A Chinese spacecraft with a three-person crew, including the country’s first female space engineer, has docked after a journey of more than six hours.

The crew will use the homegrown space station as a base for six months to conduct experiments and carry out spacewalks as Beijing gathers experience and intelligence for its eventual mission to put someone on the Moon by 2030.

The launch of Shenzhou 19 is one of 100 China has planned in a record year of space exploration as it tries to outdo its rival, the United States.

The BBC was given rare access to the Jiuquan Satellite launch centre in Gansu and we were just over a kilometre away when the spacecraft blasted off.

Flames shot out of the rocket launcher as it took to the skies, lighting up the Gobi Desert, which was then filled with a deafening roar.

Hundreds of people lined the streets, waving and cheering the names of the taikonauts, China’s word for astronauts, as they were sent off.

Just two years ago, President Xi Jinping declared that “to explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is our eternal dream”.

But some in Washington see the country’s ambition and fast-paced progress as a real threat.

Earlier this year, Nasa chief Bill Nelson said the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to the Moon, where he fears Beijing wants to stake territorial claims.

He told legislators that he believed their civilian space programme was also a military programme.

However, in Dongfeng Space City, a town built to support the launch site, China’s space programme is celebrated.

Every street light is adorned with the national flag.

Cartoon-like astronaut figurines and sculptures sit in the centre of children’s parks and plastic rockets are a centrepiece on most traffic roundabouts.

A huge poster with Xi Jinping on one side and a photo of the Shenzhou spacecraft on the other greets you as you drive into the main compound.

Hundreds have gathered in the dark after midnight to wave flags and brightly coloured lights as the Taikonauts make their last few steps on Earth before heading to the launch site.

The brass band strikes up Ode to the Motherland as young children, kept up late for the occasion, their cheeks adorned with the Chinese flag, all shout in full song.

This is a moment of national pride.

The pilot of this mission, Cai Xuzhe, is a veteran but he’s travelling with a new generation of Chinese-trained taikonauts born in 1990 – including China’s first female space engineer, Wang Haoze.

“Their youthful energy has made me feel younger and even more confident,” he told the gathered media ahead of take-off.

“Inspired by dreams that spark glory, and by glory that ignites new dreams, we assure the party and the people that we will stay true to our mission, with our hearts and minds fully devoted. We will strive to achieve new accomplishments in China’s crewed space programme.”

Standing to his left, beaming, is Song Lingdong.

He recalls watching one of China’s first space station missions as a 13-year-old with “excitement and awe”. He chose to become a pilot in the hope that this is how he could serve his country.

All three convey their deep sense of national pride, and state media has emphasised that this will be its “youngest crew” to date.

The message is clear: this is a new generation of space travellers and an investment in the country’s future.

China has already selected its next group of astronauts and they will train for potential lunar missions as well as to crew the space station.

“I am determined not to let down the trust placed in me,” says Mr Song. “I will strive to make our country’s name shine once again in space.”

China’s name has been “shining brightly” a lot lately when it comes to headlines about its space programme.

Earlier this year, the country achieved a historic first by retrieving rock and soil samples from the far side of the Moon.

In 2021, China safely landed a spacecraft on Mars and released its Zhurong rover – becoming just the second nation to do so.

China also has a fleet of satellites in space and has plans for many more.

In August it launched the first 18 of what it hopes will eventually be a constellation of 14,000 satellites providing broadband internet coverage from space, which it hopes will one day rival SpaceX’s Starlink.

Elon Musk, Starlink’s chief executive, admitted on his own platform X that China’s space programme is far more advanced than people realise.

But others in the US are voicing even greater concerns, as they fear this technology can be weaponised.

The head of US Space Command, General Stephen Whiting, told a space symposium in April that China and Russia were both investing heavily in space at a “breath-taking speed”.

He claimed that since 2018, China has tripled the amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites it has in orbit, building a “kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and target United States and allied military capabilities”.

China’s space exploration is a “collective mission for humanity”, says Li Yingliang, director of the general technology bureau of China’s Manned Space Agency, dismissing US concerns as “unnecessary”.

“I don’t think this should be called a competition… China has long upheld the notion of peaceful use of space in its manned space programme. In the future, we will further develop international co-operation in various aspects of manned space technology, all based on sharing and collaboration,” he adds.

But the new space race is no longer about getting to the Moon. It’s about who will control its resources.

The Moon contains minerals, including rare earths, metals like iron and titanium – and helium too, which is used in everything from superconductors to medical equipment.

Estimates for the value of all this vary wildly, from billions to quadrillions. So it’s easy to see why some see the Moon as a place to make lots of money. However, it’s also important to note that this would be a very long-term investment – and the tech needed to extract and return these lunar resources is some way off, writes the BBC’s science editor Rebecca Morelle.

Chinese experts at the launch centre were keen to point out the benefits of Beijing’s space station experiments.

“We study bones, muscles, nerve cells, and the effects of microgravity on them. Through this research, we’ve discovered that osteoporosis on Earth is actually similar to bone loss in space. If we can uncover unique patterns in space, we might be able to develop special medications to counteract bone loss and muscle atrophy,” said Zhang Wei, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Many of these experimental results can be applied on Earth.”

China is, at times, trying to downplay its advances.

At the launch of a roadmap for its space ambitions, which include building a research station on the Moon, returning samples of Venus’s atmosphere to Earth and launching more than 30 space missions by the middle of this century, Ding Chibiao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the country did not have a great number of achievements “compared to developed nations”.

And even here at the launch centre, they admit to “significant challenges” as they try to land a crew on the Moon.

“The technology is complex, there’s a tight schedule, and there are a lot of challenges,” said Lin Xiqiang, spokesperson for the China Manned Space Agency.

“We’ll keep up the spirit of ‘two bombs and one star’. We will maintain our self-confidence and commitment to self-improvement, keep working together and keep pushing forward. We’ll make the Chinese people’s dream of landing on the Moon a reality in the near future.”

That’s perhaps why President Xi appears to be prioritising the country’s space programme even as the economy is in a slow decline.

And even though they are bringing along international press to witness their progress – there are key restrictions.

We were kept in a hotel three hours from the launch site and transported back and forth by bus, a total journey of 12 hours, rather than being left on site for a few hours.

A simple trip to a friendly local restaurant was carefully guarded by a line of security personnel.

We also noticed a large sign in town holds a stern warning: “It’s a crime to leak secrets. It’s an honour to keep secrets. You’ll be jailed if you leak secrets. You’ll be happy if you keep secrets. You’ll be shot if you sell secrets.”

China is taking no chances with its new technology, as its rivalry with the United States is no longer just here on Earth.

The world’s two most powerful countries could soon be staking territorial claims well beyond this planet.

The area of land surface affected by drought has trebled since the 1980s, a new report into the effects of climate change has revealed.

Forty-eight per cent of the Earth’s land surface had at least one month of extreme drought last year, according to analysis by the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change – up from an average of 15% during the 1980s.

Almost a third of the world – 30% – experienced extreme drought for three months or longer in 2023. In the 1980s, the average was 5%.

The new study offers some of the most up-to-date global data on drought, marking just how fast it is accelerating.

• Drought leaves Amazon basin rivers at all-time low
• How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods
• Drought dries up lake to reveal sunken Greek village

The threshold for extreme drought is reached after six months of very low rainfall or very high levels of evaporation from plants and soil – or both.

It poses an immediate risk to water and sanitation, food security and public health, and can affect energy supplies, transportation networks and the economy.

The causes of individual droughts are complicated, because there are lots of different factors that affect the availability of water, from natural weather events to the way humans use land.

But climate change is shifting global rainfall patterns, making some regions more prone to drought.

The increase in drought has been particularly severe in South America, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.

In South America’s Amazon, drought is threatening to change weather patterns.

It kills trees that have a role to play in stimulating rainclouds to form, which disrupts delicately balanced rainfall cycles – creating a feedback loop leading to further drought.

Yet, at the same time as large sections of the land mass have been drying out, extreme rainfall has also increased.

In the past 10 years, 61% of the world saw an increase in extreme rainfall, when compared with a baseline average from 1961-1990.

The link between droughts, floods and global warming is complex. Hot weather increases the evaporation of water from soil which makes periods when there is no rain even drier.

But climate change is also changing rainfall patterns. As the oceans warm, more water evaporates into the air. The air is warming too, which means it can hold more moisture. When that moisture moves over land or converges into a storm, it leads to more intense rain.

The Lancet Countdown report found the health impacts of climate change were reaching record-breaking levels.

Drought exposed 151 million more people to food insecurity last year, compared with the 1990s, which has contributed to malnutrition. Heat-related deaths for over 65s also increased by 167% compared to the 1990s.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures and more rain are causing an increase in mosquito-related viruses. Cases of dengue fever are at an all-time high and dengue, malaria and West Nile virus have spread to places they were never found before.

An increase in dust storms has left millions more people exposed to dangerous air pollution.

“The climate is changing fast,” says Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown.

“It is changing to conditions that we are not used to and that we did not design our systems to work around.”

For the series Life at 50 degrees, BBC World Service visited some of the hottest parts of the world, where demand for water was already high. We found that extreme drought and rainfall had further squeezed access to water.

Since 2020, an extreme and exceptional agricultural drought has gripped northeast Syria and parts of Iraq.

In the past few years, Hasakah, a city of one million people, has run out of clean water.

“Twenty years ago, water used to flow into the Khabor River but this river has been dried for many years because there is no rain,” says Osman Gaddo, the Head of Water Testing, Hasakah City Water Board. “People have no access to fresh water.”

When they can’t get water, people make their own wells by digging into the ground but the groundwater can be polluted, making people ill.

The drinking water in Hasakah comes from a system of wells 25 kilometres away, but these are also drying and the fuel needed to extract water is in short supply.

Clothes go unwashed and families can’t bathe their children properly, meaning skin diseases and diarrhoea are widespread.

“People are ready to kill their neighbour for water,” one resident tells the BBC. “People are going thirsty every day.”

In South Sudan, 77% of the country had at least one month of drought last year and half the country was in extreme drought for at least six months. At the same time, more than 700,000 people have been affected by flooding.

“Things are deteriorating,” says village elder, Nyakuma. “When we go in the water, we get sick. And the food we eat isn’t nutritious enough”.

Nyakuma has caught malaria twice in a matter of months.

Her family lost their entire cattle herd after flooding last year and now survive on government aid along with anything they can forage.

“Eating this is like eating mud,” says Sunday, Nyakuma’s husband, as he searches floodwater for the roots of waterlillies.

During a drought, rivers and lakes dry up and the soil gets scorched, meaning it hardens and loses plant cover. If heavy rain follows, water cannot soak into the ground and instead runs off, causing flash flooding.

“Plants can adapt to extreme drought, to an extent anyway, but flooding really disrupts their physiology,” adds Romanello. “It is really bad for food security and the agricultural sector.”

Unless we can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and stop the global temperature from rising further, we can expect more drought and more intense rain. 2023 was the hottest year on record.

“At the moment, we are still in a position to just about adapt to the changes in the climate. But it is going to get to a point where we will reach the limit of our capacity. Then we will see a lot of unavoidable impacts,” says Romanello.

“The higher we allow the global temperature to go, the worse things are going to be”.

Bodies have been recovered after torrential rain caused flash floods in south-eastern Spain, the leader of the Valencia region says.

“Dead bodies have been found, but out of respect for the families, we are not going to provide any further data,” Carlos Mazon told reporters.

Spain has been hit by torrential rain and hailstorms, triggering flash flooding across multiple regions.

Six people are missing in Letur, which has a population of less than 1,000, in the eastern province of Albacete, officials say.

The number of bodies recovered was not specified. Rescue efforts are under way and continuing overnight.

Footage uploaded to social media shows floodwaters causing chaos, knocking down bridges and dragging cars through the streets. Other video appeared to show people clinging to trees to avoid being swept away.

Radio and TV stations have reportedly been receiving hundreds of calls for help from people trapped in flooded areas or searching for loved ones, as emergency services struggle to reach some areas.

Emergency services workers are using drones to search for the missing in the badly affected municipality of Letur, local official Milagros Tolon told Spanish public television station TVE.

“The priority is to find these people,” she said.

Spain’s state weather agency AEMET has declared a red alert in the Valencia region and the second-highest level of alert in parts of Andalusia.

Valencia city hall said all schools and sporting events are suspended on Wednesday, and parks will stay closed.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a post on X he was following reports of missing people “with concern”.

He urged people to follow the advice of the authorities, adding that people should “avoid unnecessary trips.

At least 93 people are dead or missing after an Israeli air strike on the town of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry says, in an attack that the United States called “horrifying”.

Rescuers said a five-storey residential building was hit, and videos on social media showed bodies covered in blankets on the floor.

The Israeli military said it was “aware of reports that civilians were harmed today [Tuesday] in the Beit Lahia area”. It added that the details of the incident were being looked into.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been operating in northern Gaza during the past two weeks, particularly in the areas of Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun.

The director of the nearby Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabalia, Hussam Abu Safia, told the AFP news agency that children were being treated at the hospital, which is struggling to treat patients due to a lack of staff and medicines.

“There is nothing left in the Kamal Adwan Hospital except first aid materials after the army arrested our medical team and workers,” Abu Safia said.

The IDF raided the hospital last week, saying it was being used by Hamas fighters.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the US was “deeply concerned by the loss of civilian life in this incident. This was a horrifying incident with a horrifying result”.

He pointed to “reports of two dozen children killed” in the attack.

The “tragic cost to civilians” in the latest strike “is another reminder of why we need to see an end to this war”, Miller said.

Israel says its operations in northern Gaza are designed to prevent Hamas from regrouping and accuses them of embedding among the civilian population, which Hamas denies.

In a statement on Tuesday, it said it killed 40 “terrorists” in Jabalia, and in central Gaza it said it “eliminated many terrorists” over the past 24 hours including some who “attempted to plant explosives near the troops”.

The northern Gaza Strip faces a deepening humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people living in desperate conditions.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said on Friday that “the Israeli military is subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and risk of starvation”.

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

On Monday, Israel’s parliament voted through legislation to ban the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, Unrwa, from operating in the country, sparking warnings the delivery of aid to Gaza could be severely impacted..

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, according to the health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and fighters in its figures.

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

Mount Fuji is still without snow, making it the latest time in the year the mountain has remained bare since records began 130 years ago.

The peaks of Japan’s highest mountain typically get a sprinkling of snow by early October, but unusually warm weather has meant no snowfall has been reported so far this year.

In 2023 snow was first seen on the summit on 5 October, according to AFP news agency.

Japan had its joint hottest summer on record this year with temperatures between June and August being 1.76C (3.1F) higher than an average.

In September, temperatures continued to be warmer than expected as the sub-tropical jet stream’s more northerly position allowed a warmer southerly flow of air over Japan.

A jet stream is a fast-flowing current of air that travels around the planet. It occurs when warmer air from the south meets cooler air from the north.

Nearly 1,500 areas had what Japan’s Meteorological Society classed as “extremely hot” days – when temperatures reach or exceed 35C (95F) last month.

The temperature has to be around freezing for rain to turn into snow.

October has seen the heat ease slightly, but it has still been a warmer than average month.

However, approaching November without snowfall marks the longest wait in the year for a snowcap on the summit since data was first collected in 1894.

The previous record of 26 October has been seen twice before in 1955 and 2016, Yutaka Katsuta, a forecaster at Kofu Local Meteorological Office told AFP.

While a single event cannot automatically be attributed to climate change, the observed lack of snowfall on Mount Fuji is consistent with what climate experts predict in a warming world.

Mount Fuji, south-west of Tokyo, is Japan’s highest mountain at 3,776m (12,460 ft).

The volcano, which last erupted just over 300 years ago, is visible from the Japanese capital on a clear day.

It is featured prominently in historic Japanese artwork, including wood blocks prints.

Last year, more than 220,000 people made the ascent to the peak between July and September.

Some users on X who spend their days sharing content that includes election misinformation, AI-generated images and unfounded conspiracy theories say they are being paid “thousands of dollars” by the social media site.

The BBC identified networks of dozens of accounts that re-share each other’s content multiple times a day – including a mix of true, unfounded, false and faked material – to boost their reach, and therefore, revenue on the site.

Several say earnings from their own and other accounts range from a couple of hundred to thousands of dollars.

They also say they coordinate sharing each other’s posts on forums and group chats. “It’s a way of trying to help each other out,” one user said.

