This is surely the most dramatic comeback in US political history.

Four years after leaving the White House, Donald Trump is set to move back in, after millions of Americans voted to give him a second chance.

The election campaign was one for the history books: he survived two assassination attempts and his original opponent President Joe Biden dropped out just months before election day.

Although final votes are still being counted, the majority of Americans in key battleground states chose to vote for him, with many citing the economy and immigration as a chief concern.

His triumph comes after a spectacular fall. He refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden, and his role in trying to overturn the election results to stay in office is still being scrutinised today.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump wins
• Who did each state vote for?
• Watch: How election night unfolded
• What’s next for the Trump agenda?
• Analysis: Why the US gave Trump a second chance

He faces charges for allegedly inciting the violent attack on the US Capitol on the 6 January 2021. And he will also make history as the first sitting president to have been convicted of a felony, after being found guilty of falsifying business records.

It’s not hard to see why he is a deeply polarising figure.

Throughout the campaign, Trump used incendiary rhetoric – making crass jokes and threatening vengeance against his political enemies.

Few people have a middle ground when it comes to Trump. Most of the voters I spoke to during the course of this campaign said they wished he would “shut his potty mouth” – but they were able to look past it.

Instead, they focused on the question he asked at every rally. “Are you better off now than you were two years ago?”

So many people who voted for Donald Trump told me again and again that they felt the economy was much better when he was in office and they were sick of trying to make ends meet. Although much of the cause of inflation was due to outside forces such as the Covid-19 pandemic, they blamed the outgoing administration.

Voters were also deeply concerned about illegal immigration which had reached record levels under Biden. They usually didn’t express racist views or believe that migrants were eating people’s pets, as Trump and his supporters had claimed. They just wanted much stronger border enforcement.

“America first” was another one of Trump’s slogans that really seemed to strike a chord with voters. All over the country I heard people – on the left and right – complaining about billions of dollars being spent on supporting Ukraine when they thought that money would be much better spent at home.

In the end, they just couldn’t vote for Harris, who served as Biden’s vice-president for four years. They believed it would be more of the same, and they wanted change.

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It is perhaps one of the ironies of this election that the candidate who most represented change was himself in power just four years ago. But there are several differences between then and now.

When he first came into power in 2016, he was a political outsider, and, at least for a while, he surrounded himself with veteran political advisers and staff who showed him the ropes and constrained his actions. Now he doesn’t seem that interested in playing by the rules of the game.

Many of these same advisers and staff have spoken out – calling him a “liar”, a “fascist” and “unfit”. They have cautioned that if he surrounds himself with loyalists, which he is expected to do, that there will be no one to restrain him from his more extreme ideas.

When he left office, he faced a litany of criminal charges related to his role in the Capitol riots, how he handled documents pertaining to national security, and hush money payments to a porn star.

But since the Supreme Court ruled that the president has total immunity from prosecution for official acts in office, it will be an uphill battle for any prosecutor to charge him during the next administration.

And as president, he could instruct his justice department to drop the federal charges against him relating to the 6 January riots so he doesn’t have to worry about a jail sentence. At the same time, he could pardon hundreds of people sentenced to prison for their part in the Capitol Riots.

In the end, voters were presented with two versions of America.

Donald Trump told them that their country was a failing nation that only he could Make Great Again.

Meanwhile, Harris cautioned that if Trump was elected, American democracy itself would face an existential threat. That remains to be seen. But what Trump said himself during the campaign has not exactly assuaged people’s fears.

He has heaped praise on authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, whom he said were “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not”.

He has talked about trying to silence critics in the press. Just days before the election, he also made comments that implied he wouldn’t mind if members of the media were killed.

And he has continued to amplify conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of election fraud – even though the election ultimately led to his victory.

Now, voters will find how much of what he said during the campaign was just loose talk – “Trump being Trump”. And remember: it’s not just Americans who have to confront the reality of a second Trump term.

The rest of the world will now discover what “America First” really means. From the global economic consequences of 20% tariffs that he has proposed on US imports to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that he has vowed to end – regardless of which side wins.

Donald Trump did not manage to implement all of his plans in his first term. Now with a second mandate and significantly less encumbered, America, and the world, will see what he can really do.

• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

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.

Donald Trump has done it again. Eight years after his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton and four years after Joe Biden evicted him from the White House, the former president is about to return to power.

On the back of a victory that swept across the key early voting battleground states – and improved on his electoral margins in much of America – he claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern.

“This will truly be the golden age of America,” he promised the cheering crowd at his election night rally in West Palm Beach, Florida.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump wins
• Who did each state vote for?
• Watch: How election night unfolded
• What’s next for the Trump agenda?

His victory cements a fundamental realignment of American politics toward a conservative populism that began in 2016 and was thought to have been discarded with his defeat in 2020.

His political movement is back and seemingly more durable than ever.

Trump now will have the opportunity to set about building his new administration and enacting the policies that he has promised will create that new golden age.

Trump will be joined in power by a Senate that is now again in Republican hands after four years of Democratic control. This will ease the path for Trump’s political appointees, including Cabinet officials and judicial picks, who require Senate confirmation.

It will take days, if not weeks, to determine if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives. But in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Trump predicted his party would prevail there as well.

A Republican Congress will be integral to Trump’s plan to enact a platform that includes an aggressive plan to restructure the federal bureaucracy, replacing senior career government employees with political appointments. His supporters have vetted thousands of loyalists who are poised to take control of all facets of the sprawling federal government.

Among those being swept into the corridors of power along with the new president are multi-billionaire Elon Musk, vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, Democrat turned Republican Tulsi Gabbard, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and a host of other figures who have become part of this unusual electoral coalition.

Trump has also pledged to impose broad new tariffs on imported goods to protect domestic industry, enact a range of new targeted tax breaks and credits, and implement a mass deportation of undocumented migrants living in the US.

On foreign policy, he said he would quickly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and prioritise America’s interest above all others. Those global crises will be his to solve once he takes office in January.

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Kamala Harris, her fellow Democrats and some former Trump White House officials warned that these policies will create massive economic and social disruptions and threaten global stability – and that a second Trump presidency would be unhinged and set loose from political guardrails.

On Sunday, Trump himself said that his second presidential term might be “nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular,” but he promised the end results would be good.

On Tuesday, an electoral majority – and likely even a majority of the America’s voting public – agreed.

If Congress is fully under Republican control, it will give the new president the opportunity to roll back many of the programmes implemented under the past four years of Democratic rule and enact conservative legislation – on tax policy, government spending, and trade and immigration – that will allow him to leave a more lasting mark on American government.

Trump’s victory represents a remarkable comeback for a man who departed the presidency amidst the wreckage of 6 January, with his reputation seemingly in tatters. After being roundly condemned by Democrats and even some Republicans, he set out on a four-year journey that returned him to the pinnacle of American power.

Along the way he was indicted in federal and state courts. He was convicted of multiple felonies. He was found liable in a civil court in case relating to a sexual assault. Another court levied massive fines on his business empire.

He shrugged all these off and pressed on to march to the Republican nomination.

Trump was at times unfocused and abrasive in his rally speeches, but he surrounded himself with a savvy, professional staff. Surveys indicated that Americans trusted Trump on the top two issues of this election – immigration and the economy – and his campaign relentlessly hammered his message on them.

Being on the right side of the big issues, at a time when the electoral mood in the US – and, for that matter, across may of the world’s democracies – was decidedly anti-incumbent was what mattered most.

Across the map, the former president improved many of his margins from 2020, sometimes dramatically. His campaign successfully turned out rural voters that were intensely loyal to him and ate into Democratic margins in the cities. While exit polls are still being adjusted to reflect the latest results, Trump appears to have made inroads into the traditional Democratic coalitions of young, Hispanic and black voters.

While Trump’s team appeared initially uncertain about how to handle the late switch from Biden to Kamala Harris, the former president ultimately found his footing and rode the wave of anti-incumbent sentiment back to the White House.

Now he has four more years to govern – this time with a more developed political organisation behind him, eager to turn his campaign promises into action.

• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

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.

Kamala Harris has lost her bid to become America’s first woman leader, as her Republican rival Donald Trump surged to a decisive victory in the US presidential election.

The vice-president is yet to speak or concede, despite it becoming clear by Wednesday morning that Trump had secured enough votes in key swing states to win.

Harris cancelled her expected election night appearance at Howard University in Washington DC, where she studied as an undergraduate, as Trump began to make steady gains.

He has now won enough key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin, to secure the presidency, with several states left to declare.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump wins
• Who did each state vote for?
• Watch: How election night unfolded
• Analysis: Result hands Trump free reign
• Analysis: Why the US gave Trump a second chance

Early projections revealed that the key battleground states, which had swung back to the Democrats in the 2020 election, would be won by Trump again. He defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by demolishing the Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump is also beating Harris in the popular vote – the first Republican to lead nationally since George W Bush in 2004.

As expected, Trump stormed to victory in conservative strongholds across the US, while Harris won liberal states from New York to California.

Harris saw a surge in popularity after she became the Democratic Party’s nominee in June following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate.

Her team sought to strike a more optimistic vision than the portrait of American decay presented by Trump, focusing heavily on securing abortion rights.

Trump, by contrast, frequently targeted Harris with highly personal attacks during the campaign, variously calling the vice-president “stupid”, “lazy”, and “dumb as a rock”. He also questioned her racial identity during the early stages of the campaign.

The Democrat is expected to speak later on Wednesday. A senior Trump adviser told the BBC’s US partner CBS that they expected Harris to call the president-elect to concede defeat, a step Trump refused to take when he lost the 2020 election.

The vice-president was due to address supporters on Tuesday night, but campaign co-chairman Cedric Richmond announced shortly after midnight on that she would not attend.

“We still have votes to count,” he had said at the time.

The party-like atmosphere of a few hours earlier at Howard had already turned sour as two swing states were called for Trump. At Harris HQ, Democratic fundraiser Lindy Li told the BBC the mood was “pretty grim right now”.

The former California senator was running to become the first woman, black woman and South Asian-American to win the presidency.

CBS exit poll data suggests that the Democratic nominee may have under-performed with women.

Some 54% of female voters cast their ballots for her, below the 57% of women Joe Biden won in 2020.

Black and Latino voters also appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Biden four years ago, according to Associated Press exit poll data.

The campaign faced criticism at times for its failure to expand on a a clear economic message, an issue which exit polls showed was extremely important to Americans who have faced several years of rising inflation.

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About 86 million voters cast their ballots early during one of the most turbulent campaigns in recent American history.

The Republican party enjoyed a resurgence across the country, winning a number of key congressional battles in key states and taking back control of the Senate.

The Republicans wrested two seats in West Virginia and Ohio from the Democrats and saw off a stiff challenge in Texas.

Neither party seemed to have an overall edge in the House, which Republicans narrowly control.

If the party does regain control of both chambers, it would make it easier for Trump to push through his agenda – which includes mass deportations of illegal migrants and sweeping tax cuts.

Both sides had armies of lawyers on standby for legal challenges on and after election day. Despite some early lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, the scale of his lead appeared to ward off any prospect of protracted legal battles.

Law enforcement agencies nationwide were also on high alert for potential violence.

About 30 hoax bomb threats targeted election-related locations nationwide on Tuesday, more than half of them in the state of Georgia alone, reports CBS.

• GLOBAL: What does Trump victory mean for UK?
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

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.

US shares hit record highs on Wall Street and the dollar posted its biggest gain in eight years as Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House in a historic win.

Bitcoin has also hit an all-time high, following Trump’s election promise to prioritise the volatile crypto currency.

Investors are, however, betting that Trump’s plan to cut taxes and raise tariffs will push up inflation and reduce the pace of interest rate cuts.

Higher rates for longer mean investors will get better returns on savings and investments they hold in dollars.

Markets and currencies around the world have shifted sharply following the US election news:

• The major US stock indexes soared as trading opened, with banks performing particularly well
• The dollar is up by about 1.75% against a host of different currencies, including the pound, euro and the Japanese yen
• The pound sank 1.41% against the US dollar to its lowest level since August
• The FTSE 100 index, comprising the largest companies listed in the UK, was up 0.1% on Wednesday afternoon
• The euro dived 2.24% against the US dollar to its lowest level since June
• In Japan, the benchmark Nikkei 225 stock index ended the session up by 2.6%
• In mainland China, the Shanghai Composite Index ended 0.1% lower, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down by around 2.23%

The value of Bitcoin jumped by $6,000 (£4,645) to an all-time high of $75,371.69.

Trump’s stance on crypto stands in stark contrast with that of the Biden administration, which has led a sweeping crackdown on crypto firms.

He pledged to make the US “the bitcoin superpower of the world”.

During the election campaign, Trump had suggested that he could fire Gary Gensler, the chair of US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission, who has taken legal action against several crypto firms.

Trump also said he plans to put billionaire Elon Musk in charge of an audit of governmental waste.

Mr Musk has long been a proponent of cryptocurrencies and his company Tesla famously invested $1.5bn in Bitcoin in 2021, although the price of the digital currency can be very volatile.

Tesla’s Frankfurt-listed shares rallied over 14% at the open on Wednesday. Mr Musk, Tesla’s top shareholder, has supported Trump throughout his electoral campaign.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump wins
• Who did each state vote for?
• Watch: How election night unfolded
• Analysis: Result hands Trump free reign
• Analysis: Why the US gave Trump a second chance

Experts predicted a turbulent day elsewhere on financial markets, however, as a response to global uncertainty and Trump’s potential plans for the economy.

US bond yields, the return a government promises to pay buyers of its debts, soared on Wednesday.

A bond is essentially an IOU that can be traded in the financial markets and governments often sell bonds to investors when they want to borrow money.

The moves may suggest that investors think borrowing will rise under the new administration and are demanding a higher return for their money.

Some economists have also warned that Trump’s proposals around trade would come as a “shock” to countries around the world, including the eurozone and the UK economy.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the UK would make “strong representations” to president-elect Donald Trump about the need for free and open global trade.

“The US also benefit from those that access to free and open trade with us and other countries around the world, and it’s what makes us richer as societies to benefit from that,” she said.

Donald Trump has said he would dramatically increase trade tariffs, especially on China, if he became the next US president.

Ahmet Kaya, principal economist for the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (Niesr), also said the UK could be “one of the countries most affected” under such plans.

