Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) have issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and former defence minister, as well as the military commander of Hamas.

A statement said a pre-trial chamber had rejected Israel’s challenges to the court’s jurisdiction and issued warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

A warrant was also issued for Mohammed Deif of Hamas, although Israel has said he was killed in an air strike in Gaza in July.

The judges said there were “reasonable grounds” the three men bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas. Both Israel and Hamas have rejected the allegations.

The Israeli prime minister’s office condemned the ICC’s decision as “antisemitic”, while Hamas said the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant set an “important historical precedent”.

The impact of these warrants will in part depend on whether the ICC’s 124 member states – which do not include Israel or its ally, the United States – decide to enforce them or not.

Netanyahu’s most recent overseas trip was to the US in July. Last year, he visited several other countries, including the UK.

The ICC has been part of the global justice system since 2002. It has the authority to prosecute those accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes on the territory of states party to the Rome Statute, its founding treaty.

Israel is not a member of the ICC and rejects its jurisdiction, but the court ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction over the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza because the UN’s secretary general had accepted the Palestinians’ accession to the Rome Statute.

In May, the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan sought warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, Deif and two other Hamas leaders who have since been killed, Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.

Although Israel believes Deif is dead, the chamber said it had been notified by the ICC prosecution that it was not in a position to determine whether he was killed or remained alive.

The prosecutor’s case against them stems from the events of 7 October 2023, when Hamas gunmen attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages.

Israel responded to the attack by launching a military campaign to eliminate Hamas, during which at least 44,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

For Deif, the chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that he was “responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other form of sexual violence; as well as the war crimes of murder, cruel treatment, torture; taking hostages; outrages upon personal dignity; and rape and other form of sexual violence”.

It also said there were reasonable grounds to believe the crimes against humanity were “part of a widespread and systematic attack directed by Hamas and other armed groups against the civilian population of Israel”.

For Netanyahu and Gallant, who was replaced as defence minister earlier this month, the chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that they “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.

It also found reasonable grounds to believe that “each bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population”.

The Israeli prime minister’s office said Israel “utterly rejects the false and absurd charges of the International Criminal Court”.

It condemned the ICC’s decision as antisemitic and “a modern Dreyfus trial” that would “end the same way” – a reference to the wrongful conviction of a Jewish army officer on trumped-up treason charges in 19th Century France that triggered a national crisis.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not give in to pressure. He will continue to pursue all the objectives that Israel set out to achieve in its just war against Hamas and the Iranian axis of terror,” it added.

There was no immediate reaction from Gallant. But in May he strongly rejected the ICC prosecutor’s arrest warrant requests, saying they had drawn a “despicable” parallel between Israel and Hamas and had attempted to deny his country’s right to self-defence.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog called the chamber’s decision “outrageous”, and said the ICC had “turned universal justice into a universal laughing stock”.

“The decision has chosen the side of terror and evil over democracy and freedom, and turned the very system of justice into a human shield for Hamas’ crimes against humanity,” he added.

Hamas welcomed the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, saying that it “constitutes an important historical precedent, and a correction to a long path of historical injustice against our people”.

It also called on countries around the world to enforce the warrants and work to stop what it called “the crimes of genocide against defenceless civilians in the Gaza Strip”.

Israel has vehemently denied that its forces are committing genocide against Palestinian in Gaza.

At least 38 people – including women and children – have been killed after unidentified gunmen opened fire on a convoy of 200 passenger vehicles traveling through a remote area of Pakistan.

The vehicles were attacked as they travelled through the tribal district of Kurram in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border, according to the area’s deputy police commissioner.

The gunmen initially targeted the convoy’s police escort, the provincial spokesman said in a statement.

Police were protecting the convoy following months of sectarian violence in the area, which has claimed dozens of lives this year.

Nadeem Aslam Chaudhry, the chief secretary of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told Reuters news agency Thursday’s attack was “a major tragedy”, with the death toll “likely to rise”. At least 11 people were injured, he said.

Saeeda Bano – who was in the middle of the convoy – described to BBC Urdu how she feared she would be killed as she hid under the car seats with her children during the attack.

When the gunfire finally stopped after several minutes, she saw injured people and bodies lying in the road.

Details of exactly what happened are still emerging, but Javed ullah Mehsud, a senior administration official, told AFP “approximately 10 attackers” were involved, “firing indiscriminately from both sides of the road”.

Women and children had hidden in nearby houses, while police hunted for the attackers, he added.

Most the passengers travelling in the convoy through the mountainous area were Shia, he said in an earlier statement.

Sunni and Shiite Muslim tribes have clashed repeatedly this year. An earlier series of attacks ended after a tribal council called for a ceasefire, according to Reuters news agency.

Then last month, there was another attack on passenger vehicles along a road in the region which killed 15 people.

The road Thursday’s convoy was travelling along had only reopened in recent days, with travel limited to convoys with police protection.

Sectarian violence is often linked to land disputes in the region.

However, Kurram, in Pakistan’s north-west, also borders several Afghan provinces which are home to anti-Shia militant groups, including the Islamic State group and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

The chief executive of the social media network Bluesky – which has exploded in popularity in recent weeks – was unable to give the correct age limit for users on the platform in an interview with the BBC.

While speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Breakfast programme, Jay Graber wrongly said you needed to be 18 to use Bluesky, when the actual age limit is 13.

The issue of whether young people should be able to use social media is a hot topic globally, with Australia proposing a ban for under-16s and the UK saying similar action is “on the table”.

Millions of people signed up to the app since the US election results, some in protest at the role X, formerly Twitter, played in propelling Donald Trump to victory.

Ms Graber put the rapid growth down to the “really great” experience users were having on Bluesky.

“There’s not harassment and bots and spam and a lot of the other problems that plague other platforms,” she said.

On age verification, Ms Graber told the BBC that Bluesky has “age-gating” when users sign up, by asking people to enter their date of birth.

When asked directly what the age limit was on Bluesky, Ms Graber said: “When you sign up – I’ll have to check – I think it’s like 18 and above.”

Following the interview, Bluesky contacted the BBC to clarify that the minimum age is 13, not 18. A spokesperson said: “Child safety is extremely important for Bluesky.

“You must be at least 13 years old to sign up for an account, and anyone under 18 using Bluesky has additional settings applied to ensure that the content they see is safe for minors.”

In a wide-ranging interview with presenter Rick Edwards, she said Bluesky does not try to verify the identification of the user, to ensure people are not lying when signing up.

She said: “We don’t take IDs or anything like that. I know that’s proposed in some places. That’s very private information.

“I think companies like us would want to make sure we’re handling that private user data very responsibly.”

Ms Graber also said moderation on the platform came from a mix of human moderators and automated technology, and they have no plans to introduce “traditional advertising”.

One option being looked at, she said, was making money through subscriptions for users who want extra features on their accounts.

Bluesky was developed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and visually looks how X used to look back in its Twitter days.

Mr Dorsey is no longer part of the team behind it, having stepped down from the board in May last year, and the platform has experienced a surge in sign ups since the results of the US election.

Elon Musk, the owner of X, was a major backer of Donald Trump during his campaign.

He will also be heavily involved in the President’s administration after being named co-head of the new administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Political division has lead to some people leaving X in protest since the election, and Bluesky appears to have benefitted.

In September, the company said it had nine million users. This week, it surpassed 20 million.

However that remains far behind X, as well as Threads, a rival platform set up by Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.

Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer said this week he has “no plans” to join the social media platform.

The Prime Minister told reporters that “at the moment” there are no moves to establish official UK government accounts or a personal one in his name.

He said it is “important for a government” to be able to communicate with “as many people as possible”.

X does not share its total user numbers but it is understood to be measured in the hundreds of millions. Mr Musk himself has 205m followers on his account.

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani has been charged with fraud in the US, which has accused him of orchestrating a $250m (£198m) bribery scheme and concealing it to raise money in the US.

The criminal charges, filed on Wednesday in New York, are the latest blow to 62-year-old Mr Adani, one of Asia’s richest men, whose business empire extends from ports and airports to renewable energy.

In the indictment, prosecutors alleged the tycoon and other senior executives had agreed to the payments to Indian officials to win contracts for his renewable energy company expected to yield more than $2bn in profits over 20 years.

The Adani Group has denied the allegations, calling them “baseless”.

“All possible legal recourse will be sought,” it said in a statement.

Shares of Adani Enterprises, the group’s flagship firm, closed down 22% on Thursday. Other group firms also closed in the red. Adani Green Energy, which is the firm at the centre of the allegations, said it wouldn’t proceed with a $600m bond offering.

The conglomerate has been operating under a cloud since 2023, when US short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report accusing it of decades of “brazen” stock manipulation and accounting fraud.

The claims, which Mr Adani denied, prompted a major market sell-off and an investigation by India’s market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi).

Later, Hindenburg also accused Sebi’s chief Madhabi Puri Buch of having links with off-shore funds used by the Adani group – both Ms Buch and the group have denied this.

But the US indictment is one of the biggest challenges the group has faced. Apart from Mr Adani there are seven other defendants, including his nephew.

Reports of the bribery probe into the company have been circulating for months.

Prosecutors said the US started investigating the company in 2022, and found the inquiry obstructed.

They allege that executives raised $3bn in loans and bonds, including from US firms, on the backs of false and misleading statements related to the firm’s anti-bribery practices and policies, as well as reports of the bribery probe.

“As alleged, the defendants orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars and… lied about the bribery scheme as they sought to raise capital from U.S. and international investors,” US Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement announcing the charges.

“My office is committed to rooting out corruption in the international marketplace and protecting investors from those who seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the integrity of our financial markets,” he added.

On several occasions Mr Adani met personally with government officials to advance the bribery scheme, officials said.

The US Attorney positions in the US are appointed by the president. The filing comes just weeks after Donald Trump won election to the White House, pledging to overhaul the US Justice Department.

After Trump won, Mr Adani had congratulated him on social media and pledged last week to invest $10bn in the US.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, called the charges a “body blow” to the tycoon.

“For the last nearly two years, Mr Adani has been trying to rehabilitate his image, and [trying] to show that those earlier fraud allegations levelled by the Hindenburg group were not true, and his company and his businesses had actually been doing quite well,” he told the BBC’s Business Today programme.

But it might be harder for the billionaire, he said, to “shake off” the allegations made by US authorities.

US investment firm GQG Partners LLC, which has invested nearly $10bn in the Adani Group, has said that it is “monitoring the charges” and may take “appropriate” actions for its portfolios.

Moody’s Ratings said that the indictment was a “credit negative” for the group’s firms.

“Our main focus when assessing Adani Group is on the ability of the group’s companies to access capital to meet their liquidity requirements and on its governance practices,” it said.

The issue has also set off a political storm in India.

Mr Adani is a close ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has long faced claims from opposition politicians alleging that he has benefited from his political ties, which he denies.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi demanded in a press conference that Mr Adani should be arrested and that Ms Buch should be removed from her position as Sebi chief. He accused Modi of protecting the businessman.

Modi and the government have not commented on the issue yet. Sambit Patra, a leader of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), dismissed the accusations against Modi and said that it was up to the Adani Group to “issue a statement and defend itself”.

“The law will take its course,” he said.

Opposition parties have long demanded a joint parliamentary investigation into the Hindenburg allegations against the Adani Group. They are expected to raise the issue when the winter session of parliament begins next week.

Australian teen Bianca Jones has become the fourth tourist to have died in a suspected mass poisoning in Laos.

The 19-year-old’s family confirmed her death to the media on Thursday. Hours earlier, the US State Department told the media that an American man died in the tourist town of Vang Vieng.

Two Danish women, aged 19 and 20, also died last week in Laos, Danish authorities confirmed, declining to share more due to confidentiality concerns.

The deaths remain under police investigation, but news reports and testimonies online from other tourists suggest they may have consumed drinks laced with methanol, a deadly substance often found in bootleg alcohol.

Vang Vieng is a small, riverside town in central Laos and a hub for young Westerners backpacking across Southeast Asia. It’s home to the Banana Pancake Trail – a popular backpacking route spanning Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Jones’s friend Holly Bowles is in hospital on life support, while a British woman is also reportedly in hospital.

New Zealand’s foreign ministry told local media on Thursday that one of its citizens was also unwell from suspected methanol poisoning. And the Netherlands’ foreign affairs ministry said that a Dutch tourist was sent to the hospital but is in stable condition. It is unclear how many others have fallen ill.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the department of foreign affairs had confirmed Jones’s death.

“Our first thoughts in this moment are with her family and friends who are grieving a terrible and cruel loss,” Albanese said on Thursday afternoon.

“This is every parent’s very worst fear and a nightmare that no one should have to endure.”

He said he hoped Ms Bowles, who is currently at Bangkok Hospital, would recover well.

The US State Department said it was “closely monitoring” the situation with regards to the American victim, adding that it was up to local authorities to determine the cause of death.

Australian, New Zealand and UK authorities have each warned their citizens to be careful of methanol poisoning when consuming alcohol in Laos.

Nana Backpacker Hostel, where the two Australian women stayed in Vang Vieng, told the BBC that it was closed for police investigation.

The hostel’s manager told the Associated Press that the two women were among more than 100 guests who received free shots of Lao vodka from the hostel. The pair then headed out for the night, he said, adding that no other guests reported health issues.

The manager said he hoped the investigation would clear the hostel’s name, but said they have stopped giving free shots for now.

In a statement to Australian newspaper the Herald Sun, Jones’s family expressed their “deepest gratitude for the overwhelming support, love, and prayers we’ve received from across Australia”.

“We kindly ask for privacy as we navigate through our grief and begin to heal,” the statement said.

Unlike ethanol, the key component of alcoholic beverages, methanol is toxic to humans. Bootleg liquor producers sometimes add it to their drinks, however, as a cheap way to increase alcohol content.

Earlier this year, at least 57 people in India died after consuming methanol-laced liquor. Similar cases of mass poisoning have also been reported across the world, from the Philippines to Peru. It has hospitalised and even killed dozens in Indonesia over the years, but it has rarely affected tourists.

Maurizio Cattelan’s provocative artwork of a banana duct-taped to a wall has fetched $6.2m (£4.9m) at Sotheby’s in New York – four times higher than pre-sale estimates.

