Chinese tourists huddle together against the brisk autumn breeze on a 12-storey building, vying for the best spot to photograph the point where their country meets Russia and North Korea.

The three national flags overlap on a map on the wall, which explains that Fangchuan in China’s north-east corner is a unique place for that reason.

“I feel very proud to be standing here… with Russia on my left and North Korea on my right,” declares one woman on a trip with her co-workers. “There are no borders among the people.”

That might be overly optimistic. Like the sliver of sandwiched Chinese territory she has travelled to see, Beijing too is caught between its sanctioned neighbours.

Fears over the budding alliance between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have peaked in recent weeks, with reports of North Korea deploying thousands of troops to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And that was before Pyongyang fired a banned intercontinental missile on Thursday, on the longest flight recorded yet – after turning up the rhetoric against Seoul for weeks.

“China seeks a relationship with a reasonable, high level of control over North Korea,” says Christopher Green, an analyst from the International Crisis Group. “And North Korea’s relationship with Russia threatens to undermine that.”

If Chinese leader Xi Jinping is unable shape the Putin-Kim alliance to suit his interests, China may well remain stuck in the middle as western anger and anxiety grows.

Moscow and Pyongyang deny that North Korean soldiers are headed for Ukraine, widely seen as a significant escalation. But the United States says it has seen evidence of this, following allegations by South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence.

The first reports emerged just before Xi met his Russian counterpart at the Brics summit earlier in October, overshadowing a gathering that was meant to send the West a defiant message.

It increasingly appears as though China’s allies are spiralling out of its control. Beijing, the senior partner in the triad, seeks to be the stable leader of a new world order, one that is not led by the US. But that’s difficult to do when one ally has started a war in Europe, and another is accused of aiding the invasion.

“China is unhappy with the way things are going,” Mr Green says, “but they are trying to keep their discontent relatively quiet.”

It’s certainly a sensitive topic for Beijing, judging by the response to our presence in the border town, where it seems tourists are welcome – but journalists are not.

We were in public areas at all times, and yet the team was stopped, repeatedly questioned, followed and our footage deleted.

The hotel demanded to keep my passport for “my safety and the safety of others”. Police visited our hotel rooms, and they also blocked the road to the port at Hunchun, which would have given us a closer view of the current trade between Russia and China.

On the viewing platform in Fangchuan, it’s clear that most tourists have come to see North Korea.

“I saw a person cycling,” says one girl peering through a telescope. Her friend rushes over to see: “Ooooh! It’s such a mysterious country.”

Close by is the Tumen river that gently cuts through all three countries. It is China’s gateway into the Sea of Japan, where it has territorial disputes with Tokyo.

The 1,400km-long (870 mile) Chinese border has some of the only platforms with a clear view into North Korea. South Korea’s frontier with the North is an almost impenetrable barrier, the heavily mined and fortified Demilitarized Zone.

Someone offers me a pair of binoculars. Some people are cycling through the village on ageing bicycles, but there are few other signs of life. One of the largest buildings is a school with a sign calling for children to “learn well for Chosun”, another name for North Korea.

“North Korea has always been our neighbour. It’s no stranger to us,” says a middle-aged man. “To be able to see how they live makes me realise China is prosperous and strong.”

Kim Jong Un’s regime would certainly struggle to survive without its biggest benefactor, China, which accounts for more than 90% of foreign trade, including food and fuel.

That was not always the case. In the early 1960s it was the Chinese who fled famine across the Tumen river. Some even went to school in North Korea because they believed its education system at the time was better.

The North Korean economy crashed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 – which had been its main source of aid and cheap oil – sparking severe food shortages and, eventually, famine.

Soon, North Korean refugees began wading through an often freezing river at the risk of being shot dead to escape hunger, poverty and repression. There are now more than 30,000 of them in South Korea and an unknown number still live in China.

“Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea hasn’t really had any choice but to maintain good relations with China, which has been its sole benefactor,” Mr Green says.

But now, he adds, Russia “is offering an alternative and the North Koreans are seeking to exploit that”.

Mao Zedong, the first leader of the People’s Republic of China, had likened the relationship between Beijing and Pyongyang to the closeness between “lips and teeth”: “If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold.”

Now, Beijing finds itself smarting from a lack of gratitude as Kim’s lips are “kissing elsewhere”, according to sociologist Aidan Foster-Carter, who has studied North Korea for several decades.

“North Korea has consistently been the comrade from hell to both Russia and China. They take as much money as they can and [then] do what they like.”

Analysts have noted that Kim has consistently flattered Putin over Xi in the last year. While Kim hasn’t met Xi since 2019, he has met Putin twice in the past year or so. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has drawn the two sanctioned leaders closer than ever. Putin seeks more support for his war and Kim wants to bolster his regime with alliances and attention.

From the Chinese border, it’s easy to see the burgeoning relationship between the two sides.

The whistle of a train interrupts the tourist chatter, and a steam engine pulling a long line of freight carriages slowly chugs across the railway bridge from Russia to North Korea. It stops in front of a Korean sign facing China which reads: “Towards a new victory!”

The US estimates that Kim has sold more than a million artillery shells and Grad rockets to Moscow for use in Ukraine, which North Korea denies.

But there is no doubt that the pair have stepped up cooperation after signing a security pact in June to help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.

“You have very stiff and formal language to Xi Jinping on the occasion of what is actually an historically important event – the 75th anniversary of relations of the People’s Republic of China,” Mr Foster-Carter says.

“And yet on Putin’s birthday, Kim calls him ‘my closest comrade’. If you are Xi Jinping, what are you thinking?”

It’s hard to know, because China has shown no signs of interfering with the Russia-North Korea alliance.

The US has noticed Beijing’s disquiet and for once the two rivals may have similar goals.

In the last week, State Department officials have raised the issue of North Korean troops in Russia with Chinese diplomats.

Beijing does have options – in the past, they have cut supplies of oil and coal to North Korea, and complied with US-led sanctions to curb Pyongyang’s nuclear programme.

Already, China is battling US accusations that it is selling components to Russia that aid its invasion of Ukraine. Beijing’s trade with Moscow is also flourishing, even as it tries to cope with Western tariffs.

Xi has kept Russia close because he needs Putin’s help to challenge the US-led world order. But he has not stopped trying to repair ties with Europe, the UK and even the US. China has also been holding talks with Japan and South Korea to ease historic tensions.

But Kim’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric against Seoul has the South once again debating whether it should have its own nuclear arsenal. North Korean troops on a Ukrainian battlefield would only further unravel Beijing’s plans.

The possibility has already seen South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol discuss “concrete counter-measures” and talk of strengthening security cooperation with Ukraine and Nato.

A nuclear-armed South Korea or an “East Asian Nato” are not ideal in a region where China wants greater sway. An emboldened Kim could also draw a stronger show of support from the US – in the form of warships or even weapons – towards its allies, Seoul and Tokyo.

“For a very long time, China has had a policy of three nos in Northeast Asia – one of those nos was a no nuclear North Korea. Obviously that has been a failure,” Mr Green says.

Now Beijing fears that the alliance with Russia could destabilise North Korea, he adds: “That could even benefit Vladimir Putin in a way it really would not benefit Xi Jinping.”

Experts say Beijing is just as worried as the West about what military technology Putin might sell to Kim in exchange for troops.

“Satellites, for sure,” Mr Foster-Carter says. “But Putin is bad – not mad. Russia knows just as China knows that North Korea is a loose cannon. Giving [Kim] more technology for nukes is not a good thing for anybody.”

Experts believe Xi is unlikely to do anything drastic because China needs a stable North Korea – if he cuts off aid, he would likely have a refugee crisis at the border.

But Kim too might have a decision to make.

Although Russia is paying for shells and troops, Mr Foster-Carter says, it is China that “has actually kept North Korea going all this time, often through gritted teeth. I just wonder at what point Beijing will turn on Pyongyang?”.

Kim’s deadly gamble could also have a profound impact closer to home – the 25 million North Koreans who are cut off from the outside world and completely dependent on the regime for their survival.

Across the Tumen river in Fangchuan, a North Korean soldier watches us, while we watch him.

Steam rises from snack stands selling noodles and sizzled octopus on sticks on the Chinese side. And he can probably hear the giggling tourists taking pictures with the latest cameras and phones, which he is forbidden from owning.

The shallow river is a gulf neither the tourists nor the soldier can cross.

In battleground states like Arizona and Michigan, young women are lining up to vote early. Kamala Harris is hoping they are the tide that turns the election for her.

On an abnormally warm fall morning on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, dozens of students stood in line to vote at the university’s early voting centre.

Among them was Keely Ganong, a third-year student who was excited to vote for Harris.

“She’s just a leader that I would to look up to to represent my country,” she said.

“Gender equality is on the forefront of the issues,” said her friend Lola Nordlinger, referencing abortion rights. “A woman’s choice is something that’s so personal to her, and it really should be no one else’s decision.”

Ms Ganong said everyone on campus is talking about voting with less than a week before election day.

“Student voices are definitely going to make a difference” in the election, the 20-year-old said.

• Six Trump supporters on why they’re backing him

Adrianna Pete, a 24-year-old who was on campus volunteering to teach students about the democratic process, agrees:

“I feel like a lot of women are rising up,” she said.

These young women are, in many ways, typical Harris voters. According to a recent poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics, Harris leads amongst women 18-29 by a whopping 30 points. Amongst college students specifically, of either gender, she leads by 38 points, a recent survey from Inside Higher Ed/Generation Lab survey found.

With polls neck-and-neck both nationally and in battleground states like Michigan, Harris will be counting on these young women to show up, in big numbers, to win the election.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?
• Trump’s attempts to woo the ‘manosphere’
• Women on how abortion shaped their vote

It’s a point not lost on Hannah Brocks, 20, who waited in a long line last week to attend a packed Harris and Walz rally in Ann Arbor in a local park. She’s been involved in the school’s young Democrats club, knocking on doors, sending flyers and making phone calls to try to convince people to vote for Harris.

“I just like the way she talks about people in general,” Ms Brocks said. “It’s just so much love and empathy in the way she talks about other people.”

That edge amongst young women could be amplified even more if voter turnout this election follows the same patterns as it did in 2020, when about 10 million more women voted than men, according to the Center for American Women in Politics.

Early voting exit polls show a similar breakdown this time around, with about 55% women, 45% men, according to a Politico analysis, though analysts caution we have no idea who these women have voted for.

But while much has been made of how this election is shaping up to be boys versus girls, the reality is much more complex. In that same Harvard poll, Harris’s lead amongst white women under 30 was 13 points ahead of Trump, compared to a 55-point advantage amongst non-white women under 30.

When white women of all ages are surveyed, Harris’s lead all but vanishes. It’s a history that could be repeating – in 2016, more white women backed Trump than Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Trump’s lead with white women widened.

Democrats in general have had an especially tough time with white, non-college educated voters, male and female. If Harris wants to win, she’ll have to not only have to get high turnout among the young women who support her, she’ll have to convince some women who might not fit the mould too.

“The best avatar for a voter writ large is a woman in a swing state who didn’t go to college,” says pollster Evan Roth Smith, from Blueprint, a Democratic public opinion research company.

While these women seem to trust the Republican Party more on issues like immigration and the economy, Mr Smith says abortion could be the issue that turns them towards Harris.

The vice-president has promised to restore abortion rights, while Trump has taken credit for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which used to guarantee women a right to abortion nationally.

Women at a Harris rally in the battleground state of Arizona told the BBC that the stakes this year feel especially high. The state has a question on the ballot that would allow voters to decide whether the right to abortion should be enshrined in the state’s constitution. Abortion is currently illegal after 15 weeks, with few exceptions.

Mary Jelkovsky is hopeful abortion being on the ballot here in Arizona could help bring a blue tide.

Wearing a bright blue sweatshirt reading “vote with your vag,” the 26-year-old told the BBC she and her husband have started trying to get pregnant.

She says the idea that this could be forced on someone now with Roe v Wade being overturned was hard to wrap her brain around.

Ms Jelkovsky says the Supreme Court decision opened up important conversations with her friends and family. She says she learned multiple loved ones had had abortions, including once for a life-saving measure.

“It’s personal but it’s so important to have these conversations,” she says. “For us [women], this election couldn’t be more important.”

The Harris campaign is hoping the abortion issue will not just inspire Democrats to turn up at the polls, but convince Republican women to flip sides. These “silent” Harris voters, as political analysts like to call them, could help boost her numbers in especially tight races.

Arizonian Rebecca Gau, 53, was a lifelong Republican until Trump ran for president. When she cast her vote for Joe Biden in 2020, she said it was a protest vote. But this time around, she says she feels excited to vote for Harris.

“I felt like she could represent me as a practical American woman,” she told the BBC earlier in October.

She said she’s tired of “toxic masculinity”, and she thinks other Republican women, like her, feel the same way.

“I don’t care what the political persuasion is – women are fed up,” she said.

But not all Republican women are convinced. Tracey Sorrel, a Texan who is part of the BBC’s Voter Panel, said she thinks Harris would take abortion rights too far. Ultimately, even though she doesn’t like some of what he says, Ms Sorrel said she will vote for Trump.

“I’m not voting personality. I’m voting policy. I don’t have to marry the man,” she said.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: All you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Vote weighs on minds of Ukraine’s frontline soldiers
• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Emergency teams in Spain are continuing their efforts to locate dozens of people still missing in what is the worst flooding disaster in generations.

More than 200 people are known to have died, with most fatalities happening in the Valencia region, but the death toll is expected to rise.

The floods destroyed bridges and covered towns with mud – leaving cut-off communities without water, food or electricity.

Some residents say more lives could have been saved if the local authorities had been quicker to warn of the flood risk.

Among them is Juan González, who lives in the town of Aldaia in Valencia. He told the BBC that the loss there was devastating.

“This is an area prone to flash flooding. It’s outrageous that our local government didn’t do anything about it, knowing that this was coming,” he said.

Another local, Augustin, said the flat where he lived with his wife and children had been completely flooded and they have had to move in with his parents.

• Why Valencia floods proved so deadly
• Timing of Spain flood alert under scrutiny as blame game rages
• Spaniards recount horror of deadly floods

While the worst of the weather has now passed Valencia and the Mediterranean coast, warnings remain in place in southern Spain, with the possibility of further heavy downfalls into Saturday.

That includes in the Huelva region, which has already been badly hit by downpours. The city of Cartaya saw around two months’ worth of rain in just 10 hours.

Further south, in the city of Jerez, hundreds of families had to be evacuated from their homes as heavy rain raised river levels.

Meanwhile, questions remain about how disaster relief services acted, with accusations that they were too slow, and whether Spain has an adequate warning system for natural disasters.

The civil protection agency, overseen by the regional government, issued an emergency alert to the phones of people in and around the city of Valencia after 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday, by which time the flood water was swiftly rising in many areas and in some cases already wreaking havoc.

Mireia, who lives close to some of the devastation in Valencia, said that people were “not prepared at all”.

“Many people were inside their cars, they couldn’t make it out,” she said. “They were just drowned by the water.”

Thousands of volunteers are currently helping the Spanish military and emergency services with the rescue and clean-up operation, and Valencia’s regional president, Carlos Mazon, said more troops would be deployed.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez took to social media to express his thanks to volunteers, calling them an “example of solidarity and the limitless dedication of Spanish society”.

He has vowed that his government will do whatever it takes to help those affected by the disaster.

In the devastated town of Paiporta, where more than 60 deaths have so far been reported, residents have expressed their frustration that aid is coming in too slowly.

“There aren’t enough firefighters, the shovels haven’t arrived,” Paco Clemente, a 33-year-old pharmacist, told the AFP news agency as he helped clear mud from a friend’s house.

Dozens of people have been arrested for looting, with one Aldaia resident telling AFP he saw thieves grabbing items from an abandoned supermarket as “people are a bit desperate”.

One of the contributing factors to the disaster was a lack of rainfall throughout the rest of the year, which left the ground in many areas of eastern and southern Spain unable to absorb rainwater efficiently.

The warming climate is also likely to have contributed to the severity of the floods.

In a preliminary report, World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of international scientists who investigate global warming’s role in extreme weather, found that the rainfall which struck Spain was 12% heavier due to climate change and that the weather event experienced was twice as likely.

As Spain reels from the flash floods which struck the south-east of the country this week, many are wondering why the death toll, which currently stands at over 200, is so high.

Almost all of the deaths confirmed so far have been in the Valencia region on the Mediterranean coast.

Some areas have been particularly devastated: the town of Paiporta, population 25,000, reported at least 62 deaths.

Various factors, including drivers becoming trapped in their cars, poor planning by officials and extreme rainfall being exacerbated by climate change are all likely to have contributed.

The civil protection agency, overseen by the regional government, issued an emergency alert to the phones of people in and around the city of Valencia after 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday, by which time the flood water was swiftly rising in many areas and in some cases already wreaking havoc.

A large number of those killed were on the roads, in many cases returning from work, when the flash floods struck.

Video footage shows how a first wave of flood water washed through Paiporta as cars were still circulating. Although rainfall was heavier in other areas, such as Utiel and Chiva, Paiporta’s geography, with a ravine running through its centre, made the impact of the flood particularly devastating.

Mayor Maribel Albalat said that the town was ill-prepared in terms of planning, with many ground-floor flats. Six residents of an elderly care home died when the flood water washed into the building when they were still on the ground floor. She also suggested there was an element of complacency.

“In Paiporta we don’t tend to have floods and people aren’t afraid,” she said.

• ‘It was like a tsunami’: Spaniards recount horror of deadly floods

• Timing of flood alert under scrutiny as blame game rages

• Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse

Garages were a particular death trap.

“When it rains people normally go down to their garages to get their cars out in case their garage is flooded,” Ms Albalat said.

That appears to have been the case in the neighbourhood of La Torre, on the outskirts of Valencia, where the bodies of seven people were recovered from the garage of a residential building.

The A3 motorway connecting Valencia to Madrid was one of many roads where motorists were trapped as the water level rose, leaving them unsure whether it was safer to stay in the vehicle or not.

“There are almost certainly more people who have died because the water washed people away who had got out of their cars,” one survivor told the Telecinco TV channel. Another survivor said the water had been up to his chest.

An eye-witness described seeing one driver who had got out of his car who had strapped himself to a lamppost with his belt, to stop himself from being washed away. It is unknown whether he survived.

The mayor of Chiva, Amparo Fort, warned on Thursday that nearby there were still “hundreds of cars turned upside down and they will surely have people inside them”.