It estimates that economic growth in the UK would slow to 0.4% in 2025, down from a forecast of 1.2%.

Katrina Ell, director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics said: “Trump’s global trade policies are causing particular angst in Asia, given the strong protectionist platform on which more aggressive tariffs on imports into the US have been pledged.”

Trump’s more isolationist stance on foreign policy has also raised questions about his willingness to defend Taiwan against potential aggression from China.

The self-ruling island is a major producer of computer chips, which are crucial to the technology that drives the global economy.

Investors also have other key issues to focus on this week.

On Thursday, the US Federal Reserve is due to announce its latest decision on interest rates.

Comments from the head of the central bank, Jerome Powell, will be watched closely around the world.

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• The Trump family: A guide to an American dynasty
• Who is the new vice president elect JD Vance?
• At the scene: Jubilation in the room as Trump declared victory
• Images capture high emotions as Americans react to Trump’s victory

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.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is set to reshape US foreign policy, promising potentially radical shifts on multiple fronts as war and uncertainty grip parts of the world.

During his campaign, Trump made broad policy pledges, often lacking specific details, based on principles of non-interventionism and trade protectionism – or as he puts it “America First”.

His victory signals one of the most significant potential disruptions in many years in Washington’s approach to foreign affairs in the midst of parallel crises.

We can piece together some of his likely approach to different areas from both his comments on the campaign trail and his track record in office from 2017 to 2021.

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly said he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in a day”. When asked how, he suggested overseeing a deal, but has declined to give specifics.

A research paper written by two of Trump’s former national security chiefs in May said the US should continue its weapons supply to Ukraine, but make the support conditional on Kyiv entering peace talks with Russia.

To entice Russia, the West would promise to delay Ukraine’s much-wanted entry into Nato. The former advisers said Ukraine should not give up its hopes of getting all of its territory back from Russian occupation, but that it should negotiate based on current front lines.

Trump’s Democratic opponents, who accuse him of cosying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, say his approach amounts to surrender for Ukraine and will endanger all of Europe.

He has consistently said his priority is to end the war and stem the drain on US resources.

• Follow live election night updates
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It’s not clear how far the former advisers’ paper represents Trump’s own thinking, but it’s likely to give us a guide to the kind of advice he’ll get.

His “America First” approach to ending the war also extends to the strategic issue of the future of Nato, the transatlantic all-for-one and one-for-all military alliance set up after the World War Two, originally as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

Nato now counts 32 countries and Trump has long been a sceptic of the alliance, accusing Europe of free-riding on America’s promise of protection.

Whether he would actually withdraw the US from Nato, which would signal the most significant shift in transatlantic defence relations in nearly a century, remains a matter of debate.

Some of his allies suggest his hard line is just a negotiating tactic to get members to meet the alliance’s defence spending guidelines.

But the reality is Nato leaders will be seriously worried about what his victory means for the alliance’s future and how its deterrent effect is perceived by hostile leaders.

As with Ukraine, Trump has promised to bring “peace” to the Middle East – implying he would end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon – but has not said how.

He has repeatedly said that, if he had been in power rather than Joe Biden, Hamas would not have attacked Israel because of his “maximum pressure” policy on Iran, which funds the group.

Broadly, it’s likely Trump would attempt to return to the policy, which saw his administration pull the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, apply greater sanctions against Iran and kill Gen Qasem Soleimani – Iran’s most powerful military commander.

In the White House, Trump enacted strongly pro-Israel policies, naming Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy there from Tel Aviv – a move which energised Trump’s Christian evangelical base, a core Republican voter group.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump the “best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House”.

But critics argue his policy had a destabilising effect on the region.

The Palestinians boycotted the Trump administration, because of Washington’s abandonment of their claim to Jerusalem – the city that forms the historical centre of national and religious life for Palestinians.

• How Israelis and Palestinians see US election
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They were further isolated when Trump brokered the so-called “Abraham Accords”, which saw a historic deal to normalise diplomatic ties between Israel and several Arab and Muslim countries. They did so without Israel having to accept a future independent Palestinian state alongside it – the so-called two-state solution – previously a condition of Arab countries for such a regional deal.

The countries involved were instead given access to advanced US weapons in return for recognising Israel.

The Palestinians were left at one of the most isolated points in their history by the only power that can really apply leverage to both sides in the conflict – further eroding their ability as they saw it to protect themselves on the ground.

Trump made several statements during the campaign saying he wants the Gaza war to end.

He has had a complex, at times dysfunctional relationship with Netanyahu, but certainly has the ability to apply pressure on him.

He also has a history of strong relations with leaders in the key Arab countries that have contacts with Hamas.

It’s unclear how he would navigate between his desire to show strong support for the Israeli leadership while also trying to bring the war to a close.

Trump’s allies have often portrayed his unpredictability as a diplomatic asset, but in the highly contested and volatile Middle East in the midst of a crisis already of historical proportions, it’s far from clear how this would play out.

Trump will have to decide how – or whether – to take forward the stalled diplomatic process launched by the Biden administration to get a Gaza ceasefire in return for the release of the hostages held by Hamas.

America’s approach to China is its most strategically important area of foreign policy – and one which has the biggest implications for global security and trade.

When he was in office, Trump labelled China a “strategic competitor” and imposed tariffs on some Chinese imports to the US. This sparked tit-for-tat tariffs by Beijing on American imports.

There were efforts to de-escalate the trade dispute, but the Covid pandemic wiped out this possibility, and relations got worse as the former president labelled Covid a “Chinese virus”.

While the Biden administration claimed to take a more responsible approach to China policy, it did, in fact, keep in place many of the Trump-era tariffs on imports.

• What Chinese people want from the US

The trade policy has become closely linked to domestic voter perceptions in the US about protecting American manufacturing jobs – even though much of the long-term jobs decline in traditional US industries like steel has been as much about factory automation and production changes as global competition and offshoring.

Trump has praised Chinese President Xi Jinping as both “brilliant” and “dangerous” and a highly effective leader who controls 1.4 billion people with an “iron fist”- part of what opponents characterised as Trump’s admiration for “dictators”.

The former president seems likely to shift away from the Biden administration’s approach of building stronger US security partnerships with other regional countries in a bid to contain China.

The US has maintained military assistance for self-ruled Taiwan, which China sees as a breakaway province that will eventually be under Beijing’s control.

Trump said in October that if he returned to the White House, he would not have to use military force to prevent a Chinese blockade of Taiwan because President Xi knew he was “[expletive] crazy”, and he would impose paralysing tariffs on Chinese imports if that happened.

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IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

The words in Donald Trump’s victory speech were nothing out of the ordinary – but the moment itself was truly extraordinary.

Flanked by family and key supporters such as the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, the 45th – and soon to be the 47th – president of the United States strolled on stage and revisited many of the themes and anecdotes I have become so familiar with, as I followed around in this campaign.

But this time, the circumstances – a near-certain victory and a return to the White House – meant everything took on a new significance. He spoke of an actual programme that could become reality.

Around me, hundreds of enthusiastic supporters were delirious with happiness over his success – some in tears, others hugging complete strangers.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump wins
• Who did each state vote for?
• Watch: How election night unfolded
• What’s next for the Trump agenda?
• Analysis: Why the US gave Trump a second chance

In truth, the liquor had been flowing for several hours before the teetotal Trump appeared after 02:00 EST (07:00 GMT). But the joy of his supporters, dressed in their MAGA uniforms, symbolised something far bigger than the alcohol-fuelled highs of a good night out.

Unusually for Trump, the speech did promise unity, and that he would govern for all – a tone that has largely been absent from the campaign trail.

Much will depend on whether Republicans can retain control of the House on top of successfully flipping control in their favour of the Senate.

If they do that, then their control of both chambers of Congress plus the White House – a rare thing in US politics – will open up at least two years of incredible political freedom.

Trump failed to really capitalise on the so-called trifecta of the presidency, House and Senate in his first term – but his advisers will not allow him to make such a mistake again.

They will also want him to be a lot more organised than last time around when it comes to picking a cabinet and key administration staff.

Those on stage in the early hours of Wednesday may serve as a hint of what’s to come.

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• At the scene: Jubilation in the room as Trump declared victory
• Images capture high emotions as Americans react to Trump’s victory

Musk, for example, has said he believes $2tn (£1.55tn) can be cut from the federal budget through efficiencies. It’s been suggested that the billionaire could head some kind of department of “government efficiency” to do it.

Not on stage, but in the VIP pen just in front of it, Robert F Kennedy Jr has also been touted by Trump as someone who could have a big role in healthcare in his administration.

That’s a prospect that has been greeted with horror by many – given RFK Jr’s views as a vaccine sceptic and someone who has campaigned against fluoride in water – a staple of public healthcare for decades.

And not forgetting the family. Trump’s second son, Eric, and his wife Lara – both right up there tonight – have increasingly taken centre stage as key lieutenants. What could be in store for them?

Before politics, Donald Trump built a dynasty with a multimillion-dollar inheritance, a brand name and a lot of expensive real estate.

Now that brand – and that name – is synonymous with the Republican Party, with various members of the Trump family now wielding influence.

As Trump prepares to return to the White House, here are some of the most prominent family members.

Donald Trump Jr, the eldest of the Trump children, has taken on a larger role in the years since his father left the White House.

He was prominent in the media during the selection of Trump’s running-mate JD Vance who, he says, is a friend. “It’s an incredible pick,” he said at the Republican National Convention (RNC). “Truly a great choice.”

He made no secret Ohio Senator JD Vance was his first pick and he got his wish.

Donald Trump Jr was previously married to Vanessa Trump, with whom he shares five children. He is now engaged to Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Like his brother, Eric Trump, the third of Trump’s children, has lobbied his father about issues important to him, according to reports.

He has kept a less public persona than his older brother but also maintains a leading presence in the Trump family business.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were arguably the most influential family members during Trump’s first stint in the White House.

The pair have been married since 2009 and share three children.

During Trump’s time in office, Ivanka made numerous appearances on behalf of her father and his administration.

Mr Kushner held a senior adviser role in the White House from 2017 to 2021.

The fourth child of the former president and the only one of Trump’s children born to his second wife, Marla Maples.

She has not maintained any political role in her father’s campaigns or time in the White House.

She has been married to Michael Boulos since 2022.

Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr have been together for six years and engaged since 2020.

She was a Fox News presenter from 2006 to 2018, before leaving to become a member of a pro-Trump super PAC (political action committee).

Like her fiancé, she has been an outspoken supporter of Trump, particularly in TV appearances.

She was married to California Governor Gavin Newsom in the early 2000s.

Married to Eric, she is the rising star of the family, particularly since she began serving as Republican National Committee co-chair earlier this year. She has two children with Eric.

In July, she gave a speech at the convention and spoke warmly of her father-in-law.

“Our family has faced our fair share of death threats… none of that prepares you as a daughter-in-law to watch in real time someone try to kill a person you love,” she said.

• Lara Trump’s meteoric rise signals changing of Trump family guard

Melania Trump, who returns to the White House as First Lady for a second term, has been married to Trump since 2005.

She maintained a low profile during Trump’s first term in office and has made few public appearances since.

In July, she made an unexpected appearance at the convention, just days after an attempt on her husband’s life.

In a memoir released in October, she shared her pro-choice stance on abortion. Her position is in contrast with that of her husband who has taken credit for helping overturn Roe v Wade, upending the constitutional right to abortion.

Barron Trump, 18, is her only child with Trump.

• Melania Trump speaks out: ‘Ascend above the hate’
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Barron Trump has largely stayed out of the spotlight during campaigning.

In May, it was reported he would be among the delegates from the state of Florida attending the convention in July, but a day later his mother stated that he had declined the offer.

He graduated from Oxbridge Academy in Palm Beach, Florida, in May and his father says he is now studying at Stern School of Business at New York University.

• Watch: Barron Trump receives standing ovation at rally

Kai Trump is the eldest of Trump’s grandchildren and the daughter of Donald Trump Jr and his former wife Vanessa Trump.

The 17-year-old is a keen golfer and spoke at the convention about what Trump is like as a grandfather.

“To me, he’s just a normal grandpa. He gives us candy and soda when our parents aren’t looking,” she said.

• Watch: Trump’s granddaughter speaks publicly for the first time

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ANALYSIS: Chris Mason on what a Trump win means for the UK

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• EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election

We’ve known for months that there is no love lost between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his now former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant.

But this year, there have been reports of stand-up rows and shouting matches between the two men over Israel’s war strategy.

Gallant has vastly more military experience than Netanyahu.

He began his career as a navy commando in 1977 and rose to be a major general in Israel’s Southern Command, overseeing two wars in Gaza between 2005 and 2010.

The suspicion is that Gallant’s military superiority and respect from within the armed forces grated with his boss.

In Israel’s hard-line government, the most right-wing in the country’s history, Gallant was less hawkish than some of his fellow ministers. But he was no dove.

After Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, the country’s biggest ever military humiliation, Gallant was initially fully behind the war in Gaza.

Along with Netanyahu, he faces possible war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court. Both men rejected the allegations made by the ICC’s prosecutor when he sought warrants for them in May.

But in recent months as defence minister, Gallant argued that Israel’s government should prioritise a hostage release deal with Hamas and end the war in Gaza.

Netanyahu hasn’t listened, insisting that continued military pressure on Hamas was the best way to free the remaining Israelis being held.

Since the beginning of the year, Gallant had raised concerns about the lack of a post-war strategy. Again, it fell on deaf ears.

He has pushed for a comprehensive investigation into the military, political, and intelligence failings that led to the 7 October attack.

The prime minister has been resistant, arguing now is not the time.

Gallant was also unhappy at plans to continue to allow Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students to be exempt from serving in the military.

At a time of multiple wars, he said, the country couldn’t afford such luxuries.

Netanyahu, wary of the collapse of his coalition government which has been dependent on support from the ultra-Orthodox parties, paid no heed.

The new Defence Minister, Israel Katz, who up until yesterday was the foreign minister, is more hawkish and much more in step with his boss’s thinking.

Following his appointment, he vowed to “achieve the goals of the war”, including “the return of all hostages as the most important moral mission, the destruction of Hamas in Gaza, [and] the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon”.

But compared to Gallant, Katz has virtually no military experience.

That will raise concerns here and abroad at a time when Israel is fighting two wars, in Gaza and in Lebanon, which risk further engulfing the wider Middle East.

