed and injured” by emergency services after a massive search and rescue operation.

New South Wales (NSW) Police said Lovisa Sjoberg was located on Sunday afternoon local time, suffering from a suspected snake bite, dehydration and a rolled ankle.

The avid photographer was treated for her injuries at the scene, before being rushed to hospital, where she is in a stable condition.

Sjoberg, 48, is a regular visitor to the remote Kosciuszko National Park, where she often documents wild horses living in the mountains.

Fears grew for her safety after a hire car company reported that her car had not been returned and she could not be contacted. Her car was later found unlocked and abandoned.

NSW Police launched an appeal on 21 October to the public to help find her and began a widescale search using sniffer dogs, firefighters, park rangers and a helicopter with infra-red capabilities.

Concerns increased after rescue teams failed to find her after several days and temperatures in the area surrounding Kosciuszko National Park dropped as low as zero degrees at night.

Sjoberg was found on Sunday afternoon local time by a National Parks and Wildlife Service officer on the Nungar Creek Trail at Kiandra.

Supt Toby Lindsay told media that Sjoberg had been “wandering [for] days” through “tough” bushland, and told rescuers she believed she had been bitten by a copperhead snake four days earlier.

The species tends to be shy rather than aggressive, but their venom is a powerful neurotoxin and can be fatal without medical intervention.

“She’s in fact very fortunate to be alive… she obviously went through a tough time,” Supt Lindsay said.

He added that she was now in a “reasonable condition” and is ” happy to be alive”.

Timothée Chalamet has stunned fans after making a surprise appearance at a lookalike contest for the actor.

The Wonka star crashed the event in New York City attracting a chorus of screaming fans.

Chalamet was seen posing for pictures with his curly-haired doppelgangers during a brief appearance at Washington Square Park.

The city’s police moved on the crowded event which attracted hundreds of people – calling it “unscheduled”.

Variety reported that Chalamet snuck his way through the crowd hiding behind a mask and baseball hat, before creeping up to two lookalikes who had been posing for photos, sparking shrieks across the park.

The contest, organised by YouTuber Anthony Po, promised a $50 (£39) prize for the winner and had attracted thousands of RSVPs to an online invite.

A fan of the Call Me by Your Name and Dune actor, Lauren Klas, described what made a good Chalamet. “It’s all in the nose,” he told AP news agency.

“All of his bone structure, really.”

Contestants were also asked about their French language skills, plans to make the world a better place and romantic intentions with Kylie Jenner, who the star is rumoured to be dating, AP reported.

Eventually Miles Mitchell, 21, from Staten Island, was crowned winner dressed in a Willy Wonka outfit, before he tossed candy to the crowd from a briefcase.

Some attendees reported the event was shut down by police.

In a statement to the BBC, the New York Police Department said it responded to “an unscheduled demonstration at Washington Square Park” on Sunday.

It added that people were taken into custody and later released with a summons.

Earlier this month, a new trailer was released for A Complete Unknown which will see the star depict Bob Dylan.

The biopic is set in the 1960s and follows Dylan’s rise to the top of the charts.

The film is set to be released in December in the US and in January in the UK.

Gerard Depardieu’s trial on charges of sexual assault has began in Paris with the star absent, after his lawyer asked for a delay to proceedings citing the actor’s health issues.

Depardieu is accused of attacking two women while shooting the 2021 film Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters), in the highest profile #MeToo case to hit the country.

Prosecutors say he made explicit sexual remarks to, and then aggressively “groped”, two members of the movie’s production team. If convicted he could face five years in jail.

The 75-year-old denies the charges and said in an open letter published last year that he has never “abused a woman”.

Proceedings opened at a criminal court in the French capital at around 13:30 local time (12:30 GMT). Depardieu’s lawyer, Jeremie Assous, told French media that the actor had been “deeply affected” by illness and was advised by his doctors not to attend the trial.

Assous added that his client had asked for the delay as he “wishes to come, wants to express himself” before the court, but proceedings continued in his absence.

The trial marks a major moment for France’s #MeToo movement, with Depardieu being the highest profile figure in French cinema to face accusations of sexual assault. The women – who have not been named – say Depardieu made sexual comments to them. They say he also “violently grabbed” and “groped” them.

Depardieu’s lawyer has accused the women of “false accusations”. He also claimed that one of the women was attempting to “make money” by claiming €30,000 ($32,500; £25,000) in compensation, Le Monde reported.

Since the allegations surfaced, Depardieu has become a virtual pariah. He has not appeared in a film since 2022, and he faces a second trial next year on charges of raping the actress Charlotte Arnould twice at his home in Paris. He denies the allegations.

Depardieu has also been accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen other women.

Despite the mounting allegations, the star has received strong messages of support from some members of France’s artistic community. A group of more than 50 actors, directors and producers said accusations against Depardieu were “an attack on art itself” in a letter published last year.

Signed by actors Charlotte Rampling, Carole Bouquet, Pierre Richard, and the singers Carla Bruni and Jacques Dutronc, the letter said they could not “remain silent in the face of the lynching that has fallen upon [Depardieu]”.

French President Emmanuel Macron also attracted anger, after describing the actor as “the pride of France” last year. Macron added that Depardieu was being subjected to a “manhunt”. Campaigners said the comments undermined efforts to protect women from violence.

Actress Léa Seydoux called Macron’s comments “crazy”, adding that it “gives a very bad image for France”.

Despite Macron’s show of support, his then-culture minister Rima Abdul-Malak said she would look into withdrawing Depardieu’s Legion d’Honneur after footage emerged of him making sexual comments around women in a 2018 documentary filmed in North Korea.

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.

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.

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

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it targeted military sites in several regions, with subsequent reports suggesting an Iranian missile production site had been hit. One civilian and four soldiers were killed in the attacks, the Iranian military said.

It marks the latest in a series of attacks between the two regional foes that for months have raised fears of an all-out war.

Here’s what we know.

At around 02:15 on Saturday (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.

The IDF’s strikes, which came in several waves over a three-hour period, involved scores of aircraft, including jets and drones.

Targets comprised Iran’s air defences, missile and drone production, and launch facilities. Two researchers, analysing satellite imagery, told Reuters news agency that Israel had struck buildings in Parchin, a military complex near Tehran, and may have “significantly hampered Iran’s ability to mass produce missiles”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who followed the operation from the IDF’s command and control centre in Tel Aviv – said Israel had “severely damaged Iran’s defence capability and its ability to produce missiles”.

“This regime must understand a simple principle: whoever hurts us, we hurt him,” he added.

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.

They also said the attacks did not damage Iranian oil infrastructure or nuclear facilities – targets President Joe Biden had urged Israel not to hit.

Iran has largely played down the impact of the strikes – which hit sites in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces – saying most missiles were intercepted and those that were not caused “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.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in a measured response, said the attacks should not be “exaggerated or downplayed”.

“It is up to the authorities to determine how to convey the power and will of the Iranian people to the Israeli regime,” he said on Sunday, “and to take actions that serve the interests of this nation and country.”

Meanwhile, the IDF said it had hit around 20 targets, with Netanyahu describing the attack as “precise and powerful” and having “achieved its goals”.

The Iranian military confirmed that four soldiers had died – and state news agencies reported the death of one civilian.

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 air strike 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 about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, which it said was in response to the deaths of Haniyeh, Nasrallah and Nilforoushan.

This latest attack on Iran is Israel’s response to that.

• Read more: Why did Israel attack Iran?

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, the strikes were more limited than some had been expecting.

The IDF said in a statement that it is “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 over the weekend showed 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, but it later reopened.

There are, however, signs that the Iranian government is 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 over the weekend 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”.

There is one image that keeps a Gaza musician going like no other – that of the territory’s only concert grand piano.

Khamis Abu Shaban had finally risked returning to the music school at which he taught – and which owns the piano – a few months into the current conflict.

What he saw, at the Gaza branch of the Palestinian music school, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, was “a catastrophe”.

“More than half of the Conservatory was burned. All the instruments were broken, thrown outside. You start seeing cases of instruments as soon as you get close to the Conservatory on the streets. Violins, we had more than 50, completely smashed. Cellos, more than 40, completely smashed.”

Altogether, the Gaza branch of the Conservatory used to have more than 400 instruments – both Western classical ones and traditional Arabic instruments such as the oud, qanun and nay, a type of flute. Khamis says he felt “completely destroyed”.

But then he saw something which lifted his spirits.

“The only… instrument that I saw standing was the grand piano. Honestly, I smiled when I saw it. I smiled and I laughed.”

The Yamaha concert grand also withstood bombing in a previous war between Israel and Gaza’s rulers – Hamas – in 2014, and was carefully restored the following year by a French music technician. It became a symbol for many of aspirations that the territory could develop a flourishing musical culture.

“I started talking to the piano,” says Khamis. “I asked: ‘Are you the only survivor of all the instruments? You don’t want to die?’ I really laughed.”

Singing in Gaza

Tim Whewell reported from Gaza in 2015 on the rescue of the territory’s only concert grand piano after a previous war. Now, he finds out how musicians he met then are living and working through this war. He learns about a boy who started playing the violin after he lost his hand in an airstrike. And he finds out about the second near-miraculous survival of the grand piano.

Listen on BBC Sounds

It is too dangerous for the teachers and students to resume lessons at the music school, because of Israeli military operations in the area around it in north-west Gaza. Instead, they have started giving music lessons to tens of thousands of displaced children living in the makeshift camps where many Gazans now reside.

They teach outdoors, under canvas awnings, or in schools and shelters run by UNRWA, the United Nations agency that supports Palestinian refugees.

“Life goes on, and even with all this death around us, people need anything that can make them… not happy – no-one will be happy in this period – but something that can make them smile, be able to continue with life,” Khamis says.

The teachers – who are using whatever borrowed instruments they can find – include former students of the Conservatory, such as 16-year-old violinist Sama Nijim. One of her students is Mohammed Abu Eideh, a boy who lost his right hand in an airstrike.

He used to play the oud – his favourite instrument – but this requires two hands. So Sama devised a way for him to learn violin instead – by tying a violin bow to his arm with a scarf, so that he could bow without the use of a hand.

Such versatility on the part of the staff can also be seen in teacher Osama Jahjouh’s fashioning of a nay – or traditional flute – out of a plastic pipe, because the Conservatory nays have been lost.

Fuad Khader, who created a children’s choir in Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of Gaza, says that at first it was difficult to persuade parents to let their children take part in the activities.

“They asked: ‘People are dying, and you want to teach kids to sing?’” he says. “But I just told them: ‘Everyone has to do something. I’m a musician. And this is my job.’”

Another teacher, Ahmed Abu Amsha, says the music lessons had a transformative effect on the children.

“After a week, the families came to me and told me: ‘You have changed our kids. They are getting better. They are singing, they are laughing.’”

But he adds: “Sometimes we are singing a song – and suddenly there’s a big explosion, that makes us go silent and look at each other. And I say: ‘Don’t worry, let’s continue.’ I have to be strong in front of the children. And in some moments, they forget they are in a war.

“But when they go, I’m not strong,” he says.