Some of these networks support Donald Trump, others Kamala Harris, and some are independent. Several of these profiles – which say they are not connected to official campaigns – have been contacted by US politicians, including congressional candidates, looking for supportive posts.

On 9 October, X changed its rules so the payments made to eligible accounts with a significant reach are calculated according to the amount of engagement from premium users – likes, shares and comments – rather than the number of ads under their posts.

Many social media sites allow users to make money from their posts or to share sponsored content. But they often have rules which allow them to de-monetise or suspend profiles that post misinformation. X does not have guidelines on misinformation in the same way.

While X has a smaller user base than some sites, it has a significant impact on political discourse. It raises questions about whether X is incentivising users to post provocative claims, whether they’re true or not, at a highly sensitive moment for US politics.

The BBC compared the approximate earnings reported by some of these X users with the amount they would be expected to earn, based on their number of views, followers and interactions with other profiles, and found them to be credible.

Among the misleading posts shared by some of these networks of profiles were claims about election fraud which had been rebutted by authorities, and extreme, unfounded allegations of paedophilia and sexual abuse against the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

Some misleading and false posts that originated on X have also spilled on to other social media sites with a bigger audience, such as Facebook and TikTok.

In one example, an X user with a small following says he created a doctored image purporting to show Kamala Harris working at McDonald’s as a young woman. Other users then pushed evidence-free claims that the Democratic Party was manipulating images of its candidate.

Unfounded conspiracy theories from X about the July assassination attempt on Donald Trump were also picked up on other social media sites.

X did not respond to questions about whether the site is incentivising users to post like this, nor to requests to interview owner Elon Musk.

Freedom Uncut’s content creation lair – where he streams and makes videos – is decorated with fairy lights in the shape of an American flag. He says he is an independent, but would rather Donald Trump becomes president than Kamala Harris.

Free – as his friends call him – says he can spend up to 16 hours a day in his lair posting on X, interacting with the network of dozens of content creators he’s a part of, and sharing AI-generated pictures. He does not share his full name or real identity because he says his family’s personal information has been exposed online, leading to threats.

He is by no means one of the most extreme posters, and has agreed to meet me and explain how these networks on X operate.

He says he has had 11 million views over the past few months since he began posting regularly about the US election. He brings several up on the screen as we chat at his home in Tampa, Florida.

Some are obviously satire – Donald Trump looking like a character in The Matrix as he brushes aside bullets, or President Joe Biden as a dictator. Other AI images are less fantastical – including an image of someone on the roof of their flooded home as fighter jets pass by, with the comment: “Remember that politicians don’t care about you on November 5th.”

The image echoes Mr Trump’s claim that there were “no helicopters, no rescue” for people in North Carolina following Hurricane Helene. The claim has been rebutted by the North Carolina National Guard, which says it rescued hundreds of people in 146 flight missions.

Freedom Uncut says he sees his images as “art” that sparks a conversation. He says he is “not trying to fool anybody” but that he can “do so much more by using AI”.

Since his profile was monetised, he says he can make in the “low thousands” monthly from X: “I think it’s become a lot easier for people to make money.”

He adds that some users he knows have been making more than five figures and claims he could corroborate this by seeing the reach of their posts: “It’s at that point it really does become a job.”

He says it is the “controversial” stuff that tends to get the most views – and compares this to “sensationalist” traditional media.

While he posts “provocative stuff”, he says it is “usually based in some version of reality”. But he suggests that other profiles he sees are happy to share posts they know not to be true. This, he says, is an easy “money-maker”.

Freedom Uncut dismisses concerns about false claims influencing the election, claiming the government “spreads more misinformation than the rest of the internet combined”.

He also says it is “very common” for local politicians to reach out to accounts like his on X for support. He says some of them have chatted to him about appearing on his live streams and spoken to him about creating and sharing memes, AI images and artwork for them.

Could any of these posts – misleading or not – have a tangible impact this election?

“I think that you’re seeing that currently. I think that a lot of the Trump support comes from that,” he says.

In Freedom Uncut’s view, there is “more trust in independent media” – including accounts sharing AI-generated images and misinformation – than in “some traditional media companies”.

Going head-to-head with the pro-Trump accounts Freedom Uncut describes are profiles such as Brown Eyed Susan, who has more than 200,000 followers on X.

She is part of a network of “die-hard” accounts posting content multiple times every hour in support of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. While she uses her first name, she does not share her surname because of threats and abuse she has received online.

Speaking to me from Los Angeles, Susan says she never intended to start making money from her posts – or for her account’s reach to “explode”. Sometimes she posts and re-shares more than 100 messages a day – and her individual posts sometimes reach more than two million users each.

She says she only makes money from her posts because she was awarded a blue tick, which marks paid users on the site and some prominent accounts. “I didn’t ask for it. I can’t hide it, and I can’t return it. So I clicked on monetise,” she tells me, estimating she can make a couple of hundred dollars a month.

Aside from posting about policy, some of her most viral posts – racking up more than three million views – have promoted unfounded and false conspiracy theories suggesting the July assassination attempt was staged by Donald Trump.

She acknowledges that a member of the crowd and the shooter were killed, but says she has genuine questions about Donald Trump’s injury, the security failings, and whether the incident has been properly investigated.

“There’s no way to get to the truth in this. And if they want to call it conspiratorial, they can,” she says.

Susan also shares memes, some of which use AI, taking aim at the Republican contender. Several more convincing examples make him look older or unwell. She says these “illustrate his current condition”.

Others show him looking like a dictator. She maintains that all her images are “obvious” fakes.

Like Freedom Uncut, she says politicians, including congressional candidates, have contacted her for support, and she says she tries to “spread as much awareness” as she can for them.

Following a row over whether Kamala Harris once worked at McDonald’s, a doctored image of her in the fast food chain’s uniform was shared on Facebook by her supporters and went viral.

When some pro-Trump accounts realised it was an edited photo of a different woman in the uniform, it triggered unfounded accusations that the image came from the Democratic Party itself.

An account called “The Infinite Dude” on X appeared to be the first to share the image with the caption: “This is fake”. The person behind the image tells me his name is Blake and that he shared it as part of an experiment. His profile does not have nearly as many followers as the other accounts I have been talking to.

When I ask for evidence that he doctored the image, he told me he has “the original files and creation timestamps”, but he did not share those with me as he says proof does not really matter.

“People share content not because it’s real, but because they want it to be real. Both sides do it equally – they just choose different stories to believe,” he says.

His political allegiance remains unclear and he says this “isn’t about politics”.

X says online that its priority is to protect and defend the user’s voice. The site adds manipulated media labels to some AI-generated and doctored video, audio and images. It also has a feature called Community Notes, which crowdsources fact-checking from users.

During the UK election, X did take action over a network of accounts sharing faked clips that I investigated. In the US election campaign, however, I have received no response to my questions or requests to interview Elon Musk.

That matters – because social media companies like his could affect what unfolds as voters head to the polls.

Marianna Spring investigated this story using her Undercover Voters – five fictional characters based on data from the Pew Research Centre – that allow her to interrogate what some different users are recommended on social media. Their social media accounts are private and do not message real people.

Find out more about them here – and on the BBC Americast podcast on BBC Sounds.

The night before Kamala Harris sets off on a final multi-day swing through the key battleground states that will decide the 2024 presidential election, she gave one last speech, practically in the shadow of the White House.

The venue choice was no accident. Donald Trump held his rally on 6 January 2021 in the same place, speaking to supporters just hours before thousands of them stormed the Capitol and disrupted certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory.

On a mild October night, Harris stood before what her campaign estimated was 70,000 cheering supporters at an event they may hope is a counterpoint to that cold, violent January day.

And in the unlikely chance the symbolism was missed by anyone watching, Harris made it explicit early in her speech.

“We know who Donald Trump is,” she said on Tuesday. “He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election.”

Harris didn’t dwell on the 6 January riot, however. The venue did most of the heavy lifting, providing the subtext to the speech and the point from which Harris could pivot.

While she opened by darkly warning of an “unstable” and “unhinged” Trump “obsessed with revenge”, she turned to focus on what she called her “different path”.

Acknowledging that many undecided American voters “are still getting to know” her after her abbreviated presidential campaign, Harris touched on the highlights of her biography and upbringing.

She went on to hit some of her top policy proposals, including lowering the cost of housing, expanding the child tax credit and adding homecare coverage to government-provided health insurance for the elderly.

She spent even more time talking about abortion and the need to enact legislation that provides national abortion rights – a particularly strong area for Democrats over Republican opponents.

It was, in effect, a trimmed-down version of her Democratic National Convention address – a bookend to the late August speech that the campaign billed as an introduction to Americans.

Democrats were riding high back then, enthusiastic about their new nominee after weeks of despondency and infighting that led to Biden’s decision to abandon his re-election bid.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: All you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Where UK stands on its most valued relationship
• ECONOMY: Tariffs hurt his business. He’s backing Trump anyway
• FACT-CHECK: Would Harris inflation-busting plan work?
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Since then, Harris’s campaign has had ups and downs, and is now locked in what is shaping up to be a photo finish next week.

If the polls are accurate, Harris still has work to be done to win over undecided Americans – and this speech was her last, biggest effort to do so on a prominent stage, with the White House looming over her shoulder.

Setting aside her biographical highlights and policy details, the message her campaign seems to want voters to have in mind on election day is one of contrasts – of division versus unity; bitterness versus hope; partisanship versus co-operation; past versus future.

“I pledge to seek common ground and common sense solutions to make your lives better,” Harris said. “I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”

As she was delivering her speech, however, the current resident of the building behind her made comments that illustrated how difficult her task might be.

Biden, speaking of a derisive joke about Puerto Rico that a comedian made at a Trump rally on Sunday, appeared to refer to Trump supporters as “garbage”.

The president later claimed he was referring only to the comments made by the rally speaker. But the video of his remarks are unclear – and the episode was already distracting from Harris’ event on Tuesday evening.

It’s just one more obstacle Harris will have to overcome, along with assuaging Americans’ concerns about the economy and immigration – where polls indicate Trump has the advantage.

She tried to address those in her speech as well, even if they seemed to take a back seat to more lofty language and pointed attacks.

Her speech framed the election in a way that is to her advantage. Next Tuesday will reveal whether a majority of the American public – or at least a plurality in enough key battleground states – agrees.

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.

The man who broke into the home of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on state charges in California.

David DePape was also convicted on federal charges in May leading to a 30-year prison sentence which will now be served concurrently.

In the state trial, a San Francisco jury found DePape guilty of kidnapping, first-degree burglary and false imprisonment of an elder. The attack left Paul Pelosi, now 84, in hospital for six days with a fractured skull and other injuries.

In a statement after the sentencing, the Pelosi family said that “legal justice has been served”.

“Since the violent break-in and shouts of ‘where’s Nancy?’ two years ago, not a day goes by that we do not think of this devastating assault, its trauma — or the possibility of future attacks,” the family said.

They added they hope the sentence sends a message “that political violence against elected officials or their family members will not be tolerated”.

A lawyer for DePape said he plans to appeal against Tuesday’s ruling.

“This was a really tragic end to a tragic story,” attorney Adam Lipson told reporters after the hearing.

Mr Lipson had unsuccessfully lobbied the judge to hand down a more lenient sentence, arguing that DePape suffered from mental health issues and isolation, which he said made him vulnerable to propaganda.

Judge Harry Dorfman refused, saying that he did not feel sympathy for DePape.

“I feel sympathy for the victim in this case, who’s lucky to be alive,” Judge Dorfman said as he handed down his sentence. “It’s my intention that Mr DePape will never get out of prison, he can never be paroled.”

Video of the incident that was played during the earlier trial showed DePape, a Canadian citizen who has lived in the US for two decades, breaking into the Pelosi home in California armed with a hammer on 28 October 2022.

DePape asked for Mrs Pelosi, who was not at home, when he confronted the lawmaker’s husband inside the couple’s house.

When police officers arrived after responding to a 911 call, they found Mr Pelosi and DePape both gripping the hammer.

Moments later – after being asked to drop the weapon – DePape abruptly struck Mr Pelosi before being wrestled to the ground by officers. The incident was caught on body cameras worn by the officers.

In addition to a fractured skull, Mr Pelosi suffered injuries to his arm and hand. He was struck three times during the attack.

The attacker had admitted during his federal trial that he planned to hold Mrs Pelosi hostage, interrogate her on camera and “break her kneecaps” if she did not admit to what he claimed were her lies.

Mrs Pelosi’s daughter, Christine, read a letter written by her father, in which he said the attack left him with nerve damage and in fear of sleeping alone at home.

When given the chance to address the court at the state trial, DePape spoke at length about conspiracy theories surrounding the 11 September 2001 attack, according to the Associated Press, whose reporters were inside the court room.

DePape also said he believed his government-appointed lawyers were conspiring against him, the AP reported, forcing the judge to interrupt him several times.

US President Joe Biden has called on the Georgian government to respond to international concern at the scale of violations in Saturday’s election and repeal recent Russian-style laws.

The Georgian Dream government in the South Caucasus state, which borders Russia, claimed a fourth term in power after election authorities said it had won almost 54% of the vote.

“I have been deeply alarmed by the country’s recent democratic backsliding,” Biden said, echoing concerns by the European Union, which has frozen Georgia’s bid for membership and described latest developments as “deeply worrying”.

Georgia’s pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, has refused to recognise the result.

She has spoken of a “Russian special operation” to influence the outcome and backed four opposition groups, who say the vote was “stolen” by an increasingly authoritarian party moving Georgia back into Russia’s orbit under billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili.

The US and EU have both called for an investigation into a catalogue of examples of intimidation, violence and ballot-stuffing, as well as alleged flagrant violation of the new electronic voting process.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Georgians had “a right to see that electoral irregularities are investigated swiftly, transparently and independently”.

However, the US president’s statement will sting the Georgian Dream leadership most, because it is most likely to cut through to Georgia’s 3.7 million population.

Georgian Dream’s prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, has sought to shrug off criticism of the poll. He told the BBC there were incidents in only a couple of polling stations, while in all the others “the environment was completely peaceful”.

On Tuesday, he shared a platform with Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who travelled to Tbilisi to praise the vote as “free and democratic”.

Orban made no mention of the numerous allegations of vote violations and his visit annoyed many of the EU’s 27 member states.

Thirteen foreign ministers said he did not speak on behalf of the EU, while Brussels contradicted Orban, making it clear observers had not declared the elections to be free and fair. It said developments in Georgia were “very worrying”.

In recent months, Georgian Dream has passed a Russian-style “foreign agents” law targeting media and non-government groups that receive foreign funding, as well as a law curbing LGBT rights.

Orban, who had congratulated the Georgian Dream government even before the result was declared on Saturday night, also took a swipe at his EU partners.

“European politics has a manual. If liberals win, they say it’s democratic, but if conservatives win, there’s no democracy,” he told reporters after talks with Kobakhidze.

“Here the conservatives won, so these are the disputes – you shouldn’t take them too seriously.”

Viktor Orban arrived in Tbilisi on Monday night, a short distance from a large demonstration of tens of thousands of Georgians protesting against the result.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, who was also in Tbilisi, said it was a disgrace that the EU had not recognised the result of the Georgian vote.

Western exit polls for opposition TV channels suggested that four opposition parties combined had won the election, before the Central Election Commission declared Georgian Dream the winner with a majority in parliament.

Georgian monitoring group “My Vote” has compiled an exhaustive list of the types of violations that its 1,500 observers documented on Saturday and in the run-up to the vote.

My Vote said that ahead of the election, public teachers, cleaners and bus drivers were either asked to send in their IDs or had them confiscated, while families of vulnerable people were offered financial help in return for their vote.

On the day of the election, My Vote says several different schemes were used:

• There was vote-buying and ballot-stuffing, while observers were prevented from doing their job
• Election officials and authorities did not respond to allegations of criminal offences
• The system of inking voters’ fingers was not carried out properly, so voters could vote again elsewhere
• Voters were able to use other people’s ID numbers to cast their ballots with the complicity of election officials
• Voters were able to collect numerous ID numbers by going from polling station to polling station.

President Zourabichvili had already told the BBC that so-called carousel voting had taken place, “when one person can vote 10, 15, 17 times with the same ID”.

My Vote has called for the results from 196 polling stations to be annulled, alleging that they accounted for an extra 300,000 votes.

Georgia’s prime minister has denied allegations of widespread irregularities, telling the BBC the elections were generally “in line with legal principles”. He has also denied that his government is pro-Russian and “pro-Putinist”.