The cabinet has now lost the last remaining minister who was willing and able to confront Netanyahu, another likely reason Gallant was shown the door.

There have been rumours for months that he was on the verge of being sacked.

The timing of his dismissal on the day of the United States election cannot be ignored.

The former defence minister has a much better relationship with President Joe Biden’s White House than Netanyahu, whose rapport is frosty at best.

His sacking can be seen as one more jab in the eye to the now outgoing US administration.

It will come as no surprise if the Israeli prime minister is much more willing to listen to advice on war strategy handed out by Donald Trump’s team.

Of course, in the merry-go-round world of Israeli politics, no-one will be shocked if this is not the last we hear from Gallant.

He has been sacked as defence minister once before, back in March 2023.

On that occasion, along with many high-ranking military and former military officials, he was unhappy with Netanyahu’s controversial plans to overhaul the judicial system.

His dismissal led to tens of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets calling for him to be reinstated.

After just a few days, Netanyahu was forced to back down and return Gallant to his position.

On Tuesday night, as news broke that he had been sacked again, there were again protests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but not on the same scale.

Gallant belongs to the same political party as Netanyahu, Likud, and could one day challenge his leadership in any future elections.

But the fact he has been given his marching orders now suggests the prime minister is feeling strong.

As has been the case for the past year, it is Israel’s longest-serving leader, its most Machiavellian and successful political operator, who is calling the shots.

North Korean soldiers have clashed with Ukrainian troops for the first time, Ukraine’s top officials have revealed.

In an interview with South Korean broadcaster KBS, Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said a “small group” of North Korean soldiers were attacked.

Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky, who had earlier condemned the West’s lack of response to the North Korean troops, said these “first battles with North Korea open a new chapter of instability in the world”.

Seoul, however, said it “does not believe [troops on both sides] engaged in direct combat”, but that there was an “incident” involving a small number of North Korean soldiers “near the frontline”.

Ukraine says an estimated 11,000 North Korean soldiers were in the Kursk border region, where Ukrainian troops have a foothold.

In recent weeks, South Korean and US intelligence as well as Nato have said that they have seen evidence of North Korean troops being involved in Russia’s war.

But Moscow and Pyongyang have so far not responded directly to any of the allegations.

Ukraine’s top counter-disinformation official Andriy Kovalenko first said in a Telegram post on Monday that North Korea’s “first military units… [had] already come under fire in Kursk”.

In an interview with South Korean broadcaster KBS, Rustem Umerov confirmed this, saying he expects a “significant number” of the North Korean troops to be engaged in combat, though he added it was “so far just small contacts, not full-scale engagement”.

Most of them are still undergoing training, he added.

“They’re wearing Russian uniforms, they’re undergoing tactical training, and they’re being deployed under various commands of the Russian army on the front lines,” Umerov said.

He said it was likely that five units, each consisting of around 3,000 soldiers, would be deployed across the battlefield.

He did not mention if there were any casualties.

In a daily video address on Wednesday, Zelensky called on Ukraine “together with the world… [to do] everything to make this Russian step toward expanding the war… a failure. Both for them, and for North Korea.”

Reports of such a move by North Korea have also alarmed the South, raising tensions between the two sides.

Late last month, Seoul had summoned Russia’s ambassador, seeking the “immediate withdrawal” of North Korean troops from Ukraine. It also warned that it was considering directly supplying arms to Ukraine.

Analysts have said that Pyongyang could be paid, or may be given access to Russian military technology in exchange for the troops.

On Wednesday, Russian lawmakers will vote to ratify a mutual defence treaty with North Korea, first proposed during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lavish visit to Pyongyang in June.

It pledges that Russia and North Korea will help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.

The Princess of Wales is doing “really well” and has been “amazing this whole year”, Prince William has said.

He was speaking to broadcasters ahead of presenting his environmental Earthshot Prize in Cape Town, South Africa later.

On his wrist the Prince of Wales was wearing a bracelet saying “Papa” made for him by his daughter Princess Charlotte for a Taylor Swift concert, which he said he had promised to wear on the trip and “try not to lose”.

His wife has not travelled to South Africa as she recovers after treatment for cancer and will instead be watching the ceremony at home in Windsor.

Catherine will be “cheering me on”, he said, adding: “I know she’ll be really keen to see tonight be a success.”

The bracelet was made by Charlotte for her father when they went to a Taylor Swift concert at Wembley.

Friendship bracelets have become synonymous with the pop star and her sellout Eras tour and are regularly swapped with fellow “Swifties” at her concerts.

Prince William was speaking to the BBC inside the eco “Super Dome” that has been built for this evening’s awards ceremony in Cape Town.

The eco dome will be recycled and reused elsewhere after the ceremony.

First awarded in 2021, the prize supports sustainable, eco-friendly projects from around the world, with five winners each receiving £1m.

There is a focus on ideas from Africa for this year’s event, with more than 400 African-led projects nominated and another 350 linked to the continent.

The Prince of Wales spoke of his affinity with Africa having spent time there on his gap year before university, volunteering on wildlife conservation projects in Kenya, Botswana, and Tanzania .

“I love this continent. I spent many a year looking around exploring it and just really thrilled to have the reception and exuberance and the energy that will be in this room tonight,” he said.

The ambition of the prince’s Earthshot Prize has been to bring hope and innovation to the most difficult environmental challenges.

When asked about achieving that in a tough political climate, the prince was positive.

“Everyone wants some hope and some optimism and Earthshot comes with urgent optimism,” he said.

Much of the prince’s visit to Cape Town this week has focused on young people and the power they have to bring about change.

“Without them the future is looking pretty bleak so these are the game-changers, the innovators, the inventors who are going to make the world a better place for us in future.”

This was something his own children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, were aware of, he added.

“Every family tries to do what they can to help with the environment and we go through the basics of recycling and making sure we minimise water use, turning lights off when you leave the house – we’re sensible with what we do around the environment. I think every family has those conversations.”

But he added that Earthshot had far bigger ambitions.

“We’re trying to do big scale ambition and business. I’ve brought the children along on that journey and I hope they’re proud of what we are trying to do here which is to galvanise that energy and enthusiasm to make real impact.”

A GP who disguised himself and injected his mother’s partner with a poison in a row over an inheritance has been jailed for 31 years and five months.

Thomas Kwan, 53, was posing as a community nurse giving a coronavirus booster jab when he injected Patrick O’Hara, 71, with a toxin in Newcastle in January.

Mr O’Hara, who contracted a life-threatening flesh-eating disease which caused horrific injuries, previously told Newcastle Crown Court he had become a “shell” of himself.

Kwan, who admitted attempted murder after the first day of his trial, was described as “calculated and callous” by the sentencing judge.

The GP, who worked at Happy House Surgery in Sunderland, spent months planning the “audacious” attack, prosecutor Peter Makepeace KC said.

He was “obsessed” with money and was angry his mother Wai King Leung, also known as Jenny Leung, had created a will in 2021 granting her partner of 21 years a share in her Newcastle home, the court heard.

Kwan, a wealthy doctor who lived in a large detached home in Ingleby Barwick with his wife and young son, was motivated purely by greed, Mr Makepeace said.

The doctor had installed spyware on his mother’s computer years earlier to track her finances.

On 22 January, Kwan went to Ms Leung and Mr O’Hara’s home on St Thomas Street posing as a community nurse called Raj Patel, having arranged the visit through multiple forged letters.

He was disguised behind a face mask and hat and had created a fake ID in which he had tanned his skin and wore a black wig with a false beard and moustache.

The GP travelled to Newcastle the night before in a car fitted with false number plates and stayed at a nearby hotel under a fake name.

At the end of his 45-minute visit, during which he spoke with a broken Asian accent and carried out blood checks and health surveys, Kwan injected Mr O’Hara in the arm.

Mr O’Hara said he immediately felt an “excruciating pain” but his visitor told him that was a normal reaction, then left in a hurry.

The victim quickly became suspicious when Ms Leung said the visitor was the same height as her son.

Mr O’Hara spent five weeks in Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary during which time doctors cut away large pieces of diseased flesh in a desperate bid to stop the the necrotising fasciitis spreading beyond his arm.

He needed several skin graft surgeries and was left with post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as needing ongoing physiotherapy.

Speaking outside court after the sentencing hearing, Mr O’Hara praised NHS staff who saved his life and said justice had been done.

Prosecutors believed Kwan used a pesticide called iodomethane, although multiple other poisons, including the ingredients for making ricin, were found at his home along with numerous books, recipes and terrorism manuals about toxins.

Detectives also found evidence of a “back-up plan” which involved a fake charity sending free food and wine.

Judge Mrs Justice Lambert said it was an “audacious” and extensively planned scheme to “kill a man in plain sight”, which nearly worked.

She said Kwan was masquerading as a community nurse so he could “administer a lethal injection” to his victim, and Mr O’Hara had no reason to suspect his visitor was not genuine.

The judge said the letters Kwan forged were “sophisticated” and Kwan gained entry to Mr O’Hara’s home in “the most calculated and callous way”, adding it “struck at the heart of public confidence” in the NHS.

She said doctors were baffled by Mr O’Hara’s symptoms, adding he suffered horrific injuries which needed extensive treatment.

“Fortunately he survived although he still suffers from the physical and psychological consequences of your attempt to kill him.

“It is clear he has been transformed from the tough stoical person he was before the attack.”

Mrs Justice Lambert said Mr O’Hara had post-traumatic stress disorder, flashbacks and had broken up with Kwan’s mother.

The court heard Kwan was born in Hong Kong and moved to the UK to attend boarding school at age 13, going on to study medicine at Newcastle University.

Mrs Justice Lambert said Kwan was motivated by a “continual obsession” with his mother’s estate, adding: “Your resentment and bitterness towards your mother and Mr O’Hara was all to do with money.”

She noted Kwan had a “morbid obsession” with poisons, had amassed a “library of materials” and searched the internet for iodomethane 97 times in January.

The judge said Kwan was a “dangerous offender” who posed a high risk of serious harm to Mr O’Hara.

The GP was told he had shown a “shocking level of distorted thinking, a distinct sense of entitlement and capacity for the most extreme behaviour in order to meet your own needs”.

First responders have recovered the bodies of 30 people killed in an Israeli air strike on an apartment building south of Beirut, Lebanon’s Civil Defence agency says.

Tuesday evening’s attack destroyed one side of the four-storey building that was reportedly housing displaced people in the predominantly Sunni Muslim coastal town of Barja and sparked a fire.

The Lebanese health ministry gave a preliminary death toll of 20 late on Tuesday but warned the figure could rise.

The Israeli military said it struck “terror infrastructure” belonging to the Shia armed group Hezbollah.

Moussa Zahran, who lived on one of the upper floors of the apartment building, said his son and wife were injured by falling masonry.

“These rocks that you see here weigh 100kg, they fell on a 13kg kid,” he told Reuters news agency as he surveyed the damage.

“I removed [the rocks] and… handed my son to the civil defence through the window. I carried my wife and came downstairs and got out behind the building… I thank God, glory be to Him, for this miracle.”

An Irish Times correspondent cited a member of the civil defence at the scene as saying that those killed whose bodies were found complete included seven women and three children – a seven-month-old baby and two girls aged seven and 12.

Neighbours also said the building was housing displaced people who had fled from other areas, she added.

There was no evacuation warning ahead of the strike, according to Reuters.

On Wednesday afternoon, Lebanese media reported new air strikes in the southern city of Nabatieh and Beirut’s southern suburbs. These came hours after the Israeli military ordered residents to evacuate areas around several buildings, warning them it was about to act against “facilities and interests affiliated with Hezbollah”.

The state-run National News Agency (NNA) said seven people were killed in a strike on the village of al-Ain, in the eastern Bekaa Valley.

The Israeli military also said it had killed the commander of Hezbollah’s forces in the southern border region of Khiam, and that a number of other Hezbollah fighters had been killed by air strikes and by troops operating inside southern Lebanon over the past day.

Meanwhile Hezbollah’s new secretary general, Naim Qassem, said in a speech that the group had “tens of thousands of trained resistance combatants” ready to fight and that nowhere in Israel was “beyond the reach of our drones and missiles”.

The Israeli military said Hezbollah fired about 120 rockets into northern and central Israel on Wednesday. There were no reports of injuries.

Local media said one rocket hit a car park near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, but the Israel Airport Authority said its operations were not affected. Hezbollah said it targeted the Tzrifin military base, which near the airport.

A large section of a rocket also hit a parked car in the town of Raanana, just north of Tel Aviv.

Since the escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah six weeks ago, at least 2,400 people have been killed and more than 1.2 million displaced across Lebanon, according to Lebanese authorities.

Israeli air strikes have eliminated most of the group’s leadership, including Qassem’s predecessor Hassan Nasrallah, and caused widespread destruction in parts of southern and eastern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs – areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah 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.

Israeli authorities say more than 70 people have been killed by Hezbollah attacks in Israel and the occupied Golan Heights over the past year.

A Malaysian businessman has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for his role in the US Navy’s biggest corruption scandal and for skipping a previous sentencing hearing.

Leonard Glenn Francis, known as “Fat Leonard”, pleaded guilty in 2015 to bribing senior Navy officials with millions of dollars in cash, prostitutes, luxury travel and top-shelf liquor and cigars.

In exchange, Francis said he received classified information and was able to overcharge the Navy $35m (£27m) for his company’s services to the 7th Fleet based in the Indo-Pacific.

He had been due for sentencing in 2022 but he escaped in September that year by cutting off his ankle bracelet, and was recaptured within days.

The US Attorney’s Office said Tuesday’s sentence reflected admissions in his 2015 guilty plea, his “extensive cooperation with the government”, and his guilty plea earlier on Tuesday for failing to attend the original sentencing hearing.

The court also fined the 60-year-old $150,000 and ordered him to pay the US Navy $20m in restitution.

His company, Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia, was also sentenced on Tuesday to five years probation and was fined $36m.

US officials said the scandal had weakened public trust in some Navy leaders and its fallout will be long-felt.

Francis was arrested in California in 2013 and he pleaded guilty to bribery and fraud charges in 2015.

After his escape in September, he was recaptured days later in Venezuela while trying to get to Russia.

His case came to be known as the Fat Leonard scandal because of Francis’ rotund frame at that time.