“It’s like I’m sucking the bad energy from the kids. And when I try to go to sleep, it’s a horrible feeling… [I will be] thinking of a kid – how he’s seen dead bodies in the street, and his father is dead, and his sister and his uncle… Each child has a story to tell, and I try to heal them.”

As for the grand piano, Khamis Abu Shaban hopes students will one day be able to play it again.

He says that when he last saw it, several months into the war, he lifted the lid and found that some of the strings had been cut and some of the hammers broken.

“I’m familiar with how an instrument can be damaged,” he said. “A hammer cannot be broken just by shock waves, for example. Someone has opened it and started sabotaging the inside.”

But Khamis’ delight at having seen the piano is undiminished.

“Now, I see it still standing in front of me,” he laughs. “It’s telling me: ‘I’m not one to die. I’m still here for you. And I will stay.’”

Japanese elections are normally steady and boring affairs – but this snap election was neither.

The dramatic vote follows a political funding corruption scandal that was revealed last year, which implicated senior lawmakers and cabinet members from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), tarnishing its image and angering the public.

It was the perfect storm – a scandal that saw dozens of LDP lawmakers investigated over pocketing millions of dollars in proceeds from political fundraisers, while households struggled with inflation, high prices, stagnant wages and a sluggish economy.

In the end, a furious and tired electorate sent a strong message in Sunday’s vote, punishing the LDP at the ballot box. And it was a stunning blow: a party which had ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955 lost its single-party majority in the powerful lower house.

But there was no clear winner either. A fractured opposition failed to emerge as a viable alternative when the public was looking for one.

Although severely bruised, the LDP still won more seats – 191 – than the biggest opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), whose final tally stands at 148 seats.

“This election appears to be about voters who are fed up with a party and politicians they see as corrupt and dirty. But it’s not one where they want to bring about a new leader,” said Jeffrey Hall, a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies.

And yet the old leadership’s fate is unclear. The LDP’s governing coalition has fallen short of the halfway mark – 233 seats in the 465-member Diet – after its ally Komeito lost several seats, including that of its chief.

Even with Komeito’s 24 seats, the LDP will be unable to muster a majority.

It’s a “severe judgment”, said Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who was sworn in as prime minister only early this month after winning a tight party leadership race.

Voters had “expressed their strong desire for the LDP to reflect and become a party that will act in line with the people’s will”, he said on Sunday, as results emerged.

The hope was that Ishiba as leader could save the LDP at the ballot – rising discontent and plummetting ratings had forced out the last PM, Fumio Kishida.

Still, Ishiba took a gamble when he announced a snap election less than a month ago – and it has backfired.

Both he and his party underestimated the extent of public anger and, crucially, their willingness to act on it.

To stay in power, the LDP will now need to form a coalition with other parties it fought in the election. And it will do so from a position of significant weakness because it must negotiate and make concessions to survive.

It is hard to overstate how rare this is – the LDP has always enjoyed a safe and steady place in Japanese politics.

And it has a strong track record of governance – when the opposition did take over in 1993 and 2009, it ended badly.

Since the LDP came back to power in 2012, it has managed to win every election, almost uncontested. There has long been resignation about the status quo, and the opposition remains unconvincing to the Japanese people.

“I think we [the Japanese] are very conservative,” Miyuki Fujisaki, a 66-year-old voter, told the BBC a few days before the election.

“It’s very hard for us to challenge and make a change. And when the ruling party changed once [and the opposition took over], nothing actually changed in the end, that’s why we tend to stay conservative.”

Ms Fujisaki said that she had inititially been unsure who to vote for, especially with the fundraising scandal hanging over the LDP. But given that she had always voted for them, she said she was probably going to do the same this time too.

Although the main opposition party – the CDP – made significant gains, observers say these results are less about voters endorsing the opposition than about their ire with the LDP.

Despite voters wanting to hold their politicians accountable, “in [their] minds… there really is no-one else” they trust to lead the country, Mr Hall said.

What that leaves Japan with is a weakened LDP and a splintered opposition.

The country has long been seen as a beacon of political stability, a haven for investors and a reliable US ally in an increasingly tense Asia Pacific. So the uncertainty is concerning not just for its own people, but also its neighbours and allies.

At home, a shaky coalition will not help with turning the economy around, raising wages and improving welfare for a rapidly ageing population.

And harder still will be the task of regaining the trust and respect of a public weary of politics.

Menka Gomis was born in France but has decided his future lies in Senegal, where his parents were born.

The 39-year-old is part of an increasing number of French Africans who are leaving France, blaming the rise in racism, discrimination and nationalism.

BBC Africa Eye has investigated this phenomenon – being referred to as a “silent exodus” – to find out why people like Mr Gomis are disillusioned with life in France.

The Parisian set up a small travel agency that offers packages, mainly to Africa, aimed at those wanting to reconnect with their ancestral roots, and now has an office in Senegal.

“I was born in France. I grew up in France, and we know certain realities. There’s been a lot of racism. I was six and I was called the N-word at school. Every day,” Mr Gomis, who went to school in the southern port city of Marseille, tells the BBC World Service.

“I may be French, but I also come from elsewhere.”

Mr Gomis’s mother moved to France when she was just a baby and cannot understand his motivation for leaving family and friends to go to Senegal.

“I’m not just leaving for this African dream,” he explains, adding it is a mixture of responsibility he feels towards his parents’ homeland and also opportunity.

“Africa is like the Americas at the time of… the gold rush. I think it’s the continent of the future. It’s where there’s everything left to build, everything left to develop.”

The links between France and Senegal – a mainly Muslim country and former French colony, which was once a key hub in the transatlantic slave trade – are long and complex.

A recent BBC Africa Eye investigation met migrants in Senegal willing to risk their lives in dangerous sea crossings to reach Europe.

Many of them end up in France where, according to the French Office for the Protection of Refugee and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), a record number sought asylum last year.

Around 142,500 people applied in total, and about a third of all requests for protection were accepted.

It is not clear how many are choosing to do the reverse journey to Africa as French law prohibits gathering data on race, religion and ethnicity.

But research suggests that highly qualified French citizens from Muslim backgrounds, often the children of immigrants, are quietly emigrating.

Those we met told us attitudes towards immigration were hardening in France, with right-wing parties wielding more influence.

Since their appointment last month, Prime Minister Michel Barnier and Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau have pledged to crack down on immigration, both legal and illegal, by pushing for changes to the law domestically and at the European level.

Fanta Guirassy has lived in France all her life and runs her own nursing practice in Villemomble – an outer-suburb of Paris – but she is also planning a move to Senegal, the birthplace of her mother.

“Unfortunately, for quite a few years now in France, we’ve been feeling less and less safe. It’s a shame to say it, but that’s the reality,” the 34-year-old tells the BBC.

“Being a single mother and having a 15-year-old teenager means you always have this little knot in your stomach. You’re always afraid.”

Her wake-up call came when her son was recently stopped and searched by the police as he was chatting to his friends on the street.

“As a mother it’s quite traumatic. You see what happens on TV and you see it happen to others.”

In June last year, riots erupted across France following the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk – a French national of Algerian descent who was shot by police.

The case is still being investigated, but the riots shook the nation and reflected an undercurrent of anger that had been building for years over the way ethnic minorities are treated in France.

Homecoming – BBC Africa Eye investigates the “silent exodus” of French Africans leaving France for good to reconnect with their roots.

Find it on iPlayer (UK only) or on the BBC Africa YouTube channel (outside the UK)

A recent survey of black people in France suggested 91% of those questioned had been victims of racial discrimination.

In the wake of the riots, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) called on France to address “issues of racial discrimination within its law enforcement agencies”.

The French foreign ministry dismissed the criticism, saying: “Any accusation of systemic racism or discrimination by the police in France is totally groundless. France and its police fight resolutely against racism and all forms of discrimination.”

However, according to French interior ministry statistics, racist crimes rose by a third last year, with more than 15,000 recorded incidents based on race, religion or ethnicity.

For schoolteacher Audrey Monzemba, who is of Congolese descent, such societal changes have “become very anxiety-provoking”.

Early one morning, we join her on her commute through a multicultural and working-class community on the outskirts of Paris.

With her young daughter, she makes her way by bus and train, but as she approaches the school where she works, she discreetly removes her headscarf under the hood of her coat.

In secular France, wearing a hijab has become hugely controversial and 20 years ago they were banned in all state schools – it is part of the reason Ms Monzemba wants to leave France looking to move to Senegal where she has connections.

“I’m not saying that France isn’t for me. I’m just saying that what I want is to be able to thrive in an environment that respects my faith and my values. I want to go to work without having to remove my veil,” the 35-year-old says.

A recent survey of more than 1,000 French Muslims who have left France to settle abroad suggests it is a growing trend.

It follows a peak in Islamophobia in the wake of the 2015 attacks when Islamist gunmen killed 130 people in various locations across Paris.

Moral panics around secularism and job discrimination “are at the heart of this silent flight”, Olivier Esteves, one of the authors of the report France, You Love It But You Leave It, tells the BBC.

“Ultimately, this emigration from France constitutes a real brain-drain, as it is primarily highly educated French Muslims who decide to leave,” he says.

Take Fatoumata Sylla, 34, whose parents are from Senegal, as an example.

“When my father left Africa to come here, he was looking for a better quality of life for his family in Africa. He would always tell us: ‘Don’t forget where you come from.'”

The tourism software developer, who is moving to Senegal next moth, says by going to set up a business in West Africa, she is showing she has not forgotten her heritage – though her brother Abdoul, who like her was born in Paris, is not convinced.

“I’m worried about her. I hope she’ll do OK, but I don’t feel the need to reconnect with anything,” he tells the BBC.

“My culture and my family is here. Africa is the continent of our ancestors. But it’s not really ours because we weren’t there.

“I don’t think you’re going to find some ancestral culture, or an imaginary Wakanda,” he says, referring to the technologically advanced society featured in the Black Panther movies and comic books.

In Dakar, we met Salamata Konte, who founded the travel agency with Mr Gomis, to find out what awaits French Africans like her who are choosing to settle in Senegal.

Ms Konte swapped a high-paying banking job in Paris for the Senegalese capital.

“When I arrived in Senegal three years ago I was shocked to hear them call me ‘Frenchie’,” the 35-year-old says.

“I said to myself: ‘OK, yes, indeed, I was born in France, but I’m Senegalese like you.’ So at first, we have this feeling where we say to ourselves: ‘Damn, I was rejected in France, and now I’m coming here and I’m also rejected here.'”

But her advice is: “You have to come here with humility and that’s what I did.”

As for her experience as a businesswoman, she says it has been “really difficult”.

“I often tell people that Senegalese men are misogynistic. They don’t like to hear that, but I think it’s true.

“They have a hard time accepting that a woman can be a CEO of a company, that a woman can sometimes give ‘orders’ to certain people, that I, as a woman, can tell a driver who was late: ‘No, it’s not normal that you’re late.’

“I think we have to prove ourselves a little more.”

Nonetheless, Mr Gomis is excited as he awaits his Senegalese citizenship.