Georgia’s beleaguered election commission has accused its critics of a “manipulative campaign” of disinformation and said it would recount votes in five randomly selected polling stations in each of Georgia’s 84 election districts.

The commission says the US company whose system it used maintained that “duplicating a voter on the voter list is impossible, as each voter is registered only once”.

“It is impossible to vote multiple times with a single ID, undergo double verification, or have a single voter registered across multiple precincts,” the commission added, adding that trying to discredit the system was no more than denying reality.

The Georgian president told Swiss radio that the commission was “completely dominated by the party of power, and non-government organisations… have no influence over it”.

“This state is captured,” said Eka Gigauri of Transparency International, which was involved in the My Vote monitoring mission.

“We know anything might happen… and we know no-one will investigate it or react.”

Singer Shawn Mendes opened up about his sexuality during a performance in Colorado on Monday, saying he’s “just figuring it out like everyone”.

“I don’t really know sometimes and I know other times. It feels really scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that,” he told concert-goers.

According to fan footage of the concert posted on social media, Mendes made the comments before performing an unreleased song which seems to be inspired by how speculation about his sexuality made him feel.

The Canadian singer has previously criticised such speculation, calling out its intrusiveness.

Speaking during the performance Morrison’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Mendes said he had “thought about this for a minute today if I was gonna say something tonight”.

Cheered on by the crowd, he continued: “The truth is that I didn’t get to do a lot of 15-year-old things and discover parts of myself that you do at 15.”

He continued: “There’s this thing about my sexuality, and people have been talking about it so long”, adding that it’s “kind of silly, because I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing, and it’s so hard to just put into boxes.”

“It always felt like such an intrusion on something very personal to me. Something that I was figuring out in myself, something that I had yet to discover and still have yet to discover it.”

“The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone.”

He went onto speak about his unreleased song The Mountain, which includes the lyrics: “You can say I’m too young, you can say I’m too old, you can say I like girls or boys, whatever fits your mold”.

Mendes told the crowd it was important to write that new song because “it felt like a moment where I could address it in a way that felt close to my heart”.

“And I guess I’m just speaking freely now, because I just want to be able to be closer to everyone and just kind of be in my truth,” he added.

In a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone, Mendes spoke about “this massive, massive thing for the last five years about me being gay”.

The next year, he told the Guardian speculation had been “hurtful… I get mad when people assume things about me because I imagine the people who don’t have the support system I have and how that must affect them”.

Mendes has had a number of chart-topping hits in the UK, US and Canada, including the single Señorita, which he released with Camilla Cabello – whom he also previously dated.

The sound of war is loud at night in Beirut’s eastern Achrafieh neighbourhood.

Residents can hear Israeli air strikes hitting the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs, known as Dahieh. Some can even see the explosions lighting up the sky from their balconies.

However, on the streets it is quiet.

Volunteers in uniform are patrolling the predominantly Christian neighbourhood holding walkie-talkies to co-ordinate their operation.

The neighbourhood watch was formed a few years ago following the financial crisis that hit Lebanon to reassure residents worried about crime. But with recent developments, the mission has changed.

“We have concerns with displaced people who are coming in huge numbers to Beirut, and they have a lot of needs, and it is very complicated,” says Nadim Gemayel, who formed the organisation behind the neighbourhood watch.

Communities across Lebanon rallied to help house and feed the hundreds of thousands of families who were displaced when Israel escalated its air campaign against Hezbollah last month before launching a ground invasion of the south.

However, an influx of people from the predominantly Shia Muslim areas where the Iran-backed group has a strong presence – Dahieh, south Lebanon, and the Bekaa Valley in the east – into places which are majority Sunni Muslim and Christian also risk exacerbating sectarian divisions in a country where memories of the 1975-1990 civil war are still vivid.

Recent Israeli attacks on those areas has only served to heighten tensions between residents and the displaced.

A strike on 14 October in the northern town of Aitou, which killed 23 displaced people, shook the Christian community.

Even though the arrival of wealthy Shia families from the south and Dahieh have caused rental prices to skyrocket and boosted the incomes of landlords, many are now concerned that they could be members of Hezbollah and potential Israeli targets.

Some building management firms have sent out forms to residents asking them for identity details, the number of family members who are staying in flats, and vehicles they are using.

In some areas, leaflets have been distributed asking for members of Hezbollah to leave, while individuals known to be affiliated with the group have been told to go.

“There is a feeling of fear. Some citizens are suspicious about who is coming to their region. A lot of people are very afraid that some Hezbollah members live in a building where they are followed by Israel and probably targeted,” Gemayel says.

“This is why we are trying to follow up what’s happening and trying to control this with the army and security forces to secure the refugees and citizens at the same time.”

Although residents may feel reassured by the neighbourhood watch, some worry that such initiative carries echoes of the civil war, when sectarian militias controlled different areas of Beirut.

The civil war, which lasted 15 years and left almost 150,000 people dead, pitted militias linked to Lebanon’s sects against each other.

It began as a conflict between Christian and Palestinian militias, which were allied with Muslim militias. Later, there were conflicts among Christian and Muslim militias. Foreign powers were also drawn in, with Syrian troops moving in and Israel invading twice.

The main Christian militia, the Lebanese Forces, was led by Nadim Gemayel’s father, Bashir, until he was assassinated in Achrafieh in 1982 after being elected the country’s president.

All militias were supposed to be disarmed after the 1989 Taif Accord that ended the civil war, but Hezbollah was exempt because it was fighting Israeli forces occupying southern Lebanon.

When Israeli forces finally withdrew in 2000, Hezbollah resisted pressure to give up its weapons and continued to carry out cross-border attacks on Israel. They fought a month-long war in 2006, which left much of the south and Beirut’s southern suburbs in ruins.

Gemayel has long called for Hezbollah to give up its weapons. After Israel escalated its air campaign, he said the group was “reaping what it sowed over the past 20 years” – but also warned that the Lebanese people would “pay a heavy price in destruction and devastation”.

In the mixed neighbourhood of Hamra in western Beirut, the scene is completely different.

Unlike in the predominantly Christian side of Beirut, many schools in Hamra have been turned into shelters for displaced families.

Members of the Syrian Socialist National Party, an ally of Hezbollah which has a presence in Hamra, rushed to open empty buildings, including some newly built apartment blocks, to house displaced families.

The move caused tensions between some buildings’ owners and displaced families who broke into them. Landlords expressed fears that the new arrivals would eventually refuse to leave the free accommodation.

In a six-floor 1960s-style building in the heart of Hamra, a designer who wished to remain anonymous has her studio set on the top floor. She says some families broke into the building and were squatting in the empty flats.

“At beginning, we had 20 people. Now, we have 100 living in the building,” she tells me.

“I have great sympathy for them and don’t want women and children to stay in the street. I won’t ask them to leave until the government finds a solution, but this is not sustainable.”

She is also worried about the potential social impact on the area.

The new arrivals are all from the Shia community and follow strict religious rules, with the women wearing the chador, a full-body cloak that covers everything but their faces.

“I don’t have a problem with any religion, but they also should accept my style of living as an atheist,” she says.

The mood is indeed changing in Hamra, which is home to multiple cultures and faiths.

Thousands of people are believed to have moved there.

It is hard to drive or even walk through the neighbourhood because of the number of cars and motorcycles causing traffic jams.

The night-life has also changed, with the party- and bar-goers replaced by people queueing for fast food and shisha cafes.

Outside shelters, men and women sit on the pavement, smoking shishas and watching news on their mobile phones or even TVs late into the night – something residents have complained about.

But increasing numbers of building owners are emptying people from their properties.

Fatima al-Haj Yousef, who arrived with her husband and three children from the Bekaa Valley, is worried about where to go next. She has stayed in this building for the past three weeks.

“We are happy to sign documents confirming that when the war is over, we will leave, but they sent the police to force us out,” she says. Fatima is mainly worried about her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter who suffers with cancer and needs medication.

“I just need to be somewhere safe and clean for my daughter. The schools are packed full of people, and everyone is smoking indoors.”

Fatima didn’t feel there was any sectarian tension against her as a Shia, but another man who stayed in the building with his five children had a different view.

“If they accept to pay rent, we already can pay rent. But [the landlord] didn’t accept… She wants us to go. It’s not only about the building. It’s something else. I think, and this is my opinion, she wants to kill the [Shia] Muslims here.”

This view was echoed by Daniel, a Hezbollah social worker who was helping finding alternative housing for the families.

“They think that resistance is weakened by the death of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, but we are all Nasrallah,” he says, referring to the Hezbollah leader killed by Israel in Dahieh last month.

He believes that this building is being cleared because the inhabitants are displaced families, who are predominantly Shia and are supporters of what he describes as “the resistance movement” – or Hezbollah.

Many here believe that Israel won’t stop until Hezbollah is completely disarmed.

“Either all Lebanon will be destroyed by Israel which will be catastrophic, or they [Hezbollah] surrender and give up their arms, and we build a Lebanese state that will be based on the Taif agreement, and everyone has equal rights and obligations,” says Nadim Gemayel.

Israel’s parliament voted on Monday evening to ban the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) from operating within Israel and occupied East Jerusalem.

Contact between Unrwa employees and Israeli officials will be banned, crippling its ability to operate in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Almost all of Gaza’s population of more than two million people are dependent on aid and services from the agency.

The move has faced widespread condemnation, with Unrwa warning the new law could see aid supply chains “fall apart” in the coming weeks.

Israel has defended the move, repeating its allegation that a number of the agency’s staff were involved in Hamas’s 7 October attacks last year, which killed 1,200 people.

However, Israel’s opposition to Unrwa also goes back decades.

Founded in 1949, the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or Unrwa, works in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, initially caring for the 700,000 Palestinians who were forced from or fled their homes after the creation of the state of Israel.

Over the decades, Unrwa has grown to become the biggest UN agency operating in Gaza. It employs some 13,000 people there and is key to humanitarian efforts.

It is funded primarily by voluntary donations by UN member states, with the UN itself providing some direct funds.

It distributes aid and runs shelters and key infrastructure – such as medical facilities, teacher training centres and almost 300 primary schools.

Since the war in Gaza began, the agency says it has distributed food parcels to almost 1.9 million people. It has also offered nearly six million medical consultations across the enclave over the course of the conflict.

More than 200 Unrwa staff have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023 in the course of those duties, according to the agency.

Unwra has long been criticised by Israel, with many there objecting to its very existence.

The fate of refugees has been a core issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with Palestinians harbouring a dream of returning to homes in historic Palestine, parts of which are now in Israel.

Israel rejects their claim and criticises the set-up of Unrwa for allowing refugee status to be inherited by successive generations.

It says this entrenches Palestinians as refugees, and encourages their hopes of a right of return.

The Israeli government has also long denounced the agency’s teaching and textbooks for, in its view, perpetuating anti-Israel views.

In 2022, an Israeli watchdog said Unrwa educational material taught students that Israel was attempting to “erase Palestinian identity”.

The European Commission identified what it called “anti-Semitic material” in the schoolbooks, “including even incitement to violence”, and the European Parliament has called repeatedly for EU funding to the Palestinian Authority to be conditional on removing such content.

Unrwa has previously said reports about its educational material were “inaccurate and misleading” and that many of the books in question were not used in its schools.

After the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel, allegations that some Unrwa staff were involved further amplified calls in Israel for the agency to be banned.

The military claimed that in total, more than 450 Unrwa staff were members of “terrorist organisations”. In the wake of the allegations, some 16 Western countries temporarily suspended funding for the aid agency.

The UN investigated Israel’s claim and fired nine people, but it said Israel had not provided evidence for more allegations and Unrwa denied any wider involvement with Hamas.

Speaking on Monday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated the allegations, writing on X that “Unrwa workers involved in terrorist activities against Israel must be held accountable.”

Under the new law – which was approved by 92 MPs and opposed by just 10 – contact between Unrwa employees and Israeli officials will be banned.

While most of Unrwa’s projects take place in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, it relies on agreements with Israel to operate. This includes moving aid through checkpoints between Israel and Gaza.

Along with the Palestinian Red Crescent, Unrwa handles almost all aid distribution in Gaza through 11 centres across the enclave. It also provides services to 19 refugee camps in the West Bank.

Unrwa director William Deere told the BBC that on a practical level, the ban on interacting with Israeli officials meant it would become almost impossible for the agency’s staff to operate in the country.

“We won’t be able to move in Gaza without being subject to possible attack, international staff won’t be able to get visas any longer,” he said.

The executive director of the UN’s World Food Programme said without Unrwa’s presence in Gaza, aid agencies will be unable to distribute essential food and medicine.

“They do all the work on the ground there,” Cindy McCain told the BBC. “We don’t have the contacts. We don’t have the ability to get to know the contacts, because things are so intensely difficulty there.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu said on Monday that “sustained humanitarian aid must remain available in Gaza” despite Unrwa’s ban, and that Israel would work with its international partners to ensure this.

But on Monday the US state department said Israel must do “much more” to allow international aid to enter Gaza. The warning came two weeks after it gave Israel 30 days to boost supplies, or risk seeing some military assistance cut.

People in war-torn Gaza are already struggling with a deep humanitarian crisis – but now they fear it will get much more difficult because of Israel’s ban on the biggest UN agency which operates there.

“Unrwa means everything to us: it is our life, our food, our drink and our medical care. When it closes, there will be no flour. If my son gets sick, where will I go?” asks Yasmine el-Ashry in Khan Younis.

“Banning Unrwa is another war for the Palestinian people,” said registered refugee Saeed Awida.

“They want to exterminate the Palestinian people and not provide us with humanitarian services.”

Despite international opposition, in Israel’s parliament there was wide support for the new legislation, which will prevent Israeli officials being in contact with Unrwa – the UN’s relief and works agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East.

The agency is accused of being complicit with Hamas.

“A terrorist organisation has completely taken over it,” claims Sharren Haskel from the opposition National Unity Party – a co-sponsor of the bill.

“If the United Nations is not willing to clean this organisation from terrorism, from Hamas activists, then we have to take measures to make sure they cannot harm our people ever again.”

Unrwa insists on its own neutrality.

It says that if the new Israeli laws against it are implemented as planned in three-months’ time, the effect will be profound, particularly in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“It would essentially make it impossible for us to operate in Gaza,” Sam Rose, Unrwa’s Gaza deputy director, has said.

“We wouldn’t be able to bring in supplies, because that has to take place in co-ordination with Israeli officials. It wouldn’t further be able for us to manage our movements safely in and out of Gaza around checkpoints, but just in and around conflict zones.”

He points out that the protected status of Unrwa schools, clinics and other buildings where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been sheltering would effectively be lost.

Israeli media suggest that there were warnings from diplomats and the security establishment about the consequences of taking action against Unrwa.

Israel stands accused of being in breach of the UN charter and its obligations under international humanitarian law.

However, ultimately domestic politics outweighed these considerations

Unrwa was set up in 1949 by the UN General Assembly in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war which followed the creation of the state of Israel.

It helped some 700,000 Palestinians who had fled or been forced from their homes.

Seven decades on, with the descendants of those original refugees registered, the number of Palestinians supported by Unrwa has grown to six million across Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

It helps them with aid, assistance, education and health services.

The agency has long been a lightning rod for Israeli criticism, for example with allegations that the textbooks used in its schools promote hatred of Israel.

However, this has grown dramatically since Hamas’s 7 October attack last year.

Last week, Unrwa confirmed that a Hamas commander killed in an Israeli strike had been an employee since 2022.

He was apparently filmed leading the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im.

The UN launched an investigation after Israel charged that 12 Unrwa staff took part in the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel; seven more cases later came to light.

In August, Unrwa said that nine staff members out of the thousands it employs in Gaza may have been involved in the attacks and had been fired.

“We have taken immediate and strong and direct action against any allegations that we have received,” maintains Sam Rose.

Israel has long complained that the existence of Unrwa perpetuates the problem of Palestinian refugees – a core issue in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

UN officials counter that this can only be solved as part of a negotiated political settlement.

But in Gaza, where most of the 2.3 million population are registered refugees, the new actions against Unrwa are also seen as a troubling attack on their status.

“I am telling you that the word “refugee” will disappear. They do not want the word refugee. Israel is looking for this,” Mohammed Salman from Deir al-Balah told the BBC.

At least 60 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, the Lebanese health ministry said.

Two children were among those killed in strikes which targeted 16 areas in the Baalbek region, officials said.

The ministry said 58 people were wounded, adding rescue efforts were still under way in the valley, which is a Hezbollah stronghold.

The Israeli military has not yet commented.

