US Vice-President JD Vance and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy are hosting a meeting of senior security officials near London to discuss on the war in Ukraine.

Earlier on Saturday, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer had a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and said they agreed it would be a “vital forum to discuss progress towards securing a just and lasting peace”.

Zelensky has stressed he will make no territorial concessions to Russia ahead of a summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin next week to discuss the future of the war.

Trump earlier signalled Ukraine may have to cede territory to end the war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Saturday’s meeting is understood to be taking place at Chevening, Lammy’s official country residence in Kent, where Mr Vance and his family are currently staying, and to have been called at the request of the US.

Trump and Putin are set to meet in Alaska on 15 August to discuss the future of the war in Ukraine.

Speaking on a potential deal to end the war, Trump said on Friday that there “will be some swapping of territories, to the betterment of both”.

“You’re looking at territory that’s been fought over for three and a half years, a lot of Russians have died. A lot of Ukrainians have died,” the US president said.

Sacrificing land for peace has been the Trump position all along. Zelensky has always made clear that is unacceptable under Ukraine’s constitution and would only reward Russia for starting the war.

Zelensky said in a Telegram post on Saturday that “Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier”, and reiterated that Ukraine must be involved in any solution for peace.

He has also warned against the meeting not including Kyiv, saying in a statement on X on Saturday that decisions made without Ukraine “will not achieve anything”.

While Ukraine’s president has been careful not to criticise Trump, his post on social media makes clear that he will not accept it.

Zelensky on Saturday said that Ukraine is ready for “real solutions that can bring peace” but underlined that Ukraine needed to be involved.

“Any solutions that are against us, any solutions that are without Ukraine, are simultaneously solutions against peace,” he said.

“We are ready, together with President Trump, together with all partners, to work for a real, and most importantly, lasting peace – a peace that will not collapse because of Moscow’s wishes.”

This is what Ukraine, and many European allies, were always worried about – Trump and Putin trying to do a deal without Ukraine present.

Trump’s words on Russia may have hardened in recent months, but for Ukraine they have yet to be followed by tangible actions.

The US president’s deadline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire or face more sanctions has passed without any apparent consequences.

The BBC’s US partner CBS News, citing a senior White House official, reported that it remains possible Zelensky, could end up being involved in the meeting between Putin and Trump some way, as planning for the Friday meeting is still fluid.

On the ground there is a resignation that any initial peace talks may not include Ukraine.

Among soldiers and civilians the BBC spoke to there is a strong desire for peace. There is exhaustion from the constant fighting and Russian drone and missile attacks.

But there is little evidence that Ukraine is willing to accept a peace at any price – much less one that will be forced on it without its voice being heard.

A further 11 deaths resulting from malnutrition have been reported in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

That brings the total number of malnutrition-related deaths to 212, including 98 children.

At least 38 people have also been killed and 491 injured as a result of Israeli military activity over the past 24 hours, the health ministry said.

Deaths continue to rise amid reports that a deadline of 7 October 2025 has been set for residents to evacuate Gaza City following the announcement of a controversial Israeli plan to take control of the area.

The new plan, approved by the Israeli security cabinet and detailed on Friday, lists five “principles” for ending the war in Gaza, with one being “taking security control of the territory”.

Reports in Israeli media say the plan initially focuses on taking full control of Gaza City, relocating its estimated one million residents further south.

The plan has been met with criticism from world leaders as well as fierce opposition from some within Israel, including from military officials and the families of hostages still being held in Gaza who fear for their safety.

Israel has rejected criticism, with Defence Minister Israel Katz saying condemnation would “not weaken our resolve”.

The US has been less critical – with Donald Trump saying earlier in the week that it was “pretty much up to Israel” whether to fully occupy the Gaza Strip.

• What we know about Israel’s plan to take over Gaza City
• Watch: What Israel’s Gaza City takeover plan could mean for Palestinians
• Israel rejects international criticism of Gaza City takeover plan

Israeli media reports that the government has set a two-month deadline before a military siege of Gaza City to begin on 7 October 2025, the two-year anniversary of the beginning of the war.

Within those two months, Israel plans to forcibly displace the estimated one million Palestinians living in Gaza City, roughly half the number of people living in the entirety of the territory.

Gaza City is the capital of the Gaza Strip. Its pre-war population was estimated at around 600,000 people, but that number has grown significantly throughout the war as Israel’s military campaign has pushed Palestinians into the city.

Many living there now have already been displaced multiple times through the war and are living in tents or the ruins of buildings that have been partially destroyed by Israeli air strikes.

Israeli media reports that the military would move the population towards al-Mawasi, a vast tent encampment in the south of Gaza, already home to thousands of Palestinians suffering from an absence of basic facilities and sanitation.

The plan is being widely condemned by humanitarian agencies and indeed many of Israel’s allies for its potential to add untold human suffering onto the shoulders of an already exhausted and beleaguered people.

The move to take control of Gaza City will further complicate Palestinians’ ability to meet their basic needs for survival, as UN-backed global food security experts say the “worst-case scenario of famine” is already playing out.

The UN’s humanitarian agency said on Friday that the amount of aid entering Gaza continues to be “far below the minimum required to meet people’s immense needs”.

Israel has denied there is starvation in Gaza and accused UN agencies of not picking up aid at the borders and delivering it.

The UN’s humanitarian agency said it continues to see impediments and delays as it tries to collect aid from Israeli-controlled border zones.

Challenges in distributing aid persist as deaths of people trying to get food continue to be reported.

Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday that 21 people had been killed trying to get aid in the last 24 hours.

The UN reported earlier this month that 1,373 Palestinians have been killed seeking food since late May, when a new US and Israeli-backed organisation Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) set up aid distribution sites.

The UN said most were killed by the Israeli military, with 859 killed near GHF sites and 514 along the routes of food convoys. The GHF denies the UN’s figure.

Israel has accused Hamas of instigating chaos near the aid centres and says its forces do not intentionally open fire on civilians.

Israel does not allow the BBC and other news organisations to report independently from Gaza, making it difficult to verify.

In its announcement of the plan to conquer Gaza City, Israel’s prime minister’s office said it will provide “humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones”, but did not provide further information of what that might entail.

Like previous forced displacements throughout the war, the expulsion of Palestinians will likely see chaotic and dangerous scenes of families travelling by foot, by cart or by overloaded vehicles.

It has been reported that after the deadline of 7 October 2025, Israel’s military will lay siege to Gaza City and escalate its attacks. Hamas has pledged to fiercely resist Israel’s attempt to conquer the city.

We may also see similar scenes to what the military has done in Rafah, in Gaza’s south, and in northern towns, which were forcibly evacuated before being almost totally levelled in a systematic method.

If there are Hamas fighters holding Israeli hostages in Gaza City, then this period would prove the most deadly.

It is understood that Hamas has given orders to captors to kill hostages should Israeli military troops approach close to hiding locations.

An estimated 20 Israeli hostages remain alive in Gaza, some of whom are believed to be held around Gaza City.

Israel began its military offensive in Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

Since then, more than 61,300 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israeli military operations.

Multiple pro-women’s basketball games were interrupted in the past several days after sex toys were thrown onto courts, leaving players and coaches frustrated and fans puzzled.

Two of the instigators are now facing criminal charges and the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) has condemned such behaviour.

This week, members of a meme-coin group reportedly claimed responsibility for some of the incidents in which brightly coloured dildos were thrown onto the court or bench area during games.

Players and coaches are concerned about safety, and the meaning and hostility behind the incidents.

The game between the Atlanta Dream and the Chicago Sky was paused in the closing seconds Thursday night after a purple sex toy was tossed from the stands onto the court.

While individuals in the stands were reportedly questioned, no one was arrested. The WNBA has said any fan caught throwing sex toys onto the court would be banned from the league and would face prosecution.

The exact number of incidents is unclear because in some instances, items are thrown but do not reach the court or the bench.

“It’s super disrespectful,” Chicago Sky player Elizabeth Williams said after a similar incident last week. “I don’t really get the point of it. It’s really immature. Whoever is doing it needs to grow up.”

Minnesota Lynx Head Coach Cheryl Reeve called the increasing number of incidents a “distraction”.

“This has been going on for centuries,” she told reporters on Thursday. “The sexualization of women. This is the latest version of that. And it’s not funny and it should not be the butt of jokes on radio shows, or in print or any comments.”

On Tuesday, as the Indiana Fever played the Los Angeles Sparks, a green sex toy landed on the court near Indiana player Sophie Cunningham.

She had posted on social media days before, asking the culprits to stop throwing the objects saying, “you’re going to hurt one of us”.

“Everyone’s trying to make sure the W is not a joke and it’s taken seriously, and then that happens,” Cunningham said, on her podcast episode on Tuesday.

So far, two arrests have been made. In Atlanta, Delbert Carver, 23, was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, public indecency/indecent exposure, and criminal trespass after he was accused of throwing a sex toy at a game on 29 July.

The WNBA responded in a statement: “The safety and well-being of everyone in our arenas is a top priority for our league. Objects of any kind thrown onto the court or in the seating area can pose a safety risk for players, game officials, and fans.”

The second arrest was Kaden Lopez, 18, also accused of throwing a sex toy at a 5 August game in Phoenix and hitting a man watching the game on the head.

Since the incidents have increased, community members from a meme-coin called Green Dildo Coin have taken responsibility for some of the disruptions.

A spokesperson for the group told USA Today that members started throwing green sex toys to coincide with the launch of the meme-coin, which was created the day before the first incident. The group wanted to use the “viral stunts” to garner attention, they said.

“We didn’t do this because like we dislike women’s sports or, like, some of the narratives that are trending right now are ridiculous,” the spokesperson said anonymously in a Thursday article.

They added that the two arrested were not associated with the group.

While many of the incidents included green toys, some were other colours, indicating that not all of the incidents were linked to the meme-coin.

This searing biography of Prince Andrew crackles with scandals about sex and money on almost every page, two subjects that have always caused problems for the royals.

Andrew Lownie’s book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, is an unrelentingly unflattering portrait of Prince Andrew. It depicts him as arrogant, self-seeking and in denial about his links to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The author’s best-selling biographies have a habit of changing the reputation of famous figures, such as establishing the Nazi intrigues around the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII.

Although in the case of Entitled, he hasn’t so much cemented Prince Andrew’s reputation, as put it in concrete boots and thrown it in the river. It is hard to see how he might come back from this.

This account, more than 450 pages, is said to have taken four years to research, involving hundreds of interviews. And for anyone thinking they have heard much of this story before, it is the extra and sometimes unexpected, throwaway details that will make this a fascinating read.

Like comedian Billy Connolly and Sir Elton John being at Prince Andrew’s stag night. Or film maker Woody Allen being at the same dinner with Prince Andrew at Epstein’s house in Manhattan.

This detail tallies with a piece in the New York Times this week that quotes a birthday greeting written by Allen to Epstein, which references “even royalty” being at one of Epstein’s dinners.

To rapidly lose some mid-life weight, when he was going out with a younger woman, the book records that Prince Andrew lived on a crash diet of “stewed prunes for breakfast, raw vegetables for lunch and soup for supper”.

About their academic ability, the book says that Prince Andrew and his former wife Sarah Ferguson passed two O-levels at their respective expensive private schools. Andrew had to re-take exams the following year before going on to take A-levels.

Now in disgrace, Prince Andrew is claimed to spend his time, when not riding or golfing, cooped up watching aviation videos and reading thrillers, with The Talented Mr Ripley said to be his favourite. It is about a con-man taking on the identity of a wealthy playboy.

There are some more gentle anecdotes about him, such as when he was a helicopter pilot and ferried a group of soldiers from a rifle range and decided to put down on the Sandringham estate.

Queen Elizabeth II, who was in residence, was said to have looked at the guns being toted by these unexpected arrivals. “You can put those in there if you like,” she said, pointing to an umbrella stand.

But the biography is much more crowded with anecdotes about his rudeness and his acute lack of self awareness, not to mention a prodigious number of quick-fire affairs.

It is claimed he swore at and insulted staff, bawling someone out as an “imbecile” for not using the Queen Mother’s full title. Protection officers were despatched to collect golf balls and private jets seemed to be hired as casually as an Uber on a night out.

The Paris-based journalist Peter Allen, among the sources for the book, says many of Andrew’s problems reflect on his “flawed character”.

“He’s been afforded every type of privilege, all his life, while displaying very poor judgement and getting into highly compromising situations.”

Known as “Baby Grumpling” in his early years, Andrew was claimed to have moved people from jobs because one was wearing a nylon tie, and another because he had a mole on his face.

Diplomats, whose cause Andrew was meant to be advancing, nicknamed him “His Buffoon Highness” because of all the gaffes.

There are details of his unhappy knack of getting involved with all the wrong people in his money-making ventures, from Libyan gun runners and relations of dictators to a Chinese spy.

“This book appears to seal the fate of Andrew if he was ever hoping to be reinstated officially into the working royals,” says royal commentator Pauline Maclaran.

“The public will be wanting to see some clear action on the King’s part I think – particularly as Andrew’s connections to Epstein are raked over again,” says Prof Maclaran.

If this seems like a torrent of bad news, the book also raises some deeper questions about what lies behind Prince Andrew’s character.

There are suggestions of an often lonely and isolated figure, obsessed with sex but much weaker at relationships. Sources from his time in the navy saw his “bombastic” exterior as concealing a much more vulnerable and socially awkward figure, whose upbringing had made him unsure how to behave.

He showed authentic courage when he flew helicopters in the Falklands war and he was remembered as being willing to “muck in” during that stressful time, when crews were living on canned food rather than fine dining.

On his fascination for sex, an unnamed source claims Andrew lost his virginity at the age of 11, which the same source likens to a form of abuse.

One of his former naval colleagues went from seeing Andrew as “immature, privileged, entitled” to having a more sympathetic view of a character of “loneliness and insecurity”, a public figure who was uncertain about how he fitted in with other people, and had ended up with the “wrong sort of friends”.

Top of that list must be Jeffrey Epstein. Lownie’s book offers meticulous detail of the connections between Prince Andrew and the US financier and sex offender, establishing links that went back to the early 1990s, earlier than had previously been established.

It is also strong on the unbalanced nature of their relationship, with a friend of Andrew’s describing the prince’s dealings with Epstein as “like putting a rattlesnake in an aquarium with a mouse”.

Epstein’s sleazy and abusive world, with its mix of easy money and exploitative sex, was ultimately a form of blackmail operation, claims Lownie’s book. It gave him something to hold over the many powerful people who came into his orbit.

The book is a reminder of the scale and seediness of Epstein’s exploitation of girls. It is also an account of the destruction that followed.

The famous photograph showing Virginia Giuffre with Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell in London was supposedly taken by Jeffrey Epstein. Prince Andrew is the only one of them not to be either dead or in prison.

And Lownie’s sources cast doubt on whether Epstein did take his own life, questioning the medical evidence and the series of unfortunate gaps in supervision in the jail where he was being held.

After his disastrous BBC Newsnight interview and the court case with Virginia Giuffre – which he settled with a rejection of any wrongdoing – Prince Andrew has been pushed out of public life, no longer a “working royal”.

Historian Ed Owens says it is almost six years since that Newsnight interview, but Prince Andrew is still appearing in news stories “for all the wrong reasons”.

“This isn’t good for the monarchy,” he says, even though “King Charles and Prince William have sought to limit the reputational damage Andrew can have on ‘brand Windsor’,” says Owens.

• What do we know about the Epstein files?
• Prince Andrew to pay own costs or move out of Windsor mansion
• Virginia Giuffre, Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein accuser, dies

Standing loyally beside Prince Andrew has been Sarah Ferguson, who describes their relationship as being “divorced to each other, not from each other”, still living together at Royal Lodge.

The book depicts her as being in an endless loop of binge spending, debt and then convoluted deals, sponsorships and freebies, to try to get her finances on track, before the cycle begins again.

But there is no doubting her remarkable capacity to keep bouncing back and to keep on plugging away, when others would have been down and out years ago.

She has a sense of fun that appeals to people. The book tells how successful she was at boosting sales as an ambassador for Waterford Wedgwood, then owned by Tony O’Reilly. She was described by staff as “brilliant at working a room, fresh, chic and wasn’t stuffy”.

The book is already riding high in the best-seller charts and royal commentator Richard Palmer says it raises difficult topical questions.

“It puts Andrew back at the front and centre of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal at a time when Donald Trump is facing serious questions about his own friendship with the late paedophile,” says Palmer.

“It’s a scandal that just won’t go away for the Royal Family, even though they’ve tried to distance themselves from Andrew,” he says.

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Mexico has said US military would not be entering its territory following reports that President Donald Trump had directed the Pentagon to target Latin American drug cartels.

“The United States is not going to come to Mexico with the military,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Friday. “We co-operate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be an invasion. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out.”