The travel agency is going well and he says he is already working on his next venture – a dating app for Senegal.

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For almost 35 years, Wyoming entrepreneur Alan Chadwick has run his business importing clothing from China and selling the Western-style gear to stores serving “working cowboys” in the US.

Now, as former President Donald Trump campaigns on a pledge to hit all goods coming into the country with a 10%-20% tariff, or border tax, which would rise to 60% for goods from China, Chadwick is having to drastically rethink his strategy.

The 66-year-old has been exploring moving manufacturing of his products, like wool shirts with snaps and canvas jackets, to India or Pakistan – or perhaps closing his Wyoming Traders business, which employs 16 people, and retiring altogether.

Chadwick said tariffs were a “tax on the American people” and warned that the expense for a company like his of opening a factory in the US was unrealistic.

But as he prepares to cast his ballot, he expects to swallow his qualms about tariffs in favour of other priorities, such as illegal immigration and opposition to abortion.

“I will vote for Trump even though he’s going to hurt our company if he does what he says he’s going to do,” he said.

Chadwick’s readiness to look past Trump’s views on tariffs is a sign of the contradictory impulses shaping American politics.

The Republican’s platform has shifted America – once a global champion of free trade – towards an embrace of policies that are designed to protect US companies and jobs from foreign competition, despite the potential economic drawbacks.

During his first term, Trump hit thousands of items from China with tariffs – measures that President Joe Biden, despite criticising them before entering the White House, kept in place.

This year, the Republican has put plans for sweeping tariffs at the centre of his presidential campaign, calling such duties “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”.

He argues his plans – which analysts say could return the average charge on imports to the highest level in at least 50 years – will spur job creation, reinvigorate US manufacturing, drive up wages and raise billions of dollars from other countries.

“We’re going to be a tariff nation. It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country,” he has said on the trail.

His claims are rejected by most traditional economists, who say the policy would do little to expand employment in the US, while raising costs for everyday Americans and slowing growth around the world.

In the US, the Tax Foundation predicts the tariffs would reduce overall employment by 684,000 and shrink GDP by 0.8% – and that’s without taking into account the almost certain retaliation from other countries.

For a typical US household, costs would rise by at least $1,700, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, one of the lower estimates out there.

“It’s absurd,” economist Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said of Trump’s promises. “This is not the panacea that people are hoping for.”

Despite the warnings, some surveys indicate that Trump’s ideas are resonating: a September poll by Reuters/Ipsos found that 56% of likely voters favoured the Republican’s tariff plans.

Kyle Plesa, a 39-year-old Trump voter in Miami, Florida, said he did not think tariffs would have precisely the impact the candidate has promised, but the Republican’s focus on the pitfalls of globalisation had touched a nerve.

“People are upset about it and I think Trump is at least addressing it,” he said.

“I would probably prefer protecting business and paying a little bit more due to tariffs than I would dealing with the current state of inflation and raising taxes from the left,” he added.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has attacked Trump’s tariff expansion plans as a “national sales tax”, pledging a more targeted approach.

But Trump has said money brought in from tariffs could allow for big tax cuts – sometimes floating the idea of eliminating income tax altogether.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s decision to maintain Trump’s China tariffs – and expand them on items such as electric vehicles – has also allowed the Republican to claim a policy victory.

Biden has also signed off other protectionist policies, such as on historic government spending to boost manufacturing in sectors such as semiconductors and green energy.

He and Harris, like Trump, have opposed the takeover of US Steel by a Japanese company on national security grounds, raising chills in the business world about foreign investment.

Michael Froman, who served as the US trade representative under former President Barack Obama, said Washington’s turn to tools like tariffs and restrictions on foreign investment was “probably here to stay”.

“There certainly is less enthusiasm around pursuing what we might call an affirmative trade agenda in terms of liberalisation, openness, reduction of barriers,” he said. “We just have to recognise that none of these policies are actually free. They all impose some kind of trade-off.”

Jason Trice, the co-chief executive of Jasco, an Oklahoma-based lighting and electronics company that sells to major retailers such as Walmart, said the experience of his firm shows the damage tariffs can do.

Since 2019, it has paid hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tariffs while transforming its supply chain, moving the bulk of its manufacturing from China to places such as Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.

He said the changes have made his firm less efficient and raised costs by about 10%-15%, which he has passed on to retailers, ultimately raising prices and contributing to inflation.

It has all taken a toll on his business, which has seen revenue fall 25% since 2020 and its staff numbers drop, via attrition, from 500 to 350.

“In 50 years in business, the Chinese government has… never done anything nearly as damaging to our business as what the Trump administration has done,” Trice said. “Tariffs have not helped bring jobs back to America. Tariffs have hurt American businesses and reduced employment opportunities.”

Lucerne International, a car parts supplier based in Michigan that has manufactured in China for decades, has also spent the last few years adjusting to the new climate.

With help from government incentives, the company is now working to open its first factory in its home state in 2026, plans expected to create more than 300 jobs over four years.

But though the project might sound like the kind of successful “reshoring” politicians in both parties want to see, chief executive Mary Buchzeiger, a long-time Republican, said it was a mistake for the US to try to “build walls” against its rivals.

“I don’t think tariffs are a long-term solution,” she said.

“All we’re going to do is continue to make ourselves uncompetitive on a global scale.”

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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.

After handing the reins of power to Claudia Sheinbaum on 1 October, Mexico’s outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, hoisted her arm aloft in a joint show of victory.

López Obrador – a hugely popular but controversial figure in Mexico – bequeathed more than just the presidential sash to his political protégé.

She inherits a nation, and an economy, that is performing well in some areas, and facing significant challenges in others.

The good news from her government’s perspective is that Mexico has strengthened its trade position with its neighbour to the north, displacing China as the US’s biggest trading partner.

Mexico has benefitted from “nearshoring” – that is, the relocation of US and Asian firms from China to northern Mexico to bypass punitive US tariffs on Chinese exports.

“Mexico has always been attractive to capital flows because of our geographical position, our free trade agreements with North America, our work force,” former Mexican trade negotiator Juan Carlos Baker Pineda told me before the election.

“But over the past few years, it increasingly seems that if you [a foreign firm] want to do business with the US you need some kind of footing in Mexico.”

The outlook is optimistic, he believes, pointing to Amazon’s recent announcement that it will invest $5bn (£3.8bn) in Mexico over the next 15 years, and an additional $1bn investment by German carmaker Volkswagen. Mr Baker Pineda also cites promising plans from South African, Japanese and Chinese firms.

Critics are less convinced that the relocation of manufacturing from Asia to northern Mexico benefits the Mexican economy rather than just bolstering the companies involved. The key, Mr Baker Pineda believes, lies in creating the right “corporate and government decisions in this country to sustain this trend in the long-term”.

When it comes to the immediate economic problems President Sheinbaum faces, the most pressing is state-run energy firm Pemex. It has debts of around $100bn, making it the world’s most indebted oil firm.

“The debt is a problem not just for Pemex but for Mexico,” says Fernanda Ballesteros, Mexico country manager for the Natural Resource Governance Institute.

In recent years, the López Obrador administration has reduced the amount of tax Pemex has had to pay the government. This has been cut by 60% to 30%.

At the same time, the outgoing government gave Pemex a number of cash injections, which López Obrador says he would like to see continue.

However, a steady decline in productivity at Pemex in recent years has further complicated the financing of the state-owned energy giant, which employs around 1.3 million people according to the government’s own statistics.

“President López Obrador’s policies and priorities were to double down on fossil fuels and give unconditional support to Pemex,” says Ms Ballesteros. The company is now poorly positioned, she argues, for the necessary transition to cleaner and more efficient energies in the coming decades.

“Over the past six years, 90% of Pemex’s infrastructure investments have gone towards a new refinery in Dos Bocas in Tabasco state, and the acquisition of a refinery in Deer Park in Texas.”

The government says it is on course to achieve its goal of total self-sufficiency in fuels by the first quarter of 2025. However, Pemex’s ongoing economic difficulties mean the Sheinbaum administration has its hands tied over servicing the colossal debt.

Environmental expert Eugenio Fernández Vázquez says that Pemex is a “big challenge” for Sheinbaum. “Not just in dealing with the oil industry, which is huge in terms of Mexico’s GDP, but also in taking Pemex’s massive debt burden off the public’s shoulders,” he explains.

Sheinbaum must strike a difficult balance, he adds, in getting Pemex to sell more of its products “which are obviously fossil fuels and oil-based, while at the same time addressing Mexico’s climate change responsibilities and dealing with urgent issues in our cities, like air pollution”.

For a president championed as Mexico’s most environmentally conscious leader – before entering politics, Sheinbaum was an accomplished environmental engineer – that must rankle. Especially while also spending billions in public money to prop up a greenhouse gas-emitting behemoth.

Back in the realm of Mexico’s complex relationship with its northern neighbour, President Sheinbaum faces two very different prospective partners in Washington – either the first female president of the US in Kamala Harris or a second Trump presidency.

Whoever wins in November, there are some tricky cross-border issues to address, whether on trade or undocumented immigration, the illegal traffic of guns into Mexico, or fentanyl into the US.

Furthermore, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) free trade deal is up for renegotiation in 2026, with everything from minor tweaks to major rewrites possible.

USMCA was introduced in 2020, when it replaced the previous North American Free Trade Agreement between the three countries.

Sheinbaum also has to keep an eye on the peso. In the days after her election victory in June, the currency tumbled against the dollar.

This was largely in response to a decision by the outgoing president to press ahead with a wholesale reform of the country’s judicial system under which all 7,000 judges and magistrates in Mexico will be chosen by popular vote. The plan is also supported by Sheinbaum.

Washington’s disapproval of the measure, as publicly expressed by the US Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, suggested it could complicate, even jeopardise, parts of the USMCA renegotiation. Relations between Ambassador Salazar and the new administration are already notably frostier.

Diplomatic spats aside, marrying the new constitutional rules with the legal requirements of the free trade agreement could prove far thornier than first anticipated.

Still, these are the very first days of President Sheinbaum’s administration. As part of her predecessor’s legacy, she enjoys an almost unprecedented level of support with the ruling party in an unassailable position across the country.

Her key election promise – to extend López Obrador’s social programmes in pensions, family stipends and student grants, and build what she calls the “second floor” of his political project – secured her the backing of millions of Mexicans.

She can also count on a loyal congress and, following the reform, potentially the control of the judiciary, too.

Taking office in such a powerful position is a luxury, one which supporters and critics alike expect her to use to properly address some of Mexico’s main economic obstacles.

This month, two states ruled by India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced plans to impose hefty fines and imprisonment for contaminating food with spit, urine and dirt.

The northern state of Uttarakhand will fine offenders up to 100,000 rupees ($1,190; £920), while neighbouring Uttar Pradesh is set to introduce stringent laws to address the issue.

The government directives followed the circulation of unverified videos on social media showing vendors spitting on food at local stalls and restaurants – and one video depicting a house-help mixing urine into food she was preparing.

While the videos sparked outrage among users, with many expressing concern about food safety in these states, some of the videos also became the subject of blame campaigns targeting Muslims, which were later debunked by fact-checking websites.

