Australia will recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September, following similar moves by the UK, France and Canada, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said.

Albanese said Australia received commitments from the Palestinian Authority (PA) including to demilitarise, hold general elections and continue to recognise Israel’s right to exist.

“A two-state solution is humanity’s best hope to break the cycle of violence in the Middle East and to bring an end to the conflict, suffering and starvation in Gaza,” he said on Monday.

Israel, under increasing pressure to end the war in Gaza, has said recognising a Palestinian state “rewards terrorism”.

Since Saturday, five people have died as a result of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza, bringing the total number to 217 deaths, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

It also said that in total more than 61,000 people have been killed as a result of Israel’s military campaign since 2023.

Israel launched its offensive in response to the Hamas-led attack on 7 October that year, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

The Palestinian Authority, which controls parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, earlier said recognition of statehood shows growing support for self-determination of its people.

Albanese said the decision was made after his government received commitments from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that Hamas would play no role in any future state.

The move also comes after conversations with his counterparts in the UK, France, New Zealand, and Japan over the past fortnight, Albanese said.

“There is a moment of opportunity here, and Australia will work with the international community to seize it,” he told the media.

Last Sunday, a pro-Palestinian protest drew tens of thousands of supporters who walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge, a day after a court ruling allowed the demonstration to happen.

The US has stated it will not follow suit and believes that recognising Palestinian statehood would be rewarding Hamas.

Over the weekend, US Vice-President JD Vance reiterated the US had no plans to recognise a Palestinian state, citing a lack of functional government.

At a press conference on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticised countries planning to recognise Palestinian statehood.

“To have European countries and Australia march into that rabbit hole… it is disappointing – and I think it’s actually shameful,” he said.

“They know what they would do if, right next to Melbourne or right next to Sydney, you had this horrific attack. I think you would do at least what we’re doing.”

Israel has come under fire in recent days over its plans to take over Gaza City, with UN ambassadors condemning the move which Netanyahu says is the “best way” to end the war.

Last year, Spain, Ireland and Norway formally recognised Palestine as a state, in the hopes it would encourage a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

The state of Palestine is currently recognised by 147 of the UN’s 193 member states.

At the UN, it has the status of a “permanent observer state”, allowing participation but no voting rights.

Chip giants Nvidia and AMD have agreed to pay the US government 15% of Chinese revenues as part of an “unprecedented” deal to secure export licences to China, the BBC has been told.

The US had previously banned the sale of powerful chips used in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) to China under export controls usually related to national security concerns.

Security experts, including some who served during President Donald Trump’s first term, recently wrote to the administration expressing “deep concern” that Nvidia’s H20 chip was “a potent accelerator” of China’s AI capabilities.

Nvidia told the BBC: “We follow rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets.”

It added: “While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide.”

AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House declined to comment.

Under the agreement, Nvidia will pay 15% of its revenues from H20 chip sales in China to the US government.

AMD will also give 15% of revenue generated from sales of its MI308 chip in China to the Trump administration, which was first reported by the Financial Times.

The H20 chip was developed specifically for the Chinese market after US export restrictions were imposed by the Biden administration in 2023.

Sales of the chip were effectively banned by Trump’s government in April this year.

Beijing has previously criticised the US government, accusing it of “abusing export control measures, and engaging in unilateral bullying”.

Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang has spent months lobbying both sides for a resumption of sales of the chips in China. He reportedly met US President Donald Trump last week.

“You either have a national security problem or you don’t,” said Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation.

“If you have a 15% payment, it doesn’t somehow eliminate the national security issue,” she added.

In Beijing, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “On the issue of US chips to China, China has repeatedly stated its position.”

In a letter last month to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a group of 20 security specialists said that while the biggest buyers of Nvidia’s H20 chips were civilian companies in China, they expect them to be used by the military.

They wrote: “Chips optimized for AI inference will not simply power consumer products or factory logistics; they will enable autonomous weapons systems, intelligence surveillance platforms and rapid advances in battlefield decision-making.”

In a statement to the BBC, Nvidia said: “America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America’s AI tech stack can be the world’s standard if we race.”

Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at global research firm Forrester, said the agreement to hand over 15% of China chip sales to the US government in exchange for export licences was “unprecedented”.

“The arrangement underscores the high cost of market access amid escalating tech trade tensions, creating substantial financial pressure and strategic uncertainty for tech vendors,” he added.

The resumption of chip sales to China comes as trade tensions between Beijing and Washington have been easing.

Beijing has relaxed controls on rare earth exports, while the US has lifted restrictions on chip design software firms operating in China.

In May, the world’s two biggest economies agreed to a 90-day truce in their tariffs war.

Since then, top trade officials from both sides have met on a number of occasions, although an agreement to extend the tariffs pause has not yet been confirmed ahead of a 12 August deadline.

As part of his trade policy, Trump has put pressure on major companies to make more investments in the US.

Last week, Apple said it would invest another $100bn (£74.4bn) in the country, adding to a previous pledge to spend $500bn in the US over the next four years.

In June, memory chip maker Micron Technology said its planned US investments will total $200bn. That includes construction of a new manufacturing facility in Idaho.

Nvidia itself has announced plans to build AI servers in the US worth up to $500bn, pledging to build the first AI supercomputers that are entirely American-made.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that the boss of Intel will meet with Trump at the White House after the president called for his immediate resignation due to his ties to China.

Last week, Trump said on social media that Lip-Bu Tan was “highly conflicted”, apparently referring to his alleged investments in companies that the US said were tied to the Chinese military.

Mr Tan pushed back, stating it was “misinformation”.

US President Donald Trump has said homeless people must “move out” of Washington DC as he vowed to tackle crime in the city, but the mayor pushed back against the White House likening the American capital to Baghdad in Iraq.

The Republican president has also trailed a news conference for Monday about his plan to make the city “safer and more beautiful than it ever was before”.

Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, said: “We are not experiencing a crime spike.”

Trump signed an order last month making it easier to arrest homeless people, and he last week ordered federal law enforcement into the streets of Washington DC.

“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social on Sunday. “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong.”

Alongside photos of tents and rubbish, he added: “There will be no ‘MR. NICE GUY.’ We want our Capital BACK. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The specifics of the president’s plan are not yet clear, but in a 2022 speech he proposed moving homeless people to “high quality” tents on inexpensive land outside cities, while providing access to bathrooms and medical professionals.

On Friday, Trump ordered federal agents – including from US Park Police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the US Marshals Service – into Washington DC to curb what he called “totally out of control” levels of crime.

A White House official told NPR that up to 450 federal officers were deployed on Saturday night.

The administration is also considering deploying National Guard members, although Trump has not yet made a final decision, according to reports by Reuters and ABC News.

Trump’s moves come after a 19-year-old former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was assaulted in an alleged attempted carjacking in Washington DC.

Trump vented about that incident on social media, posting a photo of the bloodied victim.

Mayor Bowser told MSNBC on Sunday: “It is true that we had a terrible spike in crime in 2023, but this is not 2023.

“We have spent over the last two years driving down violent crime in this city, driving it down to a 30-year low.”

She criticised White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller for dubbing the US capital “more violent than Baghdad”.

“Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false,” Bowser said.

Washington DC’s homicide rate remains relatively high per capita compared to other US cities, with a total of 98 such killings recorded so far this year. Homicides have been trending higher in the US capital from a decade ago.

But federal data from January suggests that Washington DC last year recorded its lowest overall violent crime figures – once carjacking, assault and robberies are incorporated – in 30 years.

Trump has promised a news conference at the White House on Monday to outline his plans to stop violent crime in the US capital.

In another post on Sunday, he said the event at 10:00 EDT (14:00 GMT) would address ending “crime, murder and death” in the city, as well as its “physical renovation”.

He described Bowser as “a good person who has tried”, adding that despite the mayor’s efforts, crime continued to get “worse” and the city was becoming “dirtier and less attractive”.

Community Partnership, an organisation that works to reduce homelessness in Washington DC, told Reuters that the city of 700,000 residents had about 3,782 people homeless on any given night.

Most were in public housing or emergency shelters, but about 800 were considered to be “on the street”.

As a district, rather than a state, Washington DC is overseen by the federal government, which has the power to override some local laws.

The president controls federal land and buildings in the city, although he would need Congress to assume federal control of the district.

In recent days, he has threatened to take over the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department, which Bowser argued was not possible.

“There are very specific things in our law that would allow the president to have more control over our police department,” Bowser said. “None of those conditions exist in our city right now.”

Trump has been critical of various Democratic-run city administrations during his two presidential terms.

In recent months, he has notably clashed with the Los Angeles leadership after ordering thousands of National Guard members to deal with unrest over raids on undocumented migrants.

That deployment became the subject of a legal battle which will reach a federal court in California on Monday.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Meir Simcha agreed to talk, but he wanted to do it somewhere special, because for him, this is a special time. In a place where nation, religion and war are linked inextricably with politics and the possession of land, Simcha chose a patch of shade under a fig tree next to a spring of fresh water.

From his dusty car, a small Toyota fitted with off road tyres, he produced a bottle of juice made from fruit and vegetables.

“Don’t worry, there’s no extra sugar,” he said as he poured it into plastic cups.

Simcha is the leader of a group of Jewish settlers steadily transforming a big stretch of the rolling terrain south of Hebron in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since it was captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

He moved two large flat stones into the shade as seats, and we sat down in a patch of lush grass, kept alive in the harsh summer heat by water dripping from a pipe coming out of the spring. It was a small oasis at the foot of a steep, arid, rocky slope and the location, if not our conversation, felt peaceful in a way that the West Bank rarely does these days.

The conflict between Arabs and Jews for control of the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea started well over a century ago when Zionists from Europe began to buy land to set up communities in Palestine.

It has been shaped by significant turning points.

The latest has come from the deadly 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s devastating response.

The consequences of the last 22 months of war, and however more months are left before a ceasefire, threaten to spread across years and generations, just like the Middle East war in 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan.

The scale of destruction and killing in the Gaza war obscures what is happening in the West Bank, which smoulders with tension and violence.

Since October 2023, Israel’s pressure on West Bank Palestinians has increased sharply, justified as legitimate security measures.

Evidence based on statements by ministers, influential local leaders like Simcha and accounts by witnesses on the ground reveal that the pressure is part of a wider agenda, to accelerate the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and to extinguish any lingering hopes of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Palestinians and human rights groups also accuse the Israeli security forces of failing in their legal duty as occupiers to protect Palestinians as well as their own citizens – not just turning a blind eye to settler attacks, but even joining in.

Violence by ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers in the West Bank has risen sharply since 7 October 2023.

Ocha, the UN’s humanitarian office, estimates an average of four settler attacks every day.

The International Court of Justice has issued an advisory opinion that the entire occupation of Palestinian territory captured in 1967 is illegal.

Israel’s rejects the ICJ’s view and claims that the Geneva Conventions forbidding settlement in occupied territories do not apply – a view disputed by many of its own allies as well as international lawyers.

In the shade of the fig tree, Simcha denied all suggestions he had attacked Palestinians, as he celebrated the fact that most of the Arab farmers who used to graze their animals on the hills he has seized and tend their olives in the valleys had gone.

He looks back to the Hamas October attacks, and Israel’s response ever since, as a turning point.

“I think that a lot has changed, that the enemy in our land lost hope. He’s beginning to understand that he’s on his way out; that’s what has changed in the last year or year and a half.

“Today you can walk around here in the land in the desert, and nobody will jump on you and try to kill you. There are still attempts to oppose our presence here in this land, but the enemy is starting to understand this slowly. They have no future here.

“The reality has changed. I ask you and the people of the world, why are you so interested in those Palestinians so much? Why do you care about them? It’s just another small nation.

“The Palestinians don’t interest me. I care about my people.”

Simcha says the Palestinians who left villages and farms near the hilltops he has claimed simply realised that God intended the land for Jews, not for them.

On 24 July this year, a panel of UN experts came to a different conclusion. A statement issued by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said: “We are deeply troubled by alleged widespread intimidation, violence, land dispossession, destruction of livelihoods and the resulting forcible displacement of communities, and we fear this is severing Palestinians from their land and undermining their food security.

“The alleged acts of violence, destruction of property, and denial of access to land and resources appear to constitute a systemic pattern of human rights violations.”

Simcha has a plan to dig a swimming pool at the base of the spring where we sat to talk. Like many others who are leading the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, he is full of plans. When I met him first, not long after Hamas burst through Israel’s border defences on 7 October 2023, he lived in a small group of isolated caravans on a hilltop overlooking the Judean desert as it sweeps down to the Dead Sea.

Since then, Simcha says his community has expanded into around 200 people on three hilltops. He was part of the faction of the settler movement known as hilltop youth, a radical fringe that became notorious for the violent harassment of Palestinians. Most Israelis who have settled in the occupied territories are not like Simcha. They went there not for ideological and religious reasons, but because property was cheaper.

But now men like Simcha are at the centre of events, with their leaders in the cabinet, leading the charge, married, older, thinking not just about swimming pools for their children but of victory over the Palestinians, once and for all, and everlasting Jewish possession of the land.

Simcha comes across as a happy man. He believes his mission – to implement the will of God by turning the West Bank into a land for Jews, and not for Palestinians – is progressing nicely.

Israel’s project to settle Jewish citizens in the newly occupied territories started within days of its victory in 1967. Over the last almost 60 years, successive Israeli governments and some wealthy sympathisers have invested vast amounts of money and energy to get to the point where around 700,000 Israeli Jews live in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

I have been watching the settlements grow for about half of the lifetime of the project, since I first reported from the occupied Palestinian territories in 1991. In that time, the terrain of much of the West Bank has been transformed. The bigger settlements look like small towns, and the West Bank is carved into sections by a network of roads and tunnels built by Israel that are as much about staking an immovable claim to the land as they are about traffic management.

On remote hilltops at night, you can see the lights coming from the caravans of settlers who see themselves as Jewish pioneers. Olive groves, orchards and vineyards owned by Palestinian farmers along the road network are often overgrown, sometimes dotted with piles of rubble left from buildings Israel has demolished.

Controlling the land around the roads is necessary, Israel says, to stop attacks on Jews in the West Bank.

Farmers in areas under settler pressure often need military permission to visit their land, sometimes just once a year.

Palestinian farmers going about their business in vans or on donkeys used to be a common sight. In many parts of the West Bank, you just do not see them anymore, especially in places like the settlements east of Shiloh on the road to Nablus, where small groups of shacks and caravans on hilltops have connected up into sprawling residential hubs linked by sinuous road networks.

When first I reported on settlements, Israeli leaders would often say that national security depended on them. Enemies lurked across the Jordan valley, and pushing out the frontier, building the land, was a Zionist imperative.

Just like the kibbutz movement of collective farms in the 1920s and 1930s inside present-day Israel, settlements in the occupied territories after 1967 were strategically placed as a first line of defence.

In this conflict, land is a vital commodity.

Trading land taken by Israel in 1967 for peace with Palestinians who wanted it for a state was at the heart of the Oslo peace process that ended in violence but provided a false dawn of hope in the 1990s.

There were headlines around the world when, after months of secret negotiations in Norway in 1993, there was a handshake on the White House lawn between Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. They had signed a declaration of principles that was hoped would lead to the end of the conflict. Israel would relinquish occupied land to Palestinians. In return, they would drop their claim to territory they had lost when Israel declared independence in 1948.

The argument at the heart of their conflict across the 20th Century, about who controlled land they both wanted, would be solved by splitting it.