Israel has carried out thousands of air strikes across Lebanon over the past five weeks, targeting what it says are Hezbollah’s operatives, infrastructure and weapons.

Governor Bachie Khodr called the attacks the “most violent” in the area since Israel escalated the conflict against Hezbollah last month.

Unverified video posted on social media showed damage to buildings and forests ablaze, as rescuers searched for the injured.

In the town of Boudai, videos on social media appeared to show residents pleading for heavy equipment to be sent to help rescue people believed to be trapped.

The regional head of Baalbek’s Civil Defence crews told the BBC that the air strikes were like a “ring of fire”.

‘It was a very violent night,” Bilal Raad said.

“It was like a ring of fire has suddenly surrounded the area.”

He added the attacks had targeted “residential quarters where civilians live or near them”, and said a lack of equipment had hampered search and rescue efforts.

The town of Al-Allaq was hardest hit with 16 people killed, all from the same family, he said.

Baalbek is home to the ancient Roman ruins of Heliopolis – a UNESCO World Heritage site – where, in Roman times, thousands of pilgrims went to worship three deities.

A UNESCO spokesperson said that analysis of satellite images had not revealed any damage within the perimeter of the inscribed site of Baalbek.

They added they were “closely following the impact of the ongoing crisis in Lebanon on the cultural heritage sites”.

Earlier on Monday, Israeli air strikes on the coastal city of Tyre left seven dead and 17 injured, Lebanon’s health ministry said. Israel issued a warning for people to leave the centre of the city.

Hezbollah said it clashed with Israeli troops near Lebanon’s southern border on Monday and fired rockets at a naval base inside Israel near Haifa.

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

The Lebanese health ministry says more than 2,700 people have been killed and more than 12,400 wounded in Lebanon since then.

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

Lebanon’s government says up to 1.3 million people have been internally displaced as a result of the conflict.

Hezbollah has announced the group’s deputy secretary general will become its new head.

Naim Qassem replaces long-term leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in Beirut last month.

He is one of the few senior Hezbollah leaders who remains alive, after Israel killed most of the group’s leadership in a series of attacks.

The appointment comes as the conflict in Lebanon intensified in recent weeks.

For more than 30 years, Naim Qassem was Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general and one of the group’s most recognised faces.

Hezbollah said he was elected by the Shura Council, in accordance with the group’s rules. His whereabouts are unclear, however some reports suggest he has fled to Iran, which is Hezbollah’s main supporter.

He was born in Beirut in 1953 to a family from Lebanon’s south.

Qassem was one of Hezbollah’s founding members and since Nasrallah’s death in an Israeli air strike he has made three televised addresses.

In one speech, he said a ceasefire was the only way Israel could guarantee the return of its residents to the north.

Announcing Qassem’s promotion, Hezbollah released a statement describing him as “bearing the blessed banner in this march”.

The statement also honoured the late Nasrallah and others killed in the conflict.

The new Hezbollah leadership was expected to be passed to cleric Hashem Safieddine, but on 22 October it was revealed that he had been killed in an Israeli air strike nearly three weeks prior.

Reacting to Qassem’s appointment on social media, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described it as a “temporary appointment” and “not for long”.

• Follow live updates on the conflict
• What we know about Israel’s attack on Iran
• Israel-Hezbollah conflict in maps

Israel has carried out air strikes across Lebanon in recent weeks, targeting what it says are Hezbollah’s operatives, infrastructure and weapons.

On Monday night, the Israeli military carried out air strikes in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, an area where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

The Lebanese health ministry said at least 60 people were killed and more than 50 wounded.

The Israeli military has yet to comment on the attack.

Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah after almost a year of cross-border hostilities sparked by the war in Gaza, saying it wanted to ensure the safe return of residents of border areas displaced by Hezbollah rocket, missile and drone attacks.

Over the past year, more than 2,700 people have been killed and nearly 12,500 injured in Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry.

Hezbollah has attacked Israel with thousands of rockets and drones over the same period, and at least 59 people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.

Satellite images analysed by BBC Verify show damage to a number of military sites in Iran from Israeli air strikes on Saturday.

They include sites experts say were used for missile production and air defence, including one previously linked to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Satellite imagery following the Israeli strikes shows damage to buildings at what experts say is a major weapons development and production facility at Parchin, about 30km (18.5 miles) east of Tehran.

The site has been linked to rocket production according to experts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Comparing high-resolution satellite imagery taken on 9 September with an image captured on 27 October, it appears that at least four structures have been significantly damaged.

One of these structures, known as Taleghan 2, has been previously linked to Iran’s nuclear programme by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

In 2016 the IAEA found evidence of uranium particles at the site, raising questions about banned nuclear activity there.

Another site apparently targeted in the Israeli air strikes is at Khojir, about 20km north-west of Parchin.

Fabian Hinz of the ISS says “Khojir is known as the area with the highest concentration of ballistic missile-related infrastructure within Iran.”

It was the site of a mysterious large explosion in 2020.

Satellite photos show at least two buildings in the complex appear to have been severely damaged.

Analysts from Sibylline, a risk intelligence company, concluded that damage to Iranian facilities believed to be linked to rocket fuel production at both Parchin and Khojir will ultimately undermine Iran’s ability to “fire another salvo of the scale necessary to breach Israeli air defences”.

A military site at Shahroud, about 350km to the east of Tehran, has also sustained damage, according to satellite imagery taken after the Israeli strikes.

Located in the northern province of Semnan, this area is significant because it’s been involved in the production of long-range missile components, according to Fabian Hinz of the IISS.

Nearby is the Shahroud Space Centre, controlled by the Revolutionary Guards Corps, from which Iran launched a military satellite into space in 2020.

Israel has claimed that it successfully targeted Iran’s aerial defence systems at number of locations but it’s difficult to confirm this with the satellite imagery available.

We have obtained satellite imagery which appears to show damage to a site described by experts as a radar installation.

It’s located on Shah Nakhjir mountain close to the western city of Ilam, and Jeremy Binnie, Middle East specialist at Janes, a defence intelligence company, says this may have been a newly updated radar defence system.

The site itself was established decades ago, but satellite pictures analysed by open source experts show it has undergone major renovation in recent years.

We’ve also identified what appears to be damage to a storage unit at the Abadan Oil Refinery based in the south-western province of Khuzestan.

However, we don’t know what caused it and there is likely to be damage in some areas across Iran caused by debris or misfiring defence systems.

The New York Times cited Israeli officials as saying that the Abadan oil refinery was one of the sites targeted in its air strikes on Saturday morning.

Iranian authorities confirmed on Saturday that Khuzestan province had been targeted by Israel.

Abadan oil refinery is the country’s largest, capable of producing 500,000 barrels a day, according to its chief executive.

Satellite imagery isn’t always conclusive in identifying damaged structures.

For example, a photograph we have verified showing smoke rising near Hazrat Amir Brigade Air Defence base suggested it had been successfully targeted. But satellite imagery of the area captured on Sunday has too many shadows to confirm any damage to the site.

Iran launched a missile attack on Israel at the start of October for the second time this year, after firing 300 missiles and drones in April.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

When US President Joe Biden walked through Kyiv in February 2023 on a surprise visit to show solidarity with Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart, air sirens were wailing. “I felt something… more strongly than ever before,” he later recalled. “America is a beacon to the world.”

The world now waits to see who takes charge of this self-styled beacon after Americans make their choice in next week’s presidential election. Will Kamala Harris carry on in Biden’s footsteps with her conviction that in “these unsettled times, it is clear America cannot retreat”? Or will it be Donald Trump with his hope that “Americanism, not globalism” will lead the way?

We live in a world where the value of US global influence is under question. Regional powers are going their own way, autocratic regimes are making their own alliances, and the devastating wars in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere are raising uncomfortable questions about the value of Washington’s role. But America matters by dint of its economic and military strength, and its major role in many alliances. I turned to some informed observers for their reflections on the global consequences of this very consequential election.

“I cannot sugarcoat these warnings,” says Rose Gottemoeller, Nato’s former deputy secretary general. “Donald Trump is Europe’s nightmare, with echoes of his threat to withdraw from Nato in everyone’s ears.”

Washington’s defence spending amounts to two-thirds of the military budgets of Nato’s 31 other members. Beyond Nato, the US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, including China and Russia.

Trump boasts he’s playing hardball to force other Nato countries to meet their spending targets, which is 2% of their GDP – only 23 of the member nations have hit this target in 2024. But his erratic statements still jar.

If Harris wins, Ms Gottemoeller believes “Nato will no doubt be in good Washington hands.” But she has a warning there too. “She will be ready to continue working with Nato and the European Union to achieve victory in Ukraine, but she will not back off on [spending] pressure on Europe.”

But Harris’s team in the White House will have to govern with the Senate or the House, which could both soon be in Republican hands, and will be less inclined to back foreign wars than their Democratic counterparts. There’s a growing sense that no matter who becomes president, pressure will mount on Kyiv to find ways out of this war as US lawmakers become increasingly reluctant to pass huge aid packages.

Whatever happens, Ms Gottemoeller says, “I do not believe that Nato must fall apart.” Europe will need to “step forward to lead.”

The next US president will have to work in a world confronting its greatest risk of major power confrontation since the Cold War.

“The US remains the most consequential international actor in matters of peace and security”, Comfort Ero, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, tells me. She adds a caveat, “but its power to help resolve conflicts is diminished.”

Wars are becoming ever harder to end. “Deadly conflict is becoming more intractable, with big-power competition accelerating and middle powers on the rise,” is how Ms Ero describes the landscape. Wars like Ukraine pull in multiple powers, and conflagrations such as Sudan pit regional players with competing interests against each other, and some more invested in war than in peace.

America is losing the moral high ground, Ms Ero says. “Global actors notice that it applies one standard to Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and another to Israel’s in Gaza. The war in Sudan has seen terrible atrocities but gets treated as a second-tier issue.”

A win by Harris, she says, “represents continuity with the current administration.” If it’s Trump, he “might give Israel an even freer hand in Gaza and elsewhere, and has intimated he could try to cut a Ukraine deal with Moscow over Kyiv’s head.”

On the Middle East, the Democratic candidate has repeatedly echoed Mr Biden’s firm backing of Israel’s “right to defend itself.” But she’s also made a point of emphasising that “the killing of innocent Palestinians has to stop.”

Trump has also declared it’s time to “get back to peace and stop killing people.” But he’s reportedly told the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to “do what you have to do.”

The Republican contender prides himself on being a peacemaker. “I will have peace in the Middle East, and soon,” he vowed in an interview with Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya TV on Sunday night.

He’s promised to expand the 2020 Abraham Accords. These bilateral agreements normalised relations between Israel and a few Arab states, but were widely seen to have sidelined the Palestinians and ultimately contributed to the current unprecedented crisis.

On Ukraine, Trump never hides his admiration for strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He’s made it clear he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and with it the US’s hefty military and financial support. “I’ll get out. We gotta get out,” he insisted in a recent rally.

In contrast, Harris has said: “I have been proud to stand with Ukraine. I will continue to stand with Ukraine. And I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war.”

But Ms Ero worries that, no matter who’s elected, things could get worse in the world.

“The biggest shock to the global economy for decades.” That’s the view of leading China scholar Rana Mitter regarding Trump’s proposed 60 percent tariffs on all imported Chinese goods.

Imposing steep costs on China, and many other trading partners, has been one of Trump’s most persistent threats in his “America first” approach. But Trump also lauds what he sees as his own strong personal connection with President Xi Jinping. He told the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board he wouldn’t have to use military force if Beijing moved to blockade Taiwan because the Chinese leader “respects me and he knows I’m [expletive] crazy.”

But both leading Republicans and Democrats are hawkish. Both see Beijing as being bent on trying to eclipse America as the most consequential power.

But Mr Mitter, a British historian who holds the ST Lee Chair in US-Asia relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School, sees some differences. With Ms Harris he says, “relations would likely develop in a linear fashion from where they are now.” If Trump wins, it’s a more “fluid scenario.” For example, on Taiwan, Mr Mitter points to Trump’s ambivalence about whether he would come to the defence of an island far from America.

China’s leaders believe both Harris and Trump will be tough. Mr Mitter sees it as “a small group of establishment types favour Harris as ‘better the opponent you know.’ A significant minority see Trump as a businessman whose unpredictability might just mean a grand bargain with China, however unlikely that seems.”

America and… the Middle East

The latest episode of the Global Story looks at what a Trump or Harris presidency could mean for violence in Israel, Gaza and the surrounding region.

Listen now on BBC Sounds. If you are outside the UK, listen wherever you get your podcasts.

“The US election is hugely consequential not just for its citizens but for the whole world because of the pressing imperative of the climate and nature crisis,” says Mary Robinson, chair of the Elders, a group of world leaders founded by Nelson Mandela, and former president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“Every fraction of a degree matters to avert the worst impacts of climate change and prevent a future where devastating hurricanes like Milton are the norm,” she added.

But as Hurricanes Milton and Helene raged, Trump derided environmental plans and policies to confront this climate emergency as “one of the greatest scams of all time.” Many expect him to pull out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement as he did in his first term.

However, Ms Robinson believes Trump cannot stop the momentum now gathering steam. “He cannot halt the US energy transition and roll back the billions of dollars in green subsidies… nor can he stop the indefatigable non-federal climate movement.”

She also urged Harris, who still hasn’t fleshed out her own stance, to step up “to show leadership, build on the momentum of recent years, and spur other major emitters to pick up the pace.”

“The outcome of the US election holds immense significance, given the unparalleled influence the United States wields, not just through its military and economic might, but through its potential to lead with moral authority on the global stage,” says Martin Griffiths, a veteran conflict mediator, who, until recently, was the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

He sees greater light if Harris wins, and says that “a return to Trump’s presidency marked by isolationism and unilateralism, offers little but a deepening of global instability.”

But he has criticism, too, for the Biden-Harris administration, citing its “hesitancy” over the deteriorating situation in the Middle East.

Aid agency bosses have repeatedly condemned Hamas’s murderous October 7th assault on Israeli civilians. But they’ve also repeatedly called on the US to do much more to end the profound suffering of civilians in Gaza as well as in Lebanon.

Biden and his top officials continually called for more aid to flow into Gaza, and did make a difference at times. But critics say the aid, and the pressure, was never enough. A recent warning that some vital military assistance could be cut pushed the decision until after the US elections.

The US is the single largest donor when it comes to the UN system. In 2022, it provided a record $18.1bn (£13.9bn).

But in Trump’s first term, he axed funding for several UN agencies and pulled out of the World Health Organisation. Other donors scrambled to fill the gaps – which is what Trump wanted to happen.

But Griffths still believes America is an indispensable power.

“In a time of global conflict and uncertainty, the world longs for the US to rise to the challenge of responsible, principled leadership… We demand more. We deserve more. And we dare to hope for more.”

For the growing number of African asylum seekers and economic migrants in the US, the upcoming presidential election could reshape their entire future.

“We deserve safety,” says Dr Yves Kaduli, a 38-year-old asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo who lives in the US.

“I have a dream that I will defend those that are persecuted,” he adds in a BBC interview.

Dr Kaduli says that in 2014, he fled eastern DR Congo – which has been wracked by conflict for almost three decades – after being kidnapped and tortured.

He had been working as a doctor at Cifunzi Hospital in Kalonge town and saw the effects of the conflict up-close.

“Women were raped. I saw it. I felt it in my body,” he tells the BBC.

Dr Kaduli says that horrified at the civilian casualties, he and many of his colleagues, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr Denis Mukwege, participated in protests against the killings and rapes by armed groups, criticising then-President Joseph Kabila’s government for its failure to guarantee the safety of people.

The medic says this led to him being targeted by unknown men.

“They came, they took me and another colleague by force during our night shift,” Dr Kaduli recalls, adding that they were then taken to a makeshift camp in a nearby forest where they were beaten, tortured and threatened with death.

Dr Kaduli says that after being held for a day he managed to escape and decided he had to get out.

Leaving his mother and young son behind, Dr Kaduli says he began what would be a five-year journey, passing first through neighbouring Rwanda, then flying to Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and finally arriving at the US-Mexico border in 2019.

“I remained on the border for at least a month, we were living in small tents in inhumane conditions.”

Dr Kaduli says he then succeeded in crossing into the US and was detained for 15 months, before being released.

He now lives in Virginia working as a medical technician, awaiting a decision on his asylum case.

Dr Kaduli is one of thousands of African migrants who against all odds complete the long journey to reach the US-Mexico border each year. It is a number that is rising.