They pointed out that many on social media had alleged that the woman adding urine to food was Muslim, but police later identified her as a Hindu.

Officials say strict laws are necessary and are aimed at deterring people from indulging in unhygienic practices around food, but opposition leaders and legal experts have questioned the efficacy of these laws and allege that they could also be misused to vilify a specific community.

The Indian Express newspaper criticised the ordinances proposed by Uttar Pradesh state, saying that they “act as a communal [sectarian] dog whistle that preys on the majority’s notions of purity and pollution and targets an already insecure minority”.

Food and food habits are sensitive subjects in culturally-diverse India as they are deeply intertwined with religion and the country’s hierarchical caste system. Norms and taboos around food sometimes lead to clashes between communities, sparking feelings of distrust. Consequently, the notion of “food safety” has also become entangled with religion, which is sometimes used to ascribe motive to alleged incidents of contamination.

Food safety is also a major concern in India, with the Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSAI) estimating that unsafe food causes around 600 million infections and 400,000 deaths annually.

Experts cite various reasons for poor food safety in India, including inadequate enforcement of food safety laws and a lack of awareness. Cramped kitchens, dirty utensils, contaminated water, and improper transport and storage practices further compromise food safety.

So, when videos of vendors spitting in food came out, people were shocked and outraged. Soon after, Uttarakhand announced hefty fines on offenders and made it mandatory for police to verify hotel staff and for CCTVs to be installed in kitchens.

In Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said to stop such incidents, police should verify every employee. The state also plans to make it mandatory for food centres to display the names of their owners, for cooks and waiters to wear masks and gloves and for CCTVs to be installed in hotels and restaurants.

According to reports, Adityanath is planning to bring in two ordinances that will penalise spitting in food with imprisonment up to 10 years.

In July, India’s Supreme Court had stayed directives issued by the Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh governments asking people running food stalls along the route of Kanwar yatra – an annual Hindu pilgrimage – to prominently display the names and other identity details of their owners. Petitioners told the top court that the directives unfairly targeted Muslims and would negatively impact their businesses.

On Wednesday, police in the state’s Barakanki town arrested restaurant owner Mohammad Irshad for allegedly spitting on a roti (flat bread) while preparing it. Mr Irshad was charged with disturbing peace and religious harmony, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.

Earlier this month, police in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, arrested two men – Naushad Ali and Hasan Ali – for allegedly spitting in a saucepan while making tea, and accused them of causing public outrage and jeopardising health, reported The Hindu.

The videos of the men spitting, which found their way onto social media days before they were arrested, were given a religious spin after many Hindu nationalist accounts began calling them incidents of “thook-jihad” or “spit-jihad”.

The term is a spin on “love-jihad” which has been coined by radical Hindu groups, who use it to accuse Muslim men of converting Hindu women by marriage. By extension, “thook-jihad” accuses Muslims of trying to defile Hindus by spitting in their food.

This is not the first time that the Muslim community has become targets of spitting accusations. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a series of fake videos showing Muslims spitting, sneezing or licking objects to infect people with the virus went viral on social media. The videos heightened religious polarisation, with Hindu hardline accounts posting anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Opposition leaders in the two BJP-ruled states have criticised the new directives, saying they could be used to target Muslims and that the government was using such orders as a smokescreen to divert attention from other key problems like unemployment and sky-rocketing inflation.

But Manish Sayana, a food safety officer in Uttarakhand, says the government’s orders are solely aimed at making food safe for consumption. He told the BBC that the food safety officers and the police have started conducting surprise checks at eateries and that they “urge people to wear masks and gloves and install CCTVs” wherever they go for checks.

Legal expert and journalist V Venkatesan says there is a need for new ordinances and laws around food safety to be properly debated on the assembly floor.

“According to me, the existing laws [under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006] are sufficient to take care of any offences connected to food safety. So, one needs to ask why the need for these new laws and directives?” he asks.

“Governments seem to think that laws prescribing harsh punishments will deter people from committing crimes, but research has shown that it is the proper implementation of laws that deter people from committing crimes. So, have the existing laws not been properly implemented in these states yet?”

When Tegi Pannu reflects on the thousands turning up to watch him perform on tour, he’s reminded of a quote his dad had framed in their house in India.

“Those who dream the most, do the most.”

“I used to dream that one day I’m going to be on the stage,” the Punjabi artist tells BBC Asian Network’s Haroon Rashid in his first ever interview.

“I wanted people to know my music first and then the man behind the music.”

Tegi has been on a sell-out tour of the UK, with songs such as Forever, Schedule and Untouchable regularly charting and being streamed hundreds of millions of times by adoring fans.

He is the latest artist involved in getting Punjabi music to have its global moment, alongside the likes of Diljit Dosanjh, AP Dhillon and Karan Aujla.

But his journey to this moment hasn’t been simple.

Tegi and his family moved to Australia from India when he was in his late teens, and his brother made it clear to him the priority was not music.

“You have to work and then you’ve got your parents to look after,” he says, adding he was “more concerned about my visa conditions”.

At one stage, he felt it might not happen as a career, but says keeping it as a hobby helped.

“You can’t let go of some things. They are in your heart and music was always in my heart.

“I think if you follow something with a true heart, God sees it.”

Pursuing a “very unstable” hobby while the family was trying to earn and make a life in a new country was not easy for Tegi.

“I worked on my residency first. I did whatever my brother said, but then I wanted to do something for myself.”

Before the music took off, Tegi says he tried to have a “low-key life” and was not really into social media – “an introvert kind of a person” is how he describes himself.

“But now I would say a guy who’s really passionate about music who wants to achieve more in his life,” he says.

The change for him came during the coronavirus pandemic, a phase of life he describes as “pre-lockdown Tegi and post-lockdown Tegi”.

It was once strict Covid restrictions were lifted in Australia that he realised the popularity of Schedule and Untouchable.

“People recognising and playing your sound. That was exciting because that’s what as a young kid I dreamed of,” he says.

“After Untouchable, I started going out and people from the road were calling ‘Tegi, Tegi’.

“I didn’t expect that. People now want to take photos with you, they want to know you and it’s exciting.”

He says his parents are also proud, and more popular too.

“Everyone’s calling them more, they’ve got people at their house every few weeks. Now they’re realising that this is big.”

But he dreams of going even bigger – naming Diljit Dosanjh and Karan Aujla, two fellow Punjabi artists, as stars he wants to emulate.

“Diljit’s consistency, he’s been doing what he loves. Every time he comes up with something exciting.

“I haven’t seen someone that good on stage.

“And with Karan, I would say his composition and lyrics, no one can match,” Tegi says.

After a number of hits, you might think there’s pressure on Tegi to replicate his success with future songs, such as the newly released Hold On which he describes as a “dance pop sound”.

“There’s always going to be pressure because there’s going to be new talent coming every few months.

“You have to improve, have to understand a new sound. You have to keep doing things like they matter and work hard.”

But he says his approach is to “keep it very simple”.

“I like to make music, which I like. If I like the music, I think people are going to like it as well.

“If I don’t like it, personally, I don’t think people are going to connect.”

He’s also keen to venture into a more country style, a risk some might say to go against what the audience wants and expects from him now.

But Tegi doesn’t see it like that.

“If you don’t experiment, you won’t know what people think of you.”

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, with the exception of medical cannabis prescribed by doctors, 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 inhumane.

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.

“To everyone’s astonishment, the vulgar insurgent has won!”

So wrote a British foreign minister in his diaries on 9 November 2016 after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to the White House.

“This looked remarkably like an abuse of power.”

So wrote the then-prime minister in her memoirs after waking up to realise that a Trump-led Washington had said US troops would be pulled out of the fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria “without any reference to the UK and other nations whose troops were operating alongside them”.

Sir Alan Duncan and Theresa May are the authors of these remarks, which the present prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, would do well to note as he ponders what difference a Trump or Kamala Harris presidency could make to the so-called special relationship between the UK and the US.

“Dealing with Donald Trump and his administration was like dealing with no other world leader,” writes the now Lady May in a book reflecting on her career.

“He was an American president like no other.”

There will be challenges, too, if the Democratic vice-president wins. She has yet to meet Sir Keir and has shown limited affinity for Europe – but she will be a vastly more conventional president than her rival.

On the off-chance that Sir Keir thought things might be different this time if Trump wins next week, the last few days showed him otherwise.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump winning?

The accusation of election interference made by the Trump campaign – courtesy of an, at best, foolishly written LinkedIn post – blew up into a transatlantic spat.

“This needs to be seen for what it is. It’s happened every election, every political party does it,” Sir Keir told me, in reference to people volunteering to work for one side or the other in American elections.

But the difference was obvious. On previous occasions it hasn’t caused an almighty row.

It was a reminder that Team Trump can be brash, unpredictable and have a long memory for perceived slights – and don’t appear to really give a stuff about its relationship with the British government.

What on earth might happen to the UK’s most cherished overseas partnership if Trump wins?

Until the row in the past week, things had, on the face of it, been going well for the new prime minister and US relations.

A few weeks ago, Sir Keir and Foreign Secretary David Lammy were in New York to meet the former president, with me accompanying them.

Teetering on a pavement on Fifth Avenue with the 58-storey Trump Tower behind me, we were trying to perfect the angle for broadcast so the garish gold lettering spelling out “TRUMP TOWER” was visible to viewers, even if a giant lorry barrelled down the road as I started talking.

I think we managed it. But a similar balancing act faced the two men. They were in New York for the United Nations General Assembly – but much of the chat on the trip was not about them meeting one of the world leaders present, but whether they could get time with a candidate hoping to become one: Donald Trump.

And they did get that meeting – which tells you rather a lot about the work British diplomats in America and London have been putting in, and the determination of Sir Keir and Mr Lammy to build bridges with the man who may be president again before long.

The prime minister later told me on BBC’s Newscast that “we both wanted to ensure we have a good relationship”. He added: “It’s up to me as prime minister to make sure I have a good relationship with whoever the president is.”

“I believe strongly in personal relations. Have the ability to, as necessary, pick up the phone to them to sort out issues or talk about issues. So it was a good dinner and I’m really glad that we managed to do it.”

Glad, no doubt, in part because of the buckets full of disobliging quotes there are about Trump, not least from David Lammy, who once described his host as a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” and a “tyrant in a toupee”.

There are no shortage of verbal skeletons in Labour’s cupboard about the man who could soon be back in the Oval Office.

In policy terms, a Trump presidency would likely bring rapid change – on climate change, on international trade (whacking up import taxes, tariffs) and on Ukraine.

Unlike a Harris administration, they would likely offer the UK a free trade deal, but it seems unlikely the terms of it would tempt London to sign up.

So what of Trump’s Democratic rival, the vice-president Kamala Harris?

Diplomatic niceties suggest if you meet one candidate in a foreign election contest, you meet the other one too.

But that isn’t likely to happen with Harris, despite Sir Keir visiting America three times since July.