On Thursday morning, the Guardia Civil shared advice on how to escape from a car during a flood on social media. People caught in floods are advised to try and escape though their cars’ windows and windscreen.

Other factors also appear to help explain why Valencia was so devastated by the weather event.

Much of the area most heavily affected, in and surrounding the country’s third-largest city, is densely populated.

A lack of rainfall throughout the rest of the year has left the ground in many areas of eastern and southern Spain unable to absorb rainwater efficiently.

Pablo Aznar, a researcher at the Socio-Economic Observatory of Floods and Droughts (Obsis), warned that much of the area affected had undergone what he described as “untrammelled development”, with many areas covered in impermeable materials, which “increases the danger posed by these events”.

The warming climate is also likely to have contributed to the severity of the floods.

In a preliminary report, World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of international scientists who investigate global warming’s role in extreme weather, found that the rainfall which struck Spain was 12% heavier due to climate change and that the weather event experienced is twice as likely.

On a crisp, sunny day in the largest Arab-majority city in the US, dozens of people gathered outside the Great Commoner cafe to catch a glimpse of Donald Trump.

“What we want is peace,” Trump told a group of Arab-American business leaders inside the Dearborn, Michigan, restaurant – days before the presidential election.

But a crowd of pro- and anti-Trump voters shouting at one another nearby demonstrated how divided the Michigan community has become over choosing the best American president to handle the escalating Middle East war.

The Republican’s Friday visit to Dearborn, once a reliably Democratic area, marks the culmination of his efforts to court the 200,000-plus Arab-Americans who live in must-win Michigan. It could sway a tied race between Trump and Kamala Harris. Hillary Clinton lost Michigan to Trump by only 10,000 votes in 2016, while Biden won it back by 150,000 votes in 2020.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?
• How Israelis and Palestinians see the US election

On billboards lining Michigan highways and during visits, the Trump campaign argues that he stands “for peace” in the Middle East, while casting Harris as pro-Israel.

That message has worked on some. Trump secured two endorsements from the mayors of Dearborn Heights, and Hamtramck, a small Muslim majority city near Detroit, while Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said Friday he declined a meeting with the former president.

The trend worries Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of the Uncommitted movement – a group protesting US support of Israel – who pledged to back Harris even though his group refused to endorse her.

“I’ve been hearing … a lot more of the feeling that this is a binary choice, and some voters feeling like maybe we should just vote for Donald Trump because he’s saying he’s a pro-peace candidate,” Mr Alawieh told the BBC at Haraz Cafe in Dearborn on Friday.

The Harris campaign, meanwhile, said the vice-president has been and is supportive of the “diverse Muslim community” in the US.

“The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans,” said Nasrina Bargzie, campaign director of Muslim and Arab American Outreach. She added that Harris would ensure the community can “live free from the hateful policies of the Trump administration”.

Despite frustrations with the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the war, several community leaders told the BBC they don’t believe Trump offers a solution either.

“We’re not naive about what he means for our community,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network, a Michigan Muslim advocacy group. He cited Trump’s “Muslim ban”, his 2017 executive order to ban travelers from predominately Muslim nations.

Still, Mr Nazarko and other leaders said sending a message about their anger over the Biden-Harris administration’s pro-Israel policies is more important than who wins the White House.

They have encouraged votes for third-party candidates – or just sitting out the election altogether.

That’s the message Hassan Abdel Salam, a leader of the Abandon Harris campaign and former Democrat, delivered to a packed room gathered for prayer at the American Muslim Center in Dearborn on Friday.

“Our intention is to show that we are punishing someone, a leader who for a year we protested and we gave ultimata, warnings,” he said. “Our belief now, even despite having lived under Trump, a truly vile person, has been that we now see that there is no lesser evil.”

Muslim leaders and political experts acknowledge that the Harris campaign has decided to focus more on securing moderate voters and improving turnout in traditionally Democratic areas like Detroit, rather than courting Muslims and Arab-Americans.

The campaign also is concerned about losing support from pro-Israel Jewish voters and other Democrats more likely to cast a ballot, said Saeed Khan, a Wayne State University professor.

Mr Khan said many voters who considered casting a ballot for third-party candidates, likely will end up voting for Harris to keep Trump out of office.

It’s a calculation Wael Alzayat, CEO of Muslim voter outreach group Emgage, hopes Michigan voters, in general, will make.

“A vote for third-party is a vote for Trump, which will bring about the worst outcome,” he said. “Trump is a brick wall.”

Mohammad Hassan, a member of Hamtramck’s fully Muslim city council, said 80 percent of his 25,000-strong Bangladeshi Muslim community is voting for Harris, while the rest could go for Trump.

But, he said, all Muslims don’t necessarily agree.

“Yemeni Muslims in the same city may go 50-50 between Trump and Harris,” he said.

The anger within the Arab-Muslim community over Gaza is real, Mr Hassan said, but unlike the Bangladeshi community, they do not vote in big numbers. “So even if their vote doesn’t go to Harris, it’s unlikely to go to Trump.”

Many Arab Americans and Muslims crave a more “balanced narrative” about the war, including more empathy for the suffering of Gazans and Lebanese, Mr Khan said.

“For Harris to talk about 100 some-odd [Israeli] hostages, and not mention 45,000 to 50,000 Gazans killed, to not consider that there was an impact on American citizens, families and lives, that I think was seen as egregious,” he said.

Over 43,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas after the group’s October 2023 attack, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage in the attack.

None of this makes the decision to support Harris easy, said Mr Alawieh, the Uncommitted leader.

Her campaign made a mistake by not budging on Israel, which also may cost her support from Democratic young voters or voters of colour, he said.

“It feels to me like the Harris campaign here in Michigan left a lot of votes on the table,” Mr Alawieh said. “I hope they’re doing that as part of some calculation that she wins. I hope that after this election, we don’t look back at her campaign and say ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have left those votes on the table.’”

• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• Where Kamala Harris stands on 10 issues
• Where Donald Trump stands on 10 issues

Some artists become legends in their lifetime yet remain a mystery years after their death.

Indian painter Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde, born 100 years ago on 2 November 1924, was one such master.

Considered one of South Asia’s greatest abstract painters, Gaitonde was part of a rebellious generation of artists who laid the foundation for a new era of Indian art in the mid-20th Century.

He was deeply inspired by the techniques used by Western painters but his work remained rooted in Asian philosophy, infusing light and texture in ways that, admirers say, evokes a profound sense of calmness.

His paintings were meant to be “meditations on the light and universe”, says Yamini Mehta, who worked as the international head of South Asian Art at Sotheby’s.

“The play of light and shadows and texture makes these paintings dynamic.”

In a career that spanned decades, Gaitonde never pursued fame or fortune. But his works continue to grab attention at auctions, years after his death in 2001.

In 2022, an untitled oil painting by him fetched 420m rupees (nearly $5m; £3.9m), setting a new record for Indian art at that time. The bluish shades of the work reminded viewers of large expanses of the sea or sky.

Gaitonde lived as a recluse for most of his life. He was deeply impacted by Japanese Zen philosophy and this meditative mindset was often reflected in his paintings.

“Everything starts from silence. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences… Your entire being is working together with the brush, the painting knife, the canvas to absorb that silence and create,” he told journalist Pritish Nandy in a rare interview in 1991.

Originally from the western state of Goa, Gaitonde’s family lived in Mumbai city (formerly Bombay) in a small, three-room dwelling in a chawl – an affordable tenement complex for the city’s working class.

A born artist, he joined Mumbai’s famous JJ School of Arts for training in 1946. Despite his father’s disapproval – art was not seen as a viable career in India at the time – Gaitonde funded his own studies and earned a diploma in 1948.

For some time, he was part of a group of influential Indian artists called the Progressive Artists Group, which was set up to encourage new forms of art. Formed in 1947 in Mumbai, the group counted leading artists such as Francis Souza, SH Raza, MF Husain and Bhanu Athaiya – the first Indian to win an Oscar – as its members.

Gaitonde also worked at the city’s Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute, another hub frequented by legends such as sitarist Ravi Shankar and theatre artist Ebrahim Alkazi.

“This was an interesting time as Mumbai was a hotbed of creativity,” says artist and writer Satish Naik, who has published an anthology on Gaitonde in the Marathi language.

Indian art at that time was largely dominated by realism, found in the murals of the Ajanta caves and in Mughal art or miniature paintings.

“Gaitonde began with realistic works but soon sought a different path. He was one of the first ones to reject the form and adopt the formless,” Naik said.

“In that sense, he was a rebel. He wanted to paint as it pleased him, not as someone dictated to him.”

Gaitonde’s deep interest in spirituality helped him progress towards his craft.

“My paintings are nothing else but the reflection of nature,” he once wrote in a 1963 questionnaire for New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

In 1963, Morris Graves, a famous abstract painter from the US, saw Gaitonde’s work during a trip to India, and was heavily impressed.

He immediately sent a letter to Dan and Marian Johnson of the Willard Gallery in New York, describing him as “one of the finest” painters he had ever seen.

“He’s as fine – or superb – as Mark Rothko at his best and will be a world-known painter one of these days,” Graves wrote.

“He is an abstract painter with something unspeakably beautiful and clean. They are the most beautiful landscapes of the mind plus light.”

In 1964, Gaitonde moved to New York after getting the Rockefeller Fellowship. The next two years were a formative phase in his career as the young artist got a chance to meet American modern artists and see their works, which further developed his style.

In 1971, Gaitonde received the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award in India, for his outstanding contribution to art.

But despite his growing fame, he became increasingly withdrawn in the coming years.

His disciple and renowned artist Laxman Shreshtha recounts in Naik’s book how MF Husain would often try to visit Gaitonde at his Delhi residence.

“If Gaitonde didn’t want to meet anyone, he would not open the door, not even for Husain who would sketch something on the door and go. That was Husain’s way of saying ‘I had dropped by’.”

Even his work underwent a shift. Usually, the artist would paint anywhere between six and seven canvases in a year. But after a spinal injury in 1984, the numbers went down considerably.

“I still continue to paint; I make paintings in my head. I now have limited energy which I need to conserve and cannot waste putting paint to canvas,” he once told art gallerist Dadiba Pundole.

As Gaitonde’s stature as an artist grew, his paintings became fewer and rarer, all of which added to the charm and mystery surrounding his work.

It is perhaps also one of the reasons why his paintings command such high prices even today.

When Gaitonde died in 2001 at the age of 77, his death went widely unreported as the artist lived his last years in obscurity.

But his thought-provoking canvases continued to make waves around the world.

Cara Manes, an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, once said that Gaitonde’s works were an embodiment of what silence might look like. “And yet there’s a certain shimmering effect that emerges out of that silence which is then pitted against these very solid marks, assertive application of colours.”

For the artist, though, art remained a deeply personal form of self-expression.

He often said: “I let the colours flow and watch. That is my painting.”

Two families in the West Midlands are waiting for compensation in the first documented case of babies being switched at birth in NHS history.

It was only taken out of idle curiosity one rainy winter’s day – but the shocking result of a DNA test was to force two women and their families to reassess everything they knew about themselves.

When Tony’s friends bought him a DNA home-testing kit for Christmas in 2021, he left it on his kitchen sideboard and forgot about it for two months.

It did not catch his eye again until one day in February. Tony was at home and bored because his weekly round of golf had been rained off. He spat into the sample tube, sent the kit off, and didn’t think about it for weeks.

The results came on a Sunday evening. Tony was on the phone to his mother, Joan, when the email arrived.

At first, everything looked as he’d expected. The test pinpointed the place in Ireland where his maternal family came from. A cousin was on his family tree. His sister was there too.

But when he looked at his sister’s name, it was wrong. Instead of Jessica, someone called Claire was listed as his full sibling (Jessica and Claire are not their real names – both have been changed, to protect the women’s identity).

Tony is the eldest of Joan’s four children. After three sons, she had longed for a daughter. She finally got her wish when Jessica arrived in 1967.

“It was a wonderful feeling, at long last having a girl,” Joan tells me.

However, she was immediately anxious when she heard there was something unexpected in Tony’s DNA results. He was, too, but he tried not to show it. Ten years after his father’s death, Tony’s mother was in her 80s and living alone. He didn’t want to worry her.

The next morning, he used the DNA testing company’s private messaging facility to contact Claire, the woman it claimed was his sister.

“Hi,” he wrote. “My name’s Tony. I’ve done this DNA test. You’ve come up as a full sibling. I’m thinking it’s a mistake. Can you shed any light on it?”

Claire had been given the same brand of DNA test two years earlier, as a birthday present from her son.

Her results had also been strange – there was no connection to where her parents were born, and she had a genetic link to a first cousin she didn’t know and couldn’t explain.

Then, in 2022, she received a notification – a full sibling had joined her family tree.

It was baffling. But in one way, it made perfect sense. Growing up, Claire had never felt like she belonged.

“I felt like an imposter,” she says. “There were no similarities, in looks or traits,” she tells me. “I thought, ‘yes – I’m adopted.’”

The Gift: Switched

In the first series of The Gift, Jenny Kleeman looked at the extraordinary truths that can unravel when people take at-home DNA tests like Ancestry and 23andMe.

For the second series, Jenny is going deeper into the unintended consequences – the aftershocks – set in motion when people link up to the enormous global DNA database.

Listen on BBC Sounds or on BBC Radio 4 at 09:30, Wednesday 6 November

When Claire and Tony started exchanging messages and biographical details, they discovered that Claire had been born about the same time and in the same hospital as Jessica, the sister Tony had grown up with.

An unavoidable explanation began to emerge – the two baby girls had been switched at birth, 55 years previously, and brought up in different families.

Cases where babies have been accidentally swapped on maternity wards are practically unheard of in the UK. In response to a 2017 Freedom of Information request, the NHS replied that as far as its records showed, there were no documented incidents of babies being sent home with the wrong parents.

Since the 1980s, newborns have been given radio frequency identification (RFID) tags immediately after their birth, which allow their location to be tracked. Before then, maternity wards relied on handwritten tags and cards on cots.

As they tried to absorb the news, Claire and Tony had to decide what to do next.

“The ripples from this will be enormous,” Tony wrote to Claire. “If you want to leave it here, then I’ll absolutely accept that, and we won’t progress this at all.”

Without hesitation, Claire knew that she wanted to meet Tony and the mother they shared.

“I just wanted to see them, meet them, talk to them and embrace them,” she says.”

When Tony finally told Joan what the DNA test had revealed, she was desperate for answers. How could this have happened?

Joan’s memories of the night her daughter was born are vivid. She had been due to give birth at home, but because she had high blood pressure, her labour was induced in a West Midlands hospital.

“They took me in on a Sunday,” she says. “It snowed that day.”

The baby was born at about 22:20. Joan held her much-longed-for daughter for only for a few minutes – she remembers gazing at the newborn’s red face and matted hair.

The baby was then taken away to the nursery for the night so her mother could rest. This was common practice in the 1960s.

A couple of hours later, just after midnight, Jessica was born in the same hospital.

The next morning, Joan was handed Jessica instead of her biological daughter, Claire.

This baby had fair hair – unlike the rest of the family, who were all dark – but Joan thought nothing of it. There were aunts and cousins with similar colouring.

By the time her husband arrived at the hospital to meet baby Jessica, they were too delighted with their new arrival to have any doubts.

Fifty-five years later, Joan was desperate to know what kind of life Claire had had. Had she grown up happy?

But before she could get answers, she and Tony had to break the news to Jessica, who had lived her entire life believing Joan was her mother, and Tony was her brother.

Tony and Joan travelled to Jessica’s home to tell her in person. Joan says she reassured her that they would always be mother and daughter, but ever since, she says their relationship has not been the same.

Jessica did not want to be interviewed in connection with this story.

A day later – and only five days after Tony got his DNA results – Claire travelled the short distance between her home and Joan’s.

For years, she had been driving through Joan’s village on her way to and from work, never knowing that this was where her biological mother lived.

Tony was waiting for her in the driveway. “Hi Sis,” he said. “Come and meet Mum.”

Claire says that from the moment she saw Joan, it felt like they had always known each other: “I looked at her, and I said, ’Oh my God, I’ve got your eyes! We have the same eyes. Oh my God, I look like someone!’”

“It just felt right,” Joan says. “I thought, she looked just like I did in my younger days.”

They spent the afternoon poring over family photographs. Claire told Tony and Joan about her partner, her children and grandchildren. They told her all about the biological father she would never get to meet.

But when it came to questions about whether she had had a happy childhood, Claire was evasive.

“I couldn’t tell the truth then,” she says. “My parents separated when I was very young. I don’t remember them being together. I was raised in absolute poverty, homelessness, often went hungry, and all that entails. It was a very difficult childhood.”

Claire says that breaking the news to the mother who raised her was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do.

She says she did her best to reassure both the parents she had grown up with, that nothing would change in their relationship. Her mother died earlier this year.

As well as coming to terms with a new genetic identity, there were practical implications for Claire, too. Because she had been born before midnight, she discovered she was a day older than she previously thought: “My birth certificate is wrong, my passport, my driving licence – everything is wrong.”

A couple of weeks after making the discovery, Tony wrote to the NHS trust that oversees the hospital where Claire and Jessica were switched, explaining what the home DNA tests had revealed.

The trust admitted liability – although two-and-a-half years later, the level of compensation has yet to be agreed. Tony and Joan say they were told it would be finalised last year.

We contacted NHS Resolution which handles complaints against the NHS. It said the baby swap was an “appalling error” for which it had accepted legal liability.

However, it said that it was a “unique and complex case” and that it was still working to agree on the amount of compensation that was due.

Claire and Joan have been discovering how much they have in common, such as their tastes in clothes and food, and how they take their tea. They’ve been on holiday, exploring their biological roots in Ireland, and they spent last Christmas together.

“We’re very close,” Claire says of her newly discovered family. “I’d like to spend as much time as I can with them, of course, but that time is gone. It was taken away.”

While Claire now calls her “Mum”, Joan tells me that Jessica no longer does. But Joan feels only that she has gained a daughter.

“It doesn’t make any difference to me that Jessica isn’t my biological daughter,” she says. “She’s still my daughter and she always will be.”

Rohit Bal, one of India’s most celebrated fashion designers, has died aged 63 after a long period of illness.

The Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) announced his death in a post on Instagram, saying that his work “redefined Indian fashion”.

One of India’s first designers, Bal popularised fashion designing as a viable, glamorous profession in the 1990s and many who came after him credit him for their success.

He had been forced to take a prolonged break due to ill health but made an emotional comeback just weeks ago.