After a final disastrous summit at Camp David in 2000, the hopes of 1993 were replaced by the deadly violence of a Palestinian uprising and a massive military response from Israel.

Part of the reason why the peace process failed was that other forces, outside the talks, were at work.

Hamas never dropped its belief that the entire land of Palestine was an Islamic possession and used suicide attacks to discredit the notion that peace was possible.

Among religious Zionists in Israel, the victory in 1967 had supercharged a wave of messianism – the belief that a divine being was coming who would redeem the Jewish people.

It electrified the settler movement.

Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish extremist brought up in Herzliya on the Mediterranean coast who spent weekends at settlements in the West Bank. During his first interrogation by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, he asked for a drink so he could toast the fact that he had saved the Jewish people from a disastrous path that denied the will of God.

Today, the messianic idea grips settlers like Simcha more powerfully than ever.

They believe the victory in 1967 was a miracle granted by God, that restored to the Jewish people the ancestral lands that he had given them in the mountain heartland of Judea and Samaria – the area that much of the rest of the world calls the West Bank. Some believe events since 7 October have extended the miracle.

Last summer, the Minister for Settlements and National Missions, Orit Strock, put it like this to a sympathetic audience at an outpost in the Hebron hills, the area where Simcha operates.

“From my point of view, this is like a miracle period,” she said. “I feel like someone standing at a traffic light, and then it turns green.”

Minister Strock was speaking a few days before the ICJ issued its opinion.

She made her remarks at a settlement in the Hebron hills that the government had just “legalised”.

Israeli law distinguishes between “legal” settlements and “illegal” outposts – a distinction that is in practice being blurred by the government’s actions.

Outposts rebranded as “young settlements” are being retrospectively legalised as the government directs funds towards them.

At a ceremony in one of them in the south Hebron Hills in April this year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose powers over the running of the occupation also make him something like the governor of the West Bank, donated 19 all-terrain vehicles to the settlers. He praised them for “grabbing massive territories”.

A sharp-eyed reporter at the Times of Israel pointed out that one of the settlers at the ceremony, Yinon Levi, had been filmed harassing Palestinians from an all-terrain vehicle. Levi is sanctioned by the UK and the European Union for using violence to drive Palestinians off their land, though President Trump lifted similar sanctions imposed by Joe Biden.

Levi is radical settler royalty, married to the daughter of Noam Federman – a notorious extremist. Federman is a former leader of the Kach party, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the European Union and others.

On 28 July this year, Yinon Levi fired a bullet that killed Odeh Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist, during a disturbance in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair. Levi pleaded self-defence and was released after three days of house arrest.

When we went to Umm al-Khair, Hathaleen’s dried blood was still at the place where he was killed.

His brother, Khalil, told me the dead man was holding his five-year-old son, Watan, and filming the violent scenes on his phone when he was killed.

The settlement movement in the West Bank has powered ahead since 7 October, under the direction of hardline Jewish nationalists in the cabinet, men like Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, who is Strock’s leader in the Religious Zionist Party.

Ben Gvir was not drafted by the IDF when he turned 18, because of his extreme beliefs. He claims he campaigned to serve.

The two ministers are very different people to the secular politicians – retired generals like Yigal Allon from the Israeli left and Ariel Sharon from the right – two men who drove the settlement movement forward in its first two decades after 1967.

Just like Allon and Sharon, they believe that security requires power.

But for Smotrich, Ben Gvir and their followers, that is underpinned by the certainty of religious belief.

The influence they have acquired in return for supporting Netanyahu and keeping him in power continues to frustrate and enrage secular Israel.

Smotrich’s Israeli opponents use the word “messianic” as term of abuse when they talk about him.

Allon and Sharon could be ruthless. After the 1967 war, Allon advocated the annexation of large parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Neither man believed they were doing the will of God.

Hamas uses religion to justify its violent opposition to the existence of Israel. Religious Zionists in the settler movement believe they are doing God’s will.

Belief in a direct connection with God does not guarantee war. But it makes the compromises necessary for peace hard to achieve.

We arranged to meet Yehuda Shaul at the road junction next to Sinjel. He is one of Israel’s most prominent opponents of the occupation.

Shaul founded an organisation called Breaking the Silence after, as a soldier, he saw first-hand the inherently brutal realities of a military occupation that has lasted almost 60 years.

Fellow Israelis have branded supporters of Breaking the Silence, which he no longer leads, as traitors many times.

Israeli military crackdowns since the October attacks have reduced Palestinian violence against settlers, while settler attacks on Palestinians have grown sharply.

Shaul says that the line between settlers and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has become blurred.

The war in Gaza has required the longest mobilisation of military reservists – the backbone of the IDF – in Israel’s history. To get more Israelis into uniform, brigades in the West Bank have formed regional defence units made up of settlers.

“Now the settlers are the military. In the military are the settlers. So that settler on the hilltop nearby a Palestinian herding community that was beating them up and throwing stones for the past two three or four years, trying to get him out, now is the soldier or the officer in uniform with a gun responsible for the area.

“So when he comes to a Palestinian and says, ‘you have 24 hours to pack up and leave or I’m going to shoot you,’ the Palestinian knows there is nothing to protect him.”

Shaul believes Israel has two choices left. One direction, he argues, is “the vector that this government is writing, displacement, abuse, killing, destroying Palestinian life, ultimately, writing a vector to mass population transfer”.

“Or, it is two states where Palestine resides besides Israel and both peoples here have rights and dignity. These are the only two options in our cards. Now you and anyone who watches us, need to choose which one you support.”

He uses language about Netanyahu’s conduct of the Gaza war since 7 October that is rare in Israel but common among Palestinians and increasingly heard among Israel’s critics in Europe.

This is part of our conversation, in the shadow of the steel and razor wire between the village of Sinjel and Road 60 – the West Bank’s main highway.

He says: “I think while we see a war of extermination in Gaza… we see a massive campaign by the state and the settlers… to basically ethnically cleanse as much land of the West Bank from Palestinians.”

I reply: “Of course, if Netanyahu was here, any of his supporters, they’d say, ‘what a load of rubbish. This is about Israeli security against terrorism and attacks on Jews.’ What do you make of that?”

He responds: “I actually believe that if 7 October taught us one thing it is, if you really care about protecting Israelis and Palestinian life, you need to take care of the root causes of the violence: decades of brutal military occupation, displacement of Palestinians and a conflict that is going on for about 100 years.

“Ultimately, the security protection, the sustainability of Jewish self-determination in this land, is interlinked and intertwined with achieving self-determination rights and equality for Palestinians.”

A Chinese warship ploughed into its own coast guard vessel on Monday while the latter was chasing a Philippine vessel in the South China Sea, Manila said.

Philippine coast guard officials were distributing aid to fishermen in the disputed Scarborough Shoal, Commodore Jay Tarriela said, when the Chinese coast guard “performed a risky manoeuvre” which inflicted “substantial damage” on the Chinese warship’s forward deck.

China confirmed that a confrontation took place and accused the Philippines of “forcibly intruding” into Chinese waters, but did not mention the collision.

The South China Sea is at the centre of a territorial dispute between China, the Philippines and other countries.

Tensions between Beijing and Manila have sharply escalated in recent years, with each side accusing the other of provocations and altercations at sea, including some involving weapons such as swords, spears and knives.

The Scarborough Shoal, a triangular chain of reefs and rocks, has been a flashpoint between the two countries since China seized it in 2012.

Video released by Manila showed a Chinese coast guard vessel firing water cannons as it chased the Philippine coast guard ship, before slamming loudly into a much larger Chinese ship after making a sudden turn.

The collision rendered the Chinese warship “unseaworthy”, Tarriela said. It is unclear if anyone was injured in the incident.

The Philippines Coast Guard has “consistently urged” the Chinese authorities to respect international conventions in handling territorial disputes, “especially considering their role in enforcing maritime laws”, Tarriela said.

“We have also emphasised that such reckless behaviour at sea could ultimately lead to accidents,” he added.

China’s coast guard, however, said it was acting “in accordance with the law” and took “all necessary measures” to drive the Philippine vessels away.

This is the latest in a string of dangerous encounters over the last two years as Beijing and Manila seek to enforce their claims on disputed reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea.

In December last year, the Philippines said China’s coast guard fired water cannons and “sideswiped” a government vessel during a maritime patrol near the Scarborough Shoal.

Beijing initially said Philippine ships “came dangerously close” and that its crew’s actions had been “in accordance with the law”. It later accused Manila of making “bogus accusations in an attempt to mislead international understanding”.

In June 2024, Filipino soldiers used their “bare hands” to fight off Chinese coast guard personnel armed with swords, spears and knives in the area. The skirmish led to one Filipino soldier losing his thumb, Manila said.

A British backpacker has pleaded guilty to killing a man in Australia after hitting him while riding an e-scooter with an alcohol level more than three times the legal limit.

Alicia Kemp, 25, from Redditch, Worcestershire, had been drinking with a friend on a Saturday afternoon in May when she was kicked out of a bar because the two of them were drunk, the court heard earlier.

The pair hired an e-scooter in the evening, and Kemp was driving at speeds of 20 to 25km/h (12 to 15mph) when she hit 51-year-old Thanh Phan from behind on a pavement in Perth’s city centre.

The father-of-two hit his head on the pavement and died in hospital from a brain bleed two days later.

Kemp’s passenger was also hurt in the crash – sustaining a fractured skull and broken nose – but her injuries were not life-threatening.

In Perth’s Magistrates Court on Monday, Kemp – appearing via video link – pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death while intoxicated. The charge carries a maximum 20-year prison term.

Prosecutors dropped a second charge of dangerous driving causing bodily harm to her passenger.

Earlier, the court heard that Kemp’s blood alcohol content level was 0.158 after the crash, more than three times the legal limit of 0.05 in Australia.

Prosecutors said CCTV footage showed Kemp’s “inexplicably dangerous” riding before she struck Mr Phan, who was waiting to cross the road.

In a statement from Mr Phan’s family earlier this year, the structural engineer was described as a beloved husband, father, brother and dear friend.

Kemp’s lawyer Michael Tudori said she was relieved after pleading guilty and hoped to be sentenced before Christmas, according to local media.

“You could see she was ready to say those words, you know, she’s obviously done something stupid,” Mr Tudori told the ABC.

Kemp, who was in Western Australia on a working holiday visa, will remain in custody until her sentencing.

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India’s top court has ordered authorities in Delhi and its suburbs to move all stray dogs from streets to animal shelters.

The court expressed concerns over rising “menace of dog bites leading to rabies” and gave an eight-week deadline to officials to finish the task.

Delhi’s stray dog population is estimated at one million, with suburban Noida, Ghaziabad, and Gurugram also seeing a rise, municipal sources say.

India has millions of stray dogs and the country accounts for 36% of the total rabies-related deaths in the world, according to the World Health Organization.

• Do India’s stray dogs kill more people than terror attacks?

“Infants and young children, not at any cost, should fall prey to rabies. The action should inspire confidence that they can move freely without fear of being bitten by stray dogs,” legal news website Live Law quoted the court as saying on Monday.

The court took up the issue following reports of increasing dog bites in Delhi and other major cities.

The court directed that multiple shelters be established across Delhi and its suburbs, each capable of housing at least 5,000 dogs. These shelters should be equipped with sterilisation and vaccination facilities, as well as CCTV cameras.

The court ruled sterilised dogs must not be released in public areas, despite current rules requiring their return to the capture site.

It also ordered that a helpline should be set up within a week to report dog bites and rabies cases.

Animal welfare groups, however, have voiced strong concerns over the court’s directive. They said that the timeline set up by the court was unrealistic.

“Most Indian cities currently do not have even 1% of the capacity [needed] to rehabilitate stray dogs in shelters,” said Nilesh Bhanage, founder of PAWS, a prominent animal rights group.

“If the court and the authorities actually want to end the menace, they should focus on strengthening the implementation of the existing regulations to control dog population and rabies – they include vaccination, sterilisation and efficient garbage management.”

Government data shows that there were 3.7 million reported cases of dog bites across the country in 2024.

Activists say the true extent of rabies-related deaths is not fully known.

The World Health Organization says that “the true burden of rabies in India is not fully known; although as per available information, it causes 18,000-20,000 deaths every year”.

On the other hand, according to data submitted in the parliament by the Indian government, 54 rabies deaths were recorded in 2024, up from 50 in 2023.

South Korea’s military has shrunk to about 450,000 people – a decline of 20% over the last six years, according to a defence ministry report released by a ruling party lawmaker on Sunday.

Authorities say the main reason behind the decline is the country’s dismal birth rate, which at 0.75 babies per woman is the world’s lowest.

South Korea retains compulsory military service mainly because the country is still technically at war with its nuclear-armed neighbour North Korea.

A study published by South Korean researchers in July had suggested that the country would need at least 500,000 soldiers to defend against an attack from the North, which is believed to have 1.3 million active-duty members.

The difference in military sizes put South Korea in a “structurally difficult position to succeed in defence”, the study said.

It also noted that South Korea needed “decisive action at the national level” to maintain at least 500,000 troops.

The number of divisions in South Korea’s military has dropped from 59 to 42 since 2006 – with units having either disbanded or merged with one another – according to the defence ministry report sent to Democratic Party lawmaker Choo Mi-ae, who made it public on Sunday.

South Korea has been increasing its defence budget in response to rising geopolitical tensions in the region. Its defence budget for 2025 stands at more than 60 trillion won ($43bn; £32bn) – more than North Korea’s GDP.

In South Korea, all able-bodied men are required to serve 18 months of military service, although rare exceptions are made – and deferments are sometimes granted.

Military service is unpopular with many men in the country, with some critics arguing that the system disrupts the careers of young men. The debate surrounding the issue has also become inextricably linked to conversations around gender equality.

Some conservatives have argued that female citizens should also be conscripted amid the country’s looming demographic crisis.

The country has repeatedly broken its own record for having the world’s lowest birth rate: 0.98 babies per woman in 2018, 0.84 in 2020, 0.72 in 2023 and 0.75 in 2024. If this trend continues, experts warn the country’s population of 50 million could halve in 60 years.

Colombian senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe has died two months after being shot in the head in a targeted attack which shocked the South American nation.

The 39-year-old was hit by three bullets – two of them in the head and one in the leg – at a campaign rally on 7 June in the capital, Bogotá.

His wife confirmed his death on social media, paying tribute to “the love of my life”.

A teenager has been arrested on suspicion of carrying out the shooting, but the motive behind the attack is still unclear.

Uribe’s wife, María Claudia Tarazona, thanked her late husband for “a life full of love” and for being “the best father” for their children.

According to a statement published on Saturday by the hospital where Uribe was being treated, the senator had suffered a bleed to his central nervous system and was due to undergo surgery.

He had already had several surgeries since he was first taken to the Santa Fe clinic in June.

His wife had asked people to pray for his recovery and thousands had turned out at vigils and rallies to show their support.

Uribe, who had been a senator since 2022, had been seeking his party’s nomination for the 2026 presidential election.

He was attending a political event in a middle-class neighbourhood of the capital when he was shot.

A teenage suspect was arrested as he was fleeing the scene. The 15-year-old has been charged with attempted murder and pleaded not guilty.

Several others have been detained on suspicion of aiding the gunman.

The brazen attack on the senator has brought back memories of the turbulent decades of the 1980s and 90s in Colombia, when several presidential candidates and influential Colombian figures were assassinated.