No 10 blames the pressures on the vice-president’s diary in an election campaign.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When will we know who’s won?
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• POLLS: Is Harris or Trump winning?
• ANALYSIS: What’s really behind America’s men v women election
• ON THE GROUND: ‘It’s rough out here’: Why Trump and Harris should listen to this mum of seven

It is worth stating the obvious too – while Sir Keir and Harris have never met, she is a vastly more known quantity and far more likely to be conventional in her approach to high office than her rival.

And Sir Keir has gone out of his way to spend a lot of time with President Biden in the last four months, including two trips to the White House and a recent meeting in Berlin.

An imperfect way of getting a sense of how his vice-president might govern – and with no opportunity to build a personal relationship – but not entirely useless at getting something of a handle on it.

Oh and it is worth making a very big picture point too – whoever wins. Increasingly, America’s focus is on the rise of the east and in particular China. Europe matters less to Washington than it did and that holds true whatever the result.

And so Westminster and the world awaits.

Whatever happens, expect the conversation to quickly turn to if and when the prime minister gets an early invite to Washington in the new year.

There will be a queue of leaders heading to the White House.

And what about a state visit to the UK – as Donald Trump revelled in, in 2019 – for a returning president like no other or for America’s first woman president?

Let’s see.

• Harris or Trump? What Chinese people want
• What the world thought of Harris-Trump debate
• Moscow had high hopes for Trump in 2016. It’s more cautious this time

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.

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

Air quality in India’s capital Delhi has deteriorated to severe and extremely poor levels in the past few days, data shows.

Pollution levels crossed 25-30 times the World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommended safe limit at several locations in the city last week.

Experts have warned that the situation will worsen in the coming days due to weather conditions, use of firecrackers during the festival of Diwali on Thursday and burning of crop remains in neighbouring states.

Delhi and several northern Indian cities report extreme levels of air pollution between October and January every year, causing disruption to businesses, shutting down of schools and offices.

The levels of tiny particulate matter (known as PM 2.5), which can enter deep into the lungs and cause a host of diseases, reached as high as 350 micrograms per cubic metre in some areas on Monday, data from government-run Safar website shows.

According to the website, air quality is categorised as very poor when PM 2.5 levels reach 300 to 400, and it’s termed severe when the limit reaches 400-500.

Delhi gets enveloped in a thick blanket of smog every winter due to smoke, dust, low wind speed, vehicular emissions and crop stubble burning.

In November and December, farmers in the neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana burn crop stubble to clear their fields.

Farming groups say they need financial and technical help to find alternative ways of clearing crop remains but government schemes have so far not been effective.

The smoke from firecrackers set off during Diwali adds to the problem.

Like every year, the Delhi government has announced a complete ban on the manufacturing, storage and sale of fireworks ahead of the festival, which falls later this week.

But such bans have not been completely effective in the past as people source fireworks from other states.

The Delhi government has also enacted its Graded Response Action Plan, known as GRAP, to tackle pollution.

It bans all activities which involve the use of coal and firewood, as well as diesel generator use for non-emergency services.

Authorities in Delhi have warned residents to stay indoors as much as possible and have curbed construction activity in the city.

They have also urged people to use public transport to cut vehicular emissions.

Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to get exclusive insight on the latest climate and environment news from the BBC’s Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, delivered to your inbox every week. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.

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?”

A Chinese court has upheld the death sentence for a woman who trafficked more than a dozen children in the 1990s, in a case that has gripped the country, state media report.

Yu Huaying was sentenced to death again on Friday, after a re-trial that considered additional evidence found that she sold 17 children, not 11 as the 2023 trial had found.

The case first came to light in 2022, when a woman whom she trafficked for 3,500 yuan ($491; £378) in 1995 reported her ordeal to police in Guiyang, in China’s south-west.

Yang Niuhua, who was already in her early 30s by that time, was looking for her family and documented her search on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok.

Ms Yang was eventually reunited with her relatives following a DNA test, only to be told both her parents had died a few years after she was snatched in Guizhou province.

Ms Yang’s report led police to arrest Yu, who was in court during Friday’s sentencing.

The court also stripped Yu of all political rights for life and ordered the confiscation of all her property.

“Yu Huaying’s subjective malice is extremely deep, her criminal behavior is particularly heinous, and the consequences of her actions are severe, warranting harsh punishment. Although she confessed, this is insufficient to justify a lighter sentence,” the court said.

According to state media reports, Yu’s first victim was her own son, whom she sold for 5,000 yuan when she was in her 20s.

The boy’s father, Gong Xianliang, would eventually become Yu’s cohort in child trafficking. Gong died after Yu was arrested.

Luo Xingzhen – whose two children were snatched by Yu in 1996 – previously revealed how she had spent two decades waiting for her children to come home to the family’s shoe repair stall, the same spot where they were taken.

“The pain the traffickers have caused me is unspeakable, and the break in my family can never be repaired,” she said in November last year, according to the English-language Global Times.

State media report that some parents of Yu’s victims suffered from depression and the ordeal had led families to break apart.

The court said Yu built a “complete criminal chain” of child trafficking, finding children in the provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan and the municipality of Chongqing in the south and selling them up north in Hebei through intermediaries, according to reports.

Yu was detained for two months in 2000 for child abduction and in 2004 was jailed for eight years for a similar offence.

Human trafficking has long been a concern in China and cases draw outrage when they are exposed, such as when a woman, who was trafficked for marriage, was found chained in Jiangsu province last year.

When China’s one-child policy was in force, a cultural preference for male children led to the trafficking of unwanted baby girls.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has warned Indians against an emerging online fraud known as “digital arrest”.

Some people have reportedly been scammed out of millions of rupees by fraudsters, who contact their victims via video call posing as police or tax officials levelling false charges at them.

The scammers order their victims to stay in one place – usually their home – under the false pretence of a “digital arrest,” telling them not to contact anyone.

Modi said digital arrest does not exist in Indian law and no enforcement agency would ever ask citizens for personal details by phone or video call.

“The fraudsters impersonate police, Central Bureau of Investigation, narcotics and at times central bank officials,” Modi said.

The scammers appear on screen with a studio setup resembling a police station, tax office or a federal investigation agency. They also wear official-looking uniforms to appear legitimate and produce fake ID cards.

Scammers typically claim that the victim has sent a parcel containing illegal goods such as drugs, or claim their phone has been linked to illegal activity. Deepfake videos and false arrest warrants have also been reported as part of the scam.

More and more cases of so-called digital arrests are being reported.

In August, Bengaluru police arrested several men after a victim was allegedly scammed out of more than 20 million rupees ($237,000; £183,000), according to Indian media reports.

Fraudsters said a parcel addressed to the victim contained the drug MDMA and had been seized by police. Over a WhatsApp call, they threatened him with legal action if he did not pay to settle his alleged legal issues.

Actor Maala Parvathi, who appears mainly in Malayalam-language movies, also reported being targeted by the scam this month.

Indian media reported that she said the scammers showed her fake ID cards, pretending to be officers from Mumbai Police, accused her of smuggling drugs to Taiwan and placed her under virtual arrest for questioning.

She realised it was a fraud before any exchange of money took place, she reportedly said.

In his warning to the nation, Modi told victims to follow three steps to stay safe.

“First, stay calm and do not panic. Record or take a screen recording if possible,” the prime minister said.

“Second, remember that no government agency will threaten you online.

“Third, take action by calling the national cyber helpline and also inform police about the crime.”

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”.

A comedian at a Donald Trump rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, sparking fury from Republicans and Democrats and accusations of racism.

The comic, Tony Hinchcliffe, was among the speakers at the Madison Square Garden in New York on Sunday. He also made a series of jokes that leant on racist stereotypes.

A Trump adviser distanced the former president from the Puerto Rico joke, which was also denounced by Trump’s Democratic rival, Kamala Harris. Harris herself was the target of another Trump warm-up speaker who also sparked controversy.

The furore came as one of the world’s top Latin celebrities, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, endorsed Harris for president.

In his joke, Hinchcliffe, known as Kill Tony, said: “There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The line appeared to meet a mixed reception. Two Republicans in the state of Florida, which has a prominent Puerto Rican population, were among those who called out the joke.

US congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar said she was “disgusted” by the “racist comment”. She said on X that it did not “reflect the GOP values”, referring to the Republican Party, and noted thousands of Puerto Ricans served in the military.

US Senator Rick Scott said: “The joke bombed for a reason. It’s not funny and it’s not true.” He added that “Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans”.

Puerto Rico is a US island territory in the Caribbean. Its residents are unable to vote in US presidential elections, but there is a large diaspora across the US who can.

Hinchcliffe also suggested Latinos “loved making babies”.

He drew on racist tropes about black people and watermelons, which prompted groans from the audience – and he called Palestinians rock-throwers while in the same sentence suggested Jews would not spend money – invoking an antisemitic trope.

The comedian later defended his material. “These people have no sense of humour,” he wrote on X in response to criticism from Democratic lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz.

He added: “I love Puerto Rico and vacation there. I made fun of everyone… watch the whole set.”

Ocasio-Cortez responded, saying: “You don’t ‘love Puerto Rico’. You like drinking piña coladas. There’s a difference.”

She had earlier said Hinchcliffe’s comments were “super upsetting”, noting that her family was from Puerto Rico.

The night’s other speakers courted controversy with their own remarks. David Rem, a childhood friend of Trump, called Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist”.

And Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani falsely claimed the Democratic candidate was “on the side of the terrorists” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Although much of the focus was on the comments by his guest speakers, Trump used the occasion to announce a plan for tax credits for those who take care of a parent or a loved one. “It’s about time that they were recognised,” he said.

He also reiterated plans for a mass deportation for illegal migrants, speaking of his wish to “rescue” places that had been “invaded and conquered” by “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals”.

• US election polls: Who is ahead – Harris or Trump?
• Why Trump and Harris should listen to this mum of seven
• Live updates: Final week of campaigning under way

Earlier on Sunday, Harris unveiled policies aimed at helping those in Puerto Rico – garnering support from Jennifer Lopez, who has Puerto Rican parents, as well as Bad Bunny. Numerous other big-name celebrities have already backed her.

Bad Bunny posted multiple videos of Harris talking about the island, her ideas to help residents, and her attacks on how Trump handled Hurricane Maria as president when the deadly storm killed nearly 3,000 people there in 2017.

A source close to Bad Bunny confirmed to the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that this represented an endorsement of Harris, breaking his longstanding tradition of not weighing in on national politics.

In the last seven years, there has been an exodus from Puerto Rico, whose inhabitants have moved to the mainland US including Florida and swing states such as North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Puerto Ricans are now reportedly the second largest Latino subgroup in those states.

Bad Bunny’s comments appeared to be pre-planned, and he did not address the remarks by Hinchcliffe. But fellow Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin did, telling his fans “this is what they think of us” and urging them to vote for Harris.

There are around 36 million Hispanic voters eligible to vote this year, according to the Pew Research centre. They have generally formed a key plank of the Democratic coalition but Republicans have been eating into that support.

Madison Square Garden, near the heart of the city, is one of the most famous venues in the world and capable of seating about 20,000.

It is also in Trump’s hometown, and the city in which he landed a historic criminal conviction earlier this year.