The New York Times reported on Friday that Trump had secretly signed a directive to begin using military force on foreign soil.

In a statement to the BBC, the White House did not address the directive but said that Trump’s “top priority is protecting the homeland”.

The reported directive appears to follow an executive order signed by Trump earlier this year formally designating eight drug cartels as terrorist entities – six of which are Mexican.

• From Mexico cartel safe house to US streets: BBC tracks deadly fentanyl targeted by Trump tariffs
• How does fentanyl get into the US?

Speaking to reporters, Sheinbaum said the Mexican government was informed that an order on the cartels was coming, and “that it had nothing to do with the participation of any military personnel”.

“It is not part of any agreement, far from it. When it has been brought up, we have always said ‘No’,” she said.

Earlier this year, Sheinbaum told reporters that Trump’s decision to designate cartels as terrorists “cannot be an opportunity for the US to invade our sovereignty”.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the designation would help the US target cartels, including through intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense.

“We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organisations, not simply drug dealing organisations,” Rubio said.

The New York Times report says the directive signed by Trump provides “an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations” against cartels, both at sea and on foreign soil.

In recent months, Mexico has worked with the US to curb the illegal flow of both migrants and drugs through the US-Mexico border.

June saw the lowest border crossings on record, according to data by the US Customs and Border Protections, and last week, US Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson said fentanyl seizures at the border were down by over half.

In a post on X, Johnson celebrated the collaboration between Sheinbum and Trump, writing that their leadership had resulted in cartels “going bankrupt and our countries are safer because of it”.

Hee-kyung giggles as she steps into Seoul’s new “warm-hearted convenience store”.

At 29, she is perhaps not the person most would have imagined wanting to take advantage of the South Korean capital’s latest efforts to combat loneliness.

But Hee-Kyung visits every day to grab the free instant ramen noodles and spend hours chatting with other visitors and social workers.

“I tell myself, ‘another day, another escape from feeling lonely’,” Hee-kyung says.

A teenage runaway, she no longer talks to anyone from her family. The friends she has she met online, through the shared love of K-pop group SuperJunior, and they live far away. Currently unemployed, she has no work mates to chat to.

She lives alone, and whiles away the time watching cute animal videos on her phone as she lies on the floor.

“I have no other place to go if it weren’t for [the store].”

Hee-Kyung is one of 20,000 people to visit the four stores since they were opened in March. The city had been expecting just 5,000 in the first year.

This particular location, in the city’s north-eastern district of Dongdaemun, sees around 70 to 80 visitors each day.

Most are in their 40s and 50s, but Hee-Kyung is far from being the only young person to access the store’s services.

A 2022 study revealed an estimated 130,000 young people in the city – those aged between 19 and 39 – are either socially isolated or shut in. That same study also found the share of single-person households in the capital had reached nearly 40% – that alarmed a government that has been trying to reverse plummeting birth and marriage rates.

The day the BBC visited, around a dozen visitors – men and women, young and old – were sitting on benches or burrowed into beanbags, watching a film together.

“We have movie days to encourage low-level bonding,” whispers Kim Se-heon, the manager of the city’s Loneliness Countermeasure Division.

The stores are designed to offer a warm, cafe-like atmosphere. In one corner, an older woman closed her eyes as she sank into the automatic massage chair that hummed. In another, there are stacks of noodles.

“Ramen is a symbol of comfort and warmth in South Korea,” Kim explains.

While waiting for the noodles to cook, visitors are asked to fill out a brief survey on their mood and living conditions.

These are just a handful of the growing number of socially isolated people that the city is trying to reach.

The change South Korea has undergone is seismic: in a generation, it has gone from a war-torn agrarian society to a developed economy.

A few decades ago, it was common to see large families with six to eight children, living under the same roof. But years of migration to cities have shrunk families and turned places like Seoul into sprawling metropolises.

Unaffordable housing, rising costs and gruelling working hours have led more and more young people to reject marriage or parenthood, or both. On the other end is an ageing population that feels neglected by children who are racing to keep up.

“You know the saying that the least tasty meal is the one you are having alone? I ask older people who come in if they were eating okay. They would tear up, just being asked that question,” says Lee In-sook, the counsellor at the store.

After a divorce and her grown-up children leaving home, she understands how it feels to be alone.

The first time Hee-kyung – who is around the age of In-sook’s daughter – arrived at the store, she immediately caught her eye.

Like many visitors, Hee-kyung was quiet on the first day, barely speaking to others. The second time she came, she began to speak to In-sook.

It was the growing number of “lonely deaths” that worried Seoul officials enough to act. Older people were dying alone at home, and their bodies were not discovered until days or weeks later.

That mission soon expanded to tackling loneliness itself. But Seoul is not the first to do this.

In 2018, the UK appointed a Minister for Loneliness. Japan followed the example, establishing an agency to address the problem which it said had become more pronounced in the Covid-19 pandemic.

The phenomenon of withdrawing from society altogether is common enough in Japan that it has a name: hikikomori. In South Korea too, a rising number of young people have been voluntarily cutting themselves off from a highly competitive and exacting society.

“Perhaps it was the pandemic that led to this,” muses Lee Yu-jeong, who manages one of Seoul’s anti-loneliness programmes.

She points out how her children remain buried in their smartphones when their friends visit. “People today express how difficult it is to have a network of friends. Loneliness has become something that needs to be tackled as a society.”

The first step was opening a hotline for people who need someone to speak to. A nationwide survey in 2023 found that a third of Korean adults have either no one to ask for help with housework or speak to when feeling sad.

Its counselors offer a 40-minute call to discuss any topic. Park Seung-ah has been making three calls a day from her cubicle.

“I was surprised to see that many young people wanted these sessions. They want to share the burden on their chest but there is often a power dynamic with parents or their friends. So they come to us.”

The “warm-hearted convenience stores” followed swiftly, a physical location where the lonely were welcome.

The Dongdaemun location was picked due to its proximity to low-income housing, where residents live in tiny, subdivided apartments alone.

Sohn, 68, visits the store once a week to watch films, and to escape his cramped home.

“[The stores] should have opened before I was born. It’s good to spend even just two to three hours,” he says.

Sohn has spent more than five decades of his life caring for his mother, who suffered a brain aneurism when he was a child. As a result, he never married or had children.

The cost of the dedication became clear when she died.

Penniless and walking with a cane since suffering a brain haemorrhage himself several years ago, he says there aren’t many places for him.

“Places cost money, going to the cinema costs money,” he says.

The stores were created specially to welcome those who aren’t welcome in other places, explains store manager Lee Bo-hyun.

They go beyond a bit of room and a film – offering air-conditioning during the hottest summer months to those on low incomes who cannot afford it at home.

It is also supposed to be a space where the lonely can sidestep the stigma of asking for help. The choice of name – “convenience stores” – was a deliberate attempt to distance them from psychiatric clinics, important in a country where there is still a stigma against asking for help for mental health – especially among older residents.

And yet, some of their reservations can still be seen when they walk through the door for the first time, compounded by their experience of isolation.

Visitors are often uncomfortable speaking to another person or eating together initially, store manager Lee says.

“The typical loneliness, if that repeats for days, months, and half year, that is now more than a feeling,” Lee explains.

“Those folks start to avoid places with people. So many people ask us if they can take the ramen to go because they won’t eat with others.”

Lee would tell them that they don’t need to talk. They can simply sit at the same table and have noodles.

It has been months since Hee-kyung was one of the quiet new arrivals.

So, has it made a difference? In-sook recalls a conversation she was having with a local paper. When she brought up her daughter, she felt a sudden pang and her voice broke.

“I am going to hug you,” Hee-kyung declared.

She walked over from the other side of the room and embraced In-sook.

The enthralling 2-2 draw for the Anderson-Tendulkar trophy between England and India provided a dramatic start to the new World Test Championship cycle.

It was an epic contest, each of the five Tests going into the final day, four in fact into the final session, providing some of the best individual and collective performances the five-day format has seen in recent years.

The scoreline scoffed at projections made by former cricketers and pundits before the series, a majority of whom had predicted an easy win – if not a clean sweep – for England.

Setting aside England’s home advantage, experts argued India’s pre-series struggles made them easy targets – and with good reason.

Whitewashed 0-3 at home by New Zealand, followed by a 3-1 drubbing by Australia down under in two preceding series, India looked vulnerable and wobbly.

A spate of sudden retirements and fitness issues left India without four key players – R Ashwin, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, and Mohammed Shami. Their absence was expected to place immense pressure on young Shubman Gill, leading the side in his first series as captain.

India’s squad had undeniable talent, but its inexperience – especially in batting under challenging conditions – was a concern.

KL Rahul, Ravindra Jadeja, and Rishabh Pant were seasoned campaigners in England, but Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sai Sudarshan, Karun Nair, Washington Sundar, and Abhimanyu Easwaran had never played at this level there before.

Gill’s modest overseas batting record fuelled doubts about his suitability for captaincy. Added worries over pace ace Jasprit Bumrah’s fitness further dimmed India’s prospects.

Losing the first Test at Headingley from a winning position, as England chased 373 in the fourth innings, confirmed pundits’ doubts.

But India recovered from this setback in style to win the next Test at Edgbaston by a whopping 336 runs.

The swift turnaround came not from luck but skill and relentless determination – qualities that defined India’s performance for the rest of the series.

The three Tests that followed were bitterly fought, both teams raising the intensity and skill levels, matching each other blow-for-blow.

This sparked frequent heated clashes but also unforgettable acts of heroism, with players from both sides battling fatigue and injury to keep their teams in the fight.

Some aspects of what kept India in the fight right through the neck-and-neck contest comes through in the stats.

Three batters – Gill, Rahul and Jadeja – topped 500 runs in the series. England had one, Joe Root.

There were 12 centuries made by India, England had nine.

Mohammed Siraj with 23 was the highest wicket-taker from either side. The only bowler to take 10 wickets in a match was Akash Deep.

Failures were scant, heroes were plenty, but the pillars of India’s extraordinary show in the series were Gill and Siraj.

Gill, in Bradmanesque form, made 754 runs, 430 of them coming in one Test.

He failed by a mere 20 runs to break Sunil Gavaskar’s record series aggregate, and was also second to Don Bradman (810) for highest runs made in a series by a captain.

To be mentioned alongside Bradman and Gavaskar testifies to Gill’s achievement and potential. His prolific scoring earned his team’s full respect, and after a hesitant start, he quickly grew in confidence, showing fine temperament and smart tactics in tough situations.

Siraj, who since his 2021 debut had lived in the shadows of Bumrah and Shami, emerged so spectacularly that he instantly entered cricket folklore.

Feisty and indefatigable, he bowled with a lion’s heart – steaming in at full tilt, sparing his body no mercy, embracing the spearhead’s role in Bumrah’s absence, and inspiring the other pacers to bowl out of their skins – earning universal awe and admiration.

Siraj’s 23 wickets came at an average of 32.43, with an economy rate of 4.02 and a strike rate of 48.43 – hardly earth-shattering figures.

In India’s two victories, he was the decisive force. At Edgbaston, his six wickets in the first innings (seven overall) swung the match firmly in India’s favour. At the Oval, he took nine wickets – four in the first innings and five in the second – turning the match on its head.

How India held their nerve for 25 days under immense pressure – driven by willpower, ambition, and skill – culminating in a thrilling final 56-minute comeback at the Oval to win and level the series, is one of Test cricket’s most riveting tales.

It also marked this Indian young team’s transition from apprehension and misgivings one of rich promise fuelled by ambition and excellence.

The future looks rosy.

US Vice President JD Vance is taking his holiday in the UK – a trip which will include visits to the Cotswolds, Scotland and, to kick it all off, a few days staying with Foreign Secretary David Lammy at his grace-and-favour country home, Chevening House in Kent.

It would seem an unlikely friendship on the face of it. One grew up in north London, the other in rust-belt Ohio.

One is a left-wing advocate of multi-culturalism, the other a conservative who has, albeit jokingly, referred to the UK as “the first truly Islamist country” with a nuclear bomb.

Yet, despite their differences Lammy and Vance appear to be the best of friends.

As he settled in for a brief chat with the media in the drawing room at Chevening alongside the foreign secretary, Vance spoke warmly of their relationship.

“I have to say that I really have become a good friend, and David has become a good friend of mine,” he said. “Our families enjoy each other’s company very much, which always helps.”

Chevening is set in 3,000 acres of land, including a maze and lake, which was the first destination for the two families on Friday morning, for a spot of fishing.

Vance joked this activity put “a strain on the special relationship” with his children all catching carp, while the foreign secretary came away empty-handed.

Lammy didn’t seem bitter, telling the vice president he was “delighted” to welcome him and his family to 115-room Chevening, which he described as “my home”.

Strictly speaking, the 17th century manor house belongs to the nation, but cabinet ministers, particularly foreign secretaries, are allowed to use it for family getaways or meetings with foreign dignitaries.

The vice president seemed suitably impressed with his friend’s weekend retreat.

Vance acknowledged the two men come from “different political spectrums” but said Lammy had been “kind enough to make time on a visit to [Washington] DC, we got to know each other a little bit then”.

Since that first meeting, when Lammy was in opposition and Vance had just been elected to the US Senate, they have met regularly including at the new Pope’s inauguration in May.

Last week, Lammy told the Guardian he, Vance and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner bonded over drinks in the Villa Taverna, the US ambassador’s residence in Rome.

“I had this great sense that JD completely relates to me and he completely relates to Angela. So it was a wonderful hour and a half,” he said. “I was probably the shyest of the three.”

He said that, like Vance, Rayner and himself were “not just working-class politicians, but people with dysfunctional childhoods”.

Lammy’s parents split up during his teens. His father went to the US and Lammy never saw him again.

Vance told the story of his own upbringing – including an absent father and a mother with a drug addiction – in his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

Despite their trickier starts in life, both ended up at prestigious US colleges. Lammy studied at Harvard, where he met and befriended Barack Obama. Vance went to Harvard’s rival Yale – “not quite as good,” Lammy joked at Chevening.

The two men have also bonded over their Christian faith. Vance converted to Catholicism as an adult and attended Mass with Lammy when he visited Washington DC earlier this year.

The pair have something else in common, although neither want to to draw attention to it: their previous less-than-flattering comments about Donald Trump.

JD Vance’s past verdict – “reprehensible”, “an idiot”, “I never liked him”.

And Lammy’s? “A tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo Nazi sympathising sociopath”.

Be it political expediency or a genuine change of heart, both have since revised their opinions.

But how far do personal relations matter, when there are so many other factors at play – be it national self interest in the case of tariffs, or differences of opinion such as over the situation in Gaza?

Bronwen Maddox the CEO of the Chatham House international affairs think tank says they do, “particularly under this administration”.

“Trump has deliberately personalised these things,” she adds.

That is why Lammy – despite his natural affiliation with the Democratic Party in the US – was tasked with building bridges with their Republican opponents, even before the general election.

Although that might have appeared a tall order, Chair of Republicans Overseas Greg Swenson says his party tend to feel fonder towards the UK than the Democrats.

Vance and Trump have criticised the UK in the past, but Swenson says it “comes from a good place”.

“Both want what’s best for the UK… you never want to see your friend make a mistake.”

However, if Lammy thinks his friendship with Vance is exclusive he may be disappointed.

The vice president is also meeting Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage has hinted that he may be as well.

In between meeting UK politicians, Vance will be squeezing in a trip to the Cotswolds – something that may infuriate those Americans, such as TV chat show host Ellen DeGeneres, who fled to the area specifically to escape Trump and his acolytes.

There have also been reports that singer-rapper couple Beyonce and Jay-Z have been house-hunting in the area.

Explaining the appeal of the region to wealthy Americans, writer Plum Sykes told the BBC’s PM programme it combines the desire for countryside with the need for glamour.

“Americans can’t go to Wales and survive in the same way they can in the Cotswolds where you can get a matcha latte and go to a gyrotonics class.

“The business of the private jet people at Cotswolds airport has gone through the roof.”

Vance is reported to be staying in a house, very close to Diddly Squat – the farm and pub belonging to broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson.

That sets up the possibility of an awkward encounter between the two. Clarkson has previously lambasted Vance, with “a bearded god-botherer” being among his more printable insults.

But a friendship might still flower, after all forming unlikely relationships seems to be as fashionable as the Cotswolds at the moment.

Astronaut Jim Lovell, who guided the Apollo 13 mission safely back to Earth in 1970, has died aged 97.

Nasa said he had “turned a potential tragedy into a success” after an attempt to land on the Moon was aborted because of an explosion onboard the spacecraft while it was hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth.

Tens of millions watched on television as Lovell and two other astronauts splashed back down into the Pacific Ocean, a moment which has become one of the most iconic in the history of space travel.

Lovell, who was also part of the Apollo 8 mission, was the first man to go to the Moon twice – but never actually landed.