The auction house says Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun outbid six other rivals to get the “Comedian” installation of the Italian visual artist on Wednesday.

“In the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience,” Mr Sun was quoted as saying.

The taped banana – now perhaps one of the most expensive fruits ever sold – was actually bought earlier in the day for a mere $0.35, according to the New York Times.

“Comedian” was first unveiled to the public in 2019, instantly becoming a viral sensation and also provoking heated debates about what art is.

The installation – which has travelled around the world – comes with instructions on how to replace the banana whenever it rots.

In fact, the fruit has been eaten not once, but twice.

In 2023, a South Korean art student helped himself when the installation went on display at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art.

The museum later placed a new banana in the same spot, local media reported.

Four years earlier, a performance artist pulled the banana from the wall after the artwork was sold for $120,000 at Art Basel in Miami.

The banana was swiftly replaced, and no further action was taken.

Justin Sun runs the Tron blockchain network, which facilitates some cryptocurrency transactions. Last year the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused him of fraud, saying he had falsely inflated trading volumes of TRX, Tron’s crypto token. Mr Sun denies the charges.

Payment app PayPal experienced a brief outage worldwide on Thursday, it confirmed.

It said in a post on its service status page it was experiencing “a system issue” that affecting multiple PayPal Products – including account withdrawal and express checkout.

The company said the technical issue was swiftly resolved.

However, even a brief outage was enough to cause problems for customers, who reported being unable to log in to their accounts or said they were having problems making payments.

Platform outage monitor Downdetector had received more than seven thousand reports from users as of 12:12 GMT.

According to the company’s service status dashboard, the incident began at 10:53 UTC.

It said its cryptocurrency services and peer-to-peer payment app, Venmo, were among its services affected by the outage.

Customers took to social media to post about not being able to access their accounts.

Several users on X, formerly Twitter, posted screenshots of an alert telling them “please check your entries and try again” when attempting to log in.

Founded in 1998, PayPal has grown to become a major, global financial institution.

It told investors in October that its total number of active accounts across its operations had soared to 432 million in the period ending 30 September.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has gifted North Korea’s main zoo more than 70 animals, including a lion and two brown bears, in yet another display of burgeoning relations between Moscow and Pyongyang.

Putin’s environment minister, Alexander Kozlov, brought the animals to the North Korean capital on board a cargo plane, Kozlov’s office said on its official Telegram channel on Wednesday.

The shipment of animals from Moscow also included two yaks, five cockatoos and dozens of pheasants as well as mandarin ducks, Kozlov’s office said.

The gift comes weeks after the US and South Korea revealed that North Korea had sent thousands of troops to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine.

While in Pyongyang the Russian environment minister also paid a courtesy visit to Kim.

This isn’t the first time in recent memory that Russia has sent animals to North Korea.

Earlier this year, Putin gifted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un 24 pure-bred horses, reportedly as thanks for artillery shells provided by North Korea.

Putin and Kim have strengthened their alliance in recent months as both countries face sanctions from the West.

The Russian president needs support for his war in Ukraine while North Korea needs Russia’s space technology which could aid its missile programme.

That burgeoning alliance was on full display in June when Putin visited North Korea and signed an agreement with Kim to protect each other’s nations from “aggression”.

During that visit, Putin gifted Kim with a Russian-made Aurus limousine, tea set and artwork.

Kim is believed to be a car enthusiast and has been seen in a Maybach limousine, several Mercedes, a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a Lexus sports utility vehicle.

Putin had also gifted Kim with an Aurus in February, five months after Kim visited the Vostochny space centre in Russia’s Far East.

Dozens of people are reported to have been killed in overnight Israeli air strikes in northern Gaza.

Paramedics and Hamas-affiliated media said at least 66 were killed, including women and children, when several houses sheltering displaced people were hit near Kamal Adwan hospital in the town of Beit Lahia. One unverified video showed more than 20 bodies lined up in a street.

Another 22 people were killed in a strike on a house in the northern Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza City, according to the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. It has recently intensified its offensive in northern Gaza, saying it is stopping Hamas from regrouping.

Deadly Israeli strikes were also reported elsewhere in Gaza on Thursday morning. A hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis said it had received the bodies of 24 people killed in Israeli military action there and in nearby Rafah.

Parts of northern Gaza are under Israeli siege and virtually no humanitarian aid has been delivered in 40 days, the UN warned on Tuesday.

Gazan medics say they are struggling to treat the injured, with aid agencies saying they cannot get essential supplies into the area.

Earlier this week, at least 34 people were killed in an Israeli air strike on a five-storey residential block in Beit Lahia, the civil defence agency said.

Israel’s ground offensive in northern Gaza has displaced up to 130,000 people over the past five weeks.

The UN says 75,000 people remain under siege with dwindling supplies of water and food in the towns of Beit Lahia, Jabalia and Beit Hanoun.

Last week, a report by Human Rights Watch said Israel had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by deliberately causing the mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza.

About 1.9 million people – 90% of Gaza’s population – have fled their homes over the past year, and 79% of the territory is under Israeli-issued evacuation orders, according to the UN.

Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the group’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

Nearly 44,000 people have been killed and more than 104,000 injured in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

On Wednesday, the US blocked a Gaza ceasefire draft resolution at the UN Security Council – the fourth time it has used its veto power during the conflict to shield its ally, Israel.

Fourteen of the 15 council members voted in favour of the draft, which demanded that the war in Gaza “must end immediately, unconditionally and permanently and all remaining hostages must be immediately and unconditionally released”.

Deputy US ambassador to the UN, Robert Wood, said the document “abandoned” the necessity for there to be “a linkage between a ceasefire and the release of hostages”.

Wood said the proposed resolution would have sent a “dangerous message” to Hamas that “there’s no need to come back to the negotiating table”.

In a separate development, US mediator Amos Hochstein has arrived in Israel from Lebanon.

He has said that he sees a “real opportunity” to end the conflict in Lebanon after the Lebanese government and Hezbollah largely agreed to a US ceasefire proposal.

A fugitive Zambian lawmaker with a bounty on his head has been arrested in Zimbabwe, Zambian authorities have said.

Emmanuel “Jay Jay” Banda, who was facing robbery charges, is accused of having escaped from custody in August as he awaited to appear in court.

He is said to have escaped through a window at Chipata Central Hospital in Eastern Province where he had been admitted following his arrest and was being guarded by police and prison officers.

The police then issued a bounty of 2m Zambian kwacha ($72,000; £57,000) for him.

He denies the allegations of robbery.

At a press conference on Wednesday, the Zambian minister for home affairs said the MP had been arrested earlier this week in Harare.

Jack Mwiimbu said the MP was arrested by Zimbabwean police at a flat he had been renting and would remain there pending extradition formalities.

He said the government was keen to know who had facilitated the MP’s escape as well as visits by his wife to Harare.

He thanked the Zimbabwean authorities for their co-operation.

The opposition Patriotic Front (PF) party, led by former President Edgar Lungu, condemned what he called an “emerging and worrying scenario”.

Banda, who has been an independent MP since 2021, was previously associated with Lungu, who lost the presidency to Hakainde Hichilema that year.

The PF spokesman, Emmanuel Mwamba, said what was happening was “an abduction” adding that the government should follow “internationally prescribed extradition protocols”.

“We are urging the Zambian government that they should not join other African countries that are known to go other jurisdictions and pick and extract a citizen they are looking for for committing crimes,” he told the BBC.

The BBC has asked the Zambian government for a response.

On Thursday, the Zambian police said that Interpol in Harare had confirmed that Banda was in their custody and had requested extradition documents.

It noted that Banda had in a preliminary interview with Interpol denied the charges, “alleging he was being targeted due to his familial ties” with Lungu. This prompted a request for clarification on the charges, which Zambia provided.

The Zambian police added that preparations to “finalise and transmit the required documents to [interpol in] Harare are currently underway” and further updates would be given in due course.

In May this year, Banda had been reported missing in unclear circumstances. He resurfaced a day later, saying that he had been abducted.

At least three opposition politicians and a civil rights activists were arrested following the case.

Two of those who were arrested – Edith Nawakwi, leader of the opposition Forum for Development and Democracy party, and civil rights activist Brebner Changala – accused the state of being behind the abductions.

The home affairs ministry however denied the state’s involvement in the matter.

On social media there had been speculation that the abduction was staged, which was denied by Banda’s family.

Banda was later arrested in June this year and charged with the non-bailable offence of aggravated robbery relating to the theft of property worth 12,000 kwacha ($430; £340) in 2015.

He faces additional charges of escaping from lawful custody.

But Mr Mwamba told the BBC that the charges were “politically motivated”.

“Hon Jay Jay Banda is one of those members of parliament who are close to the former president, who this government is pursuing relentlessly.”

He said the case was from a decade ago and had been processed in court before, adding that the charges were meant to keep him from telling the truth about the abduction.

He said that at the time of his alleged escape, he had been admitted to hospital, because of a medical condition following his abduction.

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A row has broken out at COP29 climate talks as leading countries said a draft deal risked going back on a historic agreement to reduce the use of planet-warming fossil fuels.

“Standing still is retreat and the world will rightly judge us very harshly if this is the outcome,” said UK energy minister Ed Miliband.

The UK, European Union, New Zealand and Ireland said the proposed agreement was “unacceptable”.

Developing nations said they are unhappy that a pot of money has not been agreed to help them tackle climate change.

Nearly 200 countries are meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan to try to decide on the next steps in tackling climate change.

The row comes as the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned countries that “failure is not an option”.

At the heart of the talks is a trade-off between promises of more money from developed nations and global pledges to reduce the use of fossil fuels.

Some developing nations and oil-rich countries are reluctant to push strong action on cutting fossil fuels because it could jeopardise their economic growth.

In an open meeting of all nations, the EU Commissioner for Climate Action Wopke Hoekstra called the draft deal “unbalanced, unworkable and unsubtle”.

US Climate Envoy John Podesta said: “We are surprised that there is nothing that carries forward…what we agreed last year in Dubai.”

“We will have failed in our duty and the millions of people already feeling the effects of extreme weather,” he added.

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Samoan minister Cedric Schuster, representing small island nations on the front-line of climate change, said:

“We cannot afford to undermine the progress achieved less than a year ago in Dubai”.

At the COP28 climate talks last year, nations agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels.”

“If we do not get ambition on mitigation, then everything else fails,” said Eamon Ryan, Ireland’s minister for the environment, speaking to journalists.

Diplomats are upset with the COP29 hosts Azerbaijan. They say the draft deal reflects the views of the Arab group of countries and what’s termed the Like-Minded group, which includes Saudi Arabia, China, India and Bolivia.

The Saudis have suggested that the fossil fuels agreement reached was just one option for countries, rather than an specific instruction.

Minister Ryan said the new proposed deal text reflected this view.

“We all know that there has been backsliding. There has been an attempt to interpret what we agreed last year as a menu, and actually taking back the language and taking back the commitment, and that has to stop in the interest of the Arab group too.”

But developing countries have made clear that they think richer countries are also going back on previous promises. In 2015, as part of the landmark Paris Agreement, developed nations promised to provide money to help poorer countries move away from fossil fuels and prepare for extreme weather.

The proposed agreement on new finance for climate – published Thursday morning – currently contains no figure.

Diego Pacheco, Bolivia’s lead negotiator, said: “This is not even a joke. This is an offence to the demands of the global south.

“This is a finance COP and needs political will to provide finance and any thing less is a betrayal to […] the Paris agreement and to millions of people around the world,” he said

The G77+China group, which represents developing countries, want $1.3tn (£1.03tn) by 2030. That could be from governments and private sources like banks or businesses.

But they say no specific number has been mentioned here.

“I have heard figures in the corridors, but nothing official,” said Evans Njewa, chair for the Least Developed Countries Group.

Developing countries also want to get a figure about how money will be from grants, such as in aid budgets, and how much would be private loans.

They fear any more loans will increase their existing debt burdens.

“I felt really scared to be honest,” says James, describing an incident on Snapchat that left him questioning whether it was safe to go to school.

The Australian boy, 12, had had a disagreement with a friend, and one night before bed the boy added him to a group chat with two older teenagers.

Almost instantly, his phone “started blowing up” with a string of violent messages.

“One of them sounded like he was probably 17,” James tells the BBC. “He sent me videos of him with a machete… he was waving it around. Then there were voice messages saying that they were going to catch me and stab me.”

James – not his real name – first joined Snapchat when he was 10, after a classmate suggested everyone in their friendship group get the app. But after telling his parents about his cyberbullying experience, which was ultimately resolved by his school, James deleted his account.

His experience is a cautionary tale that shows why the Australian government’s proposed social media ban on children under 16 is necessary, says his mother Emma, who is also using a pseudonym.

The laws, which were tabled in parliament’s lower house on Thursday, have been billed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as “world-leading”.

But while many parents have applauded the move, some experts have questioned whether kids should – or even can – be barred from accessing social media, and what the adverse effects of doing so may be.

Albanese says the ban – which will cover platforms such as X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram – is about protecting kids from the “harms” of social media.

“This is a global problem and we want young Australians essentially to have a childhood. We want parents to have peace of mind,” he said on Thursday.

The new legislation provides a “framework” for the ban. But the 17-page document, which is expected to head to the Senate next week, is sparse on detail.

Instead, it will be up to the nation’s internet regulator – the eSafety Commissioner – to hash out how to implement and enforce the rules, which will not come into effect for at least 12 months after legislation is passed.

According to the bill, the ban will apply to all children under 16 and that there will be no exemptions for existing users or those with parental consent.

Tech companies will face penalties of up to A$50m ($32.5m; £25.7) if they do not comply, but there will be exemptions for platforms which are able to create “low-risk services” deemed suitable for kids. Criteria for this threshold are yet to be set.

Messaging services and gaming sites, however, will not be restricted, as will some sites that can be accessed without an account like YouTube, which has prompted questions over how regulators will determine what is and isn’t a social media platform in a fast-moving landscape.

A group representing the interests of tech companies such as Meta, Snapchat and X in Australia has dismissed the ban as “a 20th Century response to 21st Century challenges”.

Such legislation could push kids into “dangerous, unregulated parts of the internet”, Digital Industry Group Inc says – a fear also expressed by some experts.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has acknowledged the gargantuan task her office will face when enforcing the ban, given “technology change is always going to outpace policy”.