Francis was returned to California last December under a prisoner swap between the US and Venezuela that saw Washington release an ally of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in exchange for 10 American detainees.

“Leonard Francis lined his pockets with taxpayer dollars while undermining the integrity of US Naval forces,” said US Attorney Tara McGrath in a statement.

“The impact of his deceit and manipulation will be long felt, but justice has been served today,” McGrath said.

The bribery and corruption that Francis had “fostered” within the US Navy over many years was “aggravated and egregious”, but under custody, he helped investigators uncover “unprecedented levels of corruption” in the establishment, the US Attorney’s Office said.

Francis provided investigators with detailed information on hundreds of sailors, from petty officers to admirals.

“Mr. Francis’ sentencing brings closure to an expansive fraud scheme that he perpetrated against the US Navy with assistance from various Navy officials,” said Kelly Mayo, Director of the defence department’s Office of the Inspector General.

“Mr. Francis’ actions not only degraded the 7th Fleet’s readiness but shook the Fleet’s trust in its leadership who furthered his corrupt practices,” Kelly said.

Myanmar’s military leader Min Aung Hlaing is on his first visit to China since he ousted the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021.

The significant losses his regime has suffered in the civil war at the hands of poorly-armed insurgents has raised questions over how long he will remain at the helm.

So, the invitation to visit China – an important ally, neighbour and Myanmar’s largest trading partner – is significant, although it is not a state visit.

It is a long way from a Chinese endorsement of his disastrous handling of the post-coup chaos in Myanmar, but it does suggest that Beijing sees him as an essential part of a solution to the conflict there.

Leading a large delegation of officials and business figures, Min Aung Hlaing arrived on Tuesday in Kunming, a city in the province of Yunnan, which shares a long border with Myanmar.

He is attending a minor summit of countries in the so-called Greater Mekong Sub-region.

The embattled leader has cut an isolated figure since the coup, and been shunned by the regional gatherings which are usually attended by Burmese leaders.

The few overseas trips he has made since 2021 have mainly been to Russia, now a staunch ally.

During his visit, he is expected to meet Chinese Premier Li Qiang, who is presiding over the summit. But this is otherwise a low-level affair, attended by heads of government from other authoritarian governments in the region, such as Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

China always takes the symbolic importance of diplomatic protocol seriously, and will be conscious of the signal sent out by Min Aung Hlaing’s presence at a Chinese-hosted meeting.

This matters, after a perception over the past year that China might be preparing to wash its hands of Min Aung Hlaing, as the civil war has become increasingly costly for Beijing.

The ethnic insurgent alliance which has inflicted the greatest defeats on the Myanmar military operates along the border with China, and launched its offensive a year ago with the declared objective of shutting down scam centres of which thousands of Chinese citizens had become victims.

It was widely presumed that China, frustrated by the junta’s refusal to act, had given the insurgents a green light to move in and do so.

Since then, though, China has tried to rein in the insurgents, to prevent an outright collapse of the military regime in Nay Pyi Daw.

Beijing is known to be pushing Min Aung Hlaing to come up with a timetable for elections to bring an end to military rule. It wants cross-border trade restored, and ambitious Chinese investment plans for Myanmar protected.

Many of the groups fighting the military takeover in Myanmar have vowed never to negotiate with the coup leaders. They argue that the military must be taken out of Burmese politics for good and put under civilian control, and a new federal political system established.

The National Unity Government (NUG), which represents the elected administration ousted by the coup, has objected to the implicit recognition given to the junta by China’s invitation to Min Aung Hlaing this week.

“Myanmar’s people want stability, peace and economic growth. It is Min Aung Hlaing and his group who are destroying these things,” said the NUG’s spokesperson, Kyaw Zaw.

“I am concerned that [the visit] will unintentionally incite a misunderstanding of the Chinese government among Myanmar’s public.”

But the opposition is still a long way from defeating the junta, and China fears that if it were to collapse, even worse chaos might ensue as different armed groups jostled for power.

It looks like China is willing to work with the junta, despite the military regime’s record of brutality and incompetence.

And for now, Chinese-led diplomacy is all there is because Western influence is negligible.

India, Myanmar’s other giant neighbour, has concerned itself largely with localised border issues.

And the efforts of Asean, the Association of South East Asian Nations, of which Myanmar is a member – essentially a five-point consensus agreed with Min Aung Hlaing just three months after his coup – have gone nowhere.

China alone has the commitment and influence to make a plausible attempt to end the civil war in Myanmar.

In many countries it’s a teenage rite of passage: a first kiss.

But a new survey of Japanese high school students has revealed that four out of five 15-18-year-old boys have yet to reach the milestone.

And things aren’t looking much different for the girls, with just over one in four female high schoolers having had their first kiss.

These are the lowest figures recorded since Japan first began asking teenagers about their sexual habits back in 1974 – and are likely to be a worry in a country with one of the world’s lowest birth rates.

The study by the Japan Association for Sex Education (Jase) quizzed 12,562 students across junior high schools, high schools and university – asking them about everything from kisses to sexual intercourse.

The survey takes place every six years, and has been recording a fall in first kisses since 2005 – when the figure was closer to one in two.

But this year’s report found kissing was not the only area which had seen a fall in numbers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it also revealed a drop in the numbers of Japanese youth having sexual intercourse.

According to the study, the ratio of high school boys who say they have had sexual intercourse fell 3.5 points from 2017 to 12%. For high school girls, it declined 5.3 points to 14.8%.

Experts have pointed to the impact of the Covid pandemic as one possible reason for the drop.

School closures and restrictions on physical contact during the Covid pandemic had likely impacted many of these students, as it happened “at a sensitive time when [they were] beginning to become interested in sexuality”, according to Yusuke Hayashi, a sociology professor at Musashi University quoted in the Mainichi newspaper.

However, the survey did find one area of increase: the number of teenagers admitting to masturbation across all demographics was at record high levels.

The results come after a separate survey earlier this year found that nearly half of marriages in Japan are sexless.

The results of the surveys come as Japan struggles to arrest its falling birth rate, and provide further cause for concern. In 2023, the then-prime minister warned that the country’s low birth rate was pushing it to the brink of being able to function.

Some researchers have suggested the population – currently at 125 million people – could fall to less than 53 million by the end of the century. A range of other contributing factors have been marked out as possible contributing factors – including rising living costs, more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children

Japan already has the world’s oldest population, measured by the UN as the proportion of people aged 65 or older.

In late 2023, Japan said that for the first time one in 10 people in the country are aged 80 or older.

In March, diaper-maker Oji Holdings announced it would stop making baby nappies to focus on making adult diapers.

A small business owner said she was shocked and heartbroken to find her card designs being sold on giant online retailer Temu’s website without her knowledge.

Anwen Roberts, who owns design company Draenog, said identical versions of her Welsh language products appeared on the Chinese-based site after being copied without permission.

Ms Roberts said it was an added pressure for small businesses like hers in Caernarfon, Gwynedd, when she was trying to make a living.

Temu, which has now taken down the cards from its site, said it acted “quickly” when “potential infringements” were reported, and its goal was to protect brands and artist rights.

Temu, which is owned by the Chinese giant PDD Holdings and was valued earlier this year at $150bn (£117bn), is a marketplace where third-party sellers offer their products directly to customers.

Ms Roberts said it was a “massive shock” to see her work and designs being sold online without her knowledge.

“They were identical and they used the designs we have online,” she told Newyddion S4C.

“It just breaks your heart a bit to know someone has used your work, put it out there and is potentially making money from something that I as a small business have created.”

Among the cards sold through Temu was nadolig llawen mam a dad – merry Christmas mum and dad in Welsh – featuring two hedgehogs nose to nose while snow falls.

Both the colouring, greeting and designs were the same.

The Temu site card read nadolig llawen mam a dad while Draenog’s is mam a dad nadolig llawen.

Another Temu site card showed a large balloon with penblwydd hapus – happy birthday – written on it and tied to a dachshund, which was identical to a Draenog card.

Temu, which sells everything from clothes to electronics and furniture, launched in the US in 2022 and later in the UK and the rest of the world, and ships to about 50 countries.

“They can just take hundreds of thousands of images, take them off the internet, create some text, do it really quickly and they miss out the bit of weeks and months and hours of working with small businesses like I do and putting a lot of time and energy in,” said Ms Roberts.

She said the onus on people like her to report issues was frustrating and time-consuming as there was “also the time of having to track them down and knowing your rights”.

UK government body the Intellectual Property Office called IP infringement both a “local and global challenge” and said it worked with others to “help tackle the threat it poses to businesses and consumers”.

The IPO said it engaged with major e-commerce stores to remove goods which infringed rights or were counterfeit. It also spoke to them to “permanently remove persistent sellers from their platforms” and “published guidance to help traders protect their IP rights on all major e-commerce stores, including Temu”.

The IPO said: “If people believe that their IP rights are being infringed, or suspect such goods are being offered for sale on e-commerce sites or social media marketplaces, they should make use of the tools these sites provide and always report this.”

Fflur Elin of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), said its research indicated one in five small firms experienced copying of their work when using the biggest platforms.

“This is extremely challenging and many often feel powerless when taking disputes to larger companies,” she added.

The FSB wants the UK government to “implement a system that allows dispute resolution between the larger companies and the small businesses and that is paid by a mechanism that raises the fees from the big platforms”.

Temu said it investigated this case and “removed the infringing products that were found”

In a statement it added: “For sellers who repeatedly violate these rules or commit serious infringements, we permanently ban them from the platform and remove all of their products.

“We have invested heavily in IP [intellectual property] rights protection, expanded our IP team, and introduced an IP portal and brand protection centre to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of handling infringement claims.

“As a result, we resolve over 99% of takedown requests within just a few days, which is faster than the industry average.”

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy is coming to the end of his maiden tour of Africa with the aim of resetting relations with the 54-nation continent.

“Our new approach will deliver respectful partnerships that listen rather than tell, deliver long-term growth rather than short-term solutions and build a freer, safer, more prosperous continent,” he said as he set out the agenda for his trip to the continent’s two biggest powers – Nigeria and South Africa.

Lammy’s visit follows his appointment as foreign secretary in the Labour government that took office earlier this year.

Since Labour was last in office in 2010, relations between African states and other world powers have changed massively.

Today, China is the largest trade partner for many African countries, while Russia has increasingly made inroads, including by offering military support to West African states battling jihadists.

Oil-rich Gulf nations, along with Turkey, have also been increasing their influence on the continent by striking business and military deals.

In contrast, UK-Africa relations have been “a lot more lacklustre”, says Alex Vines, the head of the Africa programme at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

This is particularly the case between the UK and its biggest trading partner on the continent, South Africa, and the trip is an “attempt to reboot that”, he adds.

“I want to hear what our African partners need and foster relationships so that the UK and our friends and partners in Africa can grow together,” Lammy said.

Britain is no newcomer to the continent. A long – and at times chequered – history underpins many of its relationships with African countries.

Almost all its former colonies on the continent are part of the Commonwealth, although countries that did not have this historical link to the UK have joined the group, including Rwanda, Togo and Gabon. Angola has also applied to join.

“The Commonwealth will likely continue to be a key platform,” says Nicole Beardsworth, an academic at South Africa’s Wits University.

As its former colonies gained independence in the middle of the last century, Britain continued to play a sort of “big brother” role.

But this is now changing.

Dr Vines says Africa did not feature significantly in a major document released last year to outline the UK’s priorities on the global stage.

“There were name checks to countries like Nigeria and South Africa and Kenya in it, but there wasn’t much written,” he says.

Dr Vines adds that he expects South Africa-UK relations to improve under Labour because of its historic ties with the anti-apartheid movement that fought white-minority rule.

“That comes from the anti-apartheid struggle and the solidarity that Labour and people that were the Labour movement provided for combating apartheid,” he says.

Dr Beardsworth, however, notes that former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May tried to bolster ties with Africa, but her efforts were “scuppered” after she resigned in 2019 following turmoil in the then governing party.

The UK then had an unprecedented turnover of prime ministers who had to deal with domestic crises, the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, and the Covid pandemic.

“Africa fell off the radar,” Dr Beardsworth says, adding that the exception was the controversial, and now-scrapped, deal to send some asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda.

Being the world’s youngest continent – with a median age of 19 – Africa presents opportunities for the future, the UK Foreign Office said.

“Africa has huge growth potential, with the continent on track to make up 25% of the world’s population by 2050,” read a statement from the office.

With an ageing population in the UK – as with much of the developed world – Dr Vines says that the sharing of skills will increase.

He adds that migration is an “emotive and complicated issue”, but the UK and other Western nations should avoid “cherry-picking the best and corroding African states from being successful themselves”.

The UK Foreign Office said that “growth is the core mission of this government and will underpin our relationships in Nigeria, South Africa and beyond”.

That will mean “more jobs and more opportunities for Brits and Africans alike,” it added.

The UK’s Africa policy has long focused on development aid, but this has been slashed in recent years as the country faces its own economic crisis.

Dr Vines says aid can be important to deal with humanitarian crises, climate shocks and to finance projects aimed at expanding the private sector in Africa, but he does not see the Labour government increasing funding.

“When you had a previous Labour government under Tony Blair, Britain saw itself as a global superpower for international development – that’s no longer the case,” he says.

Dr Beardsworth says relations are expected to move towards being more economically focused, and “much more mutually beneficial”.

She says this could also see the normalisation of the UK’s relations with Zimbabwe and Harare being welcomed back to the Commonwealth after relations broke down during the rule of the late Robert Mugabe.

Differences over international affairs such as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East could also play out less in the public.

South Africa’s position on both conflicts has been at odds with much of the West.

But South African analyst Yanga Molotana does not see this as a major problem.

“Two things can exist at the same time – I can still hold my position, I can still hold my views, and we can still have a mutually beneficial relationship without the moral pressure of you saying that I have to agree with everything that you say,” she adds.

Dr Vines agrees, saying he expects the UK to continue promoting multi-party democracy in Africa, but there will be “less finger-wagging, and more quiet diplomacy”.

“The concern is probably going to be more regularly raised in private,” he says.

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At the wheel of an ambulance, Samir El Chekieh drives with sirens wailing to the latest Israeli air strike in El Karak in the Bekaa Valley, eastern Lebanon.