Acting Nasa head Sean Duffy said Lovell had helped the US space programme to “forge a historic path”.

In a statement, Lovell’s family said: “We will miss his unshakeable optimism, his sense of humor, and the way he made each of us feel we could do the impossible. He was truly one of a kind.”

Tom Hanks, who played Lovell in the 1995 movie , called the astronaut one of those people “who dare, who dream, and who lead others to the places we would not go on our own”.

Hanks said in a statement on Instagram that Lovell’s many voyages “were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive”.

One Saturday, a 16-year-old hauled a heavy, three-foot tube into the middle of a large field in Wisconsin.

He had persuaded his science teacher to help him make a makeshift rocket. Somehow, he had managed to get his hands on the ingredients for gunpowder – potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal.

He pulled on a welder’s helmet for protection. He packed it with powder, struck a match and ran like hell.

The rocket rose 80 feet into the air and exploded. Had the chemicals been packed slightly differently, he would have been blown to pieces.

For Jim Lovell, this was more than a childish lark.

In achieving his dream to be a rocket scientist, he would become an American hero. But it was not going to be easy.

James Arthur Lovell Jr was born on 25 March 1928 – just a year after Charles Lindbergh made his historic trip across the Atlantic.

“Boys like either dinosaurs or airplanes,” he said. “I was very much an airplane boy.”

When he was five years old, his father died in a car accident.

His mother, Blanche, worked all hours, struggling to keep food on the table. University was well beyond their financial reach.

The answer was the US Navy, which was hungry for new pilots after World War Two. It was not building rockets but at least it involved flying.

Lovell signed up to a programme that sent him to college at the military’s expense while training as a fighter pilot.

Two years in, he gambled and switched to the Navy Academy at Annapolis, on Chesapeake Bay, in the hope of working with his beloved rockets.

It was a lucky decision.

A few months later, the Korean War broke out and his former fellow apprentice pilots were sent to South East Asia. Many never got to finish their education.

Marriage was banned at Annapolis and girlfriends discouraged. The navy did not want its midshipmen wasting their time on such frivolities.

But Lovell had a sweetheart. Marilyn Gerlach was the high school girl he had shyly asked to the prom.

Women were not allowed on campus and trips outside were limited to 45 minutes. Somehow the relationship survived.

Just hours after his graduation in 1952, the newly commissioned Ensign Lovell married her.

They would be together for more than 70 years, until Marilyn’s death in 2023.

He did everything he could to advertise his love of rocketry.

His thesis at the Navy Academy was in the unheard-of topic of liquid-fuel engines. After graduation, he hoped to specialise in this pioneering new technology.

But the navy had other ideas.

Lovell was assigned to an aircraft carrier group flying Banshee jets off ships at night. It was a white-knuckle, high-wire business fit only for daredevils. But for Lovell, it was not enough.

In 1958, he applied to Nasa.

Project Mercury was America’s attempt to place a man in orbit around the Earth. Jim Lovell was one of the 110 test pilots considered for selection but a temporary liver condition put paid to his chances.

Four years later, he tried again.

In June 1962, after gruelling medical tests, Nasa announced its “New Nine”. These would be the men to deliver on President Kennedy’s pledge to put American boots on the Moon.

It was the most elite group of flying men ever assembled. They included Neil Armstrong, John Young and, fulfilling his childhood dream, Jim Lovell.

Three years later he was ready.

His first trip into space was aboard the two-man Gemini 7. Lovell and fellow astronaut Frank Borman ate a steak-and-eggs breakfast and blasted off.

Their mission: to find out if men could survive two weeks in space. If not, the Moon was out of reach.

With the endurance record complete, Lovell’s next flight was in command of Gemini 12 alongside space rookie Buzz Aldrin.

This time they proved that man could work outside a spacecraft. Aldrin clambered awkwardly into the void, spending five hours photographing star fields.

Now for the Moon itself.

The crew of Apollo 8 would be the first to travel beyond low Earth orbit and enter the gravitational pull of another celestial body.

It was Nasa’s most dangerous mission yet.

The Saturn V rocket that shot Lovell, Borman and William Anders out of our atmosphere at 25,000mph (40,233km/h) was huge – three times larger than anything seen on the Gemini programme.

As navigator, Lovell took with him a sextant to take star readings – in case the computers failed and they had to find their own way home.

Sixty-eight hours after take-off, they made it.

The engines fired and Apollo 8 slid silently behind the Moon. The men heard a crackle in their headsets as the radio signal to Mission Control faltered and then failed.

The spellbound astronauts pinned themselves to the windows, the first humans to see the far side of our nearest celestial neighbour. And then, from over the advancing horizon, an incredible sight.

“Earthrise,” gasped Borman.

“Get the camera, quick,” said Lovell.

It was Christmas Eve 1968.

America was mired in Vietnam abroad and civil unrest at home. But at that moment, it seemed that humanity was united.

The people of the world saw their planet as the astronauts saw it – fragile and beautiful, shining in the desolation of space.

Lovell read from the Book of Genesis, the basis of many of the world’s great religions, to the people of the Earth.

“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

For him, it was an image that changed our world forever. He put his thumb against the window and the whole world disappeared behind it. It was the most moving experience of his life.

As the spacecraft re-emerged from the darkness, Lovell was first to announce the good news. “Please be advised,” he said as the radio crackled back into life, “there is a Santa Claus.”

At that very moment, 239,000 miles away, a man in a blue Rolls-Royce pulled up outside Lovell’s house in Houston.

He walked past the dozens of reporters camped outside and handed a box to Marilyn.

She opened the star-patterned tissue paper and pulled out a mink jacket. “Happy Christmas,” said the card that came with it, “and love from the Man in the Moon.”

They went up as astronauts and came down celebrities. The people of the Earth had followed their every move on TV.

There were ticker tape parades, congressional honours and a place on the cover of Time Magazine. And they had not even set foot on the Moon.

That honour went, of course, to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

A year later, Kennedy’s dream was posthumously seen to fruition. A small step was taken and mankind took its giant leap. The New Nine had done their job.

In April 1970, it was Jim Lovell’s turn. Fortunately, the crew of Apollo 13 did not believe in unlucky numbers.

Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were men of science – highly trained and determined to follow Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface. But things went badly wrong.

They were 200,000 miles above the Earth and closing in on their target when they needed to stir tanks containing vital oxygen and hydrogen.

Swigert flicked the switch. It should have been a routine procedure but the command module, Odyssey, shuddered. Oxygen pressure fell and power shut down.

“I believe we’ve had a problem here,” said Swigert. Lovell had to repeat the message to a stunned Mission Control: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

It was one of the greatest understatements of all time. The crew were in big trouble – a dramatic explosion had disabled their craft.

Haise and Lovell worked frantically to boot up the lunar module, Aquarius.

It was not supposed to be used until they got to the Moon. It had no heat shield, so could not be used to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. But it could keep them alive until they got there.

The world stopped breathing and watched.

For a second time, Jim Lovell had brought the world together as one. The first time it had been for Earthrise, the second would be to witness his fight to survive.

“For four days,” said Marilyn, “I didn’t know if I was a wife or a widow.”

Temperatures fell to freezing, food and water were rationed. It was days before they limped back to the fringes of Earth’s atmosphere. They climbed back aboard the Odyssey and prayed the heat shield had not been damaged.

The radio silence that accompanies re-entry went on far longer than normal. Millions watched on TV, many convinced that all was lost.

After six agonising minutes, Jack Swigert’s voice cut through the silence.

The team on the ground held its breath until the parachutes deployed and the crew was safely down.

The mission was Nasa’s greatest failure and, without question, its finest hour.

Lovell retired from the navy in 1973 and opted for a the quiet life, working for the Bay-Houston Towing Company, giving speeches and serving as president of the National Eagle Scout Association.

His book, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, became the famous 1995 movie, starring Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell.

For the film, the director asked him to dress up as an admiral. It was for a cameo scene, shaking hands with Hanks when the crew were rescued from the sea.

But the old American hero was not having it.

Jim Lovell had been to the Moon twice, witnessed Earthrise and narrowly avoided a cold death in space – and saw no reason to falsely burnish his .

He took out his old navy uniform, dusted it down and put it on for the cameo appearance.

“I retired as a captain,” he insisted, “and a captain I will be.”

“We are not happy with these men in this hotel because we fear for our children,” Orla Minihane tells me. “If that makes me far-right then so be it.”

Orla has lived near Epping since she was a child and describes herself as a “very boring woman who has worked in the City of London for 25 years”. Last year she joined Reform UK and hopes to stand as a local candidate for the party.

On a busy road leading to the Essex town, The Bell Hotel, now fortified, is one of more than 200 across the country where the government houses asylum seekers.

In the last month a series of protests, sometimes totalling several hundred people from both sides – and on one occasion up to 2,000 according to Essex Police – have taken place over the use of hotels for asylum seekers. About 20 more were planned for Friday and Saturday this week.

The latest round of demonstrations began at the 80-room Bell in July, after a man living in the hotel was arrested, and subsequently charged, with sexual assault, harassment and inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity. Hadush Kebatu, 41, from Ethiopia, has denied the offences and is in custody.

The case has sparked a wider conversation about the effect of housing asylum seekers in hotels in communities across Britain.

“Before there were women and children in the hotel – there was a little bit of crime, most people got on with it,” Orla says. “But now it’s the fact that it’s all men. It’s not a balanced culture.”

The protests have been promoted on social media under red, white and blue banner text with slogans such as “Protect Our Community”, “Safety of Women and Children Before Foreigners” and “All Patriots Welcome”.

We have identified far-right activists at some of the protests and activists who oppose them are watching what is happening closely.

The activist group Stand Up To Racism sees this as far-right organisations “stirring up racist violence” and trying to repeat the violence that flared after the murders of three young girls in Southport.

However, the protests are often organised by people with little experience of street campaigning, including mothers with families and professional careers, like Orla. That they are getting involved suggests that in some communities, with hotels close by, there is a shift in the public mood about Britain’s asylum hotels.

Outside The Bell, which is surrounded by steel fencing and guarded by a 24/7 security team, one of its residents, Wael, from Libya, is a year into his asylum claim and waiting for his fourth Home Office interview.

“I spoke with one of the protesters,” Wael says. “Everything’s good. Epping is nice. We can sit and stay. People respect us.

“I want to learn English and work. In a car wash or something. I will not stay here and take food. I have a dream – to make money and play football and have fun with my time. It’s a small dream.”

Wael is happy to talk, give his name and have his picture taken. But two other young Iraqi Kurds who are staying at The Bell, and allowed to freely come and go, are more cautious and less positive.

They tell me a gang of youths in masks and on motorbikes, has just shouted expletives at them. Shortly afterwards I catch sight of the bikers nearby.

One of the asylum seekers says that living in a hotel room 24 hours a day is messing with his mind. When I ask about their dealings with the Home Office they hurry inside The Bell.

Shortly afterwards a passing driver yells, “Burn it down”.

Last summer in the wake of the Southport murders, that is what some protesters tried to do at other hotels.

This summer, there have been isolated clashes, when activists on each side of the argument, anti-fascists and hard-right, have faced each other, or the police.

Often the migrants have watched from the sidelines, penned up behind the fencing, or filming from upstairs windows.

The police have largely kept control, sometimes facing criticism for their methods, including the false claim that Essex Police used buses to transport pro-migrant activists to a protest in Epping. For now, arrest numbers are way below those in 2024.

I ask Orla, who made an impassioned speech at a recent protest, why she is so aggrieved by the asylum hotel.

She says friends have described their daughters being “grabbed” by young, non-white men in the area. She has seen shoplifting, she says, in the local Marks & Spencer.

“Everyone knows they are asylum seekers,” Orla says, “Epping is very white.”

She adds of the hotel’s occupants: “You know they are coming for freebies and when they come here they abuse the privilege. It’s ridiculous.”

Asylum seekers would say they are seeking protection by coming to the UK, although some are ultimately judged not to be eligible for asylum status.

Last month Stand Up To Racism claimed Orla had shared a stage with an alleged member of a neo-Nazi group at a hotel protest. She told BBC News she had “no idea” who he was, and he says he has since left the group.

Asylum seekers are not normally allowed to work in the UK. Successive governments have judged that paying for their accommodation and food is preferable to allowing them to compete with British workers in the jobs market, offering an incentive to come here.

In June, the government warned some asylum seekers may be illicitly working as food delivery drivers.

Sixteen miles south of Epping, residents in Canary Wharf, east London, live in gleaming glass towers and traditional East End houses alongside another asylum hotel. It is a very different place but many locals share similar opinions.

Asylum seekers recently arrived during the small hours at the wharf-side four-star Britannia International – 610 rooms, but, according to a former staff member, no longer the “luxury hotel” described in some reports. Rumours that they were coming triggered protests by local residents, many of them office workers in the Canary Wharf business district.

Outside the hotel, Chengcheng Cul, who is Chinese, draws a distinction between his “legal migration” to the UK, and “illegal asylum seekers”.

“If people can come over the Channel illegally, and easily, what encourages decent people to come legally, pay their tax, and get involved in this society? Is this setting a good example? This country has opened the border to illegal migrants.”

Lorraine Cavanagh, who works for charities on the Isle of Dogs, echoes the concerns in Epping. “I don’t know who they are.

“They are unidentified men who can walk around and do what they want to do with no consequences,” she says.

That comment, “I don’t know who they are”, lies at the heart of the opposition to asylum seekers in these communities.

It can be very hard to establish basic facts about the young men in the hotels, the system that put them there, or the impact they might have on locals.

While growing in number, asylum seekers who come by small boats across the English Channel are a small proportion of total immigration to the UK, and in 2024, just over a third of all asylum seekers.

The government has contracted out the task of accommodating them to three companies: Serco, Clearsprings and Mears. They buy up rooms in houses and in hotels, usually taking them over completely.

Ministers regularly talk about their ambition to “smash the gangs”, but say less about the hotels. The government won’t confirm where they are because of concerns they might be attacked.

Madeleine Sumption from the Migration Observatory points out there is a problem publishing information about small groups of asylum seekers when it might identify them by age or sex, a long-standing approach for public bodies.

We know how many hotel places are being used in each region – the vast majority are in the south of England. They cost £5.77m a day for the government to provide. The estimated cost over the decade to 2029 has spiralled from £4.5bn in 2019 to £15.3bn.

But there are no specific figures for the age and sex of hotel occupants, no details about their countries of origin, or their claim for sanctuary in the UK.

So when local communities allege crime rates go up when asylum hotels are opened, or raise fears about the hotels being full of only single adult males, it is often impossible to prove the point either way.

There were 35 sexual and violent offences reported in Epping town in May. In the same month, the year before, when there were no asylum seekers at The Bell, 28 sexual and violent offences were reported. In May 2023, the hotel was being used by the Home Office for migrant families. The number of reported offences was 32.

But how many of these offences involved asylum seekers? The police do not publish statistics about exactly where crimes happen or who is reported to have committed them.

So in many ways, we don’t know “who they are”.

Orla believes more information would help reduce tension and is furious at the government’s handling of the asylum system.

“If you conceal the truth and you act as if you are hiding something, people are going to be angry,” she says. “If they said there are 70 in the Bell Hotel, five are from Sudan, five from somewhere else, I think most people would feel better.”

Epping Forest District Council’s Conservative Leader, Chris Whitbread recently said that “it is important to be transparent” about asylum hotel information.

In a recent report, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, criticised how the Home Office deals with asylum hotels. “It is clear that the Home Office still has a long way to go to build trust and confidence in its willingness to be open and honest about its intentions and performance,” he wrote.

The Home Office says it removed 6,000 people from hotels in early 2025 and has already closed 200 hotels. In its manifesto, Labour pledges to close them all by the next election.

On the other side of the political divide from the anti-migrant campaigners, in north London outside a meeting “to organise against the right wing”, Sabby Dhalu from the protest group Stand Up To Racism wants the government to work more closely with councils so that their residents are better informed.

This should include “explaining why these people are here, where they come from, what’s happening in those countries,” she says. “That they’re in the process of seeking asylum and going through the application process. Settling them in with the community.”

“I think you’ve got far right organisations that are determined to repeat the events of last year,” she added.

“And because for their own cynical reasons, they want to stir up racist violence, and in order to build their own political organisations.”

That said, she feels that voices on the right are “whipping up” and weaponising a wider feeling of discontent among the public over Labour’s cuts to public spending, and that the government is “making silly concessions” to the right in doing so.

Stopping the boats is a challenge which haunts the government, as it did the Conservatives. The Home Office has managed to cut the asylum claim backlog, currently standing at 79,000, but the claimants keep coming and the cost of accommodation is soaring. There is a feeling the government is struggling to cope and ignoring the views of communities.

Many are in agreement that having more than 200 hotels, full of asylum seekers often waiting for lengthy periods for decisions on their applications, is not a sustainable situation.