“It will always be fluid, and this is why regulators like eSafety have to be nimble,” she told BBC Radio 5 Live.

But Ms Inman Grant has also raised concerns about the central idea behind the government’s policy, which is that there’s a causal link between social media and declining mental health.

“I would say that the evidence base is not settled at all,” she said, pointing to research from her own office which found that some of the most vulnerable groups, such as LGBTQ+ or First Nations teenagers, “feel more themselves online than they do in the real world”.

This is a sentiment echoed by Lucas Lane, 15, who runs an online business selling nail polish to boys. “This [ban] destroys… my friendships and the ability to make people feel seen,” the Perth teenager tells the BBC.

Ms Inman Grant would rather see tech companies clean up their platforms, as well as more investment in education tools to help young people stay safe online. She uses the analogy of teaching children to swim, rather than banning them from the water.

“We don’t fence the ocean… but we do create protected swimming environments that provide safeguards and teach important lessons from a young age,” she told parliament earlier this year.

But parents like Emma see it differently.

“Should we really be wasting our time trying to help kids navigate these difficult systems when tech companies just want them on them all the time?” she says.

“Or should we just allow them to be kids and learn how to be sociable outside with each other, and then start these discussions later on?”

Amy Friedlander, a mother of three from the Wait Mate movement – which encourages parents to delay giving their kids smartphones – agrees.

“We can’t ignore all the positives that technology has brought into our lives. There are huge upsides, but what we haven’t really considered is the impact it is having on brains which aren’t ready for it.”

Over 100 Australian academics have criticised the ban as “too blunt an instrument” and argued that it goes against UN advice which calls on governments to ensure young people have “safe access” to digital environments.

It has also failed to win the backing of a bipartisan parliamentary committee that’s been examining the impact of social media on adolescents. Instead, the committee recommended that tech giants face tougher regulations.

To address some of those concerns, the government says it will eventually introduce “digital duty of care” laws, which will make it a legal obligation for tech companies to prioritise user safety.

Joanne Orlando, a researcher in digital behaviour, argues that while a ban “could be part of a strategy, it absolutely can’t be the whole strategy”.

She says “the biggest piece of the puzzle” should be educating kids to think critically about the content they see on their feeds and how they use social media.

The government has already spent A$6m since 2022 to develop free “digital literacy tools” to try and do just that. However, research suggests that many young Australians aren’t receiving regular lessons.

Ms Orlando and other experts warn there are also significant hurdles to making the age-verification technology – which is required to enforce the ban – effective and safe, given the “enormous risks” associated with potentially housing the identification documents of every Australian online.

The government has said it is aiming to solve that challenge through age-verification trials, and hopes to table a report by mid-next year. It has promised that privacy concerns will be front and centre, but offered little detail on what kind of technology will actually be tested.

In its advice, the eSafety Commissioner has floated the idea of using a third-party service to anonymise a user’s ID before it is passed on to any age verification sites, to “preserve” their privacy.

However, Ms Orlando remains sceptical. “I can’t think of any technology that exists at this point that can pull this off,” she tells the BBC.

Australia is by no means the first country to try to restrict how young people access certain websites or platforms online.

In 2011, South Korea passed its “shutdown law” which prevented children under 16 from playing internet games between 22:30 and 6:00, but the rules – which faced backlash – were later scrapped citing the need to “respect the rights of youths”.

More recently France introduced legislation requiring social media platforms to block access to children under 15 without parental consent. Research indicated almost half of users were able to circumvent the ban using a simple VPN.

A law in the US state of Utah – which was similar to Australia’s – ran into a different issue: it was blocked by a federal judge who found it unconstitutional.

Albanese has conceded that Australia’s proposal may not be foolproof, and if it passes the parliament, it would be subject to a review.

“We all know technology moves fast and some people will try to find ways around these new laws but that is not a reason to ignore the responsibility that we have,” he told lawmakers.

But for parents like Emma and Ms Friedlander – who have lobbied for the changes – it’s the message that the ban sends which matters most.

“For too long parents have had this impossible choice between giving in and getting their child an addictive device or seeing their child isolated and feeling left out socially,” Ms Friedlander says.

“We’ve been trapped in a norm that no one wants to be a part of.”

James says that since quitting Snapchat he’s found himself spending more time outside with friends.

And he hopes that the new laws could enable more kids like him to “get out and do the things they love” instead of feeling pressured to be online.

The Border-Gavaskar Test series between Australia and India, which starts in Perth on Friday, pits the two best teams in red-ball cricket against each other.

The last four series between these two countries have been compelling, making it the pre-eminent rivalry in Test cricket today. This period has been particularly good for India, who have won the rubber on all four occasions, including twice in succession in Australia.

But India’s unexpected recent whitewash by New Zealand, marked by the failure of top stars, has raised doubts about the future of some big names.

The spotlight in the current series will be on veterans Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, who have been the pillars of India’s dominance across formats over the past decade. However, with advancing age and recent dips in form, questions linger about their ability and hunger to continue competing at the highest level.

The most concerning issue has been the form of star batter Virat Kohli, the poster boy of Indian cricket.

His recent struggles have stretched over more than three years. In the past five years, Kohli, who once piled up Test centuries with ease, has managed to add only two more to the 27 he had amassed earlier at a rapid pace.

His Test batting average, once hovering in the mid-50s, has dipped below 48. The run machine who was touted as most likely to overhaul Sachin Tendulkar’s Test records has been sputtering.

Australia has long been a happy hunting ground for Kohli. His first Test century came in Adelaide in 2011, and during the 2014-15 series, he dazzled with almost magical strokeplay, cementing his place among the game’s greats.

Kohli’s fiery aggression – outdoing even the Aussies at their own game – earned him respect and adoration from fans Down Under. When he led India to their historic first Test series victory in Australia in 70 years, he assumed cult status.

Captain Rohit Sharma, a late bloomer in Test cricket, may have had comparatively modest success in the format, but the respect he commands from opponents is every bit as significant as that given to Kohli.

After starting with centuries in his first two Tests, Sharma lost his way and place, briefly, till he was given the opener’s slot. Since then he hasn’t looked back.

Sharma’s prowess in white-ball cricket has often overshadowed his superlative batting in Tests, where he can be destructive and sublime as the situation demands.

He often faces criticism for his inconsistency in producing big scores. However, there’s unanimous agreement that when Sharma finds his rhythm, India’s chances of winning Tests soar dramatically.

While Sharma hasn’t had a prolonged lean trot like Kohli, he has unfortunately hit a dramatic slump in the recent home Tests against Bangladesh and New Zealand.

In 10 innings each during these matches, neither Sharma nor Kohli managed to muster even 200 runs. The calibre and class of Sharma and Kohli are beyond dispute. The concern is whether they are over the hill.

Ashwin and Jadeja are undoubtedly world-class all-rounders. With more than 3,000 runs apiece, Ashwin has surpassed 500 Test wickets, while Jadeja recently crossed the 300-mark. Both would be welcomed with open arms into any team in the world.

In tandem, they’ve more often than not played havoc with opposing teams though their overseas record is modest.

In 10 Tests in Australia, Ashwin has taken 39 wickets at an average of 42.15. Meanwhile, Jadeja has claimed 14 wickets in just four Tests at an impressive average of 21.78 – better than Ashwin’s, though from a smaller sample size.

But such stats can also be misleading.

Ashwin is the more experimental of the two, adding an element of surprise and edge to his bowling. In 2021, he had Australia’s top batsmen, Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne, dancing to his tune. Jadeja, on the other hand, is the master of control – economical and deadly, especially on a crumbling pitch.

The value of Ashwin and Jadeja extends beyond just their bowling. Ashwin’s doughty batting in the memorable 2021 series was critical in India winning the series. Jadeja has often shored up the batting with stout defence and spunky strokes when the top order has fallen. And he is worth 30-35 runs on fielding alone.

The concerns about Ashwin and Jadeja stem from their relatively modest bowling returns against New Zealand at home last month. Ashwin took nine wickets at a strike rate of 66.33, while Jadeja claimed 16 wickets at 37.93.

Effectively, the Kiwi spinners outshone both these stalwarts, and India lost a home series after 18 Test wins. As in the case of Sharma and Kohli, was this an aberration or a sign of waning powers?

It would be reckless to dismiss players of such high calibre and vast experience based on a handful of stats. Beyond their skill and ambition, great players rely on self-belief and pride to overcome the toughest challenges and deliver when it matters most.

However, as they approach the winter of their careers, how these outstanding players perform in the current series is crucial – both for the team and for themselves.

Success here will signal a resurgence, helping them fend off stiff competition from a wave of exceptionally talented young players. On the other hand, failure will only intensify calls for a broader transition in Indian cricket.

They have sold more albums than any other K-pop girl band last year, gained tens of millions of fans worldwide and are arguably one of South Korea’s hottest acts.

What the members of NewJeans are not, however, are workers, according to the government.

The country’s Ministry of Employment and Labor on Wednesday dismissed claims of workplace harrassment against a member of the group, saying celebrities were not seen as workers under the country’s labour law – and were, therefore, not entitled to the same rights.

The decision has drawn its fair share of scorn, with people saying they are not surprised given this is an industry known for its punishing schedules and intense competition.

This is the latest scandal to hit NewJeans, which has for months been embroiled in a public feud with its record label, Ador.

With slick pop songs like Super Shy, OMG and Supernatural, NewJeans were the eighth biggest-selling act in the world last year, and were nominated for best group at this year’s MTV Awards.

Formed by label Ador in 2022, the group has five members – Minji, Hanni, Danielle, Haerin and Hyein – whose ages range from 16 to 20.

The incident started after 20-year-old Hanni and the other four members of the band raised concerns about their treatment by Ador during an impromptu YouTube livestream on 11 September.

In the band’s YouTube video, which has since been deleted, they made claims of workplace harassment, among others, which culminated in Hanni saying she would testify in a hearing about bullying in the music industry.

The Vietnamese-Australian singer, whose real name is Pham Ngoc Han, told lawmakers that she felt “the company hated us”.

She described how senior members of Hybe ignored her and her bandmates, and gave them cold shoulder. She also alleged that employees of the agency bad-mouthed NewJeans on internal communication app and asked a journalist to downplay the group’s record sales in one article.

Hybe had previously denied the accusations. The CEO of Ador, which is a subsidiary of Hybe, said at the hearing that she would “listen more closely” to her artists.

Her allegations prompted fans to file a petition about workplace bullying to the government.

But on Wednesday, South Korea’s labour ministry rejected these claims, saying given the content and nature of the management contract signed by Hanni, she is not regarded as a worker under the country’s Labour Standards Act.

“Individuals must meet the criteria under the Labour Standards Act… to be considered workers. This includes having fixed working hours and providing labour under the employer’s direct supervision and control. Celebrities, including singers, are typically classified as independent contractors,” Chunghwan Choi, senior partner of Yulchon law firm in Seoul explained.

The government also cites the nature of Hanni’s income, which is deemed to be “profit sharing, rather than wages”, according to local reports, adding that she pays business income tax rather than employment income tax.

One expert has called the response “utterly unfair and yet unsurprising”.

The work for K-pop idols is “emotionally and physically exhausting”, according to her, as they work “incredibly long hours, often seven days a week for months in a row…[with] no clearly defined periods of rest”, says CedarBough Saeji, Assistant Professor of Korean and East Asian Studies at Pusan National University in South Korea.

“Exploitation of the workers is accepted because they are not regular employees and there is no labour union, or clearly we can now see, no governmental agency to advocate for humane working conditions for them,” she argues.

There are currently no specific laws in South Korea that provide protections for the working rights of celebrities or artists, says Mr Choi, saying that this “underscores the urgent need for reforms to address longstanding issues in the entertainment industry”.

One measure that could be put into place to safeguard the working rights of artists is something similar to the Talent Agency Act in Hollywood, which requires talent agencies to obtain licenses and prohibits unfair or exploitative contracts, adds Mr Choi.

However, he adds that “while there have been discussions about implementing laws similar to the Talent Agency Act, no such legislation has been enacted yet”.

On Wednesday, New Jeans fans rallied under the hashtag “IdolsAreWorkers” in support of the band.

Others pointed out that the decision had a legal basis, as celebrities were not technically seen as workers under the law, but called for greater reforms in the industry.

“I get what they’re saying about the role not qualifying for the legal defintion of workplace harrassment, but this just shows the need for reform in the K-pop industry”, said one user on X.

Hanni has yet to comment on the government’s decision.

Hybe, which represents massive K-pop groups such as BTS and Seventeen, is South Korea’s largest music firm.

South Korea’s entertainment industry is known for its high-pressure environment, where celebrities are held to strict standards over their appearances and behaviour.

A decade ago, it seemed as though the global nuclear industry was in an irreversible decline.

Concerns over safety, cost, and what to do with radioactive waste had sapped enthusiasm for a technology once seen as a revolutionary source of abundant cheap energy.

Yet now there is widespread talk of a revival, fuelled by tech giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon all announcing investments in the sector, as well as the growing pressures on wealthy nations to curb their carbon emissions.

But how real is the comeback?

When commercial nuclear power was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s, governments were seduced by its seemingly unlimited potential.

Nuclear reactors could harness and control the same awesome forces released by atomic bombs – to provide electricity for millions of homes. With a single kilogram of uranium yielding some 20,000 times as much energy as a kilogram of coal, it seemed like the future.

But the technology also inspired public fear. And that fear seemed to be justified by the Chernobyl disaster, which spread radioactive contamination across Europe in early 1986.

It fuelled widespread public and political opposition – and slowed the growth of the industry.

Another accident, at the Fukushima Daichi plant in Japan in 2011, re-energised concerns about nuclear safety. Japan itself shut down all of its reactors in the immediate aftermath, and only 12 have since restarted.

Germany decided to phase out nuclear power altogether. Other countries scaled back plans to invest in new power plants, or extend the lives of ageing facilities.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, this led to the loss of 48GW of electric power generation globally between 2011 and 2020.

But nuclear development did not stop. In China, for example, there were 13 nuclear reactors in 2011. There are now 55, with another 23 under construction.

For Beijing, scrambling to meet rapidly growing electricity demand, nuclear had, and still has, a vital role to play.