“We will always need a Rohit Bal around to show what classic elegance is – and why it crosses the generational divide,” said an article in The Indian Express newspaper after Bal, looking frail but delighted, appeared alongside his models at the grand finale of the India Fashion Week in October.

Bal’s designs won acclaim for his deep understanding of Indian textiles and meticulous attention to detail.

His innovative creations were worn by Hollywood stars and supermodels and he became synonymous with blending India’s rich cultural heritage with a contemporary flair.

Born in Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1961, Bal graduated from Delhi’s St Stephens College with an honours degree in history. He then worked in his family’s export business for a few years, learning the ropes.

After completing his formal education in fashion design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) in Delhi, Bal embarked on a journey that would redefine Indian fashion.

He set up his own label and designer line in 1990 and later opened several stores in India, the Middle East and Europe.

On his website, Bal described himself as a designer who “combines the right mix of history, folklore, village craft, and dying arts to create imaginative and innovative masterpieces for catwalks and fashion talks”.

In 1996, Time magazine listed him as India’s ‘Master of fabric and fantasy’.

Bal’s designs reached far and wide, with Hollywood actress Uma Thurman and supermodels Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Pamela Anderson wearing his creations. In 2001, tennis star Anna Kournikova walked the ramp for his Paris show.

Best known for his use of lotus and peacock motifs, Bal used rich fabrics like velvet and brocade – his designs were elaborate, inspired by Indian grandeur and royalty.

Apart from designing clothes in his own label, Bal lent his name to endorse products from shoes to linen, had tie-ups with textile giants like the Aditya Birla Group and even ventured into designing jewellery and luxury watches.

He also opened a line for children, saying that he believed that “children are a major consumer class in urban India”.

Bal crafted costumes for the widely-watched Indian game show Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) and designed costumes for the cabin crew of British Airways.

He unveiled his inaugural prêt line for online retailer Jabong in 2014.

“I want to separate Rohit Bal from the House of Bal – in products as well as style, in expensiveness and expanse,” Bal told Shefalee Vasudev in Mint newspaper.

“Rohit Bal stores (there will be no prêt here) will be special. People come to me only for special things – they want garments that are like handmade pieces of art. I have it in me to balance the right and left sides of my creative and business leanings.”

When I met Bal years ago in his studio, his characteristic flamboyance was evident in dazzling neon coloured silks embellished with intricate embroidery; sleek blouses and skirts along with taffeta skirts and netted blouses, in bright, warm and cool colours.

“Fabric is the seed of designing a garment, it is the lifeblood of fashion,” he told me.

His earliest memories of fabric were totally sensory, he said, recalling the downy feel of a jamawar shawl at home in Srinagar and the soft warmth of his mother’s shahtoosh saris.

His early years in Srinagar contributed to what he described as a “blissful childhood”. The idyllic life, he said, was disrupted by the violence in the region, compelling the family to relocate to Delhi.

Bal remembered embarking on a sartorial adventure at the age of 11 when he coaxed his father into a tailor’s shop in Delhi to craft his own cowboy pants adorned with tassels.

Bal also diversified into the restaurant business and designed the interiors of one of Delhi’s posh restaurants, Veda, whose opulent and extravagant interiors created a buzz in the Indian media.

He told me it was also okay with him if foreign brands like Armani or Hilfiger came to take up high street space in India.

“They can’t do what I can with Indian designs,” Bal said.

His flamboyant lifestyle prompted the Indian media to call him “the bad boy of fashion”.

“People see me in photographs surrounded by pretty models and think that I am a snobbish, high-maintenance designer who is about beauty and hedonism. When they meet me, they realise how fake that perception is,” he told Vasudev.

At least 14 people have been killed after a concrete canopy at a railway station in northern Serbia collapsed, the country’s President Aleksandar Vučić said.

A young girl aged six or seven was among the dead, he added.

People were sitting on benches under the outdoor overhang at the station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city, at the time of the collapse around noon local time (11:00 GMT), Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) reported.

Three people are in hospital. Among them are two women who were pulled alive from under the rubble a few hours after the collapse.

In an address to the nation, Mr Vučić said he hoped the number of dead would not rise beyond 14, adding that five of those killed had still not been identified.

“Those responsible, I assure you, will be punished,” he said, quoted by AFP.

Around 80 rescuers from all over the country are involved in the search, using heavy machinery, which is still ongoing.

The railway station building was renovated in 2021, and renovated again this year in order to be officially opened on 5 July.

Serbian media quoted Railway Infrastructure of Serbia, the body responsible for the concrete canopy, as saying it had not been reconstructed with the station. It was built in 1964.

Prime Minister Miloš Vučević said Friday was one of the most difficult days in Novi Sad’s post-war history.

“This is a great, terrible tragedy for Novi Sad and for all of Serbia,” he added, sending condolences to the families of the victims and thanking first responders.

The government declared Saturday as an official day of mourning.

Lawyers hired by MrBeast to investigate claims that his former co-host groomed a teenager have concluded that the allegations were “without basis”, the star YouTuber has said.

Ava Kris Tyson stopped working with MrBeast in July after other YouTubers accused her of sending inappropriate messages to a minor, reportedly then 13, when she was 20.

At the time, Tyson apologised for her “past actions”, but said her behaviour never “extended beyond bad edgy jokes” and denied ever grooming anyone.

The alleged victim – who was named online – also defended her, saying the claims were “massive lies” and that they had never been “exploited or taken advantage of”.

MrBeast, 26, real name Jimmy Donaldson, hosts the largest channel on YouTube, with 325m subscribers, and is known for making videos of stunts, challenges and acts of philanthropy.

Tyson, 28, who last year came out as transgender, has appeared regularly on the channel since it was launched in 2012.

After the initial claims in July, MrBeast said he was “disgusted” by the “serious allegations of Ava Tyson’s behaviour online” and “opposed to such unacceptable acts”.

On Friday, he shared a letter on X from Quinn Emanuel Urqhart & Sullivan LLP, the law firm he hired to conduct an investigation into the claims.

The letter said the firm had conducted 39 interviews with current and former employees of MrBeast’s company and reviewed over 4.5m documents collected from mobile phones, e-mails, and a variety of messaging platforms.

“Allegations of sexual misconduct… between company employees and minors are without basis. The allegations were soundly rejected, including by alleged victims,” it said.

It added that allegations the company had knowingly employed “individuals with proclivities or histories towards illegal… conduct” were “similarly without basis”.

The letter said some “isolated instances of workplace harassment and misconduct were identified” and that, once informed about them, the company had taken “swift and appropriate actions”.

Following the publication of the letter, the alleged victim of Tyson’s behaviour said again that the claims were “completely false”.

“People used my name to make very serious allegations and claims without ever speaking to me,” they said.

“It was incredibly difficult having my name thrown around in a public forum without being given the opportunity to share the truth.

“The private investigators reviewed all my [direct messages] and interactions with Kris.

“I was not groomed. These were false allegations made up by other people with my name thrown in them.”

Responding to the initial allegations in July, Tyson apologised for her “unacceptable social media posts, past actions, and to those who may feel betrayed by how I used to act online”, but added: “I never groomed anyone”.

“To lump these two factors together to create a narrative that my behavior extended beyond bad edgy jokes is disgusting and did not happen,” she said.

“I have learned that my old humor is not acceptable. I cannot change who I was, but I can continue to work on myself.”

Israeli strikes have killed 19 people, including eight women, around Lebanon’s eastern city of Baalbek, the country’s health ministry has said.

It came hours after tens of thousands of residents fled in response to evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military that covered the entire city and two neighbouring towns.

Mayor Mustafa al-Shell told the BBC more than 20 strikes were reported on Wednesday afternoon in the Baalbek area, with five inside the city itself, where there is a Unesco-listed ancient Roman temple complex.

The Israeli military said it had struck Hezbollah command-and-control centres and infrastructure in Baalbek and Nabatiyeh, in southern Lebanon.

The military also said it had targeted Hezbollah fuel depots in the Bekaa Valley, where Baalbek is located. It gave no details, but Lebanon’s state news agency said diesel tanks were hit in the town of Douris, where Mr Shell said pictures showed a huge column of black smoke rising into the air.

The attacks came as Hezbollah’s new secretary-general said the group would continue its war plan against Israel under his leadership and that it would not “cry out” for a ceasefire.

Speaking a day after his appointment was announced, Naim Qassem said he would follow the agenda of his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in Beirut last month.

Qassem made the speech from an undisclosed location amid reports suggesting he had fled to Iran, which is Hezbollah’s main supporter.

After weeks of an air offensive that has brought devastation to large parts of southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs, the Israeli military appears to be expanding its campaign against Hezbollah in the east of the country – another area where the group has a strong presence and support.

Baalbek is a key population centre in the Bekaa Valley, near the border with Syria. It is a largely rural area and one of Lebanon’s poorest regions.

Hezbollah has established part of its infrastructure and recruited fighters from there.

The area is also strategically important for Hezbollah, as it is part of a route linking the group to its allies in Syria and Iraq and, ultimately, to Iran.

On Wednesday morning, the Israeli military issued evacuation orders for the whole of Baalbek and the neighbouring towns of Ain Bourday and Douris, warning that it would “act forcefully against Hezbollah interests”.

Roula Zeaiter, programme manager for the Lebanese Women Democratic Gathering (RDFL), said the orders sparked panic among residents, including displaced families from other parts of the country.

“Minutes after the order to leave came, the streets were filled with people grabbing their things, locking their homes and closing their shops,” she told the charity ActionAid.

“We’re scrambling like scared mice, moving from place to place. Lebanon is becoming like Gaza, with Israeli forces using the same tactics.”

Videos posted online showed huge traffic jams on the main roads out of the city.

Mustafa al-Shell estimated that about 50,000 people fled within two hours, but he added that many others decided to stay behind “for various reasons”.

He said the initial wave of Israeli strikes on Wednesday afternoon hit villas and other residential buildings in Baalbek’s city centre and its outskirts.

“It’s not clear what the Israelis have targeted,” he added. “But I can tell you that there are no ammunition dumps or weapons caches in Baalbek.”

The state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported that the Ras al-Ain Hills, Amshki, al-Asira, al-Kayyal Road areas were hit, and the northern and southern entrances to Baalbek. The strikes also targeted Ain Bourday and Douris, including diesel tanks in its vicinity, it said.

Later, the Lebanese health ministry said 11 people, including three women, were killed in a strike on Salibi Farm in the Baalbek area. Eight others, including five women, were killed in another strike in Bednayel, it added.

The ministry separately said another 11 people were killed in Israeli strikes in the town of Sohmor, in the southern Bekaa Valley.

Following the strikes on Baalbek, the Israeli military said it had conducted “intelligence-based strikes on fuel depots located inside military compounds belonging to Hezbollah’s Logistical Reinforcement Unit 4400 in the Bekaa Valley”. The unit was responsible for transferring weapons from Iran, it added.

A second statement said aircraft had “struck command-and-control centres and terrorist infrastructure” in the Baalbek area.

It also accused Hezbollah of systematically using civilian infrastructure and areas for military activities, which the group has previously denied.

Mr Shell said none of the strikes hit Baalbek’s Unesco World Heritage site, which comprises the ruins of Roman temples which date back to the 1st Century AD and are among the largest and best-preserved in the world.

However, he warned of what he called “Israeli treachery” and said Lebanese authorities were “pleading… for international bodies to stand fast in defence of Baalbek’s Roman ruins”.

Unesco warned in a post on X on Wednesday that featured a photo of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, that World Heritage sites across the Middle East, particularly those in Lebanon, were under threat.

“Unesco recalls to all parties their obligation to respect and protect the integrity of these sites. They are the heritage of all humanity and should never be targeted,” it said.

On Monday night, several buildings were levelled around the Gouraud Barracks area of Baalbek, near the Roman ruins, during Israeli strikes that killed more than 60 people across the Bekaa Valley.

When asked by reporters in Washington about the Baalbek strikes, US state department spokesman Matthew Miller called on Israel not to threaten the lives of civilians or damage critical civilian infrastructure and cultural heritage.

He also confirmed that US Middle East envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk were “traveling to Israel to engage on issues including a diplomatic resolution in Lebanon, as well as how we get to an end to the conflict in Gaza”.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Najob Mikati, expressed optimism that a ceasefire might be possible in “the coming hours or days”.

Two sources told Reuters news agency that US mediators were working on a proposal for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah which would be used to finalise the full implementation of UN Security Council resolution 1701.

The resolution ended the last war they fought in 2006 and included a call for southern Lebanon to be free of any armed personnel or weapons other than those of the Lebanese state and a UN peacekeeping force.

Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah – which it proscribes as a terrorist organisation – after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza.

It says it wants to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of northern Israeli border areas displaced by rocket attacks, which Hezbollah launched in support of Palestinians the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

The Israeli military said about 60 projectiles fired by Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel on Wednesday. No injuries were reported.

More than 2,800 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 2,100 in the past five weeks, and 1.2 million others displaced, according to Lebanese authorities.

Israeli authorities say more than 60 people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.

Israel must immediately address the “catastrophic humanitarian situation” in Gaza, the US envoy to the UN has warned, as the deadline approaches to improve the flow of aid or face cuts to American military assistance.

“Israel’s words must be matched by action on the ground,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. “Right now, that is not happening.”

The US has given its ally until 12 November to “surge” all assistance, with a minimum of 350 lorries entering Gaza daily. But the UN says only 10% of that number have crossed each day on average since then.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said it was going “above and beyond its humanitarian obligations” and blamed Hamas.

Mr Danon also rejected international criticism of the Israeli parliament’s decision to ban the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) from working in Israel.

Israel’s allies have warned that Unrwa plays a critical role in delivering humanitarian assistance to Gaza, where it is the largest humanitarian organisation on the ground.

In a briefing to the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday, UN Middle East peace envoy Tor Wennesland said he had witnessed a “horrific humanitarian nightmare” during a recent visit to Gaza.

He said the north of the Palestinian territory had received virtually no humanitarian assistance since the start of October, when the Israeli military began a ground offensive in the Jabalia area that it said was aimed at stopping Hamas fighters from regrouping there.

The operation has killed scores of Palestinians, caused mass displacement and led to the closure of essential services, including water wells and medical facilities.

The US ambassador said the reports of children going days without food in Jabalia had made her think about how she had seen a girl die of starvation almost three decades ago.

Ms Thomas-Greenfield said the Biden administration had made clear to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel must address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza immediately and that the US “rejects any Israeli efforts to starve Palestinians in Jabalia, or anywhere else”.

“The US has stated clearly that Israel must allow food, medicine and other supplies into all of Gaza – especially the north, and especially as winter sets in – and protect the workers distributing it,” she added.

Mr Danon told the Council that Israel had been “hard at work delivering humanitarian aid”.

“The problem isn’t the flow of aid. It is Hamas, which hijacks supplies, storing or selling them to fuel their terror machine while Gaza’s civilians are neglected. Israel remains committed to working with our partners to deliver aid to those in need,” he added.

On 13 October, the Biden administration told Mr Netanyahu’s government that Israel must act within 30 days on a series of concrete measures to boost aid supplies, citing US laws which can prohibit military assistance to countries that impede delivery of US humanitarian aid.

They included enabling a minimum of 350 lorries a day to enter through all Israeli-controlled crossings with Gaza and ending the “isolation” of the north immediately.

According to data published Unrwa, only 852 aid lorries have crossed into Gaza this month, compared with about 3,000 lorries in September. A total of 502 have entered since the letter, with an average of 35 lorries crossing each day between 14 and 29 October.

Israel’s own data, meanwhile, says a total of 1,386 lorries have crossed between 1 and 28 October – a daily average of 49. It says there are also 670 lorry loads of aid awaiting collection from inside Gaza.

Ms Thomas-Greenfield also expressed US concern about the two laws adopted by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, forbidding Israeli state officials from contact with Unrwa and prohibiting Unrwa operations in Israel and annexed East Jerusalem in three months’ time.

“We know that right now, there is no alternative to Unrwa when it comes to delivering food and other life-saving aid in Gaza. Therefore, we have concerns about this legislation being implemented,” she said.

Mr Danon accused Unrwa of being “a terrorist front camouflaged as a humanitarian agency”, citing the involvement of a handful of its thousands of staff in the 7 October attacks on Israel.

Unrwa insists it is impartial and that the laws breach the UN charter and Israel’s obligations under international law.

On Monday, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said his Israeli counterpart had floated the possibility of delayed implementation of the legislation during a call at the weekend.

“When I raised this issue with Foreign Minister [Israel] Katz yesterday, he was at pains to explain that, although the Knesset could pass its bill today, that does not mean that it has to be implemented,” Mr Lammy told the UK Parliament.

But in an unusual statement sent to the BBC on Wednesday, the Israeli foreign ministry contradicted Mr Lammy’s account.

“In general, we do not refer to the content of diplomatic talks. Nevertheless, and in order to remove any doubts, it should be clarified that the description of Foreign Minister Katz’s remarks is not true and does not reflect what was said in the conversation,” it said.

“The foreign minister is, of course, committed to the implementation of the Knesset’s legislation as well as to Israel’s international humanitarian obligations.”

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.

Jennylyn M Barrios’ job as a make-up artist takes her all over Manila – precious time away from Uno, her 10-month-old son.

There simply isn’t enough time in the day to make the homemade meals her growing baby needs. But in rapidly developing Philippines, there are increasingly options for busy, working mums like her.

“If I need to make something from scratch, I need to work double time before I finish the product,” she explains.

“But for Cerelac, I just need to add hot water and prepare the mix. I feed it three times a day – for breakfast, lunch, and then for dinner. It’s easy to feed, available, affordable – all great for working mums.”

Jennylyn is one of many mums increasingly turning to commercially available baby food products in recent years: sales of instant cereals, porridges, pureed foods, pouches and snacks across South East Asia have doubled in five years.

Cerelac – an instant porridge mix – is Nestle’s biggest seller here, offering not only convenience but aspiration as well, all for an affordable price, a key consideration with a rise in cost of living.

A quick search on social media shows a slew of aspirational mums with their smiling infants extolling its virtues – including offering some of the crucial nutrients growing children need.

But while the product will be instantly recognisable to parents across the world, the ingredients here may not be.

Because, along with the benefits of added micronutrients Cerelac offers parents in the Philippines and the UK, some flavours in the South East Asian nation offer something else: added sugar.

And that, in a country where parents are increasingly turning from traditional diets to convenience foods, has health professionals worried.