The 32-year-old firefighter and paramedic with the Lebanese Civil Defense Force (CDF) only got a few hours’ sleep last night. It is now the middle of the afternoon and he still hasn’t had breakfast.

Since the escalation of the war between Israel and the Shia Muslim Hezbollah, the men and women of the CDF see little rest, and brace themselves for a mass casualty incident every day.

This article contains graphic descriptions

It is starkly different from the last war with Israel in 2006, Samir says. “We didn’t have those kind of air strikes. Recently, a fire station was hit, and a church in the south, and our humanitarian colleagues have been killed.”

CDF workers say civilians, including women and children, are increasingly among the dead and injured when they attend a call out.

The war between Israel and Hezbollah is spreading deeper and wider across Lebanon.

An intense bombing campaign has broadened far beyond the country’s southern border villages and the capital Beirut, to towns in the fertile Bekaa and the historic city of Baalbek, principally Shia areas, where Hezbollah was founded. The port cities of Sidon and Tyre have also seen an increase in attacks.

Israel says it is only targeting Hezbollah fighters, weapons and infrastructure. Since its campaign against the militant group escalated, Israel estimates it has destroyed two-thirds of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile stockpile.

But Hezbollah is still firing rockets daily towards Israel.

The BBC spent two weeks with Civil Defense Force crews in the Bekaa Valley, which stretches eastwards to the border with Syria. Permission from Hezbollah was required to visit the scene of Israeli attacks.

In that time, the number and frequency of strikes in the area dramatically increased.

On 28 October, there were more than 100 Israeli strikes, and in the past week alone 160 people were killed in the Bekaa, according to official figures. The Lebanese government does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its figures.

Samir and his men arrive in the Shia village of El Karak to find chaos and destruction – the air is thick with smoke and dust.

Earlier at their station in the nearby city of Zahle, they had heard a powerful explosion – and from their balcony seen a plume of smoke in the distance. They jumped into their fire trucks and ambulances and headed straight there.

A woman in chador sits on the pavement begging to be let into the smoking ruins of an apartment block, but men reason with her to stay put. It is too dangerous, a second Israeli air strike could be coming.

The first body they find is of a man, blown across the ground by the explosion.

There are survivors underneath the pancaked floors of the apartments and Samir goes deep in the rubble. He is not wearing plastic protective gloves as fire is still blazing inside, so when he finds a child, he can feel shattered bones beneath his fingertips. As he carefully retrieves the child, he realises it is only half a body.

“The first victim I found was a child. I don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy,” he tells me afterwards. “Sorry to explain that. But it’s from the stomach and up – from stomach and down there is nothing.”

In the past, the CDF crew have received phone calls telling them to evacuate a site they are attending. They assume they are from the Israelis. No such call comes on this day, so for an hour Samir and others dig deeper into the ruin.

Eventually they find a 10-year-old girl alive. She tells the rescuers that her eight-month-old brother, Mohammed, was next to her.

“After that, we started hearing the screaming of a small child,” Samir says.

Through a small crevice in the rubble they spot the trapped boy, trying to move his legs, his babygrow and a single blue sock visible to the rescue crew. They painstakingly remove the debris around him and he is gently cradled in Samir’s hands and brought to safety. Mohammed is now being treated in Iraq for the head injury he suffered, his family says.

The CDF works across Lebanon’s sectarian divide. It does not discriminate, says Samir, who is Christian and is the head of operations at the station in Zahle – a predominantly Christian town, dominated by a statue of the Virgin Mary, which rises 54m above a hilltop.

“We don’t ask the sex of the victim. We don’t ask if he’s black, white. We don’t ask if he’s Christian or Muslim. We are humanitarians,” Samir says.

The UN estimates that every day in October at least one child was killed and 10 were injured in Israeli attacks. Those losses, combined with those of their colleagues killed in strikes, are taking their toll on Samir and his men.

Almost 24 hours after they left the El Karak site, a second Israeli attack brought down the rest of the apartment building.

In the early evenings, Hezbollah still fires rockets from nearby hillsides, targeting Israel. One salvo of at least six projectiles causes a brush fire near Zahle.

In the town of Khodor, the Hezbollah flag is planted on the ruins of one of the many buildings that have been flattened by Israeli bombs. Children’s toys have been arranged at its base. A large red Shia flag flaps in the wind nearby – it is almost the only sound in the largely abandoned town.

With a bandaged head, Jawad Hamzeh takes me through the rubble of his home.

His three daughters died in the attack, including 24-year-old Nada who was pregnant. He holds up another daughter’s law books, she was studying to be a lawyer.

There were no militants here, he says. “Where are the missiles, do you see them?” he asks.

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah began attacking Israel on 8 October 2023 in solidarity with its ally Hamas, which had carried out a devastating attack on Israel the day before. Months of cross-border exchanges followed, and then, in late September this year, Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nassrallah, and followed that with a ground invasion.

Hezbollah is committed to Israel’s destruction, but it is more than a militant group. It is the most powerful political force in Lebanon and a social movement which serves as a bulwark for Lebanon’s long-discriminated Shia communities against other sects in the country.

Tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced by the year-long war. By attacking Hezbollah on multiple fronts, Israel hopes to degrade the group and let its people return home.

Despite US-led ceasefire talks, neither side appears willing to back down.

On 30 October, the Israeli military issued an evacuation order in the Bekaa city of Baalbek, which the UN described as the “largest forced movement Lebanon has experienced in a single day” since the start of the conflict. As many as 150,000 people were given only hours to flee another Israeli assault.

There, not far from the magnificent Roman ruins with its towering temple of Bacchus, I met Hussein Nassereldine, 42, whose home had been destroyed in an Israeli strike the night before.

“No terrorist or bad person lived here,” he says. “All who lived here were decent people.” He says it was home to families who had fled Beirut in 1982 during the country’s civil war, including his own. “We were born here and lived here, and we will stay and won’t leave here,” he says.

As I leave, men with pickaxes and shovels are making slow progress in the rubble and Hussein prepares to erect a tent on what was left of his home.

Outside the city, at the Dar Al Amal hospital, the injured are recovering from Baalbek’s deadliest day. Of the 63 people killed, two thirds of those were women and children according to the local governor. Israel says it struck 110 Hezbollah-linked targets.

In a bare room, filled only with screams, three-year-old Selin’s tiny hand reaches out for comfort. But there is no-one there. She has burns to her face, a fractured leg and wounds to her groin and side. Her mother, father, two sisters and brother were all killed in the Israeli air strike that left her broken and alone.

Across the corridor of the intensive care unit, two-year-old Kayan Smeha has a fractured skull. His mother, Najat, 24, kisses him gently on his cheek and cradles him to quieten him.

“He is still panicking,” she tells me. “And he is probably re-running the scene as I am doing. I can handle it, but he is small, he can’t.”

Tears roll down her cheek, but she is defiant.

“I’m crying because I am afraid for my baby. But if they think they can break us they are mistaken. If I had to, I will sacrifice my son and my husband, my father, my mother, my sister,” Najat says.

“Death of loved ones is hard but not harder than getting humiliated. And we will hold on to our faith and to our traditions till death.”

At the small CDF station in the village of Ferzoul, between orchards and vineyards, the Sun comes up after a cold night. The seasonal temperature is dropping here and most of Lebanon’s shelters for the displaced are full.

Samir arrives and I ask him how he copes with what he has seen.

“Some of the pictures are stuck in our head,” he says, adding that they will never go away.

He leans heavily on his faith.

“When you manage to keep one [person] alive, that will give you the strength to keep going,” he says.

“And this is a power that’s given from God and we’re going to still do our job. Even if we were directly targeted, we say here in Lebanon, God will keep us safe and we have faith in God and he will keep us safe.”

“We can turn this around in one term.”

So said the new Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, to staff at Conservative Campaign Headquarters – in other words, she can win the next general election.

Psychologically, she has to say that and she has to believe it, for why else would someone take on the job of Leader of the Opposition?

Granted, candidates for leader run when they think it is their time – the opportunity may never come around again – but they also have to believe the often thankless slog of opposition is worth it, because turfing out the government is possible.

The arithmetic of doing so – recovering from the Conservatives’ worst ever election defeat and overturning a Himalayan Labour majority – looks a tall order, but so volatile is the electorate you never know.

And so, next for Badenoch, the business of making senior appointments.

Reshuffles are always something of a nightmare for leaders as they are guaranteed deliverers of disappointment and deflated egos as well as sources of smiles and preferment.

But three factors make this one particularly tricky for the new Tory leader.

Firstly, numbers.

There are only 121 Conservative MPs and almost as many shadow ministerial roles to fill, if she wants to man-mark every single minister in government with their own shadow.

One potential solution to this is to ask some junior shadow ministers to shadow more than one brief, but that involves asking them to take on even more work.

And the number is not really 121 because there are those MPs who have said they want to be backbenchers, such as former leader Rishi Sunak, former deputy leader Sir Oliver Dowden, former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and former Home Secretary and leadership contender James Cleverly for a start.

Then there are those who are chairing select committees and so cannot serve on their party’s frontbench.

And then there are those the leadership would not want to appoint in a million years.

Suddenly, the numbers are getting tight and that is before you offer someone a job and they turn it down and so, implicitly at least, threaten not to serve at all – and that has happened too.

Secondly, the power of patronage.

When you are prime minister, you can pick up the phone and offer real power.

Doing stuff, taking decisions, being in government.

When you are leader of the opposition, you pick up the phone and offer the worthy, democratically vital but ultimately much less appealing role of being a shadow minister.

And thirdly, there is Kemi Badenoch’s authority over her parliamentary party.

She was the first choice for leader of just 35% of Conservative MPs and 57% of party members who voted in the leadership race.

A win is a win, but neither endorsement was emphatic.

All three of these factors swirl as she picks her top team.

What to do with the guy who came second is a perennial challenge for new leaders.

In this instance, what to offer Robert Jenrick and what might he accept?

Word reaches me that there was quite the back-and-forth between Badenoch and Jenrick.

He was offered shadow health secretary, shadow housing secretary, shadow work and pensions secretary, and shadow justice secretary, I am told.

He was not offered shadow foreign secretary.

For a little while on Monday, he did not say yes to any of the jobs he was offered, stewing over whether they were appealing, senior enough or might box him in too much politically.

One Tory source, not close to the leadership, told me: “Kemi just doesn’t like Rob. She thinks his whole schtick about her and whether she has any policies has done her lasting damage with the Right and with Reform voters. This is only likely to further unravel.”

Half an hour or so later, those around Jenrick made it known he had accepted becoming shadow justice secretary, that “the party needs to come together” and that “unity could not be more important”.

But they are not exactly a nest of birds singing in perfect harmony.

Perhaps the biggest appointment of all is shadow chancellor, particularly in the aftermath of a budget that has done much to define how Labour appears to want to approach its early years in office.

Mel Stride is a former cabinet minister, a former minister in the Treasury and a former chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, so it is a brief he is familiar with.

And then there is the decision to make Dame Priti Patel the shadow foreign secretary.

Dame Priti is a long-standing and pretty well-known senior Conservative who has served in government at the highest level as home secretary.

But she is also someone who found herself prematurely out of government back in 2017 after it emerged, extraordinarily, that she had run a freelance foreign policy operation while on holiday in Israel.

Baroness May, who was then prime minister, was furious and Dame Priti resigned before she was fired.

One senior Conservative got in touch with me to claim that Badenoch, in appointing Patel, had “destroyed within 48 hours any chance she had of having a respectable foreign policy”.

Ouch.

No one said opposition was easy.

And these are just the criticisms from Badenoch’s own side.

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A week after flash floods hit eastern Spain, recriminations are flying over who was to blame for the country’s worst natural disaster in living memory amid angry scenes on the part of those affected.

An initial image of cross-party unity has been replaced by disputes over which institutions had jurisdiction in the disaster areas where at least 218 people lost their lives.

In the immediate aftermath of the floods, Valencia regional leader Carlos Mazón of the conservative People’s Party (PP) welcomed Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and thanked him for his government’s support.

It was an unusual sight in the context of Spain’s deeply polarised politics, with Mazón even calling Sánchez “dear prime minister”.

Valencia’s regional leader has faced criticism for taking around 12 hours to respond to a red weather warning by Spain’s national meteorological office (Aemet) on 29 October and issue an alert directly to people’s phones, by which time the flood was already causing enormous damage.

However, the national leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, questioned the information provided by the Aemet, which is supervised by the central government. He also complained that the prime minister’s administration had not co-ordinated with the regional government.

In the days since, pressure has mounted on Mazón, with many commentators and political adversaries calling on him to resign for his actions on that day, as well as for eliminating the Valencia Emergency Unit (UVE) on taking office last year.

In response, he has taken a more confrontational approach, in line with that of his party boss.

That has included blaming the CHJ hydrographic agency, which is controlled by Madrid, for allegedly activating and then de-activating an alert on the day in question.

“If the CHJ had re-activated the hydrological alert, the alarm message would have been sent immediately” by the regional government, Mazón said.

The CHJ has responded by explaining that it provides data on rainfall and related matters but that it does not issue alerts of this kind.

Fifteen thousands troops, civil guards and police have now arrived in the Valencia region, double the number from last weekend.

Mazón has countered claims that his government did not request enough support from the military in the wake of the weather event, insisting that the armed forces themselves were responsible for such decisions.

The head of the military emergency unit (UME), Javier Marcos, responded by saying that protocol dictated that the regional government had to request any such support.

“I can have 1,000 men at the door of the emergency but I can’t go in, legally, without authorisation from the head of the emergency,” he said, referring to the Valencia leader.

Mazón’s comments about the military reportedly enraged the defence minister, Margarita Robles, who expressed her anger during a crisis meeting of ministers with King Felipe on Monday.

Meanwhile, the political situation has been further complicated after calls by Núñez Feijóo for the prime minister to declare a national state of emergency, which would centralise management of the crisis in Madrid, wresting powers from Valencia’s regional government.

The leader of the far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, has also backed such a measure, which has been ruled out by the government.

“Sánchez is the one responsible for not activating all the state resources when lives could have been saved,” he said, denouncing the “evil and incompetence” of the administration.

The king, Sánchez and Mazón were all hit by the blowback of public anger over the handling of the tragedy on Sunday, when people in the Valencian town of Paiporta, the worst hit by the floods, threw mud and jeered at them, calling them “murderers”.