Now interest in the sector seems to be growing elsewhere once again. This is partly because developed countries are hunting for ways to meet energy demand, while striving to meet emissions reduction targets under the Paris Agreement.

With 2024 projected to be the warmest year on record, the pressure to cut carbon emissions is mounting. A renewed focus on energy security, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has also been a factor.

South Korea, for example, recently scrapped plans to phase out its large fleet of nuclear power stations over the next four decades – and will build more instead.

And France has reversed plans to reduce its own reliance on nuclear energy, which provides 70% of its electricity. Instead, it wants to build up to eight new reactors.

In addition, last week the US government reaffirmed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or Cop29, held in Azerbaijan, that it intends to triple nuclear power generation by 2050.

The White House had originally pledged to do this on the side lines of last year’s conference, Cop28. A total of 31 countries have now agreed to try to triple their use of nuclear power by 2050, including the UK, France and Japan.

Also at Cop29, which ends on Friday, 22 November, the US and UK announced that they would collaborate to speed up the development of new nuclear power technology.

This came after it was agreed in the final statement or “stocktake” of last year’s Cop28 that nuclear power should be one of the zero or low emission technologies to be “accelerated” to help combat climate change.

But hunger for clean power is not just coming from governments. Technology giants are striving to develop more and more applications that use artificial intelligence.

Yet AI relies on data – and data centres need constant, reliable electricity. According to Barclays Research, data centres account for 3.5% of electricity consumption in the US today, but that figure could rise to more than 9% by the end of the decade.

In September, Microsoft signed a 20-year deal to buy power from Constellation Energy, which will lead to the reopening of the infamous Three Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania – the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history, where a reactor suffered a partial meltdown in 1979.

Despite its tainted public image, another reactor at the plant continued to generate electricity until 2019. Constellation’s chief executive Joe Dominguez described the deal to reopen it as a “powerful symbol of the rebirth of nuclear power as a clean and reliable energy resource”.

Other tech giants have taken a different approach. Google plans to buy energy produced from a handful of so-called Small Modular Reactors or SMRs – a nascent technology intended to make nuclear energy easier and cheaper to deploy. Amazon is also supporting SMR development and construction.

SMRs themselves are being promoted, in part, as a solution to one of the biggest drawbacks facing nuclear power today. In western nations, new power stations have to be built to exacting modern safety standards. This, cobined with their sheer scale, makes them prohibitively expensive and complicated to build.

Hinkley Point C is a good example. Britain’s first new nuclear power station since the mid-1990s is being built on a stretch of remote coastline in southwest England.

It is meant to be the first of a batch of new plants to replace the country’s ageing reactor fleet. But the project is running some five years behind schedule and will cost up to £9bn ($11.5bn) more than planned.

It is not an isolated case. The US’s newest reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia opened seven years late, and cost more than $35bn – well over double their original budget.

SMRs are designed to solve this problem. They will be smaller than traditional reactors, using standardised parts that can be assembled quickly, at sites close to where the power is needed.

But while there are some 80 different designs under development globally, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the concept has yet to be proven commercially.

Opinions about nuclear power remain highly polarised. Supporters claim the technology is indispensable if climate targets are to be reached. Among them is Rod Adams, whose Nucleation Capital fund promotes investment in nuclear technology.

“Nuclear fission has a seven-decade history showing it is one of the safest power sources available,” he explains.

“It is a durable, reliable source of power with low ongoing costs already, but capital costs have been too high in Western countries.”

Opponents though, insist nuclear power is not the answer.

According to Professor M.V. Ramana of the University of British Columbia, it is “a folly to consider nuclear energy as clean”. It is, he says, “one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity. Investing in cheaper low-carbon sources of energy will provide more emissions reductions per dollar.”

If current trends do herald a new nuclear age, one old problem remains. After 70 years of atomic power, there is still disagreement over what to do with the accumulated radioactive waste – some of which will remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.

The answer being pursued by many governments is geological disposal – burying the waste in sealed tunnels deep underground. But only one country, Finland, has actually built such a facility, while environmentalists and anti-nuclear campaigners argue that dumping waste out of sight and out of mind is simply too risky.

Solving that conundrum may be a key factor in dictating whether there really will be a new age of nuclear power.

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Along with about 600 other men, Ndumiso lives and works in a small gang-controlled “town” – complete with markets and a red light district – that has grown up deep underground at a disused gold mine in South Africa.

Ndumiso told the BBC that after being laid off by a big mining firm, he decided to join the gang in its underground world to become what is known as a “zama zama”, an illegal miner.

He digs for the precious metal and surfaces every three months or so to sell it on the black market for a huge profit, earning more than he ever did before – though the risks now are far higher.

“The underground life is ruthless. Many do not make it out alive,” said the 52-year-old, who spoke to the BBC on condition that his real name was not used as he feared reprisals.

“In one level of the shaft there are bodies and skeletons. We call that the zama-zama graveyard,” he said.

But for those who survive, like Ndumiso, the job can be lucrative.

While he sleeps on sandbags after back-breaking days underground, his family lives in a house he has bought in a township of the main city, Johannesburg.

He made cash payments of 130,000 rand (about $7,000; £5,600) for the one-bedroom house, which he has now extended to include another three bedrooms, he said.

An illegal miner for about eight years, Ndumiso has managed to send his three children to fee-paying schools – one of whom is now in university.

“I have to provide for my wife and children and this is the only way I know,” he said, adding that he preferred to toil underground rather than adding to the high crime rate by becoming a car-hijacker or robber, after spending many years trying to find legal work.

His current job is at a mine in the small town of Stilfontein, around 90 miles (145km) south-west of Johannesburg, which is at the centre of global attention after a government minister, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, promised to “smoke out” the hundreds of miners who were underground there, with the security forces preventing food and water from being sent down.

“Criminals are not to be helped. Criminals are to be persecuted,” Ntshavheni said.

A campaign group, The Society for the Protection of Our Constitution, has launched a court case to demand access to the mineshaft, which police say is about 2km (1.2 miles) deep.

The court has given an interim ruling, stating that food and other essentials could be delivered to the miners.

Ndumiso works at a different shaft at the mine, and surfaced last month, before the current stand-off.

He is now waiting to see how the situation unfolds, before deciding whether to return.

The stand-off follows a government decision to crack down on an industry that has spiralled out of control, with mafia-like gangs running it.

“The country has been grappling with the scourge of illegal mining for many years, and mining communities bore the brunt of peripheral criminal activities such as rape, robbing and damage to public infrastructure, among others,” said Mikateko Mahlaule, chairman of the parliamentary committee on mineral resources.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said the mine was a “crime scene”, but police were negotiating with the miners to end the stand-off, rather than going down to arrest them.

“Law-enforcement authorities have information that some of the miners may be heavily armed. It is well-established that illegal miners are recruited by criminal gangs and form part of wider organised crime syndicates,” he added.

Ndumiso was among hundreds of thousands of workers – both locals and nationals of neighbouring states like Lesotho – who have been retrenched as South Africa’s mining industry has gone into decline over the last three decades. Many of these have gone on to become “zama zamas” at the abandoned mines.

South Africa-based Benchmark Foundation researcher David van Wyk, who has studied the industry, said there were about 6,000 abandoned mines in the country.

“While they are not profitable for large-scale industrial mining, they are profitable for small-scaling mining,” he told the BBC Focus on Africa podcast.

Ndumiso said he used to work as a drill operator, earning less than $220 (£175) a month, for a gold-mining company until he was laid off in 1996.

After struggling for the next 20 years to find a full-time job because of South Africa’s crushingly high unemployment rate, he said he decided to become an illegal miner.

There are tens of thousands of illegal miners in South Africa, with Mr Van Wyk saying they number about 36,000 alone in Gauteng province – the country’s economic heartland, where gold was first discovered in the 19th Century.

“Zama zamas will often spend months underground without surfacing and depend heavily on outside support for food and other necessities. It is arduous and dangerous work,” said a report by campaign group Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime.

“Some carry pistols, shotguns and semi-automatic weapons to protect themselves from rival gangs of miners,” it added.

Ndumiso told the BBC that he did own a pistol, but he also paid his gang a monthly “protection fee” of about $8.

Its heavily armed guards fend off threats, especially from Lesotho gangs reputed to have more lethal firepower, he said.

Under the 24-hour protection of the gang, Ndumiso said he used dynamite for rock-blasting and rudimentary tools such as a pick axe, spade and chisel to find gold.

Most of what he finds he gives to the gang leader, who pays him a minimum of $1,100 every two weeks. He said he was able to keep some gold, which he sells on the black market to top up his income.

He was among the fortunate miners to have such an arrangement, he said – explaining that others were kidnapped and taken to the shaft to work like slave labourers, receiving no payment or gold.

Ndumiso said he normally stayed underground for about three months at a time, and then came up for two to four weeks to spend time with his family and sell his gold, before going back into the deep pits.

“I look forward to sleeping on my bed and eating home-cooked meals. Breathing in fresh air is an amazingly powerful feeling.”

Ndumiso does not come out more often in case he loses his digging spot, but after three months it gets too much to remain underground.

He recalled that once when he reached the surface: “I was so blinded by the sunlight that I thought I had gone blind.”

His skin had also become so pale that his wife took him for a medical check-up: “I was honest with the doctor about where I lived. He did not say anything, and just treated me. He gave me vitamins.”

Above ground Ndumiso does not just relax. He also works with other illegal miners as ore-bearing rocks brought up from below are blasted and crushed into fine powder.

This is then “washed” by his group at a makeshift plant to separate the gold using dangerous chemicals like mercury and sodium cyanide.

Ndumiso said he then sells his share of the gold – one gram for $55, less than the official price of about $77.

He said he has a ready-made buyer, whom he contacts via WhatsApp.

“The first time I met him I did not trust him so I told him to meet me in the car park of a police station. I knew I would be safe there.

“Now we meet in any car park. We have a scale. We weigh the gold on the spot. I then hand it to over to him, and he pays me in cash,” he said, pointing out that he walks away with between $3,800 and $5,500.

He gets this amount every three months, meaning his average annual income is between $15,500 and $22,000 – far more than the $2,700 he earned as a legally employed miner.

Ndumiso said the gang leaders earned far more, but he did not know how much.

As for the buyer of his gold, Ndumiso said he did not know anything about him, except that he was a white man in an illegal industry that involves people of different races and classes.

This makes it difficult to clamp down on the criminal networks, with Mr Van Wyk saying the government was targeting miners – but not the “kingpins living in the leafy suburbs of Johannesburg and Cape Town”.

Mr Ramaphosa said that illegal mining was costing “our economy billions of rands in lost export income, royalties and taxes”, and the government would continue to work with mining firms “to ensure they take responsibility for rehabilitating or closing mines that are no longer operational”.

Mr Van Wyk told the BBC Focus on Africa podcast that the government would worsen South Africa’s economic crisis if it clamped down on the “zama zamas”.

“There should be a policy to decriminalise their operations, to better organise them and to regulate them,” he added.

When Ndumiso goes back underground to work, he takes with him cartons of canned food to avoid paying the exorbitant prices at the “markets” that exist there.

Apart from food, basic items – like cigarettes, torches, batteries – and mining tools were sold there, he said.

This suggests that a community – or a small town – had developed underground over the years, with Ndumiso saying there was even a red light district, with sex workers brought underground by the gangs.

Ndumiso said the mine where he worked was made up of several levels, and a labyrinth of tunnels that connected to each other.

“They are like highways, with signs painted to give directions to different places and levels – like the level that we use as the toilet, or the level that we call the zama-zama graveyard,” he said.

“Some are killed by rival gang members; others die during rockfalls and are crushed by massive boulders. I lost a friend after he was robbed of his gold and shot in the head.”

Although life underground is perilous, it is a risk that thousands like Ndumiso are willing to take, as they say the alternative is to live and die poor in a nation where the unemployment rate stands at more than 30%.

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High-tech equipment made by a UK firm worth $2.1m (£1.6m) has been sold to companies in Russia connected to the military, customs documents seen by BBC News suggest.

The documents indicate the British-made camera lenses were shipped by a company registered in Kyrgyzstan, apparently run by a swimwear model.

The UK manufacturer, Beck Optronic Solutions, which has worked on British Challenger 2 tanks and F35 fighter jets, told us it had not breached sanctions, had no dealings with Russia or Kyrgyzstan, and was unaware of the shipments.

Our investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of sanctions imposed on Russia since the war in Ukraine began.

The trail led us to Valeria Baigascina, a 25-year-old, originally from the central Asian state of Kazakhstan but now living in Belarus. A part-time model, she posts regularly about her jet-set lifestyle on social media. In the past two years she has visited Dubai, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

Her social media gave no indication she was also the director of a firm which had channelled millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to sanctioned companies in Russia, as our search of customs documents revealed.

According to Belarusian registration details, Ms Baigascina was the founder and director of a company called Rama Group LLC. Set up in February 2023, it is registered to an address in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan – 2,300 miles (3,713 km) from her home in Belarus.

Both countries are former Soviet states with strong trading links to Russia. Belarus remains Moscow’s strongest ally in Europe.

Trade data shows that since sanctions on Russia were introduced in February 2022, UK exports to Kyrgyzstan have increased by more than 300%. Experts suspect some goods are actually destined for Moscow.

The customs documents obtained by the BBC suggest that Rama Group made two shipments to Moscow of high-end optics that can be used in missiles, tanks and aircraft.

The equipment is listed on the customs form as being made by Beck Optronic Solutions in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. The company manufactures high-precision lenses used in targeting and surveillance systems.

Though some of its lenses are used in healthcare and engineering, Beck’s website details extensive military and defence applications.

The lenses and optical technology sold by Beck Optronics are specifically listed as goods that either cannot be legally exported to Russia, or that need permission from UK authorities before any sale can take place.

The BBC has identified, through customs documents, a total of six shipments of products said to have been made by Beck with a total value of $2.1m (£1.6m) and transferred to Moscow through Rama and another intermediary company, Shisan LLC.

In December 2023 and January 2024, Rama Group made its two shipments to Moscow listing them as “rotating part of camera”. These shipments went to Sol Group, a company based in Smolensk, 200 miles (320km) south-west of Moscow, which has been sanctioned by the US.

It is not clear what international route the goods took – the documents indicate some of the shipments may actually have originated in Thailand.

