Aarish, 15, sits on a hospital bed in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. A pair of dark glasses hides a painful injury in his left eye.

His cornea was damaged a week ago when an improvised firecracker device that he bought to celebrate the Diwali festival exploded near his face, causing him to lose vision in one eye. He has undergone emergency surgery and his doctor says only time will tell how much sight he can regain.

The teenager, who doesn’t go to school, says he’s most worried about missing work – his father works as a gardener and Aarish repairs televisions to supplement the family income. Child labour is illegal in India, but millions of children work. Indian law allows children above 14 years to work in some industries which are seen as non-hazardous.

Aarish is among hundreds of children and young adults from at least five states across northern India who have suffered serious eye injuries from using the same kind of device – called “carbide guns” – during Diwali.

The “carbide gun”, a rudimentary device, using calcium carbide in a plastic pipe, gives dramatic results – a loud blast that sounds like a gunshot, accompanied by fiery sparks. But the explosion is unpredictable and often delayed – officials told the BBC that many of the injuries occurred when children peeped inside the pipe to check just as the blast happened.

The sale and purchase of calcium carbide is regulated in India, but farmers and shopkeepers often use it to artificially ripen fruit. Police officials also say the crude guns are sometimes used to scare away animals from fields.

But many in India had not heard of these guns until last week, when a spate of injuries was reported after Diwali. Officials said these devices began flooding local markets in northern India after viral social media videos showed them being used as firecrackers.

More than 100 cases of carbide gun-related eye injuries have been reported in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal district alone, with at least 15 requiring surgery. Another 100 cases have been reported from three other districts.

In Bihar state, 170 cases have been reported, with 40 requiring surgery, says Dr Bibhuti Prassan Sinha, who heads the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology in Patna city. The actual numbers are likely to be higher, he added.

Cases have also been reported from the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, as well as capital Delhi. Some states, including Madhya Pradesh, have now banned the use of carbide guns as firecrackers and several sellers have been arrested.

Kavitha Kumar, head of ophthalmology at Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal, says that patients have been coming in with mild, moderate and severe eye injuries.

“In milder cases, skin on the eye and around it has sustained chemical injuries and thermal burns. In moderate cases, chemical particulate matter has caused mild damage to the cornea and in severe cases, there’s extensive damage to the cornea, causing temporary vision loss. With surgery, the patient may be able to regain their sight over time,” she says.

Some doctors told the BBC that they were shocked by the severity of the injuries. Dr Aditi Dubey from Hamidia Hospital said that she had never seen chemical injuries caused by Diwali firecrackers and had to research what “carbide guns” were.

Many patients said that they bought the gun after seeing it on Instagram Reels and YouTube videos. An attractive aspect was the price – at 150-200 rupees ($1.70-$2; £1.28-£1.70) a piece, it was a relatively cheap firecracker that promised to make a big impact.

A search for the term “carbide gun” on Instagram and YouTube throws up dozens of videos of young people making and using these devices, often accompanied by rap music.

Some accounts have also termed these videos “science experiments” with hashtags like “useful project” and “experiment video”.

Dr Sinha told the BBC that one of his patients was an engineering student who made the gun at home after watching such videos. He’s currently being treated after losing vision in one of his eyes.

Calcium carbide is a regulated substance in India – its possession, use and manufacturing are controlled by law because of its harmful effects and potential for abuse.

When it comes in contact with water, it produces acetylene gas, which is highly flammable and has damaging properties on health.

Under the Calcium Carbide Rules, 1987, a licence is needed for its sale, purchase and storage – but only for quantities above 200kg.

A government official in Bhopal who didn’t want to be named told the BBC that calcium carbide is still widely used to artificially ripen fruit despite a federal ban as it contains traces of poisonous substances.

Harinarayanachari Mishra, Police Commissioner of Bhopal, told the BBC that carbide guns are also used in northern India during wedding festivities and by farmers to drive away monkeys.

Dr Partha Biswas, president of the All India Ophthalmological Society, says carbide guns should be banned urgently.

“It’s a national problem. And the seriousness of these incidents shouldn’t be minimised as mere “accidents” that took place during the Diwali festival,” he says.

He adds that there’s potential for these guns to be used as firecrackers during other festivals and events, like when India wins a cricket match or during New Year.

“These crude ‘carbide bombs’ or ‘carbide guns’ can cause permanent blindness, disfigurement and disability,” he says, demanding a nationwide crackdown on manufacturers and sellers of the guns as well as more control over the supply chain of calcium carbide.

Back at Hamidia Hospital, Alzain, whose left eye was operated on after he lost his vision, sits inside the tight embrace of his mother. The seven-year-old had pestered his uncle to buy the gun after watching videos on YouTube.

Alzain’s worried mother, Afreen, hasn’t left his bedside since he was admitted a week ago.

“I’m scared for his future,” she says. “I hope he’s able to see again.”

Prince Andrew hosted Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Harvey Weinstein at Royal Lodge, the publicly-owned home where he effectively lives rent-free.

The trio visited the Windsor mansion as part of his daughter Beatrice’s masked ball 18th birthday celebrations in 2006, two months after a US arrest warrant had been issued for Epstein for the sexual assault of a minor.

It had previously been reported that Epstein, Maxwell and Weinstein visited Windsor Castle for the event, but not that they had been hosted at Andrew’s private home.

Andrew, who is facing increased scrutiny over his living arrangements in light of his relationship with Epstein, has not responded to a request for comment.

It is understood that Epstein, Maxwell and Weinstein visited Royal Lodge ahead of the main party, which took place in the state rooms of Windsor Castle and involved a champagne reception and banquet.

The BBC has matched the trees and patio wall in a previously published image of the trio to other pictures of Royal Lodge.

Epstein was arrested by police in Florida eight days after the event.

Asked by BBC Newsnight in 2019 why he invited Epstein to his daughter’s 18th birthday two months after the US arrest warrant was issued, Andrew said: “Certainly I wasn’t aware when the invitation was issued what was going on in the United States and I wasn’t aware until the media picked up on it because he never said anything about it.”

Andrew relinquished his titles earlier this month amid renewed scrutiny of his links with Epstein following the posthumous publication of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir.

In the memoir, Ms Giuffre said she was forced to have sex with the prince on three separate occasions, including once with Epstein and “eight other young girls”.

Andrew, who reached a financial settlement with Ms Giuffre in 2022, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. In 2019, he told BBC Newsnight he did not remember meeting Ms Giuffre “at all” and that they “never had any sort of sexual contact”.

Fresh questions have also been asked about how he is able to fund his lifestyle despite not being a working royal.

The revelation that he has only ever paid a token annual rent on his Windsor mansion, Royal Lodge, has intensified the questions over his living arrangements – even though he paid for renovations and rent in advance so there were no monthly payments.

Buckingham Palace has not commented on whether Prince Andrew might move out of his home – or where he might go.

But BBC News understands that two other properties in the grounds of Windsor Castle, Adelaide Cottage and Frogmore Cottage, were options suggested to both Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson some months ago.

Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell seemed to be regular guests at royal residences in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

An image of the pair at Balmoral, the royals’ private Highland estate, was released by prosecutors during Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial.

It is thought to have been taken in 1999, when Andrew reportedly invited the couple to stay at the Scottish castle

In 2000, Epstein was a guest at Windsor Castle and the prince hosted a birthday event for Maxwell at Sandringham, the monarch’s private country retreat in Norfolk.

He told BBC Newsnight the latter event was “a straightforward shooting weekend”.

Ghislaine Maxwell visited Buckingham Palace as part of a private tour in 2002.

A photo of her sitting on the monarch’s throne next to actor Kevin Spacey was obtained by the Daily Telegraph almost two decades later.

It is thought Prince Andrew organised the tour but that Jeffrey Epstein was not part of it.

Andrew has confirmed he travelled on Epstein’s private jet, stayed at his private island, stayed at his Palm Beach mansion, and visited Ghislaine Maxwell’s home at Belgravia in London.

Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

In 2008, he reached a plea deal with prosecutors after the parents of a 14-year-old girl told police in Florida that Epstein had molested their daughter at his Palm Beach home.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence in the US for recruiting and trafficking four teenage girls for sexual abuse by Epstein, her then boyfriend.

Weinstein has been convicted of sexual assault by courts in New York and Los Angeles, but has secured a retrial on some of his convictions.

US President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of deals on his Asia visit to secure the supply of rare earths, a critical sector that China has long dominated.

The deals with Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia differ in size and substance and it’s too early to assess their tangible impact. But they all include efforts to diversify access to the minerals that have become essential for advanced manufacturing, from electric vehicles to smartphones.

The agreements, which aim to lock partners into trading with the US, are a clear bid to reduce dependence on China, ahead of a key meeting with its leader Xi Jinping.

They could eventually challenge Beijing’s stranglehold over rare earths, but experts say it will be a costly process that will take years.

“Building new mines, refining facilities, and processing plants in regions such as Australia, the United States, and Europe comes with much higher capital costs, stricter environmental regulations, and more expensive labour and energy inputs [compared to China],” Patrick Schroder, senior research fellow at the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House wrote in an editorial this week.

It’s not clear yet if the $550bn US investment Japan had previously agreed to will be part of the rare earths deal. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is expected to flesh out those details with Japanese companies during his upcoming visit.

But it’s a turning point step in the US-China rivalry.

Beijing controls the processing of almost all the world’s rare earths, which has given Xi powerful leverage in the ongoing trade war with Washington. Chinese export controls have choked supply of rare earths recently as the two countries try to nail down a deal spanning a range of issues, from tariffs to the sale of TikTok’s US operations.

The controls have also raised familiar concerns across manufacturing hubs in the US, Europe and Asia – a reminder of how vulnerable global supply chains are to the rocky US-China relationship.

Before Trump even travelled to Asia this week, he clinched an $8.5bn deal with Australia, promising industrial co-operation and joint investment to build processing capacity for rare earths outside China.

Speaking at the time, during Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to the White House, Trump said that “in about a year from now we’ll have so much critical minerals and rare earths that you won’t know what to do with them”, adding that “they’ll be worth $2” – the suggestion being that prices would plummet as supply soared.

Both the timeline and the price are unlikely, but Australia is certainly an important partner in the US quest for critical minerals.

“The country is a periodic table that lights up like a Christmas tree boasting one of the broadest and richest concentrations of mineral resources on Earth,” Gracelin Baskaran and Kessarin Horvath of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies wrote in a recent essay.

Several companies are already building refineries, including Iluka Resources, which told the BBC earlier this year that it would be financially near impossible without government support.

The critical minerals deal with Japan involves the two sides agreeing to boost the supply and production of rare earths – and includes plans for co-ordinated investment and stockpiling of rare earths as well as a Rapid Response Group to manage supply shocks.

The deals with the smaller South East Asian economies are just as thin on details. Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia all agreed to increase US access to rare earths and export rules that would favour American buyers over Chinese companies. They also include promises that they will not block shipments to the US, and would encourage local processing and investment by non-Chinese firms.

But the deals with Malaysia and Thailand are non-binding agreements, or what we call a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU). Will they survive political shifts in these countries?

Another big question that has not been addressed is regulation – especially given potential environmental damage. With rare earths, it’s not just mining but even the processing that is a dirty business. It involves extraction, leaching, thermal cracking and refining, all of which produce radioactive components. The impact in China has been well-documented, which has meant that it’s not an industry other countries have readily embraced.

The world’s largest supplier of rare earths outside China is the Australian company Lynas Rare Earths. It relies on Malaysia for part of its refining but has faced a number of regulatory hurdles there over the years.

By binding regional heavyweights like Japan and Australia into investment deals which potentially give the US more control over rare earths supplies, Trump will enter into the high-stakes Thursday talks with Xi on firm ground.

But the fact is China still controls around 70% of rare earth processing. And catching up requires immense amounts of capital, strong environmental laws and technical expertise. Building a single processing plant can take years from design to full production. Australia has been serious about ramping up production of rare earths for a long time now, but its plants are still not up and running.

And China is hardly a silent observer in this region – trade with the world’s second-biggest economy is essential for all these countries, including Japan. So Washington cannot discount the influence Beijing wields, especially in South East Asia.

Supply chains governing rare earths need to diversify and transform. Commitments to co-operate and invest are a start, but the road ahead is long and complicated.

A man accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has pleaded guilty on the first day of his trial.

Tetsuya Yamagami, 45, told a court in the capital Tokyo that “everything is true”, according to local media.

Yamagami – also facing charges over arms control law violations – used a homemade gun to shoot Abe during a politcal campaign event in the western city of Nara in 2022.

Abe – who was known for his hawkish foreign policy and a signature economic strategy that popularly came to be known as “Abenomics” – was shot several times, and died in hospital later the same day.

Yamagami is reported to have previously told investigators he targeted Abe because he blamed the 67-year-old for allegedly promoting the Unification Church, which he said had bankrupted his mother.

He alleged the donations, said to total about 100 million yen ($660,000), were made as proof of her faith to the church, more popularly known as the “Moonies”.

Abe’s killing shone a spotlight on close links between the Liberal Democratic Party and the church, leading to the resignation of four ministers in the intervening years.

In March this year, a Tokyo court ordered the disbandment of the church, stripping it of its tax exempt status and requring it to liquidate its assets.

“I was in prison but you almost got there,” Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim joked to US President Donald Trump as the cameras rolled.

It was a dicey joke – one he quickly moved on from given Trump’s less-than amused demeanour – but also arguably one only a veteran politician basking in his recent wins would dare make.

He had just signed a deal with Trump to lower tariffs on Malaysian exports to the US from 24% to 19%. Although many other details remain unclear, any assurance that levies will not rise further is welcome amid all the uncertainty.

But most important of all, Anwar had secured Trump’s attendance at a regional summit whose relevance has been repeatedly questioned. The US president was at the meeting of Association of South East Asian Nations, or Asean, in Kuala Lumpur solely to preside over a highly publicised “peace deal” between Thailand and Cambodia, which Anwar orchestrated.

He also brokered the fragile ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia after deadly border clashes earlier this year – he stepped in after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on both sides if the fighting didn’t stop.

Some called it a diplomatic victory for Malaysia, while others said Anwar was simply in the right place at the right time – this year, it was the Malaysian PM’s turn to lead Asean.

But Anwar would argue he waited 25 years for his turn – a turbulent time in the wings, during which he was jailed twice.

Anwar first made his name as a charismatic firebrand student leader who founded Malaysia’s Islamic youth movement, ABIM.

In 1982, he joined the long-ruling party United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), surprising many who had expected him to steer clear of the establishment.

But it proved a canny political move – he climbed up the ladder rapidly and held multiple ministerial posts.

In 1993, he became deputy to then-prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and was widely seen as his heir-apparent. That was until they fell out over the handling of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which hit Malaysia hard.

Anwar was sacked the next year, then jailed for sodomy and corruption – charges he denies to this day, arguing they were part of a smear campaign to remove him as a political threat.

In 2004, a year after Mahathir stepped down, Malaysia’s Supreme Court overturned the sodomy conviction and freed Anwar. He emerged as the leader of an invigorated opposition, leading it to its strongest-ever performance in the 2013 elections.

Less than a year later, while preparing to fight a state election, new sodomy charges were filed against him, sending him back to jail.

Then in 2016, in a shock turn of events, Mahathir came out of retirement to run for top office, as then-leader Najib Razak faced corruption allegations.

Mahathir, then 92, struck an unlikely deal with the still-imprisoned Anwar, where he promised to free Anwar if elected, and eventually hand over the PM job to him. Their coalition scored a historic victory in 2018, but the alliance began to unravel as the nonagenarian kept shifting the goalposts for handing over power.

In the 2022 election, Anwar’s coalition won the most seats but still fell short of the number needed to form a government.