Whether or not the current protests continue, the government will have to find a solution.

A police officer has died from injuries sustained while responding to a shooting outside the headquarters of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.

The incident, which took place on Friday near Emory University, involved a “single shooter” who is now dead, the Atlanta police department said.

It said the officer, David Rose, had been taken to hospital and later died from his injuries. No civilian was wounded in the incident.

The motive is unclear, but US media, citing an unnamed law-enforcement official, reported a theory that the gunman believed he was sick as a result of a coronavirus vaccine.

Media reports also suggested the man’s father had called police on the day of the shooting believing his son was suicidal.

CDC Director Susan Monarez said the centre was “heartbroken” by the attack.

“DeKalb County police, CDC security, and Emory University responded immediately and decisively, helping to prevent further harm to our staff and community,” she wrote in a post on X.

In a press briefing on Friday, police said they became aware of a report of an active shooter at around 16:50 local time (21:50 BST) near the CDC campus.

Officers from multiple agencies responded. Emory University posted at the time on social media: “Active shooter on Emory Atlanta Campus at Emory Point CVS. RUN, HIDE, FIGHT.”

The CDC campus received multiple rounds of gunfire into buildings.

Police said they found the shooter “struck by gunfire” – but could not specify whether that was from law enforcement or self-inflicted.

Media outlets have reported that CDC employees have been asked to work remotely on Monday.

South Korea’s military says North Korea has begun removing some of the loudspeakers used to broadcast propaganda across the border between the two countries.

North Korea’s move appears to be a positive reaction to the overtures from newly elected South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, who had campaigned on improving inter-Korean ties.

South Korea dismantled some of its own loudspeakers earlier this week. It had halted broadcasts along the demilitarised zone shortly after Lee took office in June – prompting a similar response from its neighbour.

South Korean broadcasts had often featured K-pop songs and news reports while the North played unsettling noises, such as howling animals.

In a statement on Saturday, South Korea’s military said it had “detected North Korean troops dismantling propaganda loudspeakers in some parts along the front line from this morning”.

It added: “It remains to be confirmed whether the devices have been removed across all regions, and the military will continue to monitor related activities.”

The speaker broadcasts had been suspended on previous occasions. But after a six-year pause, they resumed in June 2024 in response to Pyongyang’s campaign of sending rubbish-filled balloons to the South.

Residents living along the border had complained that their lives have been blighted by noise coming from both sides, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Seoul claimed the broadcasts could be heard as much as 10km (six miles) across the border in the day and up to 24km (15 miles) at night.

But speaking after South Korea suspended its broadcasts in June, organisations advocating to improve the human rights of North Koreans criticised the move.

Ties between North and South Korea had deteriorated under President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was more hawkish towards Pyongyang.

Yoon was impeached and removed from his post for briefly placing South Korea under martial law in December, citing supposed threats from anti-state forces and North Korea sympathisers.

Reuniting with the South had always been a key, if increasingly unrealistic, part of the North’s ideology since the inception of the state – until its current leader, Kim Jong Un, abandoned the idea in 2024.

Both countries are technically still at war since the Korean War ended in 1953 without a peace treaty.

The enthralling 2-2 draw for the Anderson-Tendulkar trophy between England and India provided a dramatic start to the new World Test Championship cycle.

It was an epic contest, each of the five Tests going into the final day, four in fact into the final session, providing some of the best individual and collective performances the five-day format has seen in recent years.

The scoreline scoffed at projections made by former cricketers and pundits before the series, a majority of whom had predicted an easy win – if not a clean sweep – for England.

Setting aside England’s home advantage, experts argued India’s pre-series struggles made them easy targets – and with good reason.

Whitewashed 0-3 at home by New Zealand, followed by a 3-1 drubbing by Australia down under in two preceding series, India looked vulnerable and wobbly.

A spate of sudden retirements and fitness issues left India without four key players – R Ashwin, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, and Mohammed Shami. Their absence was expected to place immense pressure on young Shubman Gill, leading the side in his first series as captain.

India’s squad had undeniable talent, but its inexperience – especially in batting under challenging conditions – was a concern.

KL Rahul, Ravindra Jadeja, and Rishabh Pant were seasoned campaigners in England, but Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sai Sudarshan, Karun Nair, Washington Sundar, and Abhimanyu Easwaran had never played at this level there before.

Gill’s modest overseas batting record fuelled doubts about his suitability for captaincy. Added worries over pace ace Jasprit Bumrah’s fitness further dimmed India’s prospects.

Losing the first Test at Headingley from a winning position, as England chased 373 in the fourth innings, confirmed pundits’ doubts.

But India recovered from this setback in style to win the next Test at Edgbaston by a whopping 336 runs.

The swift turnaround came not from luck but skill and relentless determination – qualities that defined India’s performance for the rest of the series.

The three Tests that followed were bitterly fought, both teams raising the intensity and skill levels, matching each other blow-for-blow.

This sparked frequent heated clashes but also unforgettable acts of heroism, with players from both sides battling fatigue and injury to keep their teams in the fight.

Some aspects of what kept India in the fight right through the neck-and-neck contest comes through in the stats.

Three batters – Gill, Rahul and Jadeja – topped 500 runs in the series. England had one, Joe Root.

There were 12 centuries made by India, England had nine.

Mohammed Siraj with 23 was the highest wicket-taker from either side. The only bowler to take 10 wickets in a match was Akash Deep.

Failures were scant, heroes were plenty, but the pillars of India’s extraordinary show in the series were Gill and Siraj.

Gill, in Bradmanesque form, made 754 runs, 430 of them coming in one Test.

He failed by a mere 20 runs to break Sunil Gavaskar’s record series aggregate, and was also second to Don Bradman (810) for highest runs made in a series by a captain.

To be mentioned alongside Bradman and Gavaskar testifies to Gill’s achievement and potential. His prolific scoring earned his team’s full respect, and after a hesitant start, he quickly grew in confidence, showing fine temperament and smart tactics in tough situations.

Siraj, who since his 2021 debut had lived in the shadows of Bumrah and Shami, emerged so spectacularly that he instantly entered cricket folklore.

Feisty and indefatigable, he bowled with a lion’s heart – steaming in at full tilt, sparing his body no mercy, embracing the spearhead’s role in Bumrah’s absence, and inspiring the other pacers to bowl out of their skins – earning universal awe and admiration.

Siraj’s 23 wickets came at an average of 32.43, with an economy rate of 4.02 and a strike rate of 48.43 – hardly earth-shattering figures.

In India’s two victories, he was the decisive force. At Edgbaston, his six wickets in the first innings (seven overall) swung the match firmly in India’s favour. At the Oval, he took nine wickets – four in the first innings and five in the second – turning the match on its head.

How India held their nerve for 25 days under immense pressure – driven by willpower, ambition, and skill – culminating in a thrilling final 56-minute comeback at the Oval to win and level the series, is one of Test cricket’s most riveting tales.

It also marked this Indian young team’s transition from apprehension and misgivings one of rich promise fuelled by ambition and excellence.

The future looks rosy.

The banning of high street fashion adverts which featured models who looked “unhealthily thin” has led industry experts to warn of a return to the super skinny trend.

The aesthetic characterised by models with hollow faces and protruding bones was seen in the 1990s and early 2000s but in more recent years been pushed aside to allow space for the body positive movement which embraced curves.

However Zara, Next and Marks & Spencer have all had adverts banned in recent months over models who “appeared unhealthily thin”. The advertising watchdog has told the BBC it has seen a “definite uptick” in complaints about such ads.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said in 2025 it had received five or six of these complaints a week but in the two weeks after July’s M&S ad ban it had more than 20.

In 2024 it received 61 complaints about models’ weight but it only had grounds to investigate eight.

The figures are tiny but it is something the watchdog is keeping a close eye on, along with cracking down on illegal adverts for prescription-only weight loss drugs.

ASA guidelines state that advertisers should ensure that they don’t present an unhealthy body image as aspirational.

Model and activist Charli Howard wrote a viral open letter after being dropped by her modelling agency for being “too big” despite being a UK size six to eight.

A decade on she says: “I think we’re on the cusp of seeing heroin chic return.”

The phrase heroin chic was used in the early 1990s, when some models were extremely thin, pale and had dark under eye circles reminiscent of drug use.

Ms Howard says the high street adverts are as worrying as images being shared on social media as “thinspiration”.

In June, TikTok blocked search results for “skinnytok” – a hashtag which critics say directs people towards content which “idolises extreme thinness.”

“Some women are naturally thin, and that’s absolutely fine. But deliberately hiring models who appear unwell is deeply disturbing,” she said.

The ASA in all its recent rulings, did not deem any models to be unhealthy. In the case of Next it acknowledged that in other shots of the same model she appeared healthy. Instead it said the pose, styling and camera angles made each of the models in the retailers adverts appear thinner.

M&S said the model’s pose was chosen to portray confidence and ease and not to convey slimness. Next said the model, while slim, had a “healthy and toned physique”.

Zara, which had two adverts banned last week, said that both models had medical certification proving they were in good health.

The ASA said that shadows, poses, and a slick back bun hairstyle had been used to make the models appear thinner.

“Lighting definitely plays a role – it can bring out cheekbones, collarbones, and ribcages,” Ms Howard said.

“After the body positivity movement of the 2010s, it was sadly inevitable fashion might swing back… and we know just how harmful it can be,” she said.

For model and yoga teacher Charlotte Holmes, the demand for thinner models is nothing new.

During her 20-year career she noticed “a brief moment of increased inclusivity” but was still turned down for jobs for “not being thin enough.”

“The body positivity movement raised awareness, but it didn’t fully change the system. Now, it feels like we’re back where we started,” she says.

The 36-year-old was crowned Miss England in 2012 and came fourth in Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model in 2010.

She believes “ultra-thin” has always remained the “silent standard” for models.

“Terms like ‘heroin chic’ and trends like ‘skinnytok’ show how quickly harmful ideals can resurface. It’s not progress, it’s repetition,” she says.

Fashion journalist and consultant Victoria Moss does not think we are facing “heroin chic” but instead connects the trend to the rise of weight loss injections.

“What’s happening at the moment across broader culture is about thinness being held up as a moral health imperative, driven by the fervour over GLP-1 weight loss medication,” she says.

Ms Moss acknowledged many celebrities, like Kim Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey, have visibly shrunk before our eyes.

But she still thinks it is unusual to see very slim models in High Street fashion campaigns, saying it is “more a catwalk phenomenon”.

“I think in all these cases the models have been very young, it must be incredibly upsetting for them to become the focus of these banned adverts. Many women are naturally very slim and it is wrong to cast aspersions,” she says.

Simone Konu-Rae stylist and senior lecturer in fashion communication at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London says while it is important to “appreciate that the human body comes in a range of shapes and sizes”, being thin is not necessarily back in fashion “it simply never went away”.

“High Street brands use runway models to elevate their collections,” she reckons.

“The High Street is saying ‘look, we have the same model as your favourite luxury brand, and our products look just as good at a fraction of the price’,” she adds.

Ms Konu-Rae says the problem is not that the models aren’t healthy but that this is “not the norm for many people, and trying to achieve this body type can be harmful.

“Showing more body diversity is key to showing people they can be fashionable and stylish without having to change who they are,” she says.

Personal stylist Keren Beaumont says the comeback of nineties fashion – such as ultra-low rise jeans and strappy slip tops – could be to blame.

“With these re-emerging trends in silhouettes, we see hip bones and chests exposed and in keeping with the original presentations of these silhouettes, these are being shown on very, very thin models,” she says.

“My hope is that the recent imagery from Next, M&S and Zara will be a reminder to brands to maintain the diversity we have seen in models in recent years and not to regress back to outdated standards.”

Matt Wilson at the ASA says the issue highlighted brands’ responsibilities and “the thoughtfulness they need to take”.

“Societally we know there’s a problem with eating disorders and we must continue to ban adverts that may cause harm.”

Multiple pro-women’s basketball games were interrupted in the past several days after sex toys were thrown onto courts, leaving players and coaches frustrated and fans puzzled.

Two of the instigators are now facing criminal charges and the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) has condemned such behaviour.

This week, members of a meme-coin group reportedly claimed responsibility for some of the incidents in which brightly coloured dildos were thrown onto the court or bench area during games.

Players and coaches are concerned about safety, and the meaning and hostility behind the incidents.

The game between the Atlanta Dream and the Chicago Sky was paused in the closing seconds Thursday night after a purple sex toy was tossed from the stands onto the court.

While individuals in the stands were reportedly questioned, no one was arrested. The WNBA has said any fan caught throwing sex toys onto the court would be banned from the league and would face prosecution.

The exact number of incidents is unclear because in some instances, items are thrown but do not reach the court or the bench.

“It’s super disrespectful,” Chicago Sky player Elizabeth Williams said after a similar incident last week. “I don’t really get the point of it. It’s really immature. Whoever is doing it needs to grow up.”

Minnesota Lynx Head Coach Cheryl Reeve called the increasing number of incidents a “distraction”.

“This has been going on for centuries,” she told reporters on Thursday. “The sexualization of women. This is the latest version of that. And it’s not funny and it should not be the butt of jokes on radio shows, or in print or any comments.”

On Tuesday, as the Indiana Fever played the Los Angeles Sparks, a green sex toy landed on the court near Indiana player Sophie Cunningham.

She had posted on social media days before, asking the culprits to stop throwing the objects saying, “you’re going to hurt one of us”.

“Everyone’s trying to make sure the W is not a joke and it’s taken seriously, and then that happens,” Cunningham said, on her podcast episode on Tuesday.

So far, two arrests have been made. In Atlanta, Delbert Carver, 23, was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, public indecency/indecent exposure, and criminal trespass after he was accused of throwing a sex toy at a game on 29 July.

The WNBA responded in a statement: “The safety and well-being of everyone in our arenas is a top priority for our league. Objects of any kind thrown onto the court or in the seating area can pose a safety risk for players, game officials, and fans.”

The second arrest was Kaden Lopez, 18, also accused of throwing a sex toy at a 5 August game in Phoenix and hitting a man watching the game on the head.

Since the incidents have increased, community members from a meme-coin called Green Dildo Coin have taken responsibility for some of the disruptions.

A spokesperson for the group told USA Today that members started throwing green sex toys to coincide with the launch of the meme-coin, which was created the day before the first incident. The group wanted to use the “viral stunts” to garner attention, they said.

“We didn’t do this because like we dislike women’s sports or, like, some of the narratives that are trending right now are ridiculous,” the spokesperson said anonymously in a Thursday article.

They added that the two arrested were not associated with the group.

While many of the incidents included green toys, some were other colours, indicating that not all of the incidents were linked to the meme-coin.

A bus carrying mourners from a funeral has crashed in western Kenya, killing 25 people, local authorities say.

The driver lost control, veered off the road and overturned into a ditch along the Kisumu-Kakamega Highway on Friday afternoon, a police report seen by the BBC says. This area is notorious for many deadly accidents.

Police said 10 women, 10 men and one girl died at the scene, with 20 passengers injured, five of them seriously. Four people later died in hospital, officials said.

The passengers were returning from a burial ground and are all believed to be from one family.

The cause of the crash is not yet clear, police said.

The vehicle was a secondary school bus, but there were no students on board as it was being used for the funeral transport.

The bus was coming from a burial ceremony at Nyahera and going to Nyakach, a distance of about 62 km (38.5 miles).

Kenya’s Ministry of Health made a call for an “urgent blood drive” to help survivors and extended its “condolences to the bereaved”.

It also urged motorists to exercise caution, especially as the country deals with numerous fatal road accidents.

Kenyan President William Ruto called on X for authorities to quickly book “those responsible for any acts of negligence leading to the accident and address all traffic violations to ensure road safety across the country”.

The National Transport and Safety Authority of Kenya said they will aid investigations into the cause of the crash.

This crash comes after six people died earlier this week when a light aircraft belonging to a medical charity crashed in Nairobi.

On Thursday, nine people were killed when a bus collided with a train in the town of Naivasha, local media reported. And on Saturday, seven people were killed in another crash near Nairobi, according to media reports.

Between 2020 and 2021, Kenyan road deaths rose more than 20%. In 2021, more than 4,500 people were killed and more than 16,000 injured.

The UK would have lost World War Two if Sir Keir Starmer had been its leader at the time, the US ambassador to Israel has suggested in an attack on the prime minister’s response to Israel’s Gaza City takeover plan.

In a post on social media, Mike Huckabee wrote: “So Israel is expected to surrender to Hamas & feed them even though Israeli hostages are being starved?”

“Did UK surrender to Nazis and drop food to them? … If you had been PM then UK would be speaking German!” he said.

His comments come after Starmer condemned Israel’s plans to take over Gaza City as “wrong” and urged its government to immediately reconsider its decision “to further escalate its offensive”.

A spokesperson for No 10 said they had nothing to add to Starmer’s comments.