Shisan LLC, another Kyrgyz company, was responsible for four further shipments of Beck Optronics’ products worth $1.5m (£1.1m).

Two of those shipments involved “short-wave infrared camera lens” and went to the Ural Optical & Mechanical Plant, which makes bomb-aiming equipment and is also sanctioned because of its links to the Russian military.

Rama Group and Shisan share the same address in Bishkek – a modern five-storey block in a prosperous part of the city. However, when we visited we were told Valeria Baigascina was out of the country on a business trip.

We found her number through her social media posts and put our allegations to her.

Ms Baigascina said she was the founder of the company but had sold it in May. She denied the allegations, saying that when she had owned it, “nothing like that was supplied”. She then hung up.

Later, by email, she told us the accusations were “ridiculous” and based on “false information”.

Our research shows that in May this year she sold Rama Group to her best friend, Angelina Zhurenko, who runs a lingerie business in Kazakhstan.

Ms Zhurenko told us: “Trading activities are carried out exclusively within the framework of the current legislation of Kyrgyzstan. The company does not violate any prohibitions. Any other information is false.”

The director of the other intermediary company, Shisan, is listed as Evgeniy Anatolyevich Matveev. We put our allegations to him by email.

He told us that our information was “false” and that he ran “a business supplying exclusively civilian goods manufactured in Asian countries”.

He continued: “This does not contradict the laws of the state in which I work, and has nothing to do with US sanctions, because it is impossible to prohibit free trade in Asian goods available for sale and delivery.”

There’s no evidence that Beck Optronics knew about these shipments or that the final destination of the lenses was Russia.

The company told us it had nothing to do with the shipments: “Beck has not shipped anything contrary to UK export controls or any sanctions applying in the UK. It has had no dealings with any party or company in Russia, Kyrgyzstan or Thailand, was not aware that any shipments might ultimately be destined for any of these destinations and has not shipped anything to these destinations.”

It believes some of the equipment listed wasn’t even made by the company and that customs documents may have been falsified.

But these alleged exports are part of a much bigger picture involving shipments from a number of sources.

Analysis of customs documents by the Washington-based security think tank C4ADS suggest that Shisan completed 373 shipments via Kyrgyzstan to Russia between July and December 2023.

Of these, 288 contained goods that fall under customs codes for “high-priority battlefield items”.

Over the same six-month period, Rama Group completed a total of 1,756 shipments to Russia. Of these, 1,355 were for items on the “high-priority battlefield items” list.

Its most recent shipments, including electronics by US and UK companies, went to a Russian company named Titan-Mikro, which has been subject to US sanctions since May 2023 for operating within Russia’s military sector.

“When they sell this technology to a client who is potentially a Russian end-user, they fully should understand that this is to kill people,” says Olena Tregub from NAKO, Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption organisation.

She warns that the holes in the sanctions regime are costing lives.

“Without those technologies, those weapons would not fly. The brain of those ballistic missiles, the brain of those kamikaze drones, are made of Western technology,” she says.

International authorities are aware of Kyrgyzstan’s role in sanctions evasion.

In April, UK’s foreign secretary at the time, David Cameron, travelled to Bishkek and urged the Kyrgyz authorities to do more to tighten their sanctions’ compliance.

The Kyrgyz president expressed confidence that Lord Cameron’s official visit to his country would “give new impetus to multifaceted co-operation between Kyrgyzstan and the UK”.

David O’Sullivan, the EU’s Special Envoy for the Implementation of Sanctions told us that efforts continue to shut down “illicit procurement networks”, and that “companies are required to undertake due diligence checks to understand who is the final end-user and where ‘battlefield items’ end up ultimately”.

In a matter of days US President Joe Biden’s administration and Russia have made separate – but significant – moves aimed at influencing the outcome of the war in Ukraine, two months ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

There is a sense of Moscow maximising its gains and of Biden abandoning long-held red lines before Trump seeks to deliver on his claim to end the war in 24 hours.

Ukraine has already acted on Biden’s decision to let Kyiv fire first long-range Atacms missiles deep into Russian territory. As Kyiv struggles to hold on to its territory in the east, Biden has promised to send anti-personnel landmines too as part of new military assistance worth nearly $300m (£239m).

What prompted Biden’s change of heart appears to have been the arrival of thousands of North Koreans deployed to the front line, which the US sees as a “massive escalation”.

But Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has ratcheted up the tension still further by loosening the conditions of use for Russia’s nuclear weapons. That “effectively eliminates” defeat on the battlefield, claims Moscow.

One Russia commentator suggested Putin might view the current situation as an “in-between” moment that gives him the sense he has the upper hand in Ukraine.

At the start of this week, Russia launched its biggest aerial attack on Ukraine for almost three months. Amid fears of a renewed strike on Wednesday, several Western embassies closed their doors.

“It’s all connected,” says Mykhaylo Samus, head of the New Geopolitics Research Network in Ukraine. He argues Russia has been stockpiling hundreds of Iskander and Kinzhal missiles for weeks to enable it to carry out strikes and thus send a psychological message ahead of the transfer of power in Washington DC.

Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, may have been spared on Wednesday, but the message got through.

“Everything is about preparing for a strong position for talks with Trump, to understand Russia is not going to make compromise and everything depends on [Ukraine’s President Volodymyr] Zelensky.”

“There’s clearly an effort ahead of Trump to maximise their standings,” agrees Jade McGlynn, from the war studies department at King’s College London. She is highly sceptical that a deal with Putin is possible – and that ultimately his aim is to subjugate Russia’s south-western neighbour.

Ukraine marked 1,000 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion on Tuesday with Russian forces waging relentless attacks in a bid to seize key hubs in the east of Ukraine.

The mood in Moscow appears to be that it is only a matter of time before Ukraine is in its hands, says Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

From January, however, Putin will have to consider other factors, she says: “He will have to deal with the fact that Trump now is responsible for the situation. If Putin escalates, it can worsen the chances for a deal. He will have to be more flexible, more open to different options.”

The Biden administration announced new military assistance for Ukraine to include ammunition, missiles and drones, as well as anti-personnel landmines.

The US leader’s decision to allow Kyiv to begin firing Atacms into Russian territory was clearly directed at helping Kyiv, but it was felt by the Trump entourage, too.

Although Trump has so far said nothing, his pick for National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, spoke of “another step up the escalation ladder and nobody knows where this is going”.

He did not go as far as some on the Trump team. Donald Trump Jr complained Biden was trying to “get World War Three” going before his father could even return to the White House.

“There’s one president at a time,” said state department spokesman Matthew Miller “When the next president takes office, he can make his own decisions.”

Some Republicans have backed Biden’s move, although Sen Lindsay Graham said he should have done it “to help Ukraine and he’s playing politics with it”.

Russia’s reaction may or may not be an empty threat.

Under its revised nuclear doctrine, Moscow will now be able to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries that are backed by nuclear powers, and if it comes under “massive” air attack, too.

Alexander Yermakov from the Russian International Affairs Council says the change is not so much as an operational manual for using nuclear weapons, but “primarily it serves as a declaration to potential adversaries, outlining the scenarios in which such measures could be considered”.

Another message from Putin to the West, then.

Tatiana Stanovaya believes it is not that he wants to start World War Three, but because “he believes he must scare the Western elites to show they are playing with fire”.

What happens beyond January is anyone’s guess.

Kremlin insiders have already begun briefing about their minimal demands from any Trump initiative to end the war, and Volodymyr Zelensky has begun making his position clear too.

Asked in a US TV interview what would happen to Ukraine if Washington slashed military aid, he was clear: “If they will cut, I think we will lose. Of course, anyway, we will stay and we will fight. We have production, but it’s not enough to prevail.”

Putin insists Ukraine will have to remain neutral for any relations to work, even though it is now part of Ukraine’s constitution to join both Nato and the European Union.

A Reuters news agency report on Wednesday cited Russian officials saying Putin might be open to pulling out from relatively small patches of territory but nothing bigger.

Zelensky on Tuesday presented his 10-point “resilience plan” to parliament, and one defiant message rang out in the Verkhovna Rada more than most.

“Maybe Ukraine will have to outlive someone in Moscow in order to achieve all its goals… to restore the full integrity of Ukraine.”

One day Russia would be without Putin, in other words, but Ukraine would be going nowhere.

For Ukrainians that wait could take years, says Mykhaylo Samus, but they would never consent to abandoning Crimea or any other territory under Russian occupation.

The most Zelensky might be prepared to sign would be a ceasefire without commitments, he believes. Anything else would lead to internal conflict as many would view it as a betrayal.

Ahead of any talks Mykola Bielieskov of the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Kyiv believes the key is to prevent any major Russian breakthrough in the east.

“For us it’s just necessary to localise [Russian] advances… using Atacms, anti-personnel landmines or whatever. Because if the Russians are successful they would try to dictate terms.”

Speaking to the BBC from Kharkiv, Jade McGlynn said few Ukrainians believed Trump would be able to engineer any kind of lasting peace deal.

Any kind of settlement that left Ukraine in a much worse position would lead to political chaos, she said.

“Europe needs to step up,” she said, “and ultimately we know that the Scandinavians, Baltic states and Poland are not enough.”

A 43-year-old man was fatally shot by police in Las Vegas after he called 911 for help while fighting off an intruder in his home.

The family of Brandon Durham, including his 15-year-old daughter who was hiding in a nearby room, have asked for the officer to be fired.

Mr Durham’s teenage daughter said she was “disgusted” with Las Vegas police as they treated him like “the suspect” not “the victim”.

A lawyer for Alexander Bookman, the officer who shot Mr Durham, said he committed no crimes.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said Mr Bookman, 26, had been placed on paid administrative leave while they conduct an internal review of the 12 November incident.

Mr Durham had called 911 to report that two people were shooting outside and were trying to break into his home, police said.

Officers responding to the report found cars with broken windows outside.

They also noticed damage to the house and heard shouting from inside, police said, prompting Mr Bookman to kick down the front door to enter.

Body camera footage released by the police shows Mr Bookman walking through the home with his gun drawn, while screaming and banging can be heard out of view.

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Turning the corner of an L-shaped hallway, the officer finds a shirtless Mr Durham wrestling over a knife with a woman wearing a ski mask, later identified as 31-year-old Alejandra Boudreaux.

Mr Bookman yells, “hey, drop the knife, drop the knife”, seconds before firing a shot that hit Mr Durham and sent him and Ms Boudreaux to the ground.

Mr Bookman then fires five more shots at Mr Durham and says “put your hands up”, body-worn camera footage released by police showed.

Mr Durham was pronounced dead at the scene. Ms Boudreaux was arrested and charged with four counts, including home invasion with a deadly weapon.

“I am disgusted in how the Metropolitan Police told my father, after killing him, to stay down,” Mr Durham’s daughter told local news. “I’m disgusted that the Metropolitan Police will allow me to live fatherless for the rest of my life.”

The family’s lawyer has asked for an immediate arrest warrant for Mr Bookman.

“Unlike a civil case, in which an individual’s negligence is at issue, criminal cases require proof of a person’s criminal intent,” David Roger, general counsel for the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, said in a statement to CNN. “While Mr. Durham’s death is tragic, Officer Bookman was doing his job and did not intend to commit a crime.”

Citing a police report, local news outlets said Mr Durham and Ms Boudreaux were previously in a romantic relationship.

Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren said police did not find a gun on the scene, despite multiple reports of shots fired.

The incident brought police shootings back into the spotlight, occurring just days before the justice department opened an investigation into the death of Sonya Massey, who was fatally shot in July by an officer inside her home in Illinois.

Australia’s debate over capping foreign student numbers is “not over” despite a controversial bill unexpectedly losing support, a top industry body says.

The bill, part of efforts to slash overall migration to Australia, had been opposed by most universities who say it would damage the higher education sector and its global reputation.

The government argued the legislation was needed to make the industry more sustainable and ease pressure on housing, and it was expected to easily pass with opposition support this week.

However in a surprise eleventh-hour move, Australia’s opposition leader said his coalition would vote against the bill as it didn’t go far enough.

Though some universities have expressed support at the bill’s apparent demise, they also say it extends the uncertainty surrounding the industry – which is worth about A$50bn (£25.7bn, $32.7bn) to the economy.

Luke Sheehy, head of Universities Australia, told the BBC the news brought “no sense of relief” for him.

“I just knew that we would be looking at international students [used] as cannon fodder in a phoney war on migration right through to the election now,” said Mr Sheehy, whose organisation advocates for 39 universities.

The cap proposed limiting new enrolments at 270,000 for 2025 – a significant cut on the number in 2024. It had been due to come into effect in just six weeks.

Some universities have made job cuts and rejected student applications in anticipation of the new laws, and the BBC was told foreign students were already choosing to study elsewhere as a result of the reduced confidence in the sector.

The legislation, currently before the Senate, has not been formally withdrawn by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government but it cannot pass without the support of the main opposition Liberal-National coalition or the Greens, who also oppose it.

Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton called the bill “a dog’s breakfast” and vowed to introduce “deeper cuts” if he wins the upcoming election, due by May.

The Greens, on the other hand, described the bill “dog whistling that shamefully scapegoated international students for the housing crisis they did not cause”.

The government has accused Mr Dutton of hypocrisy, arguing he has often talked “tough” on cutting immigration to the country, which has reached record levels in recent years.

The expected failure of the bill would mean an existing visa policy, which has been widely accused of exacerbating problems by funnelling most international students to a select few city-based universities, will remain in place.

The Group of Eight (Go8) – a body which represents Australia’s top ranked universities – said the bill would have hurt students and staff and that common sense had prevailed.

But the industry has been left scrambling again, with only a few months left until the 2025 academic year begins. Observers say some universities could now receive a spike in students when they had a expected a cut, and others – predominantly in regional locations – will no longer expect as many, putting them under greater financial pressure.

“The most devastating part of this discussion is that we still don’t have a resolution,” Mr Sheehy said.

“We’re nowhere closer to providing the certainty, stability and growth the government promised us all those many months ago when they proposed caps.”

Texas authorities say they are prepared to offer President-elect Donald Trump 1,400-acres (567 hectares) of land along the US-Mexico border to build detention facilities for undocumented migrants.

In a letter, the Texas General Land Office said the plot could be used to build facilities for “processing, detention, and co-ordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history”.