After days of deadlock, the king appointed him PM.

Some thought his term would be short-lived. But nearly three years on, the 78-year-old has already held on to the job for longer than his three predecessors.

Anwar’s biggest achievement is perhaps the political stability he appears to have brought to a country that has cycled through three prime ministers between 2020 and 2021.

“Malaysia these days is sometimes seen as among the most stable in South East Asia… which has also made it relatively attractive for investors,” says Syaza Shukri, a political science professor at the International Islamic University Malaysia.

But cost of living is rising, as it is in so many other countries. In July, 20,000 protesters took to the streets in Kuala Lumpur demanding Anwar’s resignation, over rising costs and a lack of economic reforms.

And expensive investments in semiconductor manufacturing and data centres are yet to pay off. That’s why the tariff deal with the US was crucial for the export-driven economy.

Others accuse his administration of not doing enough to promote a more inclusive Malaysia in the face of rising Islamism. Religious outrage has sometimes spilled into violence in the Muslim-majoirty country, which also has a sizeable ethnic Chinese population.

In 2024, a convenience store chain sparked an outcry for selling socks printed with the word “Allah” – the Arabic word for God – which many Muslims saw as an insult to Islam. The store was attacked with Molotov cocktail attacks as people called for it to be boycotted and for the company’s executives to be charged.

In 2023, a Chinese Muslim restaurant had to publicly apologise after it came under fire over a staff member wearing a crucifix necklace.

“The middle ground for Malaysian politics is no longer a tolerant multiracial Malaysia, but a conservative Malaysia with an Islamic outlook… Anwar’s position on political Islam may just move the country to unchartered territory,” professor of Asian studies James Chin wrote in a commentary published by CNA.

Critics also accuse Anwar of favouritism and question his anti-corruption pledges – in a contentious move, public prosecutors dropped 47 corruption charges in 2023 against a key Anwar ally, the deputy PM.

Internationally, Anwar has been more successful.

As prime minister, he has a deft balancing act ahead to make sure the emerging, economy he is in charge of doesn’t get caught between the US and China.

He had also invited China’s leader Xi Jinping to the summit. Xi had made an official visit to Malaysia in April, after a 12-year gap, but he skipped this week’s summit.

But Trump’s presence was no small thing for South East Asian economies that rely on the US market. It meant other countries, like Thailand and Vietnam, could also discuss details and gain assurances on tariffs – which they would count as a win, for now.

Anwar has been very active on the diplomatic front. Within his first year as PM, he visited all Asean countries, apart from Myanmar, where a civil war has been raging since the army seized power in 2021.

It has been one of Asean’s most intractable challenges – while Anwar has been praised for speaking up more on the issue, little has changed on the ground, partly because China has the most influence over the military junta.

Still, Professor Chin believes Anwar has “moved the needle a little” in restoring Asean’s relevance.

His role in the Thailand-Cambodia ceasefire also boosted Anwar’s standing, but these diplomatic wins mean little to ordinary Malaysians.

What’s resonated at home is his advocacy for the Palestinian cause, which has become louder since the war in Gaza began in 2023.

“Anwar needs to fly the Palestinian flag to the hilt to satisfy public opinion and fortify himself against attacks from opponents who accuse him of not going far enough,” says Ariel Tan, coordinator of the Malaysia programme at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

But Anwar also faces a dilemma because he needs to maintain good ties with Washington, Israel’s most powerful ally, Ms Tan says.

“Since Trump’s re-election, he has reduced his criticism of the United States’ role in the conflict. Engaging the US has become more critical, particularly with the tariff threat.”

The question is, will Anwar be able to balance the demands at home with those abroad, and start to replicate his international success on a local stage?

The answer to that will be crucial to his survival in the next election, due in 2028.

Two people have been killed in an underground explosion at a mine in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), the first such incident of its kind since 2015.

Emergency services were called to the Endeavor mine at Cobar, about 700km (435 miles) northwest of Sydney, in the early hours of Tuesday after reports two people had been critically injured.

Police said a man, in his 60s, was confirmed dead at the scene and two women, both in their 20s, were brought to the surface, but one later died. The second woman was airlifted to hospital for minor injuries and shock.

Polymetals Resources, which bought the Endeavour mine in 2023, said all operations at the site had been temporarily suspended.

It did not say what caused the explosion. The company’s executive chairman Dave Sproule said it was “shocked and saddened by the tragic incident” and “our deepest thoughts and condolences go out to the employee’s families, friends and colleagues”.

Fatalities from mine explosions are rare in Australia, with the most recent death happening in 2015 at a mine in Queensland according to Safe Work Australia.

Cobar Mayor Jarrod Marsden said it was an “absolutely tragic” situation.

“The most valuable thing to come out of a mine are the miners, and two families don’t get to see their loved ones anymore,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

“Cobar is a small mining community, it’s very tight-knit, and I’m sure everyone’s going to be thinking of their families today.”

A report will be prepared for the coroner and an investigation into the incident will be carried out by the state’s workplace safety authority.

According to the Endeavour mine’s website, it had been operating continuously from 1982 to 2020 and the new owners were in the process of restarting mining activities for silver, zinc and lead metal production this year.

The mine includes a 7km (4.3 miles) decline and 300m shaft, the site said.

NSW Premier Chris Minns extended his condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of the workers who died.

“This is a heartbreaking day for the Cobar community and will be felt across the entire mining industry,” he said.

Safety protocols and procedures have “greatly improved in mining”, Minns said, but the two deaths were a “sobering reminder of why we need to always remain vigilant to protect workers”.

Last week, a helicopter appeared over the green, folded hills of Ukhrul in India’s north-eastern state of Manipur.

By the time it touched down on a makeshift helipad outside Somdal village, the crowd had already begun to sing. When the door opened, the crowd surged towards a frail man in dark glasses and a black suit. Quickly, they draped him in a traditional shawl.

After more than half a century, Thuingaleng Muivah, India’s oldest rebel, had come home.

Now 91, Mr Muivah is the general secretary of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), or NSCN (I-M), the most powerful of the Naga insurgent factions that once fought the Indian state in one of Asia’s longest-running rebellions – though today the organisation is often regarded as a shadow of its former self.

His supporters see him as the keeper of a demand India has never recognised – a separate state for Naga people. His critics remember something else: a movement accused of targeted killings and running a parallel government in Nagaland through “taxes” many call extortion – allegations the NSCN (I-M) denies.

Nagaland, a largely Christian state wedged between Myanmar and Bangladesh, is home to a people spread across neighbouring Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam states. Muivah seeks either full sovereignty or a “Greater Nagaland” uniting Nagas across borders, especially in Manipur.

Muivah himself was born in what is now Manipur state – a reminder that the Naga identity extends far beyond Nagaland’s borders.

This was his second attempt to return home – the first, in 2010, was blocked by the Manipur government, which cited the risk of unrest and security concerns. When he finally made it back with his wife last week, almost the entire village gathered to welcome the Avakharar – the “eldest father”, as they called him. Among them was his only surviving sibling, 84-year-old Asui Muivah.

“Generation comes and goes, but the nation stays,” he wrote in a message read aloud by his deputy, VS Atem, as he was too weak to speak himself. “The issue we are fighting for is greater and older than most of us.”

Muivah had left this same hillside village in 1964, trekking east to join the Naga struggle for sovereignty – a journey that would take him to the jungles of northern Myanmar, the ideological camps of Maoist China and the negotiation tables of Delhi.

After coming out of the jungles for a ceasefire in 1997, Muivah has lived in Delhi and a sprawling camp in Hebron in Nagaland, which serves as the NSCN (I-M)’s headquarters, complete with signs declaring, “Freedom is the birthright of all nations”.

“His return to his village is more personal than political – driven by a longing for home. His calls for a separate Naga flag and a constitution are expected, and they help keep him politically relevant. But the broader idea of ‘Greater Nagaland’ has largely faded over the years,” says Pradip Phanjoubam, editor-in-chief of the Imphal Review of Arts and Politics.