As the scenes became increasingly violent, the prime minister’s security detail led him away to his car. Mazón stayed near the king and Queen Letizia, who both engaged with some of the local people in an effort to reassure them that everything possible was being done to help.

While the wisdom of that visit has been widely questioned, Mazón has since presented a €31.4bn proposal for the reconstruction of the flood-devastated areas, to be financed by the central government.

Sánchez, meanwhile, has announced a separate initial aid package worth €10.6bn.

“What Spaniards want is to see their institutions, not fighting with each other, but working shoulder to shoulder,” he said as he announced it.

South Africa has closed one of its busiest border crossings with Mozambique following violent post-electoral protests in the neighbouring country.

The protests have led to deadly clashes in several cities following last month’s disputed presidential election, won by Mozambique’s ruling Frelimo party.

The authorities say there are reports of vehicles being torched on the Mozambican side of the Lebombo port of entry.

“Due to these security incidents and in the interest of public safety, the port has been temporarily closed until further notice,” the South African border agency said.

Lebombo, one of the four busiest land ports in southern Africa, is about 110km (68 miles) from Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, and about 440km from South Africa’s capital of Pretoria.

Travellers have been advised to use alternative crossing points between the two countries.

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Violence had spread to Ressano Garcia, a small area in Maputo province, near Lebombo, said Michael Masiapato, South Africa’s Border Management Authority (BMA) commissioner.

Mr Masiapato said the South African side was not affected, but safety measures needed to be taken.

“Some buildings have been set alight. At the moment we are working on securing the Lebombo border as well as travellers’ safety,” he said in a statement.

“The border will be closed to ensure the safety of travellers.”

Reports say protesters on the Mozambican side of the border have burnt down an immigration office in that country.

Seven Mozambican officials have requested refuge on the South African side for safety and protection, the authorities said.

BMA officials, the South African police and the army have been engaged to stop the protests from spilling over into South Africa.

Demonstrations started at the end of October in Maputo after Daniel Chapo, the Frelimo candidate, was officially declared the winner with more than 71% of the vote.

Opposition leader Venâncio Mondlane, who came second with 20% of the vote, went into hiding before the results were announced.

He cited fears for his safety after his aide and lawyer were killed as they were preparing to challenge the results.

The protests have led to violent clashes with the police and at least 18 people have been killed, according to Human Rights Watch.

The internet and social media have also been restricted.

A general strike called by Mondlane has continued, despite the prime minister’s call for people to return to work.

On Tuesday, Defence Minister Cristóvão Chume threatened to deploy the army ahead of nationwide protests called for Thursday.

Chume said the post-election protests were intended “to change the democratically established power”.

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A court in Kenya has sentenced two men to 35 years each for the murder of Ugandan athlete Benjamin Kiplagat at the end of last year.

The Olympic steeplechaser was stabbed to death on New Year’s Eve in the town of Eldoret, known as a top training centre for athletes.

“Your actions were cruel to a defenceless person whose life you cut short,” Justice Reuben Nyakundi told Peter Ushuru Khalumi and David Ekai Lokere during the sentencing hearing in the High Court in Eldoret.

Kiplagat’s murder shocked people in Kenya, which has seen the killing of a number of other elite athletes in recent years.

The judge said that Khalumi and Lokere had followed Kiplagat, who was in his car, and then CCTV footage showed that they had intentionally killed him in a premeditated act. The exact motive for the murder was not clear but at the time of the arrests the police had said it was robbery.

On Monday, in an emotional request to the court, the athlete’s mother had asked Justice Nyakundi to hand down life sentences.

She talked about how her son, who started his career running barefoot, had worked hard to become an international runner and the family’s breadwinner, the Nation newspaper reports.

“My son had 8,000 [Kenyan] shillings ($62; £48) and an expensive mobile phone, but the killers did not take any of the property from him. Their mission was to painfully finish him,” the newspaper quotes her as saying.

Despite not acceding to the family’s request for life sentences, they said they were happy with the outcome and that justice had been served.

Kiplagat, who was 34 when he died, reached the final of the 3,000m steeplechase at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He also competed in the following two Games and is the holder of the Ugandan record at the event.

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Girls Aloud are to release a new version of their hit single I’ll Stand By You, with the lead vocal sung entirely by their late bandmate Sarah Harding.

The ballad was originally released as a Children In Need song in 2004 and topped the UK chart for two weeks. The 20th anniversary re-release will again raise money for the charity.

“It really is a special celebration of Sarah, and also Girls Aloud’s involvement with Children In Need over the years,” singer Nadine Coyle said.

Harding died of complications from breast cancer in September 2021 at the age of 39.

Her isolated vocal for I’ll Stand By You was rediscovered earlier this year as the band were pulling together archive material for their sold-out arena tour.

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The song became an emotional highpoint of the tour, with Harding shown singing on screens while her bandmates guided the audience in a heartfelt singalong.

Initially spread across the stage, Nadine, Cheryl, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh slowly moved towards each other before singing the last chorus a capella, harmonising with their late friend while holding hands.

“It was an emotional moment for us all,” reflected the band in a statement announcing the new single release.

I’ll Stand By You – Sarah’s Version premiered on Wednesday during Zoe Ball’s BBC Radio 2 breakfast show.

Speaking on the programme, Nadine called the song “really special” and paid tribute to “our wonderful Sarah”.

The new mix showcases the singer’s strength as a vocalist – with a tell-tale rasp that catches on the song’s message of friendship and solidarity.

A new version of the music video, featuring unseen archive footage, will also be screened during the Children in Need appeal show on BBC One on 15 November. The single will be released on the same day.

The Pretenders star Chrissie Hynde, who wrote and released the original song in 1994, endorsed the new recording.

“How wonderful to hear I’ll Stand By You with the lovely vocals of Sarah Harding leading the way for BBC Children in Need,” she said in a press release.

Children in Need is the BBC’s charity for disadvantaged children and young people across the UK.

Meanwhile, ITV will screen highlights of the recent Girls Aloud tour on 17 November, marking what would have been Harding’s 43rd birthday.

The full concert will also be available to stream on ITVX.

Iran’s judiciary has said Iranian-German dissident Jamshid Sharmahd died before his execution was reported by state media late last month.

The judiciary’s news agency said on 28 October that Sharmahd – who was sentenced to death on the charge of “corruption on Earth” in 2023 following a trial that human rights groups said was grossly unfair – had been “punished for his actions”.

On Tuesday, judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir told reporters that “his sentence was ready to be implemented, but he died before the sentence was carried out”. He gave no further details.

Sharmahd’s daughter, Gazelle, said she did not trust anything said by Iranian authorities and demanded proof from an independent international investigation.

She accused Germany and the US – where Sharmahd lived – of “failing policies, shirking responsibility and gross negligence” in response to the case, and demanded that they now “fulfil their duty, find my father, and return him to Germany and then the US and launch investigations”.

“My father was kidnapped, tortured, isolated and robbed off all his basic rights for four long years,” she added. “Any cause of death under these circumstances is premeditated murder and a declaration of war against all of Europe and America.”

A German official told Reuters news agency: “Jamshid Sharmahd was abducted by Iran and detained for years without a fair trial, in inhumane conditions and without the necessary medical care. Iran is responsible for his death.”

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock ordered the closure of all three Iranian consulates in her country and recalled the German ambassador from Tehran last week in response to what she condemned as the “cold-blooded murder” of Sharmahd.

Mr Jahangir dismissed Germany’s protest at Tuesday’s news conference, insisting that Iran’s judicial system was “an independent institution” and that it did “not allow any interference of any foreign country in judicial affairs”.

He also said that Sharmahd, who lived in the US, had been tried “as an Iranian for the terrorist actions that he committed”.

His comments came two days after Gazelle Sharmahd had demanded proof of her father’s execution.

Iranian authorities accused the 69-year-old journalist and activist of being the leader of a terrorist group known as Tondar and of planning a number of attacks in Iran, including the 2008 bombing of a mosque in Shiraz in that killed 14 people.

Tondar – which means “thunder” in Persian – is another name of the Kingdom Assembly of Iran (KAI), a little-known US-based opposition group that seeks to restore the monarchy overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Sharmahd said he was only a spokesman for Tondar and denied any involvement in the attacks. His daughter called the accusations “slanderous, baseless… and outrageous”.

His family believe he was kidnapped in July 2020 by Iranian agents in Dubai, where he was waiting for a connecting flight to India, and then forcibly taken to Iran via Oman.

The following month, Iran’s intelligence ministry announced that it had arrested Sharmahd following a “complex operation”, without providing any details. It also published a video in which he appeared blindfolded and seemingly confessed to various crimes.

Iran’s judiciary also announced on Tuesday that a court in the north-western city of Orumiyeh had handed death sentences to three people convicted of involvement in the 2020 assassination of top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

Fakhrizadeh was shot dead by a remote-controlled weapon near Tehran in an attack that Iran blamed on Israel.

Mr Jahangir said the three people were accused of “committing espionage for the occupying regime of Israel” and “transporting equipment into Iran for the assassination of martyr Fakhrizadeh under the guise of smuggling alcoholic beverages”.

The world’s first wood-panelled satellite has been launched into space to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars.

Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth.

Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue.

Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood.

“Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there’s no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it,” Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency.

“Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood,” Prof Murata said. “A wooden satellite should be feasible, too.”

If trees could one day be planted on the Moon or Mars, wood might also provide material for colonies in space in the future, the researchers hope.

Along with its wood panels, LignoSat also incorporates traditional aluminium structures and electronic components. It has sensors on board to monitor how its wood reacts to the extreme environment of space during the six months it will orbit the Earth.

Dr Simeon Barber, a space research scientist at the Open University in the UK, said: “We have to be clear that this is not a satellite completely made of wood… but the basic premise behind the idea is really interesting.

“From a sustainability point of view, wood is a material that can be grown and is therefore renewable,” he told the BBC.

“The idea that you might be able to grow wood on another planet to help you explore space or make shelters – explorers have always used wood to make shelters when they’ve gone to a new land.”

Dr Barber said it wasn’t the first time that wood had been used on spacecraft.

“We use wood – cork – on the re-entry, outer shell of vessels of spacecraft to help them survive re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.”

Russian and Soviet lunar landers used cork to help the rover have grip as it was descending to the surface, he added.

“There’s nothing wrong with using wood in space – it’s using the right material for the right task.”

He pointed out that wood has properties that are hard to control.

“So from an engineering point of view it’s quite a difficult material to work with… I think wood’s always going to have a problem to make critical structures like parts of spacecraft where you need to predict how strong it’s going to be.”

The researchers at Kyoto University hope using wood in making spacecraft could also be much less polluting than metal ones when they burn-up on re-entry at the end of their life.

Experts have warned of the increasing threat of space junk falling to Earth, as more spacecraft and satellites are launched.

Dr Barber acknowledged the space industry was under growing pressure over the amount of pollution it puts into the atmosphere but he was sceptical using wooden spacecraft could provide the answer.

“In principle having materials such as wood which can burn up more easily would reduce certainly those metallic contaminants… But you may end up taking more material with you in the first place just to burn it up on the way down.”

A leading Slovak mountain climber has died while descending a 7,234m (23,730ft) peak in Nepal, after completing the rare feat of scaling the mountain’s perilous eastern face.

Ondrej Huserka fell into a crevasse on Thursday, after he and his climbing partner ascended the Langtang Lirung mountain in the Himalayas – the 99th-highest peak in the world.

The 34-year-old mountaineer had previously climbed in the Alps, Patagonia and the Pamir Mountains.

His Czech climbing partner Marek Holecek said the pair were returning to base after becoming the first mountaineers to ascend Langtang Lirung via a “terrifying” eastern route.

While rappelling a mountain wall, Mr Huserka’s rope snapped and he fell into an ice crevasse, his partner said in an emotional Facebook update posted after he returned alone.

He then “hit an angled surface after an 8m drop, then continued down a labyrinth into the depths of the glacier”.

In the Facebook post, Mr Holecek recalled hearing his partner’s cries for help and desperately trying to save him.

“I rappelled down to him and stayed with him for four hours until his light faded,” Mr Holecek said.

After freeing him from the ice, Mr Holecek realised his partner was paralysed.

“His star was fading as he lay in my arms,” he said.

The Slovak climbers’ association, SHS James, said adverse weather in Nepal had prevented rescue action.

“Following a phone call with Marek Holecek and his status published yesterday, and given the weather conditions under Langtang Lirung, the family and friends will have to cope with the fact that Ondrej is not with us any more,” it said in a social media post.

The Langtang Lirung mountain sits alongside other peaks in the Nepalese Himalayas and is a popular trekking destination.

Judith Swift, a climber who visited Langtang in the spring of this this year, said it was described to her by a local Nepalese Sherpa as “the killer mountain”.

“Not many people have summited it and many, including now sadly Ondrej Huserka, have died climbing it,” she told the BBC.

Mr Huserka joined the Slovak national alpinism team in 2011 and won the SHS James best ascent of the year award six times, according to his personal website.

His decade-long mountaineering career took him around the world.

He completed the first ascent of the “Summer Bouquet” on Alexander Block Peak in Kyrgyzstan, and repeated a “legendary route” on the Cerro Torre’s south-east ridge in South America, his website says.

Paying tribute to the late climber, SHS James said Mr Huserka was a “top alpinist” and “world-class”.

The Slovak Spectator said he was “one of the best Slovak mountaineers”.

This is surely the most dramatic comeback in US political history.

Four years after leaving the White House, Donald Trump is set to move back in, after millions of Americans voted to give him a second chance.

The election campaign was one for the history books: he survived two assassination attempts and his original opponent President Joe Biden dropped out just months before election day.

Although final votes are still being counted, the majority of Americans in key battleground states chose to vote for him, with many citing the economy and immigration as a chief concern.

His triumph comes after a spectacular fall. He refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden, and his role in trying to overturn the election results to stay in office is still being scrutinised today.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump wins
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• Watch: How election night unfolded
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• Analysis: Why the US gave Trump a second chance

He faces charges for allegedly inciting the violent attack on the US Capitol on the 6 January 2021. And he will also make history as the first sitting president to have been convicted of a felony, after being found guilty of falsifying business records.

It’s not hard to see why he is a deeply polarising figure.

Throughout the campaign, Trump used incendiary rhetoric – making crass jokes and threatening vengeance against his political enemies.