New York – viewed by some as a curious choice for the final week of campaigning – is a solid blue state and will not be decisive in the race for the White House.

Tony Hinchcliffe is a stand-up comedian based in Austin, Texas, known for his podcast Kill Tony, which offers stand up comedians the opportunity to audition for 60 seconds before Hinchcliffe and his co-host, Brian Redban.

The podcast has 1.89 million subscribers on YouTube.

The comedian grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, and described himself as “the class clown”. He got his start in the comedy world working for Joe Rogan and writing jokes for celebrities on Comedy Central Roast.

This is not the fist time some of his comments have made headlines for their offensive nature.

In 2021, he used a racial slur when referring to American-Chinese comedian Peng Deng during a comedy set and refused to apologise.

“I knew that what I had done was not wrong,” Hinchcliffe said when asked by Vanity Fair about that controversy. “It was so dumbfounding to me because it was a joke, and my stance is that comedians should never apologise for a joke.”

Hinchcliffe was one of the comedians who appeared on former NFL star Tom Brady’s Netflix comedy roast earlier this year.

• 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?

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter.

Readers in the US can sign up here. Those in the UK can sign up here.

North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia and are operating in the Kursk border region where Ukrainian troops have a foothold, Nato has said for the first time.

The alliance’s Secretary General, Mark Rutte, said he could confirm the deployment after weeks of intelligence reports, following a meeting with South Korean security and defence officials on Monday.

The newly installed Nato chief said the deployment represented a “significant escalation” and a “dangerous expansion” of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Last week, President Vladimir Putin refused to deny that North Korean troops had arrived in Russia, following reports that Pyongyang was preparing to send thousands of troops to aid its ally.

“This is our sovereign decision,” Putin said, sidestepping the question during a news conference. “Whether we use it or not, where, how, or whether we engage in exercises, training, or transfer some experience. It’s our business.”

It is unclear exactly how many North Korean soldiers have been sent. South Korea’s spy agency said earlier this month that at least 1,500 North Korean troops had already arrived in Russia, prompting Seoul to issue Moscow with a stern diplomatic rebuke.

But Rutte’s intervention on Monday marked the first time Nato had formally acknowledged that Pyongyang’s forces were operating in Russia. He added that North Korea had already sent ballistic missiles and millions of rounds of ammunition to Moscow for use in Ukraine.

In return, President Putin has agreed to send military technology and other support to help North Korea evade international sanctions, Rutte said. The partnership, he added, was “undermining global peace and security”.

His warning that North Korean troops are operating in Kursk will cause concern in Western capitals. Fighting has continued between Moscow and Kyiv’s forces more than two months after Ukrainian troops first entered Russia’s western region in a shock operation.

Russia is said to have redeployed thousands of troops into the region, helping to stall Ukraine’s advance. The operation has seen Kyiv’s forces claim about 250sq km of territory, but it appears to have failed in its primary objective of diverting Moscow’s momentum in the east of Ukraine.

The arrival of North Korean forces in Kursk could heap further pressure on Kyiv’s embattled troops.

A senior Ukrainian official told the New York Times that about 5,000 elite North Korean troops were set to have joined the Russian detachment in the border region by Monday. President Volodymyr Zelensky also said on Friday that his government had information that those troops could be on the battlefield within days.

Western leaders have warned for weeks that such a move would risk an intensification of the conflict.

Last week, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko – a loyal ally to President Putin – appeared to echo that assessment. He told the BBC that such a move would mark “a step towards the escalation of the conflict”.

North Korea and Russia have grown increasingly close since Moscow found itself largely isolated after its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this year, North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un struck an agreement with President Putin pledging to help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.

The US has repeatedly accused Pyongyang of sending vast amounts of military hardware to Russia, including ballistic missiles and launchers.

But some experts have questioned the degree to which Pyongyang’s troops will be able to aid the Russian war effort. Apart from the language barrier, the North Korean army has no recent combat experiences, they said.

Footage obtained by Ukrainian defence intelligence officials has also showed Russian troops expressing doubts as to how the North Korean troops will be commanded and supplied.

Moscow’s full-scale invasion has now raged for more than two-and-a-half years, with Rutte claiming that more than 600,000 Russian troops have now been killed or wounded in the war. He said the Kremlin was “unable to sustain his assault on Ukraine without foreign support”.

Separately, President Zelensky said on Monday that about 650,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded. “They [Russians] are not collecting the bodies… their people are rotting on the ground,” he said in an interview with The Times of India.

Official casualty updates from either side are rare.

But according to an analysis by BBC Russian, more than 70,000 Russian troops have been confirmed killed in combat.

In February, Zelensky said about 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Estimates by several Western media outlets suggest that number is much higher.

A woman missing for six days in Australia’s Snowy Mountains has been found “dazed and injured” by emergency services after a massive search and rescue operation.

New South Wales (NSW) Police said Lovisa Sjoberg was located on Sunday afternoon local time, suffering from a suspected snake bite, dehydration and a rolled ankle.

The avid photographer was treated for her injuries at the scene, before being rushed to hospital, where she is in a stable condition.

Sjoberg, 48, is a regular visitor to the remote Kosciuszko National Park, where she often documents wild horses living in the mountains.

Fears grew for her safety after a hire car company reported that her car had not been returned and she could not be contacted. Her car was later found unlocked and abandoned.

NSW Police launched an appeal on 21 October to the public to help find her and began a widescale search using sniffer dogs, firefighters, park rangers and a helicopter with infra-red capabilities.

Concerns increased after rescue teams failed to find her after several days and temperatures in the area surrounding Kosciuszko National Park dropped as low as zero degrees at night.

Sjoberg was found on Sunday afternoon local time by a National Parks and Wildlife Service officer on the Nungar Creek Trail at Kiandra.

Supt Toby Lindsay told media that Sjoberg had been “wandering [for] days” through “tough” bushland, and told rescuers she believed she had been bitten by a copperhead snake four days earlier.

The species tends to be shy rather than aggressive, but their venom is a powerful neurotoxin and can be fatal without medical intervention.

“She’s in fact very fortunate to be alive… she obviously went through a tough time,” Supt Lindsay said.

He added that she was now in a “reasonable condition” and is ” happy to be alive”.

This month, two states ruled by India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced plans to impose hefty fines and imprisonment for contaminating food with spit, urine and dirt.

The northern state of Uttarakhand will fine offenders up to 100,000 rupees ($1,190; £920), while neighbouring Uttar Pradesh is set to introduce stringent laws to address the issue.

The government directives followed the circulation of unverified videos on social media showing vendors spitting on food at local stalls and restaurants – and one video depicting a house-help mixing urine into food she was preparing.

While the videos sparked outrage among users, with many expressing concern about food safety in these states, some of the videos also became the subject of blame campaigns targeting Muslims, which were later debunked by fact-checking websites.

They pointed out that many on social media had alleged that the woman adding urine to food was Muslim, but police later identified her as a Hindu.

Officials say strict laws are necessary and are aimed at deterring people from indulging in unhygienic practices around food, but opposition leaders and legal experts have questioned the efficacy of these laws and allege that they could also be misused to vilify a specific community.

The Indian Express newspaper criticised the ordinances proposed by Uttar Pradesh state, saying that they “act as a communal [sectarian] dog whistle that preys on the majority’s notions of purity and pollution and targets an already insecure minority”.

Food and food habits are sensitive subjects in culturally-diverse India as they are deeply intertwined with religion and the country’s hierarchical caste system. Norms and taboos around food sometimes lead to clashes between communities, sparking feelings of distrust. Consequently, the notion of “food safety” has also become entangled with religion, which is sometimes used to ascribe motive to alleged incidents of contamination.

Food safety is also a major concern in India, with the Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSAI) estimating that unsafe food causes around 600 million infections and 400,000 deaths annually.

Experts cite various reasons for poor food safety in India, including inadequate enforcement of food safety laws and a lack of awareness. Cramped kitchens, dirty utensils, contaminated water, and improper transport and storage practices further compromise food safety.

So, when videos of vendors spitting in food came out, people were shocked and outraged. Soon after, Uttarakhand announced hefty fines on offenders and made it mandatory for police to verify hotel staff and for CCTVs to be installed in kitchens.

In Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said to stop such incidents, police should verify every employee. The state also plans to make it mandatory for food centres to display the names of their owners, for cooks and waiters to wear masks and gloves and for CCTVs to be installed in hotels and restaurants.

According to reports, Adityanath is planning to bring in two ordinances that will penalise spitting in food with imprisonment up to 10 years.

In July, India’s Supreme Court had stayed directives issued by the Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh governments asking people running food stalls along the route of Kanwar yatra – an annual Hindu pilgrimage – to prominently display the names and other identity details of their owners. Petitioners told the top court that the directives unfairly targeted Muslims and would negatively impact their businesses.

On Wednesday, police in the state’s Barakanki town arrested restaurant owner Mohammad Irshad for allegedly spitting on a roti (flat bread) while preparing it. Mr Irshad was charged with disturbing peace and religious harmony, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.

Earlier this month, police in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, arrested two men – Naushad Ali and Hasan Ali – for allegedly spitting in a saucepan while making tea, and accused them of causing public outrage and jeopardising health, reported The Hindu.

The videos of the men spitting, which found their way onto social media days before they were arrested, were given a religious spin after many Hindu nationalist accounts began calling them incidents of “thook-jihad” or “spit-jihad”.

The term is a spin on “love-jihad” which has been coined by radical Hindu groups, who use it to accuse Muslim men of converting Hindu women by marriage. By extension, “thook-jihad” accuses Muslims of trying to defile Hindus by spitting in their food.

This is not the first time that the Muslim community has become targets of spitting accusations. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a series of fake videos showing Muslims spitting, sneezing or licking objects to infect people with the virus went viral on social media. The videos heightened religious polarisation, with Hindu hardline accounts posting anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Opposition leaders in the two BJP-ruled states have criticised the new directives, saying they could be used to target Muslims and that the government was using such orders as a smokescreen to divert attention from other key problems like unemployment and sky-rocketing inflation.

But Manish Sayana, a food safety officer in Uttarakhand, says the government’s orders are solely aimed at making food safe for consumption. He told the BBC that the food safety officers and the police have started conducting surprise checks at eateries and that they “urge people to wear masks and gloves and install CCTVs” wherever they go for checks.

Legal expert and journalist V Venkatesan says there is a need for new ordinances and laws around food safety to be properly debated on the assembly floor.

“According to me, the existing laws [under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006] are sufficient to take care of any offences connected to food safety. So, one needs to ask why the need for these new laws and directives?” he asks.

“Governments seem to think that laws prescribing harsh punishments will deter people from committing crimes, but research has shown that it is the proper implementation of laws that deter people from committing crimes. So, have the existing laws not been properly implemented in these states yet?”

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 heavy police response has stifled Halloween celebrations in Shanghai, in what many have viewed as an attempt by authorities to crack down on large public gatherings and freedom of expression.

Witnesses have told the BBC they saw police dispersing crowds of costumed revellers on the streets of Shanghai, while photos of apparent arrests have spread on social media.