The Naga struggle predates India itself. In 1918, returning World War One labourers formed the Naga Club to assert a distinct identity. When India became independent in 1947, Naga leaders refused to join the new republic, declaring, “We are not Indians”, and held their own unrecognised plebiscite for independence in 1951.

As armed conflict began to intensify, the Indian government sent in troops in 1955. What followed was decades of insurgency, factional splits and ceasefires. The rebellion claimed thousands of lives, displaced generations and militarised the lush, Christian-majority hills.

“The Naga conflict,” says political scientist Sanjib Baruah, “is among the world’s least-known but longest-running armed movements.”

Muivah was born in March 1935 in Somdal, where his family often went hungry. Educated at a local Christian school, he was drawn early to the ideas of revolution and Naga nationalism.

By his teens, Muivah was already a Naga nationalist, singing “God Bless My Nagaland” at school and questioning why his people lived in “humiliation” under the colonial government. After studying at St Anthony’s College in Shillong and reading Marx, Hegel and Rousseau, he joined the Naga National Council (NNC) – the first political organisation of the Nagas to demand independence from India – in 1964.

Two years later, 31-year-old Muivah joined more than 130 guerrillas on a 97-day trek through the jungles of northern Myanmar to China’s Yunnan province. “We carried our own rice and slept on grass in clearings,” he said in a 1998 interview. “I could stand the hunger, but sometimes there was no water to drink.” They crossed rivers on bamboo rafts hacked through thick undergrowth, and trudged on in subzero cold.

Beijing trained the rebels in guerrilla warfare, Marxist-Leninist theory and “people’s war”. Muivah studied briefly in Beijing’s College of Diplomacy, visited Vietnam and came back speaking reverently of Mao and Zhou Enlai – though he would later fuse their ideology with a deeply Christian nationalism. He returned to Nagaland after five years.

In 1980, Muivah and his comrades Isak Chishi Swu and SS Khaplang founded the NSCN, breaking away from the older NNC that had signed a controversial peace accord with Delhi.

Their faction later split again – into the NSCN (I-M) and NSCN (K), led by Khaplang of Myanmar – spawning smaller offshoots across the northeast.

At its height, the NSCN (I-M) was the mother of all insurgencies in the region, training and arming smaller ethnic groups and running what India’s intelligence agencies called a “shadow state” across the hills, according to Subir Bhaumik, a veteran chronicler of the region. The group faced accusations of extortion, killings and human rights abuses.

Critics within the Naga insurgency also point to a violent legacy. The Zeliangrong United Front (ZUF) has accused Muivah of ordering “merciless killings of many prominent leaders” and carrying out arson in villages “in the name of taxation or fighting the Indian Army,” leaving “common Nagas” to bear the cost, its spokesperson Louis Gangmei said.

Over the years, Muivah transformed from jungle commissar to political negotiator. After decades of exile – in Thailand, the Netherlands and the borderlands of Myanmar – he entered a ceasefire with India.

But his demand for a separate Naga flag and constitution remains a stumbling block. In a interview in 2020, Muivah told journalist Karan Thapar: “The Nagas will never be part of the Indian Union, nor accept its constitution. There can be no solution without our flag and our constitution.”

The Indian government has offered greater autonomy, but rejects any concession implying sovereignty; the 2015 Framework Agreement, once hailed as a breakthrough, now languishes. “We have not surrendered our free existence and sovereignty ,” Muivah declared last week. “Come what may, we shall defend it to the last.”

Yet over the past decade, as Muivah’s health declined and the movement splintered into dozens of factions, the NSCN (I-M)’s once-formidable influence has waned. A younger generation of Nagas, weary of blockades and extortion, now increasingly seeks peace and economic stability.

At the same time, experts like Prof Baruah say that the “proud display of Naga flags in his home village testifies to the vitality and resilience of the Naga movement” – a reminder that while its horizons may have narrowed, the sentiment endures.

More importantly, he adds, “even objectively strong states can choose live-and-let-live deals with armed groups rather than trying to disarm and demobilise them”.

Muivah says his group has held more than 600 rounds of talks with New Delhi on a Naga homeland since the late 1990s. Yet critics remain unsparing. The Manipur-based ZUF dismissed his return as “empty-handed,” arguing there is “no reason to glorify an individual who failed the Nagas on all fronts.” Supporters believe he is war-weary, unsure of peace, and still waiting for the political settlement that has defined his life’s struggle.

As early as 2006, he told Mr Bhaumik, the journalist, “I am very tired. I feel doubly tired because there seems to be no result coming out of the talks.” The wait goes on.

Hidden away in a lab in north-west London three black metal robotic hands move eerily on an engineering work bench. No claws, or pincers, but four fingers and a thumb opening and closing slowly, with joints in all the right places.

“We’re not trying to build Terminator,” jokes Rich Walker, director of Shadow Robot, the firm that made them.

Bespectacled, with long hair and a beard and moustache, he seems more like a latter-day hippy than a tech whizz, and he is clearly proud as he shows me around his firm.

“We set out to build the robot that helps you, that makes your life better, your general-purpose servant that can do anything around the home, do all the housework…”

But there’s a deeper ambition: to address one of the UK’s most pressing challenges – the escalating crisis in social care.

There were 131,000 vacancies for adult care workers in England, a report by charity, Skills for Care, found last year. And in all, around two million people aged 65 and over in England are living with unmet care needs, according to Age UK.

By 2050, one in four people in the UK expected to be aged 65 or over, potentially putting more strain still on the care system.

Which is where robots come in.

The previous government announced a £34m investment in developing robots that could potentially be used to give care. It went as far as saying, in 2019, that “within the next 20 years, autonomous systems like… robots will become a normal part of our lives, transforming the way we live, work and travel.”

Could this “techno-solutionism” – which sounds more like something out of a sci-fi film – really be the solution? And would you really trust your elderly relatives, or yourself when you’re at your most vulnerable with what is essentially a very strong machine?

Japan offers a peek into a future with robots living among us.

Ten years ago, its government began offering subsidies to robot manufacturers to develop and popularise the use of robots in care homes – fuelled in part by an ageing population and relative lack of care home staff.

Dr James Wright, an AI specialist and visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London, spent seven months observing them. And specifically, looking at how well they worked in a Japanese care home.

In all, three types of robots were studied: the first, called HUG, was designed by Fuji Corporation in Japan and looked like a highly sophisticated walking frame. It had support pads that people could lean right into, and it helped carers lift people from bed to, say, a wheelchair or the toilet.

The second, meanwhile, looked a bit like a baby seal and was called Paro. This robot, intended to stimulate dementia patients, was trained to respond to being stroked through movements and sounds.

The third was a small friendly-looking humanoid robot called Pepper. It could give instructions and also demonstrate exercises by moving its arms – and was used to lead exercise classes in the care home.

Even before he started observing them, Dr Wright had bought into the hype a little.

“I was expecting that the robots would be easily adopted by care workers who were massively overstretched and extremely busy in their work.

“What I found was, almost the opposite.”

He discovered that, in fact, the biggest drain on the time of care home staff was cleaning and recharging the robots – and above all troubleshooting when they went wrong.

“After several weeks the care workers decided the robots were more trouble than they were worth and used them less and less, because they were too busy to use them,” he tells me.

“HUG had to be moved around all the time to get [it] out of the residents’ way. Paro caused distress to one of the residents who had become overly attached to it. And they couldn’t follow Pepper’s exercise routines because it was too short for people to see – and they couldn’t hear it properly because its voice was too high-pitched.”

The teams behind the robots had their own responses to Dr Wright’s research.

The developers behind HUG says that since then they’ve refined the design to make it more compact and user-friendly. Paro’s creator Takanori Shibata said that Paro has been used for 20 years and pointed to trials that demonstrated “clinical evidence of [the] therapeutic effects”. Pepper is now owned by a different company and its software has been substantially updated.

And yet the study was not without merit.