Uribe’s own mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was kidnapped by Los Extraditables in 1990 – an alliance created by leading drug lords.

She was held hostage by them for five months before being shot dead during a botched rescue attempt.

Uribe often cited her as his inspiration to run for political office “to work for our country”.

Los Extraditables, who said they would prefer a grave in Colombia to a prison cell in the US, abducted and attacked renowned Colombians in an attempt to force the government at the time to overturn its extradition treaty with the US.

The bones of a British man who died in a terrible accident in Antarctica in 1959 have been discovered in a melting glacier.

The remains were found in January by a Polish Antarctic expedition, alongside a wristwatch, a radio, and a pipe.

He has now been formally identified as Dennis “Tink” Bell, who fell into a crevasse aged 25 when working for the organisation that became the British Antarctic Survey.

“I had long given up on finding my brother. It is just remarkable, astonishing. I can’t get over it,” David Bell, 86, tells BBC News.

“Dennis was one of the many brave personnel who contributed to the early science and exploration of Antarctica under extraordinarily harsh conditions,” says Professor Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey .

“Even though he was lost in 1959, his memory lived on among colleagues and in the legacy of polar research,” she adds.

It was David who answered the door in his family home in Harrow, London, in July 1959.

“The telegram boy said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but this is bad news’,” he says. He went upstairs to tell his parents.

“It was a horrendous moment,” he adds.

Talking to me from his home in Australia and sitting next to his wife Yvonne, David smiles as stories from his childhood in 1940s England spill out.

They are the memories of a younger sibling admiring a charming, adventurous big brother.

“Dennis was fantastic company. He was very amusing. The life and soul of wherever he happened to be,” David says.

“I still can’t get over this, but one evening when me, my mother and father came home from the cinema,” he says.

“And I have to say this in fairness to Dennis, he had put a newspaper down on the kitchen table, but on top of it, he’d taken a motorbike engine apart and it was all over the table,” he says.

“I can remember his style of dress, he always used to wear duffel coats. He was just an average sort of fellow who enjoyed life,” he adds.

Dennis Bell, nicked-named “Tink”, was born in 1934. He worked with the RAF and trained as a meteorologist, before joining the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey to work in Antarctica.

“He was obsessed with Scott’s diaries,” David says, referring to Captain Robert Scott who was one of the first men to reach the South Pole and died on an expedition in 1912.

Dennis went to Antarctica in 1958. He was stationed for a two-year assignment at Admiralty Bay, a small UK base with about 12 men on King George Island, which is roughly 120 kilometres (75 miles) off the northern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The British Antarctic Survey keeps meticulous records and its archivist Ieuan Hopkins has dug out detailed base camp reports about Dennis’s work and antics on the harsh and “ridiculously isolated” island.

Reading aloud, Mr Hopkins says: “He’s cheerful and industrious, with a mischievous sense of humour and fondness for practical jokes.”

Dennis’s job was to send up meteorological weather balloons and radio the reports to the UK every three hours, which involved firing up a generator in sub-zero conditions.

Described as the best cook in the hut, he was in charge of the food store over the winter when no supplies could reach them.

Antarctica felt even more cut off than it is today, with extremely limited contact with home. David recalls recording a Christmas message at BBC studios with his parents and sister Valerie to be sent to his brother.

He was best known for his love of the husky dogs used to pull sledges around the island, and he raised two litters of dogs.

He was also involved in surveying King George Island to produce some of the first mapping of the largely unexplored place.

It was on a surveying trip that the accident happened, a few weeks after his 25th birthday.

On 26 July 1959, in the deep Antarctic winter, Dennis and a man called Jeff Stokes left the base to climb and survey a glacier.

Accounts in the British Antarctic Survey records explain what happened next and the desperate attempts to rescue him.

The snow was deep and the dogs had started to show signs of tiredness. Dennis went on ahead alone to encourage them, but he wasn’t wearing his skis. Suddenly he disappeared into a crevasse, leaving a hole behind him.

According to the accounts, Jeff Stokes called into the depths and Dennis was able to shout back. He grabbed onto a rope that was lowered down. The dogs pulled on the rope and Dennis was hitched up to the lip of the hole.

But he had tied the rope onto his belt, perhaps because of the angle he lay in. As he reached the lip, the belt broke and he fell again. His friend called again, but this time Dennis didn’t reply.

“That’s a story I shall never get over,” says David.

The base camp reports about the accident are business-like.

“We heard from Jeff […] that yesterday Tink fell down a crevasse and was killed. We hope to return tomorrow, sea ice permitting,” it continues.

Mr Hopkins explains that another man, called Alan Sharman, had died weeks earlier, and the morale was very low.

“The sledge has got back. We heard the sad details. Jeff has badly bitten frostbitten hands. We are not taking any more risks to recover,” the report reads the day after the accident.

Reading the reports again, Mr Hopkins discovered that earlier in the season, it had been Dennis who’d made the coffin for Alan Sharman.

“My mother never really got over it. She couldn’t handle photographs of him and couldn’t talk about him,” David says.

He recalls that two men on Dennis’s base visited the family, bringing a sheepskin as a gesture.

“But there was no conclusion. There was no service; there was no anything. Just Dennis gone,” David says.

About 15 years ago, David was contacted by Rod Rhys Jones, chair of the British Antarctic Monument Trust.

Since 1944, 29 people have died working on British Antarctic Territory on scientific missions, according to the trust.

Rod was organising a voyage for relatives of some of the 29 to see the spectacular and remote place where their loved ones had lived and died.

David joined the expedition, called South 2015.

“The captain stopped at the locations and give four or five hoots of the siren,” he says.

The sea-ice was too thick for David to reach his brother’s hut on King George Island.

“But it was very, very moving. It lifted the pressure, a weight off my head, as it were,” he says.

It gave him a sense of closure.

“And I thought that would be it,” he says.

But on 29 January this year, a team of Polish researchers working from the Henryk Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station stumbled across something practically on their doorstep.

Dennis had been found.

Some bones were in the loose ice and rocks deposited at the foot of Ecology Glacier on King George Island. Others were found on the glacier surface.

The scientists explain that fresh snowfall was imminent, and they put down a GPS marker so their “fellow polar colleague” would not be lost again.

A team of scientists made up of Piotr Kittel, Paulina Borówka and Artur Ginter at University of Lodz, Dariusz Puczko at the Polish Academy of Sciences and fellow researcher Artur Adamek carefully rescued the remains in four trips.

It is a dangerous and unstable place, “criss-crossed with crevasses”, and with slopes of up to 45 degrees, according to the Polish team.

Climate change is causing dramatic changes to many Antarctic glaciers, including Ecology Glacier, which is undergoing intense melting.

“The place where Dennis was found is not the same as the place where he went missing,” the team explains.

“Glaciers, under the influence of gravity, move their mass of ice, and with it, Dennis made his journey,” they say.

Fragments of bamboo ski poles, remains of an oil lamp, glass containers for cosmetics, and fragments from military tents were also collected.

“Every effort was made to ensure that Dennis could return home,” the team say.

“It’s an opportunity to reassess the contribution these men made, and an opportunity to promote science and what we’ve done in the Antarctic over many decades,” adds Rod Rhys Jones.

David still seems overwhelmed by the news, and repeats how grateful he is to the Polish scientists.

“I’m just sad my parents never got to see this day,” he says.

David will soon visit England where he and his sister, Valerie, plan to finally put Dennis to rest.

“It’s wonderful; I’m going to meet my brother. You might say we shouldn’t be thrilled, but we are. He’s been found – he’s come home now.”

A few days ago, India’s Election Commission released updated draft electoral rolls for Bihar state, where key elections are scheduled for November, following a month-long revision of the voters’ list.

But opposition parties and election charities say the exercise was rushed through – and many voters in Bihar have told the BBC that the draft rolls have wrong photos and include dead people.

The Special Intensive Revision – better known by its acronym SIR – was held from 25 June to 26 July and the commission said its officials visited each of the state’s listed 78.9 million voters to verify their details. It said the last such revision was in 2003 and an update was necessary.

The new draft rolls have 72.4 million names – 6.5 million fewer than before. The commission says deletions include 2.2 million dead, 700,000 enrolled more than once and 3.6 million who have migrated from the state.

Corrections are open until 1 September, with over 165,000 applications received. A similar review will be conducted nationwide to verify nearly a billion voters.

But opposition parties have accused the commission of dropping many voters – especially Muslims who make up a sizeable chunk of the population in four border districts – to aid Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming state election.

The poll body and BJP have denied the allegations. In response to the BBC’s questions, the Election Commission shared its 24 June order on conducting the SIR and a 27 July press note outlining efforts to ensure no eligible voter was “left behind”.

“Further, [the commission] does not take any responsibility of any other misinformation or unsubstantiated allegations being floated around by some vested interests,” it added in the response.

The commission has not released the list of deleted names or given any break-up according to religion, so it’s not possible to verify the opposition’s concerns.

A review by Hindustan Times newspaper found high voter deletions in Kishanganj, a district with the largest share of Muslims in Bihar, but not in other Muslim-dominated constituencies.

Parliament has faced repeated adjournments as opposition MPs demand a debate on what they call a threat to democracy. Outside, they chanted “Down down Modi”, “Take SIR back” and “Stop stealing votes”. The Supreme Court is also reviewing the move after watchdog ADR questioned its timing.

“It comes just three months before the assembly elections and there has not been enough time given to the exercise,” Jagdeep Chhokar of ADR, told the BBC.

“As reports from the ground showed, there were irregularities when the exercise was being conducted and the process of data collection was massively faulty,” he added.

The ADR has argued in court that the exercise “will disenfranchise millions of genuine voters” in a state that’s one of India’s poorest and is home to “a large number of marginalised communities”.

It says the SIR shifts the burden onto people to prove their citizenship, often requiring their own and their parents’ documents within a short deadline – an impossible task for millions of poor migrant workers.

While the draft roll was being published, we travelled to Patna and nearby villages to hear what voters think of SIR.

In Danara village, home to the poorest of the poor known as Mahadalits, most residents work on farms of upper-castes or are unemployed.

Homes are crumbling, open drains line the narrow lanes and a stagnant puddle near the local temple has turned brackish.

Most residents had little to no idea about SIR or its impact, and many weren’t sure if officials had even visited their homes.

But they deeply value their vote. “Losing it would be devastating,” says Rekha Devi. “It will push us further into poverty.”

In Kharika village, many men said they’d heard of SIR and submitted forms, spending 300 rupees (£3.42; £2.55) on getting new photos taken. But after the draft rolls came out, farmer and retired teacher Tarkeshwar Singh called it “a mess”. He shared pages showing his family’s details – pointing out errors, including the wrong photo next to his name.

“I have no idea whose photo it is,” he says, adding that his wife Suryakala Devi and son Rajeev also have wrong pictures. “But the worst is my other son Ajeev’s case – it has an unknown woman’s photo.”

Mr Singh goes on to list other anomalies – in his daughter-in-law Juhi Kumari’s document, he’s named as husband in place of his son. Another daughter-in-law, Sangeeta Singh, is listed twice from the same address – only one has her correct photo and date of birth.

Many of his relatives and neighbours, he says, have similar complaints. He points out the name of a cousin who died more than five years back but still figures on the list – and at least two names that appear twice.

“There’s obviously been no checking. The list has dead people and duplicates and many who did not even fill the form. This is a misuse of government machinery and billions of rupees that have been spent on this exercise.”

Mr Chhokar of ADR says they will raise these issues in the Supreme Court this week. In July, the court said it would stay the exercise if petitioners produce 15 genuine voters missing from the draft rolls.

“But how do we do that since the commission has not provided a list of the 6.5 million names that have been removed?” he asks.

Mr Chhokar says a justice on the two-judge bench suggested delinking the exercise from upcoming elections to allow more time for a proper review.

“I’ll be happy with that takeaway,” he says.

The SIR and draft rolls have split Bihar’s parties: the opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) questions them, while the ruling Janata Dal (United) – BJP alliance backs them.

“The complexity of this revision has left many people confused,” says Shivanand Tiwari, general secretary of the RJD.

Tiwari questions the Election Commission’s “claims that 98.3% electors have filled their forms” and says “in most villages, our voters and workers say the Block Level Officer (BLO) – generally a local schoolteacher appointed by the commission to go door-to-door – did not visit them. Many BLOs are not trained and don’t know how to upload forms”. (The commission has said the BLOs have worked “very responsibly”.)

Tiwari alleges that the “commission is partisan and this is manipulation of elections”.

“We believe the target are border areas where a lot of Muslims live who never vote for the BJP,” he says.

The BJP and the JD(U) have rejected the criticism, saying “it’s entirely political”.

“Only Indian citizens have the right to vote and we believe that a lot of Rohingya and Bangladeshis have settled in the border areas in recent years. And they have to be weeded out from the list,” said Bhim Singh, a BJP MP from Bihar.

“The SIR has nothing to do with anyone’s religion and the opposition is raising it because they know they will lose the upcoming election and need a scapegoat to blame for their loss,” he added.

JD(U)’s chief spokesperson and state legislator Neeraj Kumar Singh said “the Election Commission is only doing its job”.

“There are lots of voters on the list who figure twice or even three times. So shouldn’t that be corrected?” he asks.

No-one would want to work without getting a salary, or even worse – having to pay to be there.

Yet paying companies so you can pretend to work for them has become popular among young, unemployed adults in China. It has led to a growing number of such providers.

The development comes amid China’s sluggish economy and jobs market. Chinese youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, at more than 14%.

With real jobs increasingly hard to come by, some young adults would rather pay to go into an office than be just stuck at home.

Shui Zhou, 30, had a food business venture that failed in 2024. In April of this year, he started to pay 30 yuan ($4.20; £3.10) per day to go into a mock-up office run by a business called Pretend To Work Company, in the city of Dongguan, 114 km (71 miles) north of Hong Kong.

There he joins five “colleagues” who are doing the same thing.

“I feel very happy,” says Mr Zhou. “It’s like we’re working together as a group.”

Such operations are now appearing in major cities across China, including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Kunming. More often they look like fully-functional offices, and are equipped with computers, internet access, meeting rooms, and tea rooms.

And rather than attendees just sitting around, they can use the computers to search for jobs, or to try to launch their own start-up businesses. Sometimes the daily fee, usually between 30 and 50 yuan, includes lunch, snacks and drinks.

Dr Christian Yao, a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Management in New Zealand, is an expert on the Chinese economy.

“The phenomenon of pretending to work is now very common,” he says. “Due to economic transformation and the mismatch between education and the job market, young people need these places to think about their next steps, or to do odd jobs as a transition.

“Pretend office companies are one of the transitional solutions.”

Mr Zhou came across the Pretend To Work Company while browsing social media site Xiaohongshu. He says he felt that the office environment would improve his self-discipline. He has now been there for more than three months.

Mr Zhou sent photos of the office to his parents, and he says they feel much more at ease about his lack of employment.

While attendees can arrive and leave whenever they want, Mr Zhou usually gets to the office between 8am and 9am. Sometimes he doesn’t leave until 11pm, only departing after the manager of the business has left.

He adds that the other people there are now like friends. He says that when someone is busy, such as job hunting, they work hard, but when they have free time they chat, joke about, and play games. And they often have dinner together after work.

Mr Zhou says that he likes this team building, and that he is much happier than before he joined.

In Shanghai, Xiaowen Tang rented a workstation at a pretend work company in Shanghai for a month earlier this year. The 23-year-old graduated from university last year and hasn’t found a full-time job yet.