Few people have a middle ground when it comes to Trump. Most of the voters I spoke to during the course of this campaign said they wished he would “shut his potty mouth” – but they were able to look past it.

Instead, they focused on the question he asked at every rally. “Are you better off now than you were two years ago?”

So many people who voted for Donald Trump told me again and again that they felt the economy was much better when he was in office and they were sick of trying to make ends meet. Although much of the cause of inflation was due to outside forces such as the Covid-19 pandemic, they blamed the outgoing administration.

Voters were also deeply concerned about illegal immigration which had reached record levels under Biden. They usually didn’t express racist views or believe that migrants were eating people’s pets, as Trump and his supporters had claimed. They just wanted much stronger border enforcement.

“America first” was another one of Trump’s slogans that really seemed to strike a chord with voters. All over the country I heard people – on the left and right – complaining about billions of dollars being spent on supporting Ukraine when they thought that money would be much better spent at home.

In the end, they just couldn’t vote for Harris, who served as Biden’s vice-president for four years. They believed it would be more of the same, and they wanted change.

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It is perhaps one of the ironies of this election that the candidate who most represented change was himself in power just four years ago. But there are several differences between then and now.

When he first came into power in 2016, he was a political outsider, and, at least for a while, he surrounded himself with veteran political advisers and staff who showed him the ropes and constrained his actions. Now he doesn’t seem that interested in playing by the rules of the game.

Many of these same advisers and staff have spoken out – calling him a “liar”, a “fascist” and “unfit”. They have cautioned that if he surrounds himself with loyalists, which he is expected to do, that there will be no one to restrain him from his more extreme ideas.

When he left office, he faced a litany of criminal charges related to his role in the Capitol riots, how he handled documents pertaining to national security, and hush money payments to a porn star.

But since the Supreme Court ruled that the president has total immunity from prosecution for official acts in office, it will be an uphill battle for any prosecutor to charge him during the next administration.

And as president, he could instruct his justice department to drop the federal charges against him relating to the 6 January riots so he doesn’t have to worry about a jail sentence. At the same time, he could pardon hundreds of people sentenced to prison for their part in the Capitol Riots.

In the end, voters were presented with two versions of America.

Donald Trump told them that their country was a failing nation that only he could Make Great Again.

Meanwhile, Harris cautioned that if Trump was elected, American democracy itself would face an existential threat. That remains to be seen. But what Trump said himself during the campaign has not exactly assuaged people’s fears.

He has heaped praise on authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, whom he said were “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not”.

He has talked about trying to silence critics in the press. Just days before the election, he also made comments that implied he wouldn’t mind if members of the media were killed.

And he has continued to amplify conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of election fraud – even though the election ultimately led to his victory.

Now, voters will find how much of what he said during the campaign was just loose talk – “Trump being Trump”. And remember: it’s not just Americans who have to confront the reality of a second Trump term.

The rest of the world will now discover what “America First” really means. From the global economic consequences of 20% tariffs that he has proposed on US imports to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that he has vowed to end – regardless of which side wins.

Donald Trump did not manage to implement all of his plans in his first term. Now with a second mandate and significantly less encumbered, America, and the world, will see what he can really do.

• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

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.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is set to reshape US foreign policy, promising potentially radical shifts on multiple fronts as war and uncertainty grip parts of the world.

During his campaign, Trump made broad policy pledges, often lacking specific details, based on principles of non-interventionism and trade protectionism – or as he puts it “America First”.

His victory signals one of the most significant potential disruptions in many years in Washington’s approach to foreign affairs in the midst of parallel crises.

We can piece together some of his likely approach to different areas from both his comments on the campaign trail and his track record in office from 2017 to 2021.

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly said he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in a day”. When asked how, he suggested overseeing a deal, but has declined to give specifics.

A research paper written by two of Trump’s former national security chiefs in May said the US should continue its weapons supply to Ukraine, but make the support conditional on Kyiv entering peace talks with Russia.

To entice Russia, the West would promise to delay Ukraine’s much-wanted entry into Nato. The former advisers said Ukraine should not give up its hopes of getting all of its territory back from Russian occupation, but that it should negotiate based on current front lines.

Trump’s Democratic opponents, who accuse him of cosying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, say his approach amounts to surrender for Ukraine and will endanger all of Europe.

He has consistently said his priority is to end the war and stem the drain on US resources.

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It’s not clear how far the former advisers’ paper represents Trump’s own thinking, but it’s likely to give us a guide to the kind of advice he’ll get.

His “America First” approach to ending the war also extends to the strategic issue of the future of Nato, the transatlantic all-for-one and one-for-all military alliance set up after the World War Two, originally as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

Nato now counts 32 countries and Trump has long been a sceptic of the alliance, accusing Europe of free-riding on America’s promise of protection.

Whether he would actually withdraw the US from Nato, which would signal the most significant shift in transatlantic defence relations in nearly a century, remains a matter of debate.

Some of his allies suggest his hard line is just a negotiating tactic to get members to meet the alliance’s defence spending guidelines.

But the reality is Nato leaders will be seriously worried about what his victory means for the alliance’s future and how its deterrent effect is perceived by hostile leaders.

As with Ukraine, Trump has promised to bring “peace” to the Middle East – implying he would end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon – but has not said how.

He has repeatedly said that, if he had been in power rather than Joe Biden, Hamas would not have attacked Israel because of his “maximum pressure” policy on Iran, which funds the group.

Broadly, it’s likely Trump would attempt to return to the policy, which saw his administration pull the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, apply greater sanctions against Iran and kill Gen Qasem Soleimani – Iran’s most powerful military commander.

In the White House, Trump enacted strongly pro-Israel policies, naming Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy there from Tel Aviv – a move which energised Trump’s Christian evangelical base, a core Republican voter group.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump the “best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House”.

But critics argue his policy had a destabilising effect on the region.

The Palestinians boycotted the Trump administration, because of Washington’s abandonment of their claim to Jerusalem – the city that forms the historical centre of national and religious life for Palestinians.

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They were further isolated when Trump brokered the so-called “Abraham Accords”, which saw a historic deal to normalise diplomatic ties between Israel and several Arab and Muslim countries. They did so without Israel having to accept a future independent Palestinian state alongside it – the so-called two-state solution – previously a condition of Arab countries for such a regional deal.

The countries involved were instead given access to advanced US weapons in return for recognising Israel.

The Palestinians were left at one of the most isolated points in their history by the only power that can really apply leverage to both sides in the conflict – further eroding their ability as they saw it to protect themselves on the ground.

Trump made several statements during the campaign saying he wants the Gaza war to end.

He has had a complex, at times dysfunctional relationship with Netanyahu, but certainly has the ability to apply pressure on him.

He also has a history of strong relations with leaders in the key Arab countries that have contacts with Hamas.

It’s unclear how he would navigate between his desire to show strong support for the Israeli leadership while also trying to bring the war to a close.

Trump’s allies have often portrayed his unpredictability as a diplomatic asset, but in the highly contested and volatile Middle East in the midst of a crisis already of historical proportions, it’s far from clear how this would play out.

Trump will have to decide how – or whether – to take forward the stalled diplomatic process launched by the Biden administration to get a Gaza ceasefire in return for the release of the hostages held by Hamas.

America’s approach to China is its most strategically important area of foreign policy – and one which has the biggest implications for global security and trade.

When he was in office, Trump labelled China a “strategic competitor” and imposed tariffs on some Chinese imports to the US. This sparked tit-for-tat tariffs by Beijing on American imports.

There were efforts to de-escalate the trade dispute, but the Covid pandemic wiped out this possibility, and relations got worse as the former president labelled Covid a “Chinese virus”.

While the Biden administration claimed to take a more responsible approach to China policy, it did, in fact, keep in place many of the Trump-era tariffs on imports.

• What Chinese people want from the US

The trade policy has become closely linked to domestic voter perceptions in the US about protecting American manufacturing jobs – even though much of the long-term jobs decline in traditional US industries like steel has been as much about factory automation and production changes as global competition and offshoring.

Trump has praised Chinese President Xi Jinping as both “brilliant” and “dangerous” and a highly effective leader who controls 1.4 billion people with an “iron fist”- part of what opponents characterised as Trump’s admiration for “dictators”.

The former president seems likely to shift away from the Biden administration’s approach of building stronger US security partnerships with other regional countries in a bid to contain China.

The US has maintained military assistance for self-ruled Taiwan, which China sees as a breakaway province that will eventually be under Beijing’s control.

Trump said in October that if he returned to the White House, he would not have to use military force to prevent a Chinese blockade of Taiwan because President Xi knew he was “[expletive] crazy”, and he would impose paralysing tariffs on Chinese imports if that happened.

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IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

Kamala Harris has lost her bid to become America’s first woman leader, as her Republican rival Donald Trump surged to a decisive victory in the US presidential election.

The vice-president is yet to speak or concede, despite it becoming clear by Wednesday morning that Trump had secured enough votes in key swing states to win.

Harris cancelled her expected election night appearance at Howard University in Washington DC, where she studied as an undergraduate, as Trump began to make steady gains.

He has now won enough key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin, to secure the presidency, with several states left to declare.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump wins
• Who did each state vote for?
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Early projections revealed that the key battleground states, which had swung back to the Democrats in the 2020 election, would be won by Trump again. He defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by demolishing the Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump is also beating Harris in the popular vote – the first Republican to lead nationally since George W Bush in 2004.

As expected, Trump stormed to victory in conservative strongholds across the US, while Harris won liberal states from New York to California.

Harris saw a surge in popularity after she became the Democratic Party’s nominee in June following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate.

Her team sought to strike a more optimistic vision than the portrait of American decay presented by Trump, focusing heavily on securing abortion rights.

Trump, by contrast, frequently targeted Harris with highly personal attacks during the campaign, variously calling the vice-president “stupid”, “lazy”, and “dumb as a rock”. He also questioned her racial identity during the early stages of the campaign.

The Democrat is expected to speak later on Wednesday. A senior Trump adviser told the BBC’s US partner CBS that they expected Harris to call the president-elect to concede defeat, a step Trump refused to take when he lost the 2020 election.

The vice-president was due to address supporters on Tuesday night, but campaign co-chairman Cedric Richmond announced shortly after midnight on that she would not attend.

“We still have votes to count,” he had said at the time.

The party-like atmosphere of a few hours earlier at Howard had already turned sour as two swing states were called for Trump. At Harris HQ, Democratic fundraiser Lindy Li told the BBC the mood was “pretty grim right now”.

The former California senator was running to become the first woman, black woman and South Asian-American to win the presidency.

CBS exit poll data suggests that the Democratic nominee may have under-performed with women.

Some 54% of female voters cast their ballots for her, below the 57% of women Joe Biden won in 2020.

Black and Latino voters also appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Biden four years ago, according to Associated Press exit poll data.

The campaign faced criticism at times for its failure to expand on a a clear economic message, an issue which exit polls showed was extremely important to Americans who have faced several years of rising inflation.

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About 86 million voters cast their ballots early during one of the most turbulent campaigns in recent American history.

The Republican party enjoyed a resurgence across the country, winning a number of key congressional battles in key states and taking back control of the Senate.

The Republicans wrested two seats in West Virginia and Ohio from the Democrats and saw off a stiff challenge in Texas.

Neither party seemed to have an overall edge in the House, which Republicans narrowly control.

If the party does regain control of both chambers, it would make it easier for Trump to push through his agenda – which includes mass deportations of illegal migrants and sweeping tax cuts.

Both sides had armies of lawyers on standby for legal challenges on and after election day. Despite some early lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, the scale of his lead appeared to ward off any prospect of protracted legal battles.

Law enforcement agencies nationwide were also on high alert for potential violence.

About 30 hoax bomb threats targeted election-related locations nationwide on Tuesday, more than half of them in the state of Georgia alone, reports CBS.

• GLOBAL: What does Trump victory mean for UK?
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

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.

Republican Donald Trump will be the next US president – after an historic victory that will send him back to the White House.

The race with Democrat Kamala Harris had been thought to be on a knife edge, but overnight results showed Trump had secured enough votes to win.

He will be the first former president to return to office in more than 130 years, and – at 78 – the oldest man ever elected to the role.

Trump has already been congratulated by world leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the UK’s Keir Starmer, but the official presidential election results are not yet confirmed.

There had been fears that extremely close races in some of the key battleground “swing” states might have left the results uncertain.

But earlier-than-expected wins in North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, coupled with victories in solidly Republican states, meant he reached the magic 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency.

CBS, the BBC’s broadcasting partner in the US, projected Donald Trump as the overall winner just after 05:30 EST (10:30 GMT) the day after the election.

However, it could still take days or even weeks for the detailed election results to be confirmed officially in every state.

No. Trump becomes the president-elect, and his running mate JD Vance becomes the vice-president elect.

Trump will be sworn in at the presidential inauguration on Monday, 20 January 2025, at which point he will legally assume the power and responsibilities of the presidency.

Once every valid vote has been included in the final results, a process known as the electoral college confirms the election result.

In each state a varying number of electoral college votes are up for grabs. It is securing these – and not just the backing of voters themselves – that ultimately wins the presidency.

Generally, states award all of their electoral college votes to whoever wins the popular vote, and this is confirmed after meetings on 17 December.

The new US Congress then meets on 6 January to count the electoral college votes and confirm the new president.

It was this meeting of Congress, to certify the election results, that Trump’s supporters tried to stop, when they marched on the US Capitol in 2021 after Trump refused to concede defeat to Joe Biden.

President-elect Trump and vice-president-elect JD Vance will work with their transition team to organise the handover from President Biden’s administration.

They will identify their policy priorities, start vetting the candidates who will take up key roles in the new administration, and prepare to take over the functions of government.

Trump and his team will also begin receiving classified national security briefings covering current threats and ongoing military operations.

The president-elect and vice-president-elect also receive mandatory protection from the US Secret Service.

The outgoing president usually invites the incoming president to the White House in the days after the election.

They also typically attend the inauguration to symbolise the peaceful transfer of power, although Trump chose to boycott the ceremony in 2020.

He did however follow the tradition begun by Ronald Reagan of leaving a handwritten note in the Oval Office for his successor to read.

At the time, President Biden told reporters that his predecessor had left “a very generous letter”.