In his post on X on Friday, in which he reposted a statement by Starmer, Huckabee said: “Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?

“That wasn’t food you dropped. If you had been PM then UK would be speaking German!”

During World War Two, British and American forces dropped 4,000 tons of bombs on the eastern German city over two days, killing tens of thousands of civilians.

Starmer’s earlier statement said: “The Israeli Government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong, and we urge it to reconsider immediately.

“This action will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages. It will only bring more bloodshed,” he added.

In the early hours of Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet approved plans to take over Gaza’s capital, in a controversial escalation of its war in the territory.

Netanyahu has previously said he wants to take control of the whole of the Gaza Strip but the approved plan focuses specifically on Gaza City in the territory’s north, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live.

Israel’s move has been staunchly opposed, including from within Israel, such as by members of the country’s army leadership and the families of hostages being held in Gaza.

The plan has also been heavily criticised internationally. The United Nations’ human rights chief Volker Türk warned further escalation of the war would cause “more massive forced displacement, more killing, more unbearable suffering”.

Following the announcement of Israel’s plan, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the country would suspend the export of arms to Israel, which could be used in Gaza, saying it was “increasingly difficult to understand” how Israel’s military plan would achieve legitimate aims.

However, the US has not condemned the move. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said it was “pretty much up to Israel” whether to fully occupy Gaza.

During a meeting with the UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy in Kent on Friday, US Vice-President JD Vance refused to disclose whether the US government knew about Israel’s plans to take over Gaza City.

He added that Trump would address the issue, saying their aim is to stop Hamas “attacking innocent people” and to solve humanitarian problems in Gaza.

Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have outlined five “principles” for ending the war.

These include the disarmament of Hamas, the return of all Israeli hostages, the demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip, Israeli security control over the Gaza Strip and the establishment of an alternative civilian administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.

More than 61,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the IDF began its military operation, in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

Fifty hostages are still being held by Hamas – 20 of whom are believed to still be alive.

Convicted triple-murderer Erin Patterson allegedly tried to repeatedly poison her husband, including with cookies she claimed their daughter had baked him, a court was told.

The Australian woman was last month found guilty of murdering three relatives – and attempting to kill another – with a toxic mushroom-laced beef Wellington.

The 50-year-old was originally charged with three counts of attempted murder against her estranged husband Simon Patterson, but these charges were dropped without explanation on the eve of her trial.

The details of the allegations, which Patterson denied, were suppressed to protect the proceedings, but can now be made public for the first time.

Three people died in hospital in the days after the lunch on 29 July 2023: Patterson’s former in-laws, Don Patterson, 70, and Gail Patterson, 70, as well as Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66.

Local pastor Ian Wilkinson – Heather’s husband – recovered after weeks of treatment in hospital.

In lengthy pre-trial hearings last year, Mr Patterson had detailed what he suspected was a years-long campaign to kill him with tainted food – including one episode which had left him so ill he spent weeks in a coma and his family was twice told to say their goodbyes.

In a quiet moment during the early days of Patterson’s trial, her estranged husband choked up as he explained his sorrow to a near empty courtroom.

Mr Patterson’s parents and his aunt had been killed, and his uncle almost died too, after eating the toxic meal prepared by his wife. He had narrowly avoided the same fate, pulling out of the lunch gathering the day before.

“I have a lot to grieve,” he said to the judge, sitting in the witness box as the jury prepared to return from a break.

“The legal process has been very difficult… especially the way it’s progressed in terms of the charges relating to me and my evidence about that – or non-evidence now, I guess.”

“I’m sitting here, half thinking about the things I’m not allowed to talk about and… I don’t actually understand why. It seems bizarre to me, but it is what it is.”

What he wasn’t allowed to talk about – the elephant in the room throughout the trial – was his claim that Patterson had been trying to poison him long before the fatal lunch that destroyed his family on 29 July 2023.

Mr Patterson gave evidence during pre-trial hearings, which are a standard part of the court process and allow judges to determine what evidence is admissible – or allowed to be presented to a jury.

As the charges relating to Mr Patterson were dropped, his evidence on the matter was excluded from the raft of information presented at the nine-week trial this year.

But he had explained that, as far as he knows, it all began with a Tupperware container of Bolognese penne in November 2021.

Mr Patterson and his wife had separated in 2015 – though they still aren’t divorced – and he thought they remained on amicable terms.

Under questioning from Patterson’s lawyer, Mr Patterson confirmed he had noticed “nothing untoward” in their relationship at that point: “If by ‘nothing untoward’, you mean anything that would make me think she would try and kill me, correct.”

But after eating that meal, he began suffering from vomiting and diarrhoea, and spent a night in hospital.

“I had the idea I got sick from Erin’s food. I did not give it too much thought,” he said in his police statement, according to The Age newspaper.

Months later, in May 2022, he fell ill again after eating a chicken korma curry prepared by Patterson on a camping trip in the rugged mountains and alpine scruff of Victoria’s High Country region.

“While Erin was preparing food I was getting the fire going so I didn’t watch her prepare it,” he told the court.

Within days, he was in a coma in a Melbourne hospital, and a large part of his bowel was surgically removed in a bid to save his life.

“My family were asked to come and say goodbye to me twice, as I was not expected to live,” he said in a 2022 Facebook post, reported by The South Gippsland Sentinel Times two years ago.

In September 2022, while visiting a stunning, isolated stretch of Victorian coastline, he would become desperately unwell again after eating a vegetable wrap.

At first, he felt nausea and diarrhoea coming on, the court heard, before his symptoms escalated. He started slurring his speech, gradually lost control of his muscles, and began “fitting”.

“By the end of the journey [to hospital], all I could move was my neck, my tongue and lips,” he told the court.

A family friend who was a doctor, Christopher Ford, suggested Mr Patterson start a food diary so they could try to figure out what was making him so sick.

“I couldn’t understand why these things kept on happening to him in such a way that he had essentially three near-death experiences,” Dr Ford told the court.

Mr Patterson returned to see him in February 2023, five months before the fatal lunch, revealing he’d come to believe his estranged wife was responsible.

He told Dr Ford about a batch of cookies supposedly baked by his daughter, which he feared were treats tainted – possibly with antifreeze chemicals – by his wife, who had called repeatedly to check whether he had eaten any.

The court would hear investigators never figured out what Patterson had allegedly been feeding him, though they suspected rat poison may have been used on at least one occasion, and had found a file on Patterson’s computer with information about the toxin.

After this discovery, Mr Patterson changed his medical power of attorney, removing his wife, and quietly told a handful of family members of his fears.

The court heard that his father Don Patterson responded diplomatically, but his sister Anna Terrington told the pre-trial hearings she had believed her brother, and was anxious when she learned about the lunch Patterson had planned.

Ms Terrington called her parents the night before to warn them.

“Dad said, ‘No, we’ll be ok’,” she said.

Five days later, she gathered in a Melbourne hospital chapel alongside her brother and other worried relatives. Down the hall, deteriorating in their beds, were Don and Gail Patterson and Heather and Ian Wilkinson.

Ruth Dubois, the Wilkinsons’ daughter, told the pre-trial hearings Simon Patterson had assembled the group to tell them he suspected his previous grave illnesses were the work of his wife.

“[He said] he had stopped eating food that Erin had prepared, because he suspected Erin had been messing with it,” she said.

“He was really sorry that he hadn’t told our family before this… but he thought he was the only person she was targeting, and that they’d be safe.”

It was also revealed that Patterson had visited a local tip the afternoon of the lunch at her house, though it is unknown what, if anything, she disposed of there.

The jury heard that she had travelled to the same dump days after the lunch to get rid of a food dehydrator used to prepare the meal, but the judge ruled they couldn’t be told about the first visit.

Other bizarre evidence which was ultimately left out of the trial included a 2020 post to a poisons help forum on Facebook, in which Patterson claimed her cat had eaten some mushrooms under a tree and had vomited, alongside pictures of fungi.

Patterson had never owned a cat, prosecutors said, arguing the post was evidence of a long-standing interest in the poisonous properties of mushrooms.

On Friday, Justice Christopher Beale set down a sentencing hearing for 25 August, where those connected to the case will have the opportunity to give victim impact statements.

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Authorities in Brussels are considering using ferrets to tackle the city’s longstanding issue with rats.

The rodents have become a major problem in the Belgian capital, prompting the council to set up a rat task force.

Under the proposals, a professional rat catcher would use trained ferrets to hunt out the animals and chase them towards traps.

“Since the rat is a natural prey for the ferret, the ferret is able to drive the rats out of their hiding places and bring them closer to traps,” a spokesperson for Anas Ben Adelmoumen, the councillor in charge of public cleanliness, said.

Ferrets have already been used in some instances in Brussels, the spokesperson said, and now the council is proposing extending the method across the city. A decision on their use is expected in the coming months.

One district, Etterbeek, has been using ferrets for some time with positive results. Rats that manage to escape the traps are usually scared off by the scent of the ferrets, allowing an area to be clear of rodents for several months.

Brussels has seen its brown rat population almost double in the last 10 years, according to the Brussels Times.

It is thought to be down to milder winters, which make ideal mating conditions. The popularity of compost bins is also thought to have boosted the city’s rat numbers.

Since January, the rat task force says it has carried out more than 600 “interventions” in people’s homes.

It has called on residents to contact the council as soon as they see the signs of a rat infestation. It has also boosted its budget by 20% to a total of 65,000 euros (£56,332, $75,766) and invested in smart traps to capture the animals.

A fierce wildfire north-west of Los Angeles prompted evacuation orders for thousands of residents on Friday, as extreme heat and dry conditions fuelled its rapid spread.

The blaze, named the Canyon Fire, ignited on Thursday afternoon along the border of Ventura and Los Angeles counties. By Friday evening, it had expanded from 30 acres to nearly 5,400.

The fire has been partially contained, with 28% of its perimeter under control late on Friday, officials said, and evacuation orders were reduced to warnings.

On Friday night, a firefighter suffered major injuries when their truck rolled over a ridge and down a steep hillside, CBS, the BBC’s US media partner, reported.

While extreme heat and dry conditions had been complicating firefighting efforts, on Friday night, Ventura county said in a statement that “favourable weather conditions” had allowed firefighters to make “good progress in supressing the blaze.”

There were still some 400 firefighters battling the flames on Friday evening.

The fire remains active and is spreading east toward Castaic in Los Angeles County, authorities said.

With the temperatures forecast to soar to 100°F (37.7°C) in the coming days, residents are being urged to stay on alert.

In the city of Santa Clarita, one of the closest to the blaze, residents have been told to stay away from fire-affected areas.

“If you’re in Santa Clarita, Hasley Canyon, or Val Verde, take evacuation orders seriously – when first responders say GO, leave immediately. Keep aware – please don’t risk lives,” LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger wrote on X on Friday.

The Canyon Fire is one of several active wildfires across the state, according to California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

The Gifford Fire, the largest active blaze in California, has engulfed almost 100,000 acres and is burning across the San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties.

Wildfires have become more frequent in California, with experts citing climate change as a key factor. Hotter, drier conditions have made fire seasons longer and more destructive.

In January this year, the Eaton Fire tore through the Altadena neighbourhood just north of Los Angeles, killing at least 31 people and destroying thousands of structures.

Scientists have found strong evidence of a giant gas planet in the nearest star system to our own.

At four-and-a-half light years away, the lifeless planet would be a close neighbour to Earth in astronomical terms and could have moons that sustain life.

The signs were found in the star system Alpha Centauri by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope.

The potential planet was detected last year, but it had disappeared in follow-up observations. Astronomers must now look again to prove it definitely exists.

Scientists are particularly excited about this discovery because of the similarities between the exoplanet’s star and our Sun.

“Four years is a long way but in galaxy terms, it’s very close – it’s in our neighbourhood,” said Dr Carly Howett, associate professor of space instrumentation at the University of Oxford.

“It is around a star that is Sun-like and about the same temperature and brightness. That’s really important if we want to think about habitable worlds,” she added.

The planet would be similar to our solar system’s gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter, and would be enveloped in a thick gas cloud.

That means it could not support life itself, but it could have moons that are habitable.

Jupiter and some other planets in our solar system have icy moons, which researchers believe could support life.

Scientists are currently investigating that possibility on missions called Europa Clipper and Juice.

But those planets are far away from our life-giving Sun. The potential “new” planet is comparatively close to its star.

The signs were found in direct imaging by the James Webb Space Telescope, which is the closest thing scientists have to taking photographs of distant objects.

“These are incredibly challenging observations to make, even with the world’s most powerful space telescope, because these stars are so bright, close, and move across the sky quickly,” said Charles Beichman from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-first author of the new discoveries.

Those stars create huge amounts of bright light that can block out nearby objects.

That could be why the planet was detected once, in August 2024, but then seemingly disappeared when scientists looked for it again.

“Probably the planet was either behind the star or too close to be able to see it. You need an element of luck,” said Dr Howett.

Astronomers will now look for more signs of the planet. They hope to use a new Nasa telescope – the Grace Roman Space Telescope – which is due to start operating in 2027.

Future observations by the James Webb Space Telescope should also be able to tell us what the planet is made up of, using something called spectral imaging.

That will build up a more detailed picture of what it looks like, and how habitable any orbiting Moons could be.

The leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia signed an agreement aimed at ending decades of conflict as they were hosted by President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday.

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan shook hands after the US president described the event as “historic”.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Trump said of the agreement, which will reopen some key transport routes between the countries and increase US influence in the region.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, in the 1980s and 1990s and violence has flared up in the years since.

On Friday, Trump said Armenia and Azerbaijan had promised to stop all fighting “forever” as well as open up travel, business and diplomatic relations.

“We are today establishing peace in the Caucasus,” Aliyev said. “We lost a lot of years being preoccupied with wars and occupation and bloodshed.”

Pashinyan called the signing a “significant milestone” in relations between the two countries.

“Thirty-five years they fought, and now they’re friends and they’re going to be friends a long time,” Trump said at the event.

• EXPLAINED: Conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenians explained

The White House said that, as part of the deal, the US will also help build a major transit corridor that will be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.

The route will connect Azerbaijan and its autonomous Nakhchivan exclave, which are separated by Armenian territory. In the past, Aliyev has demanded that Armenia give his country a railroad corridor to Nakhichevan.

Armenia wanted to have control of the road and the Azerbaijani leader has in the past threatened to take the corridor by force. The issue has halted and stalled previous peace negotiations.

Both leaders praised Trump and his team throughout the meeting: “President Trump, in six months, did a miracle,” Aliyev said.

Trump said he had also signed a bilateral agreement with both countries to expand energy and technology trade.

The US president has sought to make peace deals between several warring countries during his second term.

The summit on Friday also signifies the US expanding its influence in the region at the expense of Russia. For more than a century, the Kremlin has played the role of power and peace broker there.

Most recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has acted as the main mediator in the conflict. The last agreement signed by Aliyev and Pashinyan was crafted by Putin.

With Trump now bringing the two countries together, Putin is largely sidelined. Moscow has worked to insert its interests into peace talks, but both sides abandoned those proposals in favour of an American solution.

The announcement on Friday came shortly before Trump announced that he would meet Putin for talks in Alaska next week.

This searing biography of Prince Andrew crackles with scandals about sex and money on almost every page, two subjects that have always caused problems for the royals.

Andrew Lownie’s book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, is an unrelentingly unflattering portrait of Prince Andrew. It depicts him as arrogant, self-seeking and in denial about his links to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The author’s best-selling biographies have a habit of changing the reputation of famous figures, such as establishing the Nazi intrigues around the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII.

Although in the case of Entitled, he hasn’t so much cemented Prince Andrew’s reputation, as put it in concrete boots and thrown it in the river. It is hard to see how he might come back from this.

This account, more than 450 pages, is said to have taken four years to research, involving hundreds of interviews. And for anyone thinking they have heard much of this story before, it is the extra and sometimes unexpected, throwaway details that will make this a fascinating read.

Like comedian Billy Connolly and Sir Elton John being at Prince Andrew’s stag night. Or film maker Woody Allen being at the same dinner with Prince Andrew at Epstein’s house in Manhattan.

This detail tallies with a piece in the New York Times this week that quotes a birthday greeting written by Allen to Epstein, which references “even royalty” being at one of Epstein’s dinners.

To rapidly lose some mid-life weight, when he was going out with a younger woman, the book records that Prince Andrew lived on a crash diet of “stewed prunes for breakfast, raw vegetables for lunch and soup for supper”.

About their academic ability, the book says that Prince Andrew and his former wife Sarah Ferguson passed two O-levels at their respective expensive private schools. Andrew had to re-take exams the following year before going on to take A-levels.

Now in disgrace, Prince Andrew is claimed to spend his time, when not riding or golfing, cooped up watching aviation videos and reading thrillers, with The Talented Mr Ripley said to be his favourite. It is about a con-man taking on the identity of a wealthy playboy.