Her university has an unwritten rule that students must sign an employment contract or provide proof of internship within one year of graduation; otherwise, they won’t receive a diploma.

She sent the office scene to the school as proof of her internship. In reality, she paid the daily fee, and sat in the office writing online novels to earn some pocket money.

“If you’re going to fake it, just fake it to the end,” says Ms Tang.

Dr Biao Xiang, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, says that China’s pretending to work trend comes from a “sense of frustration and powerlessness” regarding a lack of job opportunities.

“Pretending to work is a shell that young people find for themselves, creating a slight distance from mainstream society and giving themselves a little space.”

The owner of the Pretend To Work Company in the city of Dongguan is 30-year-old Feiyu (a pseudonym). “What I’m selling isn’t a workstation, but the dignity of not being a useless person,” he says.

He himself has been unemployed in the past, after a previous retail business that he owned had to close during the Covid pandemic. “I was very depressed and a bit self-destructive,” he recalls. “You wanted to turn the tide, but you were powerless.”

In April of this year he started to advertise Pretend To Work, and within a month all the workstations were full. Would-be new joiners have to apply.

Feiyu say that 40% of customers are recent university graduates who come to take photos to prove their internship experience to their former tutors. While a small number of them come to help deal with pressure from their parents.

The other 60% are freelancers, many of whom are digital nomads, including those working for big ecommerce firms, and cyberspace writers. The average age is around 30, with the youngest being 25.

Officially, these workers are referred to as “flexible employment professionals”, a grouping that also includes ride-hailing and trucker drivers.

Over the longer term Feiyu says it is questionable whether the business will remain profitable. Instead he likes to view it more as a social experiment.

“It uses lies to maintain respectability, but it allows some people to find the truth,” he says. “If we only help users prolong their acting skills we are complicit in a gentle deception.

“Only by helping them transform their fake workplace into a real starting point can this social experiment truly live up to its promise.”

Mr Zhou is now spending most of his time improving his AI skills. He says he’s noticed that some companies are specifying proficiency in AI tools when recruiting. So he thinks gaining such AI skills “will make it easier” for him to find a full-time job.

The day Russia’s full-scale invasion began, Dima’s dad told him he might never see him again.

“The building in our street got blown up. Dad said, ‘I’m going to do everything I can so that you can live a normal life.'”

Days later, Dima’s father had joined the military and left for the front line.

Fifteen-year-old Dima is sharing memories of his dad with 49 other Ukrainian children. Sitting around a campfire, they hold candles to commemorate their missing loved ones.

The gentle slopes of Ukraine’s Carpathian mountains, smothered in brilliant green spruce and fir trees, stretch into the distance.

It’s a striking backdrop for this heartbreaking scene. We’re in the relative safety of western Ukraine, Russian bombs rarely fall here.

A little girl talks about when the full-scale invasion began.

“The first time we got bombed, my hands were shaking and I was crying,” she says. “It took me a long time to cope with that.”

This campfire activity is a kind of group therapy session. It’s part of a pioneering summer camp for a very special group of Ukrainian children, those with a parent who has disappeared during the war.

Some are soldiers missing in action on the front line, presumed dead. Some are in captivity or trapped in occupied areas.

The Ukrainian government says more than 70,000 people are officially listed as missing.

The charity that runs the camp, Gen.Ukrainian, helps thousands of traumatised children across Ukraine and runs several summer camps.

But this is the first for this category of children, and the BBC was given exclusive access.

“Many of these children have multiple traumas because not only are their fathers missing, but some of them have uncles and grandmothers missing too,” explains Vanui Martirosyan, lead psychologist at the charity.

“They’re living like in a frozen state. They cannot plan something in the future because they do not know what the future will bring. And we cannot work with them like with children with actual loss, because they do not have this point of starting grieving.”

She says many of the children spend hours trawling Russian social media channels, desperately searching for information about their family members. The channels often contain violent content related to the war.

“They feel fear of crying, they think that if they start crying it will continue for forever. This type of trauma is maybe the most difficult to work with.”

The day after the campfire meeting, I speak to Dima, who wants to tell me more about his dad. The last time he heard from him was the day before he disappeared in November 2023.

“He sent a video of them all drinking tea in the forest and wrote me a message saying, ‘Everything’s fine, I’ll call you tomorrow,'” Dima says.

The next day, Dima’s mum got a phone call saying his dad was missing in action.

“I started calling his mobile. Dad didn’t answer. That was it. I was sitting there and I started crying. I realised I wouldn’t see my dad for a while.”

During all our interviews with the children, including with Dima, a Gen.Ukrainian psychologist was present.

“I kept hoping until the end that Dad is a prisoner of war somewhere. Even now I still hope,” Dima says.

Dima’s trauma only intensified after his mum began to look into the circumstances of his dad’s disappearance.

Initially she was told by the military that her husband was missing following an airstrike on his position.

“Then someone else called mum, the chief of something-or-other, and said the Russians shot everyone, and someone saw Dad’s body lying there without any legs. Then another soldier who was at Dad’s position said they saw him dead, with shrapnel wounds to the head.”

Dima says the effect on both him and his mother was profound.

“Mum cried a lot because of that. I supported her,” Dima says. “When Dad left, he said, ‘Dima, no matter what happens you must look after Mum because you’re a man, and you’re her son.”‘

Group therapy at the camp takes place daily, held in small rooms. We are allowed to observe the start of one of the sessions – the rest is confidential.

One psychologists, Olena, shows a colour chart to the children, used to describe emotions. Green is happy, blue is sad, yellow is anxious or overstimulated, and red is anger.

Today, they’ll be discussing sadness. The more unpleasant and sad we feel, says Olena, the more we love the people we are sad about. That shows these people are important to us.

The children are encouraged to express their feelings, including through art. At an art therapy session, many of the paintings show happy families, houses and pets.

One seven-year-old boy, Zahar, tells me his painting is called “Daddy comes home.” It shows yellow stick men in front of a blue sky – the colours of the Ukrainian flag.

Many of the children live in cities that come under near-constant bombardment by Russian drones and missiles. Like 16-year-old Nastia’s hometown of Kharkiv, in the north-east of Ukraine, close to the frontline.

“If there’s bombing nearby, I go and shelter in the corridor. I worry and stress a lot,” Nastia says.

Her father was also a soldier. He disappeared around a year ago on the frontline. She last saw him two weeks before he went missing.

I ask her what memories of your father she has and her eyes glisten.

“He was very kind, he spoilt me a lot. He had a sweet tooth like me, and always knew what treats to buy me,” Nastia says. “I remember only the good things about Dad. The only sad thing I remember is that he disappeared.

“I love him very much and I know he loves me too,” she continues, adding, “I hope we can make new memories with him again.”

This camp also offers the kids a chance to catch up on sleep, uninterrupted by air-raid sirens – and to just have fun and play. There are regular trips to the swimming pool, hikes and games of volleyball.

“It’s important for the body to make movements in order to heal the trauma,” explains head psychologist Vanui.

At the camp closing ceremony, it’s time for the children and staff to say goodbye.

One boy, Ilya, is in floods of tears – he doesn’t want to go home.

“We have a child like this in every camp,” smiles Oksana Lebedieva, the founder of Gen.Ukrainian.

She points to the throngs of children playing in the garden.

“Maybe for the first time in their lives, they’ve found people who went through the same experience. And it’s very important. Group therapy is more important than anything – to see you’re not alone with the pain.”

Oksana says the scale of the task facing her charity is overwhelming.

“Millions of Ukrainian children are traumatised by war. This is a humanitarian catastrophe.”

When it comes to the Lucy Letby case, there are two parallel universes. In one, the question of her guilt is settled. She is a monster who murdered seven babies and attempted to murder seven more while she was a nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.

In the other universe, Letby is the victim of a flawed criminal justice system in which unreliable medical evidence was used to condemn and imprison an innocent woman.

This is what Letby’s barrister Mark McDonald argues. He says he has the backing of a panel of the best experts in the world who say there is no evidence any babies were deliberately harmed.

These extremes are both disturbing and bewildering. One of them is wrong – but which? Who should we believe?

The families of the infants say there is no doubt. Letby was convicted after a 10-month trial by a jury that had considered a vast range of evidence. They say Letby’s defenders are picking on small bits of evidence out of context and that the constant questioning of her guilt is deeply distressing.

I have spent almost three years investigating the Letby case – in that time I have made three Panorama documentaries and cowritten a book on the subject with my colleague Judith Moritz. Yet, if true, the new evidence, presented by Mark McDonald in a series of high-profile press conferences and media releases, is shocking.

According to his experts, the prosecution expert medical case is unreliable.

Mark McDonald has not released the panel’s full reports, which are currently with the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body he needs to persuade to reopen Letby’s case, but he has released summaries of the panel’s findings.

Letby was found guilty of 15 counts of murder and attempted murder, and the jury in her original trial reached unanimous verdicts on three of those cases. That is a good indication of where the strongest medical evidence might lie.

To get a sense of the imperfections woven through both the prosecution and the defence arguments, it’s worth looking at one of those cases in which the guilty verdict was unanimous: that of Baby O.

Baby O was born in June 2016, one of triplet brothers. At Letby’s trial, the jury was told that his death was in part the result of liver injuries, which the prosecution pathologist described as impact-type injuries – similar to those in a car accident.

As in other cases for which Letby was convicted, the prosecution said circumstantial evidence also tied her to the crime.

However, a paediatric pathologist who was not involved in the case but has seen Baby O’s post-mortem report, says it was “unlikely” Baby O’s liver injuries were caused by impact – as the prosecution claims.

“You can’t completely rule out the possibility,” says the pathologist, who does not want to be identified. “But in my view, the location of the injuries and the condition of the liver tissue itself don’t fit with that explanation.”

Which raises the obvious question – if the prosecution were wrong about Baby O’s liver injuries, then why did he die?

Letby was accused of injecting air into the blood of Baby O as well as that of other babies. This, the prosecution said, caused an air bubble and a blockage in the circulation known as air embolism.

During the trial the prosecution pointed to several pieces of evidence to make their case, including a 1989 academic study of air embolism in newborn babies, which noted skin discolouration as one possible feature of it.

Prosecutors argued that these same skin colour changes were observed in several babies in the Letby case.

However, Dr Shoo Lee, a Canadian neonatologist and one of the authors of that 1989 study, is now part of Letby’s team of defence experts working with Mark McDonald. He argues that his study was misused.

He says skin discolouration has not featured in any reported cases of air embolism in babies where the air has entered the circulation via a vein – which is what the prosecution alleged happened in the Letby case.

In other words, the prosecution was wrong to use skin discolouration as evidence of air embolism.

It sounds significant. But is it enough to defeat the air embolism allegations?

As with many aspects of the Letby case, the answer is not clear-cut.

The prosecution did not rely on skin discolouration alone to make their case for air embolism. And although there have not been any reported cases of skin discolouration in babies where air has entered the circulation via a vein, some critics have argued that the number of reported air embolism cases is small and that the theory is still possible.

To muddy the waters further, another of Mark McDonald’s panel of experts has said that in fact there was post-mortem evidence of air embolism in the babies.

“We know these babies suffered air embolism because of the post-mortem imaging in some of them,” says Neena Modi, a professor of neonatal medicine.

She believes this is highly likely to have occurred during resuscitation, and that there are much more plausible explanations for the collapses and deaths of the babies in the Letby case than air embolism.

The air embolism theory, she said, was “highly speculative”. But her remarks show the debate is far from settled.

There has been another explanation for Baby O’s death.

In December 2024, Mark McDonald called a press conference in which one of his experts, Dr Richard Taylor, claimed that a doctor had accidentally pierced the baby’s liver with a needle during resuscitation. This, he argued, had led to the baby’s death.

Dr Taylor added: “I think the doctor knows who they are. I have to say from a personal point of view that if this had happened to me, I’d be unable to sleep at night knowing that what I had done had led to the death of a baby, and now there is a nurse in jail, convicted of murder.”

The doctor accused of causing the baby’s death was subsequently identified as Stephen Brearey – one of Letby’s principal accusers at the Countess of Chester Hospital.

Mr Brearey says: “Given the ongoing investigations and inquiries, and to respect the confidentiality of those involved, I will not be making any further comment at this time.”

It was a bombshell claim. But does the evidence support it?

One indication that the needle theory might be shaky was that Dr Taylor, by his own admission, had not seen Baby O’s medical notes and was relying on a report that had been written by two other experts.

Another obvious problem with the needle theory is that it had already been examined at length during Letby’s trial.

The prosecution pathologist concluded that there was no evidence that a needle had pierced Baby O’s liver while he was alive and the paediatric pathologist we spoke to agrees.

They told us: “These injuries weren’t caused by a needle. They were in different parts of the liver and there was no sign of any needle injury on the liver.”

Even if the needle had penetrated the baby’s liver, it cannot explain why Baby O collapsed in the first place or why he died – the needle was inserted after the baby’s final and fatal collapse towards the end of the resuscitation.

When asked if he still stood by his comments about the doctor’s needle, Dr Taylor told us that while the needle may not have been the primary cause of death, his “opinion has not substantially changed”.

He said the “needle probably penetrated the liver” of Baby O, and “probably accelerated his demise”.

The question of where this leaves the case presented by Mark McDonald’s panel of experts when it comes to the needle theory is a difficult one to answer.

It would appear that among Letby’s defenders, there is not consensus.

Consultant neonatologist Dr Neil Aiton is one of the authors of the original report on which Dr Taylor based his comments. Dr Aiton says that he has examined the evidence independently and has concluded that Baby O’s liver injuries were caused by inappropriate resuscitation attempts, including hyperinflation of the baby’s lungs.

However, he also says it was “pretty clear” a needle had punctured the liver during resuscitation.

When Dr Aiton was told that other experts, including the paediatric pathologist who spoke to the BBC, have examined the case of Baby O and said that it is implausible to conclude this happened, he said that there were two possibilities. Either the liver ruptured because of a needle or it ruptured spontaneously.

Dr Aiton’s position appears to be that poor resuscitation caused the baby’s liver injuries and whether it was a needle or not is “not important”.

That is a contrast from what Dr Taylor said in that December press conference. And critics say Dr Aiton’s account still does not explain why Baby O collapsed in the first place and why he needed such desperate resuscitation.

A summary report from Letby’s expert panel appears to back further away from the needle theory. It says a needle “may have” punctured the liver.

Other experts, including the paediatric pathologist, said that Dr Aiton’s observation of hyper-inflated lungs would not explain Baby O’s liver injuries.

Once again, the case illustrates how difficult it is to distinguish between plausible and implausible claims.

Since that press conference, other experts working for Letby’s defence team have put forward another theory for Baby O’s death. They say his liver injuries were the result of traumatic delivery at the time of birth.

Professor Modi says this was a “highly plausible cause”.

But that has been contested from a surprising direction. Dr Mike Hall, a neonatologist, was Lucy Letby’s original defence expert and attended court throughout her trial.

He has been a staunch critic of her conviction, arguing her trial wasn’t fair and that there is no definitive medical evidence that babies were deliberately harmed.

However, Dr Hall’s view is that evidence for the birth trauma theory is simply not there. He notes that Baby O was born in good condition by caesarean section and there is no record of a traumatic delivery in the baby’s medical notes.

“There’s still no evidence that anyone did anything deliberately to harm Baby O,” he adds. “However, something was going on with Baby O, which we haven’t explained.