After the inauguration, the new president begins work immediately.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump wins
• Who did each state vote for?
• Watch: How election night unfolded
• What’s next for the Trump agenda?
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Donald Trump has done it again. Eight years after his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton and four years after Joe Biden evicted him from the White House, the former president is about to return to power.

On the back of a victory that swept across the key early voting battleground states – and improved on his electoral margins in much of America – he claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern.

“This will truly be the golden age of America,” he promised the cheering crowd at his election night rally in West Palm Beach, Florida.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump wins
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His victory cements a fundamental realignment of American politics toward a conservative populism that began in 2016 and was thought to have been discarded with his defeat in 2020.

His political movement is back and seemingly more durable than ever.

Trump now will have the opportunity to set about building his new administration and enacting the policies that he has promised will create that new golden age.

Trump will be joined in power by a Senate that is now again in Republican hands after four years of Democratic control. This will ease the path for Trump’s political appointees, including Cabinet officials and judicial picks, who require Senate confirmation.

It will take days, if not weeks, to determine if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives. But in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Trump predicted his party would prevail there as well.

A Republican Congress will be integral to Trump’s plan to enact a platform that includes an aggressive plan to restructure the federal bureaucracy, replacing senior career government employees with political appointments. His supporters have vetted thousands of loyalists who are poised to take control of all facets of the sprawling federal government.

Among those being swept into the corridors of power along with the new president are multi-billionaire Elon Musk, vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, Democrat turned Republican Tulsi Gabbard, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and a host of other figures who have become part of this unusual electoral coalition.

Trump has also pledged to impose broad new tariffs on imported goods to protect domestic industry, enact a range of new targeted tax breaks and credits, and implement a mass deportation of undocumented migrants living in the US.

On foreign policy, he said he would quickly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and prioritise America’s interest above all others. Those global crises will be his to solve once he takes office in January.

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Kamala Harris, her fellow Democrats and some former Trump White House officials warned that these policies will create massive economic and social disruptions and threaten global stability – and that a second Trump presidency would be unhinged and set loose from political guardrails.

On Sunday, Trump himself said that his second presidential term might be “nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular,” but he promised the end results would be good.

On Tuesday, an electoral majority – and likely even a majority of the America’s voting public – agreed.

If Congress is fully under Republican control, it will give the new president the opportunity to roll back many of the programmes implemented under the past four years of Democratic rule and enact conservative legislation – on tax policy, government spending, and trade and immigration – that will allow him to leave a more lasting mark on American government.

Trump’s victory represents a remarkable comeback for a man who departed the presidency amidst the wreckage of 6 January, with his reputation seemingly in tatters. After being roundly condemned by Democrats and even some Republicans, he set out on a four-year journey that returned him to the pinnacle of American power.

Along the way he was indicted in federal and state courts. He was convicted of multiple felonies. He was found liable in a civil court in case relating to a sexual assault. Another court levied massive fines on his business empire.

He shrugged all these off and pressed on to march to the Republican nomination.

Trump was at times unfocused and abrasive in his rally speeches, but he surrounded himself with a savvy, professional staff. Surveys indicated that Americans trusted Trump on the top two issues of this election – immigration and the economy – and his campaign relentlessly hammered his message on them.

Being on the right side of the big issues, at a time when the electoral mood in the US – and, for that matter, across may of the world’s democracies – was decidedly anti-incumbent was what mattered most.

Across the map, the former president improved many of his margins from 2020, sometimes dramatically. His campaign successfully turned out rural voters that were intensely loyal to him and ate into Democratic margins in the cities. While exit polls are still being adjusted to reflect the latest results, Trump appears to have made inroads into the traditional Democratic coalitions of young, Hispanic and black voters.

While Trump’s team appeared initially uncertain about how to handle the late switch from Biden to Kamala Harris, the former president ultimately found his footing and rode the wave of anti-incumbent sentiment back to the White House.

Now he has four more years to govern – this time with a more developed political organisation behind him, eager to turn his campaign promises into action.

• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

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.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House might also prove to be a win for one of his most visible supporters: Elon Musk.

The world’s richest man spent election night in Florida with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort as returns came in.

“The people of America gave @realDonaldTrump a crystal clear mandate for change tonight,” Mr Musk wrote on the social media platform X as Trump’s victory began to appear all but certain.

And at his victory speech at the Palm Beach Convention Center, Trump spent several minutes praising Mr Musk and recounting the successful landing of a rocket manufactured by one of Mr Musk’s companies, SpaceX.

Mr Musk threw his support behind the Republican almost immediately after the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.

As one of the president-elect’s most important backers, the tech billionaire donated more than $119m (£92m) to fund a Super PAC aimed at re-electing Trump.

He also spent the last weeks before election day running a get-out-the-vote effort in the battleground states, which included a daily giveaway of $1m to voters in those states. The giveaway became the subject of a legal challenge, though a judge later ruled they could go ahead.

• Follow live election day updates as Trump eyes return
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• Has Trump won? When will the US election results be announced?
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After throwing his name, money, and platform behind Trump, Mr Musk has plenty to gain from Trump’s re-election.

The president-elect has said that in a second term, he would invite Mr Musk into his administration to eliminate government waste.

Mr Musk has referred to the potential effort as the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, the name of a meme and cryptocurrency that he has popularised.

The businessman could also benefit from Trump’s presidency through his ownership of SpaceX, which already dominates the business of sending government satellites to space.

With a close ally in the White House, Mr Musk could seek to further capitalise on those government ties.

Mr Musk has criticised rivals including Boeing for the structure of their government contracts, which he says disincentive finishing projects on budget and on time.

SpaceX has also moved into building spy satellites just as the Pentagon and American spy agencies appear poised to invest billions of dollars into them.

Mr Musk’s electric vehicle maker Tesla could meanwhile reap gains from an administration that Trump has said would be defined by “the lowest regulatory burden.”

Just last month, the US agency in charge of regulating road safety revealed it was probing Tesla’s self-driving software systems.

Mr Musk has also come under fire for allegedly seeking to block Tesla workers from unionising. The United Auto Workers filed unfair labour practice charges against both Trump and Musk after the two talked about Musk supposedly firing striking workers during a conversation on X.

Trump has also pledged to lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

That’s another promise Mr Musk is likely hoping he will keep.

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US shares hit record highs on Wall Street and the dollar posted its biggest gain in eight years as Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House in a historic win.

Bitcoin has also hit an all-time high, following Trump’s election promise to prioritise the volatile crypto currency.

Investors are, however, betting that Trump’s plan to cut taxes and raise tariffs will push up inflation and reduce the pace of interest rate cuts.

Higher rates for longer mean investors will get better returns on savings and investments they hold in dollars.

Markets and currencies around the world have shifted sharply following the US election news:

• The major US stock indexes soared as trading opened, with banks performing particularly well
• The dollar is up by about 1.75% against a host of different currencies, including the pound, euro and the Japanese yen
• The pound sank 1.41% against the US dollar to its lowest level since August
• The FTSE 100 index, comprising the largest companies listed in the UK, was up 0.1% on Wednesday afternoon
• The euro dived 2.24% against the US dollar to its lowest level since June
• In Japan, the benchmark Nikkei 225 stock index ended the session up by 2.6%
• In mainland China, the Shanghai Composite Index ended 0.1% lower, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down by around 2.23%

The value of Bitcoin jumped by $6,000 (£4,645) to an all-time high of $75,371.69.

Trump’s stance on crypto stands in stark contrast with that of the Biden administration, which has led a sweeping crackdown on crypto firms.

He pledged to make the US “the bitcoin superpower of the world”.

During the election campaign, Trump had suggested that he could fire Gary Gensler, the chair of US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission, who has taken legal action against several crypto firms.

Trump also said he plans to put billionaire Elon Musk in charge of an audit of governmental waste.

Mr Musk has long been a proponent of cryptocurrencies and his company Tesla famously invested $1.5bn in Bitcoin in 2021, although the price of the digital currency can be very volatile.

Tesla’s Frankfurt-listed shares rallied over 14% at the open on Wednesday. Mr Musk, Tesla’s top shareholder, has supported Trump throughout his electoral campaign.

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Experts predicted a turbulent day elsewhere on financial markets, however, as a response to global uncertainty and Trump’s potential plans for the economy.

US bond yields, the return a government promises to pay buyers of its debts, soared on Wednesday.

A bond is essentially an IOU that can be traded in the financial markets and governments often sell bonds to investors when they want to borrow money.

The moves may suggest that investors think borrowing will rise under the new administration and are demanding a higher return for their money.

Some economists have also warned that Trump’s proposals around trade would come as a “shock” to countries around the world, including the eurozone and the UK economy.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the UK would make “strong representations” to president-elect Donald Trump about the need for free and open global trade.

“The US also benefit from those that access to free and open trade with us and other countries around the world, and it’s what makes us richer as societies to benefit from that,” she said.

Donald Trump has said he would dramatically increase trade tariffs, especially on China, if he became the next US president.

Ahmet Kaya, principal economist for the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (Niesr), also said the UK could be “one of the countries most affected” under such plans.

It estimates that economic growth in the UK would slow to 0.4% in 2025, down from a forecast of 1.2%.

Katrina Ell, director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics said: “Trump’s global trade policies are causing particular angst in Asia, given the strong protectionist platform on which more aggressive tariffs on imports into the US have been pledged.”

Trump’s more isolationist stance on foreign policy has also raised questions about his willingness to defend Taiwan against potential aggression from China.

The self-ruling island is a major producer of computer chips, which are crucial to the technology that drives the global economy.

Investors also have other key issues to focus on this week.

On Thursday, the US Federal Reserve is due to announce its latest decision on interest rates.

Comments from the head of the central bank, Jerome Powell, will be watched closely around the world.

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

North Korean soldiers have clashed with Ukrainian troops for the first time, Ukraine’s top officials have revealed.

In an interview with South Korean broadcaster KBS, Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said a “small group” of North Korean soldiers were attacked.

Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky, who had earlier condemned the West’s lack of response to the North Korean troops, said these “first battles with North Korea open a new chapter of instability in the world”.

Seoul, however, said it “does not believe [troops on both sides] engaged in direct combat”, but that there was an “incident” involving a small number of North Korean soldiers “near the frontline”.

Ukraine says an estimated 11,000 North Korean soldiers were in the Kursk border region, where Ukrainian troops have a foothold.

In recent weeks, South Korean and US intelligence as well as Nato have said that they have seen evidence of North Korean troops being involved in Russia’s war.

But Moscow and Pyongyang have so far not responded directly to any of the allegations.

Ukraine’s top counter-disinformation official Andriy Kovalenko first said in a Telegram post on Monday that North Korea’s “first military units… [had] already come under fire in Kursk”.

In an interview with South Korean broadcaster KBS, Rustem Umerov confirmed this, saying he expects a “significant number” of the North Korean troops to be engaged in combat, though he added it was “so far just small contacts, not full-scale engagement”.

Most of them are still undergoing training, he added.

“They’re wearing Russian uniforms, they’re undergoing tactical training, and they’re being deployed under various commands of the Russian army on the front lines,” Umerov said.

He said it was likely that five units, each consisting of around 3,000 soldiers, would be deployed across the battlefield.

He did not mention if there were any casualties.

In a daily video address on Wednesday, Zelensky called on Ukraine “together with the world… [to do] everything to make this Russian step toward expanding the war… a failure. Both for them, and for North Korea.”

Reports of such a move by North Korea have also alarmed the South, raising tensions between the two sides.

Late last month, Seoul had summoned Russia’s ambassador, seeking the “immediate withdrawal” of North Korean troops from Ukraine. It also warned that it was considering directly supplying arms to Ukraine.

Analysts have said that Pyongyang could be paid, or may be given access to Russian military technology in exchange for the troops.

On Wednesday, Russian lawmakers will vote to ratify a mutual defence treaty with North Korea, first proposed during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lavish visit to Pyongyang in June.

It pledges that Russia and North Korea will help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.

The Princess of Wales is doing “really well” and has been “amazing this whole year”, Prince William has said.

He was speaking to broadcasters ahead of presenting his environmental Earthshot Prize in Cape Town, South Africa later.

On his wrist the Prince of Wales was wearing a bracelet saying “Papa” made for him by his daughter Princess Charlotte for a Taylor Swift concert, which he said he had promised to wear on the trip and “try not to lose”.

His wife has not travelled to South Africa as she recovers after treatment for cancer and will instead be watching the ceremony at home in Windsor.

Catherine will be “cheering me on”, he said, adding: “I know she’ll be really keen to see tonight be a success.”

The bracelet was made by Charlotte for her father when they went to a Taylor Swift concert at Wembley.

Friendship bracelets have become synonymous with the pop star and her sellout Eras tour and are regularly swapped with fellow “Swifties” at her concerts.

Prince William was speaking to the BBC inside the eco “Super Dome” that has been built for this evening’s awards ceremony in Cape Town.

The eco dome will be recycled and reused elsewhere after the ceremony.

First awarded in 2021, the prize supports sustainable, eco-friendly projects from around the world, with five winners each receiving £1m.

There is a focus on ideas from Africa for this year’s event, with more than 400 African-led projects nominated and another 350 linked to the continent.

The Prince of Wales spoke of his affinity with Africa having spent time there on his gap year before university, volunteering on wildlife conservation projects in Kenya, Botswana, and Tanzania .

“I love this continent. I spent many a year looking around exploring it and just really thrilled to have the reception and exuberance and the energy that will be in this room tonight,” he said.

The ambition of the prince’s Earthshot Prize has been to bring hope and innovation to the most difficult environmental challenges.

When asked about achieving that in a tough political climate, the prince was positive.

“Everyone wants some hope and some optimism and Earthshot comes with urgent optimism,” he said.

Much of the prince’s visit to Cape Town this week has focused on young people and the power they have to bring about change.

“Without them the future is looking pretty bleak so these are the game-changers, the innovators, the inventors who are going to make the world a better place for us in future.”

This was something his own children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, were aware of, he added.

“Every family tries to do what they can to help with the environment and we go through the basics of recycling and making sure we minimise water use, turning lights off when you leave the house – we’re sensible with what we do around the environment. I think every family has those conversations.”

But he added that Earthshot had far bigger ambitions.

“We’re trying to do big scale ambition and business. I’ve brought the children along on that journey and I hope they’re proud of what we are trying to do here which is to galvanise that energy and enthusiasm to make real impact.”