Mr Walker of Shadow Robot is adamant that the use of robots in care should not be dismissed. For one thing, he argues, the next generation of them will be much more capable.

Praminda Caleb-Solly, a professor at the University of Nottingham is determined to make these robots work well in practice. “We are trying to get these robots out of the labs into the real world,” she says.

To do this she has set up a network, Emergence, to help connect robot makers with businesses and individuals who will use them – and to find out from elderly people themselves that they’d want from robots.

The answers vary.

Some people have said they want robots with voice interaction and, understandably, a non-threatening appearance. Others want a “cute design”. But many requests come down to the practical way they’d like the robot to adapt to their changing needs – and for the robot to charge and clean itself.

“We don’t want to look after the robot – we want the robot to look after us,” said one person who was asked the question.

Some businesses in the UK are testing out robots too.

Home care provider, Caremark has been trialling Geni, a small voice-activated robot, with some people who use their services in Cheltenham.

One man who has early-onset dementia explained he enjoyed asking Genie to play Glenn Miller songs.

Overall, however, reactions have been “like Marmite,” according to director Michael Folkes – with some people loving Geni, and others less complimentary.

But Mr Folkes also stresses these devices aren’t about replacing people. “We’re trying to build a future where carers have more time to care.”

Back in the laboratory of the Shadow Robot Company in London, Rich Walker points out another big challenge: mastering the perfect robotic hand.

“For the robot to be useful, it needs to have the same ability to interact with the world as [a] human does,” he explains. “And for that it needs human-like dexterity.”

The robot hand Mr Walker shows me certainly seems nimble. It’s made from metal and plastic, and fitted with 100 sensors, with the dexterity and strength of a human hand. Each finger moves to touch its thumb smoothly, quickly and precisely, finishing with an ‘OK’ to sign off.

It can even do a Rubik’s Cube, one-handed.

Yet it is still a long way from doing the more delicate tasks, like using a pair of scissors or picking up smaller, more fragile objects.

“The way we use a pair of scissors is quite mind-blowing when you think about it,” Mr Walker says.

“If you try and analyse what happens, you’re using your sense of touch in subtle and precise ways and receiving feedback, which makes you adjust the way you cut. How do you tell a robot how to do that?”

Mr Walker’s team, together with 35 other engineering firms, are working to design a hand more like ours – it’s part of what’s known as the Robot Dexterity Programme.

It’s one of the projects run by a government agency called the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) that sets out to support scientific research that is high risk (because it might well not work) but also high-reward for its potential to transform society.

The project’s leader, Professor Jenny Read, explains they are looking at how animals move as part of this, to better inform the design not only of the hand but to inform a complete rethink of how robots are made. “One of the very striking things about animal bodies is their grace and efficiency, evolution has ensured that, in fact.

“I think gracefulness really is a form of efficiency.”

Guggi Kofod, an engineer turned entrepreneur from Denmark, is trying to develop artificial muscles for robots that can be used instead of motors.

His Denmark-based firm, Pliantics, is at an early stage of development, but have made the key breakthrough of finding a material that seems to do the job and is durable.

He is driven by deeply personal reasons too.

“Several people near me died from dementia very recently,” he explains. “I see from the people who are caring for dementia patients, and it is very challenging.

“So, if we could build systems that help them to not be scared, and that help them live at least a decent level of life… That’s incredibly motivating for me.”

The muscles his firm designs are made from a soft material that extends and contracts, much like real muscles, when an electric current is applied.

Guugi Kofod is working with Shadow Robot, as part of the ARIA project to develop a robotic human-sized hand whose artificial muscles could give it a more precise and delicate grip.

The ultimate aim is for it to detect small pressure changes when it grips an object, and to know when to stop squeezing, just as the skin on fingertips does.

Dr Wright, who observed the robots in Japan, has one final concern. That is, if they catch on, robots could end up making life worse for human carers.

“The only way that economically you can make this work is to pay the care workers less and have much larger care homes, which are standardised to make it easy for robots to operate in,” he argues.

“As a result, there would be more robots taking care of people, with care workers being paid a minimum wage to service the robots, which is the opposite of this vision that robots are going to give time back to care workers to spend quality time with residents, to talk.”

• The debate: Are facial recognition cameras in shops a step too far?

Other experts are more positive. “It’s going to be a huge industry, given the deficit we have in the workforce right now. The demand for carers as our population ages will be huge,” argues Gopal Ramchurn, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton.

He is also CEO of Responsible AI, which is involved in trying to ensure that artificial intelligence systems are safe, reliable, and trustworthy.

But he cites Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot, which served drinks and mingled at a Tesla event last year, as a sign that – like it or not – the robots are coming.

“We are trying to anticipate that future, before the big tech companies come in and deploy these things without asking us what we think about them,” he adds.

So now is the time to develop the right regulations to ensure that the robots work for us, he argues, rather than the other way round.

“We need to be ready for that future.”

A Dutch Olympic volleyball player convicted of raping a British girl a decade ago has been denied a visa to compete in Australia.

Steven van de Velde, 31, was due to play at the Beach Volleyball World Championships in Adelaide, South Australia, next month.

In 2016, the then 21-year-old pleaded guilty to three counts of raping a 12-year-old girl in Milton Keynes and was sentenced to four years in jail. He had met the girl on Facebook and travelled to England from Amsterdam before raping her in her home in 2014.

Two weeks ago, South Australia’s Attorney-General Kyam Maher wrote to the federal government, calling on authorities to reject his visa as his crimes were “utterly abhorrent”.

The letter also said “we do not believe that foreign child sex offenders should be granted entry to this country”.

Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the government will “continue to use every tool we have available to ensure that Australians can be safe and feel safe in their communities”.

After the rape in 2014, Van de Velde returned to the Netherlands but in 2016, he was extradited to the UK and arrested. Ahead of his sentencing, the court heard he was aware of the girl’s age.

He served 12 months of his four-year sentence and restarted his professional sporting career in 2018, playing for his national team in several global tournaments.

Last year, he represented the Netherlands at the Paris Olympics and was booed by some people in the crowd. Earlier, an online petition calling for him to be banned from the Olympics had attracted 90,000 signatures.

The BBC has contacted the organisers of the world championship event in South Australia and the Dutch national volleyball association for comment.

Sudan’s military chief has confirmed the army’s withdrawal from its last western stronghold of el-Fasher after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) declared control of the city.

In a televised address, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said he had approved the withdrawal in response to the “systematic destruction and killing of civilians”.

He said he had agreed with local leaders to “leave and go to a safe place to protect the remaining citizens and the rest of the city from destruction”.

The UN has raised the alarm over reports of atrocities committed by the RSF in recent days, and has called for safe passage for trapped civilians.

The RSF have denied accusations they were killing civilians.

The fall of el-Fasher could mark a significant turning point in Sudan’s civil war, which has killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly 12 million people since April 2023.

The city’s capture gives the RSF control over all five state capitals in Darfur, consolidating its parallel administration in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.

On Monday, the UN head, Antonio Guterres, said he was “gravely concerned” over the situation in el-Fasher, and condemned the reported “violations of international humanitarian law”.

He said the 18-month siege of el-Fasher – and the surrounding North Darfur region – have been an epicentre of suffering, with malnutrition, disease and violence claiming lives every day.

The UN Human Rights Office also warned that the number of large-scale, ethnically motivated violations and atrocities in el-Fasher was increasing.

“States with influence must act to prevent atrocities by RSF and allied fighters; accountability is key,” it said in a statement.

In his address, Gen Burhan denounced inaction by the international community to end atrocities, and vowed to fight “until this land is purified”.

“We can turn the tables every time, and we can return every land desecrated by these traitors to the nation’s fold,” he said.

El-Fasher was the army’s last foothold in the vast western region of Darfur and had since May last year endured a worsening siege, causing a severe shortage of food.