In the Philippines, Nestle says it follows a set of standards and guidelines from the Codex Commission – a collective established by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) consisting of food manufacturers, governments and UN agencies.

“The added sugar we have in our products are all well below the threshold prescribed by international and local guidelines who always follow the FDA, who follows Codex, and these are the experts in this field,” said Arlene Tan-Bantoto, Nestlé Nutrition business executive officer.

But WHO has called the current standards inadequate and recommends they be updated with a particular focus on avoiding sugar and salt in any food for children under three.

Yet a Unicef study of 1,600 baby foods across South East Asia found nearly half included added sugars and sweeteners.

There is, says Ms Tan-Bantoto, a simple explanation for why it is needed in Cerelac in particular: to disguise the taste of crucial nutrients like iron, which has a metallic taste, and the brain nutrient, DHA, which smells like fish.

“Micronutrient deficiency is widespread in the country and we are serious in our efforts in alleviating it,” said Ms Tan-Bantoto.

“Ninety-seven percent of babies do not meet their daily nutrient requirement, 40% of babies, zero to five, suffer from iron deficiency anaemia. And we know that to be anaemic has lifelong consequences. For instance, brain development and next poor immunity and 20% of kids zero to five are stunted. That means we fortify our products.”

At a clinic in Manila, they see first-hand the impacts of malnutrition on babies and toddlers on a regular basis – although as diets change, so too is how the cases are presenting.

“Sometimes they are underweight, some are overweight, and some are severely malnourished,” one doctor told the BBC.

It is impossible to say exactly why there has been a rise in overweight children. There are multiple factors in the rise of obesity – including a change in lifestyles and urbanisation. But nutritionists say taste preferences are developed at a young age and in some countries like in the Philippines, many foods catering to a sweet palate are started early.

It is why the added sugar in a product like Cerelac is such a concern, according to public health experts like Dr Mianne Silvestre. The most popular flavour of Cerelac in the Philippines has about 17.5g of total sugars per serving – more than four teaspoons of sugar – but that can include both naturally occurring and added sugars. Nestle says in the Philippines, it has several variants or flavours without added sugar, and also flavours with added sugar.

“We always mention that malnutrition isn’t just being undernourished, it’s also overnourished also overweight and obese children, and very difficult to diet,” explains Dr Silvestre.

“Starting these babies so young on this level of sugar. It’s mind-boggling.”

Unicef nutrition officer for the Philippines, Alice Nkoroi, says a lack of local, government regulation also puts parents at a distinct disadvantage.

“If you go to other countries in Europe… they will have regulations that control what is sold out there and also make sure that companies put out what is they’re clear on what is in the content and at the front of the pack, it’s easy for the families and consumers to understand what is good for them and what is unhealthy,” she points out.

And it is not just what is in the product – or on the packaging – which needs regulating, she adds. “We conducted a digital scan… and what we saw is that families are bombarded 99% on what is on social media,” Ms Nkoroi said. “There’s a need for us to regulate what is coming out or being pushed out there in social media, especially targeted to children.”

Chiara Maganalles – or Mommy Diaries PH as she’s known on social media – has 1.6 million Facebook followers. In a lively YouTube video for Nestle’s “Parenteam” educational platform, she tells tens of thousands of subscribers about the benefits of Cerelac.

She’s been promoting the product for years, and for her, it is a win-win.

“I mean with my first kid… I did feed her Cerelac first because it’s convenient… It suits our budget… because of the nutritional content as well, it says that it’s fortified with iron,” she said.

Influencing has also transformed Chiara’s life – she’s now able to support her family from the money she makes from brand deals.

But critics say paid partnerships can look like trustworthy expert advice compared to conventional advertising methods. And what Chaira recommended – feeding Cerelac several times a day – goes even against what Nestle told the BBC.

Ms Tan-Bantoto described it as a “complementary” food to a baby’s diet, which should not be taken “the whole day”.

“At least give one bowl,” she said, for the nutritional value.

Nestle says it recommends one serving of infant cereal each day along with a diverse diet of foods, like fruits, vegetables, and meat daily. The company says the information is shared on its product labels, but promotional material on e-commerce sites and its educational platform suggest meal plans with Cerelac products up to three times a day.

The demand for regulation in the Philippines does have some star power. The sister of the current president and daughter of former president Ferdinand Marcos Snr – Imee Marcos – is sponsoring a bill that would prohibit manufacturers of baby food from adding sugar in their products.

A failure to comply could lead to a hefty fine, and imprisonment of producers and manufacturers for one to five years.

“I’m very hopeful that it will see the light of day. There’s so many bills and the food lobbies, the huge multinationals that purvey all these foods are immensely powerful and until today I haven’t even had a hearing,” Senator Imee Marcos told the BBC.

For its part Nestle says it is listening to concerns, and is phasing out added sugar in baby food – but that balancing the nutritional profile and composition of the product with taste takes time.

The company’s bestseller is due to get a sugar-free variety, with plans to completely eliminate all added sugar in the next “two to three years”, Ms Tan-Bantoto said.

Research published this week indicates that cutting sugar in the first 1,000 days of a baby’s life – from conception to the age of two – appears to reduce the risk of developing significant health issues in adult life.

A team of researchers at the University of Southern California found that limiting the intake of sugar in early life cut the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 35%, and high blood pressure by 20%.

Experts believe the first 1,000 days of life are a crucial period which can shape a person’s future health.

Throughout an election campaign, US voters are bombarded with images of the two candidates – speaking from podiums, greeting rally crowds and stepping down aircraft stairs. Here’s a different visual perspective of who they are and where they’ve come from.

Long before they even knew what the White House was… Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are pictured above both aged three.

Decades apart, Democratic presidential nominee Harris spent her early years in Oakland, California, and Republican nominee Trump was raised in the New York borough of Queens.

Harris (left in the left-hand image below) and her sister Maya (centre) were primarily brought up by their Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher and social activist.

Trump’s father Fred Trump was the son of German immigrants and his mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was born in Scotland. They enrolled him in the New York Military Academy at age 13.

Harris spent five years at high school in Montreal, Canada, where her mother took up a teaching job at McGill University. She later enrolled in the historically black college, Howard University in Washington DC.

Trump has said his five years at the academy, which began in 1959, gave him military training and helped shape his leadership skills. He later sat out the Vietnam War due to deferments – four for academic reasons and one due to bone spurs.

From an early age, Harris was taught by her mother the importance of the civil rights movement and she attended the annual Martin Luther King Jr Freedom March in Washington in 2004.

After earning a degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Trump became favoured to succeed his father at the helm of the family business.

Harris returned to California, where she rose swiftly to the top of the state’s criminal justice system – taking a job as its attorney general – and used that momentum to mount a successful run for the US Senate in 2016.

At the same time as she entered Congress, Trump was stepping into the White House for the first time, having stunned the world to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Three years later Harris ran a lacklustre presidential campaign, but was picked by the victor of the Democratic race, Joe Biden, to be his running mate. They proved to be the winning ticket, defeating Trump and Mike Pence.

The end of the Trump presidency and the start of the Biden-Harris term were marked by Covid lockdowns, mask mandates and social unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Harris struggled at times to make her mark as vice-president, but found her voice in 2022 when the US Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion.

President Biden was happy for her to become the White House champion for the pro-choice movement.

It was Trump who had made the Supreme Court more conservative, paving the way for the abortion ruling.

During his time in the Oval Office, he also took the US out of the Paris climate accord and took steps to reduce immigration.

Harris’s debut international visit as vice-president was to Guatemala in 2021, as part of the responsibility she was given to reduce the numbers of Latin American migrants reaching America’s southern border with Mexico.

Foreign policy issues that have dominated her time in office include the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the chaotic US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Trump’s first visit overseas as president was to Saudi Arabia in 2017. Trump advocates isolationist policies that involve disentangling his country from foreign conflicts and promoting American industry.

Harris is married to Doug Emhoff (pictured below), who campaigns regularly on her behalf. She is stepmother – or “Momala”, as she says – to Emhoff’s children from his first marriage, Cole (left) and Ella (right).

Various members of Donald Trump’s family have played roles in his political career, though appearances in the 2024 campaign by his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, have been limited.

With his first wife, Ivana, Trump had three children: Donald Jr (second left in the lower picture), Ivanka (second right) and Eric (right). He had a daughter, Tiffany (left), with his second wife, Marla Maples. He married his third wife Melania (third left) in 2005, with whom he has one son, Barron.

Harris entered the 2024 presidential race relatively late in the process, replacing Joe Biden who pulled out.

She made history as the first black and Asian-American woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, and went on to give a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

In the same election, Donald Trump earned the rare distinction of earning a third presidential nomination from his party. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – sporting a bandaged ear after surviving an assassination attempt during the campaign.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When is the US election and how does it work?
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Vote weighs on minds of Ukraine’s frontline soldiers
• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• 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.

An illustrator from Bristol, who felt on the “edge of burnout” before being diagnosed with ADHD, is calling for increased awareness of the condition in the workplace.

Ana Jaks from Stokes Croft was diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in 2020 at the age of 27.

She is now part of a campaign called Staring Back At Me, which was created to combat ADHD stigma, particularly around women and non-binary people.

“I thought it was normal for people to feel as constantly stressed as I did,” said Ana, describing her work life before diagnosis.

Staring Back at Me is a disease awareness campaign, aiming to help people recognise the symptoms of ADHD, while highlighting the stigma that women may face in the workplace.

The first phase of the project, which focused on signs and symptoms of ADHD, was launched in 2022, while the second phase, which focuses on ADHD in the workplace, was launched in October.

As part of the campaign Ana designed illustrations for the lining on suit jackets that represent the invisible nature of ADHD in the workplace.

The illustrations featured inside the linings of the suit jackets, which were worn by two ambassadors in the campaign’s movie.

“I hope other women with ADHD do not fear being seen,” said Jenny Mclaughlin, Staring Back at Me campaign ambassador.

“I hope this campaign and my story shows the strengths someone with ADHD can bring to the workplace.

“All we need is the right environment and support to thrive.”

Before the increase in ADHD awareness, Ana said she felt she had to “mask” her condition while at work, which only exacerbated her symptoms.

“Eventually you start to slip and you start to wobble and fall apart. The longer that you’ve been doing that, the more severe the collapse of that is going to be.”

“You’re pretending to be something that you’re not and that imposter syndrome turns into self-esteem issues and it can manifest itself as anxiety and depression.”

Although we are now seeing an increase in awareness of ADHD, approximately 50-75% of women remain undiagnosed and there is still a lack of understanding of the condition, said Professor Amanda Kirby, chair of the ADHD Foundation.

“This is especially true in the workplace,” she added.

ADHD is a neurodevelopment condition that can cause differences in the way people think, learn, process and behave.

Research conducted in 2018 found that up to 75% of women living with ADHD are currently undiagnosed in the UK.

Research shows that women are consistently under-diagnosed in childhood.

According to the National Library of Medicine, ADHD symptoms present differently in girls and boys, with girls exhibiting more “internalised” symptoms such as distraction, disorganisation and forgetfulness.

Adults with ADHD may find they have problems with:

• Organisation and time management
• Following instructions
• Focusing and completing tasks
• Coping with stress
• Feeling restless or impatient
• Impulsiveness and risk taking

Some adults may also have issues with relationships or social interaction.

Ana first noticed her symptoms at school when she found that she was overly-distracted and impulsive.

She dropped out of her A-Levels because she felt she could not keep up as she struggled with anxiety and depression.

Ana was diagnosed in 2020. She had just graduated from university and was working as a freelancer in a studio space.

“I wasn’t functioning in the same way as everybody else and I couldn’t quite understand what it was.

“And I remember saying to myself – ‘I just want to grow out of this’ – but I didn’t know what ‘this’ was.”

Finally receiving her ADHD diagnosis at 27, Ana felt she was finally able to understand herself.

“There’s a relief, but it quickly turns into thinking, ‘Oh, my life could have been a lot easier’ if I’d known sooner.

“I remember crying a lot. It was quite strange to have someone affirm everything that I had struggled with and it wasn’t because I was rubbish at life.

“There’s a lot of grief that comes with it. From speaking to other people that have had a diagnosis it’s quite a common feeling.”

Since her diagnosis, Ana has found that prioritising sleep, daily exercise and spending time outdoors have helped with her ADHD.

She said she now feels better-equipped to understand her mind and communicate her needs.

“In the workplace I do still have to push myself forward a bit more to act a certain way. But then everyone does,” she said.

“The clients I have spoken to [about my diagnosis] have been really great and really accommodating. I’ve only had positive experiences when I have spoken about it.”

It’s hard to see her in the crowd of men. She is the tiny figure towards the back.

The soldiers have ordered the men to strip to their underwear. Even some of the elderly ones. They gaze up at whoever is taking the photograph. It is almost certainly an Israeli soldier.

The image appears to have first been published on the Telegram account of a journalist with strong sources in the Israel Defence Forces.

The men look abject, fearful and exhausted. The little girl, who was noticed in the picture by a BBC producer, is looking away. Maybe something out of sight of the camera has caught her attention. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to look at the soldiers and their guns.

The military have told the people to stop here. Bomb-blasted buildings stretch off into the distance behind them. They are checking the men, for weapons, documents, any sign they might be linked to Hamas.

So often the suffering of this war is found in the detail of individual lives. The child’s presence, her expression as she looks away, is a detail that poses so many questions.

Foremost, who was she? What happened to her? The photo was taken a week ago.

A week of hundreds killed, many wounded, and thousands uprooted from their homes. Children died under the rubble of air strikes or because there wasn’t the medicine or medical staff to treat them.

Working with BBC Arabic Gaza Today programme we began searching for the child. Israel does not allow the BBC or other international media access to Gaza to report independently, so the BBC depends on a trusted network of freelance journalists. Our colleagues approached their contacts with aid agencies in the north, showing the photograph in places where the displaced had fled.

Within 48 hours word came back. The message on the phone read: “We have found her!”

Julia Abu Warda, aged three, was alive. When our journalist reached the family in Gaza City – where many from Jabalia have fled – Julia was with her father, grandfather and mother.

She was watching a cartoon of animated chickens singing, difficult to hear because of the ominous whine of an Israeli drone overhead.

Julia was surprised to suddenly be the focus of a stranger’s attention.

“Who are you?” her father asked, playfully.

“Jooliaa” she replied, stretching the word for emphasis.

Julia was physically unscathed. Dressed in a jumper and jeans, her hair in buns held by bright blue floral bands. But her expression was wary.

Then Mohammed began to tell the story behind the photograph.

Five times the family was displaced in the last 21 days. Each time they were running from air strikes and gunfire.

On the day the photo was taken they heard an Israeli drone broadcasting a warning to evacuate.

This was in the Al-Khalufa district where the IDF was advancing against Hamas.

“There was random shellfire. We went toward the centre of Jabalia refugee camp, on the road to the checkpoint.”

The family carried their clothes, some cans of tinned food, and a few personal possessions.

At first everybody was together. Julia’s dad, her mother Amal, her 15-month-old brother Hamza, a grandfather, two uncles and a cousin.

But in the chaos, Mohammed and Julia were separated from the others.

“I got separated from her mother due to the crowd and all the belongings we were carrying. She was able to leave, and I stayed in place,” Mohammed said.

Father and daughter eventually moved on with the flow of people heading out. The streets reeked of death. “We saw destruction and bodies scattered on the ground,” Mohammed said. There was no way to stop Julia seeing at least some of it. After more than a year of war, children have become familiar with the sight of those who have died violent deaths.

The group reached an Israeli checkpoint.

“There were soldiers on the tanks and soldiers on the ground. They approached the people and started firing above their heads. People were pushing against each other during the shooting.”

The men were ordered to strip to their underwear. This is routine procedure as the IDF searches for concealed weapons or suicide bombers. Mohammed says they were held at the checkpoint for six to seven hours. In the photograph Julia appears calm. But her father recalled her distress afterwards.

“She started screaming and told me she wanted her mother.”

The family was reunited. The displaced are packed into small areas. Bonds of family are tight. Word travels fast in Gaza City when kin arrive from Jabalia. Julia was comforted by the people who loved her. There were sweets and potato chips, a treat that had been stored away.

Then Mohammed disclosed to our colleague the deep trauma Julia had suffered, before that day of their flight from Jabalia to Gaza City. She had a favourite cousin. His name was Yahya and he was seven years old. They used to play together in the street. About two weeks ago Yahya was in the street when the Israelis launched a drone strike. The child was killed.

“Life used to be normal. She would run and play,” he said. “But now, whenever there’s shelling, she points and says, ‘plane!’ While we are trapped she looks up and points towards the drone flying over us.”

According to Unicef – the United Nations children’s agency -14,000 children have been reportedly killed in the war.

“Day after day children are paying the price for a war they did not start,” said Unicef spokesman, Jonathan Crickx.

“Most of the children I have met have lost a loved one in often terrible circumstances.”

The UN estimates that nearly all children in the Gaza Strip – nearly one million – need mental health support.

It is hard to call a child like Julia lucky. When you think of what she has seen and lost and where she is trapped. Who knows what will return in dreams and memories in the days ahead. By now she knows that life can end with terrible suddenness.

Her good fortune is in the family that will do whatever is humanly possible – in the face of air strikes, gun battles, hunger and disease – to protect her.

Berhane Haile was walking home from school earlier this year through the mountainous countryside of Tigray in northern Ethiopia when an almighty blast changed his life forever.

The 16-year-old had just stepped on a piece of ordnance that left the bones and flesh on his left leg smashed, torn and bleeding – he was in agony.

“The explosion threw me away backwards. There was blood everywhere. People heard the sound and came rushing,” he told the BBC World Service.

The teenager then had to endure being carried by his distraught father and other villagers on foot for two hours over hilly terrain to Adwa, which is the main town in the area about 162km (100 miles) north on the road from Tigray’s capital, Mekelle – and not far from the Eritrean border.

This was the location of the nearest hospital – and the medics there managed to save his life, but what was left of his leg had to be amputated. Parts of both his hands were also blown away.

His farming village of Seyabo deep in the mountains of Tigray was littered with unexploded munitions in the wake of a civil war that ended in November 2022.

These were mainly grenades, shells and other weapons left behind by fleeing fighters from both sides – no landmines are thought to have been planted in this area.

The two-year conflict, which saw millions of people fleeing their homes and becoming dependent on aid, has been described as one of Africa’s deadliest in recent decades.

It broke out in late 2020 between allied Ethiopian and Eritrean troops on one side and local Tigrayan fighters on the other, both fighting for control of the region.