“We don’t know what the cause of this is. But that doesn’t mean that we therefore have to pretend that we know.”

For the jury, Baby O was one of the clearest cases that proved Letby was a killer. And yet there appears to be flawed expert evidence on both sides.

There were two other cases where the jury returned unanimous verdicts – the cases of Babies F and L.

The prosecution argued that both babies had been poisoned with insulin and highlighted blood tests that it said were clear evidence of this. For the prosecution, the insulin cases proved that someone at the Countess of Chester Hospital was harming babies.

Letby’s defence have, meanwhile, marshalled numerous arguments against the insulin theory. One is that the blood test used – an immunoassay – is inaccurate and should have been verified. But even Letby’s experts accept the test is accurate around 98% of the time.

Another argument is that premature babies can process insulin differently and that the blood test results are “within the expected range for pre-term infants”. But the medical specialists we’ve spoken to are baffled by this claim and say it goes against mainstream scientific understanding.

Of course, mainstream opinion can be wrong. But it is difficult to tell because Letby’s defence team have not shared the scientific evidence.

One of the experts behind the report – a mechanical engineer who carries out biomedical research – clarified that his analysis says the blood test results were “not uncommon”. However, Letby’s defence declined to show the BBC the published studies that support this claim.

Once again, the claims of both the prosecution and defence are not clear-cut.

Ultimately, the question of whether Letby’s case should be re-examined by the Court of Appeal now lies with CCRC. They have the task of studying Mark McDonald’s expert reports.

If he is successful and Lucy Letby’s case is referred back to the Court of Appeal – that is ultimately where the expert evidence on both sides will face a true reckoning.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has announced the UK will recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel meets certain conditions, including agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza and reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted furiously to the announcement, saying the decision rewarded “Hamas’s monstrous terrorism”.

What would it mean if recognition does go ahead, and what difference would it make?

Palestine is a state that does and does not exist.

It has a large degree of international recognition, diplomatic missions abroad and teams that compete in sporting competitions, including the Olympics.

But due to the Palestinians’ long-running dispute with Israel, it has no internationally agreed boundaries, no capital and no army. Due to Israel’s military occupation, in the West Bank, the Palestinian authority, set up in the wake of peace agreements in the 1990s, is not in full control of its land or people. Gaza, where Israel is also the occupying power, is in the midst of a devastating war.

Given its status as a kind of quasi-state, recognition is inevitably somewhat symbolic. It will represent a strong moral and political statement but change little on the ground.

But the symbolism is strong. As Foreign Secretary David Lammy pointed out during his speech at the UN on Tuesday, “Britain bears a special burden of responsibility to support the two-state solution”.

He went on to cite the 1917 Balfour Declaration – signed by his predecessor as foreign secretary Arthur Balfour – which first expressed Britain’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

But that declaration, Lammy said, came with a solemn promise “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

Supporters of Israel have often pointed out that Lord Balfour did not refer explicitly to the Palestinians or say anything about their national rights.

But the territory previously known as Palestine, which Britain ruled through a League of Nations mandate from 1922 to 1948, has long been regarded as unfinished international business.

Israel came into being in 1948, but efforts to create a parallel state of Palestine have foundered, for a multitude of reasons.

As Lammy said, politicians “have become accustomed to uttering the words ‘a two-state solution'”.

The phrase refers to the creation of a Palestinian state, alongside Israel, in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, broadly along the lines that existed prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

But international efforts to bring about a two-state solution have come to nothing and Israel’s colonisation of large parts of the West Bank, illegal under international law, has turned the concept into a largely empty slogan.

The State of Palestine is currently recognised by 147 of the UN’s 193 member states.

At the UN, it has the status of a “permanent observer state”, allowing participation but no voting rights.

Australia has become the latest country to say it will recognise Palestinian Statehood at the next UN General Assembly in September – after similar announcements from France, Japan, Canada and the UK, on some conditions.

New Zealand said it would consider its position on recognition of a Palestinian state in August, ahead of a formal consideration of the issue in September.

If the UK and France do recognise a Palestinian state next month, Palestine would have the support of four of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members – the other two being China and Russia.

This will leave the US, Israel’s strongest ally by far, in a minority of one.

US Vice-President JD Vance has reiterated the US has no plans to recognise a Palestinian state, citing a lack of functional government.

Washington has recognised the Palestinian Authority, currently headed by Mahmoud Abbas, since the mid-1990s but has stopped short of recognising an actual state.

Several US presidents have expressed their support for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. But Donald Trump is not one of them. Under his two administrations, US policy has leaned heavily in favour of Israel.

Without the backing of Israel’s closest and most powerful ally, it is impossible to see a peace process leading to an eventual two-state solution.

Successive British governments have talked about recognising a Palestinian state, but only as part of a peace process, ideally in conjunction with other Western allies and “at the moment of maximum impact”.

To do it simply as a gesture, the governments believed, would be a mistake. It might make people feel virtuous, but it would not actually change anything on the ground.

But events have clearly forced the current government’s hand.

The scenes of creeping starvation in Gaza, mounting anger over Israel’s military campaign and a major shift in British public opinion – all of these have influenced government thinking.

The clamour, among MPs and even the cabinet front bench, has become deafening.

At a Commons debate last week, Lammy was bombarded from all sides by questions asking why the UK was still not recognising a Palestinian state.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting summed up the views of many MPs when he urged the government to recognise Palestine “while there is still a state of Palestine left to recognise”.

But the UK has not simply followed the lead set by France’s Emmanuel Macron last week or the governments of Ireland, Spain and Norway last year.

Sir Keir has chosen to make his pledge conditional: Britain will act unless the government of Israel takes decisive steps to end the suffering in Gaza, reach a ceasefire, refrain from annexing territory in the West Bank – a move symbolically threatened by Israel’s parliament the Knesset last week – and commit to a peace process that results in a two-state solution.

Downing Street knows there is virtually no chance of Netanyahu committing himself in the next six weeks to that kind of peace process. He has repeatedly ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state.

So British recognition of Palestine is certainly coming.

For all Netanyahu’s implacable opposition, Sir Keir is hoping this is indeed a “moment of maximum impact”.

But the Britain in 2025 is not the Britain of 1917 when the Balfour Declaration was signed. Its ability to bend others to its will is limited. It is hard to know, right now, what the impact will actually be.

A Chinese warship ploughed into its own coast guard vessel on Monday while the latter was chasing a Philippine vessel in the South China Sea, Manila said.

Philippine coast guard officials were distributing aid to fishermen in the disputed Scarborough Shoal, Commodore Jay Tarriela said, when the Chinese coast guard “performed a risky manoeuvre” which inflicted “substantial damage” on the Chinese warship’s forward deck.

China confirmed that a confrontation took place and accused the Philippines of “forcibly intruding” into Chinese waters, but did not mention the collision.

The South China Sea is at the centre of a territorial dispute between China, the Philippines and other countries.

Tensions between Beijing and Manila have sharply escalated in recent years, with each side accusing the other of provocations and altercations at sea, including some involving weapons such as swords, spears and knives.

The Scarborough Shoal, a triangular chain of reefs and rocks, has been a flashpoint between the two countries since China seized it in 2012.

Video released by Manila showed a Chinese coast guard vessel firing water cannons as it chased the Philippine coast guard ship, before slamming loudly into a much larger Chinese ship after making a sudden turn.

The collision rendered the Chinese warship “unseaworthy”, Tarriela said. It is unclear if anyone was injured in the incident.

The Philippines Coast Guard has “consistently urged” the Chinese authorities to respect international conventions in handling territorial disputes, “especially considering their role in enforcing maritime laws”, Tarriela said.

“We have also emphasised that such reckless behaviour at sea could ultimately lead to accidents,” he added.

China’s coast guard, however, said it was acting “in accordance with the law” and took “all necessary measures” to drive the Philippine vessels away.

This is the latest in a string of dangerous encounters over the last two years as Beijing and Manila seek to enforce their claims on disputed reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea.

In December last year, the Philippines said China’s coast guard fired water cannons and “sideswiped” a government vessel during a maritime patrol near the Scarborough Shoal.

Beijing initially said Philippine ships “came dangerously close” and that its crew’s actions had been “in accordance with the law”. It later accused Manila of making “bogus accusations in an attempt to mislead international understanding”.

In June 2024, Filipino soldiers used their “bare hands” to fight off Chinese coast guard personnel armed with swords, spears and knives in the area. The skirmish led to one Filipino soldier losing his thumb, Manila said.

Dozens of soldiers have been arrested in Mali accused of plotting to topple the country’s military leaders, sources say.

The wave of arrests, which reportedly went on overnight and are expected to continue, reflect increased tensions within the military government, with reports that a jihadist insurgency in the north is gaining ground. The authorities have not commented on the arrests.

Initial reports indicated that Gen Abass Dembele, the former governor of the Mopti region and Gen Nema Sagara, one of the few women at the highest levels of the Malian army, were among those detained.

However, a source close to Gen Dembele told the BBC that neither of them had been arrested.

The source, who confirmed the ongoing arrests, told a BBC reporter in Bamako that he had just left Gen Dembele’s house and he was “doing well”.

The AFP news agency reported that the detained soldiers were allegedly planning to overthrow the government, citing multiple sources within the military and junta-backed transitional council.

“All are soldiers. Their objective was to overthrow the junta,” it quoted an unnamed lawmaker in the National Transition Council as saying.

He said there had been about “50 arrests”, while a security source said there were at least 20 arrests, linked to “attempts to destabilise the institutions,” AFP reports.

The arrests have reportedly been going on over a number of days.

They come amid political tension heightened by the junta’s crackdown on former Prime Ministers Moussa Mara and Choguel Maiga over accusations of harming the reputation of the state and embezzlement.

Mara, a recent outspoken critic of the military government, has been in detention since 1 August, while Maiga is facing judicial sanctions.

In May, the junta dissolved all political parties following rare anti-government protests, which Mara described as a severe blow to reconciliation efforts initiated by the military leaders last year.

The junta leader Gen Asimi Goïta, who seized power through two coups in 2020 and 2021, had promised elections last year, but these have never been held.

In July, the transition period was extended by five years, clearing him to continue leading the country until at least 2030.

Mali has been fighting an Islamist insurgency since 2012 – one of the reasons given for the military takeover but attacks by jihadist groups have continued and even increased.

Alongside its neighbours Niger and Burkina Faso, it has enlisted the help of Russian allies to contain the jihadist attacks in the region after breaking ties with France – but there has been no significant improvements in security.

• The region with more ‘terror deaths’ than rest of world combined
• Why young Africans are celebrating military takeovers
• Three military-run states leave West African bloc – what will change?
• Mali coup leader granted five-year term in power
• Mali signs trade deal with Russia as ties strengthen

One person has died in Turkey after a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck the north-west province of Balikesir on Sunday evening.

An 81-year-old woman passed away shortly after she was pulled out from rubble in the town of Sindirgi, which was the epicentre of the quake, Turkey’s interior minister said.

Sixteen buildings collapsed as a result of the tremors, and 29 people had been injured, Ali Yerlikaya added.

Turkey’s disaster management agency said the quake was recorded at around 19:53 local time (16:53 GMT), and was felt as far away as Istanbul.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a statement wishing a swift recovery to everyone who was affected, and said that all recovery efforts were being closely monitored.

“May God protect our country from any kind of disaster,” he wrote on X.

Search and rescue operations have now concluded, and the interior minister said that there were no other signs of serious damage or casualties.

Pictures from Sindirgi, however, show large buildings totally flattened and towering piles of twisted metal and debris.

Turkey is located at the intersection of three major tectonic plates, and experiences frequent seismic activity as a result.

In February 2023, more than 50,000 people were killed when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake devastated the south-eastern region of the country.

A further 5,000 were killed in neighbouring Syria.

More than two years on from that quake, hundreds of thousands of people remain displaced.

European allies have rallied behind Ukraine in a renewed surge of support, insisting that any peace talks with Russia must include Kyiv.

A joint statement issued by the leaders of the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Finland and the European Commission came ahead of US President Donald Trump’s meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday.

A White House official has said that Trump is willing to hold a trilateral meeting which would also include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but, for now, it remains a Trump-Putin summit, as initially requested by the Russian leader.

Zelensky has said any agreements without Kyiv will amount to “dead decisions”.

Trump has previously suggested that he could start by meeting only with Putin, telling reporters he planned to “start off with Russia.” But the US president also said that he believed “we have a shot at” organising a trilateral meeting with both Putin and Zelensky.

Whether Putin would agree to this is unclear – he has refused several opportunities to hold direct talks, and the two leaders have not met face-to-face since Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago.

Speaking on Friday, Trump also suggested that there “will be some swapping of territories” in order for Moscow and Kyiv to reach an agreement – to which Zelensky reacted strongly.

“We will not reward Russia for what it has perpetrated,” he said on Telegram. “Any decisions against us, any decisions without Ukraine, are also decisions against peace.”

“The Russians… still impose the idea of ‘exchanging’ Ukrainian territory for Ukrainian territory, with consequences that guarantee nothing but more convenient positions for the Russians to resume the war,” he added defiantly.

CBS, the BBC’s US media partner, has reported that the White House is trying to sway European allies to accept an agreement that would include Russia taking the entire Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, and keeping the Crimean Peninsula.

The European leaders, in their statement released late on Saturday night, stressed that “international borders must not be changed by force”.

“Ukraine has the freedom of choice over its own destiny,” they said, stressing that their nations would continue to support Ukraine diplomatically, militarily and financially.

The leaders also said that a “diplomatic solution” is critical, not just to protect Ukraine – but also Europe’s security.

It’s not just Ukraine that is struggling to be part of the Alaska meeting.

European allies are also worried about their lack of influence over the outcome of any agreement that Trump could reach with Putin.

In a post on X on Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron raised concerns about Russia and the US excluding European involvement.

“Europeans will also necessarily be part of the solution, as their own security is at stake,” he wrote.

On Sunday, Zelensky thanked the allies for their support.

“The end of the war must be fair, and I am grateful to everyone who stands with Ukraine and our people today for the sake of peace in Ukraine, which is defending the vital security interests of our European nations,” he said.

Europe has taken a tough approach to Moscow – including imposing sanctions against Russian entities and providing military aid for Ukraine.

Zelensky said he told Macron in a phone call on Saturday that the key was to make sure “the Russians do not get to deceive anyone again”.

“We all need a genuine end to the war and reliable security foundations for Ukraine and other European nations,” the Ukrainian leader said.

US diplomacy with Europe and Ukraine fell to Vice-President JD Vance on Saturday, when he visited the UK and held talks with Foreign Secretary David Lammy as well as two of Zelensky’s top aides.

Thanking Vance for the discussions, Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelensky’s office, stressed the need for Ukraine to be included.

“A reliable, lasting peace is only possible with Ukraine at the negotiating table,” he said. “A ceasefire is necessary – but the frontline is not a border.”

The summit in Alaska, the territory which Russia sold to the US in 1867, would be the first between sitting US and Russian presidents, since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021.

Nine months later, Moscow sent troops into Ukraine.

In 2022, the Kremlin announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions – Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – despite not having full control over them.

Moscow has failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough in its full-scale invasion, but occupies large swathes of Ukraine’s eastern territory. Ukrainian offensives, meanwhile, have not been able to push the Russian forces back.

Elon Musk’s electric car and energy company Tesla has applied for a licence to supply electricity to British homes.