But with many Americans saying immigration is a top concern in this election, and both candidates promising to crack down at the border, African asylum seekers are worried the public may turn against them.

“We see our politicians criminalise our status, demonise our community and being a president, they can decide our future,” Dr Kaduli tells the BBC.

In 2022, around 13,000 African migrants were recorded at the US-Mexico border, according to US Customs and Border protection data. By 2023, this figure had quadrupled to 58,000.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports a sharp increase in asylum applications from West African countries such as Senegal, Mauritania and Guinea since 2022 at the same border.

New asylum applications from Senegalese nationals alone jumped from 773 in 2022, to 13,224 in 2024.

Although relatively stable, more than one third of the population in Senegal live in poverty, according to the World Bank.

• ‘I found out on social media that my son had died’

A growing number of young Senegalese choose to migrate to the US rather than face the more dangerous route to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea.

They are opting for an increasingly popular route – which is being shared through social media, including TikTok – through visa-friendly Nicaragua.

In September 2023, more than 140 Senegalese people were deported back home after crossing the Mexico-US border.

People are coming to the US for mixed reasons, says Kathleen Bush-Joseph from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think-tank funded by research grants and foundations.

“People can be fleeing persecution and fleeing economic circumstances that make it difficult to feed their children. There are incentives to apply for asylum because they can get a work permit while they wait and that can really create a draw for people seeking to improve their lives,” she says.

Successfully claiming asylum in the US is particularly challenging for African migrants.

Language barriers, a lack of community upon arrival and a lack of awareness of African conflicts make the stringent process even harder for Africans, says Ms Bush-Joseph.

“Judges and attorneys are often not familiar with the situations in some of the African countries that people are fleeing,” she tells the BBC.

There are also risks for those who are deported.

In 2022, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report alleging that dozens of asylum seekers from Cameroon were imprisoned, tortured and raped after being sent back from the US border.

“People were deported directly back to harm and persecution and in contexts where there are ongoing conflicts and wide-spread human rights violations,” HRW researcher Lauren Seigbert tells the BBC.

“It’s just a huge risk to send people back,” she adds.

Nils Kinuani, a federal policy manager at African Communities Together, an organisation that supports African asylum seekers and refugees in the US, says rhetoric around immigration in the election campaign has caused “great fear” among his community.

“People are fearful. There are concerns that refugee programmes could come under attack,” Mr Kinuani says.

His organisation and others are calling for more legal routes to help African migrants who are terrified of deportation.

One option is humanitarian parole status, a legal protection for foreign nationals from countries facing crises such as conflicts or natural disasters.

It can be issued by the US government to allow people at risk to live and work in the US temporarily – current programmes include Ukraine, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Afghanistan.

There are no official humanitarian parole programmes in place between the US and any African country.

Mr Kinuani adds that there is some resentment over the way that refugees from Ukraine have been treated, compared to other nationalities.

Just a few weeks after the war broke out in Ukraine, nationals fleeing the conflict were eligible to apply for humanitarian parole, he says.

“Ukrainian communities didn’t even need to ask or advocate for humanitarian parole. For a country like Sudan, we have to push.”

Since April 2023, the ongoing war in Sudan has forced nine million people from their homes.

Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have put controlling immigration and solving the US-Mexico border crisis high up on their list of campaign promises.

If elected, Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump would carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history” and reinstate border policies reminiscent of his first term in office, according to the official Republican National Committee’s 2024 Platform.

Meanwhile, the Democratic candidate and Vice-President Kamala Harris has promised to revive a bipartisan border security bill that failed in Congress earlier this year.

The bill would “increase asylum staffing” and ensure a “faster and fairer” asylum process, according to the White House.

But it has received criticism from human rights groups and the UN.

The outgoing administration of President Joe Biden – of which Harris is a part – has already moved to crack down on migrants at the border.

Under an executive order issued in June, officials can quickly remove migrants entering the US illegally without processing their asylum requests once a daily threshold is met and the border is “overwhelmed”.

This has led to a sharp decline in the number of people trying to enter the US through the border, according to US officials.

For the first time in almost two decades more than half of Americans want immigration levels to the US cut, rather than kept at their present level or increased, recent polling from global analytics and advisory firm Gallup suggests.

“In the US there is an increasing awareness that the asylum system is so overwhelmed and people are making claims because there aren’t other ways to come to the United States,” says Ms Bush-Joseph.

“Frustration that people have about the dysfunction of the US immigration system does mean that there is concern about the number of people claiming asylum.”

For now, Dr Kaduli is stuck in limbo and could be left waiting four to 10 years for a decision on his asylum application.

He says that a couple of years ago, his father passed away, but his current status does not allow him to leave the country to see his family.

“I feel uncomfortable when my case is still pending and I see on the television the speech of politicians, but I know if I’m here it’s for a reason,” he says.

His ultimate hope is that one day his son and mother will join him in the US.

“I believe that America will give me the same values, to work for myself, to help my family, to participate in the economy of this country, so I’m between doubt and hope.”

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• ECONOMY: Harris and Trump should listen to this mum of seven
• KATTY KAY: What’s really behind this men v women election
• CONGRESS: Democrats bet big on Texas and target Ted Cruz
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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

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.

• ‘Try or die’ – one man’s determination to get to the Canary Islands
• How sailors say they were tricked into smuggling cocaine by a British man
• How a Malawi WhatsApp group helped save women trafficked to Oman
• ‘Terrible things happened’ – inside TB Joshua’s church of horrors

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.

In the North Philadelphia neighbourhood of Fairhill, signs of Puerto Rico are never far off.

The US island territory’s red, white and blue flag adorns homes and businesses, and the sounds of salsa and reggaetón boom from passing cars and restaurants selling fried plantains and spit-roasted pork.

The area is the beating heart of Philadelphia’s more than 90,000-strong Puerto Rican population and forms a key part of Pennsylvania’s Latino community, which both the Democrats and Republicans have sought to woo ahead of the 5 November election.

But on Monday morning, many locals were left seething at a joke made at Donald Trump’s rally the night before in New York, in which comic Tony Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage”.

The joke, some said, could come back to haunt the Republicans in a key swing state that Democrats won by a narrow margin of 1.17% – about 82,000 votes – in 2020.

“The campaign just hurt itself, so much. It’s crazy to me,” said Ivonne Torres Miranda, a local resident who said she remains disillusioned by both candidates – Republican Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris – with just eight days to go in the campaign.

“Even if he [Mr Hinchcliffe ] was joking – you don’t joke like that.

“We’re Puerto Ricans. We have dignity, and we have pride,” she told the BBC, speaking in rapid-fire Spanish with a strong Puerto Rican accent.

“You’ve got to think before saying things.”

• US election polls: Who is ahead – Harris or Trump?
• Listen: Americast on final week of election campaign

In the aftermath, the Trump campaign was quick to distance itself from Mr Hinchcliffe’s joke, with a spokesman saying the remark “does not reflect the views” of Trump or his campaign.

The Harris campaign pounced on the joke, with the vice-president pointing to the comment as a sign that Trump is “fanning the fuel of trying to divide” Americans.

Her views were echoed by Puerto Rican celebrities Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez, who both endorsed Harris on Sunday.

A campaign official told CBS, the BBC’s US partner, that the controversy was a political gift to the Democrats.

Some Puerto Rican residents agree with that assessment.

“[The joke] just put it in the bag for us. He literally just gave us the win,” said Jessie Ramos, a Harris supporter. “He has no idea how hard the Latino community is going to come out and support Kamala Harris.”

Residents of Puerto Rico – a US island territory in the Caribbean – are unable to vote in presidential elections, but the large diaspora in the US can.

Across Pennsylvania, about 600,000 eligible voters are Latino.

More than 470,000 of them are Puerto Ricans – one of the largest concentrations in the country and a potential deciding factor in a state where polls show Harris and Trump in an extremely tight race.

North Philadelphia in particular has been a target for Harris, who on Sunday made a campaign stop at Freddy & Tony’s, a Puerto Rican restaurant and community hub in Fairhill.

The same day, Harris unveiled a new policy platform for Puerto Rico, promising economic development and improved disaster relief and accusing Trump of having “abandoned and insulted” the island during Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Whether or not this will sway Puerto Rican voters remains to be seen.

Freddy & Tony’s owner, Dalma Santiago, told the BBC that she is not sure whether the joke will make a difference but that she believed that it was heard “loud and clear” in Fairhill and other Puerto Rican communities.

“Everybody has their own opinion,” she told the BBC. “But nobody will be forgetting that one.”

Similarly, Moses Santana, a 13-year US Army veteran who works at a harm reduction facility in Fairhill, said he is unsure of the joke’s impact.

In an interview with the BBC on a Fairhill street corner, Mr Santana said the area is traditionally weary of politicians of all kinds, with many believing that both parties have failed to address socio-economic issues, crime and drug abuse there.

“Folks around here tend not to get what they ask for,” he added. “Even when they vote.”

On Tuesday, Trump will campaign in Allentown, a town of about 125,000 in Pennsylvania where about 33,000 people identify as Puerto Rican.

But even among Trump supporters in Pennsylvania’s wider Latino community, the joke was poorly received.

That included Republican voter Jessenia Anderson, a Puerto Rican resident from the town of Johnstown about 240 miles (386 km) west of Philadelphia.

Ms Anderson, a military veteran who was born in New York’s heavily Puerto Rican Lower East Side, is a frequent attendee of Trump rallies in Pennsylvania.

She described the joke as “deeply offensive” and said the routine felt “wildly out of place” – and implored her fellow Republicans to engage in “thoughtful and respectful conversations”.

But Ms Anderson has no plan to switch her vote.

“My belief in the party’s potential to make a positive impact remains strong,” she said.

“I hope they will approach Latino voters with the respect they deserve.”

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• ECONOMY: Harris and Trump should listen to this mum of seven
• KATTY KAY: What’s really behind this men v women election
• CONGRESS: Democrats bet big on Texas and target Ted Cruz
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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

The Vietnamese people smuggler emerged, briefly and hesitantly, from the shadows of a scraggly forest close to the northern French coastline.

“Move away from the others. Come this way, fast,” he said, gesturing across a disused railway line to a member of our team, who had spent weeks posing undercover as a potential customer.

Moments later, the smuggler – a tall figure with bright dyed blonde hair – turned away sharply, like a startled fox, and vanished down a narrow path into the woods.

Earlier this year, Vietnam emerged – abruptly – as the biggest single source of new migrants seeking to cross the Channel to the UK illegally in small boats. Arrivals surged from 1,306 in the whole of 2023, to 2,248 in the first half of 2024.

Our investigation – including interviews with Vietnamese smugglers and clients, French police, prosecutors and charities – reveals how Vietnamese migrants are paying double the usual rate for an “elite” small boat smuggling experience that is faster and more streamlined. As the death toll in the Channel hits a record level this year, there are some indications that it might be safer too.

As part of our work to penetrate the Vietnamese operations, we met an experienced smuggler who is operating in the UK and forging documents for migrants seeking to reach Europe. Separately, our undercover reporter – posing as a Vietnamese migrant – arranged, by phone and text, to meet a smuggling gang operating in the woods near Dunkirk in order to find out how the process works.

“A small boat service is £2,600. Payment to be made after you arrive in the UK,” the smuggler, who called himself Bac, texted back. We heard similar figures from other sources. We believe Bac may be a senior figure in a UK-based gang and the boss of Tony, the blonde man in the woods.

He had given us instructions about the journey from Europe to the UK, explaining how many migrants first flew from Vietnam to Hungary – where we understand it is currently relatively easy for them to get a legitimate work visa, often obtained using forged documents. Bac said that the migrants then travelled on to Paris and then to Dunkirk.

“Tony can pick you up at the [Dunkirk] station,” he offered, in a later text.

Vietnamese migrants are widely considered to be vulnerable to networks of trafficking groups. These groups may seek to trap them in debt and force them to pay off those debts by working in cannabis farms or other businesses in the UK.

It is clear, from several recent visits to the camps around Dunkirk and Calais, that the Vietnamese gangs and their clients operate separately from other groups.

“They keep to themselves and are much more discreet than the others. We see them very little,” says Claire Millot, a volunteer for Salam, an NGO that supports migrants in Dunkirk.

A volunteer with another charity tells us of recently catching a rare glimpse of roughly 30 Vietnamese buying life jackets at a Dunkirk branch of the sports gear chain Decathlon.

As well as keeping their distance, the streamlined service offered by the Vietnamese gangs involves far less waiting around in the camps. Many African and Middle Eastern migrants spend weeks, even months, in grim conditions on the French coast. Some don’t have enough cash to pay for a place on a small boat, and try to earn their fare by working for the smuggling gangs. Many are intercepted on the beaches by French police and have to make several attempts before they successfully cross the Channel.

On a recent visit we saw dozens of tired families – from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Eritrea and elsewhere – gathering in the drizzle at a muddy spot where humanitarian groups provide daily meals and medical assistance. A group of children played Connect 4 at a picnic table, while a man sought treatment for a wound to his arm. Several parents told us that they had heard about a four-month-old Kurdish boy who had drowned the previous night after the boat he was travelling in capsized during an attempted Channel crossing. None of them said the death would discourage them from making their own attempt.

There were no Vietnamese in sight. It seems clear that Vietnamese smugglers tend to bring their clients to the camps in northern France when the weather is already looking promising and a crossing is imminent.

We had first encountered the new influx of Vietnamese migrants earlier this year, stumbling on one of their camps near Dunkirk. It appeared to be significantly neater and more organised than other migrant camps, with matching tents pitched in straight lines and a group cooking a tantalising and elaborate meal involving fried garlic, onions and Vietnamese spices.

“They’re very organised and united and stay together in the camps. They’re quite something. When they arrive at the coast, we know that a crossing will be done very quickly. These are most likely people with more money than others,” says Mathilde Potel, the French police chief heading the fight against illegal migration in the region.

The Vietnamese do not control the small boat crossings themselves, which are largely overseen by a handful of Iraqi Kurdish gangs. Instead they negotiate access and timings.

“The Vietnamese are not allowed to touch that part of the process [the crossing]. We just deliver clients to [the Kurdish gangs],” says another Vietnamese smuggler, who we are calling Thanh, currently living in the UK. He tells us the extra cash secures priority access to the small boats for their Vietnamese clients.

While the relative costs are clear, the issue of safety is murkier. It is a fact – and perhaps a telling one – that during the first nine months of 2024, not a single Vietnamese was among the dozens of migrants confirmed to have died while trying to cross the Channel. But in October, a Vietnamese migrant did die in one incident, in what has now become the deadliest year on record for small boat crossings.

It is possible that by paying extra, the Vietnamese are able to secure access to less crowded boats, which are therefore less likely to sink. But we’ve not been able to confirm this.

What does seem clearer is that the Vietnamese smugglers are cautious about sending their clients out on boats in bad weather. Texts from Bac to our undercover reporter included specific suggestions regarding travel to the camp, and the best day to arrive.

“Running a small boat service depends on the weather. You need small waves. And it must be safe… We had good weather earlier this week and lots of boats left… It would be good if you can be here [in Dunkirk] tomorrow. I’m planning a [cross-Channel] move on Thursday morning,” Bac texted.

Sitting outside their tents in two separate camps in the woods near Dunkirk earlier this month, two young men told us almost identical stories about the events which had prompted them to leave Vietnam in order to seek new lives. How they had borrowed money to start small businesses in Vietnam, how those businesses had failed, and how they had then borrowed more money from relatives and loan sharks, to pay smugglers to bring them to the UK.

“Life in Vietnam is difficult. I couldn’t find a proper job. I tried to open a shop, but it failed. I was unable to pay back the loan, so I must find a way to earn money. I know this [is illegal] but I have no other option. I owe [the Vietnamese equivalent of] £50,000. I sold my house, but it wasn’t enough to pay off the debt,” said Tu, 26, reaching down to stroke a kitten that strolled past.

Two chickens emerged from behind another tent. A mirror hung from a nearby tree. Plug sockets were available under a separate awning for charging phones.

The second migrant, aged 27, described how he had reached Europe via China, sometimes on foot or in trucks.

“I heard from my friends in the UK that life is much better there, and I can find a way to make some money,” said the man, who did not want to give his name.

Are these people victims of human trafficking? It is unclear. All the Vietnamese migrants we spoke to said they were in debt. If they ended up working for the smuggling gangs in the UK in order to pay for their journey and to pay off their debts then they would, indeed, have been trafficked.