• UN pleads for safe passage for civilians trapped in war-hit Sudan city
• Sudan’s fertile region where food is rotting amid famine and war
• A simple guide to the war in Sudan

One longer walk a day is better for your heart than lots of short strolls, especially if you don’t exercise much, according to new research published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Walking for at least 15 minutes without stopping is ideal, it says. That’s about 1,500 steps in a row, which gives your heart a good workout.

Many people aim for 10,000 steps a day, but that number came from a Japanese pedometer advertisement – not science. Still, experts agree more steps are generally better for your health.

The study looked at 33,560 adults aged 40–79 in the UK who walked fewer than 8,000 steps a day.

They were grouped by how long their walks were (measured with a step-counter over a week):

• less than 5 minutes (43%)
• 5 to 10 minutes (33.5%)
• 10 to 15 minutes (15.5%)
• 15 minutes or more (8%)

The researchers, from the University of Sydney and the Universidad Europea in Spain, tracked their health over eight years.

People who walked in longer stretches had a lower risk of heart problems than those who walked in short bursts.

Even among the least active – those walking under 5,000 steps a day – longer walks made a big difference. Their risk of heart disease and death dropped significantly.

Whether that’s because they were fitter to begin with isn’t fully clear from the study, but the researchers did try to control for this by taking into account factors like whether the person smoked, was obese or had high cholesterol.

The researchers say how you walk matters – not just how much. Walking for longer at a time, even if you don’t walk much overall, appears to help your heart.

Simple changes, like setting aside time for a longer walk, could make a big difference, they suggest.

Co-lead researcher Prof Emmanuel Stamatakis said: “We tend to place all the emphasis on the number of steps or the total amount of walking but neglect the crucial role of patterns, for example ‘how’ walking is done.

“This study shows that even people who are very physically inactive can maximise their heart health benefit by tweaking their walking patterns to walk for longer at a time, ideally for at least 10-15 minutes, when possible.”

Prof Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, said while the study shows a link between walking and better heart health, it doesn’t prove that walking directly causes the improvement.

The NHS recommends 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, like brisk walking, ideally spread out evenly across the week.

Older adults over 65 should try to move every day, even if it’s just light activity around the house, the advice says.

Emily McGrath, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Exercise helps everyone live a happier and healthier life. If you have heart and circulatory disease, it can help you manage your condition and make you feel better overall.

“You may find it hard to be more active at first, but as time goes on it’ll get easier as your body gets used to the activity. You may only notice small improvements at first, but it all adds up and counts towards keeping your heart healthy.”

If you are walking or cycling at night or in low light conditions, wear reflective clothing or use a flashlight or headlamp to increase your visibility to other road users.

Stay alert and be aware of your surroundings.

Use designated lanes or paths, if available. Always cross at designated crossing points where road traffic is more likely to see and expect you to be crossing the road.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Cameroon’s Constitutional Council has proclaimed the re-election of 92-year old President Paul Biya, the world’s oldest head of state, for an eighth successive term.

Amid rumours of a close result and claims of victory by his main challenger, former government minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary, excitement and tension had been building in the run-up to Monday’s declaration.

The official outcome, victory for Biya with 53.7%, ahead of Tchiroma Bakary on 35.2%, came as both a shock and yet, for many Cameroonians, an anti-climax.

Biya’s decision to stand for another seven-year mandate, after 43 years in power, was inevitably contentious,. Not only because of his longevity in power, but also because his style of governance has raised questions.

Extended stays abroad, habitually at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva or alternative more discreet locations around the Swiss lakeside city, have repeatedly triggered speculation about the extent to which he is actually governing Cameroon – or whether most decisions are in fact taken by the prime minister and ministers or the influential secretary general of the presidency, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh.

Last year, after making a speech at a Second World War commemoration in the South of France in August and attending the China Africa summit in Beijing the next month, the president disappeared from view for almost six weeks without any announcement or explanation, sparking speculation about his health.

Even after senior officials appeared to indicate that he was, once again, in Geneva, reportedly working as usual, there was no real news until the announcement of his impending return home to the capital, Yaoundé, where he was filmed being greeted by supporters.

And this year it was not really a surprise when he squeezed a further pre-election visit to Geneva into his schedule just weeks before polling day.

Biya’s inscrutable style of national leadership, rarely calling formal meetings of the full cabinet or publicly addressing complex issues, leaves a cloud of uncertainty over the goals of his administration and the formation of government policy.

At a technical level, capable ministers and officials pursue a wide range of initiatives and programmes. But the political vision and sense of direction has been largely absent.

His regime has shown itself sporadically willing to crack down on protest or detain more vocal critics. But that is not the only or perhaps even the most important factor that has kept him in power.

For it has to be said that Biya has also fulfilled a distinctive political role.

He has acted as a balancing figure in what is a complex country, marked by large social, regional and linguistic differences – between, for example, the equatorial south and the savannah north, or the majority of regions that are French-speaking and the English-speaking North-West and South-West, with their different educational and institutional traditions.

In a state whose early post-independence years were marked by debates over federalism and tensions over the form that national unity should take, he has assembled governments that include representatives of a wide range of backgrounds.

Albeit sometimes under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and international creditors, his administrations have averted debt disaster and, in recent years, gradually consolidated national finances.

Moreover, the past decade or so has seen Biya appear increasingly almost like a constitutional monarch, a symbolic figure who may decide a few key issues but leaves others to set the course on most policy areas.

And his continuation in this role has been facilitated by the competitive rivalries between senior figures in the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM). While he is there, the succession does not have to be decided.

However, with no designated or preferred political heir apparent, and with some one-time “next generation” CPDM figures themselves now getting on in years, Biya’s perpetuation in office has fuelled a constantly turning rumour mill about the succession.

Increasingly, the name of his son Franck has been cited, even though he shows little interest in politics or government.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of either development or security challenges for the president despite Cameroon’s rich natural resource diversity.

Is it possible that today we are seeing a decisive erosion in popular tolerance of Biya’s self-effacing version of semi-authoritarian rule?

Are Cameroonians tiring of a system that offers them multi-party electoral expression but little hope of actually changing their rulers?

Has the bloody crisis in the English-speaking regions exposed the limits of the president’s cautious and distant approach?

When protests demanding reform first erupted there in 2016 Biya was slow to respond. By the time he did offer meaningful change and a national dialogue, the momentum of violence had accelerated, eroding the space for real compromise.

Meanwhile, so low-key in style, he has failed to really sell an economic and social development vision for Cameroon or instil a sense of progress towards a goal.

Biya was already testing the limits of popular tolerance with his decision to stand for a seventh successive term in 2018.

But ultimately he managed to face down a strong opposition challenge from Maurice Kamto, leader of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM) – and when Kamto disputed the official results awarding him only 14% of the vote, he was detained for more than eight months.

But this time around, Tchiroma’s candidacy shifted the mood and sense of possibility in a way that no previous challenger has managed, at least since 1992, when even official results credited John Fru Ndi, of the Social Democratic front (SDF), with 36% of the vote, only just behind Biya on 40%.

And this time it is not just that Biya is seven years older and even more hands-off than before.

It is also that, in contrast to Kamto – who struggled to reach far beyond his core electorate – Tchiroma, a Muslim northerner, has attracted support from a wide cross section of society and of Cameroon’s regions, notably including the two anglophone regions.

This one-time political prisoner who later compromised with Biya and accepted a ministerial post, had the guts to go to Bamenda, the largest English-speaking city, and apologise for his role in the government’s actions.

And over recent days, as tensions grew in the run-up to the result declaration, Tchiroma shrewdly stayed in Garoua, his home city in the north, where crowds of young supporters had gathered to shield him from the risk of arrest by the security forces.

Now, after expectations that had built so high, there is intense frustration and anger among opposition supporters at the official result, however expected it may have been.

The security forces were already reported to have shot protesters in Douala, the southern port city that is the hub of the economy. And shooting has now been reported from Garoua too.

For Cameroon, Biya’s determination to secure an eighth presidential term has brought high risks and painful costs.