If approved by the energy watchdog Ofgem, it would allow Tesla to take on the big firms that dominate the UK energy market to provide electricity to households and businesses in England, Scotland and Wales as soon as next year.

Tesla, which is best known as one of the world’s biggest makers of electric vehicles (EV), also has a solar energy and battery storage business.

Tesla did not immediately reply to a BBC request for comment.

Ofgem can take up to nine months to process applications for energy supply licences.

Tesla Electric already operates a power supplier in Texas that allows owners of its EVs to charge their cars cheaply and pays them for feeding surplus electricity back to the grid.

The application, which was signed by Andrew Payne who runs Tesla’s European energy operations, was filed late last month.

Tesla has sold more than a quarter of a million EVs and tens of thousands of home storage batteries in the UK, which could help it gain access to a sizeable customer base for an electricity supply business.

The Ofgem licence application comes as Tesla’s EV sales have fallen across Europe in recent months.

In July, UK car registrations of Teslas fell by almost 60% and by more than 55% in Germany, industry data showed.

That took the firm’s sales decline in the month to 45% in 10 key European markets.

Tesla has faced tough competition from rival EV makers, especially China’s BYD.

Musk has also been criticised for his relationship with US President Donald Trump, although the two have now very publicly fallen out.

His involvement in right-wing politics in the UK, Germany and Italy, meanwhile, has drawn ire from some of Tesla’s customers.

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South Korea’s military has shrunk to about 450,000 people – a decline of 20% over the last six years, according to a defence ministry report released by a ruling party lawmaker on Sunday.

Authorities say the main reason behind the decline is the country’s dismal birth rate, which at 0.75 babies per woman is the world’s lowest.

South Korea retains compulsory military service mainly because the country is still technically at war with its nuclear-armed neighbour North Korea.

A study published by South Korean researchers in July had suggested that the country would need at least 500,000 soldiers to defend against an attack from the North, which is believed to have 1.3 million active-duty members.

The difference in military sizes put South Korea in a “structurally difficult position to succeed in defence”, the study said.

It also noted that South Korea needed “decisive action at the national level” to maintain at least 500,000 troops.

The number of divisions in South Korea’s military has dropped from 59 to 42 since 2006 – with units having either disbanded or merged with one another – according to the defence ministry report sent to Democratic Party lawmaker Choo Mi-ae, who made it public on Sunday.

South Korea has been increasing its defence budget in response to rising geopolitical tensions in the region. Its defence budget for 2025 stands at more than 60 trillion won ($43bn; £32bn) – more than North Korea’s GDP.

In South Korea, all able-bodied men are required to serve 18 months of military service, although rare exceptions are made – and deferments are sometimes granted.

Military service is unpopular with many men in the country, with some critics arguing that the system disrupts the careers of young men. The debate surrounding the issue has also become inextricably linked to conversations around gender equality.

Some conservatives have argued that female citizens should also be conscripted amid the country’s looming demographic crisis.

The country has repeatedly broken its own record for having the world’s lowest birth rate: 0.98 babies per woman in 2018, 0.84 in 2020, 0.72 in 2023 and 0.75 in 2024. If this trend continues, experts warn the country’s population of 50 million could halve in 60 years.

No-one would want to work without getting a salary, or even worse – having to pay to be there.

Yet paying companies so you can pretend to work for them has become popular among young, unemployed adults in China. It has led to a growing number of such providers.

The development comes amid China’s sluggish economy and jobs market. Chinese youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, at more than 14%.

With real jobs increasingly hard to come by, some young adults would rather pay to go into an office than be just stuck at home.

Shui Zhou, 30, had a food business venture that failed in 2024. In April of this year, he started to pay 30 yuan ($4.20; £3.10) per day to go into a mock-up office run by a business called Pretend To Work Company, in the city of Dongguan, 114 km (71 miles) north of Hong Kong.

There he joins five “colleagues” who are doing the same thing.

“I feel very happy,” says Mr Zhou. “It’s like we’re working together as a group.”

Such operations are now appearing in major cities across China, including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Kunming. More often they look like fully-functional offices, and are equipped with computers, internet access, meeting rooms, and tea rooms.

And rather than attendees just sitting around, they can use the computers to search for jobs, or to try to launch their own start-up businesses. Sometimes the daily fee, usually between 30 and 50 yuan, includes lunch, snacks and drinks.

Dr Christian Yao, a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Management in New Zealand, is an expert on the Chinese economy.

“The phenomenon of pretending to work is now very common,” he says. “Due to economic transformation and the mismatch between education and the job market, young people need these places to think about their next steps, or to do odd jobs as a transition.

“Pretend office companies are one of the transitional solutions.”

Mr Zhou came across the Pretend To Work Company while browsing social media site Xiaohongshu. He says he felt that the office environment would improve his self-discipline. He has now been there for more than three months.

Mr Zhou sent photos of the office to his parents, and he says they feel much more at ease about his lack of employment.

While attendees can arrive and leave whenever they want, Mr Zhou usually gets to the office between 8am and 9am. Sometimes he doesn’t leave until 11pm, only departing after the manager of the business has left.

He adds that the other people there are now like friends. He says that when someone is busy, such as job hunting, they work hard, but when they have free time they chat, joke about, and play games. And they often have dinner together after work.

Mr Zhou says that he likes this team building, and that he is much happier than before he joined.

In Shanghai, Xiaowen Tang rented a workstation at a pretend work company in Shanghai for a month earlier this year. The 23-year-old graduated from university last year and hasn’t found a full-time job yet.

Her university has an unwritten rule that students must sign an employment contract or provide proof of internship within one year of graduation; otherwise, they won’t receive a diploma.

She sent the office scene to the school as proof of her internship. In reality, she paid the daily fee, and sat in the office writing online novels to earn some pocket money.

“If you’re going to fake it, just fake it to the end,” says Ms Tang.

Dr Biao Xiang, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, says that China’s pretending to work trend comes from a “sense of frustration and powerlessness” regarding a lack of job opportunities.

“Pretending to work is a shell that young people find for themselves, creating a slight distance from mainstream society and giving themselves a little space.”

The owner of the Pretend To Work Company in the city of Dongguan is 30-year-old Feiyu (a pseudonym). “What I’m selling isn’t a workstation, but the dignity of not being a useless person,” he says.

He himself has been unemployed in the past, after a previous retail business that he owned had to close during the Covid pandemic. “I was very depressed and a bit self-destructive,” he recalls. “You wanted to turn the tide, but you were powerless.”

In April of this year he started to advertise Pretend To Work, and within a month all the workstations were full. Would-be new joiners have to apply.

Feiyu say that 40% of customers are recent university graduates who come to take photos to prove their internship experience to their former tutors. While a small number of them come to help deal with pressure from their parents.

The other 60% are freelancers, many of whom are digital nomads, including those working for big ecommerce firms, and cyberspace writers. The average age is around 30, with the youngest being 25.

Officially, these workers are referred to as “flexible employment professionals”, a grouping that also includes ride-hailing and trucker drivers.

Over the longer term Feiyu says it is questionable whether the business will remain profitable. Instead he likes to view it more as a social experiment.

“It uses lies to maintain respectability, but it allows some people to find the truth,” he says. “If we only help users prolong their acting skills we are complicit in a gentle deception.

“Only by helping them transform their fake workplace into a real starting point can this social experiment truly live up to its promise.”

Mr Zhou is now spending most of his time improving his AI skills. He says he’s noticed that some companies are specifying proficiency in AI tools when recruiting. So he thinks gaining such AI skills “will make it easier” for him to find a full-time job.

A Chinese warship ploughed into its own coast guard vessel on Monday while the latter was chasing a Philippine vessel in the South China Sea, Manila said.

Philippine coast guard officials were distributing aid to fishermen in the disputed Scarborough Shoal, Commodore Jay Tarriela said, when the Chinese coast guard “performed a risky manoeuvre” which inflicted “substantial damage” on the Chinese warship’s forward deck.

China confirmed that a confrontation took place and accused the Philippines of “forcibly intruding” into Chinese waters, but did not mention the collision.

The South China Sea is at the centre of a territorial dispute between China, the Philippines and other countries.

Tensions between Beijing and Manila have sharply escalated in recent years, with each side accusing the other of provocations and altercations at sea, including some involving weapons such as swords, spears and knives.

The Scarborough Shoal, a triangular chain of reefs and rocks, has been a flashpoint between the two countries since China seized it in 2012.

Video released by Manila showed a Chinese coast guard vessel firing water cannons as it chased the Philippine coast guard ship, before slamming loudly into a much larger Chinese ship after making a sudden turn.

The collision rendered the Chinese warship “unseaworthy”, Tarriela said. It is unclear if anyone was injured in the incident.

The Philippines Coast Guard has “consistently urged” the Chinese authorities to respect international conventions in handling territorial disputes, “especially considering their role in enforcing maritime laws”, Tarriela said.

“We have also emphasised that such reckless behaviour at sea could ultimately lead to accidents,” he added.

China’s coast guard, however, said it was acting “in accordance with the law” and took “all necessary measures” to drive the Philippine vessels away.

This is the latest in a string of dangerous encounters over the last two years as Beijing and Manila seek to enforce their claims on disputed reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea.

In December last year, the Philippines said China’s coast guard fired water cannons and “sideswiped” a government vessel during a maritime patrol near the Scarborough Shoal.

Beijing initially said Philippine ships “came dangerously close” and that its crew’s actions had been “in accordance with the law”. It later accused Manila of making “bogus accusations in an attempt to mislead international understanding”.

In June 2024, Filipino soldiers used their “bare hands” to fight off Chinese coast guard personnel armed with swords, spears and knives in the area. The skirmish led to one Filipino soldier losing his thumb, Manila said.

A British backpacker has pleaded guilty to killing a man in Australia after hitting him while riding an e-scooter with an alcohol level more than three times the legal limit.

Alicia Kemp, 25, from Redditch, Worcestershire, had been drinking with a friend on a Saturday afternoon in May when she was kicked out of a bar because the two of them were drunk, the court heard earlier.

The pair hired an e-scooter in the evening, and Kemp was driving at speeds of 20 to 25km/h (12 to 15mph) when she hit 51-year-old Thanh Phan from behind on a pavement in Perth’s city centre.

The father-of-two hit his head on the pavement and died in hospital from a brain bleed two days later.

Kemp’s passenger was also hurt in the crash – sustaining a fractured skull and broken nose – but her injuries were not life-threatening.

In Perth’s Magistrates Court on Monday, Kemp – appearing via video link – pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death while intoxicated. The charge carries a maximum 20-year prison term.

Prosecutors dropped a second charge of dangerous driving causing bodily harm to her passenger.

Earlier, the court heard that Kemp’s blood alcohol content level was 0.158 after the crash, more than three times the legal limit of 0.05 in Australia.

Prosecutors said CCTV footage showed Kemp’s “inexplicably dangerous” riding before she struck Mr Phan, who was waiting to cross the road.

In a statement from Mr Phan’s family earlier this year, the structural engineer was described as a beloved husband, father, brother and dear friend.

Kemp’s lawyer Michael Tudori said she was relieved after pleading guilty and hoped to be sentenced before Christmas, according to local media.

“You could see she was ready to say those words, you know, she’s obviously done something stupid,” Mr Tudori told the ABC.

Kemp, who was in Western Australia on a working holiday visa, will remain in custody until her sentencing.

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US President Donald Trump has said homeless people must “move out” of Washington DC as he vowed to tackle crime in the city, but the mayor pushed back against the White House likening the American capital to Baghdad in Iraq.

The Republican president has also trailed a news conference for Monday about his plan to make the city “safer and more beautiful than it ever was before”.

Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, said: “We are not experiencing a crime spike.”

Trump signed an order last month making it easier to arrest homeless people, and he last week ordered federal law enforcement into the streets of Washington DC.

“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social on Sunday. “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong.”

Alongside photos of tents and rubbish, he added: “There will be no ‘MR. NICE GUY.’ We want our Capital BACK. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The specifics of the president’s plan are not yet clear, but in a 2022 speech he proposed moving homeless people to “high quality” tents on inexpensive land outside cities, while providing access to bathrooms and medical professionals.

On Friday, Trump ordered federal agents – including from US Park Police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the US Marshals Service – into Washington DC to curb what he called “totally out of control” levels of crime.

A White House official told NPR that up to 450 federal officers were deployed on Saturday night.

The administration is also considering deploying National Guard members, although Trump has not yet made a final decision, according to reports by Reuters and ABC News.

Trump’s moves come after a 19-year-old former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was assaulted in an alleged attempted carjacking in Washington DC.

Trump vented about that incident on social media, posting a photo of the bloodied victim.

Mayor Bowser told MSNBC on Sunday: “It is true that we had a terrible spike in crime in 2023, but this is not 2023.

“We have spent over the last two years driving down violent crime in this city, driving it down to a 30-year low.”

She criticised White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller for dubbing the US capital “more violent than Baghdad”.

“Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false,” Bowser said.

Washington DC’s homicide rate remains relatively high per capita compared to other US cities, with a total of 98 such killings recorded so far this year. Homicides have been trending higher in the US capital from a decade ago.

But federal data from January suggests that Washington DC last year recorded its lowest overall violent crime figures – once carjacking, assault and robberies are incorporated – in 30 years.

Trump has promised a news conference at the White House on Monday to outline his plans to stop violent crime in the US capital.

In another post on Sunday, he said the event at 10:00 EDT (14:00 GMT) would address ending “crime, murder and death” in the city, as well as its “physical renovation”.

He described Bowser as “a good person who has tried”, adding that despite the mayor’s efforts, crime continued to get “worse” and the city was becoming “dirtier and less attractive”.

Community Partnership, an organisation that works to reduce homelessness in Washington DC, told Reuters that the city of 700,000 residents had about 3,782 people homeless on any given night.

Most were in public housing or emergency shelters, but about 800 were considered to be “on the street”.

As a district, rather than a state, Washington DC is overseen by the federal government, which has the power to override some local laws.

The president controls federal land and buildings in the city, although he would need Congress to assume federal control of the district.

In recent days, he has threatened to take over the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department, which Bowser argued was not possible.

“There are very specific things in our law that would allow the president to have more control over our police department,” Bowser said. “None of those conditions exist in our city right now.”

Trump has been critical of various Democratic-run city administrations during his two presidential terms.

In recent months, he has notably clashed with the Los Angeles leadership after ordering thousands of National Guard members to deal with unrest over raids on undocumented migrants.

That deployment became the subject of a legal battle which will reach a federal court in California on Monday.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

The UK’s seas have had their warmest start to the year since records began, helping to drive some dramatic changes in marine life and for its fishing communities.

The average surface temperature of UK waters in the seven months to the end of July was more than 0.2C higher than any year since 1980, BBC analysis of provisional Met Office data suggests.

That might not sound much, but the UK’s seas are now considerably warmer than even a few decades ago, a trend driven by humanity’s burning of fossil fuels.

That is contributing to major changes in the UK’s marine ecosystems, with some new species entering our seas and others struggling to cope with the heat.

Scientists and amateur naturalists have observed a remarkable range of species not usually widespread in UK waters, including octopus, bluefin tuna and mauve stinger jellyfish.

The abundance of these creatures can be affected by natural cycles and fishing practices, but many researchers point to the warming seas as a crucial part of their rise.

“Things like jellyfish, like octopus… they are the sorts of things that you expect to respond quickly to climate change,” said Dr Bryce Stewart, a senior research fellow at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth.