We had sought to draw the blonde Vietnamese smuggler, Tony, out of a nearby forest and onto more neutral territory, where his gang – possibly armed, as other gangs certainly are – might pose less of a threat to us. We intended to confront him about his involvement in a lucrative and often deadly criminal industry. But Tony remained wary of leaving his own “turf” and grew impatient and angry when our colleague, still posing as a potential migrant, declined to follow him into the forest.

“Why are you staying there? Follow that path. Move quickly! Now,” Tony ordered.

There was a brief pause. The sound of birdsong drifted across the clearing.

“What an idiot… Do you just want to stand there and get caught by the police?” the smuggler asked, with rising exasperation.

Then he turned away and retreated into the woods.

Had our colleague been a genuine migrant, she would probably have followed Tony. We were told by other sources that once in the camps, migrants were not allowed to leave unless they paid hundreds of dollars to the smugglers.

The Vietnamese gangs may be promising a quick, safe, “elite” route to the UK, but the reality is much darker – a criminal industry, backed by threats, involving deadly risks and no guarantee of success.

A new study highlights how promoting female entrepreneurship can greatly enhance women’s workforce participation. By creating more opportunities for other women, female-led businesses can drive significant economic growth, it says.

Imagine a world where women, though half the population, own less than a fifth of businesses.

This is the reality the World Bank uncovered in a survey spanning 138 countries from 2006 to 2018.

Even more intriguing is how female-owned businesses empower other women.

In male-owned firms, only 23% of workers were women, but female-owned businesses employ far more women. And while just 6.5% of male-owned businesses have a woman as the top manager, over half of female-owned firms are led by women.

• Why are millions of Indian women dropping out of work?

In India, the situation is even more challenging. Female labour participation and entrepreneurship are low, with the total number of women in the workforce barely changing over the past 30 years.

But the picture looks slightly better when it comes to entrepreneurship.

Women make up about 14% of entrepreneurs and own a significant share of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). They contribute notably to industrial output and employ a substantial portion of the workforce, according to the 2023 State of India’s Livelihoods Report.

Most MSMEs in India are microenterprises, with many women-owned businesses being single-person ventures, according to Niti Aayog, a government think-tank. While some women-owned enterprises employ staff in big numbers, a large majority operate with very few workers.

So Indian women are not really under-represented in entrepreneurship, but they operate much smaller firms than men – especially in the informal sector.

Not surprisingly, women’s contribution to India’s GDP is just 17%, less than half the global average. And India ranks 57th out of 65 countries for women’s entrepreneurship, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report 2021.

A new paper by Gaurav Chiplunkar (University of Virginia) and Pinelopi Goldberg (Yale University) argues that promoting female entrepreneurship could significantly boost women’s workforce participation, as female-led businesses often create more opportunities for other women.

The authors developed a framework to measure the barriers women in India face when entering the labour force and becoming entrepreneurs.

They found substantial obstacles to women’s employment and higher costs for female entrepreneurs when expanding their businesses by hiring workers. Their simulations showed that removing barriers would boost female-owned businesses, increase women’s workforce participation, and drive economic gains through higher wages, profits, and more efficient female-owned firms replacing less productive male-owned ones.

So, policies that support female entrepreneurship are crucial, the authors argue. Policies that boost entrepreneurship and increase labour demand – allowing more women to become entrepreneurs – can be more effective – and quicker – than changing long-standing social norms, says Mr Chiplunkar.

“History tells us that norms are sticky,” says Ashwini Deshpande of Ashoka University.

Women still shoulder most household chores – cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare, and elder care. There are more barriers, including limited access to safe, efficient transportation and childcare, restricting their ability to work within commuting distance. Even women’s limited ability to travel independently is a key factor restricting their participation in the labour market, as shown in a recent study led by Rolly Kapoor of University of California.

Despite a recent uptick in India’s women’s labour force participation, the picture is not as promising as it seems, as Ms Deshpande notes in a paper.

The increase, she found, reflected an increase in self-employed women, a combination of paid work and disguised unemployment, a situation where more people are employed than actually needed for a task, resulting in low productivity.

“There is an urgent need to increase women’s participation in regular salaried paid work with job contracts and social security benefits. This would be the most important step, albeit not the only one, towards women’s economic empowerment,” says Ms Deshpande.

It’s not going to be easy. For one, many women face obstacles – from families and communities – to working at all, regardless of whether they want to be entrepreneurs. And if more women join the workforce but there aren’t enough jobs – because barriers to starting businesses remain – wages could actually drop.

Research shows that women in India work when opportunities arise, indicating that the declining labour force participation rate is a result of insufficient jobs and reduced demand for women’s labour. A recent Barclays Research report says India can reach 8% GDP growth by ensuring women make up over half of the new workforce by 2030.

Boosting female entrepreneurship could be a way out.

“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

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has defended his newspaper’s decision to stop making presidential endorsements, saying the move could help improve credibility.

Mr Bezos, who is also the Amazon founder, argued in an article on the Post’s website on Monday that presidential endorsements created the “perception of bias” and did not “tip the scales” of an election.

The comments follow public scrutiny, as well as the newspaper’s reported loss of thousands of subscribers and the resignation of some editorial staff members.

The decision to stop endorsing a presidential candidate – which was announced just days before the election – broke with a custom the Post had generally followed for decades.

“No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement’. None,” Mr Bezos wrote in his defence of the move.

“What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

The paper has endorsed a candidate in most presidential elections since the 1970s, though when it announced the move, CEO William Lewis described the decision as a return “to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates”.

• Who’s ahead in the polls – Harris or Trump?

The Washington Post Guild’s leadership – which represents workers at the paper – said it was “deeply concerned” by the decision.

“We are already seeing cancellations from once-loyal readers,” the Guild said in its statement. “This decision undercuts the work of our of members at a time when we should be building our readers’ trust, not losing it.”

The paper has lost as many as 200,000 digital subscribers, and several editorial staff including board members have stepped down, according to a report by NPR. The Post itself declined to comment, and Mr Bezos has not addressed the report.

In its own news article on the decision, The Washington Post reported – citing two sources briefed on the sequence of events who were not authorised to speak publicly – that editorial staffers had planned to endorse Vice-President Kamala Harris, but the article was never published.

Mr Bezos denied the timing of the decision was a “intentional strategy” and chalked it up to “inadequate planning”.

“I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it,” Mr Bezos wrote.

But he said the paper would need to “exercise new muscles” to stay competitive and current.

The Washington Post owner also denied the decision was a “quid pro quo of any kind” with Harris or her Republican rival for the presidency, Donald Trump.

In addition to The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today have also announced they will not endorse a presidential candidate this time.

Meanwhile, the New York Times and New York Post have made endorsements for Harris and Trump respectively.

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

Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has admitted that he kept a “death squad” to crack down on crime while mayor of one of the country’s largest cities.

In his first testimony before an official investigation on his so-called war on drugs, the 79-year-old said the squad was made of gangsters, adding that he would tell them “kill this person, because if you do not, I will kill you now”.

Duterte won the presidency by a landslide in 2016 on the promise of replicating his anti-crime campaign in Davao city on a national scale.

The nationwide drug war saw thousands of suspects killed in controversial police operations and is now being investigated by the International Criminal Court.

During the senate hearing on Monday, Duterte also said he told police officers to “encourage” suspects to fight back so officers could justify the killings.

“Do not question my policies because I offer no apologies, no excuses. I did what I had to do, and whether or not you believe it… I did it for my country,” said Duterte in his opening statement.

“I hate drugs, make no mistake about it.”

However, he denied that he gave his police chiefs permission to kill suspects, adding that his “death squad” was made of “gangsters… not policemen”.

“I can make the confession now if you want. I had a death squad of seven, but they were not police, they were gangsters.”

Duterte also remained defiant, claiming that many criminals had resumed their illegal activities after he stepped down as president.

“If given another chance, I’ll wipe all of you,” he said.

His appearance on Monday was the first time he had showed up at an inquiry into his anti-drug campaign since his term ended in 2022.

It was also the first time he directly faced some of his accusers, including families of victims of the drug war and former senator Leila de Lima, a Duterte critic who was jailed for seven years on a drug-dealing charge that was eventually dropped.

The Philippine government estimates that more than 6,252 people have been gunned down by the police and “unknown assailants” in Duterte’s “war on drugs”. Rights groups say the numbers could actually run into the tens of thousands.

An earlier report by the UN’s High Commisioner for Human Rights found that Duterte’s drugs crackdown had been marked by high-level rhetoric that could be seen as giving police officers “permission to kill”.

Police said many of their victims, who they claimed were drug lords or peddlers, were often killed in “self defence” during shoot-outs. But many families claim their sons, brothers or husbands were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The war on drugs campaign was controversial and drew huge international criticism, but it also had its share of supporters in a country where millions use drugs, mostly methamphetamine, known locally as “shabu”.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been accused of asking for free personal flight upgrades directly from the former CEO of national carrier Qantas.

A new book by Australian journalist Joe Aston claims Albanese made several calls to ex-CEO Alan Joyce, and received upgrades on 22 flights taken between 2009 and 2019.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Albanese did not say whether he had spoken to Joyce about personal upgrades, but said he followed the rules and had been “completely transparent” with his disclosures.

“There is no accusations being made with any specifics at all about any of this, none,” he added.

Albanese, who previously served as federal transport minister, also criticised former opposition party staffer Aston of “trying to sell a book”.

In his book – The Chairman’s Lounge: The Inside Story of How Qantas Sold Us Out – Aston, reportedly cites Qantas insiders as saying Albanese spoke to Joyce about his personal travel plans.

Albanese said he did recall having two conversations with Joyce about flights that did not involve personal travel.

“Of the 22 flights, 10 of them were… [in 2013] over a one-month period where both Qantas and Virgin provided upgrades for flights that were paid for by the Australian Labor party to make sure there was not any cost to taxpayers for what was internal business.

“In my time in public life, I have acted with integrity, I have acted in a way that is entirely appropriate and I have declared in accordance with the rules,” he said.

While it is not unheard of for Australian politicians to get free flight upgrades, they are required to declare such gifts.

Australia’s shadow transport minister Senator Bridget McKenzie has called for an inquiry to investigate the allegations.

“There are serious questions which only Mr Joyce and the Prime Minister can answer,” she told reporters.

Speaking on Today, a popular breakfast news show, she said she too had received a free flight updgrade in the past but added: “There’s a difference to receive a gift and declare it on your register to actually getting on the blower and saying, listen, mate, the missus and I are going overseas on a holiday. How about upgrading those economy tickets?”

Last year, the Albanese government faced questions for denying a request by Qatar Airways to increase flights to Australia – a move that aviation analysts said favoured Qantas.

Criticism over that decision has now resurfaced as some opposition leaders questioned Albanese’s personal relationship with Joyce.

Joyce was chief executive of Qantas for 15 years and led the company through the 2008 global financial crisis, the Covid pandemic and record fuel prices.

However, by the time he stepped down in 2023, Qantas was facing growing public anger over high fares, andured mass delays and cancellations. It also laid off 1,700 ground staff during the pandemic – a move that an Australian high court later ruled illegal.

A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico.

Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They uncovered the hidden complex – which they have called Valeriana – using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.

They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.

The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.

It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.

But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say.

Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

The find helps change an idea in Western thinking that the Tropics was where “civilisations went to die”, says Professor Marcello Canuto, a co-author in the research.

Instead, this part of the world was home to rich and complex cultures, he explains.

We can’t be sure what led to the demise and eventual abandonment of the city, but the archaeologists say climate change was a major factor.

Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).

It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.

There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.

The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.

It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.

It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game.

• How ancient Maya cities have withstood the ravages of time

There was also evidence of a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population.

In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.

Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London, who was not involved in the research, says it supports claims that Maya lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages.

“The point is that the landscape is definitely settled – that is, settled in the past – and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild’,” she says.

The research suggests that when Maya civilisations collapsed from 800AD onwards, it was partly because they were so densely populated and could not survive climate problems.

“It’s suggesting that the landscape was just completely full of people at the onset of drought conditions and it didn’t have a lot of flexibility left. And so maybe the entire system basically unravelled as people moved farther away,” says Mr Auld-Thomas.

Warfare and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to eradication of Maya city states.

Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof Canuto.

In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch.

But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work.

Mr Auld-Thomas says his work suggests there are many sites out there that archaeologists have no idea about.

In fact so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.

“I’ve got to go to Valeriana at some point. It’s so close to the road, how could you not? But I can’t say we will do a project there,” says Mr Auld-Thomas.

“One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study,” he adds.

The research is published in the academic journal Antiquity.

Former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon has been released from prison after spending four months behind bars.

Bannon, 70, was released from a Danbury, Connecticut, correctional facility on Tuesday, Benjamin O’Cone, a Bureau of Prisons spokesman, told the BBC.

Bannon, a conservative podcast host who was key to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress in 2022 for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena related to a January 6 Capitol riot investigation.

“The four months in federal prison not only didn’t break me, it empowered me,” Bannon said on his podcast following his release.

“I am more energised and more focused than I’ve ever been in my entire life.”

Bannon is expected to hold a news conference in New York City later Tuesday.

Before he was sent to jail, he promised to continue to help Trump and his campaign from behind bars.

“I’ve served my country now for the last 10 or so years focusing on this,” he told the BBC before going to prison, referring to politics and Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. “If I have to do it in a prison, I do it in a prison – it makes no difference at all.”

Bannon has remained loyal to Trump and hostile towards Democratic figures, despite a falling out between the two during Trump’s presidency.

“I’m a political prisoner of Nancy Pelosi, I’m a political prisoner of Merrick Garland; I’m a political prisoner of Joe Biden and the corrupt Biden establishment,” he said before going to jail.

The Trump loyalist claimed on his podcast in May that Democrats were “going to do everything to steal this election”.

He has repeatedly falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Bannon is still facing other legal troubles – having been indicted on charges of money laundering, fraud and conspiracy in a separate New York state case in 2022.

He has been accused of cheating donors to a fundraiser that promised to build a portion of a wall on the US-Mexico border. Bannon has pled not guilty to the charges.

Teri Garr, an Oscar-nominated actress best known for her work in movies including Young Frankenstein, Mr Mom and Tootsie, has died at 79, US media report.

Garr died in Los Angeles on Tuesday after a 20-year battle with multiple sclerosis “surrounded by family and friends”, her publicist Heidi Schaeffer said in a statement.

She first talked publicly about the chronic autoimmune disease in 2002 to raise awareness for others living with it.

The comedy actor faced other health problems and underwent an operation to repair an aneurysm in 2007, BBC’s US news partner CBS reports.

Garr got her start as a background dancer in Elvis Presley movies.

Her mother, also a former dancer, put her in dance classes at the age of six.

Her first gig was joining the road company for West Side Story in Los Angeles.

She then began dancing in movies before starring in television shows like Batman and Dr. Kildare.

Garr’s big break came in 1974 when she played a supporting role in the thriller, The Conversation.

She was then cast as Gene Wilder’s lab assistant in the horror comedy Young Frankenstein where she spoke with a German accent. This was a career breakthrough for Garr.

She established herself as a comedy actor and began making frequent appearances on Late Night with David Letterman.

Beyond comedy, Garr also played dramatic roles in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Black Stallion. She also appeared in television shows such as Star Trek and That Girl.

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 Chinese spacecraft with a three-person crew, including the country’s first female space engineer, has docked after a journey of more than six hours.

The crew will use the homegrown space station as a base for six months to conduct experiments and carry out spacewalks as Beijing gathers experience and intelligence for its eventual mission to put someone on the Moon by 2030.

Beijing declared the launch of Shenzhou 19 a “complete success” – it is one of 100 China has planned in a record year of space exploration as it tries to outdo its rival, the United States.

The BBC was given rare access to the Jiuquan Satellite launch centre in Gansu and we were just over a kilometre away when the spacecraft blasted off.

Flames shot out of the rocket launcher as it took to the skies, lighting up the Gobi Desert with a deafening roar.

Hundreds of people lined the streets, waving and cheering the names of the taikonauts, China’s word for astronauts, as they were sent off.

Just two years ago, President Xi Jinping declared that “to explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is our eternal dream”.

But some in Washington see the country’s ambition and fast-paced progress as a real threat.

Earlier this year, Nasa chief Bill Nelson said the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to the Moon, where he fears Beijing wants to stake territorial claims.

He told legislators that he believed their civilian space programme was also a military programme.

However, in Dongfeng Space City, a town built to support the launch site, China’s space programme is celebrated.

Every street light is adorned with the national flag.

Cartoon-like astronaut figurines and sculptures sit in the centre of children’s parks and plastic rockets are a centrepiece on most traffic roundabouts.