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Ever since her death in 1986, it was taken as common knowledge that Elsa Lanchester – who became a horror movie icon by playing the title character in the Bride of Frankenstein – had been cremated and her ashes sprinkled in the ocean.

But then Scott Michaels, the founder of Dearly Departed Tours, discovered that her cremated remains were interred in a rose garden under her married name, Elsa Lanchester Laughton.

“For almost 40 years no one had made the connection – until now,” he says.

Mr Michaels, 63, is a historian who specialises in the dark side of Hollywood. A go-to for programmes about dead Hollywood celebrities and murder, he has consulted for Quentin Tarantino’s Manson murder film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Mr Michaels’ museum of memorabilia and oddities was also a local must-see, before it closed during the pandemic, for its eclectic collection, which included the Buick Electra that Jayne Mansfield died in in 1967.

Deeply passionate about unsung Hollywood, he has also made it a habit to organise fundraisers and events for marginalised, forgotten or cult actors, like Schlitzie (“Pinhead” in Freaks) and Ken Weatherwax (“Pugsley” from the television Addams Family).

It was this interest that led Mr Michaels to delve further into what happened to the remains of Lanchester.

Born on October 28, 1902 in Lewisham, London, Lanchester was a child actor in theatre and cabaret, and even made records of ancient Victorian songs and ballads.

At 25 she met and married fellow actor Charles Laughton, and starred alongside him as Anne of Cleeves in 1933’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, for which Laughton won the Best Actor Oscar.

He played the title role in The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1939, and the couple worked on twelve films together, most notably Witness for the Prosecution in 1957, for which they were both Oscar-nominated.

Lanchester had been nominated before, in 1949’s Come to the Stable, and after Laughton’s death she continued to work steadily, including on a number of Disney films including Mary Poppins and That Darn Cat!.

Actor Bruce Davison played Willard alongside Lanchester as his controlling mother Henreitta. He speaks fondly of that time, and especially of her sense of humour.

“She told me: ‘You know when a director is giving you a load of codswallop? What you do is say ‘Oooh, that’s very interesting, let me do that.’ And then just do whatever the hell you want!” he laughs.

Davison also recalled something that would tantalise horror fans today.

“I used to take a Super 8 camera to set, and one time I filmed her at the top of the stairs when she did The Bride for me, staring down and giving me that sneer! She was glad for the Bride role,” he added, “she understood what it had done for her.”

Although the Bride of Frankenstein – in which Lanchester’s own long hair stretched up over a wire beehive contraption to startling effect – did indeed earn her a place in film history, the issue of what exactly happened to her remains after her death was less well recorded.

In her autobiography, Lanchester wrote that she did not like the location of her husband’s burial plot in Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills cemetery – Laughton died in 1962. She wrote she would prefer to be cremated with no funeral service, which is partly why everyone assumed for decades she had her ashes scattered.

An interest in death began early for Mr Michaels, who was born and grew up in Detroit. He recalls seeing the tented graveside set-up at a family funeral and asking his mom “are we going to the circus?” He was three years old.

More than that, the family home was on one of the most dangerous intersections in the city. A young Mr Michaels heard – and saw – so many car accidents that it almost became business as usual, and the springboard for an unusual career celebrating those who have died, he says.

When he learned of Lanchester’s interment, during the course of his regular research into historic death certificates, he decided she would be his next memorial project.

Her seven-minute, dialogue-free appearance alongside Boris Karloff as the Bride was legendary – she deserved to have her legacy remembered.

She was, after all, basically the only female star of the Universal Horror cast, he says.

“Many people also forget that she played Mary Shelley, who tells her frightening tale of man trying to play God to poets Shelley and Byron, at the beginning of the film,” Mr Michaels says.

Interest in Lanchester had been sparked earlier in the year when Universal Studios released merchandise and special editions of Bride of Frankenstein to celebrate the film’s 90th anniversary. In July, a blue plaque was unveiled at Lanchester’s childhood home in Battersea, London, that also noted her mother Edith, who was a socialist, feminist, and suffragette.

It was a surprise when Mr Michaels discovered that Lanchester’s agent, Herschel Green, had interred her at Valhalla Memorial Park, in North Hollywood – and that her ashes had not been scattered as had been widely believed.

“Maybe she didn’t really care much about what happened after she was gone,” he suggests.

In less than 36 hours, Mr Michaels had crowdfunded enough for a formal wall marker to recognise this horror legend. The unveiling ceremony will be held on 28 October – her birthday.

“I wanted to celebrate on her 123rd birthday,” Michaels says, “and honestly I forgot that it was just a few days before Halloween.”

Vishal Kalita’s collection of music cassettes has turned his residence in India’s Assam state into a private museum.

For more than a decade, the 30-year-old has been travelling across the country buying obsolete tapes, which he has carefully stored at his home in Guwahati city.

The collection, which was opened to the public last month, also includes hundreds of CDs and rare posters of musicians from around the world.

But it’s the discography of Zubeen Garg, a singer and composer from the state, that has been drawing the most number of visitors.

A cultural icon in Assam, Garg died in Singapore last month, leaving his millions of fans heartbroken.

Mr Kalita has some 38,000 songs of the singer in his collection, including songs that cannot be found anywhere else today, he says.

On 16 September, just days before his death, Garg had even visited Mr Kalita’s residence and said the collection reminded him of some of his “long-forgotten” creations.

Mr Kalita is now part of a larger network of Garg’s fans and friends who are trying to make his oeuvre more accessible through online streaming platforms and ensure royalties for his family.

“Some of these cassettes are too old and can get damaged. I want to bring them back to public memory,” he says.

But can he do it?

• A beloved Indian singer drowned in Singapore. Now fans want answers

Many of Garg’s songs cannot be uploaded online without risking copyright violation owing to a lack of clarity over their ownership, which is scattered among a complicated network of producers, distributors and music labels.

It’s not just him – music ownership is a long-debated subject globally.

For instance, 14-time Grammy winner Taylor Swift had to re-record her albums to own all her music, while several other musicians have started their own labels to retain full or partial control over their work. In India, too, music ownership has long been mired in tensions around contracts tilted in favour of producers and labels over creators.

Garg’s fans got a glimpse of this complicated universe soon after his death, when many of them went searching for one of his most popular songs, Mayabini Ratir Bukut, on a popular music streaming platform, but found it missing. The song was later uploaded by a user but removed within a week due to licensing issues.

“There are hundreds of his songs whose ownership is either difficult to trace or remains contested,” Manas Barua, filmmaker and Garg’s friend, told the BBC.

In India, the Copyright Act, 1957, governs music ownership, with separate copyright for lyrics, musical composition and sound recording, says Delhi-based intellectual property rights lawyer Neel Mason.

The “first owners” of the lyrics and musical composition are the “authors” – the lyricists and composers, respectively. But when it comes to the sound recordings, “the producer is deemed to be the author”, so they are the first owner, says Mr Mason.

Owners can transfer ownership or choose to grant rights to third parties, exclusively or non-exclusively, through licensing, which can lead to a complex and often untraceable network unless paperwork is meticulously maintained.

In a career spanning 33 years, 52-year-old Garg sang in more than 40 languages and dialects. Some of his songs are owned by his own label, while many from the 1990s and 2000s belong to producers and distributors that pay him royalties.

The producers transferred the copyright to distributors, says Mr Barua. “For decades, such copyright transfers were done without charging money. There was no way for producers to monetise music other than through cassettes and CDs. So, they were dependent on distributors.”

New economic prospects around music ownership opened up only after private radio stations started acquiring licences from music owners for hefty amounts, and grew manifold with online streaming.

The music licensing ecosystem in India has evolved over the years, with focus moving from royalties to ownership, says music journalist Anurag Tagat. “The online streaming revolution has highlighted the importance of ownership and the economic opportunities that can emerge in the future.”

In Garg’s case, several songs have uncertain or contested ownership, and some of them can be found online, uploaded by random users only to be repeatedly removed. Also, many of Garg’s older tracks were never digitised and risk being lost.