There are some more gentle anecdotes about him, such as when he was a helicopter pilot and ferried a group of soldiers from a rifle range and decided to put down on the Sandringham estate.

Queen Elizabeth II, who was in residence, was said to have looked at the guns being toted by these unexpected arrivals. “You can put those in there if you like,” she said, pointing to an umbrella stand.

But the biography is much more crowded with anecdotes about his rudeness and his acute lack of self awareness, not to mention a prodigious number of quick-fire affairs.

It is claimed he swore at and insulted staff, bawling someone out as an “imbecile” for not using the Queen Mother’s full title. Protection officers were despatched to collect golf balls and private jets seemed to be hired as casually as an Uber on a night out.

The Paris-based journalist Peter Allen, among the sources for the book, says many of Andrew’s problems reflect on his “flawed character”.

“He’s been afforded every type of privilege, all his life, while displaying very poor judgement and getting into highly compromising situations.”

Known as “Baby Grumpling” in his early years, Andrew was claimed to have moved people from jobs because one was wearing a nylon tie, and another because he had a mole on his face.

Diplomats, whose cause Andrew was meant to be advancing, nicknamed him “His Buffoon Highness” because of all the gaffes.

There are details of his unhappy knack of getting involved with all the wrong people in his money-making ventures, from Libyan gun runners and relations of dictators to a Chinese spy.

“This book appears to seal the fate of Andrew if he was ever hoping to be reinstated officially into the working royals,” says royal commentator Pauline Maclaran.

“The public will be wanting to see some clear action on the King’s part I think – particularly as Andrew’s connections to Epstein are raked over again,” says Prof Maclaran.

If this seems like a torrent of bad news, the book also raises some deeper questions about what lies behind Prince Andrew’s character.

There are suggestions of an often lonely and isolated figure, obsessed with sex but much weaker at relationships. Sources from his time in the navy saw his “bombastic” exterior as concealing a much more vulnerable and socially awkward figure, whose upbringing had made him unsure how to behave.

He showed authentic courage when he flew helicopters in the Falklands war and he was remembered as being willing to “muck in” during that stressful time, when crews were living on canned food rather than fine dining.

On his fascination for sex, an unnamed source claims Andrew lost his virginity at the age of 11, which the same source likens to a form of abuse.

One of his former naval colleagues went from seeing Andrew as “immature, privileged, entitled” to having a more sympathetic view of a character of “loneliness and insecurity”, a public figure who was uncertain about how he fitted in with other people, and had ended up with the “wrong sort of friends”.

Top of that list must be Jeffrey Epstein. Lownie’s book offers meticulous detail of the connections between Prince Andrew and the US financier and sex offender, establishing links that went back to the early 1990s, earlier than had previously been established.

It is also strong on the unbalanced nature of their relationship, with a friend of Andrew’s describing the prince’s dealings with Epstein as “like putting a rattlesnake in an aquarium with a mouse”.

Epstein’s sleazy and abusive world, with its mix of easy money and exploitative sex, was ultimately a form of blackmail operation, claims Lownie’s book. It gave him something to hold over the many powerful people who came into his orbit.

The book is a reminder of the scale and seediness of Epstein’s exploitation of girls. It is also an account of the destruction that followed.

The famous photograph showing Virginia Giuffre with Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell in London was supposedly taken by Jeffrey Epstein. Prince Andrew is the only one of them not to be either dead or in prison.

And Lownie’s sources cast doubt on whether Epstein did take his own life, questioning the medical evidence and the series of unfortunate gaps in supervision in the jail where he was being held.

After his disastrous BBC Newsnight interview and the court case with Virginia Giuffre – which he settled with a rejection of any wrongdoing – Prince Andrew has been pushed out of public life, no longer a “working royal”.

Historian Ed Owens says it is almost six years since that Newsnight interview, but Prince Andrew is still appearing in news stories “for all the wrong reasons”.

“This isn’t good for the monarchy,” he says, even though “King Charles and Prince William have sought to limit the reputational damage Andrew can have on ‘brand Windsor’,” says Owens.

• What do we know about the Epstein files?
• Prince Andrew to pay own costs or move out of Windsor mansion
• Virginia Giuffre, Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein accuser, dies

Standing loyally beside Prince Andrew has been Sarah Ferguson, who describes their relationship as being “divorced to each other, not from each other”, still living together at Royal Lodge.

The book depicts her as being in an endless loop of binge spending, debt and then convoluted deals, sponsorships and freebies, to try to get her finances on track, before the cycle begins again.

But there is no doubting her remarkable capacity to keep bouncing back and to keep on plugging away, when others would have been down and out years ago.

She has a sense of fun that appeals to people. The book tells how successful she was at boosting sales as an ambassador for Waterford Wedgwood, then owned by Tony O’Reilly. She was described by staff as “brilliant at working a room, fresh, chic and wasn’t stuffy”.

The book is already riding high in the best-seller charts and royal commentator Richard Palmer says it raises difficult topical questions.

“It puts Andrew back at the front and centre of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal at a time when Donald Trump is facing serious questions about his own friendship with the late paedophile,” says Palmer.

“It’s a scandal that just won’t go away for the Royal Family, even though they’ve tried to distance themselves from Andrew,” he says.

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Multiple pro-women’s basketball games were interrupted in the past several days after sex toys were thrown onto courts, leaving players and coaches frustrated and fans puzzled.

Two of the instigators are now facing criminal charges and the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) has condemned such behaviour.

This week, members of a meme-coin group reportedly claimed responsibility for some of the incidents in which brightly coloured dildos were thrown onto the court or bench area during games.

Players and coaches are concerned about safety, and the meaning and hostility behind the incidents.

The game between the Atlanta Dream and the Chicago Sky was paused in the closing seconds Thursday night after a purple sex toy was tossed from the stands onto the court.

While individuals in the stands were reportedly questioned, no one was arrested. The WNBA has said any fan caught throwing sex toys onto the court would be banned from the league and would face prosecution.

The exact number of incidents is unclear because in some instances, items are thrown but do not reach the court or the bench.

“It’s super disrespectful,” Chicago Sky player Elizabeth Williams said after a similar incident last week. “I don’t really get the point of it. It’s really immature. Whoever is doing it needs to grow up.”

Minnesota Lynx Head Coach Cheryl Reeve called the increasing number of incidents a “distraction”.

“This has been going on for centuries,” she told reporters on Thursday. “The sexualization of women. This is the latest version of that. And it’s not funny and it should not be the butt of jokes on radio shows, or in print or any comments.”

On Tuesday, as the Indiana Fever played the Los Angeles Sparks, a green sex toy landed on the court near Indiana player Sophie Cunningham.

She had posted on social media days before, asking the culprits to stop throwing the objects saying, “you’re going to hurt one of us”.

“Everyone’s trying to make sure the W is not a joke and it’s taken seriously, and then that happens,” Cunningham said, on her podcast episode on Tuesday.

So far, two arrests have been made. In Atlanta, Delbert Carver, 23, was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, public indecency/indecent exposure, and criminal trespass after he was accused of throwing a sex toy at a game on 29 July.

The WNBA responded in a statement: “The safety and well-being of everyone in our arenas is a top priority for our league. Objects of any kind thrown onto the court or in the seating area can pose a safety risk for players, game officials, and fans.”

The second arrest was Kaden Lopez, 18, also accused of throwing a sex toy at a 5 August game in Phoenix and hitting a man watching the game on the head.

Since the incidents have increased, community members from a meme-coin called Green Dildo Coin have taken responsibility for some of the disruptions.

A spokesperson for the group told USA Today that members started throwing green sex toys to coincide with the launch of the meme-coin, which was created the day before the first incident. The group wanted to use the “viral stunts” to garner attention, they said.

“We didn’t do this because like we dislike women’s sports or, like, some of the narratives that are trending right now are ridiculous,” the spokesperson said anonymously in a Thursday article.

They added that the two arrested were not associated with the group.

While many of the incidents included green toys, some were other colours, indicating that not all of the incidents were linked to the meme-coin.

Hee-kyung giggles as she steps into Seoul’s new “warm-hearted convenience store”.

At 29, she is perhaps not the person most would have imagined wanting to take advantage of the South Korean capital’s latest efforts to combat loneliness.

But Hee-Kyung visits every day to grab the free instant ramen noodles and spend hours chatting with other visitors and social workers.

“I tell myself, ‘another day, another escape from feeling lonely’,” Hee-kyung says.

A teenage runaway, she no longer talks to anyone from her family. The friends she has she met online, through the shared love of K-pop group SuperJunior, and they live far away. Currently unemployed, she has no work mates to chat to.

She lives alone, and whiles away the time watching cute animal videos on her phone as she lies on the floor.

“I have no other place to go if it weren’t for [the store].”

Hee-Kyung is one of 20,000 people to visit the four stores since they were opened in March. The city had been expecting just 5,000 in the first year.

This particular location, in the city’s north-eastern district of Dongdaemun, sees around 70 to 80 visitors each day.

Most are in their 40s and 50s, but Hee-Kyung is far from being the only young person to access the store’s services.

A 2022 study revealed an estimated 130,000 young people in the city – those aged between 19 and 39 – are either socially isolated or shut in. That same study also found the share of single-person households in the capital had reached nearly 40% – that alarmed a government that has been trying to reverse plummeting birth and marriage rates.

The day the BBC visited, around a dozen visitors – men and women, young and old – were sitting on benches or burrowed into beanbags, watching a film together.

“We have movie days to encourage low-level bonding,” whispers Kim Se-heon, the manager of the city’s Loneliness Countermeasure Division.

The stores are designed to offer a warm, cafe-like atmosphere. In one corner, an older woman closed her eyes as she sank into the automatic massage chair that hummed. In another, there are stacks of noodles.

“Ramen is a symbol of comfort and warmth in South Korea,” Kim explains.

While waiting for the noodles to cook, visitors are asked to fill out a brief survey on their mood and living conditions.

These are just a handful of the growing number of socially isolated people that the city is trying to reach.

The change South Korea has undergone is seismic: in a generation, it has gone from a war-torn agrarian society to a developed economy.

A few decades ago, it was common to see large families with six to eight children, living under the same roof. But years of migration to cities have shrunk families and turned places like Seoul into sprawling metropolises.

Unaffordable housing, rising costs and gruelling working hours have led more and more young people to reject marriage or parenthood, or both. On the other end is an ageing population that feels neglected by children who are racing to keep up.

“You know the saying that the least tasty meal is the one you are having alone? I ask older people who come in if they were eating okay. They would tear up, just being asked that question,” says Lee In-sook, the counsellor at the store.

After a divorce and her grown-up children leaving home, she understands how it feels to be alone.

The first time Hee-kyung – who is around the age of In-sook’s daughter – arrived at the store, she immediately caught her eye.

Like many visitors, Hee-kyung was quiet on the first day, barely speaking to others. The second time she came, she began to speak to In-sook.

It was the growing number of “lonely deaths” that worried Seoul officials enough to act. Older people were dying alone at home, and their bodies were not discovered until days or weeks later.

That mission soon expanded to tackling loneliness itself. But Seoul is not the first to do this.

In 2018, the UK appointed a Minister for Loneliness. Japan followed the example, establishing an agency to address the problem which it said had become more pronounced in the Covid-19 pandemic.

The phenomenon of withdrawing from society altogether is common enough in Japan that it has a name: hikikomori. In South Korea too, a rising number of young people have been voluntarily cutting themselves off from a highly competitive and exacting society.

“Perhaps it was the pandemic that led to this,” muses Lee Yu-jeong, who manages one of Seoul’s anti-loneliness programmes.

She points out how her children remain buried in their smartphones when their friends visit. “People today express how difficult it is to have a network of friends. Loneliness has become something that needs to be tackled as a society.”

The first step was opening a hotline for people who need someone to speak to. A nationwide survey in 2023 found that a third of Korean adults have either no one to ask for help with housework or speak to when feeling sad.

Its counselors offer a 40-minute call to discuss any topic. Park Seung-ah has been making three calls a day from her cubicle.

“I was surprised to see that many young people wanted these sessions. They want to share the burden on their chest but there is often a power dynamic with parents or their friends. So they come to us.”

The “warm-hearted convenience stores” followed swiftly, a physical location where the lonely were welcome.

The Dongdaemun location was picked due to its proximity to low-income housing, where residents live in tiny, subdivided apartments alone.

Sohn, 68, visits the store once a week to watch films, and to escape his cramped home.

“[The stores] should have opened before I was born. It’s good to spend even just two to three hours,” he says.

Sohn has spent more than five decades of his life caring for his mother, who suffered a brain aneurism when he was a child. As a result, he never married or had children.

The cost of the dedication became clear when she died.

Penniless and walking with a cane since suffering a brain haemorrhage himself several years ago, he says there aren’t many places for him.

“Places cost money, going to the cinema costs money,” he says.

The stores were created specially to welcome those who aren’t welcome in other places, explains store manager Lee Bo-hyun.

They go beyond a bit of room and a film – offering air-conditioning during the hottest summer months to those on low incomes who cannot afford it at home.

It is also supposed to be a space where the lonely can sidestep the stigma of asking for help. The choice of name – “convenience stores” – was a deliberate attempt to distance them from psychiatric clinics, important in a country where there is still a stigma against asking for help for mental health – especially among older residents.

And yet, some of their reservations can still be seen when they walk through the door for the first time, compounded by their experience of isolation.

Visitors are often uncomfortable speaking to another person or eating together initially, store manager Lee says.

“The typical loneliness, if that repeats for days, months, and half year, that is now more than a feeling,” Lee explains.

“Those folks start to avoid places with people. So many people ask us if they can take the ramen to go because they won’t eat with others.”

Lee would tell them that they don’t need to talk. They can simply sit at the same table and have noodles.

It has been months since Hee-kyung was one of the quiet new arrivals.

So, has it made a difference? In-sook recalls a conversation she was having with a local paper. When she brought up her daughter, she felt a sudden pang and her voice broke.

“I am going to hug you,” Hee-kyung declared.

She walked over from the other side of the room and embraced In-sook.

Mexico has said US military would not be entering its territory following reports that President Donald Trump had directed the Pentagon to target Latin American drug cartels.

“The United States is not going to come to Mexico with the military,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Friday. “We co-operate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be an invasion. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out.”

The New York Times reported on Friday that Trump had secretly signed a directive to begin using military force on foreign soil.

In a statement to the BBC, the White House did not address the directive but said that Trump’s “top priority is protecting the homeland”.

The reported directive appears to follow an executive order signed by Trump earlier this year formally designating eight drug cartels as terrorist entities – six of which are Mexican.

• From Mexico cartel safe house to US streets: BBC tracks deadly fentanyl targeted by Trump tariffs
• How does fentanyl get into the US?

Speaking to reporters, Sheinbaum said the Mexican government was informed that an order on the cartels was coming, and “that it had nothing to do with the participation of any military personnel”.

“It is not part of any agreement, far from it. When it has been brought up, we have always said ‘No’,” she said.

Earlier this year, Sheinbaum told reporters that Trump’s decision to designate cartels as terrorists “cannot be an opportunity for the US to invade our sovereignty”.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the designation would help the US target cartels, including through intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense.

“We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organisations, not simply drug dealing organisations,” Rubio said.

The New York Times report says the directive signed by Trump provides “an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations” against cartels, both at sea and on foreign soil.

In recent months, Mexico has worked with the US to curb the illegal flow of both migrants and drugs through the US-Mexico border.

June saw the lowest border crossings on record, according to data by the US Customs and Border Protections, and last week, US Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson said fentanyl seizures at the border were down by over half.

In a post on X, Johnson celebrated the collaboration between Sheinbum and Trump, writing that their leadership had resulted in cartels “going bankrupt and our countries are safer because of it”.

Astronaut Jim Lovell, who guided the Apollo 13 mission safely back to Earth in 1970, has died aged 97.

Nasa said he had “turned a potential tragedy into a success” after an attempt to land on the Moon was aborted because of an explosion onboard the spacecraft while it was hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth.

Tens of millions watched on television as Lovell and two other astronauts splashed back down into the Pacific Ocean, a moment which has become one of the most iconic in the history of space travel.

Lovell, who was also part of the Apollo 8 mission, was the first man to go to the Moon twice – but never actually landed.

Acting Nasa head Sean Duffy said Lovell had helped the US space programme to “forge a historic path”.

In a statement, Lovell’s family said: “We will miss his unshakeable optimism, his sense of humor, and the way he made each of us feel we could do the impossible. He was truly one of a kind.”

Tom Hanks, who played Lovell in the 1995 movie , called the astronaut one of those people “who dare, who dream, and who lead others to the places we would not go on our own”.

Hanks said in a statement on Instagram that Lovell’s many voyages “were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive”.