A huge poster with Xi Jinping on one side and a photo of the Shenzhou spacecraft on the other greets you as you drive into the main compound.

Hundreds have gathered in the dark after midnight to wave flags and brightly coloured lights as the Taikonauts make their last few steps on Earth before heading to the launch site.

The brass band strikes up Ode to the Motherland as young children, kept up late for the occasion, their cheeks adorned with the Chinese flag, all shout in full song.

This is a moment of national pride.

The pilot of this mission, Cai Xuzhe, is a veteran but he’s travelling with a new generation of Chinese-trained taikonauts born in 1990 – including China’s first female space engineer, Wang Haoze.

“Their youthful energy has made me feel younger and even more confident,” he told the gathered media ahead of take-off.

“Inspired by dreams that spark glory, and by glory that ignites new dreams, we assure the party and the people that we will stay true to our mission, with our hearts and minds fully devoted. We will strive to achieve new accomplishments in China’s crewed space programme.”

Standing to his left, beaming, is Song Lingdong.

He recalls watching one of China’s first space station missions as a 13-year-old with “excitement and awe”. He chose to become a pilot in the hope that this is how he could serve his country.

All three convey their deep sense of national pride, and state media has emphasised that this will be its “youngest crew” to date.

The message is clear: this is a new generation of space travellers and an investment in the country’s future.

China has already selected its next group of astronauts and they will train for potential lunar missions as well as to crew the space station.

“I am determined not to let down the trust placed in me,” says Mr Song. “I will strive to make our country’s name shine once again in space.”

China’s name has been “shining brightly” a lot lately when it comes to headlines about its space programme.

Earlier this year, the country achieved a historic first by retrieving rock and soil samples from the far side of the Moon.

In 2021, China safely landed a spacecraft on Mars and released its Zhurong rover – becoming just the second nation to do so.

China also has a fleet of satellites in space and has plans for many more.

In August it launched the first 18 of what it hopes will eventually be a constellation of 14,000 satellites providing broadband internet coverage from space, which it hopes will one day rival SpaceX’s Starlink.

Elon Musk, Starlink’s chief executive, admitted on his own platform X that China’s space programme is far more advanced than people realise.

But others in the US are voicing even greater concerns, as they fear this technology can be weaponised.

The head of US Space Command, General Stephen Whiting, told a space symposium in April that China and Russia were both investing heavily in space at a “breath-taking speed”.

He claimed that since 2018, China has tripled the amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites it has in orbit, building a “kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and target United States and allied military capabilities”.

China’s space exploration is a “collective mission for humanity”, says Li Yingliang, director of the general technology bureau of China’s Manned Space Agency, dismissing US concerns as “unnecessary”.

“I don’t think this should be called a competition… China has long upheld the notion of peaceful use of space in its manned space programme. In the future, we will further develop international co-operation in various aspects of manned space technology, all based on sharing and collaboration,” he adds.

But the new space race is no longer about getting to the Moon. It’s about who will control its resources.

The Moon contains minerals, including rare earths, metals like iron and titanium – and helium too, which is used in everything from superconductors to medical equipment.

Estimates for the value of all this vary wildly, from billions to quadrillions. So it’s easy to see why some see the Moon as a place to make lots of money. However, it’s also important to note that this would be a very long-term investment – and the tech needed to extract and return these lunar resources is some way off, writes the BBC’s science editor Rebecca Morelle.

Chinese experts at the launch centre were keen to point out the benefits of Beijing’s space station experiments.

“We study bones, muscles, nerve cells, and the effects of microgravity on them. Through this research, we’ve discovered that osteoporosis on Earth is actually similar to bone loss in space. If we can uncover unique patterns in space, we might be able to develop special medications to counteract bone loss and muscle atrophy,” said Zhang Wei, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Many of these experimental results can be applied on Earth.”

China is, at times, trying to downplay its advances.

At the launch of a roadmap for its space ambitions, which include building a research station on the Moon, returning samples of Venus’s atmosphere to Earth and launching more than 30 space missions by the middle of this century, Ding Chibiao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the country did not have a great number of achievements “compared to developed nations”.

And even here at the launch centre, they admit to “significant challenges” as they try to land a crew on the Moon.

“The technology is complex, there’s a tight schedule, and there are a lot of challenges,” said Lin Xiqiang, spokesperson for the China Manned Space Agency.

“We’ll keep up the spirit of ‘two bombs and one star’. We will maintain our self-confidence and commitment to self-improvement, keep working together and keep pushing forward. We’ll make the Chinese people’s dream of landing on the Moon a reality in the near future.”

That’s perhaps why President Xi appears to be prioritising the country’s space programme even as the economy is in a slow decline.

And even though they are bringing along international press to witness their progress – there are key restrictions.

We were kept in a hotel three hours from the launch site and transported back and forth by bus, a total journey of 12 hours, rather than being left on site for a few hours.

A simple trip to a friendly local restaurant was carefully guarded by a line of security personnel.

We also noticed a large sign in town holds a stern warning: “It’s a crime to leak secrets. It’s an honour to keep secrets. You’ll be jailed if you leak secrets. You’ll be happy if you keep secrets. You’ll be shot if you sell secrets.”

China is taking no chances with its new technology, as its rivalry with the United States is no longer just here on Earth.

The world’s two most powerful countries could soon be staking territorial claims well beyond this planet.

At least 93 people are dead or missing after an Israeli air strike on the town of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry says, in an attack that the United States called “horrifying”.

Rescuers said a five-storey residential building was hit, and videos on social media showed bodies covered in blankets on the floor.

The Israeli military said it was “aware of reports that civilians were harmed today [Tuesday] in the Beit Lahia area”. It added that the details of the incident were being looked into.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been operating in northern Gaza during the past two weeks, particularly in the areas of Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun.

The director of the nearby Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabalia, Hussam Abu Safia, told the AFP news agency that children were being treated at the hospital, which is struggling to treat patients due to a lack of staff and medicines.

“There is nothing left in the Kamal Adwan Hospital except first aid materials after the army arrested our medical team and workers,” Abu Safia said.

The IDF raided the hospital last week, saying it was being used by Hamas fighters.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the US was “deeply concerned by the loss of civilian life in this incident. This was a horrifying incident with a horrifying result”.

He pointed to “reports of two dozen children killed” in the attack.

The “tragic cost to civilians” in the latest strike “is another reminder of why we need to see an end to this war”, Miller said.

Israel says its operations in northern Gaza are designed to prevent Hamas from regrouping and accuses them of embedding among the civilian population, which Hamas denies.

In a statement on Tuesday, it said it killed 40 “terrorists” in Jabalia, and in central Gaza it said it “eliminated many terrorists” over the past 24 hours including some who “attempted to plant explosives near the troops”.

The northern Gaza Strip faces a deepening humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people living in desperate conditions.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said on Friday that “the Israeli military is subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and risk of starvation”.

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

On Monday, Israel’s parliament voted through legislation to ban the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, Unrwa, from operating in the country, sparking warnings the delivery of aid to Gaza could be severely impacted..

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, according to the health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and fighters in its figures.

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

Mount Fuji is still without snow, making it the latest time in the year the mountain has remained bare since records began 130 years ago.

The peaks of Japan’s highest mountain typically get a sprinkling of snow by early October, but unusually warm weather has meant no snowfall has been reported so far this year.

In 2023 snow was first seen on the summit on 5 October, according to AFP news agency.

Japan had its joint hottest summer on record this year with temperatures between June and August being 1.76C (3.1F) higher than an average.

In September, temperatures continued to be warmer than expected as the sub-tropical jet stream’s more northerly position allowed a warmer southerly flow of air over Japan.

A jet stream is a fast-flowing current of air that travels around the planet. It occurs when warmer air from the south meets cooler air from the north.

Nearly 1,500 areas had what Japan’s Meteorological Society classed as “extremely hot” days – when temperatures reach or exceed 35C (95F) last month.

The temperature has to be around freezing for rain to turn into snow.

October has seen the heat ease slightly, but it has still been a warmer than average month.

However, approaching November without snowfall marks the longest wait in the year for a snowcap on the summit since data was first collected in 1894.

The previous record of 26 October has been seen twice before in 1955 and 2016, Yutaka Katsuta, a forecaster at Kofu Local Meteorological Office told AFP.

While a single event cannot automatically be attributed to climate change, the observed lack of snowfall on Mount Fuji is consistent with what climate experts predict in a warming world.

Mount Fuji, south-west of Tokyo, is Japan’s highest mountain at 3,776m (12,460 ft).

The volcano, which last erupted just over 300 years ago, is visible from the Japanese capital on a clear day.

It is featured prominently in historic Japanese artwork, including wood blocks prints.

Last year, more than 220,000 people made the ascent to the peak between July and September.

When US President Joe Biden walked through Kyiv in February 2023 on a surprise visit to show solidarity with Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart, air sirens were wailing. “I felt something… more strongly than ever before,” he later recalled. “America is a beacon to the world.”

The world now waits to see who takes charge of this self-styled beacon after Americans make their choice in next week’s presidential election. Will Kamala Harris carry on in Biden’s footsteps with her conviction that in “these unsettled times, it is clear America cannot retreat”? Or will it be Donald Trump with his hope that “Americanism, not globalism” will lead the way?

We live in a world where the value of US global influence is under question. Regional powers are going their own way, autocratic regimes are making their own alliances, and the devastating wars in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere are raising uncomfortable questions about the value of Washington’s role. But America matters by dint of its economic and military strength, and its major role in many alliances. I turned to some informed observers for their reflections on the global consequences of this very consequential election.

“I cannot sugarcoat these warnings,” says Rose Gottemoeller, Nato’s former deputy secretary general. “Donald Trump is Europe’s nightmare, with echoes of his threat to withdraw from Nato in everyone’s ears.”

Washington’s defence spending amounts to two-thirds of the military budgets of Nato’s 31 other members. Beyond Nato, the US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, including China and Russia.

Trump boasts he’s playing hardball to force other Nato countries to meet their spending targets, which is 2% of their GDP – only 23 of the member nations have hit this target in 2024. But his erratic statements still jar.

If Harris wins, Ms Gottemoeller believes “Nato will no doubt be in good Washington hands.” But she has a warning there too. “She will be ready to continue working with Nato and the European Union to achieve victory in Ukraine, but she will not back off on [spending] pressure on Europe.”

But Harris’s team in the White House will have to govern with the Senate or the House, which could both soon be in Republican hands, and will be less inclined to back foreign wars than their Democratic counterparts. There’s a growing sense that no matter who becomes president, pressure will mount on Kyiv to find ways out of this war as US lawmakers become increasingly reluctant to pass huge aid packages.

Whatever happens, Ms Gottemoeller says, “I do not believe that Nato must fall apart.” Europe will need to “step forward to lead.”

The next US president will have to work in a world confronting its greatest risk of major power confrontation since the Cold War.

“The US remains the most consequential international actor in matters of peace and security”, Comfort Ero, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, tells me. She adds a caveat, “but its power to help resolve conflicts is diminished.”

Wars are becoming ever harder to end. “Deadly conflict is becoming more intractable, with big-power competition accelerating and middle powers on the rise,” is how Ms Ero describes the landscape. Wars like Ukraine pull in multiple powers, and conflagrations such as Sudan pit regional players with competing interests against each other, and some more invested in war than in peace.

America is losing the moral high ground, Ms Ero says. “Global actors notice that it applies one standard to Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and another to Israel’s in Gaza. The war in Sudan has seen terrible atrocities but gets treated as a second-tier issue.”

A win by Harris, she says, “represents continuity with the current administration.” If it’s Trump, he “might give Israel an even freer hand in Gaza and elsewhere, and has intimated he could try to cut a Ukraine deal with Moscow over Kyiv’s head.”

On the Middle East, the Democratic candidate has repeatedly echoed Mr Biden’s firm backing of Israel’s “right to defend itself.” But she’s also made a point of emphasising that “the killing of innocent Palestinians has to stop.”

Trump has also declared it’s time to “get back to peace and stop killing people.” But he’s reportedly told the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to “do what you have to do.”

The Republican contender prides himself on being a peacemaker. “I will have peace in the Middle East, and soon,” he vowed in an interview with Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya TV on Sunday night.

He’s promised to expand the 2020 Abraham Accords. These bilateral agreements normalised relations between Israel and a few Arab states, but were widely seen to have sidelined the Palestinians and ultimately contributed to the current unprecedented crisis.

On Ukraine, Trump never hides his admiration for strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He’s made it clear he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and with it the US’s hefty military and financial support. “I’ll get out. We gotta get out,” he insisted in a recent rally.

In contrast, Harris has said: “I have been proud to stand with Ukraine. I will continue to stand with Ukraine. And I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war.”

But Ms Ero worries that, no matter who’s elected, things could get worse in the world.

“The biggest shock to the global economy for decades.” That’s the view of leading China scholar Rana Mitter regarding Trump’s proposed 60 percent tariffs on all imported Chinese goods.

Imposing steep costs on China, and many other trading partners, has been one of Trump’s most persistent threats in his “America first” approach. But Trump also lauds what he sees as his own strong personal connection with President Xi Jinping. He told the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board he wouldn’t have to use military force if Beijing moved to blockade Taiwan because the Chinese leader “respects me and he knows I’m [expletive] crazy.”

But both leading Republicans and Democrats are hawkish. Both see Beijing as being bent on trying to eclipse America as the most consequential power.

But Mr Mitter, a British historian who holds the ST Lee Chair in US-Asia relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School, sees some differences. With Ms Harris he says, “relations would likely develop in a linear fashion from where they are now.” If Trump wins, it’s a more “fluid scenario.” For example, on Taiwan, Mr Mitter points to Trump’s ambivalence about whether he would come to the defence of an island far from America.

China’s leaders believe both Harris and Trump will be tough. Mr Mitter sees it as “a small group of establishment types favour Harris as ‘better the opponent you know.’ A significant minority see Trump as a businessman whose unpredictability might just mean a grand bargain with China, however unlikely that seems.”

America and… the Middle East

The latest episode of the Global Story looks at what a Trump or Harris presidency could mean for violence in Israel, Gaza and the surrounding region.

Listen now on BBC Sounds. If you are outside the UK, listen wherever you get your podcasts.

“The US election is hugely consequential not just for its citizens but for the whole world because of the pressing imperative of the climate and nature crisis,” says Mary Robinson, chair of the Elders, a group of world leaders founded by Nelson Mandela, and former president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“Every fraction of a degree matters to avert the worst impacts of climate change and prevent a future where devastating hurricanes like Milton are the norm,” she added.

But as Hurricanes Milton and Helene raged, Trump derided environmental plans and policies to confront this climate emergency as “one of the greatest scams of all time.” Many expect him to pull out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement as he did in his first term.

However, Ms Robinson believes Trump cannot stop the momentum now gathering steam. “He cannot halt the US energy transition and roll back the billions of dollars in green subsidies… nor can he stop the indefatigable non-federal climate movement.”

She also urged Harris, who still hasn’t fleshed out her own stance, to step up “to show leadership, build on the momentum of recent years, and spur other major emitters to pick up the pace.”

“The outcome of the US election holds immense significance, given the unparalleled influence the United States wields, not just through its military and economic might, but through its potential to lead with moral authority on the global stage,” says Martin Griffiths, a veteran conflict mediator, who, until recently, was the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

He sees greater light if Harris wins, and says that “a return to Trump’s presidency marked by isolationism and unilateralism, offers little but a deepening of global instability.”

But he has criticism, too, for the Biden-Harris administration, citing its “hesitancy” over the deteriorating situation in the Middle East.

Aid agency bosses have repeatedly condemned Hamas’s murderous October 7th assault on Israeli civilians. But they’ve also repeatedly called on the US to do much more to end the profound suffering of civilians in Gaza as well as in Lebanon.

Biden and his top officials continually called for more aid to flow into Gaza, and did make a difference at times. But critics say the aid, and the pressure, was never enough. A recent warning that some vital military assistance could be cut pushed the decision until after the US elections.

The US is the single largest donor when it comes to the UN system. In 2022, it provided a record $18.1bn (£13.9bn).

But in Trump’s first term, he axed funding for several UN agencies and pulled out of the World Health Organisation. Other donors scrambled to fill the gaps – which is what Trump wanted to happen.

But Griffths still believes America is an indispensable power.

“In a time of global conflict and uncertainty, the world longs for the US to rise to the challenge of responsible, principled leadership… We demand more. We deserve more. And we dare to hope for more.”

The man who broke into the home of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on state charges in California.