An estimate by the African Union puts the number of people killed in the clashes and the humanitarian crisis prompted by the conflict as high as half a million.

Yet two years on from the peace deal that ended the war, there are still people being killed and wounded by the remnants of warfare.

Berhane had veered off the usual mountain footpath because he had spotted his family’s sheep and goats grazing – and had gone over to stop them entering someone else’s plot of land. This is when he stood on the explosive.

Since 2023, the Red Cross says it has helped close to 400 victims of inadvertent explosions – 80% of them children.

But the charity believes this figure is just the “tip of the iceberg”.

Nigsti Gidey was five months pregnant when her husband was killed by an explosion earlier this year in Newi district, near Adwa.

He had gone out to help with construction work in their village when he stepped on some discarded ordnance. He was taken to a hospital but he did not survive.

“Ordnances are everywhere,” his widow told the BBC.

“Officials tell us not to touch any metallic substance on the road.”

Efforts have been made to collect unexploded weapons – like in Gorero, a small village off the side of the main road to Adwa, where officials have combed farms and fields.

But it is difficult to do extensive searches and local police chief Hadush Gebremedhin says he has asked his superiors for more support to conduct bigger sweeps.

He has not heard back, meaning it is likely that resources are limited and bomb disposal experts in short supply.

Mr Hadush’s officers have removed the fuses from some of the weapons they have found, but even so he says extreme heat or accidental fire could detonate them.

Weapons-clearing charities – with experience dealing with the aftermath of other African conflicts – might eventually step in, but it is an issue which requires massive co-ordination.

In Adwa, officials who lack options to safely dispose of explosives carry them back at great personal risk to store them haphazardly in the compound of the town’s peace and security office.

Still the all-consuming fear that reigned over Berhane’s village, where the sound of heavy gunfire once echoed through the mountains, has gone.

Basic services like electricity and the internet, cut off during the war, have resumed allowing Seyabo and other villages, towns and cities to come back to life.

Berhane was able to go back to school for the first time in years a few months after the conflict ended, but even before his accident last February, life for his family was far from normal.

He lost his eldest brother, who was a fighter on the Tigrayan side, during the war.

One of his sisters, also a fighter, sustained permanent injuries and is still receiving medical support in Mekelle.

Another sister who had lived in a different part of Tigray was forced out of her home and has been unable to return, as her town is located in a disputed area claimed by both Tigray and the neighbouring region of Amhara.

She had been living in a camp for displaced people in Adwa town until recently when she moved to help Berhane.

As for Berhane, a humanitarian organisation has been able to provide him with a prosthetic leg and crutch, which has helped him walk again.

He was not able to move back to Seyabo, as life there often involves taking strenuous hikes through the mountains.

A usual 20-minute journey by foot to the village school would now take around an hour – so he has moved to Adwa, where he has rented a house with his sister.

They are unclear how they will cover all their costs as his sister is still dependent on aid, but Berhane says this is the best way for him to continue at school.

His new schoolmates help him write notes in class as the explosion also damaged his fingers and thumbs.

“I have mixed feelings,” he told the BBC about his situation.

“Sometimes I get angry but other times I realise I am still alive and feel grateful.”

His dreams of one day becoming a farmer are over. Before his accident he often helped his father on the family farm where they grew maize, sorghum and other grains.

His move to the town has upset his parents, already suffering from the repercussions of the war.

But Berhane, now 17, says he is determined to persevere so that one day he can help them.

He wants to continue his education further and has set his sights on becoming a civil servant.

• How war has hurt Ethiopia’s Olympic hopes
• How a massacre in the sacred city of Aksum unfolded
• The war is over the rapes continue
• Tigray truce a triumph for PM Abiy Ahmed

A US carrier strike group – a major fleet of warships – is a potent symbol of American military power and a signal that it’s willing to defend allies and deter enemies.

So the presence of such a force in the North Sea over the past few weeks is meant to reassure European allies, despite the political uncertainties back home.

American military power has helped protect Europe for the past 75 years – but the US presidential election raises the question: for how much longer?

Military commanders do their best to avoid politics.

But among a group of journalists invited on board the USS Harry S Truman, the US presidential race was high on the agenda. The question was: will America still have Europe’s back?

Rear Adm Sean Bailey said: “What I can tell you is we are firmly committed to our alliance, firmly committed to Nato.”

But he’s not the one who will be deciding US foreign policy, and nor is his answer likely to assuage doubts.

Germany’s Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, knows change is in the air.

Asked about the likely impact of the US election on Europe last week, he said it was a question of whether America does “a lot less, or a little bit less”.

He didn’t mention names, but it’s Donald Trump who’s likely to do a lot less.

USS Harry S Truman proudly bears the name of the president who helped establish Nato 75 years ago.

But a second Trump term could once again shake the alliance to its very core.

The Truman doctrine of giving military, economic and political support to democratic nations under threat is very different to Trump’s policy of America First.

He recently said Russia can “do whatever the hell they want” to allies who don’t spend enough on defence.

Any US withdrawal from Europe would leave a large hole.

The USS Harry S Truman is proof of what America brings in sheer size and numbers – with 5,000 crew and more than 60 aircraft.

The Royal Navy’s carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, sailing nearby, provided a reminder of Europe’s more modest defences.

The British carrier was sailing with an air wing of a few helicopters and eight F-35 jets – a pale reflection of US military clout.

• How the election could change the world
• US allies try to ‘Trump-proof’ Nato
• What is Nato and which countries are members?

Overall the US has more than 100,000 military personnel deployed in Europe.

Last time he was president, Trump threatened to withdraw some of those forces. If elected he could do the same again.

Many Republicans believe Europe should look after itself. That’s certainly the view of Elbridge Colby, a senior Pentagon official in the last Trump administration.

He says the US should “withhold” its forces from Europe to focus on the threat posed by China.

The election will also have an impact on US military aid to Ukraine – America is by far its biggest military backer.

But a senior Nato official, who did not want to be named, recently told the BBC “regardless of who wins the share of America’s contribution to Ukraine will probably decrease in relative terms”.

Europe, he said, can’t expect the US to continue giving an “outsized” contribution.

The reality is that America’s military focus has already been shifting east to the Indo-Pacific region and the rise of China.

The Pentagon identifies China as its greatest security challenge. China now has a larger navy than the US. It’s building a fleet the size of the entire Royal Navy every two years.

The sailors and pilots on board the carrier recognise there’s a pivot east too.

Cdr Bernie Lutz has spent much of his naval career flying F-18s off a US carrier in the Pacific and Middle East.

He recognises why they’re now sailing in European waters. “There’s a lot going on,” he says.

But he adds, “I think the Pacific theatre is the bigger, overarching long-term goal”.

Like the rest of the 5,000-strong crew of the carrier, he has not yet been told where they’ll be sailing next – but it’s been widely reported that the USS Harry S Truman will soon be on its way to the Middle East.

That region, too, will remain a challenge for whoever’s president next.

Capt Dave Snowden says he’s happy to carry the banner of de-escalation or deterrence or even sail into harm’s way – wherever the carrier’s sent.

But the lack of serious foreign policy debate in the election reflects a reluctance to get directly involved in more wars.

America will still remain the world’s most pre-eminent military power.

The question is how will the next president use it.

A selection of striking news photographs taken around the world this week.

Election day in the US is officially on Tuesday, but millions of Americans have already cast their ballots. With early voting events around the country drawing lines, more than 62.7m voters had handed in ballots by Thursday – a landmark number.

Partisans on both sides have been quick to cite the early voting data as evidence that their side is gaining some kind of decisive advantage. But what does it all mean? That’s a hard question to answer.

There’s one thing we can say for certain: American voting habits have changed as pandemic behavioural shifts stick around. This year’s early voting totals are well shy of the 101.5m early ballots cast in 2020, when the Covid virus kept many away from crowded polling places, but it’s more than the total early votes cast in 2016 (47.2m) or 2012 (46.2m).

Though each state handles early voting differently, we can also learn a little about who is participating. Some states release raw totals of votes cast through mail-in ballots, in-person voting days or both. Many share the party registration of voters and sometimes more detailed demographic information, such as gender, race and age.

The rest of the picture, however, is much murkier and any insight into this election season is best taken with a heavy dose of salt.

Many of the conclusions about early voting are being drawn based on the demographic data alone. We won’t find out which candidates these ballots have been cast for until election day.

But here’s what I’m noticing, from state reports as compiled by the University of Florida Election Lab.

Republicans appear to be losing their wariness of early voting. In 2020, they made up 30.5% of the total early votes cast in the 20 states that track party registration, versus 44.8% for Democrats. That was due, in part, to Trump’s warning that mail voting was rife with corruption.

The former president is singing a different tune this year, and so far Republicans are too. They represent 36.1% of early votes cast across the country, while Democrats represent 38.9% (the remaining quarter has come from voters not affiliated with any party or who have registered with a third party).

That’s important because it means a “red mirage” effect may be less pronounced. Republicans took an early lead four years ago in places like Pennsylvania because election-day in-person votes were counted before poll workers tallied the early ballots, which leaned in support of Democrats.

Meanwhile, Democrats this year might be encouraged by the gender gap – at least as far as early vote participation.

In the six states that report gender data, including the battlegrounds of Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina, women are casting 54.2% of the early ballots so far. That’s a few percentage points higher than the 2020 mark found in a post-election exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

If recent surveys are correct and women are now backing Democrats by a historically large margin, it could mean a boost for Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Drilling down into individual states, more than 50% of eligible voters have now cast ballots in Georgia – a sign that voter enthusiasm is high. The early turnout there is slightly whiter and older than the early voting 2020 electorate. That could help Donald Trump.

The former president is also getting good news in Nevada, where more registered Republicans have cast ballots than registered Democrats. That’s a dramatic break from past elections, when Democrats built up a big early voting advantage, particularly in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which helped them prevail despite a surge of rural conservatives voting on election day.

Like most early voting data, Nevada’s tabulations come with an asterisk, however. A growing number of young voters are now unaffiliated independents even though they lean left. If they end up casting ballots for Harris, it could put the state into Harris’s column on election day.

There are similar glass half-full or half-empty examples all over the map. In Pennsylvania, for example, more registered Democrats have voted than Republicans – but they are doing so by a smaller margin than in 2020, when President Joe Biden won the state.

And none of that takes into account independent voters, frustrated moderate suburban Republicans who may be voting for Harris or traditional blue-collar Democrats who are now on board with Trump.

And, lest we forget, 158m Americans cast ballots for president in 2020 – 65.9% of the voting-eligible population. Even if we don’t hit that mark this time around, there are still a lot of potential ballots waiting to be cast.

Political junkies may be desperate to read the tea leaves with just a handful of days until the election, but for the moment the results are mostly just hot water.

• 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
• PEOPLE: How much is abortion shaping women’s vote?
• 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.

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 polls were relatively stable in September and early October but they have tightened in the last couple of weeks, as shown in the chart below, with trend lines showing the averages and dots for individual poll results for each candidate.

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

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 leads in the swing states are so small that it’s impossible to know who is really ahead from looking at the polling averages.

Polls are designed to broadly explain how the public feels about a candidate or an issue, not predict the result of an election by less than a percentage point so it’s important to keep that in mind when looking at the numbers below.

It’s also important to remember that the individual polls used to create these averages have a margin of error of around three to four percentage points, so either candidate could be doing better or worse than the numbers currently suggest.

If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does highlight some differences between the states.

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 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.

The polls have underestimated support for Trump in the last two elections and the national polling error in 2020 was the highest in 40 years according to a post-mortem by polling experts – so there’s good reason to be cautious about them going into this year’s election.

The polling miss in 2016 was put down to voters changing their minds in the final days of the campaign and because college-educated voters – who were more likely to support Hillary Clinton – had been over-represented in polling samples.

In 2020, the experts pointed to problems with getting Trump supporters to take part in polls, but said it was “impossible” to know exactly what had caused the polling error, especially as the election was held during a pandemic and had a record turnout.

Pollsters have made lots of changes since then and the polling industry “had one of its most successful election cycles in US history” in the 2022 midterm elections, according to analysts at 538.

But Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot in the midterms and we won’t know until after election day whether these changes can deal with the influx of irregular voters he tends to attract.

• Listen: How do election polls work?

• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• FACT-CHECK: What the numbers really say about crime
• Read more about: Kamala Harris | Donald Trump | US election

Cyclists using a mobile phone while riding in Japan could face up to six months jail under strict new rules introduced Friday.

Those who breach the revised road traffic law can be punished with a maximum sentence of six months in prison, or a fine of 100,000 yen ($655; £508).

The number of accidents involving cyclists started climbing in 2021, as more people opted to cycle instead of using public transport during the pandemic, according to local media. Authorities are now racing to regulate riders.

Besides cracking down on phone usage, the new rules also target cyclists riding under the influence of alcohol, with a penalty of up to three years in prison or a fine of 500,000 yen ($3,278; £2,541).

Hours after the new laws came into effect, Osaka authorities confirmed on Friday that they had already recorded five violations, including two men who were caught riding bicycles while drunk. One of the men had collided with another cyclist, but no injuries were reported.

Under the new rules, cyclists who cause accidents can be fined up to 300,000 yen ($2,000; £1,500 ) or jailed up to a year.

The total number of traffic accidents across Japan may be declining, but bicycle accidents are on the rise. More than 72,000 bicycle accidents were recorded in Japan in 2023, accounting for over 20% of all traffic accidents in the country, according to local media.

In the first half of 2024 there was one fatality and 17 serious injuries from accidents involving cyclists using their phones — the highest number since the police started recording such statistics in 2007.

Between 2018 and 2022 there were 454 accidents caused by cyclists using phones, according to police — a 50% increase from the previous five-year period.

The latest rules come amid a series of safety regulations aimed at protecting the safety of riders and pedestrians.

Last year, authorities made it compulsory for cyclists to wear helmets. In May, Japan’s parliament passed a bill allowing police to fine cyclists for traffic violations.

Unlike in many other countries, cycling on pavements is legal in Japan, and is a common practice.

Two artworks by the American artist Andy Warhol have been stolen during an overnight break-in at a gallery in the Netherlands.

The incident took place at the MPV Gallery in the North Brabant province.

The thieves originally took four silkscreens from Warhol’s Reigning Queens series but abandoned two nearby, the gallery owner told Dutch broadcaster NOS.

The works taken are of the late Queen Elizabeth II and of Margrethe II, who was Queen of Denmark until her abdication earlier this year.

Local police, who are investigating, said it appeared that there had been some form of explosion and that there was a lot of damage to the gallery and surrounding buildings. The thieves are said to have fled in a car.

According to NOS, two other prints in the series, depicting Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Queen Ntombi Tfwala of Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, were abandoned because they did not fit in the vehicle.

The four artworks were being kept at the gallery ahead of the PAN Amsterdam art fair later this month, where they were to be put up for sale as a set.

They are part of a series of 16 silk screens of the four queens that Warhol, who is considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century, created in 1985 – two years before his death.

Voters in Botswana have rejected the country’s long-serving governing party in a result that marks a political earthquake in the diamond-rich southern African nation.

The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) – in power since independence in 1966 – has won only four parliamentary seats as of Friday afternoon. It will be replaced by the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC).

In a phone call to UDC leader Duma Boko, President Mokgweetsi Masisi conceded and congratulated his opponent.

Despite overseeing a dramatic change in Botswana, recent poor economic growth and high unemployment dented the BDP’s popularity.

The party “had got it wrong big time”, Masisi told a press conference.

“I will respectfully step aside and participate in a smooth transition process ahead of inauguration. I am proud of our democratic processes and I respect the will of the people.”

He has urged his supporters to remain calm and rally behind the new government.

Speaking to Boko on the phone, the outgoing president said: “You can count on me to always be there to provide whatever guidance you might want.”

In his first comments to the media since the outcome was clear, Boko, a 54-year-old former human rights lawyer, said: “What has happened today takes our democracy to a higher level. It now means we’ve seen a successful, peaceful, orderly democratic transition.”

“It’s a shock to me in terms of the numbers. I’m humbled and I can only pledge to [the people of Botswana] that we’ll do the very best,” he added.

This was the third time he had run as a presidential candidate.

UDC and other opposition party supporters have been celebrating in the capital, Gaborone, and elsewhere in the country.

“I did not ever think I would witness this change in my life,” 23-year-old student Mpho Mogorosi, who had gone on to the streets of Gaborone, told the Reuters news agency.

“The BDP had stayed too long in power and I am proud to be part of the people that removed them for a better Botswana,” she said.

• A party in power for 58 years pledges change for Botswana

The UDC has won 35 seats, according to the latest tally, which means that it has an outright majority in parliament.

It has pledged to adopt a new economic strategy that creates well-paying jobs and distributes wealth that empowers all citizens.

Kgoberego Nkawana, just elected as an MP, told the BBC’s Newsday programme that many young people in Botswana remained jobless despite huge deposits of diamonds and a fairly thriving tourism industry in the country.

“The unemployment rate is very very high and people are living literally on handouts from government because there are no jobs. So it’s really bad,” Nkawana said.

The party has committed to creating 450,000 to 500,000 jobs within five years.

The Botswana Patriotic Front (BPF), supported by former President Ian Khama who split from the BDP, has so far secured five seats while the Botswana Congress Party (BCP) has got 14 seats as things stand.

Political analyst Lesole Machacha said the way that the change in government has been accepted was very impressive.

“It’s very rare [on the continent] for a smooth transition to occur,” he told the BBC. “This has been very peaceful.”

Masisi – in office since 2018 – led the BDP’s failed campaign.

The president ran on a message that his party could bring about “change”, but not enough voters were convinced the BDP could do what was needed for the country.

• Why voters fall out of love with liberation movements
• How friends became foes in Africa’s diamond state
• A simple guide to Botswana

Jennylyn M Barrios’ job as a make-up artist takes her all over Manila – precious time away from Uno, her 10-month-old son.

There simply isn’t enough time in the day to make the homemade meals her growing baby needs. But in rapidly developing Philippines, there are increasingly options for busy, working mums like her.

“If I need to make something from scratch, I need to work double time before I finish the product,” she explains.

“But for Cerelac, I just need to add hot water and prepare the mix. I feed it three times a day – for breakfast, lunch, and then for dinner. It’s easy to feed, available, affordable – all great for working mums.”

Jennylyn is one of many mums increasingly turning to commercially available baby food products in recent years: sales of instant cereals, porridges, pureed foods, pouches and snacks across South East Asia have doubled in five years.