One Saturday, a 16-year-old hauled a heavy, three-foot tube into the middle of a large field in Wisconsin.

He had persuaded his science teacher to help him make a makeshift rocket. Somehow, he had managed to get his hands on the ingredients for gunpowder – potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal.

He pulled on a welder’s helmet for protection. He packed it with powder, struck a match and ran like hell.

The rocket rose 80 feet into the air and exploded. Had the chemicals been packed slightly differently, he would have been blown to pieces.

For Jim Lovell, this was more than a childish lark.

In achieving his dream to be a rocket scientist, he would become an American hero. But it was not going to be easy.

James Arthur Lovell Jr was born on 25 March 1928 – just a year after Charles Lindbergh made his historic trip across the Atlantic.

“Boys like either dinosaurs or airplanes,” he said. “I was very much an airplane boy.”

When he was five years old, his father died in a car accident.

His mother, Blanche, worked all hours, struggling to keep food on the table. University was well beyond their financial reach.

The answer was the US Navy, which was hungry for new pilots after World War Two. It was not building rockets but at least it involved flying.

Lovell signed up to a programme that sent him to college at the military’s expense while training as a fighter pilot.

Two years in, he gambled and switched to the Navy Academy at Annapolis, on Chesapeake Bay, in the hope of working with his beloved rockets.

It was a lucky decision.

A few months later, the Korean War broke out and his former fellow apprentice pilots were sent to South East Asia. Many never got to finish their education.

Marriage was banned at Annapolis and girlfriends discouraged. The navy did not want its midshipmen wasting their time on such frivolities.

But Lovell had a sweetheart. Marilyn Gerlach was the high school girl he had shyly asked to the prom.

Women were not allowed on campus and trips outside were limited to 45 minutes. Somehow the relationship survived.

Just hours after his graduation in 1952, the newly commissioned Ensign Lovell married her.

They would be together for more than 70 years, until Marilyn’s death in 2023.

He did everything he could to advertise his love of rocketry.

His thesis at the Navy Academy was in the unheard-of topic of liquid-fuel engines. After graduation, he hoped to specialise in this pioneering new technology.

But the navy had other ideas.

Lovell was assigned to an aircraft carrier group flying Banshee jets off ships at night. It was a white-knuckle, high-wire business fit only for daredevils. But for Lovell, it was not enough.

In 1958, he applied to Nasa.

Project Mercury was America’s attempt to place a man in orbit around the Earth. Jim Lovell was one of the 110 test pilots considered for selection but a temporary liver condition put paid to his chances.

Four years later, he tried again.

In June 1962, after gruelling medical tests, Nasa announced its “New Nine”. These would be the men to deliver on President Kennedy’s pledge to put American boots on the Moon.

It was the most elite group of flying men ever assembled. They included Neil Armstrong, John Young and, fulfilling his childhood dream, Jim Lovell.

Three years later he was ready.

His first trip into space was aboard the two-man Gemini 7. Lovell and fellow astronaut Frank Borman ate a steak-and-eggs breakfast and blasted off.

Their mission: to find out if men could survive two weeks in space. If not, the Moon was out of reach.

With the endurance record complete, Lovell’s next flight was in command of Gemini 12 alongside space rookie Buzz Aldrin.

This time they proved that man could work outside a spacecraft. Aldrin clambered awkwardly into the void, spending five hours photographing star fields.

Now for the Moon itself.

The crew of Apollo 8 would be the first to travel beyond low Earth orbit and enter the gravitational pull of another celestial body.

It was Nasa’s most dangerous mission yet.

The Saturn V rocket that shot Lovell, Borman and William Anders out of our atmosphere at 25,000mph (40,233km/h) was huge – three times larger than anything seen on the Gemini programme.

As navigator, Lovell took with him a sextant to take star readings – in case the computers failed and they had to find their own way home.

Sixty-eight hours after take-off, they made it.

The engines fired and Apollo 8 slid silently behind the Moon. The men heard a crackle in their headsets as the radio signal to Mission Control faltered and then failed.

The spellbound astronauts pinned themselves to the windows, the first humans to see the far side of our nearest celestial neighbour. And then, from over the advancing horizon, an incredible sight.

“Earthrise,” gasped Borman.

“Get the camera, quick,” said Lovell.

It was Christmas Eve 1968.

America was mired in Vietnam abroad and civil unrest at home. But at that moment, it seemed that humanity was united.

The people of the world saw their planet as the astronauts saw it – fragile and beautiful, shining in the desolation of space.

Lovell read from the Book of Genesis, the basis of many of the world’s great religions, to the people of the Earth.

“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

For him, it was an image that changed our world forever. He put his thumb against the window and the whole world disappeared behind it. It was the most moving experience of his life.

As the spacecraft re-emerged from the darkness, Lovell was first to announce the good news. “Please be advised,” he said as the radio crackled back into life, “there is a Santa Claus.”

At that very moment, 239,000 miles away, a man in a blue Rolls-Royce pulled up outside Lovell’s house in Houston.

He walked past the dozens of reporters camped outside and handed a box to Marilyn.

She opened the star-patterned tissue paper and pulled out a mink jacket. “Happy Christmas,” said the card that came with it, “and love from the Man in the Moon.”

They went up as astronauts and came down celebrities. The people of the Earth had followed their every move on TV.

There were ticker tape parades, congressional honours and a place on the cover of Time Magazine. And they had not even set foot on the Moon.

That honour went, of course, to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

A year later, Kennedy’s dream was posthumously seen to fruition. A small step was taken and mankind took its giant leap. The New Nine had done their job.

In April 1970, it was Jim Lovell’s turn. Fortunately, the crew of Apollo 13 did not believe in unlucky numbers.

Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were men of science – highly trained and determined to follow Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface. But things went badly wrong.

They were 200,000 miles above the Earth and closing in on their target when they needed to stir tanks containing vital oxygen and hydrogen.

Swigert flicked the switch. It should have been a routine procedure but the command module, Odyssey, shuddered. Oxygen pressure fell and power shut down.

“I believe we’ve had a problem here,” said Swigert. Lovell had to repeat the message to a stunned Mission Control: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

It was one of the greatest understatements of all time. The crew were in big trouble – a dramatic explosion had disabled their craft.

Haise and Lovell worked frantically to boot up the lunar module, Aquarius.

It was not supposed to be used until they got to the Moon. It had no heat shield, so could not be used to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. But it could keep them alive until they got there.

The world stopped breathing and watched.

For a second time, Jim Lovell had brought the world together as one. The first time it had been for Earthrise, the second would be to witness his fight to survive.

“For four days,” said Marilyn, “I didn’t know if I was a wife or a widow.”

Temperatures fell to freezing, food and water were rationed. It was days before they limped back to the fringes of Earth’s atmosphere. They climbed back aboard the Odyssey and prayed the heat shield had not been damaged.

The radio silence that accompanies re-entry went on far longer than normal. Millions watched on TV, many convinced that all was lost.

After six agonising minutes, Jack Swigert’s voice cut through the silence.

The team on the ground held its breath until the parachutes deployed and the crew was safely down.

The mission was Nasa’s greatest failure and, without question, its finest hour.

Lovell retired from the navy in 1973 and opted for a the quiet life, working for the Bay-Houston Towing Company, giving speeches and serving as president of the National Eagle Scout Association.

His book, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, became the famous 1995 movie, starring Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell.

For the film, the director asked him to dress up as an admiral. It was for a cameo scene, shaking hands with Hanks when the crew were rescued from the sea.

But the old American hero was not having it.

Jim Lovell had been to the Moon twice, witnessed Earthrise and narrowly avoided a cold death in space – and saw no reason to falsely burnish his .

He took out his old navy uniform, dusted it down and put it on for the cameo appearance.

“I retired as a captain,” he insisted, “and a captain I will be.”

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet in Alaska next Friday to discuss the future of the war in Ukraine.

Trump announced the 15 August meeting on social media and it was later confirmed by a Kremlin spokesperson, who said the location was “quite logical” given Alaska’s relative proximity to Russia.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said any solutions must include Ukraine, adding he is ready to work with all partners towards a “lasting peace”.

The announcement of the meeting came just hours after Trump had signalled that Ukraine might have to cede territory in order to end the war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.

“You’re looking at territory that’s been fought over for three and a half years, a lot of Russians have died. A lot of Ukrainians have died,” Trump said at the White House on Friday.

“It’s very complicated. We’re going to get some back, we’re going to get some switched. There will be some swapping of territories, to the betterment of both.”

The US president did not provide further details of what that proposal would look like.

However, the BBC’s US partner CBS News, citing sources familiar with the discussions, reports that the White House is trying to sway European leaders to accept an agreement that would include Russia taking the entire Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and keeping Crimea.

It would give up the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, which it partially occupies, as part of the proposed agreement, CBS reports.

Earlier on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin had proposed a similar arrangement to Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff during a recent meeting in Moscow.

It remains unclear whether Ukraine and European allies would agree to such a deal, given Zelensky and Putin remain far apart on the conditions for peace.

Zelensky has previously rejected any preconditions for territorial concessions.

In a statement released on Telegram on Saturday, the Ukrainian president reiterated: “The answer to the Ukrainian territorial issue is already in the Constitution of Ukraine. No one will and cannot deviate from this. Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.”

“Any solutions that are against us, any solutions that are without Ukraine, are at the same time solutions against peace,” he said, adding that his country is ready for “real solutions” that bring peace.

“We are ready, together with President Trump, together with all partners, to work for a real, and most importantly, lasting peace – a peace that will not collapse because of Moscow’s wishes.”

One senior White House official told CBS that the planning for next Friday’s meeting was fluid, and it was still possible that Zelensky would be involved in some capacity.

Moscow has failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough in its full-scale invasion, but occupies around 20% of Ukraine’s territory. Ukrainian offensives, meanwhile, have not pushed the Russian forces back.

• Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia
• Why Trump-Putin talks are unlikely to bring rapid end to Ukraine war
• Steve Rosenberg: Putin and Trump’s relationship has soured but a Ukraine deal is still possible

Three rounds of direct talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul have failed to bring the war closer to an end, and Moscow’s military and political preconditions for peace are seen by Kyiv and its allies as the de facto capitulation of Ukraine.

Russian demands include Ukraine becoming a neutral state, dramatically reducing its military and abandoning its Nato aspirations, as well as the lifting of Western sanctions imposed on Russia.

Moscow also wants Kyiv to withdraw its military from the four regions which Russia partially occupies in south-east Ukraine, and to demobilise its soldiers.

Trump, however, insisted on Friday that the US had “a shot at” a trilateral peace agreement between the countries.

“European leaders want to see peace, President Putin, I believe, wants to see peace, and Zelensky wants to see peace,” he told reporters.

“President Zelensky has to get all of his, everything he needs, because he’s going to have to get ready to sign something and I think he’s working hard to get that done,” Trump said.

Last month, Trump admitted to the BBC that he had thought a deal to end the war in Ukraine was on the cards with Russia four different times: “I’m disappointed in him [Putin], but I’m not done with him.”

He has hardened his stance against the Kremlin in recent weeks, imposing a deadline of Friday 8 August for Russia to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or face more sweeping sanctions.

But as the deadline approached the economic threat was quickly overshadowed by plans for Trump and Putin to meet in person to discuss a potential peace deal.

There was no announcement of further sanctions on Russia from the White House on Friday.

Trump and Putin spoke by phone in February in the first direct exchange between the leaders since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The last time a US president met Putin was in 2021, when Joe Biden met him at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland.

“We are not happy with these men in this hotel because we fear for our children,” Orla Minihane tells me. “If that makes me far-right then so be it.”

Orla has lived near Epping since she was a child and describes herself as a “very boring woman who has worked in the City of London for 25 years”. Last year she joined Reform UK and hopes to stand as a local candidate for the party.

On a busy road leading to the Essex town, The Bell Hotel, now fortified, is one of more than 200 across the country where the government houses asylum seekers.

In the last month a series of protests, sometimes totalling several hundred people from both sides – and on one occasion up to 2,000 according to Essex Police – have taken place over the use of hotels for asylum seekers. About 20 more were planned for Friday and Saturday this week.

The latest round of demonstrations began at the 80-room Bell in July, after a man living in the hotel was arrested, and subsequently charged, with sexual assault, harassment and inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity. Hadush Kebatu, 41, from Ethiopia, has denied the offences and is in custody.

The case has sparked a wider conversation about the effect of housing asylum seekers in hotels in communities across Britain.

“Before there were women and children in the hotel – there was a little bit of crime, most people got on with it,” Orla says. “But now it’s the fact that it’s all men. It’s not a balanced culture.”

The protests have been promoted on social media under red, white and blue banner text with slogans such as “Protect Our Community”, “Safety of Women and Children Before Foreigners” and “All Patriots Welcome”.

We have identified far-right activists at some of the protests and activists who oppose them are watching what is happening closely.

The activist group Stand Up To Racism sees this as far-right organisations “stirring up racist violence” and trying to repeat the violence that flared after the murders of three young girls in Southport.

However, the protests are often organised by people with little experience of street campaigning, including mothers with families and professional careers, like Orla. That they are getting involved suggests that in some communities, with hotels close by, there is a shift in the public mood about Britain’s asylum hotels.

Outside The Bell, which is surrounded by steel fencing and guarded by a 24/7 security team, one of its residents, Wael, from Libya, is a year into his asylum claim and waiting for his fourth Home Office interview.

“I spoke with one of the protesters,” Wael says. “Everything’s good. Epping is nice. We can sit and stay. People respect us.

“I want to learn English and work. In a car wash or something. I will not stay here and take food. I have a dream – to make money and play football and have fun with my time. It’s a small dream.”

Wael is happy to talk, give his name and have his picture taken. But two other young Iraqi Kurds who are staying at The Bell, and allowed to freely come and go, are more cautious and less positive.

They tell me a gang of youths in masks and on motorbikes, has just shouted expletives at them. Shortly afterwards I catch sight of the bikers nearby.

One of the asylum seekers says that living in a hotel room 24 hours a day is messing with his mind. When I ask about their dealings with the Home Office they hurry inside The Bell.

Shortly afterwards a passing driver yells, “Burn it down”.

Last summer in the wake of the Southport murders, that is what some protesters tried to do at other hotels.

This summer, there have been isolated clashes, when activists on each side of the argument, anti-fascists and hard-right, have faced each other, or the police.

Often the migrants have watched from the sidelines, penned up behind the fencing, or filming from upstairs windows.

The police have largely kept control, sometimes facing criticism for their methods, including the false claim that Essex Police used buses to transport pro-migrant activists to a protest in Epping. For now, arrest numbers are way below those in 2024.

I ask Orla, who made an impassioned speech at a recent protest, why she is so aggrieved by the asylum hotel.

She says friends have described their daughters being “grabbed” by young, non-white men in the area. She has seen shoplifting, she says, in the local Marks & Spencer.

“Everyone knows they are asylum seekers,” Orla says, “Epping is very white.”

She adds of the hotel’s occupants: “You know they are coming for freebies and when they come here they abuse the privilege. It’s ridiculous.”

Asylum seekers would say they are seeking protection by coming to the UK, although some are ultimately judged not to be eligible for asylum status.

Last month Stand Up To Racism claimed Orla had shared a stage with an alleged member of a neo-Nazi group at a hotel protest. She told BBC News she had “no idea” who he was, and he says he has since left the group.

Asylum seekers are not normally allowed to work in the UK. Successive governments have judged that paying for their accommodation and food is preferable to allowing them to compete with British workers in the jobs market, offering an incentive to come here.

In June, the government warned some asylum seekers may be illicitly working as food delivery drivers.

Sixteen miles south of Epping, residents in Canary Wharf, east London, live in gleaming glass towers and traditional East End houses alongside another asylum hotel. It is a very different place but many locals share similar opinions.

Asylum seekers recently arrived during the small hours at the wharf-side four-star Britannia International – 610 rooms, but, according to a former staff member, no longer the “luxury hotel” described in some reports. Rumours that they were coming triggered protests by local residents, many of them office workers in the Canary Wharf business district.

Outside the hotel, Chengcheng Cul, who is Chinese, draws a distinction between his “legal migration” to the UK, and “illegal asylum seekers”.

“If people can come over the Channel illegally, and easily, what encourages decent people to come legally, pay their tax, and get involved in this society? Is this setting a good example? This country has opened the border to illegal migrants.”

Lorraine Cavanagh, who works for charities on the Isle of Dogs, echoes the concerns in Epping. “I don’t know who they are.

“They are unidentified men who can walk around and do what they want to do with no consequences,” she says.

That comment, “I don’t know who they are”, lies at the heart of the opposition to asylum seekers in these communities.

It can be very hard to establish basic facts about the young men in the hotels, the system that put them there, or the impact they might have on locals.

While growing in number, asylum seekers who come by small boats across the English Channel are a small proportion of total immigration to the UK, and in 2024, just over a third of all asylum seekers.