“It’s a bit like the canary in the coal mine – the sorts of quite extraordinary changes we’ve seen over the last few years really do indicate an ecosystem under flux,” he added.

Harry Polkinghorne, a keen 19-year-old angler, described how he regularly sees bluefin tuna now, including large schools of the fish in frantic feeding frenzies.

“It’s just like watching a washing machine in the water,” he said. “You can just see loads of white water, and then tuna fins and tuna jumping out.”

Bluefin tuna numbers have been building over the past decade in south-west England for a number of reasons, including warmer waters and better management of their populations, Dr Stewart explained.

Heather Hamilton, who snorkels off the coast of Cornwall virtually every week with her father David, has swum through large blooms of salps, a species that looks a bit like a jellyfish.

They are rare in the UK, but the Hamiltons have seen more and more of these creatures in the last couple of years.

“You’re seeing these big chains almost glowing slightly like fairy lights”, she said.

“It just felt very kind of out of this world, something I’ve never seen before.”

But extreme heat, combined with historical overfishing, is pushing some of the UK’s cold-adapted species like cod and wolf-fish to their limits.

“We’re definitely seeing this shift of cooler water species moving north in general,” said Dr Stewart.

Marine heatwave conditions – prolonged periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – have been present around parts of the UK virtually all year.

Some exceptional sea temperatures have also been detected by measurement buoys off the UK coast, known as WaveNet and run by the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas).

And the record 2025 warmth comes after very high sea temperatures in 2023 and 2024 too.

The Met Office says its data from the end of June 2024 to now is provisional and will be finalised in the coming months, but this usually results in only very minor changes.

“All the way through the year, on average it’s been warmer than we’ve really ever seen [for the UK’s seas],” said Prof John Pinnegar, the lead adviser on climate change at Cefas.

“[The seas] have been warming for over a century and we’re also seeing heatwaves coming through now,” he added.

“What used to be quite a rare phenomenon is now becoming very, very common.”

Like heatwaves on land, sea temperatures are affected by natural variability and short-term weather. Clear, sunny skies with low winds – like much of the UK had in early July – can heat up the sea surface more quickly.

But the world’s oceans have taken up about 90% of the Earth’s excess heat from humanity’s emissions of planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide.

That is making marine heatwaves more likely and more intense.

“The main contributor to the marine heatwaves around the UK is the buildup of heat in the ocean,” said Dr Caroline Rowland, head of oceans, cryosphere and climate change at the Met Office.

“We predict that these events are going to become more frequent and more intense in the future” due to climate change, she added.

With less of a cooling sea breeze, these warmer waters can amplify land heatwaves, and they also have the potential to bring heavier rainfall.

Hotter seas are also less able to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which could mean that our planet heats up more quickly.

The sea warmth is already posing challenges to fishing communities.

Ben Cooper has been a fisherman in Whitstable on the north Kent coast since 1997, and relies heavily on the common whelk, a type of sea snail.

But the whelk is a cold-water species, and a marine heatwave in 2022 triggered a mass die-off of these snails in the Thames Estuary.

“Pretty much 75% of our earnings is through whelks, so you take that away and all of a sudden you’re struggling,” explained Mr Cooper.

Before the latest heatwave, the whelks had started to recover but he said the losses had forced him to scale back his business.

Mr Cooper recalled fishing trips with his father in the 1980s. Back then, they would rely on cod.

“We lost the cod because basically the sea just got too warm. They headed further north,” he said.

The precise distribution of marine species varies from year to year, but researchers expect the UK’s marine life to keep changing as humans continue to heat up the Earth.

“The fishers might in the long term have to change the species that they target and that they catch,” suggested Dr Pinnegar.

“And we as consumers might have to change the species that we eat.”

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Meir Simcha agreed to talk, but he wanted to do it somewhere special, because for him, this is a special time. In a place where nation, religion and war are linked inextricably with politics and the possession of land, Simcha chose a patch of shade under a fig tree next to a spring of fresh water.

From his dusty car, a small Toyota fitted with off road tyres, he produced a bottle of juice made from fruit and vegetables.

“Don’t worry, there’s no extra sugar,” he said as he poured it into plastic cups.

Simcha is the leader of a group of Jewish settlers steadily transforming a big stretch of the rolling terrain south of Hebron in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since it was captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

He moved two large flat stones into the shade as seats, and we sat down in a patch of lush grass, kept alive in the harsh summer heat by water dripping from a pipe coming out of the spring. It was a small oasis at the foot of a steep, arid, rocky slope and the location, if not our conversation, felt peaceful in a way that the West Bank rarely does these days.

The conflict between Arabs and Jews for control of the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea started well over a century ago when Zionists from Europe began to buy land to set up communities in Palestine.

It has been shaped by significant turning points.

The latest has come from the deadly 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s devastating response.

The consequences of the last 22 months of war, and however more months are left before a ceasefire, threaten to spread across years and generations, just like the Middle East war in 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan.

The scale of destruction and killing in the Gaza war obscures what is happening in the West Bank, which smoulders with tension and violence.

Since October 2023, Israel’s pressure on West Bank Palestinians has increased sharply, justified as legitimate security measures.

Evidence based on statements by ministers, influential local leaders like Simcha and accounts by witnesses on the ground reveal that the pressure is part of a wider agenda, to accelerate the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and to extinguish any lingering hopes of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Palestinians and human rights groups also accuse the Israeli security forces of failing in their legal duty as occupiers to protect Palestinians as well as their own citizens – not just turning a blind eye to settler attacks, but even joining in.

Violence by ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers in the West Bank has risen sharply since 7 October 2023.

Ocha, the UN’s humanitarian office, estimates an average of four settler attacks every day.

The International Court of Justice has issued an advisory opinion that the entire occupation of Palestinian territory captured in 1967 is illegal.

Israel’s rejects the ICJ’s view and claims that the Geneva Conventions forbidding settlement in occupied territories do not apply – a view disputed by many of its own allies as well as international lawyers.

In the shade of the fig tree, Simcha denied all suggestions he had attacked Palestinians, as he celebrated the fact that most of the Arab farmers who used to graze their animals on the hills he has seized and tend their olives in the valleys had gone.

He looks back to the Hamas October attacks, and Israel’s response ever since, as a turning point.

“I think that a lot has changed, that the enemy in our land lost hope. He’s beginning to understand that he’s on his way out; that’s what has changed in the last year or year and a half.

“Today you can walk around here in the land in the desert, and nobody will jump on you and try to kill you. There are still attempts to oppose our presence here in this land, but the enemy is starting to understand this slowly. They have no future here.

“The reality has changed. I ask you and the people of the world, why are you so interested in those Palestinians so much? Why do you care about them? It’s just another small nation.

“The Palestinians don’t interest me. I care about my people.”

Simcha says the Palestinians who left villages and farms near the hilltops he has claimed simply realised that God intended the land for Jews, not for them.

On 24 July this year, a panel of UN experts came to a different conclusion. A statement issued by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said: “We are deeply troubled by alleged widespread intimidation, violence, land dispossession, destruction of livelihoods and the resulting forcible displacement of communities, and we fear this is severing Palestinians from their land and undermining their food security.

“The alleged acts of violence, destruction of property, and denial of access to land and resources appear to constitute a systemic pattern of human rights violations.”

Simcha has a plan to dig a swimming pool at the base of the spring where we sat to talk. Like many others who are leading the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, he is full of plans. When I met him first, not long after Hamas burst through Israel’s border defences on 7 October 2023, he lived in a small group of isolated caravans on a hilltop overlooking the Judean desert as it sweeps down to the Dead Sea.

Since then, Simcha says his community has expanded into around 200 people on three hilltops. He was part of the faction of the settler movement known as hilltop youth, a radical fringe that became notorious for the violent harassment of Palestinians. Most Israelis who have settled in the occupied territories are not like Simcha. They went there not for ideological and religious reasons, but because property was cheaper.

But now men like Simcha are at the centre of events, with their leaders in the cabinet, leading the charge, married, older, thinking not just about swimming pools for their children but of victory over the Palestinians, once and for all, and everlasting Jewish possession of the land.

Simcha comes across as a happy man. He believes his mission – to implement the will of God by turning the West Bank into a land for Jews, and not for Palestinians – is progressing nicely.

Israel’s project to settle Jewish citizens in the newly occupied territories started within days of its victory in 1967. Over the last almost 60 years, successive Israeli governments and some wealthy sympathisers have invested vast amounts of money and energy to get to the point where around 700,000 Israeli Jews live in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

I have been watching the settlements grow for about half of the lifetime of the project, since I first reported from the occupied Palestinian territories in 1991. In that time, the terrain of much of the West Bank has been transformed. The bigger settlements look like small towns, and the West Bank is carved into sections by a network of roads and tunnels built by Israel that are as much about staking an immovable claim to the land as they are about traffic management.

On remote hilltops at night, you can see the lights coming from the caravans of settlers who see themselves as Jewish pioneers. Olive groves, orchards and vineyards owned by Palestinian farmers along the road network are often overgrown, sometimes dotted with piles of rubble left from buildings Israel has demolished.

Controlling the land around the roads is necessary, Israel says, to stop attacks on Jews in the West Bank.

Farmers in areas under settler pressure often need military permission to visit their land, sometimes just once a year.

Palestinian farmers going about their business in vans or on donkeys used to be a common sight. In many parts of the West Bank, you just do not see them anymore, especially in places like the settlements east of Shiloh on the road to Nablus, where small groups of shacks and caravans on hilltops have connected up into sprawling residential hubs linked by sinuous road networks.

When first I reported on settlements, Israeli leaders would often say that national security depended on them. Enemies lurked across the Jordan valley, and pushing out the frontier, building the land, was a Zionist imperative.

Just like the kibbutz movement of collective farms in the 1920s and 1930s inside present-day Israel, settlements in the occupied territories after 1967 were strategically placed as a first line of defence.

In this conflict, land is a vital commodity.

Trading land taken by Israel in 1967 for peace with Palestinians who wanted it for a state was at the heart of the Oslo peace process that ended in violence but provided a false dawn of hope in the 1990s.

There were headlines around the world when, after months of secret negotiations in Norway in 1993, there was a handshake on the White House lawn between Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. They had signed a declaration of principles that was hoped would lead to the end of the conflict. Israel would relinquish occupied land to Palestinians. In return, they would drop their claim to territory they had lost when Israel declared independence in 1948.

The argument at the heart of their conflict across the 20th Century, about who controlled land they both wanted, would be solved by splitting it.

After a final disastrous summit at Camp David in 2000, the hopes of 1993 were replaced by the deadly violence of a Palestinian uprising and a massive military response from Israel.

Part of the reason why the peace process failed was that other forces, outside the talks, were at work.

Hamas never dropped its belief that the entire land of Palestine was an Islamic possession and used suicide attacks to discredit the notion that peace was possible.

Among religious Zionists in Israel, the victory in 1967 had supercharged a wave of messianism – the belief that a divine being was coming who would redeem the Jewish people.

It electrified the settler movement.

Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish extremist brought up in Herzliya on the Mediterranean coast who spent weekends at settlements in the West Bank. During his first interrogation by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, he asked for a drink so he could toast the fact that he had saved the Jewish people from a disastrous path that denied the will of God.

Today, the messianic idea grips settlers like Simcha more powerfully than ever.

They believe the victory in 1967 was a miracle granted by God, that restored to the Jewish people the ancestral lands that he had given them in the mountain heartland of Judea and Samaria – the area that much of the rest of the world calls the West Bank. Some believe events since 7 October have extended the miracle.

Last summer, the Minister for Settlements and National Missions, Orit Strock, put it like this to a sympathetic audience at an outpost in the Hebron hills, the area where Simcha operates.

“From my point of view, this is like a miracle period,” she said. “I feel like someone standing at a traffic light, and then it turns green.”

Minister Strock was speaking a few days before the ICJ issued its opinion.

She made her remarks at a settlement in the Hebron hills that the government had just “legalised”.

Israeli law distinguishes between “legal” settlements and “illegal” outposts – a distinction that is in practice being blurred by the government’s actions.

Outposts rebranded as “young settlements” are being retrospectively legalised as the government directs funds towards them.

At a ceremony in one of them in the south Hebron Hills in April this year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose powers over the running of the occupation also make him something like the governor of the West Bank, donated 19 all-terrain vehicles to the settlers. He praised them for “grabbing massive territories”.

A sharp-eyed reporter at the Times of Israel pointed out that one of the settlers at the ceremony, Yinon Levi, had been filmed harassing Palestinians from an all-terrain vehicle. Levi is sanctioned by the UK and the European Union for using violence to drive Palestinians off their land, though President Trump lifted similar sanctions imposed by Joe Biden.

Levi is radical settler royalty, married to the daughter of Noam Federman – a notorious extremist. Federman is a former leader of the Kach party, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the European Union and others.

On 28 July this year, Yinon Levi fired a bullet that killed Odeh Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist, during a disturbance in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair. Levi pleaded self-defence and was released after three days of house arrest.

When we went to Umm al-Khair, Hathaleen’s dried blood was still at the place where he was killed.

His brother, Khalil, told me the dead man was holding his five-year-old son, Watan, and filming the violent scenes on his phone when he was killed.

The settlement movement in the West Bank has powered ahead since 7 October, under the direction of hardline Jewish nationalists in the cabinet, men like Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, who is Strock’s leader in the Religious Zionist Party.

Ben Gvir was not drafted by the IDF when he turned 18, because of his extreme beliefs. He claims he campaigned to serve.

The two ministers are very different people to the secular politicians – retired generals like Yigal Allon from the Israeli left and Ariel Sharon from the right – two men who drove the settlement movement forward in its first two decades after 1967.

Just like Allon and Sharon, they believe that security requires power.

But for Smotrich, Ben Gvir and their followers, that is underpinned by the certainty of religious belief.

The influence they have acquired in return for supporting Netanyahu and keeping him in power continues to frustrate and enrage secular Israel.

Smotrich’s Israeli opponents use the word “messianic” as term of abuse when they talk about him.

Allon and Sharon could be ruthless. After the 1967 war, Allon advocated the annexation of large parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Neither man believed they were doing the will of God.

Hamas uses religion to justify its violent opposition to the existence of Israel. Religious Zionists in the settler movement believe they are doing God’s will.

Belief in a direct connection with God does not guarantee war. But it makes the compromises necessary for peace hard to achieve.

We arranged to meet Yehuda Shaul at the road junction next to Sinjel. He is one of Israel’s most prominent opponents of the occupation.

Shaul founded an organisation called Breaking the Silence after, as a soldier, he saw first-hand the inherently brutal realities of a military occupation that has lasted almost 60 years.

Fellow Israelis have branded supporters of Breaking the Silence, which he no longer leads, as traitors many times.

Israeli military crackdowns since the October attacks have reduced Palestinian violence against settlers, while settler attacks on Palestinians have grown sharply.

Shaul says that the line between settlers and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has become blurred.

The war in Gaza has required the longest mobilisation of military reservists – the backbone of the IDF – in Israel’s history. To get more Israelis into uniform, brigades in the West Bank have formed regional defence units made up of settlers.

“Now the settlers are the military. In the military are the settlers. So that settler on the hilltop nearby a Palestinian herding community that was beating them up and throwing stones for the past two three or four years, trying to get him out, now is the soldier or the officer in uniform with a gun responsible for the area.

“So when he comes to a Palestinian and says, ‘you have 24 hours to pack up and leave or I’m going to shoot you,’ the Palestinian knows there is nothing to protect him.”