Trump has repeatedly pledged to deport millions of undocumented migrants and mobilise the National Guard to help carry this out.

His plan, however, is likely to face enormous financial and logistics hurdles, as well as immediate legal challenges from rights groups.

The letter, published online and sent to Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, notes that the owner of the recently purchased land had refused to allow a border wall to be built there and “actively blocked law enforcement” from accessing it.

“Now it’s essentially farmland, so it’s flat, it’s easy to build on. We can very easily put a detention centre on there,” Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham said in an interview with Fox News, which first reported the offer.

The state government in Texas, which launched its own unilateral border security operation after Trump left office, has been broadly supportive of Trump’s promises to strengthen the US-Mexico border.

Buckingham said she was “100% on board with the Trump administration’s pledge to get these criminals out of our country”.

But the Democratic governors of three other southern border states – California, Arizona, and New Mexico – have said they will not aid mass deportations.

“Local and state officials on the frontlines of the Harris-Biden border invasion have been suffering for four years and are eager for President Trump to return to the Oval Office,” Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

“President Trump will marshal every lever of power to secure the border, protect their communities, and launch the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrant criminals in history.”

What any new detention facilities would look like is unclear, although the incoming “border czar” Tom Homan has suggested they could be “soft-sided”.

Facilities currently in use range from soft-sided, camp-like facilities used by Customs and Border Patrol to house undocumented migrants for short periods of time, as well as brick-and-mortar buildings used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

County and state jails are also used, for which local jurisdictions receive compensation from immigration authorities.

Stephen Miller, the top Trump adviser on immigration who has been picked as deputy chief of staff for policy, has previously said the Trump administration would build vast holding facilities to serve as staging centres for mass deportations.

In a late 2023 interview with the New York Times, Miller said that the facilities would likely be built on open land near Texas’ border with Mexico.

A 2024 spending bill signed by President Joe Biden allocated $3.4m (£2.69m) for ICE to house as many as 41,500 on any given day.

“If Trump conducts mass deportations, ICE would blow past that number very quickly,” Adam Isacson, a migration and border expert from the Washington Office on Latin America told the BBC.

ICE data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that there were 38,863 immigrant detainees being held as of 2 November.

The largest number – just over 12,000 – are held at facilities located in Texas.

News of Texas’ offer to the president-elect comes as Democratic-run cities and states have vowed to not co-operate with Trump’s promises of mass deportations.

On Tuesday, for example, Los Angeles’ city council passed a “sanctuary city” ordinance to bar using local resources to help federal immigration authorities.

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, said that the fact that Republican-led states are more likely to co-operate with the Trump administration’s immigration goals could create a “patchwork of protections” that differ widely across the country.

“We might see the divide between red and blue states widen,” she said.

Ms Bush-Joseph added that additional facilities in Texas could also mean that undocumented migrants detained in the US interior could ultimately be moved and processed there.

“If you’re picking up people in blue states, and they don’t have detention facilities available, then do you try to move them to red states?” she asked. “That’s the question.”

BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2025 longlist has been announced, with breakout stars like Chappell Roan and Barry Can’t Swim joined by newcomers including Myles Smith and Good Neighbours.

The award is given to rising artists with “the best chance of mainstream success” in the next 12 months. Past winners include Adele, Sam Smith, Michael Kiwanuka, PinkPantheress and Haim.

Last year’s winners, The Last Dinner Party, went on to score a number one album and a Mercury Prize nomination for their debut release, Prelude To Ecstasy.

This year’s longlist also includes indie band English Teacher and Northern Irish rap act Kneecap. The winner will be announced on BBC Radio 1 and BBC News in January.

The 11 acts in the running are:

• Barry Can’t Swim
• Chappell Roan
• Confidence Man
• Doechii
• English Teacher
• Ezra Collective
• Good Neighbours
• KNEECAP
• mk.gee
• Myles Smith
• Pozer

The nominees were chosen by a panel of more than 180 music industry experts and artists including representatives from Spotify, the Glastonbury Festival and the BBC; as well as musicians such as Sir Elton John, Dua Lipa, Jorja Smith, The Blessed Madonna and Sam Smith.

US pop star Chapell Roan is the clear frontrunner, after an electrifying year that saw her go from Olivia Rodrigo’s backing vocalist to breakout pop star.

Rejecting the trend for whispery bedroom pop, her songs are full of cheerleader chants and exuberant hooks that document her coming of age and the discovery of her sexuality.

Last week, she was nominated for six Grammy Awards, including best new artist and album of the year, for her debut The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess.

• Find out more about this year’s artists
• The pundits who voted in the poll

Also hotly-tipped are London jazz ensemble Ezra Collective, who won the Mercury Prize in 2023 for their soulful and ebullient album Where I’m Meant To Be.

This year’s follow-up – tited Dance, No One’s Watching – is both an invitation and an invocation, with supple funk grooves that propelled the album into the top 10.

Shape-shifting rapper Doechii also makes the list, cementing her rise as one of hip-hop’s brightest new voices.

Born in Florida, she rose to attention with the viral 2021 hit Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, after which she toured with SZA and Doja Cat.

She is also nominated for the best new artist Grammy, and her recent mixtape Alligator Bites Don’t Heal was called “one of the year’s very best albums” by Rolling Stone.

Making a very different brand of hip-hop are Kneecap, who rap in both English and Irish about the aftermath of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

The trio, who use the stage names Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí, released their second album earlier this year alongside a “mostly true” movie depicting their origin story.

Representing London’s rap scene is Croydon-born Pozer, whose debut single Kitchen Stove has been streamed more than 30 million times on Spotify since February.

After a period when solo artists were in the ascendance, this year’s longlist has a healthy showing for bands, who occupy five of the 11 spots.

They include UK pop-rock duo Good Neighbours, who tap into a rich vein of feelgood nostalgia on tracks like Home and Daisies; and Australian electro-pop outfit Confidence Man, already known for their theatrically-choreographed (and fantastically fun) stage shows.

There’s a second Mercury Prize winner on the list in the shape of Leeds band English Teacher.

Combining art-rock angularity with biting social satire, their debut album This Could Be Texas was called “one of the finest debuts of the decade” by indie publication The Line Of Best Fit.

Edinburgh producer Barry Can’t Swim also makes the longlist, following a summer of huge festival appearances that saw crowds swoon to his upbeat, elegaic brand of dance music.

The list is completed by rising singer-songwriter Myles Smith, who scored a top 10 hit with the gospel-infused pop hit Stargazing earlier this year; and US guitar prodigy Mk.gee (pronounced “ma-ghee”), whose debut album Two Star & The Dream Police has quietly become a word of mouth success.

The musician, born Michael Gordon, who’s been championed by Frank Ocean, recently made his debut on US comedy institution Saturday Night Live.

Now in its 23rd year, the Sound Of list has tipped everyone from Stormzy and Dua Lipa to Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga for success.

This year’s nominees may be more recognisable than previous acts were at this stage in their careers.

That’s down to a change in the eligibility criteria that recognises the difficulties of achieving crossover success in the streaming era.

To qualify, artists could not have had more than two UK top 10 albums or two UK top 10 singles by 30 September 2024.

The winner will be announced in the New Year, with the top five revealed in reverse order between Monday 6 and Friday 10 January.

Radio 1 will also host a special concert with performances from artists on the longlist on Monday 2 December.

The application for tickets is now open on the BBC Shows and Tours website.

The concert will be hosted by Sian Eleri and Jack Saunders, who said the 2025 longlist was “one of the strongest in a while”.

“It’s a reflection of the freedom artists are feeling creatively at the moment. Can’t wait to see who the top five are!”

US House Speaker Mike Johnson has backed plans to ban transgender women from using female bathrooms on Capitol Hill.

“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” Johnson said in a statement on Wednesday. He said the new rule would be enforceable in the Capitol and in House office buildings.

It comes after his Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace, introduced a bill to enact a ban following the election of Sarah McBride, the first-ever openly transgender lawmaker.

In a statement, McBride said she was not elected “to fight about bathrooms”.

“I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” McBride said, adding that she would follow the new regulations from Speaker Johnson, “even if I disagree with them”.

“This effort to distract from the real issues facing this country hasn’t distracted me,” the incoming Democratic representative said.

Many of McBride’s fellow Democrats issued sharper rebukes of the change, including Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.

“There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone,” Fetterman wrote on X.

Others have accused Mace of bullying a fellow member of Congress.

“This is your priority, that you want to bully a member of Congress, as opposed to welcoming her to join this body so all of us can work together to get things done and deliver real results for the American people?” Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said.

• Sarah McBride becomes first transgender Congress member
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• The moment I decided my vote

The new rule will apply to all single-sex facilities in Capitol and House office facilities, including changing rooms and locker rooms. House representatives all have their own bathrooms and unisex bathrooms are available in parts of the Capitol Hill complex.

The House Speaker, Johnson in this case, has control of facilities within the chamber and therefore has the authority to issue the policy surrounding bathrooms.

Mace earlier said the measure was intended to target McBride, telling reporters on Tuesday it was “absolutely and then some” a response to her new colleague.

“This is about women and our right to privacy, our right to safety,” she said. “I’m not going to allow biological men into women’s private spaces.”

On Wednesday Mace introduced an additional bill that would bar transgender women from “women’s private spaces” across all federal property.

Mace, first elected in 2020, first campaigned as a moderate Republican in a competitive South Carolina district.

In a 2021 article in the Washington Examiner, which is still available on her official website, Mace said she “strongly supports LGBTQ rights and equality”.

“No one should be discriminated against,” she wrote.

She has faced criticism from the socially conservative wing of her party for her moderation on abortion, and her push to increase contraception access nationwide.

Asked about any contradiction between Mace’s present actions and her past statements, her spokeswoman Gabrielle Lipsky reiterated support for the ban and said: “We support gay marriage, voted for the respect for marriage act twice. If you think protecting women is discrimination, you are the problem.”

Over the past two years, Republicans in Washington DC and across state capitols have focused on transgender issues, including seeking to limit access to gender-related surgery for minors and to bar transgender athletes from female-only sports categories.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump said transgender students should be allowed to use whichever bathroom “they feel is appropriate”, but he reversed his stance after facing Republican criticism.

In the last stretch of his most recent campaign, Trump and his fellow Republicans narrowed in on opposing transgender rights, spending $215m (£170m) on related advertising, according to tracking firm AdImpact.

According to AP VoteCast, a survey of some 120,000 people who cast ballots in November’s election, more than half of voters said support for transgender rights had gone too far.

But it is unclear to what extent the issue actually drove voters to cast their ballot, as polls suggest it ranked lower among voter priorities than the economy, immigration, democracy and other key policy areas.

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani has been charged with fraud in the US, which has accused him of orchestrating a $250m (£198m) bribery scheme and concealing it to raise money in the US.

The criminal charges, filed on Wednesday in New York, are the latest blow to 62-year-old Mr Adani, one of Asia’s richest men, whose business empire extends from ports and airports to renewable energy.

In the indictment, prosecutors alleged the tycoon and other senior executives had agreed to the payments to Indian officials to win contracts for his renewable energy company expected to yield more than $2bn in profits over 20 years.

The Adani Group has denied the allegations, calling them “baseless”.

“All possible legal recourse will be sought,” it said in a statement.

Shares of Adani Enterprises, the group’s flagship firm, closed down 22% on Thursday. Other group firms also closed in the red. Adani Green Energy, which is the firm at the centre of the allegations, said it wouldn’t proceed with a $600m bond offering.

The conglomerate has been operating under a cloud since 2023, when US short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report accusing it of decades of “brazen” stock manipulation and accounting fraud.

The claims, which Mr Adani denied, prompted a major market sell-off and an investigation by India’s market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi).

Later, Hindenburg also accused Sebi’s chief Madhabi Puri Buch of having links with off-shore funds used by the Adani group – both Ms Buch and the group have denied this.

But the US indictment is one of the biggest challenges the group has faced. Apart from Mr Adani there are seven other defendants, including his nephew.

Reports of the bribery probe into the company have been circulating for months.

Prosecutors said the US started investigating the company in 2022, and found the inquiry obstructed.

They allege that executives raised $3bn in loans and bonds, including from US firms, on the backs of false and misleading statements related to the firm’s anti-bribery practices and policies, as well as reports of the bribery probe.

“As alleged, the defendants orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars and… lied about the bribery scheme as they sought to raise capital from U.S. and international investors,” US Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement announcing the charges.

“My office is committed to rooting out corruption in the international marketplace and protecting investors from those who seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the integrity of our financial markets,” he added.

On several occasions Mr Adani met personally with government officials to advance the bribery scheme, officials said.

The US Attorney positions in the US are appointed by the president. The filing comes just weeks after Donald Trump won election to the White House, pledging to overhaul the US Justice Department.

After Trump won, Mr Adani had congratulated him on social media and pledged last week to invest $10bn in the US.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, called the charges a “body blow” to the tycoon.

“For the last nearly two years, Mr Adani has been trying to rehabilitate his image, and [trying] to show that those earlier fraud allegations levelled by the Hindenburg group were not true, and his company and his businesses had actually been doing quite well,” he told the BBC’s Business Today programme.

But it might be harder for the billionaire, he said, to “shake off” the allegations made by US authorities.

US investment firm GQG Partners LLC, which has invested nearly $10bn in the Adani Group, has said that it is “monitoring the charges” and may take “appropriate” actions for its portfolios.

Moody’s Ratings said that the indictment was a “credit negative” for the group’s firms.

“Our main focus when assessing Adani Group is on the ability of the group’s companies to access capital to meet their liquidity requirements and on its governance practices,” it said.

The issue has also set off a political storm in India.

Mr Adani is a close ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has long faced claims from opposition politicians alleging that he has benefited from his political ties, which he denies.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi demanded in a press conference that Mr Adani should be arrested and that Ms Buch should be removed from her position as Sebi chief. He accused Modi of protecting the businessman.

Modi and the government have not commented on the issue yet. Sambit Patra, a leader of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), dismissed the accusations against Modi and said that it was up to the Adani Group to “issue a statement and defend itself”.

“The law will take its course,” he said.

Opposition parties have long demanded a joint parliamentary investigation into the Hindenburg allegations against the Adani Group. They are expected to raise the issue when the winter session of parliament begins next week.

Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) have issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and former defence minister, as well as the military commander of Hamas.