Authorities have yet to comment. While there has been no official notice prohibiting Halloween celebrations, rumours of a possible crackdown began circulating online earlier this month.

It comes a year after Halloween revellers in Shanghai went viral for donning costumes poking fun at the Chinese government and its policies.

Pictures from last year’s Halloween event showed people dressing up as a giant surveillance camera, Covid testers, and a censored Weibo post.

This year, footage posted to social media showed people dressed in seemingly uncontroversial costumes, including those of comic book characters such as Batman and Deadpool, being escorted into the back of police vans. Some party-goers said online they were forced to remove make-up at a police station.

But it remains unclear what – if any – types of costumes police were targeting, as many other revellers were left alone.

Eyewitnesses have told BBC Chinese that on Friday a large number of police officers and vehicles gathered on Julu Road in downtown Shanghai, and people dressed in costumes were asked to leave the scene.

On Saturday, police were seen dispersing revellers from the city’s Zhongshan Park.

The BBC spoke to a Shanghai resident who was at the park with friends that night. “Every time someone new showed up on the scene, everyone would go, ‘Wow that’s cool’ and laugh. There were policemen on the sidelines, but I felt they also wanted to watch,” the person said.

But the festive mood ended around 22:00 local (14:00 GMT) when a new group of policemen arrived and began cordoning off the park, according to the eyewitness. “As we left the park, we were told to take off all our headgear. We were told everyone leaving from that exit could not be costumed.”

The person added that they saw a man clash with police officers when he tried to enter.

Another Shanghai resident said the number of police officers taking down the details of people dressed in costumes appeared to exceed the number of revellers themselves.

“Shanghai is not supposed to be like this,” the person said. “It has always been very tolerant.”

The BBC has asked the Shanghai police for a response.

Rumours of a crackdown have been circulating in recent days.

Earlier this month, some business owners who run coffeeshops, bookshops and bars in Shanghai received government notices discouraging Halloween events, the BBC understands.

Around the same time, messages from what appeared to be a government work chat group spread online, suggesting there would be a ban on large-scale Halloween activities. The BBC could not verify these messages.

Some universities issued warnings to their students.

One student at the prestigious Fudan University said they were told by school authorities recently not to participate in gatherings. On Sunday evening, the student received a call from a school counsellor.

“They called me to ask if I had gone out, if I had taken part [in activities]. And if I did participate, I could not reveal I was a student [of the university],” the person told the BBC.

The BBC has also seen a notice from another university in Shanghai issued to students in mid-October discouraging them to “reduce participation in big and small gatherings in the near future”.

This is not the first time Chinese authorities have cracked down on fancy dress. In 2014, Beijing police said people wearing Halloween-themed costumes on the city’s metro system could face arrest, claiming costumes could cause crowds to gather and create “trouble”.

But this year comes on the back of the White Paper Protest movement, which began in November 2022 when large groups of people, mostly youths, gathered spontaneously one night on a street in Shanghai to mourn the victims of a fire.

That gathering soon turned into brief – but widespread – demonstrations against the country’s Covid policies, in one of the biggest challenges to the Chinese government’s authority since the Tiananmen protests.

Air quality in India’s capital Delhi has deteriorated to severe and extremely poor levels in the past few days, data shows.

Pollution levels crossed 25-30 times the World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommended safe limit at several locations in the city last week.

Experts have warned that the situation will worsen in the coming days due to weather conditions, use of firecrackers during the festival of Diwali on Thursday and burning of crop remains in neighbouring states.

Delhi and several northern Indian cities report extreme levels of air pollution between October and January every year, causing disruption to businesses, shutting down of schools and offices.

The levels of tiny particulate matter (known as PM 2.5), which can enter deep into the lungs and cause a host of diseases, reached as high as 350 micrograms per cubic metre in some areas on Monday, data from government-run Safar website shows.

According to the website, air quality is categorised as very poor when PM 2.5 levels reach 300 to 400, and it’s termed severe when the limit reaches 400-500.

Delhi gets enveloped in a thick blanket of smog every winter due to smoke, dust, low wind speed, vehicular emissions and crop stubble burning.

In November and December, farmers in the neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana burn crop stubble to clear their fields.

Farming groups say they need financial and technical help to find alternative ways of clearing crop remains but government schemes have so far not been effective.

The smoke from firecrackers set off during Diwali adds to the problem.

Like every year, the Delhi government has announced a complete ban on the manufacturing, storage and sale of fireworks ahead of the festival, which falls later this week.

But such bans have not been completely effective in the past as people source fireworks from other states.

The Delhi government has also enacted its Graded Response Action Plan, known as GRAP, to tackle pollution.

It bans all activities which involve the use of coal and firewood, as well as diesel generator use for non-emergency services.

Authorities in Delhi have warned residents to stay indoors as much as possible and have curbed construction activity in the city.

They have also urged people to use public transport to cut vehicular emissions.

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Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has given a measured response to Israeli strikes on the country, saying the attack should not be “exaggerated or downplayed” while refraining from pledging immediate retaliation.

President Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran would “give an appropriate response” to the attack, which killed at least four soldiers, adding that Tehran did not seek war.

Israel said it targeted military sites in several regions of Iran on Saturday in retaliation for Iranian attacks, including a barrage of almost 200 ballistic missiles fired towards Israel on 1 October.

On Sunday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had crippled Iranian air defence and missile production systems. He said the strikes had “severely damaged Iran’s defence capability and its ability to produce missiles”.

“The attack was precise and powerful and achieved its goals,” Netanyahu said at a ceremony commemorating the victims of last year’s 7 October attacks by Hamas.

“This regime must understand a simple principle: whoever hurts us, we hurt him.”

Official Iranian sources have publicly played down the impact of the attack, saying most missiles were intercepted and those that weren’t caused only limited damage to air defence systems.

In his first public comments since the attack, Khamenei said: “It is up to the authorities to determine how to convey the power and will of the Iranian people to the Israeli regime and to take actions that serve the interests of this nation and country.”

He adopted a much more measured tone compared to previous fiery and menacing language. In the past, he has threatened to “flatten Haifa and Tel Aviv” if Israel attacked Iran, or to “hit Israel 10 times if they strike once”.

It is uncharacteristic for Khamenei to delegate responsibility to “authorities”, as the commander-in-chief. He has consistently influenced major political decisions in the past 35 years as the supreme leader, undermining the role of the president. This could be an attempt to avoid appearing weak for not responding decisively or to deflect blame if a retaliation were to backfire.

President Pezeshkian largely echoed Khamenei’s language, telling a cabinet meeting: “We do not seek war, but we will defend the rights of our nation and country.”

The Israeli strikes were more limited than some observers had been expecting. The US had publicly pressured Netanyahu’s government not to hit oil and nuclear facilities, advice seemingly heeded by Israel.

The Iranian foreign minister said on Sunday that Iran had “received indications” about an impending attack hours before it took place.

“We had received indications since the evening about the possibility of an attack that night,” Abbas Araghchi told reporters, without going into more detail.

Western countries have urged Iran in turn not to respond in order to break the cycle of escalation between both Middle Eastern countries, which they fear could lead to all-out regional war.

Iranian media has carried footage of daily life continuing as normal and framing the “limited” damage as a victory, a choice analysts said was intended to reassure Iranians.

Fighting continued between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and between Israel and the Palestinian armed group Hamas in Gaza.

On Sunday, an Israeli air strike on the town of Sidon in southern Lebanon killed at least eight people, according to local authorities. Late on Sunday Lebanon said at least 21 people had been killed in Israeli strikes on the south of the country.

In Gaza, nine people were killed in an Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter in the al-Shati refugee camp, Palestinians officials said. Palestinian media and the Reuters news agency said three of the dead were Palestinian journalists, citing government officials.

And in Israel, a man was killed and at least 30 injured after a truck hit a bus stop near an Israeli military base north of Tel Aviv, in what authorities said was a suspected terror attack.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday proposed a two-day ceasefire in Gaza, which would involve an exchange of four Israeli hostages for some Palestinian prisoners.

He said that within 10 days of implementing such a temporary ceasefire, talks should resume with the aim of reaching a more permanent one.

But speaking to the BBC’s Arabic Service, a senior Hamas official said its conditions for a ceasefire – rejected by Israel for months – have not changed.

Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinian militant group continued to demand a complete ceasefire, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a serious prisoner swap deal.

“Any agreement that does not guarantee these conditions holds no value,” he added.

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 42,924 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Timothée Chalamet has stunned fans after making a surprise appearance at a lookalike contest for the actor.

The Wonka star crashed the event in New York City attracting a chorus of screaming fans.

Chalamet was seen posing for pictures with his curly-haired doppelgangers during a brief appearance at Washington Square Park.

The city’s police moved on the crowded event which attracted hundreds of people – calling it “unscheduled”.

Variety reported that Chalamet snuck his way through the crowd hiding behind a mask and baseball hat, before creeping up to two lookalikes who had been posing for photos, sparking shrieks across the park.

The contest, organised by YouTuber Anthony Po, promised a $50 (£39) prize for the winner and had attracted thousands of RSVPs to an online invite.

A fan of the Call Me by Your Name and Dune actor, Lauren Klas, described what made a good Chalamet. “It’s all in the nose,” he told AP news agency.

“All of his bone structure, really.”

Contestants were also asked about their French language skills, plans to make the world a better place and romantic intentions with Kylie Jenner, who the star is rumoured to be dating, AP reported.

Eventually Miles Mitchell, 21, from Staten Island, was crowned winner dressed in a Willy Wonka outfit, before he tossed candy to the crowd from a briefcase.

Some attendees reported the event was shut down by police.

In a statement to the BBC, the New York Police Department said it responded to “an unscheduled demonstration at Washington Square Park” on Sunday.

It added that people were taken into custody and later released with a summons.

Earlier this month, a new trailer was released for A Complete Unknown which will see the star depict Bob Dylan.

The biopic is set in the 1960s and follows Dylan’s rise to the top of the charts.

The film is set to be released in December in the US and in January in the UK.

A prolific Vietnamese people smuggler, who entered the UK illegally this year in a small boat, has told the BBC he forges visa documents for other Vietnamese who plan to make the same crossing.

The man, whom we are calling Thanh, is now claiming UK asylum and told us he has spent almost 20 years – his entire adult life – in the smuggling industry.

He has been in prison, led a gang working on the northern coast of France, and claims to have helped more than 1,000 people to risk their lives to cross the Channel.

The self-confessed criminal met the BBC at a secret location to share detailed information about the mechanics of the international smuggling industry.

Thanh walks into the room cautiously, dark eyes moving fast as if searching for possible exit routes. A small, neat, quietly authoritative figure in a black polo neck.

There are handshakes and he says “hello” in a soft, strongly accented voice. Beyond that, we speak almost exclusively through a Vietnamese translator.

After months of phone calls and one brief meeting, the interview takes place on a grey day in a small hotel room, in a northern English town that we are choosing not to name here.

We decided there was a strong public interest in hearing about Thanh’s life in the smuggling trade, which could only be secured in return for agreeing to keep his identity confidential. He fears being recognised not only by the British authorities but by Vietnamese criminals in the UK.