Shaul believes Israel has two choices left. One direction, he argues, is “the vector that this government is writing, displacement, abuse, killing, destroying Palestinian life, ultimately, writing a vector to mass population transfer”.

“Or, it is two states where Palestine resides besides Israel and both peoples here have rights and dignity. These are the only two options in our cards. Now you and anyone who watches us, need to choose which one you support.”

He uses language about Netanyahu’s conduct of the Gaza war since 7 October that is rare in Israel but common among Palestinians and increasingly heard among Israel’s critics in Europe.

This is part of our conversation, in the shadow of the steel and razor wire between the village of Sinjel and Road 60 – the West Bank’s main highway.

He says: “I think while we see a war of extermination in Gaza… we see a massive campaign by the state and the settlers… to basically ethnically cleanse as much land of the West Bank from Palestinians.”

I reply: “Of course, if Netanyahu was here, any of his supporters, they’d say, ‘what a load of rubbish. This is about Israeli security against terrorism and attacks on Jews.’ What do you make of that?”

He responds: “I actually believe that if 7 October taught us one thing it is, if you really care about protecting Israelis and Palestinian life, you need to take care of the root causes of the violence: decades of brutal military occupation, displacement of Palestinians and a conflict that is going on for about 100 years.

“Ultimately, the security protection, the sustainability of Jewish self-determination in this land, is interlinked and intertwined with achieving self-determination rights and equality for Palestinians.”

The bones of a British man who died in a terrible accident in Antarctica in 1959 have been discovered in a melting glacier.

The remains were found in January by a Polish Antarctic expedition, alongside a wristwatch, a radio, and a pipe.

He has now been formally identified as Dennis “Tink” Bell, who fell into a crevasse aged 25 when working for the organisation that became the British Antarctic Survey.

“I had long given up on finding my brother. It is just remarkable, astonishing. I can’t get over it,” David Bell, 86, tells BBC News.

“Dennis was one of the many brave personnel who contributed to the early science and exploration of Antarctica under extraordinarily harsh conditions,” says Professor Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey .

“Even though he was lost in 1959, his memory lived on among colleagues and in the legacy of polar research,” she adds.

It was David who answered the door in his family home in Harrow, London, in July 1959.

“The telegram boy said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but this is bad news’,” he says. He went upstairs to tell his parents.

“It was a horrendous moment,” he adds.

Talking to me from his home in Australia and sitting next to his wife Yvonne, David smiles as stories from his childhood in 1940s England spill out.

They are the memories of a younger sibling admiring a charming, adventurous big brother.

“Dennis was fantastic company. He was very amusing. The life and soul of wherever he happened to be,” David says.

“I still can’t get over this, but one evening when me, my mother and father came home from the cinema,” he says.

“And I have to say this in fairness to Dennis, he had put a newspaper down on the kitchen table, but on top of it, he’d taken a motorbike engine apart and it was all over the table,” he says.

“I can remember his style of dress, he always used to wear duffel coats. He was just an average sort of fellow who enjoyed life,” he adds.

Dennis Bell, nicked-named “Tink”, was born in 1934. He worked with the RAF and trained as a meteorologist, before joining the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey to work in Antarctica.

“He was obsessed with Scott’s diaries,” David says, referring to Captain Robert Scott who was one of the first men to reach the South Pole and died on an expedition in 1912.

Dennis went to Antarctica in 1958. He was stationed for a two-year assignment at Admiralty Bay, a small UK base with about 12 men on King George Island, which is roughly 120 kilometres (75 miles) off the northern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The British Antarctic Survey keeps meticulous records and its archivist Ieuan Hopkins has dug out detailed base camp reports about Dennis’s work and antics on the harsh and “ridiculously isolated” island.

Reading aloud, Mr Hopkins says: “He’s cheerful and industrious, with a mischievous sense of humour and fondness for practical jokes.”

Dennis’s job was to send up meteorological weather balloons and radio the reports to the UK every three hours, which involved firing up a generator in sub-zero conditions.

Described as the best cook in the hut, he was in charge of the food store over the winter when no supplies could reach them.

Antarctica felt even more cut off than it is today, with extremely limited contact with home. David recalls recording a Christmas message at BBC studios with his parents and sister Valerie to be sent to his brother.

He was best known for his love of the husky dogs used to pull sledges around the island, and he raised two litters of dogs.

He was also involved in surveying King George Island to produce some of the first mapping of the largely unexplored place.

It was on a surveying trip that the accident happened, a few weeks after his 25th birthday.

On 26 July 1959, in the deep Antarctic winter, Dennis and a man called Jeff Stokes left the base to climb and survey a glacier.

Accounts in the British Antarctic Survey records explain what happened next and the desperate attempts to rescue him.

The snow was deep and the dogs had started to show signs of tiredness. Dennis went on ahead alone to encourage them, but he wasn’t wearing his skis. Suddenly he disappeared into a crevasse, leaving a hole behind him.

According to the accounts, Jeff Stokes called into the depths and Dennis was able to shout back. He grabbed onto a rope that was lowered down. The dogs pulled on the rope and Dennis was hitched up to the lip of the hole.

But he had tied the rope onto his belt, perhaps because of the angle he lay in. As he reached the lip, the belt broke and he fell again. His friend called again, but this time Dennis didn’t reply.

“That’s a story I shall never get over,” says David.

The base camp reports about the accident are business-like.

“We heard from Jeff […] that yesterday Tink fell down a crevasse and was killed. We hope to return tomorrow, sea ice permitting,” it continues.

Mr Hopkins explains that another man, called Alan Sharman, had died weeks earlier, and the morale was very low.

“The sledge has got back. We heard the sad details. Jeff has badly bitten frostbitten hands. We are not taking any more risks to recover,” the report reads the day after the accident.

Reading the reports again, Mr Hopkins discovered that earlier in the season, it had been Dennis who’d made the coffin for Alan Sharman.

“My mother never really got over it. She couldn’t handle photographs of him and couldn’t talk about him,” David says.

He recalls that two men on Dennis’s base visited the family, bringing a sheepskin as a gesture.

“But there was no conclusion. There was no service; there was no anything. Just Dennis gone,” David says.

About 15 years ago, David was contacted by Rod Rhys Jones, chair of the British Antarctic Monument Trust.

Since 1944, 29 people have died working on British Antarctic Territory on scientific missions, according to the trust.

Rod was organising a voyage for relatives of some of the 29 to see the spectacular and remote place where their loved ones had lived and died.

David joined the expedition, called South 2015.

“The captain stopped at the locations and give four or five hoots of the siren,” he says.

The sea-ice was too thick for David to reach his brother’s hut on King George Island.

“But it was very, very moving. It lifted the pressure, a weight off my head, as it were,” he says.

It gave him a sense of closure.

“And I thought that would be it,” he says.

But on 29 January this year, a team of Polish researchers working from the Henryk Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station stumbled across something practically on their doorstep.

Dennis had been found.

Some bones were in the loose ice and rocks deposited at the foot of Ecology Glacier on King George Island. Others were found on the glacier surface.

The scientists explain that fresh snowfall was imminent, and they put down a GPS marker so their “fellow polar colleague” would not be lost again.

A team of scientists made up of Piotr Kittel, Paulina Borówka and Artur Ginter at University of Lodz, Dariusz Puczko at the Polish Academy of Sciences and fellow researcher Artur Adamek carefully rescued the remains in four trips.

It is a dangerous and unstable place, “criss-crossed with crevasses”, and with slopes of up to 45 degrees, according to the Polish team.

Climate change is causing dramatic changes to many Antarctic glaciers, including Ecology Glacier, which is undergoing intense melting.

“The place where Dennis was found is not the same as the place where he went missing,” the team explains.

“Glaciers, under the influence of gravity, move their mass of ice, and with it, Dennis made his journey,” they say.

Fragments of bamboo ski poles, remains of an oil lamp, glass containers for cosmetics, and fragments from military tents were also collected.

“Every effort was made to ensure that Dennis could return home,” the team say.

“It’s an opportunity to reassess the contribution these men made, and an opportunity to promote science and what we’ve done in the Antarctic over many decades,” adds Rod Rhys Jones.

David still seems overwhelmed by the news, and repeats how grateful he is to the Polish scientists.

“I’m just sad my parents never got to see this day,” he says.

David will soon visit England where he and his sister, Valerie, plan to finally put Dennis to rest.

“It’s wonderful; I’m going to meet my brother. You might say we shouldn’t be thrilled, but we are. He’s been found – he’s come home now.”

Chip giants Nvidia and AMD have agreed to pay the US government 15% of Chinese revenues as part of an “unprecedented” deal to secure export licences to China, the BBC has been told.

The US had previously banned the sale of powerful chips used in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) to China under export controls usually related to national security concerns.

Security experts, including some who served during President Donald Trump’s first term, recently wrote to the administration expressing “deep concern” that Nvidia’s H20 chip was “a potent accelerator” of China’s AI capabilities.

Nvidia told the BBC: “We follow rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets.”

It added: “While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide.”

AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House declined to comment.

Under the agreement, Nvidia will pay 15% of its revenues from H20 chip sales in China to the US government.

AMD will also give 15% of revenue generated from sales of its MI308 chip in China to the Trump administration, which was first reported by the Financial Times.

The H20 chip was developed specifically for the Chinese market after US export restrictions were imposed by the Biden administration in 2023.

Sales of the chip were effectively banned by Trump’s government in April this year.

Beijing has previously criticised the US government, accusing it of “abusing export control measures, and engaging in unilateral bullying”.

Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang has spent months lobbying both sides for a resumption of sales of the chips in China. He reportedly met US President Donald Trump last week.

“You either have a national security problem or you don’t,” said Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation.

“If you have a 15% payment, it doesn’t somehow eliminate the national security issue,” she added.

In Beijing, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “On the issue of US chips to China, China has repeatedly stated its position.”

In a letter last month to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a group of 20 security specialists said that while the biggest buyers of Nvidia’s H20 chips were civilian companies in China, they expect them to be used by the military.

They wrote: “Chips optimized for AI inference will not simply power consumer products or factory logistics; they will enable autonomous weapons systems, intelligence surveillance platforms and rapid advances in battlefield decision-making.”

In a statement to the BBC, Nvidia said: “America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America’s AI tech stack can be the world’s standard if we race.”

Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at global research firm Forrester, said the agreement to hand over 15% of China chip sales to the US government in exchange for export licences was “unprecedented”.

“The arrangement underscores the high cost of market access amid escalating tech trade tensions, creating substantial financial pressure and strategic uncertainty for tech vendors,” he added.

The resumption of chip sales to China comes as trade tensions between Beijing and Washington have been easing.

Beijing has relaxed controls on rare earth exports, while the US has lifted restrictions on chip design software firms operating in China.

In May, the world’s two biggest economies agreed to a 90-day truce in their tariffs war.

Since then, top trade officials from both sides have met on a number of occasions, although an agreement to extend the tariffs pause has not yet been confirmed ahead of a 12 August deadline.

As part of his trade policy, Trump has put pressure on major companies to make more investments in the US.

Last week, Apple said it would invest another $100bn (£74.4bn) in the country, adding to a previous pledge to spend $500bn in the US over the next four years.

In June, memory chip maker Micron Technology said its planned US investments will total $200bn. That includes construction of a new manufacturing facility in Idaho.

Nvidia itself has announced plans to build AI servers in the US worth up to $500bn, pledging to build the first AI supercomputers that are entirely American-made.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that the boss of Intel will meet with Trump at the White House after the president called for his immediate resignation due to his ties to China.

Last week, Trump said on social media that Lip-Bu Tan was “highly conflicted”, apparently referring to his alleged investments in companies that the US said were tied to the Chinese military.

Mr Tan pushed back, stating it was “misinformation”.

Australia will recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September, following similar moves by the UK, France and Canada, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said.

Albanese said Australia received commitments from the Palestinian Authority (PA) including to demilitarise, hold general elections and continue to recognise Israel’s right to exist.

“A two-state solution is humanity’s best hope to break the cycle of violence in the Middle East and to bring an end to the conflict, suffering and starvation in Gaza,” he said on Monday.

Israel, under increasing pressure to end the war in Gaza, has said recognising a Palestinian state “rewards terrorism”.

Since Saturday, five people have died as a result of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza, bringing the total number to 217 deaths, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

It also said that in total more than 61,000 people have been killed as a result of Israel’s military campaign since 2023.

Israel launched its offensive in response to the Hamas-led attack on 7 October that year, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

The Palestinian Authority, which controls parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, earlier said recognition of statehood shows growing support for self-determination of its people.

Albanese said the decision was made after his government received commitments from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that Hamas would play no role in any future state.

The move also comes after conversations with his counterparts in the UK, France, New Zealand, and Japan over the past fortnight, Albanese said.

“There is a moment of opportunity here, and Australia will work with the international community to seize it,” he told the media.

Last Sunday, a pro-Palestinian protest drew tens of thousands of supporters who walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge, a day after a court ruling allowed the demonstration to happen.

The US has stated it will not follow suit and believes that recognising Palestinian statehood would be rewarding Hamas.

Over the weekend, US Vice-President JD Vance reiterated the US had no plans to recognise a Palestinian state, citing a lack of functional government.

At a press conference on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticised countries planning to recognise Palestinian statehood.

“To have European countries and Australia march into that rabbit hole… it is disappointing – and I think it’s actually shameful,” he said.

“They know what they would do if, right next to Melbourne or right next to Sydney, you had this horrific attack. I think you would do at least what we’re doing.”

Israel has come under fire in recent days over its plans to take over Gaza City, with UN ambassadors condemning the move which Netanyahu says is the “best way” to end the war.

Last year, Spain, Ireland and Norway formally recognised Palestine as a state, in the hopes it would encourage a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

The state of Palestine is currently recognised by 147 of the UN’s 193 member states.

At the UN, it has the status of a “permanent observer state”, allowing participation but no voting rights.

EasyJet has suspended one of its captains after he was reportedly seen roaming a luxury hotel drunk and naked.

The unnamed pilot was witnessed walking through common areas of a five-star resort in Cape Verde without any clothes on in the early hours of the morning on 5 August, after an extended drinking session in a bar, according to the Sun.

He was due to operate a return flight to Gatwick more than 36 hours later, but was grounded after the budget airline received complaints about the incident and a replacement pilot found.

An EasyJet spokesman told the BBC the pilot now faces an investigation and that the safety of passengers and crew was its “highest priority”.

The captain arrived at the Melia Dunas Beach Resort and Spa in the West African island nation on 4 August and proceeded to begin drinking, the Sun reports.

At around 02:30 local time (04:30 BST) the following morning, hotel guests reportedly saw him strip off and wander into the reception, before moving onto the gym and spa, according to the newspaper.

“The pilot did not have a stitch on and reeked of alcohol,” an anonymous source inside the airline was quoted by the paper as saying.

“Anyone who saw the pilot cavorting naked in the early hours on the day before a flight would not dream of getting on a plane with him at the controls.”

He was scheduled to helm the 2,332-nautical-mile (4,318km) trip back to Gatwick on the afternoon of 6 August, but was removed from the flight.

An EasyJet spokesman said: “As soon as we were made aware, the pilot was immediately stood down from duty, in line with our procedures, pending an investigation.

“The safety of our passengers and crew is EasyJet’s highest priority.”

The airline’s code of business ethics states that staff must behave “with integrity when dealing with our people, our customers, our partners and the communities within which we operate”.