Cerelac – an instant porridge mix – is Nestle’s biggest seller here, offering not only convenience but aspiration as well, all for an affordable price, a key consideration with a rise in cost of living.

A quick search on social media shows a slew of aspirational mums with their smiling infants extolling its virtues – including offering some of the crucial nutrients growing children need.

But while the product will be instantly recognisable to parents across the world, the ingredients here may not be.

Because, along with the benefits of added micronutrients Cerelac offers parents in the Philippines and the UK, some flavours in the South East Asian nation offer something else: added sugar.

And that, in a country where parents are increasingly turning from traditional diets to convenience foods, has health professionals worried.

In the Philippines, Nestle says it follows a set of standards and guidelines from the Codex Commission – a collective established by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) consisting of food manufacturers, governments and UN agencies.

“The added sugar we have in our products are all well below the threshold prescribed by international and local guidelines who always follow the FDA, who follows Codex, and these are the experts in this field,” said Arlene Tan-Bantoto, Nestlé Nutrition business executive officer.

But WHO has called the current standards inadequate and recommends they be updated with a particular focus on avoiding sugar and salt in any food for children under three.

Yet a Unicef study of 1,600 baby foods across South East Asia found nearly half included added sugars and sweeteners.

There is, says Ms Tan-Bantoto, a simple explanation for why it is needed in Cerelac in particular: to disguise the taste of crucial nutrients like iron, which has a metallic taste, and the brain nutrient, DHA, which smells like fish.

“Micronutrient deficiency is widespread in the country and we are serious in our efforts in alleviating it,” said Ms Tan-Bantoto.

“Ninety-seven percent of babies do not meet their daily nutrient requirement, 40% of babies, zero to five, suffer from iron deficiency anaemia. And we know that to be anaemic has lifelong consequences. For instance, brain development and next poor immunity and 20% of kids zero to five are stunted. That means we fortify our products.”

At a clinic in Manila, they see first-hand the impacts of malnutrition on babies and toddlers on a regular basis – although as diets change, so too is how the cases are presenting.

“Sometimes they are underweight, some are overweight, and some are severely malnourished,” one doctor told the BBC.

It is impossible to say exactly why there has been a rise in overweight children. There are multiple factors in the rise of obesity – including a change in lifestyles and urbanisation. But nutritionists say taste preferences are developed at a young age and in some countries like in the Philippines, many foods catering to a sweet palate are started early.

It is why the added sugar in a product like Cerelac is such a concern, according to public health experts like Dr Mianne Silvestre. The most popular flavour of Cerelac in the Philippines has about 17.5g of total sugars per serving – more than four teaspoons of sugar – but that can include both naturally occurring and added sugars. Nestle says in the Philippines, it has several variants or flavours without added sugar, and also flavours with added sugar.

“We always mention that malnutrition isn’t just being undernourished, it’s also overnourished also overweight and obese children, and very difficult to diet,” explains Dr Silvestre.

“Starting these babies so young on this level of sugar. It’s mind-boggling.”

Unicef nutrition officer for the Philippines, Alice Nkoroi, says a lack of local, government regulation also puts parents at a distinct disadvantage.

“If you go to other countries in Europe… they will have regulations that control what is sold out there and also make sure that companies put out what is they’re clear on what is in the content and at the front of the pack, it’s easy for the families and consumers to understand what is good for them and what is unhealthy,” she points out.

And it is not just what is in the product – or on the packaging – which needs regulating, she adds. “We conducted a digital scan… and what we saw is that families are bombarded 99% on what is on social media,” Ms Nkoroi said. “There’s a need for us to regulate what is coming out or being pushed out there in social media, especially targeted to children.”

Chiara Maganalles – or Mommy Diaries PH as she’s known on social media – has 1.6 million Facebook followers. In a lively YouTube video for Nestle’s “Parenteam” educational platform, she tells tens of thousands of subscribers about the benefits of Cerelac.

She’s been promoting the product for years, and for her, it is a win-win.

“I mean with my first kid… I did feed her Cerelac first because it’s convenient… It suits our budget… because of the nutritional content as well, it says that it’s fortified with iron,” she said.

Influencing has also transformed Chiara’s life – she’s now able to support her family from the money she makes from brand deals.

But critics say paid partnerships can look like trustworthy expert advice compared to conventional advertising methods. And what Chaira recommended – feeding Cerelac several times a day – goes even against what Nestle told the BBC.

Ms Tan-Bantoto described it as a “complementary” food to a baby’s diet, which should not be taken “the whole day”.

“At least give one bowl,” she said, for the nutritional value.

Nestle says it recommends one serving of infant cereal each day along with a diverse diet of foods, like fruits, vegetables, and meat daily. The company says the information is shared on its product labels, but promotional material on e-commerce sites and its educational platform suggest meal plans with Cerelac products up to three times a day.

The demand for regulation in the Philippines does have some star power. The sister of the current president and daughter of former president Ferdinand Marcos Snr – Imee Marcos – is sponsoring a bill that would prohibit manufacturers of baby food from adding sugar in their products.

A failure to comply could lead to a hefty fine, and imprisonment of producers and manufacturers for one to five years.

“I’m very hopeful that it will see the light of day. There’s so many bills and the food lobbies, the huge multinationals that purvey all these foods are immensely powerful and until today I haven’t even had a hearing,” Senator Imee Marcos told the BBC.

For its part Nestle says it is listening to concerns, and is phasing out added sugar in baby food – but that balancing the nutritional profile and composition of the product with taste takes time.

The company’s bestseller is due to get a sugar-free variety, with plans to completely eliminate all added sugar in the next “two to three years”, Ms Tan-Bantoto said.

Research published this week indicates that cutting sugar in the first 1,000 days of a baby’s life – from conception to the age of two – appears to reduce the risk of developing significant health issues in adult life.

A team of researchers at the University of Southern California found that limiting the intake of sugar in early life cut the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 35%, and high blood pressure by 20%.

Experts believe the first 1,000 days of life are a crucial period which can shape a person’s future health.

US intelligence agencies say “Russian influence actors” are behind a suspected fake video of a Haitian man who claims to have voted “multiple times” in Georgia.

The 20-second video, which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on X and other social networks, shows two men in a car claiming to be Haitian.

One says they obtained US citizenship within six months of arriving and have voted for Kamala Harris in Gwinnett and Fulton counties in Georgia. They encourage other Haitians to come to the United States.

The BBC has found clear indications, including false addresses and stock photos, which indicate the video is a fake.

In a statement, three US security agencies said that the video “falsely depicted individuals claiming to be from Haiti” and was made by “Russian influence actors”.

“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans,” said the joint statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Researchers at Clemson University said that the video bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation known as Storm-1516.

“This narrative is consistent with what we’ve seen from Storm-1516, especially in recent weeks since they’ve turned their focus squarely on the US election,” said Clemson’s Darren Linvill.

“We should absolutely not be surprised that they are focused on undermining the integrity of the US election.

“This is consistent with Russian strategy over the last two election cycles.”

Linvill said the “narrative focus, style and production of the video” match previous efforts by the Russian operation, which is linked, Clemson researchers say, to an organisation called the Russian Foundation to Battle Injustice.

The organisation was founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary leader who headed the Wagner Group until he launched a rebellion against Moscow and died in a plane crash.

Georgia’s chief elections official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said that the clip is “fake and part of a disinformation effort”.

He asked X owner Elon Musk and owners of other social media platforms to remove the video.

One man in the clip shows multiple driving licences to the camera, presumably as proof of identity. BBC Verify took screenshots of these and enhanced the images to be able to read the details on them.

The addresses on two of the licences match up to a business site and a location in the middle of a road near a petrol station – not residential addresses.

A reverse image search of the photograph on one of the licences showed it was a stock image of a man originally produced by a production company in South Africa.

US intelligence agencies said last week that a video purporting to show a poll worker destroying mail-in ballots marked for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania was “manufactured and amplified” by Russians.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Peanut, a squirrel made famous by his large and devoted Instagram following, has been euthanised just days after being seized by New York authorities.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) raided the home of Mark Longo on Wednesday following complaints of potentially unsafe housing for the animal.

Earlier this week, Mr Longo pleaded with authorities for Peanut’s safe return, writing on Instagram that there was a “special place in hell” for the DEC.

Authorities, however, said that they put the animal down after he bit an official involved in his seizure. The DEC also said it had euthanised a raccoon named Fred that they took away during the raid from Mr Longo’s home.

News of Peanut’s death came as a petition calling for his return had garnered more than 30,000 signatures by Friday afternoon.

On Thursday, Mr Longo had said he was raising money for legal fees against the DEC. A GoFundMe he set up had raised about $13,500 (£10,400).

The ordeal, he said in a Friday morning post, had become a “terrible nightmare”.

After Peanut’s death, Mr Longo posted the phone number of the DEC online and urged supporters to call the organisation to “express your feelings”.

“We will not let this be Pnuts final memory,” he wrote.

In a separate Instagram story, he thanked Peanut’s fans for the “love and support” his family had received and called for donations to help other animals kept in his “freedom farm”.

A DEC statement said an investigation had been launched after receiving “multiple reports from the public about the potentially unsafe housing of wildlife that could carry rabies and the illegal keeping of wildlife as pets”.

Mr Longo took Peanut in seven years ago after he spotted the baby squirrel by his mother, who had been hit by a car.

He cared for Peanut until he was strong enough to be released, but said he found the critter back on his porch the following morning with “a chunk of his tail missing”.

Peanut’s Instagram account has amassed more than 500,000 followers in the time since.

The account features videos of Peanut playing out skits with Mr Longo, occasionally dressed in hats, often climbing over him or being hugged, and regularly eating waffles.

Tyler, The Creator has scored his first UK number one album with Chromakopia, despite it only being available for four of the last seven days.

The Official Chart Company starts counting sales and streams at 00:01 on Fridays, when most projects from major labels are released.

But Tyler, ever the nonconformist, released his eighth studio album at 06:00 EST on Monday, three days after the week’s chart tracking began.

The 33-year-old, whose full name is Tyler Gregory Okonma, has previously said there is lots of “passive listening” at the weekend, and advocated for weekday releases.

Last year, Tyler told Canadian music journalist Nardwuar: “I think if you put it out during the week, man, that commute to work, or that commute to school… you really have that hour, 30 minutes to really dive in and really listen.”

He suggested much of the music listening at the weekends takes place in settings such as parties, or in the background while people are relaxing, which he said often means people aren’t listening as closely to the music.

But in the same interview, he admitted it could be a “dumb idea” to miss out on almost half the week’s streams and sales.

New releases used to come out on Mondays, after the previous week’s chart had been announced on Sunday evening, but it was changed to Fridays in July 2015.

That was part of a global strategy which saw the music industry launch New Music Fridays in more than 45 countries, after consumer research found fans preferred to listen to music at weekend when they felt they had more time.

But music chart analyst Chris Molanphy agrees with Tyler’s position.

“I never loved that [weekend release] date,” he told BBC News. “I found it kind of weird we were competing with movies and everything like that.”

Films are also predominantly released in cinemas towards the end of the week, usually on Fridays.

Despite the dominance of streaming, physical and download sales of a full album can play a big part in an album’s chart success because of the way they are weighted.

If Chromakopia also tops the US charts, it will be Tyler’s third number one album, despite the fact he has never achieving a top 10 single.

On his website, fans can buy different vinyl versions of the new album, bundled with original merchandise.

“He’s a marketing genius,” Molanphy said. “Tyler knows how to package his albums, his covers are beautiful to look at.”

A report last year found only 50% of vinyl consumers own a record player, making the cover art especially important.

Tyler’s 2019 album Igor, with its striking pink design, remained on the Billboard vinyl chart for 160 weeks.

The rapper has previously won the Grammy for best rap album twice, and four of his previous albums reached the top 10 in the UK.

Not everyone has been as complimentary of Chromakopia’s Monday morning release, however.

Music business journalist Eamonn Forde called it a “marketing gimmick”.

“The entire point of streaming is you need to get as much of a head of steam as possible in a chart week,” he said. “Every minute counts.”

Even if the ploy worked for Tyler, subsequent artists could experience the law of diminishing returns.

“Hip-hop is renowned for trying new sales tactics,” Molanphy said.

“It’s possible it will set a model for other artists to follow, but not everybody is Tyler, The Creator.”

On this week’s singles chart, Gigi Perez scored the number one spot with Sailor Song, ending the nine-week reign of Sabrina Carpenter’s hit Taste.

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 polls were relatively stable in September and early October but they have tightened in the last couple of weeks, as shown in the chart below, with trend lines showing the averages and dots for individual poll results for each candidate.

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

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 leads in the swing states are so small that it’s impossible to know who is really ahead from looking at the polling averages.

Polls are designed to broadly explain how the public feels about a candidate or an issue, not predict the result of an election by less than a percentage point so it’s important to keep that in mind when looking at the numbers below.

It’s also important to remember that the individual polls used to create these averages have a margin of error of around three to four percentage points, so either candidate could be doing better or worse than the numbers currently suggest.

If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does highlight some differences between the states.

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 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.

The polls have underestimated support for Trump in the last two elections and the national polling error in 2020 was the highest in 40 years according to a post-mortem by polling experts – so there’s good reason to be cautious about them going into this year’s election.

The polling miss in 2016 was put down to voters changing their minds in the final days of the campaign and because college-educated voters – who were more likely to support Hillary Clinton – had been over-represented in polling samples.

In 2020, the experts pointed to problems with getting Trump supporters to take part in polls, but said it was “impossible” to know exactly what had caused the polling error, especially as the election was held during a pandemic and had a record turnout.

Pollsters have made lots of changes since then and the polling industry “had one of its most successful election cycles in US history” in the 2022 midterm elections, according to analysts at 538.

But Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot in the midterms and we won’t know until after election day whether these changes can deal with the influx of irregular voters he tends to attract.

• Listen: How do election polls work?

• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• FACT-CHECK: What the numbers really say about crime
• Read more about: Kamala Harris | Donald Trump | US election

Chinese tourists huddle together against the brisk autumn breeze on a 12-storey building, vying for the best spot to photograph the point where their country meets Russia and North Korea.

The three national flags overlap on a map on the wall, which explains that Fangchuan in China’s north-east corner is a unique place for that reason.

“I feel very proud to be standing here… with Russia on my left and North Korea on my right,” declares one woman on a trip with her co-workers. “There are no borders among the people.”

That might be overly optimistic. Like the sliver of sandwiched Chinese territory she has travelled to see, Beijing too is caught between its sanctioned neighbours.

Fears over the budding alliance between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have peaked in recent weeks, with reports of North Korea deploying thousands of troops to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And that was before Pyongyang fired a banned intercontinental missile on Thursday, on the longest flight recorded yet – after turning up the rhetoric against Seoul for weeks.

“China seeks a relationship with a reasonable, high level of control over North Korea,” says Christopher Green, an analyst from the International Crisis Group. “And North Korea’s relationship with Russia threatens to undermine that.”

If Chinese leader Xi Jinping is unable shape the Putin-Kim alliance to suit his interests, China may well remain stuck in the middle as western anger and anxiety grows.

Moscow and Pyongyang deny that North Korean soldiers are headed for Ukraine, widely seen as a significant escalation. But the United States says it has seen evidence of this, following allegations by South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence.

The first reports emerged just before Xi met his Russian counterpart at the Brics summit earlier in October, overshadowing a gathering that was meant to send the West a defiant message.

It increasingly appears as though China’s allies are spiralling out of its control. Beijing, the senior partner in the triad, seeks to be the stable leader of a new world order, one that is not led by the US. But that’s difficult to do when one ally has started a war in Europe, and another is accused of aiding the invasion.

“China is unhappy with the way things are going,” Mr Green says, “but they are trying to keep their discontent relatively quiet.”

It’s certainly a sensitive topic for Beijing, judging by the response to our presence in the border town, where it seems tourists are welcome – but journalists are not.

We were in public areas at all times, and yet the team was stopped, repeatedly questioned, followed and our footage deleted.

The hotel demanded to keep my passport for “my safety and the safety of others”. Police visited our hotel rooms, and they also blocked the road to the port at Hunchun, which would have given us a closer view of the current trade between Russia and China.

On the viewing platform in Fangchuan, it’s clear that most tourists have come to see North Korea.

“I saw a person cycling,” says one girl peering through a telescope. Her friend rushes over to see: “Ooooh! It’s such a mysterious country.”

Close by is the Tumen river that gently cuts through all three countries. It is China’s gateway into the Sea of Japan, where it has territorial disputes with Tokyo.

The 1,400km-long (870 mile) Chinese border has some of the only platforms with a clear view into North Korea. South Korea’s frontier with the North is an almost impenetrable barrier, the heavily mined and fortified Demilitarized Zone.

Someone offers me a pair of binoculars. Some people are cycling through the village on ageing bicycles, but there are few other signs of life. One of the largest buildings is a school with a sign calling for children to “learn well for Chosun”, another name for North Korea.

“North Korea has always been our neighbour. It’s no stranger to us,” says a middle-aged man. “To be able to see how they live makes me realise China is prosperous and strong.”

Kim Jong Un’s regime would certainly struggle to survive without its biggest benefactor, China, which accounts for more than 90% of foreign trade, including food and fuel.

That was not always the case. In the early 1960s it was the Chinese who fled famine across the Tumen river. Some even went to school in North Korea because they believed its education system at the time was better.

The North Korean economy crashed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 – which had been its main source of aid and cheap oil – sparking severe food shortages and, eventually, famine.

Soon, North Korean refugees began wading through an often freezing river at the risk of being shot dead to escape hunger, poverty and repression. There are now more than 30,000 of them in South Korea and an unknown number still live in China.

“Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea hasn’t really had any choice but to maintain good relations with China, which has been its sole benefactor,” Mr Green says.

But now, he adds, Russia “is offering an alternative and the North Koreans are seeking to exploit that”.

Mao Zedong, the first leader of the People’s Republic of China, had likened the relationship between Beijing and Pyongyang to the closeness between “lips and teeth”: “If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold.”

Now, Beijing finds itself smarting from a lack of gratitude as Kim’s lips are “kissing elsewhere”, according to sociologist Aidan Foster-Carter, who has studied North Korea for several decades.

“North Korea has consistently been the comrade from hell to both Russia and China. They take as much money as they can and [then] do what they like.”

Analysts have noted that Kim has consistently flattered Putin over Xi in the last year. While Kim hasn’t met Xi since 2019, he has met Putin twice in the past year or so. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has drawn the two sanctioned leaders closer than ever. Putin seeks more support for his war and Kim wants to bolster his regime with alliances and attention.