A statement said a pre-trial chamber had rejected Israel’s challenges to the court’s jurisdiction and issued warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

A warrant was also issued for Mohammed Deif of Hamas, although Israel has said he was killed in an air strike in Gaza in July.

The judges said there were “reasonable grounds” the three men bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas. Both Israel and Hamas have rejected the allegations.

The Israeli prime minister’s office condemned the ICC’s decision as “antisemitic”, while Hamas said the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant set an “important historical precedent”.

The impact of these warrants will in part depend on whether the ICC’s 124 member states – which do not include Israel or its ally, the United States – decide to enforce them or not.

Netanyahu’s most recent overseas trip was to the US in July. Last year, he visited several other countries, including the UK.

The ICC has been part of the global justice system since 2002. It has the authority to prosecute those accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes on the territory of states party to the Rome Statute, its founding treaty.

Israel is not a member of the ICC and rejects its jurisdiction, but the court ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction over the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza because the UN’s secretary general had accepted the Palestinians’ accession to the Rome Statute.

In May, the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan sought warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, Deif and two other Hamas leaders who have since been killed, Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.

Although Israel believes Deif is dead, the chamber said it had been notified by the ICC prosecution that it was not in a position to determine whether he was killed or remained alive.

The prosecutor’s case against them stems from the events of 7 October 2023, when Hamas gunmen attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages.

Israel responded to the attack by launching a military campaign to eliminate Hamas, during which at least 44,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

For Deif, the chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that he was “responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other form of sexual violence; as well as the war crimes of murder, cruel treatment, torture; taking hostages; outrages upon personal dignity; and rape and other form of sexual violence”.

It also said there were reasonable grounds to believe the crimes against humanity were “part of a widespread and systematic attack directed by Hamas and other armed groups against the civilian population of Israel”.

For Netanyahu and Gallant, who was replaced as defence minister earlier this month, the chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that they “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.

It also found reasonable grounds to believe that “each bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population”.

The Israeli prime minister’s office said Israel “utterly rejects the false and absurd charges of the International Criminal Court”.

It condemned the ICC’s decision as antisemitic and “a modern Dreyfus trial” that would “end the same way” – a reference to the wrongful conviction of a Jewish army officer on trumped-up treason charges in 19th Century France that triggered a national crisis.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not give in to pressure. He will continue to pursue all the objectives that Israel set out to achieve in its just war against Hamas and the Iranian axis of terror,” it added.

There was no immediate reaction from Gallant. But in May he strongly rejected the ICC prosecutor’s arrest warrant requests, saying they had drawn a “despicable” parallel between Israel and Hamas and had attempted to deny his country’s right to self-defence.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog called the chamber’s decision “outrageous”, and said the ICC had “turned universal justice into a universal laughing stock”.

“The decision has chosen the side of terror and evil over democracy and freedom, and turned the very system of justice into a human shield for Hamas’ crimes against humanity,” he added.

Hamas welcomed the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, saying that it “constitutes an important historical precedent, and a correction to a long path of historical injustice against our people”.

It also called on countries around the world to enforce the warrants and work to stop what it called “the crimes of genocide against defenceless civilians in the Gaza Strip”.

Israel has vehemently denied that its forces are committing genocide against Palestinian in Gaza.

Australian teen Bianca Jones has become the fourth tourist to have died in a suspected mass poisoning in Laos.

The 19-year-old’s family confirmed her death to the media on Thursday. Hours earlier, the US State Department told the media that an American man died in the tourist town of Vang Vieng.

Two Danish women, aged 19 and 20, also died last week in Laos, Danish authorities confirmed, declining to share more due to confidentiality concerns.

The deaths remain under police investigation, but news reports and testimonies online from other tourists suggest they may have consumed drinks laced with methanol, a deadly substance often found in bootleg alcohol.

Vang Vieng is a small, riverside town in central Laos and a hub for young Westerners backpacking across Southeast Asia. It’s home to the Banana Pancake Trail – a popular backpacking route spanning Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Jones’s friend Holly Bowles is in hospital on life support, while a British woman is also reportedly in hospital.

New Zealand’s foreign ministry told local media on Thursday that one of its citizens was also unwell from suspected methanol poisoning. And the Netherlands’ foreign affairs ministry said that a Dutch tourist was sent to the hospital but is in stable condition. It is unclear how many others have fallen ill.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the department of foreign affairs had confirmed Jones’s death.

“Our first thoughts in this moment are with her family and friends who are grieving a terrible and cruel loss,” Albanese said on Thursday afternoon.

“This is every parent’s very worst fear and a nightmare that no one should have to endure.”

He said he hoped Ms Bowles, who is currently at Bangkok Hospital, would recover well.

The US State Department said it was “closely monitoring” the situation with regards to the American victim, adding that it was up to local authorities to determine the cause of death.

Australian, New Zealand and UK authorities have each warned their citizens to be careful of methanol poisoning when consuming alcohol in Laos.

Nana Backpacker Hostel, where the two Australian women stayed in Vang Vieng, told the BBC that it was closed for police investigation.

The hostel’s manager told the Associated Press that the two women were among more than 100 guests who received free shots of Lao vodka from the hostel. The pair then headed out for the night, he said, adding that no other guests reported health issues.

The manager said he hoped the investigation would clear the hostel’s name, but said they have stopped giving free shots for now.

In a statement to Australian newspaper the Herald Sun, Jones’s family expressed their “deepest gratitude for the overwhelming support, love, and prayers we’ve received from across Australia”.

“We kindly ask for privacy as we navigate through our grief and begin to heal,” the statement said.

Unlike ethanol, the key component of alcoholic beverages, methanol is toxic to humans. Bootleg liquor producers sometimes add it to their drinks, however, as a cheap way to increase alcohol content.

Earlier this year, at least 57 people in India died after consuming methanol-laced liquor. Similar cases of mass poisoning have also been reported across the world, from the Philippines to Peru. It has hospitalised and even killed dozens in Indonesia over the years, but it has rarely affected tourists.

High-tech equipment made by a UK firm worth $2.1m (£1.6m) has been sold to companies in Russia connected to the military, customs documents seen by BBC News suggest.

The documents indicate the British-made camera lenses were shipped by a company registered in Kyrgyzstan, apparently run by a swimwear model.

The UK manufacturer, Beck Optronic Solutions, which has worked on British Challenger 2 tanks and F35 fighter jets, told us it had not breached sanctions, had no dealings with Russia or Kyrgyzstan, and was unaware of the shipments.

Our investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of sanctions imposed on Russia since the war in Ukraine began.

The trail led us to Valeria Baigascina, a 25-year-old, originally from the central Asian state of Kazakhstan but now living in Belarus. A part-time model, she posts regularly about her jet-set lifestyle on social media. In the past two years she has visited Dubai, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

Her social media gave no indication she was also the director of a firm which had channelled millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to sanctioned companies in Russia, as our search of customs documents revealed.

According to Belarusian registration details, Ms Baigascina was the founder and director of a company called Rama Group LLC. Set up in February 2023, it is registered to an address in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan – 2,300 miles (3,713 km) from her home in Belarus.

Both countries are former Soviet states with strong trading links to Russia. Belarus remains Moscow’s strongest ally in Europe.

Trade data shows that since sanctions on Russia were introduced in February 2022, UK exports to Kyrgyzstan have increased by more than 300%. Experts suspect some goods are actually destined for Moscow.

The customs documents obtained by the BBC suggest that Rama Group made two shipments to Moscow of high-end optics that can be used in missiles, tanks and aircraft.

The equipment is listed on the customs form as being made by Beck Optronic Solutions in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. The company manufactures high-precision lenses used in targeting and surveillance systems.

Though some of its lenses are used in healthcare and engineering, Beck’s website details extensive military and defence applications.

The lenses and optical technology sold by Beck Optronics are specifically listed as goods that either cannot be legally exported to Russia, or that need permission from UK authorities before any sale can take place.

The BBC has identified, through customs documents, a total of six shipments of products said to have been made by Beck with a total value of $2.1m (£1.6m) and transferred to Moscow through Rama and another intermediary company, Shisan LLC.

In December 2023 and January 2024, Rama Group made its two shipments to Moscow listing them as “rotating part of camera”. These shipments went to Sol Group, a company based in Smolensk, 200 miles (320km) south-west of Moscow, which has been sanctioned by the US.

It is not clear what international route the goods took – the documents indicate some of the shipments may actually have originated in Thailand.

Shisan LLC, another Kyrgyz company, was responsible for four further shipments of Beck Optronics’ products worth $1.5m (£1.1m).

Two of those shipments involved “short-wave infrared camera lens” and went to the Ural Optical & Mechanical Plant, which makes bomb-aiming equipment and is also sanctioned because of its links to the Russian military.

Rama Group and Shisan share the same address in Bishkek – a modern five-storey block in a prosperous part of the city. However, when we visited we were told Valeria Baigascina was out of the country on a business trip.

We found her number through her social media posts and put our allegations to her.

Ms Baigascina said she was the founder of the company but had sold it in May. She denied the allegations, saying that when she had owned it, “nothing like that was supplied”. She then hung up.

Later, by email, she told us the accusations were “ridiculous” and based on “false information”.

Our research shows that in May this year she sold Rama Group to her best friend, Angelina Zhurenko, who runs a lingerie business in Kazakhstan.

Ms Zhurenko told us: “Trading activities are carried out exclusively within the framework of the current legislation of Kyrgyzstan. The company does not violate any prohibitions. Any other information is false.”

The director of the other intermediary company, Shisan, is listed as Evgeniy Anatolyevich Matveev. We put our allegations to him by email.

He told us that our information was “false” and that he ran “a business supplying exclusively civilian goods manufactured in Asian countries”.

He continued: “This does not contradict the laws of the state in which I work, and has nothing to do with US sanctions, because it is impossible to prohibit free trade in Asian goods available for sale and delivery.”

There’s no evidence that Beck Optronics knew about these shipments or that the final destination of the lenses was Russia.

The company told us it had nothing to do with the shipments: “Beck has not shipped anything contrary to UK export controls or any sanctions applying in the UK. It has had no dealings with any party or company in Russia, Kyrgyzstan or Thailand, was not aware that any shipments might ultimately be destined for any of these destinations and has not shipped anything to these destinations.”

It believes some of the equipment listed wasn’t even made by the company and that customs documents may have been falsified.

But these alleged exports are part of a much bigger picture involving shipments from a number of sources.

Analysis of customs documents by the Washington-based security think tank C4ADS suggest that Shisan completed 373 shipments via Kyrgyzstan to Russia between July and December 2023.

Of these, 288 contained goods that fall under customs codes for “high-priority battlefield items”.

Over the same six-month period, Rama Group completed a total of 1,756 shipments to Russia. Of these, 1,355 were for items on the “high-priority battlefield items” list.

Its most recent shipments, including electronics by US and UK companies, went to a Russian company named Titan-Mikro, which has been subject to US sanctions since May 2023 for operating within Russia’s military sector.

“When they sell this technology to a client who is potentially a Russian end-user, they fully should understand that this is to kill people,” says Olena Tregub from NAKO, Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption organisation.

She warns that the holes in the sanctions regime are costing lives.

“Without those technologies, those weapons would not fly. The brain of those ballistic missiles, the brain of those kamikaze drones, are made of Western technology,” she says.

International authorities are aware of Kyrgyzstan’s role in sanctions evasion.

In April, UK’s foreign secretary at the time, David Cameron, travelled to Bishkek and urged the Kyrgyz authorities to do more to tighten their sanctions’ compliance.

The Kyrgyz president expressed confidence that Lord Cameron’s official visit to his country would “give new impetus to multifaceted co-operation between Kyrgyzstan and the UK”.

David O’Sullivan, the EU’s Special Envoy for the Implementation of Sanctions told us that efforts continue to shut down “illicit procurement networks”, and that “companies are required to undertake due diligence checks to understand who is the final end-user and where ‘battlefield items’ end up ultimately”.

A 43-year-old man was fatally shot by police in Las Vegas after he called 911 for help while fighting off an intruder in his home.

The family of Brandon Durham, including his 15-year-old daughter who was hiding in a nearby room, have asked for the officer to be fired.

Mr Durham’s teenage daughter said she was “disgusted” with Las Vegas police as they treated him like “the suspect” not “the victim”.

A lawyer for Alexander Bookman, the officer who shot Mr Durham, said he committed no crimes.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said Mr Bookman, 26, had been placed on paid administrative leave while they conduct an internal review of the 12 November incident.

Mr Durham had called 911 to report that two people were shooting outside and were trying to break into his home, police said.

Officers responding to the report found cars with broken windows outside.

They also noticed damage to the house and heard shouting from inside, police said, prompting Mr Bookman to kick down the front door to enter.

Body camera footage released by the police shows Mr Bookman walking through the home with his gun drawn, while screaming and banging can be heard out of view.

• Video shows Illinois police fatally shoot woman in her home

Turning the corner of an L-shaped hallway, the officer finds a shirtless Mr Durham wrestling over a knife with a woman wearing a ski mask, later identified as 31-year-old Alejandra Boudreaux.

Mr Bookman yells, “hey, drop the knife, drop the knife”, seconds before firing a shot that hit Mr Durham and sent him and Ms Boudreaux to the ground.

Mr Bookman then fires five more shots at Mr Durham and says “put your hands up”, body-worn camera footage released by police showed.

Mr Durham was pronounced dead at the scene. Ms Boudreaux was arrested and charged with four counts, including home invasion with a deadly weapon.

“I am disgusted in how the Metropolitan Police told my father, after killing him, to stay down,” Mr Durham’s daughter told local news. “I’m disgusted that the Metropolitan Police will allow me to live fatherless for the rest of my life.”

The family’s lawyer has asked for an immediate arrest warrant for Mr Bookman.

“Unlike a civil case, in which an individual’s negligence is at issue, criminal cases require proof of a person’s criminal intent,” David Roger, general counsel for the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, said in a statement to CNN. “While Mr. Durham’s death is tragic, Officer Bookman was doing his job and did not intend to commit a crime.”

Citing a police report, local news outlets said Mr Durham and Ms Boudreaux were previously in a romantic relationship.

Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren said police did not find a gun on the scene, despite multiple reports of shots fired.