Vietnam emerged in the first months of this year – suddenly and unexpectedly – as the largest single source of migrants seeking to cross the Channel to the UK illegally in small boats.

Many Vietnamese migrants have cited failing businesses and debts at home for their decision to seek work in the UK. Their first step, experts have suggested, is often to access Europe by taking advantage of a legal work visa system in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe.

This is where Thanh’s forgery operation comes in, he says. He helps create the fake paperwork needed to get the legitimate work visas.

“I can’t justify breaking the law. But it’s a very lucrative business,” Thanh said calmly, insisting he doesn’t provide forgeries for people seeking UK visas.

We know from our interviews with Vietnamese smugglers and their clients that people pay between $15,000 (£11,570) and $20,000 (£15,470) to travel from Vietnam to mainland Europe and then to cross the Channel.

It is a dangerous business. More than 50 people have been killed crossing the Channel in small boats already this year, making 2024 the deadliest on record. For the first time, the figures include one Vietnamese.

When our team first made contact with Thanh in mainland Europe earlier this year, we knew he was going to attempt to get to the UK with other Vietnamese. He later let us know he had crossed the Channel from northern France, in a small boat.

Thanh told us he had first flown from Vietnam to Hungary on a legitimate visa – although he had acquired it using forged documents.

• How many people cross the Channel in small boats and how many claim asylum?

He had then flown on to Paris and stayed for a few days in a “safe house”, organised by a Vietnamese smuggling gang on the city’s outskirts. Soon after then, he was taken in a group by minibus to the coast and, finally, put in the hands of one of the Kurdish gangs that control the small boat crossings.

“Once you’re on the boat, you get treated like everyone else,” he said. “It’s overcrowded.”

But the Vietnamese passengers pay three or four times more money to the gangs handling the crossing routes, he told us, “so we get the advantage of being given a place more quickly”.

In fact, our sources suggest the Vietnamese pay roughly twice the usual rate.

The journey Thanh described is now an established route from Vietnam to the UK – a path heavily promoted by smugglers on Facebook, who charge clients for forged documents, flights, buses, and a place on a flimsy rubber boat. Payment for a successful Channel crossing is only made after arrival in the UK.

And Thanh had been lucky, he told us, evading French police patrolling the beaches near Calais, and crossing in an inflatable boat on his first attempt.

Or perhaps he tried several times. Over the months that we were in contact with him, he changed elements of the story he told us – perhaps to cover his tracks and to avoid giving potential clues about his identity to the UK authorities.

Thanh asked for asylum when he was interviewed by a British immigration official – explaining he had left Vietnam because he had got into debt to gangsters when his business failed. His life, he said, was in danger.

He told the official he had been trafficked to the UK in order to work for a gang to pay off his debt.

We had heard similar stories from the Vietnamese we encountered in northern France.

When we first established contact with Thanh, he portrayed himself as a desperate migrant, first stuck in France, and then trapped in the UK’s asylum system, living in a crowded hotel, unable to work, and waiting to learn his fate.

But over time, we began to learn the truth. Or rather, Thanh began to reveal the extent to which his extraordinary life story has been built on a series of elaborate, even outrageous, lies.

Sitting opposite me on a sofa, Thanh admitted that he had not been trafficked to the UK. He had made up that story as part of his asylum claim. And he went much further, claiming that all the Vietnamese migrants he knew of had been told to offer a version of the same lie.

“Yes. A lie. I was not trafficked,” he said.

Migration experts and NGOs have a range of views about the scale of trafficking from Vietnam.

One French prosecutor told us that many Vietnamese were in debt to the smugglers and ended up working in UK cannabis farms. But he played down the idea of an organised supply chain, insisting the smuggling system was more like a haphazard series of stepping stones, with each stage controlled by separate gangs. Finding work in the UK was, he said, about luck and opportunism.

Other experts insist that many, if not most, Vietnamese migrants are victims of trafficking, and that those being taken across the Channel are in fact a cheap and easy source of labour for criminal gangs in the UK. A government registry of people suspected of being victims of modern slavery has consistently shown a high number of Vietnamese.

“It is often not possible, or helpful, to differentiate when a person has been trafficked or smuggled, especially as exploitation can happen at any time,” said Jamie Fookes, UK and Europe advocacy manager at Anti-Slavery International.

“Those crossing will often have to pay either through extortion, or from being exploited in some form of forced labour or criminality on the other side.”

Safe migration routes, he added, would be the only way to prevent traffickers taking advantage of people’s desperation.

But Thanh maintains that most Vietnamese migrants aren’t trafficked, and that it is just a line used to claim asylum.

“That’s the way it’s done. [People lie about being trafficked] in order to continue the asylum process safely,” he said.

Thanh clearly has a motive to lie about this. If he were to be caught forging documents for people who went on to be trafficked, the penalties would be far more serious than for smuggling.

In our reporting we have sought to corroborate the details of Thanh’s story – and in many instances have done so successfully. But a cloud of doubt hangs, inevitably, over elements of it.

Thanh says he first left Vietnam in 2007. He was in his late teens or early twenties. He had already dropped out of school to work in a textile factory in the south of the country. But his family wanted him to head abroad, to Europe, in search of higher wages.

“I borrowed $6,000 (£4,624) from relatives and neighbours [to pay for the trip]. A lot of people had already made the same journey. We Vietnamese have always travelled like this – to wherever it is easier to make money,” he told me.

That journey first took him to a farm outside Prague, in the Czech Republic. He spent more than a year picking spring onions and other vegetables before deciding he could do better in Germany. Crossing the border illegally in a minibus, Thanh says he threw away his passport and other documents, and chose a new name.

And he went a step further.

When he arrived in Berlin, he told the authorities he was 14 years old.

The smugglers who had charged him $1,000 (£771) to get him into Germany had advised him it would be easier if he claimed he was under 16.

“I looked young in those days. Nobody challenged me on that.”

And so, the German authorities promptly sent a man they took to be a boy to a children’s home 45 minutes’ drive from the German capital, where Thanh quickly got to work, selling black-market cigarettes in the local town.

Thanh says he stayed in Germany for about two years. He left the children’s home, found a girlfriend, and soon became a father. But a police crackdown started to affect his income from selling cigarettes. And so, in 2010, he decided to try to reach the UK.

Crossing into France without his new family, he tells us, he threw away his German documents and invented yet another false identity.

By then, thousands of migrants were trying to cross the Channel to the UK by hiding in lorries and shipping containers. Thanh says he made several attempts but was unsuccessful.

“I had bad luck. The patrols were very strict. They used dogs to detect us hiding in a container.” He claims to have reached Dover at one point, only for the truck to be returned with him and a group of other migrants still inside.

Stuck in France, camping in a forest near Dunkirk, Thanh was offered work by Vietnamese people smugglers. It was a job at which, he says, he soon excelled.

“I had to provide food and supplies and arrange to send people to the lorries at particular times. I did not recruit people, but I was paid €300 (£250) for each successful crossing,” said Thanh, insisting that none of his passengers were being trafficked or exploited.

“We just provided a service. No-one was forced. It was illegal, but it was very, very profitable.”

A few years later, the same gang – no longer linked to Thanh, he says – would be involved in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants who were discovered, suffocated, inside a lorry trailer in Essex.

We need to gloss over some details of what Thanh says happened to him over the next few years in order to continue to hide his identity. He rose within a gang to become one of its senior members. But eventually, after being arrested, tried, and imprisoned for several years in Europe, he returned to Vietnam.

At which point, he might have left the smuggling world behind him. But, as he puts it now, his own reputation pulled him back in.

“People in Europe contacted me asking for help,” he told us.

“I’d already helped about 1,000 people to get to the UK successfully, so I was well known for that success.”

In 2017, he says he re-entered the smuggling trade – only this time, Thanh wasn’t smuggling people, he was forging documents for them.

Bank statements, payslips, tax invoices, anything that European embassies required to prove that people applying for student, or work, or business visas had the necessary funds to ensure they planned to return to Vietnam.

“I had a lot of clients. Depending on which embassy it was, we would provide forged bank statements or other documents.

“First, we would submit these online. If certain embassies needed to check with banks, then we’d put real cash into a bank account. We had arrangements with staff at certain banks,” Thanh explained.

“The clients couldn’t access the money themselves, but the bank staff would show the [falsified] details to embassy staff. We worked with lots of different types of Vietnamese banks.”

An expert in Vietnam told us that banking fraud is “quite common”, and there were instances of bank staff colluding with criminals to forge documents.

Thanh tells us he is not proud of his work as a forger – that he had known it was illegal and that he had done it simply to support his family. But at times he sounds boastful, observing that “people trust me, I have never failed”, and insisting his work was “not a serious crime in Vietnam”.

By now, Thanh had a new family in Vietnam. But earlier this year, he decided to leave.

It is not entirely clear why. At one point, he tells us his business had been struggling. He also mentions problems with the Vietnamese police – but he plays them down. Perhaps it is caution. But it strikes us that a lifetime of deception might have affected his ability, or his desire, to distinguish truth from fiction.

So why talk to us? Why risk blowing his cover in the UK? And why continue with his forgery business here, even now?

Thanh portrays himself as a repentant figure who now regrets his life of crime and wants to speak out to prevent other Vietnamese people from making the same mistakes. Above all, he wants to warn them against coming to the UK illegally, saying it is simply not worth it.

“I just want people in Vietnam to understand that it’s not worth borrowing lots of money to travel here. It’s not so easy for illegal arrivals to find work or make money.

“And when they do make money it’s less than in the past. It’s no better than in Germany or other European countries. I’ve been trying to find work in the grey economy, but I’ve not been successful,” he told us.

“If you want to work on a cannabis farm, there are opportunities, but I don’t want to get involved in more illegal activities now. I don’t want to land up in prison.”

Thanh urges the UK and European governments to make a bigger effort to publicise the fact there are no jobs here for illegal migrants. He also blames smuggling gangs for lying to their clients about the realities and opportunities.

• Home Office launches ‘stop the boats’ ad campaign in Vietnam

But he says people back in Vietnam are hard to dissuade, suspecting those trying to warn against travelling to Europe are “being selfish and trying to keep the job opportunities for themselves”.

When we confront Thanh, repeatedly, about his hypocrisy and his own continued involvement in the elements of smuggling industry, he shrugs. It is just business.

“We don’t force anyone to do what they do. They ask us for help, as they would from any business. There’s no trafficking involved. If you have a good reputation, the clients come to you, without threats or violence.”

But what about the dangers involved – the surging number of deaths in the Channel?

“My role is just a small one in a much bigger process.”

Thanh acknowledges that his life, and that of his family back in Vietnam, would be in danger if the smuggling gangs found out he had been talking to us. When pushed, he admits to some regrets.

“If I could start again, I would not leave Vietnam. I think my life would be much better if I had stayed at home. I’ve faced so many struggles. I don’t have a bright future.”

Was he telling the truth?

At the end of our interview, he stands up, ready to leave, and for the first time, a flicker of concern, or perhaps irritation, seems to flit across his face.

Perhaps he had said too much.