From the Chinese border, it’s easy to see the burgeoning relationship between the two sides.

The whistle of a train interrupts the tourist chatter, and a steam engine pulling a long line of freight carriages slowly chugs across the railway bridge from Russia to North Korea. It stops in front of a Korean sign facing China which reads: “Towards a new victory!”

The US estimates that Kim has sold more than a million artillery shells and Grad rockets to Moscow for use in Ukraine, which North Korea denies.

But there is no doubt that the pair have stepped up cooperation after signing a security pact in June to help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.

“You have very stiff and formal language to Xi Jinping on the occasion of what is actually an historically important event – the 75th anniversary of relations of the People’s Republic of China,” Mr Foster-Carter says.

“And yet on Putin’s birthday, Kim calls him ‘my closest comrade’. If you are Xi Jinping, what are you thinking?”

It’s hard to know, because China has shown no signs of interfering with the Russia-North Korea alliance.

The US has noticed Beijing’s disquiet and for once the two rivals may have similar goals.

In the last week, State Department officials have raised the issue of North Korean troops in Russia with Chinese diplomats.

Beijing does have options – in the past, they have cut supplies of oil and coal to North Korea, and complied with US-led sanctions to curb Pyongyang’s nuclear programme.

Already, China is battling US accusations that it is selling components to Russia that aid its invasion of Ukraine. Beijing’s trade with Moscow is also flourishing, even as it tries to cope with Western tariffs.

Xi has kept Russia close because he needs Putin’s help to challenge the US-led world order. But he has not stopped trying to repair ties with Europe, the UK and even the US. China has also been holding talks with Japan and South Korea to ease historic tensions.

But Kim’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric against Seoul has the South once again debating whether it should have its own nuclear arsenal. North Korean troops on a Ukrainian battlefield would only further unravel Beijing’s plans.

The possibility has already seen South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol discuss “concrete counter-measures” and talk of strengthening security cooperation with Ukraine and Nato.

A nuclear-armed South Korea or an “East Asian Nato” are not ideal in a region where China wants greater sway. An emboldened Kim could also draw a stronger show of support from the US – in the form of warships or even weapons – towards its allies, Seoul and Tokyo.

“For a very long time, China has had a policy of three nos in Northeast Asia – one of those nos was a no nuclear North Korea. Obviously that has been a failure,” Mr Green says.

Now Beijing fears that the alliance with Russia could destabilise North Korea, he adds: “That could even benefit Vladimir Putin in a way it really would not benefit Xi Jinping.”

Experts say Beijing is just as worried as the West about what military technology Putin might sell to Kim in exchange for troops.

“Satellites, for sure,” Mr Foster-Carter says. “But Putin is bad – not mad. Russia knows just as China knows that North Korea is a loose cannon. Giving [Kim] more technology for nukes is not a good thing for anybody.”

Experts believe Xi is unlikely to do anything drastic because China needs a stable North Korea – if he cuts off aid, he would likely have a refugee crisis at the border.

But Kim too might have a decision to make.

Although Russia is paying for shells and troops, Mr Foster-Carter says, it is China that “has actually kept North Korea going all this time, often through gritted teeth. I just wonder at what point Beijing will turn on Pyongyang?”.

Kim’s deadly gamble could also have a profound impact closer to home – the 25 million North Koreans who are cut off from the outside world and completely dependent on the regime for their survival.

Across the Tumen river in Fangchuan, a North Korean soldier watches us, while we watch him.

Steam rises from snack stands selling noodles and sizzled octopus on sticks on the Chinese side. And he can probably hear the giggling tourists taking pictures with the latest cameras and phones, which he is forbidden from owning.

The shallow river is a gulf neither the tourists nor the soldier can cross.

Two families in the West Midlands are waiting for compensation in the first documented case of babies being switched at birth in NHS history.

It was only taken out of idle curiosity one rainy winter’s day – but the shocking result of a DNA test was to force two women and their families to reassess everything they knew about themselves.

When Tony’s friends bought him a DNA home-testing kit for Christmas in 2021, he left it on his kitchen sideboard and forgot about it for two months.

It did not catch his eye again until one day in February. Tony was at home and bored because his weekly round of golf had been rained off. He spat into the sample tube, sent the kit off, and didn’t think about it for weeks.

The results came on a Sunday evening. Tony was on the phone to his mother, Joan, when the email arrived.

At first, everything looked as he’d expected. The test pinpointed the place in Ireland where his maternal family came from. A cousin was on his family tree. His sister was there too.

But when he looked at his sister’s name, it was wrong. Instead of Jessica, someone called Claire was listed as his full sibling (Jessica and Claire are not their real names – both have been changed, to protect the women’s identity).

Tony is the eldest of Joan’s four children. After three sons, she had longed for a daughter. She finally got her wish when Jessica arrived in 1967.

“It was a wonderful feeling, at long last having a girl,” Joan tells me.

However, she was immediately anxious when she heard there was something unexpected in Tony’s DNA results. He was, too, but he tried not to show it. Ten years after his father’s death, Tony’s mother was in her 80s and living alone. He didn’t want to worry her.

The next morning, he used the DNA testing company’s private messaging facility to contact Claire, the woman it claimed was his sister.

“Hi,” he wrote. “My name’s Tony. I’ve done this DNA test. You’ve come up as a full sibling. I’m thinking it’s a mistake. Can you shed any light on it?”

Claire had been given the same brand of DNA test two years earlier, as a birthday present from her son.

Her results had also been strange – there was no connection to where her parents were born, and she had a genetic link to a first cousin she didn’t know and couldn’t explain.

Then, in 2022, she received a notification – a full sibling had joined her family tree.

It was baffling. But in one way, it made perfect sense. Growing up, Claire had never felt like she belonged.

“I felt like an imposter,” she says. “There were no similarities, in looks or traits,” she tells me. “I thought, ‘yes – I’m adopted.’”

The Gift: Switched

In the first series of The Gift, Jenny Kleeman looked at the extraordinary truths that can unravel when people take at-home DNA tests like Ancestry and 23andMe.

For the second series, Jenny is going deeper into the unintended consequences – the aftershocks – set in motion when people link up to the enormous global DNA database.

Listen on BBC Sounds or on BBC Radio 4 at 09:30, Wednesday 6 November

When Claire and Tony started exchanging messages and biographical details, they discovered that Claire had been born about the same time and in the same hospital as Jessica, the sister Tony had grown up with.

An unavoidable explanation began to emerge – the two baby girls had been switched at birth, 55 years previously, and brought up in different families.

Cases where babies have been accidentally swapped on maternity wards are practically unheard of in the UK. In response to a 2017 Freedom of Information request, the NHS replied that as far as its records showed, there were no documented incidents of babies being sent home with the wrong parents.

Since the 1980s, newborns have been given radio frequency identification (RFID) tags immediately after their birth, which allow their location to be tracked. Before then, maternity wards relied on handwritten tags and cards on cots.

As they tried to absorb the news, Claire and Tony had to decide what to do next.

“The ripples from this will be enormous,” Tony wrote to Claire. “If you want to leave it here, then I’ll absolutely accept that, and we won’t progress this at all.”

Without hesitation, Claire knew that she wanted to meet Tony and the mother they shared.

“I just wanted to see them, meet them, talk to them and embrace them,” she says.”

When Tony finally told Joan what the DNA test had revealed, she was desperate for answers. How could this have happened?

Joan’s memories of the night her daughter was born are vivid. She had been due to give birth at home, but because she had high blood pressure, her labour was induced in a West Midlands hospital.

“They took me in on a Sunday,” she says. “It snowed that day.”

The baby was born at about 22:20. Joan held her much-longed-for daughter for only for a few minutes – she remembers gazing at the newborn’s red face and matted hair.

The baby was then taken away to the nursery for the night so her mother could rest. This was common practice in the 1960s.

A couple of hours later, just after midnight, Jessica was born in the same hospital.

The next morning, Joan was handed Jessica instead of her biological daughter, Claire.

This baby had fair hair – unlike the rest of the family, who were all dark – but Joan thought nothing of it. There were aunts and cousins with similar colouring.

By the time her husband arrived at the hospital to meet baby Jessica, they were too delighted with their new arrival to have any doubts.

Fifty-five years later, Joan was desperate to know what kind of life Claire had had. Had she grown up happy?

But before she could get answers, she and Tony had to break the news to Jessica, who had lived her entire life believing Joan was her mother, and Tony was her brother.

Tony and Joan travelled to Jessica’s home to tell her in person. Joan says she reassured her that they would always be mother and daughter, but ever since, she says their relationship has not been the same.

Jessica did not want to be interviewed in connection with this story.

A day later – and only five days after Tony got his DNA results – Claire travelled the short distance between her home and Joan’s.

For years, she had been driving through Joan’s village on her way to and from work, never knowing that this was where her biological mother lived.

Tony was waiting for her in the driveway. “Hi Sis,” he said. “Come and meet Mum.”

Claire says that from the moment she saw Joan, it felt like they had always known each other: “I looked at her, and I said, ’Oh my God, I’ve got your eyes! We have the same eyes. Oh my God, I look like someone!’”

“It just felt right,” Joan says. “I thought, she looked just like I did in my younger days.”

They spent the afternoon poring over family photographs. Claire told Tony and Joan about her partner, her children and grandchildren. They told her all about the biological father she would never get to meet.

But when it came to questions about whether she had had a happy childhood, Claire was evasive.

“I couldn’t tell the truth then,” she says. “My parents separated when I was very young. I don’t remember them being together. I was raised in absolute poverty, homelessness, often went hungry, and all that entails. It was a very difficult childhood.”

Claire says that breaking the news to the mother who raised her was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do.

She says she did her best to reassure both the parents she had grown up with, that nothing would change in their relationship. Her mother died earlier this year.

As well as coming to terms with a new genetic identity, there were practical implications for Claire, too. Because she had been born before midnight, she discovered she was a day older than she previously thought: “My birth certificate is wrong, my passport, my driving licence – everything is wrong.”

A couple of weeks after making the discovery, Tony wrote to the NHS trust that oversees the hospital where Claire and Jessica were switched, explaining what the home DNA tests had revealed.

The trust admitted liability – although two-and-a-half years later, the level of compensation has yet to be agreed. Tony and Joan say they were told it would be finalised last year.

We contacted NHS Resolution which handles complaints against the NHS. It said the baby swap was an “appalling error” for which it had accepted legal liability.

However, it said that it was a “unique and complex case” and that it was still working to agree on the amount of compensation that was due.

Claire and Joan have been discovering how much they have in common, such as their tastes in clothes and food, and how they take their tea. They’ve been on holiday, exploring their biological roots in Ireland, and they spent last Christmas together.

“We’re very close,” Claire says of her newly discovered family. “I’d like to spend as much time as I can with them, of course, but that time is gone. It was taken away.”

While Claire now calls her “Mum”, Joan tells me that Jessica no longer does. But Joan feels only that she has gained a daughter.

“It doesn’t make any difference to me that Jessica isn’t my biological daughter,” she says. “She’s still my daughter and she always will be.”

A former police officer in the US state of Kentucky has been found guilty of violating the civil rights of Breonna Taylor, a black woman killed in her own home during a botched raid four years ago.

Brett Hankison, 47, could face up to life in prison after being convicted of using excessive force against the 26-year-old emergency room technician.

But the jury also found him not guilty on another charge of violating the civil rights of one of Taylor’s neighbours. It was the third time Hankison had stood trial in the case.

But the verdict marks the first time any officer has been convicted in the deadly raid of 13 March 2020 that saw Taylor’s name become a rallying cry during the racial justice unrest of that year.

Members of Taylor’s family in court collapsed in tears after the verdict was returned on Friday, according to the Louisville Courier Journal.

Prosecutors wanted Hankison to be immediately taken into custody, but their request was rejected by the judge, reports the local newspaper.

The jury of five white men, one black man and six white women began their deliberations on Wednesday.

The indictment accused Hankison of depriving Taylor of the right to be free from unreasonable seizures and depriving her neighbours of the right to be free from the deprivation of liberty without due process of law.

Hankison fired 10 times into her apartment, which he said he did to protect fellow officers as Taylor’s boyfriend opened fire when officers broke down the door.

The former policeman took the stand over two days of testimony during the retrial, telling the jurors he was “trying to stay alive, trying to keep my partners alive”.

Hankison was the first of the four officers charged in the case to face a jury.

Another former officer, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty to falsifying the search warrant for Taylor’s home.

The remaining two officers had their federal charges thrown out by a judge earlier this year. The US justice department recently indicted the two on new charges.

Taylor was killed after officers wearing plain clothes executed a “no-knock” search warrant at her home. They burst into her apartment in the early morning hours while she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were asleep.

Authorities believed Taylor’s former boyfriend was using her home to hide narcotics.

Mr Walker fired a single shot when they knocked the door down, hitting one officer, Sgt John Mattingly, in the leg. Mr Walker said the officers did not announce themselves as police, and he thought they were intruders.

The three officers returned fire, shooting 32 bullets into the flat.

Another officer fired the shot that killed Taylor, but prosecutors said his use of deadly force was justified because Walker had opened fire first.

None of Hankison’s bullets hit anyone, but they did enter a neighbouring property, where a pregnant woman, a five-year-old and a man had been sleeping.

A subsequent police report contained errors, including listing Taylor’s injuries as “none” and saying no force was used to enter, when a battering ram had been used.

Hankison was fired from Louisville Metro Police Department in June 2020.

His previous federal case last year ended in a mistrial when the jury told the judge it could not reach a unanimous verdict.

He was previously tried by a Kentucky state jury in March 2022, and acquitted on three counts of felony wanton endangerment.

Taylor’s family and Walker have both received pay-outs from the city over the incident.

A series of police reforms were also introduced in Louisville.

Hankison is due to be sentenced on 12 March next year.

Rohit Bal, one of India’s most celebrated fashion designers, has died aged 63 after a long period of illness.

The Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) announced his death in a post on Instagram, saying that his work “redefined Indian fashion”.

One of India’s first designers, Bal popularised fashion designing as a viable, glamorous profession in the 1990s and many who came after him credit him for their success.

He had been forced to take a prolonged break due to ill health but made an emotional comeback just weeks ago.

“We will always need a Rohit Bal around to show what classic elegance is – and why it crosses the generational divide,” said an article in The Indian Express newspaper after Bal, looking frail but delighted, appeared alongside his models at the grand finale of the India Fashion Week in October.

Bal’s designs won acclaim for his deep understanding of Indian textiles and meticulous attention to detail.

His innovative creations were worn by Hollywood stars and supermodels and he became synonymous with blending India’s rich cultural heritage with a contemporary flair.

Born in Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1961, Bal graduated from Delhi’s St Stephens College with an honours degree in history. He then worked in his family’s export business for a few years, learning the ropes.

After completing his formal education in fashion design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) in Delhi, Bal embarked on a journey that would redefine Indian fashion.

He set up his own label and designer line in 1990 and later opened several stores in India, the Middle East and Europe.

On his website, Bal described himself as a designer who “combines the right mix of history, folklore, village craft, and dying arts to create imaginative and innovative masterpieces for catwalks and fashion talks”.

In 1996, Time magazine listed him as India’s ‘Master of fabric and fantasy’.

Bal’s designs reached far and wide, with Hollywood actress Uma Thurman and supermodels Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Pamela Anderson wearing his creations. In 2001, tennis star Anna Kournikova walked the ramp for his Paris show.

Best known for his use of lotus and peacock motifs, Bal used rich fabrics like velvet and brocade – his designs were elaborate, inspired by Indian grandeur and royalty.

Apart from designing clothes in his own label, Bal lent his name to endorse products from shoes to linen, had tie-ups with textile giants like the Aditya Birla Group and even ventured into designing jewellery and luxury watches.

He also opened a line for children, saying that he believed that “children are a major consumer class in urban India”.

Bal crafted costumes for the widely-watched Indian game show Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) and designed costumes for the cabin crew of British Airways.

He unveiled his inaugural prêt line for online retailer Jabong in 2014.

“I want to separate Rohit Bal from the House of Bal – in products as well as style, in expensiveness and expanse,” Bal told Shefalee Vasudev in Mint newspaper.

“Rohit Bal stores (there will be no prêt here) will be special. People come to me only for special things – they want garments that are like handmade pieces of art. I have it in me to balance the right and left sides of my creative and business leanings.”

When I met Bal years ago in his studio, his characteristic flamboyance was evident in dazzling neon coloured silks embellished with intricate embroidery; sleek blouses and skirts along with taffeta skirts and netted blouses, in bright, warm and cool colours.

“Fabric is the seed of designing a garment, it is the lifeblood of fashion,” he told me.

His earliest memories of fabric were totally sensory, he said, recalling the downy feel of a jamawar shawl at home in Srinagar and the soft warmth of his mother’s shahtoosh saris.

His early years in Srinagar contributed to what he described as a “blissful childhood”. The idyllic life, he said, was disrupted by the violence in the region, compelling the family to relocate to Delhi.

Bal remembered embarking on a sartorial adventure at the age of 11 when he coaxed his father into a tailor’s shop in Delhi to craft his own cowboy pants adorned with tassels.

Bal also diversified into the restaurant business and designed the interiors of one of Delhi’s posh restaurants, Veda, whose opulent and extravagant interiors created a buzz in the Indian media.

He told me it was also okay with him if foreign brands like Armani or Hilfiger came to take up high street space in India.

“They can’t do what I can with Indian designs,” Bal said.

His flamboyant lifestyle prompted the Indian media to call him “the bad boy of fashion”.

“People see me in photographs surrounded by pretty models and think that I am a snobbish, high-maintenance designer who is about beauty and hedonism. When they meet me, they realise how fake that perception is,” he told Vasudev.

Emergency teams in Spain are continuing their efforts to locate dozens of people still missing in what is the worst flooding disaster in generations.

More than 200 people are known to have died, with most fatalities happening in the Valencia region, but the death toll is expected to rise.

The floods destroyed bridges and covered towns with mud – leaving cut-off communities without water, food or electricity.

Some residents say more lives could have been saved if the local authorities had been quicker to warn of the flood risk.

Among them is Juan González, who lives in the town of Aldaia in Valencia. He told the BBC that the loss there was devastating.

“This is an area prone to flash flooding. It’s outrageous that our local government didn’t do anything about it, knowing that this was coming,” he said.

Another local, Augustin, said the flat where he lived with his wife and children had been completely flooded and they have had to move in with his parents.