The incident brought police shootings back into the spotlight, occurring just days before the justice department opened an investigation into the death of Sonya Massey, who was fatally shot in July by an officer inside her home in Illinois.

Maurizio Cattelan’s provocative artwork of a banana duct-taped to a wall has fetched $6.2m (£4.9m) at Sotheby’s in New York – four times higher than pre-sale estimates.

The auction house says Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun outbid six other rivals to get the “Comedian” installation of the Italian visual artist on Wednesday.

“In the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience,” Mr Sun was quoted as saying.

The taped banana – now perhaps one of the most expensive fruits ever sold – was actually bought earlier in the day for a mere $0.35, according to the New York Times.

“Comedian” was first unveiled to the public in 2019, instantly becoming a viral sensation and also provoking heated debates about what art is.

The installation – which has travelled around the world – comes with instructions on how to replace the banana whenever it rots.

In fact, the fruit has been eaten not once, but twice.

In 2023, a South Korean art student helped himself when the installation went on display at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art.

The museum later placed a new banana in the same spot, local media reported.

Four years earlier, a performance artist pulled the banana from the wall after the artwork was sold for $120,000 at Art Basel in Miami.

The banana was swiftly replaced, and no further action was taken.

Justin Sun runs the Tron blockchain network, which facilitates some cryptocurrency transactions. Last year the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused him of fraud, saying he had falsely inflated trading volumes of TRX, Tron’s crypto token. Mr Sun denies the charges.

An 18-year-old Briton faces up to 20 years in a Dubai prison for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old British girl while the pair were on holiday in the emirate, a human rights campaigner has said.

Marcus Fakana, of Tottenham, north London, was on holiday with his family when he began a secretive holiday romance in September with another Londoner, who has since turned 18, according to Radha Stirling, of campaign group Detained in Dubai.

After returning home and seeing pictures and chats, the girl’s mother reported the relationship to Dubai police, who then arrested Mr Fakana at his hotel, Ms Stirling said.

The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) London embassy has been asked for comment.

A UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) spokesperson said: “We are supporting a British man in the UAE and are in contact with his family.”

Ms Stirling, the founder and chief executive of Detained in Dubai, which helps foreigners abroad and is an international authority on UAE law, said Mr Fakana and his parents were “extremely distressed” by the events.

She added his parents, who work as a cleaner and in a warehouse, “don’t know what to do” and have had to return to London without their son to resume work.

She said: “It’s a unique case in that it’s the first one we’ve brought to the media where it’s a British citizen and where the age difference is so small.”

Ms Stirling continued: “We are not talking about any abuse or taking advantage of anyone.

“This is clearly just a case of two older teenagers, both of them now the same age, who have been caught up because a mother reported the behaviour.”

She added: “This has gone absolutely viral and people just don’t think it’s fair.

“They are shocked that something that is absolutely legal in the UK could warrant 20 years in prison [in Dubai].

“That would ruin their their son’s life, the whole family’s lives. Is that worth it?”

Detained in Dubai was set up in 2008 and says it has contacted Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who is also Mr Fakana’s MP.

Ms Stirling added: “UAE targets westerners for tourism, offers cheap flights, takes out expensive PR agents and marketing in newspapers but there’s very little warning us about what what can happen to us if we go to Dubai.

“What sort of crimes can we be arrested for? Because if you look at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) website, it’s nowhere near thorough enough.”

The FCDO website guidance states: “Consensual sexual relationships between a male and female outside marriage are generally legal as long as both are over the age of 18 years.

“This includes extra-marital sexual relationships.

“If a person aged 18 or over has a sexual relationship with a person under 18 years old, they will be prosecuted for having a sexual relationship with a minor.”

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has demanded Google sells Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser.

It is one of a series of remedies proposed by the DOJ in a court filing late on Wednesday aimed at stopping the tech giant from maintaining its monopoly in online search.

Government lawyers also recommended that District Judge Amit Mehta force the firm to stop entering into contracts with companies – including Apple and Samsung – that make its search engine the default on many smartphones and browsers.

The proposed remedies stem from a landmark anti-competition ruling in August, in which Judge Mehta found Google illegally crushed its competition in online search.

The Department of Justice was joined in the filing by a group of US states that argued the changes will help to open up a monopolised market.

“Restoring competition to the markets for general search and search text advertising as they exist today will require reactivating the competitive process that Google has long stifled,” the government lawyers wrote.

In response, Google said that with its proposals, the DOJ “chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership.”

“[The] DOJ’s wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Court’s decision,” said Kent Walker, president of global affairs at Google.

“It would break a range of Google products — even beyond Search — that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives.”

Google is expected to counter with its own proposed remedies by 20 December.

Judge Mehta is set to issue a decision by the summer of 2025.

Google’s search engine accounts for about 90% of all online searches globally, according to web traffic analysis platform Statcounter.

Government attorneys also said that Google’s ownership and control of the Chrome browser – along with the Android operating system – have allowed it to funnel users to its search engine.

Part of the proposal included barring Google from re-entering the browser market for five years.

The DOJ also proposed court oversight of Android to ensure the company refrains from using its ecosystem to “favour its general search services and search text ad monopolies.”

The DOJ case against Google was filed in the closing months of the first administration of Donald Trump.

With the President-elect set to return to the White House on 20 January, questions have been raised about whether his new administration would take a different approach to the case.

“It would be odd for the second Trump administration to back off a lawsuit that they filed themselves,” said Rebecca Allensworth, associate dean for research and anti-trust professor at Vanderbilt Law School.

Even if Trump sought to stop the case from proceeding, which Prof Allensworth said is unlikely, the states listed as plaintiffs could proceed on their own.

“So, given that, they can’t make it go away,” she said. “I think that the federal government will stay on it but just how hard they’ll push and what they’ll ask for, I think, is really uncertain.”

The proposed changes could play an important role in restoring competition to the online search market, according to Professor Laura Phillips-Sawyer of the University of Georgia School of Law.

The user data that Google secured because of its dominance in search helped “refine Google’s search algorithm and sell text ads,” Professor Phillips-Sawyer said.

“But, those contracts also make it impossible for any newcomer in search to secure a distribution channel, and without any real possibility of reaching consumers, no one will invest in such innovation.”

She says if Mehta accepts the governments proposals, competitors to Google – including new entrants – may have the chance to thrive.

At least 38 people – including women and children – have been killed after unidentified gunmen opened fire on a convoy of 200 passenger vehicles traveling through a remote area of Pakistan.

The vehicles were attacked as they travelled through the tribal district of Kurram in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border, according to the area’s deputy police commissioner.

The gunmen initially targeted the convoy’s police escort, the provincial spokesman said in a statement.

Police were protecting the convoy following months of sectarian violence in the area, which has claimed dozens of lives this year.

Nadeem Aslam Chaudhry, the chief secretary of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told Reuters news agency Thursday’s attack was “a major tragedy”, with the death toll “likely to rise”. At least 11 people were injured, he said.

Saeeda Bano – who was in the middle of the convoy – described to BBC Urdu how she feared she would be killed as she hid under the car seats with her children during the attack.

When the gunfire finally stopped after several minutes, she saw injured people and bodies lying in the road.

Details of exactly what happened are still emerging, but Javed ullah Mehsud, a senior administration official, told AFP “approximately 10 attackers” were involved, “firing indiscriminately from both sides of the road”.

Women and children had hidden in nearby houses, while police hunted for the attackers, he added.

Most the passengers travelling in the convoy through the mountainous area were Shia, he said in an earlier statement.

Sunni and Shiite Muslim tribes have clashed repeatedly this year. An earlier series of attacks ended after a tribal council called for a ceasefire, according to Reuters news agency.

Then last month, there was another attack on passenger vehicles along a road in the region which killed 15 people.

The road Thursday’s convoy was travelling along had only reopened in recent days, with travel limited to convoys with police protection.

Sectarian violence is often linked to land disputes in the region.

However, Kurram, in Pakistan’s north-west, also borders several Afghan provinces which are home to anti-Shia militant groups, including the Islamic State group and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

The family of renowned pandemic fundraiser Captain Sir Tom Moore damaged public trust in charities by refusing to donate any of the £1.4m received from his book deal, a long-awaited report has found.

The Charity Commission said his daughter and son-in-law displayed a “pattern of behaviour” in which they benefited personally from the Captain Tom Foundation and people “would understandably feel misled”.

The World War Two veteran became a household name during the first Covid-19 lockdown, by walking up and down his driveway in Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire.

The £38.9m raised by Capt Sir Tom for NHS Charities Together, as a result of his efforts, did not form part of the commission’s inquiry, and all of that sum went to NHS charities.

Capt Sir Tom’s family said they had been treated “unfairly and unjustly”.

“The charity set up in his name has not lived up to that legacy of others before self,” said Charity Commission chief executive David Holdsworth.

“The public – and the law – rightly expect those involved in charities to make an unambiguous distinction between their personal interests, and those of the charity and the beneficiaries they are there to serve.”

Mr Holdsworth said there were repeated instances of a “blurring of boundaries between private and charitable interests” and that Hannah and Colin Ingram-Moore benefited significantly.

“Together the failings amount to misconduct and/or mismanagement,” he said.

He added its report had found “repeated failures of governance and integrity”, and that its inquiry had been fair, balanced and independent.

The commission concluded, however, that the actions of the family did not represent criminal behaviour and it had not passed its findings to police.

Paul Latham, the director of communications at the Charity Commission, told the BBC: “We haven’t seen evidence of a crime. If we do, we have very close relations with the police and of course, would do so.

“There is a high bar for criminal offences and we have not identified that.”

In July 2023, the Captain Tom Foundation announced it was not actively seeking donations or making payments, but the foundation has not been closed down.

The Captain Tom Foundation was registered as a grant-making charity two months after the veteran’s walk began, and celebrities including David Beckham and Dame Judi Dench later helped to promote its various fundraisers.

The father-of-two died aged 100 in February 2021, with coronavirus.

His son-in-law Mr Ingram-Moore became a trustee of the foundation that same month, and Capt Sir Tom’s daughter – Mrs Ingram-Moore – became interim chief executive later that year.

The couple’s roles came into question in June 2022, when the commission launched a statutory inquiry to determine if they had benefited privately at the charity’s expense.

The regulator’s findings showed that Club Nook, a private firm set up by the Ingram-Moores in April 2020, was paid an advance of £1.47m for Capt Sir Tom’s three books, including his best-selling autobiography, Tomorrow Will be a Good Day.

The publisher Penguin, and promoter Carver PR, said the family gave repeated assurances that part of the advance would be used to set up and fund the foundation.

In addition, a press release, various marketing materials and the prologue of Capt Sir Tom’s memoir, all stated that the books would be used to support or raise money for the foundation.

However, to date the charity has not received any money from the publishing agreement.

In 2022, the commission said the inquiry twice asked Mr and Mrs Ingram-Moore to “rectify matters by making a donation to charity” but “on both occasions they declined”.

The publications were “a purely commercial endeavour” and “had damaged public trust” in charities, the report concluded.

Between 2020 and 2021, Capt Sir Tom acted as a judge for the Virgin Media Local Legends Awards and was personally paid £10,000.

The following year, his daughter was approached to be a judge and signed an ambassador agreement with Virgin Media O2 while chief executive of the Captain Tom Foundation, for which she was paid £18,000.

The subsequent Virgin Media O2 Captain Tom Foundation Connector Awards included the charity’s logo on its awards plaque.

She had already been made interim chief executive at the charity, on an annual salary of £85,000.

However, the report said there was no record that she informed the charity trustees when she entered into the financial arrangement with Virgin Media.

The commission said it did not agree with Mrs Ingram-Moore’s assertion the work was undertaken in a personal capacity.

It found this created a conflict of interest, and her failure to avoid or manage this situation “amounted to misconduct and-or mismanagement”, adding this also meant the payment she received was an “unauthorised benefit” to her husband, who was a trustee at the time.

In 2021, the Ingram-Moores received approval from the council to build a Captain Tom Foundation building beside their home, after referencing the charity’s name and number “numerous times” in the planning application.

However, the resulting building, which contained a spa pool and home cinema, was described by council enforcement officer Richard Proctor as “wholly unauthorised” and the family was forced to demolish it in February.

The Charity Commission found the couple failed to consult the trustees about the spa complex, which suggested “they were using the charity and its name inappropriately for their private benefit”.

The Ingram-Moores told the inquiry the inclusion of the charity’s name in the initial planning application was an error, claiming they were busy with “global media work” at the time, but they did intend to use the building for charitable purposes.

Other findings contained in the report showed:

• Mrs Ingram-Moore was “very much involved in discussions around setting her salary” and said to trustee Stephen Jones that “her expectations were in the region of £150,000 per annum”. Her claim that she was not offered a six-figure salary was described as “disingenuous” by the inquiry
• She “purposely” removed the conflicts of interest clause from her employment contract with the charity, telling Mr Jones: “This is not a legal requirement… I will not be doing anything to conflict with all my roles but I cannot be in a position to request authority at every turn, my life would grind to a halt.”
• Since the Ingram-Moores’ company, Club Nook, owned the Capt Sir Tom trademarks, trustees had to consult with them when it wanted to use his name for charity purposes, including by asking for permission to sell printed mugs

In July, Mr and Mrs Ingram-Moore were disqualified from being a trustee or holding a senior management position in charities for a period of eight and 10 years respectively.

Mr Holdsworth urged the Ingram-Moores to “follow through on the commitment that was made and donate a substantial amount to the charity”.

He said it was up to the remaining trustee whether to take legal action and the Commission “stood ready to provide advice as they considered that”.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Captain Tom Foundation said it was “pleased with the Charity Commission’s unequivocal findings regarding the Ingram-Moores’ misconduct”.

“We join The Charity Commission in imploring the Ingram-Moores to rectify matters by returning the funds due to the Foundation, so that they can be donated to well-deserving charities as intended by the late Captain Sir Tom Moore.

“We hope they do so immediately and without the need for further action”, the spokesperson added.

Responding to the Commission’s report, the Ingram-Moores said they had been treated “unfairly and unjustly”.

They said the two-year inquiry had taken a “serious toll” on the family’s health and described the process as “excessive”, adding that the charities watchdog had a “predetermined agenda”.

“True accountability demands transparency, not selective storytelling,” the statement said, adding that they “never took a penny” from public donations.