The government has contracted out the task of accommodating them to three companies: Serco, Clearsprings and Mears. They buy up rooms in houses and in hotels, usually taking them over completely.

Ministers regularly talk about their ambition to “smash the gangs”, but say less about the hotels. The government won’t confirm where they are because of concerns they might be attacked.

Madeleine Sumption from the Migration Observatory points out there is a problem publishing information about small groups of asylum seekers when it might identify them by age or sex, a long-standing approach for public bodies.

We know how many hotel places are being used in each region – the vast majority are in the south of England. They cost £5.77m a day for the government to provide. The estimated cost over the decade to 2029 has spiralled from £4.5bn in 2019 to £15.3bn.

But there are no specific figures for the age and sex of hotel occupants, no details about their countries of origin, or their claim for sanctuary in the UK.

So when local communities allege crime rates go up when asylum hotels are opened, or raise fears about the hotels being full of only single adult males, it is often impossible to prove the point either way.

There were 35 sexual and violent offences reported in Epping town in May. In the same month, the year before, when there were no asylum seekers at The Bell, 28 sexual and violent offences were reported. In May 2023, the hotel was being used by the Home Office for migrant families. The number of reported offences was 32.

But how many of these offences involved asylum seekers? The police do not publish statistics about exactly where crimes happen or who is reported to have committed them.

So in many ways, we don’t know “who they are”.

Orla believes more information would help reduce tension and is furious at the government’s handling of the asylum system.

“If you conceal the truth and you act as if you are hiding something, people are going to be angry,” she says. “If they said there are 70 in the Bell Hotel, five are from Sudan, five from somewhere else, I think most people would feel better.”

Epping Forest District Council’s Conservative Leader, Chris Whitbread recently said that “it is important to be transparent” about asylum hotel information.

In a recent report, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, criticised how the Home Office deals with asylum hotels. “It is clear that the Home Office still has a long way to go to build trust and confidence in its willingness to be open and honest about its intentions and performance,” he wrote.

The Home Office says it removed 6,000 people from hotels in early 2025 and has already closed 200 hotels. In its manifesto, Labour pledges to close them all by the next election.

On the other side of the political divide from the anti-migrant campaigners, in north London outside a meeting “to organise against the right wing”, Sabby Dhalu from the protest group Stand Up To Racism wants the government to work more closely with councils so that their residents are better informed.

This should include “explaining why these people are here, where they come from, what’s happening in those countries,” she says. “That they’re in the process of seeking asylum and going through the application process. Settling them in with the community.”

“I think you’ve got far right organisations that are determined to repeat the events of last year,” she added.

“And because for their own cynical reasons, they want to stir up racist violence, and in order to build their own political organisations.”

That said, she feels that voices on the right are “whipping up” and weaponising a wider feeling of discontent among the public over Labour’s cuts to public spending, and that the government is “making silly concessions” to the right in doing so.

Stopping the boats is a challenge which haunts the government, as it did the Conservatives. The Home Office has managed to cut the asylum claim backlog, currently standing at 79,000, but the claimants keep coming and the cost of accommodation is soaring. There is a feeling the government is struggling to cope and ignoring the views of communities.

Many are in agreement that having more than 200 hotels, full of asylum seekers often waiting for lengthy periods for decisions on their applications, is not a sustainable situation.

Whether or not the current protests continue, the government will have to find a solution.

The enthralling 2-2 draw for the Anderson-Tendulkar trophy between England and India provided a dramatic start to the new World Test Championship cycle.

It was an epic contest, each of the five Tests going into the final day, four in fact into the final session, providing some of the best individual and collective performances the five-day format has seen in recent years.

The scoreline scoffed at projections made by former cricketers and pundits before the series, a majority of whom had predicted an easy win – if not a clean sweep – for England.

Setting aside England’s home advantage, experts argued India’s pre-series struggles made them easy targets – and with good reason.

Whitewashed 0-3 at home by New Zealand, followed by a 3-1 drubbing by Australia down under in two preceding series, India looked vulnerable and wobbly.

A spate of sudden retirements and fitness issues left India without four key players – R Ashwin, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, and Mohammed Shami. Their absence was expected to place immense pressure on young Shubman Gill, leading the side in his first series as captain.

India’s squad had undeniable talent, but its inexperience – especially in batting under challenging conditions – was a concern.

KL Rahul, Ravindra Jadeja, and Rishabh Pant were seasoned campaigners in England, but Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sai Sudarshan, Karun Nair, Washington Sundar, and Abhimanyu Easwaran had never played at this level there before.

Gill’s modest overseas batting record fuelled doubts about his suitability for captaincy. Added worries over pace ace Jasprit Bumrah’s fitness further dimmed India’s prospects.

Losing the first Test at Headingley from a winning position, as England chased 373 in the fourth innings, confirmed pundits’ doubts.

But India recovered from this setback in style to win the next Test at Edgbaston by a whopping 336 runs.

The swift turnaround came not from luck but skill and relentless determination – qualities that defined India’s performance for the rest of the series.

The three Tests that followed were bitterly fought, both teams raising the intensity and skill levels, matching each other blow-for-blow.

This sparked frequent heated clashes but also unforgettable acts of heroism, with players from both sides battling fatigue and injury to keep their teams in the fight.

Some aspects of what kept India in the fight right through the neck-and-neck contest comes through in the stats.

Three batters – Gill, Rahul and Jadeja – topped 500 runs in the series. England had one, Joe Root.

There were 12 centuries made by India, England had nine.

Mohammed Siraj with 23 was the highest wicket-taker from either side. The only bowler to take 10 wickets in a match was Akash Deep.

Failures were scant, heroes were plenty, but the pillars of India’s extraordinary show in the series were Gill and Siraj.

Gill, in Bradmanesque form, made 754 runs, 430 of them coming in one Test.

He failed by a mere 20 runs to break Sunil Gavaskar’s record series aggregate, and was also second to Don Bradman (810) for highest runs made in a series by a captain.

To be mentioned alongside Bradman and Gavaskar testifies to Gill’s achievement and potential. His prolific scoring earned his team’s full respect, and after a hesitant start, he quickly grew in confidence, showing fine temperament and smart tactics in tough situations.

Siraj, who since his 2021 debut had lived in the shadows of Bumrah and Shami, emerged so spectacularly that he instantly entered cricket folklore.

Feisty and indefatigable, he bowled with a lion’s heart – steaming in at full tilt, sparing his body no mercy, embracing the spearhead’s role in Bumrah’s absence, and inspiring the other pacers to bowl out of their skins – earning universal awe and admiration.

Siraj’s 23 wickets came at an average of 32.43, with an economy rate of 4.02 and a strike rate of 48.43 – hardly earth-shattering figures.

In India’s two victories, he was the decisive force. At Edgbaston, his six wickets in the first innings (seven overall) swung the match firmly in India’s favour. At the Oval, he took nine wickets – four in the first innings and five in the second – turning the match on its head.

How India held their nerve for 25 days under immense pressure – driven by willpower, ambition, and skill – culminating in a thrilling final 56-minute comeback at the Oval to win and level the series, is one of Test cricket’s most riveting tales.

It also marked this Indian young team’s transition from apprehension and misgivings one of rich promise fuelled by ambition and excellence.

The future looks rosy.

India has unexpectedly become a key target in Washington’s latest push to pressure Russia over the Ukraine war.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump doubled US tariffs on India to 50%, up from 25%, penalising Delhi for purchasing Russian oil – a move India called “unfair” and “unjustified”. The tariffs aim to cut Russia’s oil revenues and force Putin into a ceasefire. The new rate will come into effect in 21 days, so on 27 August.

This makes India the most heavily taxed US trading partner in Asia and places it alongside Brazil, another nation facing steep US tariffs amid tense relations.

India insists its imports are driven by market factors and vital to its energy security, but the tariffs threaten to hit Indian exports and growth hard.

Almost all of India’s $86.5bn [£64.7bn] in annual goods exports to the US stand to become commercially unviable if these rates sustain.

Most Indian exporters have said they can barely absorb a 10-15% rise, so a combined 50% tariff is far beyond their capacity.

If effective, the tariff would be similar to “a trade embargo, and will lead to a sudden stop in affected export products,” Japanese brokerage firm Nomura said in a note.

The US is India’s top export market, making up 18% of exports and 2.2% of GDP. A 25% tariff could cut GDP by 0.2–0.4%, risking growth slipping below 6% this year.

India’s electronics and pharma exports remain exempt from additional tariffs for now, but the impact would be felt in India domestically “with labour-intensive exports like textiles and gems and jewelry taking the fall”, Priyanka Kishore of Asia Decoded, a Singapore-based consultancy told the BBC.

Rakesh Mehra of Confederation of Indian Textile Industry called the tariffs a “huge setback” for India’s textile exporters, saying they will sharply weaken competitiveness in the US market.

With tensions now escalating, experts have called Trump’s decision a high-stakes gamble.

India is not the only buyer of Russian oil – there are China and Turkey as well – yet Washington has chosen to target a country widely regarded as a key partner.

So what changed and what could be the fallout?

India’s former central bank governor Urjit Patel said that India’s “worst fears” have materialised with the recent announcement.

“One hopes that this is short term, and that talks around a trade deal slated to make progress this month will go ahead. Otherwise, a needless trade war, whose contours are difficult to gauge at this early juncture, will likely ensue,” Mr Patel wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The damaging impact of the tariffs is why few expect them to last. With new rates starting 27 August, the next 20 days are critical – India’s moves in this bargaining window will be closely watched by anxious markets.

The key question is whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government will quietly abandon trading ties with Russia to avoid the “Russia penalty” or stand firm against the US.

“India’s efforts to reduce its dependence on Russian military hardware and diversify its oil imports predate pressure from the Trump administration, so Delhi may be able to offer some conciliatory gestures in line with its existing foreign policy behaviour,” according to Dr Chietigj Bajpaee of Chatham House.

He says the relationship is in a “managed decline”, losing Cold War-era strategic importance, but Russia will remain a key partner for India for the foreseeable future.

However, some experts believe Trump’s recent actions give India an opportunity to rethink its strategic ties.

If anything the US’s actions could “push India to reconsider its strategic alignment, deepening ties with Russia, China, and many other countries”, says Ajay Srivastava of the the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based think tank.

Modi will visit China for the regional Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit – his first since the deadly 2020 Galwan border clashes. Some suggest a revival of India-Russia-China trilateral talks may be on the table.

The immediate focus is on August trade talks, as a US team visits India. Negotiations stalled earlier over agriculture and dairy – sectors where the US demands greater access, but India holds firm.

Will there be concessions in areas like dairy and farming that India has been staunchly protecting or could the political cost be too high?

The other big question: What’s next for India’s rising appeal as a China-plus-one destination for nations and firms looking to diversify their supply chains and investments?

Trump’s tariffs risk slowing momentum as countries like Vietnam offer lower tariffs. Experts say the impact on investor sentiment may be limited. India is still courting firms like Apple, which makes a big chunk of its phones locally, and has been largely shielded since semiconductors aren’t taxed under the new tariffs.

Experts will also be watching what India does to support its exporters.

“India’s government so far has not favoured direct subsidies to exporters, but its current proposed programmes of favourable trade financing and export promotion may not be enough to tackle the impact of such a wide tariff differential,” according to Nomura.

With stakes high, trade experts say only top-level diplomacy can revive a trade deal that seemed within reach just weeks ago.

For now the Indian government has put up a strong front, saying it will take “all actions necessary to protect its national interests”.

The opposition has upped the ante with senior Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi calling Trump’s 50% tariffs “economic blackmail” and “an attempt to bully India into an unfair trade deal”.

Is Modi’s touted “mega partnership” with the US now his biggest foreign policy test? And will India hit back?

Retaliation by India is unlikely but not impossible, says Barclays Research, because there is precedent.

“In 2019, India announced tariffs on 28 US products, including US apples and almonds, in response to the US tariffs on steel and aluminium. Some of these tariffs were eventually reversed in 2023, following the resolution of WTO disputes,” Barclays Research said in a note.

US Vice President JD Vance is taking his holiday in the UK – a trip which will include visits to the Cotswolds, Scotland and, to kick it all off, a few days staying with Foreign Secretary David Lammy at his grace-and-favour country home, Chevening House in Kent.

It would seem an unlikely friendship on the face of it. One grew up in north London, the other in rust-belt Ohio.

One is a left-wing advocate of multi-culturalism, the other a conservative who has, albeit jokingly, referred to the UK as “the first truly Islamist country” with a nuclear bomb.

Yet, despite their differences Lammy and Vance appear to be the best of friends.

As he settled in for a brief chat with the media in the drawing room at Chevening alongside the foreign secretary, Vance spoke warmly of their relationship.

“I have to say that I really have become a good friend, and David has become a good friend of mine,” he said. “Our families enjoy each other’s company very much, which always helps.”

Chevening is set in 3,000 acres of land, including a maze and lake, which was the first destination for the two families on Friday morning, for a spot of fishing.

Vance joked this activity put “a strain on the special relationship” with his children all catching carp, while the foreign secretary came away empty-handed.

Lammy didn’t seem bitter, telling the vice president he was “delighted” to welcome him and his family to 115-room Chevening, which he described as “my home”.

Strictly speaking, the 17th century manor house belongs to the nation, but cabinet ministers, particularly foreign secretaries, are allowed to use it for family getaways or meetings with foreign dignitaries.

The vice president seemed suitably impressed with his friend’s weekend retreat.

Vance acknowledged the two men come from “different political spectrums” but said Lammy had been “kind enough to make time on a visit to [Washington] DC, we got to know each other a little bit then”.

Since that first meeting, when Lammy was in opposition and Vance had just been elected to the US Senate, they have met regularly including at the new Pope’s inauguration in May.

Last week, Lammy told the Guardian he, Vance and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner bonded over drinks in the Villa Taverna, the US ambassador’s residence in Rome.

“I had this great sense that JD completely relates to me and he completely relates to Angela. So it was a wonderful hour and a half,” he said. “I was probably the shyest of the three.”

He said that, like Vance, Rayner and himself were “not just working-class politicians, but people with dysfunctional childhoods”.

Lammy’s parents split up during his teens. His father went to the US and Lammy never saw him again.

Vance told the story of his own upbringing – including an absent father and a mother with a drug addiction – in his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

Despite their trickier starts in life, both ended up at prestigious US colleges. Lammy studied at Harvard, where he met and befriended Barack Obama. Vance went to Harvard’s rival Yale – “not quite as good,” Lammy joked at Chevening.

The two men have also bonded over their Christian faith. Vance converted to Catholicism as an adult and attended Mass with Lammy when he visited Washington DC earlier this year.

The pair have something else in common, although neither want to to draw attention to it: their previous less-than-flattering comments about Donald Trump.

JD Vance’s past verdict – “reprehensible”, “an idiot”, “I never liked him”.

And Lammy’s? “A tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo Nazi sympathising sociopath”.

Be it political expediency or a genuine change of heart, both have since revised their opinions.

But how far do personal relations matter, when there are so many other factors at play – be it national self interest in the case of tariffs, or differences of opinion such as over the situation in Gaza?

Bronwen Maddox the CEO of the Chatham House international affairs think tank says they do, “particularly under this administration”.

“Trump has deliberately personalised these things,” she adds.

That is why Lammy – despite his natural affiliation with the Democratic Party in the US – was tasked with building bridges with their Republican opponents, even before the general election.

Although that might have appeared a tall order, Chair of Republicans Overseas Greg Swenson says his party tend to feel fonder towards the UK than the Democrats.

Vance and Trump have criticised the UK in the past, but Swenson says it “comes from a good place”.

“Both want what’s best for the UK… you never want to see your friend make a mistake.”

However, if Lammy thinks his friendship with Vance is exclusive he may be disappointed.

The vice president is also meeting Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage has hinted that he may be as well.

In between meeting UK politicians, Vance will be squeezing in a trip to the Cotswolds – something that may infuriate those Americans, such as TV chat show host Ellen DeGeneres, who fled to the area specifically to escape Trump and his acolytes.

There have also been reports that singer-rapper couple Beyonce and Jay-Z have been house-hunting in the area.

Explaining the appeal of the region to wealthy Americans, writer Plum Sykes told the BBC’s PM programme it combines the desire for countryside with the need for glamour.

“Americans can’t go to Wales and survive in the same way they can in the Cotswolds where you can get a matcha latte and go to a gyrotonics class.

“The business of the private jet people at Cotswolds airport has gone through the roof.”

Vance is reported to be staying in a house, very close to Diddly Squat – the farm and pub belonging to broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson.

That sets up the possibility of an awkward encounter between the two. Clarkson has previously lambasted Vance, with “a bearded god-botherer” being among his more printable insults.

But a friendship might still flower, after all forming unlikely relationships seems to be as fashionable as the Cotswolds at the moment.