• Why Valencia floods proved so deadly
• Timing of Spain flood alert under scrutiny as blame game rages
• Spaniards recount horror of deadly floods

While the worst of the weather has now passed Valencia and the Mediterranean coast, warnings remain in place in southern Spain, with the possibility of further heavy downfalls into Saturday.

That includes in the Huelva region, which has already been badly hit by downpours. The city of Cartaya saw around two months’ worth of rain in just 10 hours.

Further south, in the city of Jerez, hundreds of families had to be evacuated from their homes as heavy rain raised river levels.

Meanwhile, questions remain about how disaster relief services acted, with accusations that they were too slow, and whether Spain has an adequate warning system for natural disasters.

The civil protection agency, overseen by the regional government, issued an emergency alert to the phones of people in and around the city of Valencia after 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday, by which time the flood water was swiftly rising in many areas and in some cases already wreaking havoc.

Mireia, who lives close to some of the devastation in Valencia, said that people were “not prepared at all”.

“Many people were inside their cars, they couldn’t make it out,” she said. “They were just drowned by the water.”

Thousands of volunteers are currently helping the Spanish military and emergency services with the rescue and clean-up operation, and Valencia’s regional president, Carlos Mazon, said more troops would be deployed.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez took to social media to express his thanks to volunteers, calling them an “example of solidarity and the limitless dedication of Spanish society”.

He has vowed that his government will do whatever it takes to help those affected by the disaster.

In the devastated town of Paiporta, where more than 60 deaths have so far been reported, residents have expressed their frustration that aid is coming in too slowly.

“There aren’t enough firefighters, the shovels haven’t arrived,” Paco Clemente, a 33-year-old pharmacist, told the AFP news agency as he helped clear mud from a friend’s house.

Dozens of people have been arrested for looting, with one Aldaia resident telling AFP he saw thieves grabbing items from an abandoned supermarket as “people are a bit desperate”.

One of the contributing factors to the disaster was a lack of rainfall throughout the rest of the year, which left the ground in many areas of eastern and southern Spain unable to absorb rainwater efficiently.

The warming climate is also likely to have contributed to the severity of the floods.

In a preliminary report, World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of international scientists who investigate global warming’s role in extreme weather, found that the rainfall which struck Spain was 12% heavier due to climate change and that the weather event experienced was twice as likely.

Some artists become legends in their lifetime yet remain a mystery years after their death.

Indian painter Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde, born 100 years ago on 2 November 1924, was one such master.

Considered one of South Asia’s greatest abstract painters, Gaitonde was part of a rebellious generation of artists who laid the foundation for a new era of Indian art in the mid-20th Century.

He was deeply inspired by the techniques used by Western painters but his work remained rooted in Asian philosophy, infusing light and texture in ways that, admirers say, evokes a profound sense of calmness.

His paintings were meant to be “meditations on the light and universe”, says Yamini Mehta, who worked as the international head of South Asian Art at Sotheby’s.

“The play of light and shadows and texture makes these paintings dynamic.”

In a career that spanned decades, Gaitonde never pursued fame or fortune. But his works continue to grab attention at auctions, years after his death in 2001.

In 2022, an untitled oil painting by him fetched 420m rupees (nearly $5m; £3.9m), setting a new record for Indian art at that time. The bluish shades of the work reminded viewers of large expanses of the sea or sky.

Gaitonde lived as a recluse for most of his life. He was deeply impacted by Japanese Zen philosophy and this meditative mindset was often reflected in his paintings.

“Everything starts from silence. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences… Your entire being is working together with the brush, the painting knife, the canvas to absorb that silence and create,” he told journalist Pritish Nandy in a rare interview in 1991.

Originally from the western state of Goa, Gaitonde’s family lived in Mumbai city (formerly Bombay) in a small, three-room dwelling in a chawl – an affordable tenement complex for the city’s working class.

A born artist, he joined Mumbai’s famous JJ School of Arts for training in 1946. Despite his father’s disapproval – art was not seen as a viable career in India at the time – Gaitonde funded his own studies and earned a diploma in 1948.

For some time, he was part of a group of influential Indian artists called the Progressive Artists Group, which was set up to encourage new forms of art. Formed in 1947 in Mumbai, the group counted leading artists such as Francis Souza, SH Raza, MF Husain and Bhanu Athaiya – the first Indian to win an Oscar – as its members.

Gaitonde also worked at the city’s Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute, another hub frequented by legends such as sitarist Ravi Shankar and theatre artist Ebrahim Alkazi.

“This was an interesting time as Mumbai was a hotbed of creativity,” says artist and writer Satish Naik, who has published an anthology on Gaitonde in the Marathi language.

Indian art at that time was largely dominated by realism, found in the murals of the Ajanta caves and in Mughal art or miniature paintings.

“Gaitonde began with realistic works but soon sought a different path. He was one of the first ones to reject the form and adopt the formless,” Naik said.

“In that sense, he was a rebel. He wanted to paint as it pleased him, not as someone dictated to him.”

Gaitonde’s deep interest in spirituality helped him progress towards his craft.

“My paintings are nothing else but the reflection of nature,” he once wrote in a 1963 questionnaire for New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

In 1963, Morris Graves, a famous abstract painter from the US, saw Gaitonde’s work during a trip to India, and was heavily impressed.

He immediately sent a letter to Dan and Marian Johnson of the Willard Gallery in New York, describing him as “one of the finest” painters he had ever seen.

“He’s as fine – or superb – as Mark Rothko at his best and will be a world-known painter one of these days,” Graves wrote.

“He is an abstract painter with something unspeakably beautiful and clean. They are the most beautiful landscapes of the mind plus light.”

In 1964, Gaitonde moved to New York after getting the Rockefeller Fellowship. The next two years were a formative phase in his career as the young artist got a chance to meet American modern artists and see their works, which further developed his style.

In 1971, Gaitonde received the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award in India, for his outstanding contribution to art.

But despite his growing fame, he became increasingly withdrawn in the coming years.

His disciple and renowned artist Laxman Shreshtha recounts in Naik’s book how MF Husain would often try to visit Gaitonde at his Delhi residence.

“If Gaitonde didn’t want to meet anyone, he would not open the door, not even for Husain who would sketch something on the door and go. That was Husain’s way of saying ‘I had dropped by’.”

Even his work underwent a shift. Usually, the artist would paint anywhere between six and seven canvases in a year. But after a spinal injury in 1984, the numbers went down considerably.

“I still continue to paint; I make paintings in my head. I now have limited energy which I need to conserve and cannot waste putting paint to canvas,” he once told art gallerist Dadiba Pundole.

As Gaitonde’s stature as an artist grew, his paintings became fewer and rarer, all of which added to the charm and mystery surrounding his work.

It is perhaps also one of the reasons why his paintings command such high prices even today.

When Gaitonde died in 2001 at the age of 77, his death went widely unreported as the artist lived his last years in obscurity.

But his thought-provoking canvases continued to make waves around the world.

Cara Manes, an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, once said that Gaitonde’s works were an embodiment of what silence might look like. “And yet there’s a certain shimmering effect that emerges out of that silence which is then pitted against these very solid marks, assertive application of colours.”

For the artist, though, art remained a deeply personal form of self-expression.

He often said: “I let the colours flow and watch. That is my painting.”

It’s hard to see her in the crowd of men. She is the tiny figure towards the back.

The soldiers have ordered the men to strip to their underwear. Even some of the elderly ones. They gaze up at whoever is taking the photograph. It is almost certainly an Israeli soldier.

The image appears to have first been published on the Telegram account of a journalist with strong sources in the Israel Defence Forces.

The men look abject, fearful and exhausted. The little girl, who was noticed in the picture by a BBC producer, is looking away. Maybe something out of sight of the camera has caught her attention. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to look at the soldiers and their guns.

The military have told the people to stop here. Bomb-blasted buildings stretch off into the distance behind them. They are checking the men, for weapons, documents, any sign they might be linked to Hamas.

So often the suffering of this war is found in the detail of individual lives. The child’s presence, her expression as she looks away, is a detail that poses so many questions.

Foremost, who was she? What happened to her? The photo was taken a week ago.

A week of hundreds killed, many wounded, and thousands uprooted from their homes. Children died under the rubble of air strikes or because there wasn’t the medicine or medical staff to treat them.

Working with BBC Arabic Gaza Today programme we began searching for the child. Israel does not allow the BBC or other international media access to Gaza to report independently, so the BBC depends on a trusted network of freelance journalists. Our colleagues approached their contacts with aid agencies in the north, showing the photograph in places where the displaced had fled.

Within 48 hours word came back. The message on the phone read: “We have found her!”

Julia Abu Warda, aged three, was alive. When our journalist reached the family in Gaza City – where many from Jabalia have fled – Julia was with her father, grandfather and mother.

She was watching a cartoon of animated chickens singing, difficult to hear because of the ominous whine of an Israeli drone overhead.

Julia was surprised to suddenly be the focus of a stranger’s attention.

“Who are you?” her father asked, playfully.

“Jooliaa” she replied, stretching the word for emphasis.

Julia was physically unscathed. Dressed in a jumper and jeans, her hair in buns held by bright blue floral bands. But her expression was wary.

Then Mohammed began to tell the story behind the photograph.

Five times the family was displaced in the last 21 days. Each time they were running from air strikes and gunfire.

On the day the photo was taken they heard an Israeli drone broadcasting a warning to evacuate.

This was in the Al-Khalufa district where the IDF was advancing against Hamas.

“There was random shellfire. We went toward the centre of Jabalia refugee camp, on the road to the checkpoint.”

The family carried their clothes, some cans of tinned food, and a few personal possessions.

At first everybody was together. Julia’s dad, her mother Amal, her 15-month-old brother Hamza, a grandfather, two uncles and a cousin.

But in the chaos, Mohammed and Julia were separated from the others.

“I got separated from her mother due to the crowd and all the belongings we were carrying. She was able to leave, and I stayed in place,” Mohammed said.

Father and daughter eventually moved on with the flow of people heading out. The streets reeked of death. “We saw destruction and bodies scattered on the ground,” Mohammed said. There was no way to stop Julia seeing at least some of it. After more than a year of war, children have become familiar with the sight of those who have died violent deaths.

The group reached an Israeli checkpoint.

“There were soldiers on the tanks and soldiers on the ground. They approached the people and started firing above their heads. People were pushing against each other during the shooting.”

The men were ordered to strip to their underwear. This is routine procedure as the IDF searches for concealed weapons or suicide bombers. Mohammed says they were held at the checkpoint for six to seven hours. In the photograph Julia appears calm. But her father recalled her distress afterwards.

“She started screaming and told me she wanted her mother.”

The family was reunited. The displaced are packed into small areas. Bonds of family are tight. Word travels fast in Gaza City when kin arrive from Jabalia. Julia was comforted by the people who loved her. There were sweets and potato chips, a treat that had been stored away.

Then Mohammed disclosed to our colleague the deep trauma Julia had suffered, before that day of their flight from Jabalia to Gaza City. She had a favourite cousin. His name was Yahya and he was seven years old. They used to play together in the street. About two weeks ago Yahya was in the street when the Israelis launched a drone strike. The child was killed.

“Life used to be normal. She would run and play,” he said. “But now, whenever there’s shelling, she points and says, ‘plane!’ While we are trapped she looks up and points towards the drone flying over us.”

According to Unicef – the United Nations children’s agency -14,000 children have been reportedly killed in the war.

“Day after day children are paying the price for a war they did not start,” said Unicef spokesman, Jonathan Crickx.

“Most of the children I have met have lost a loved one in often terrible circumstances.”

The UN estimates that nearly all children in the Gaza Strip – nearly one million – need mental health support.

It is hard to call a child like Julia lucky. When you think of what she has seen and lost and where she is trapped. Who knows what will return in dreams and memories in the days ahead. By now she knows that life can end with terrible suddenness.

Her good fortune is in the family that will do whatever is humanly possible – in the face of air strikes, gun battles, hunger and disease – to protect her.

Throughout an election campaign, US voters are bombarded with images of the two candidates – speaking from podiums, greeting rally crowds and stepping down aircraft stairs. Here’s a different visual perspective of who they are and where they’ve come from.

Long before they even knew what the White House was… Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are pictured above both aged three.

Decades apart, Democratic presidential nominee Harris spent her early years in Oakland, California, and Republican nominee Trump was raised in the New York borough of Queens.

Harris (left in the left-hand image below) and her sister Maya (centre) were primarily brought up by their Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher and social activist.

Trump’s father Fred Trump was the son of German immigrants and his mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was born in Scotland. They enrolled him in the New York Military Academy at age 13.

Harris spent five years at high school in Montreal, Canada, where her mother took up a teaching job at McGill University. She later enrolled in the historically black college, Howard University in Washington DC.

Trump has said his five years at the academy, which began in 1959, gave him military training and helped shape his leadership skills. He later sat out the Vietnam War due to deferments – four for academic reasons and one due to bone spurs.

From an early age, Harris was taught by her mother the importance of the civil rights movement and she attended the annual Martin Luther King Jr Freedom March in Washington in 2004.

After earning a degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Trump became favoured to succeed his father at the helm of the family business.

Harris returned to California, where she rose swiftly to the top of the state’s criminal justice system – taking a job as its attorney general – and used that momentum to mount a successful run for the US Senate in 2016.

At the same time as she entered Congress, Trump was stepping into the White House for the first time, having stunned the world to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Three years later Harris ran a lacklustre presidential campaign, but was picked by the victor of the Democratic race, Joe Biden, to be his running mate. They proved to be the winning ticket, defeating Trump and Mike Pence.

The end of the Trump presidency and the start of the Biden-Harris term were marked by Covid lockdowns, mask mandates and social unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Harris struggled at times to make her mark as vice-president, but found her voice in 2022 when the US Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion.

President Biden was happy for her to become the White House champion for the pro-choice movement.

It was Trump who had made the Supreme Court more conservative, paving the way for the abortion ruling.

During his time in the Oval Office, he also took the US out of the Paris climate accord and took steps to reduce immigration.

Harris’s debut international visit as vice-president was to Guatemala in 2021, as part of the responsibility she was given to reduce the numbers of Latin American migrants reaching America’s southern border with Mexico.

Foreign policy issues that have dominated her time in office include the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the chaotic US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Trump’s first visit overseas as president was to Saudi Arabia in 2017. Trump advocates isolationist policies that involve disentangling his country from foreign conflicts and promoting American industry.

Harris is married to Doug Emhoff (pictured below), who campaigns regularly on her behalf. She is stepmother – or “Momala”, as she says – to Emhoff’s children from his first marriage, Cole (left) and Ella (right).

Various members of Donald Trump’s family have played roles in his political career, though appearances in the 2024 campaign by his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, have been limited.

With his first wife, Ivana, Trump had three children: Donald Jr (second left in the lower picture), Ivanka (second right) and Eric (right). He had a daughter, Tiffany (left), with his second wife, Marla Maples. He married his third wife Melania (third left) in 2005, with whom he has one son, Barron.

Harris entered the 2024 presidential race relatively late in the process, replacing Joe Biden who pulled out.

She made history as the first black and Asian-American woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, and went on to give a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

In the same election, Donald Trump earned the rare distinction of earning a third presidential nomination from his party. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – sporting a bandaged ear after surviving an assassination attempt during the campaign.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When is the US election and how does it work?
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Vote weighs on minds of Ukraine’s frontline soldiers
• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• 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.

As Spain reels from the flash floods which struck the south-east of the country this week, many are wondering why the death toll, which currently stands at over 200, is so high.

Almost all of the deaths confirmed so far have been in the Valencia region on the Mediterranean coast.

Some areas have been particularly devastated: the town of Paiporta, population 25,000, reported at least 62 deaths.

Various factors, including drivers becoming trapped in their cars, poor planning by officials and extreme rainfall being exacerbated by climate change are all likely to have contributed.

The civil protection agency, overseen by the regional government, issued an emergency alert to the phones of people in and around the city of Valencia after 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday, by which time the flood water was swiftly rising in many areas and in some cases already wreaking havoc.

A large number of those killed were on the roads, in many cases returning from work, when the flash floods struck.

Video footage shows how a first wave of flood water washed through Paiporta as cars were still circulating. Although rainfall was heavier in other areas, such as Utiel and Chiva, Paiporta’s geography, with a ravine running through its centre, made the impact of the flood particularly devastating.

Mayor Maribel Albalat said that the town was ill-prepared in terms of planning, with many ground-floor flats. Six residents of an elderly care home died when the flood water washed into the building when they were still on the ground floor. She also suggested there was an element of complacency.

“In Paiporta we don’t tend to have floods and people aren’t afraid,” she said.

• ‘It was like a tsunami’: Spaniards recount horror of deadly floods

• Timing of flood alert under scrutiny as blame game rages

• Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse

Garages were a particular death trap.

“When it rains people normally go down to their garages to get their cars out in case their garage is flooded,” Ms Albalat said.

That appears to have been the case in the neighbourhood of La Torre, on the outskirts of Valencia, where the bodies of seven people were recovered from the garage of a residential building.

The A3 motorway connecting Valencia to Madrid was one of many roads where motorists were trapped as the water level rose, leaving them unsure whether it was safer to stay in the vehicle or not.

“There are almost certainly more people who have died because the water washed people away who had got out of their cars,” one survivor told the Telecinco TV channel. Another survivor said the water had been up to his chest.

An eye-witness described seeing one driver who had got out of his car who had strapped himself to a lamppost with his belt, to stop himself from being washed away. It is unknown whether he survived.

The mayor of Chiva, Amparo Fort, warned on Thursday that nearby there were still “hundreds of cars turned upside down and they will surely have people inside them”.

On Thursday morning, the Guardia Civil shared advice on how to escape from a car during a flood on social media. People caught in floods are advised to try and escape though their cars’ windows and windscreen.

Other factors also appear to help explain why Valencia was so devastated by the weather event.

Much of the area most heavily affected, in and surrounding the country’s third-largest city, is densely populated.

A lack of rainfall throughout the rest of the year has left the ground in many areas of eastern and southern Spain unable to absorb rainwater efficiently.

Pablo Aznar, a researcher at the Socio-Economic Observatory of Floods and Droughts (Obsis), warned that much of the area affected had undergone what he described as “untrammelled development”, with many areas covered in impermeable materials, which “increases the danger posed by these events”.

The warming climate is also likely to have contributed to the severity of the floods.

In a preliminary report, World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of international scientists who investigate global warming’s role in extreme weather, found that the rainfall which struck Spain was 12% heavier due to climate change and that the weather event experienced is twice as likely.