David DePape was also convicted on federal charges in May leading to a 30-year prison sentence which will now be served concurrently.

In the state trial, a San Francisco jury found DePape guilty of kidnapping, first-degree burglary and false imprisonment of an elder. The attack left Paul Pelosi, now 84, in hospital for six days with a fractured skull and other injuries.

In a statement after the sentencing, the Pelosi family said that “legal justice has been served”.

“Since the violent break-in and shouts of ‘where’s Nancy?’ two years ago, not a day goes by that we do not think of this devastating assault, its trauma — or the possibility of future attacks,” the family said.

They added they hope the sentence sends a message “that political violence against elected officials or their family members will not be tolerated”.

A lawyer for DePape said he plans to appeal against Tuesday’s ruling.

“This was a really tragic end to a tragic story,” attorney Adam Lipson told reporters after the hearing.

Mr Lipson had unsuccessfully lobbied the judge to hand down a more lenient sentence, arguing that DePape suffered from mental health issues and isolation, which he said made him vulnerable to propaganda.

Judge Harry Dorfman refused, saying that he did not feel sympathy for DePape.

“I feel sympathy for the victim in this case, who’s lucky to be alive,” Judge Dorfman said as he handed down his sentence. “It’s my intention that Mr DePape will never get out of prison, he can never be paroled.”

Video of the incident that was played during the earlier trial showed DePape, a Canadian citizen who has lived in the US for two decades, breaking into the Pelosi home in California armed with a hammer on 28 October 2022.

DePape asked for Mrs Pelosi, who was not at home, when he confronted the lawmaker’s husband inside the couple’s house.

When police officers arrived after responding to a 911 call, they found Mr Pelosi and DePape both gripping the hammer.

Moments later – after being asked to drop the weapon – DePape abruptly struck Mr Pelosi before being wrestled to the ground by officers. The incident was caught on body cameras worn by the officers.

In addition to a fractured skull, Mr Pelosi suffered injuries to his arm and hand. He was struck three times during the attack.

The attacker had admitted during his federal trial that he planned to hold Mrs Pelosi hostage, interrogate her on camera and “break her kneecaps” if she did not admit to what he claimed were her lies.

Mrs Pelosi’s daughter, Christine, read a letter written by her father, in which he said the attack left him with nerve damage and in fear of sleeping alone at home.

When given the chance to address the court at the state trial, DePape spoke at length about conspiracy theories surrounding the 11 September 2001 attack, according to the Associated Press, whose reporters were inside the court room.

DePape also said he believed his government-appointed lawyers were conspiring against him, the AP reported, forcing the judge to interrupt him several times.

Singer Shawn Mendes opened up about his sexuality during a performance in Colorado on Monday, saying he’s “just figuring it out like everyone”.

“I don’t really know sometimes and I know other times. It feels really scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that,” he told concert-goers.

According to fan footage of the concert posted on social media, Mendes made the comments before performing an unreleased song which seems to be inspired by how speculation about his sexuality made him feel.

The Canadian singer has previously criticised such speculation, calling out its intrusiveness.

Speaking during the performance Morrison’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Mendes said he had “thought about this for a minute today if I was gonna say something tonight”.

Cheered on by the crowd, he continued: “The truth is that I didn’t get to do a lot of 15-year-old things and discover parts of myself that you do at 15.”

He continued: “There’s this thing about my sexuality, and people have been talking about it so long”, adding that it’s “kind of silly, because I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing, and it’s so hard to just put into boxes.”

“It always felt like such an intrusion on something very personal to me. Something that I was figuring out in myself, something that I had yet to discover and still have yet to discover it.”

“The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone.”

He went onto speak about his unreleased song The Mountain, which includes the lyrics: “You can say I’m too young, you can say I’m too old, you can say I like girls or boys, whatever fits your mold”.

Mendes told the crowd it was important to write that new song because “it felt like a moment where I could address it in a way that felt close to my heart”.

“And I guess I’m just speaking freely now, because I just want to be able to be closer to everyone and just kind of be in my truth,” he added.

In a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone, Mendes spoke about “this massive, massive thing for the last five years about me being gay”.

The next year, he told the Guardian speculation had been “hurtful… I get mad when people assume things about me because I imagine the people who don’t have the support system I have and how that must affect them”.

Mendes has had a number of chart-topping hits in the UK, US and Canada, including the single Señorita, which he released with Camilla Cabello – whom he also previously dated.

Satellite images analysed by BBC Verify show damage to a number of military sites in Iran from Israeli air strikes on Saturday.

They include sites experts say were used for missile production and air defence, including one previously linked to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Satellite imagery following the Israeli strikes shows damage to buildings at what experts say is a major weapons development and production facility at Parchin, about 30km (18.5 miles) east of Tehran.

The site has been linked to rocket production according to experts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Comparing high-resolution satellite imagery taken on 9 September with an image captured on 27 October, it appears that at least four structures have been significantly damaged.

One of these structures, known as Taleghan 2, has been previously linked to Iran’s nuclear programme by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

In 2016 the IAEA found evidence of uranium particles at the site, raising questions about banned nuclear activity there.

Another site apparently targeted in the Israeli air strikes is at Khojir, about 20km north-west of Parchin.

Fabian Hinz of the ISS says “Khojir is known as the area with the highest concentration of ballistic missile-related infrastructure within Iran.”

It was the site of a mysterious large explosion in 2020.

Satellite photos show at least two buildings in the complex appear to have been severely damaged.

Analysts from Sibylline, a risk intelligence company, concluded that damage to Iranian facilities believed to be linked to rocket fuel production at both Parchin and Khojir will ultimately undermine Iran’s ability to “fire another salvo of the scale necessary to breach Israeli air defences”.

A military site at Shahroud, about 350km to the east of Tehran, has also sustained damage, according to satellite imagery taken after the Israeli strikes.

Located in the northern province of Semnan, this area is significant because it’s been involved in the production of long-range missile components, according to Fabian Hinz of the IISS.

Nearby is the Shahroud Space Centre, controlled by the Revolutionary Guards Corps, from which Iran launched a military satellite into space in 2020.

Israel has claimed that it successfully targeted Iran’s aerial defence systems at number of locations but it’s difficult to confirm this with the satellite imagery available.

We have obtained satellite imagery which appears to show damage to a site described by experts as a radar installation.

It’s located on Shah Nakhjir mountain close to the western city of Ilam, and Jeremy Binnie, Middle East specialist at Janes, a defence intelligence company, says this may have been a newly updated radar defence system.

The site itself was established decades ago, but satellite pictures analysed by open source experts show it has undergone major renovation in recent years.

We’ve also identified what appears to be damage to a storage unit at the Abadan Oil Refinery based in the south-western province of Khuzestan.

However, we don’t know what caused it and there is likely to be damage in some areas across Iran caused by debris or misfiring defence systems.

The New York Times cited Israeli officials as saying that the Abadan oil refinery was one of the sites targeted in its air strikes on Saturday morning.

Iranian authorities confirmed on Saturday that Khuzestan province had been targeted by Israel.

Abadan oil refinery is the country’s largest, capable of producing 500,000 barrels a day, according to its chief executive.

Satellite imagery isn’t always conclusive in identifying damaged structures.

For example, a photograph we have verified showing smoke rising near Hazrat Amir Brigade Air Defence base suggested it had been successfully targeted. But satellite imagery of the area captured on Sunday has too many shadows to confirm any damage to the site.

Iran launched a missile attack on Israel at the start of October for the second time this year, after firing 300 missiles and drones in April.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico.

Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They uncovered the hidden complex – which they have called Valeriana – using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.

They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.

The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.

It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.

But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say.

Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

The find helps change an idea in Western thinking that the Tropics was where “civilisations went to die”, says Professor Marcello Canuto, a co-author in the research.

Instead, this part of the world was home to rich and complex cultures, he explains.

We can’t be sure what led to the demise and eventual abandonment of the city, but the archaeologists say climate change was a major factor.

Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).

It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.

There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.

The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.

It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.

It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game.

• How ancient Maya cities have withstood the ravages of time

There was also evidence of a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population.

In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.

Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London, who was not involved in the research, says it supports claims that Maya lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages.

“The point is that the landscape is definitely settled – that is, settled in the past – and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild’,” she says.

The research suggests that when Maya civilisations collapsed from 800AD onwards, it was partly because they were so densely populated and could not survive climate problems.

“It’s suggesting that the landscape was just completely full of people at the onset of drought conditions and it didn’t have a lot of flexibility left. And so maybe the entire system basically unravelled as people moved farther away,” says Mr Auld-Thomas.

Warfare and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to eradication of Maya city states.

Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof Canuto.

In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch.

But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work.

Mr Auld-Thomas says his work suggests there are many sites out there that archaeologists have no idea about.

In fact so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.

“I’ve got to go to Valeriana at some point. It’s so close to the road, how could you not? But I can’t say we will do a project there,” says Mr Auld-Thomas.

“One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study,” he adds.

The research is published in the academic journal Antiquity.

Some users on X who spend their days sharing content that includes election misinformation, AI-generated images and unfounded conspiracy theories say they are being paid “thousands of dollars” by the social media site.

The BBC identified networks of dozens of accounts that re-share each other’s content multiple times a day – including a mix of true, unfounded, false and faked material – to boost their reach, and therefore, revenue on the site.

Several say earnings from their own and other accounts range from a couple of hundred to thousands of dollars.

They also say they coordinate sharing each other’s posts on forums and group chats. “It’s a way of trying to help each other out,” one user said.

Some of these networks support Donald Trump, others Kamala Harris, and some are independent. Several of these profiles – which say they are not connected to official campaigns – have been contacted by US politicians, including congressional candidates, looking for supportive posts.

On 9 October, X changed its rules so the payments made to eligible accounts with a significant reach are calculated according to the amount of engagement from premium users – likes, shares and comments – rather than the number of ads under their posts.

Many social media sites allow users to make money from their posts or to share sponsored content. But they often have rules which allow them to de-monetise or suspend profiles that post misinformation. X does not have guidelines on misinformation in the same way.

While X has a smaller user base than some sites, it has a significant impact on political discourse. It raises questions about whether X is incentivising users to post provocative claims, whether they’re true or not, at a highly sensitive moment for US politics.

The BBC compared the approximate earnings reported by some of these X users with the amount they would be expected to earn, based on their number of views, followers and interactions with other profiles, and found them to be credible.

Among the misleading posts shared by some of these networks of profiles were claims about election fraud which had been rebutted by authorities, and extreme, unfounded allegations of paedophilia and sexual abuse against the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

Some misleading and false posts that originated on X have also spilled on to other social media sites with a bigger audience, such as Facebook and TikTok.

In one example, an X user with a small following says he created a doctored image purporting to show Kamala Harris working at McDonald’s as a young woman. Other users then pushed evidence-free claims that the Democratic Party was manipulating images of its candidate.

Unfounded conspiracy theories from X about the July assassination attempt on Donald Trump were also picked up on other social media sites.

X did not respond to questions about whether the site is incentivising users to post like this, nor to requests to interview owner Elon Musk.

Freedom Uncut’s content creation lair – where he streams and makes videos – is decorated with fairy lights in the shape of an American flag. He says he is an independent, but would rather Donald Trump becomes president than Kamala Harris.

Free – as his friends call him – says he can spend up to 16 hours a day in his lair posting on X, interacting with the network of dozens of content creators he’s a part of, and sharing AI-generated pictures. He does not share his full name or real identity because he says his family’s personal information has been exposed online, leading to threats.

He is by no means one of the most extreme posters, and has agreed to meet me and explain how these networks on X operate.

He says he has had 11 million views over the past few months since he began posting regularly about the US election. He brings several up on the screen as we chat at his home in Tampa, Florida.

Some are obviously satire – Donald Trump looking like a character in The Matrix as he brushes aside bullets, or President Joe Biden as a dictator. Other AI images are less fantastical – including an image of someone on the roof of their flooded home as fighter jets pass by, with the comment: “Remember that politicians don’t care about you on November 5th.”

The image echoes Mr Trump’s claim that there were “no helicopters, no rescue” for people in North Carolina following Hurricane Helene. The claim has been rebutted by the North Carolina National Guard, which says it rescued hundreds of people in 146 flight missions.

Freedom Uncut says he sees his images as “art” that sparks a conversation. He says he is “not trying to fool anybody” but that he can “do so much more by using AI”.

Since his profile was monetised, he says he can make in the “low thousands” monthly from X: “I think it’s become a lot easier for people to make money.”

He adds that some users he knows have been making more than five figures and claims he could corroborate this by seeing the reach of their posts: “It’s at that point it really does become a job.”

He says it is the “controversial” stuff that tends to get the most views – and compares this to “sensationalist” traditional media.

While he posts “provocative stuff”, he says it is “usually based in some version of reality”. But he suggests that other profiles he sees are happy to share posts they know not to be true. This, he says, is an easy “money-maker”.

Freedom Uncut dismisses concerns about false claims influencing the election, claiming the government “spreads more misinformation than the rest of the internet combined”.

He also says it is “very common” for local politicians to reach out to accounts like his on X for support. He says some of them have chatted to him about appearing on his live streams and spoken to him about creating and sharing memes, AI images and artwork for them.

Could any of these posts – misleading or not – have a tangible impact this election?

“I think that you’re seeing that currently. I think that a lot of the Trump support comes from that,” he says.

In Freedom Uncut’s view, there is “more trust in independent media” – including accounts sharing AI-generated images and misinformation – than in “some traditional media companies”.

Going head-to-head with the pro-Trump accounts Freedom Uncut describes are profiles such as Brown Eyed Susan, who has more than 200,000 followers on X.

She is part of a network of “die-hard” accounts posting content multiple times every hour in support of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. While she uses her first name, she does not share her surname because of threats and abuse she has received online.

Speaking to me from Los Angeles, Susan says she never intended to start making money from her posts – or for her account’s reach to “explode”. Sometimes she posts and re-shares more than 100 messages a day – and her individual posts sometimes reach more than two million users each.

She says she only makes money from her posts because she was awarded a blue tick, which marks paid users on the site and some prominent accounts. “I didn’t ask for it. I can’t hide it, and I can’t return it. So I clicked on monetise,” she tells me, estimating she can make a couple of hundred dollars a month.

Aside from posting about policy, some of her most viral posts – racking up more than three million views – have promoted unfounded and false conspiracy theories suggesting the July assassination attempt was staged by Donald Trump.

She acknowledges that a member of the crowd and the shooter were killed, but says she has genuine questions about Donald Trump’s injury, the security failings, and whether the incident has been properly investigated.

“There’s no way to get to the truth in this. And if they want to call it conspiratorial, they can,” she says.

Susan also shares memes, some of which use AI, taking aim at the Republican contender. Several more convincing examples make him look older or unwell. She says these “illustrate his current condition”.

Others show him looking like a dictator. She maintains that all her images are “obvious” fakes.

Like Freedom Uncut, she says politicians, including congressional candidates, have contacted her for support, and she says she tries to “spread as much awareness” as she can for them.

Following a row over whether Kamala Harris once worked at McDonald’s, a doctored image of her in the fast food chain’s uniform was shared on Facebook by her supporters and went viral.

When some pro-Trump accounts realised it was an edited photo of a different woman in the uniform, it triggered unfounded accusations that the image came from the Democratic Party itself.

An account called “The Infinite Dude” on X appeared to be the first to share the image with the caption: “This is fake”. The person behind the image tells me his name is Blake and that he shared it as part of an experiment. His profile does not have nearly as many followers as the other accounts I have been talking to.

When I ask for evidence that he doctored the image, he told me he has “the original files and creation timestamps”, but he did not share those with me as he says proof does not really matter.

“People share content not because it’s real, but because they want it to be real. Both sides do it equally – they just choose different stories to believe,” he says.

His political allegiance remains unclear and he says this “isn’t about politics”.

X says online that its priority is to protect and defend the user’s voice. The site adds manipulated media labels to some AI-generated and doctored video, audio and images. It also has a feature called Community Notes, which crowdsources fact-checking from users.

During the UK election, X did take action over a network of accounts sharing faked clips that I investigated. In the US election campaign, however, I have received no response to my questions or requests to interview Elon Musk.

That matters – because social media companies like his could affect what unfolds as voters head to the polls.

Marianna Spring investigated this story using her Undercover Voters – five fictional characters based on data from the Pew Research Centre – that allow her to interrogate what some different users are recommended on social media. Their social media accounts are private and do not message real people.

Find out more about them here – and on the BBC Americast podcast on BBC Sounds.