Shyamantak Gautam, a producer of Assamese films and an associate of Garg, has engaged a team to draft a list of songs written, sung and composed by Garg.

“At least 1,033 of his songs are registered with the [Indian Performing Right Society] IPRS so far, and we are trying to register more of them,” Gautam told the BBC.

IPRS – India’s sole government-authorised organisation that collects and distributes music royalties – says it is ensuring that creators or their families are paid when their work is used commercially.

“The rapid rise of digital platforms has made ownership tracking more complex, with diverse licensing models, multiple stakeholders and music use,” IPRS chief executive officer Rakesh Nigam told the BBC, adding that Garg’s songs registered with them will “remain protected for 60 years beyond his lifetime”.

This is a great initiative, and it should have been done years ago, popular Bollywood singer Shaan told the BBC. “Tracking distributors at a regional level to fix music ownership can be a challenging prospect. But if they can do it as a team, that’s great.”

The producers of Garg’s songs were all from Assam, so it was not difficult to identify them, says Mr Gautam, adding that the challenge begins after that.

Mr Barua says, “We are building a chain to determine how licences changed hands among distributors. In his [Garg’s] case, several distributors who last held a licence or owned his songs are either dead or have wound up their business.”

Garg’s case is a window to the massive oeuvres of several Indian singers and issues of ownership right and compensation associated with them.

For instance, SP Balasubrahmanyam, who sang more than 40,000 songs, got into a legal dispute with legendary composer Ilaiyaraaja. Lata Mangeshkar, who lent her voice to more than 30,000 melodies, was a vocal advocate of artists’ royalties – an issue over which she fell out with producers and fellow artists in the industry.

Decades before Garg and several of his contemporaries in India started their music labels, legendary Indian singer KJ Yesudas did so in 1980. The central idea was the same: to have more control over their creations.

Meanwhile, in Guwahati, Mr Kalita is trying to get access to the latest Japanese technology to digitise some of Garg’s tapes that can’t be found online.

“I want these rare tapes to be digitised in the best quality. Zubeen Garg will live through his music. And, as his fan, that’s the least I can do for him,” he says.

There weren’t many boybands bigger than Five in the late 1990s.

But at the height of their popularity they dramatically called it a day in 2001, as the stress and pressures of fame and an unrelenting schedule took a toll on all of them.

Now, decades later – and to the delight of Millennials – Scott, Ritchie, J, Sean and Abz are back.

“It was too much too fast. Way too fast,” Abz tells me, while Ritchie explains it was “like being strapped to a rocket”.

“I think I was just in survival mode for five years, because I can’t remember a thing,” Sean adds, who was just 15 when the band was formed.

They have invited me into the rehearsal studio ahead of their upcoming tour, 25 years after they were last on the road together.

And it’s clear they’re much more comfortable this time around, with J saying they feel “spectacularly fortunate” to have a second chance.

The group sold more than 20 million records in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with tracks such as Keep on Movin’ and Everybody Get Up.

But reuniting after more than 20 years doesn’t come without risk. Oasis may have sold out a stadium tour in seconds, but others haven’t been as fortunate.

Scott says all five of them didn’t sleep the night before their reunion was announced.

“I phoned my wife, Kerry, in the middle of the night and asked: ‘What if no one cares? What if we think it’s going to be this big thing and everyone goes, so what?'”

But fortunately, the group’s fans did care, and the band’s arena tour of the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand is almost sold out.

“We knew we’d done well but I don’t think we realised how well our younger selves had done. And how much we’d affected some peoples lives and how much they’d loved us,” Ritchie says.

Another thing the band were unsure about was the prospect of singing and dancing together again.

Sean explains: “We sold a tour without even knowing [we could do it]. We believed it but we had to get into rehearsals to actually find out, but we can confirm it’s still there!”

The band are now all in their 40s but had barely left school when they formed. It was clearly an overwhelming time.

Ritchie tells me: “We got into it very young and we thought we’d won the lottery and all our dreams were coming true. In many ways, they did, but in some ways it turned into a nightmare psychologically, [there were] a lot of things we weren’t expecting.

“We’d wake up on a tour bus and think, not what country are we in, but what continent are we in?”

J agrees: “There are loads of blank spots in our memories, and we’ve spoken about it and come to the conclusion that it was all so fast, and we were in flight or fight mode for the whole thing. It was like you were being chased by something.”

So after all that time apart, I want to know who made the first move about the prospect of reuniting.

Scott says that not even being in the same room with his four former bandmates for over 20 years had been playing on his mind.

“I phoned Abz and I hadn’t spoken to him for 10 years, and one of the first things he said to me was ‘It’s so nice to hear your voice’. So we just got together – it wasn’t about a tour, it was about being friends again.

“No one outside this bubble knows what we went through,” he adds.

Though one person who knows more than most about what Five experienced is Robbie Williams, who was a member of Take That before finding success as a solo artist.

Five performed Keep On Movin’ with him at one of his shows in London this summer.

Ritchie says he had “performer insecurity” and feared the crowd wouldn’t know who they were, “but it went off”.

Sean adds that Robbie “knew everything we’ve been through”, adding the six of them sat for two hours chatting.

On the emotional trauma Five went through, Scott says Robbie told them it was like “carrying a big bag of rocks and you need to empty it day by day.”

For J, the whole experience of being back in the band is “the antithesis of what it was before.”

“The people we’ve got around us, how we’re being managed. how we’re being looked after, which is the most important thing. We were last time but people were kind of learning on the job.”

They’ve reconciled and reunited now but would Five go back in time and do it all again?

Abz says he would “but differently”, while Ritchie laughs: “With this head, I’d love to do it, because I’d be checking the accounts a lot more!”

“I was in prison but you almost got there,” Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim joked to US President Donald Trump as the cameras rolled.

It was a dicey joke – one he quickly moved on from given Trump’s less-than amused demeanour – but also arguably one only a veteran politician basking in his recent wins would dare make.

He had just signed a deal with Trump to lower tariffs on Malaysian exports to the US from 24% to 19%. Although many other details remain unclear, any assurance that levies will not rise further is welcome amid all the uncertainty.

But most important of all, Anwar had secured Trump’s attendance at a regional summit whose relevance has been repeatedly questioned. The US president was at the meeting of Association of South East Asian Nations, or Asean, in Kuala Lumpur solely to preside over a highly publicised “peace deal” between Thailand and Cambodia, which Anwar orchestrated.

He also brokered the fragile ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia after deadly border clashes earlier this year – he stepped in after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on both sides if the fighting didn’t stop.

Some called it a diplomatic victory for Malaysia, while others said Anwar was simply in the right place at the right time – this year, it was the Malaysian PM’s turn to lead Asean.

But Anwar would argue he waited 25 years for his turn – a turbulent time in the wings, during which he was jailed twice.

Anwar first made his name as a charismatic firebrand student leader who founded Malaysia’s Islamic youth movement, ABIM.

In 1982, he joined the long-ruling party United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), surprising many who had expected him to steer clear of the establishment.

But it proved a canny political move – he climbed up the ladder rapidly and held multiple ministerial posts.

In 1993, he became deputy to then-prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and was widely seen as his heir-apparent. That was until they fell out over the handling of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which hit Malaysia hard.

Anwar was sacked the next year, then jailed for sodomy and corruption – charges he denies to this day, arguing they were part of a smear campaign to remove him as a political threat.

In 2004, a year after Mahathir stepped down, Malaysia’s Supreme Court overturned the sodomy conviction and freed Anwar. He emerged as the leader of an invigorated opposition, leading it to its strongest-ever performance in the 2013 elections.

Less than a year later, while preparing to fight a state election, new sodomy charges were filed against him, sending him back to jail.

Then in 2016, in a shock turn of events, Mahathir came out of retirement to run for top office, as then-leader Najib Razak faced corruption allegations.

Mahathir, then 92, struck an unlikely deal with the still-imprisoned Anwar, where he promised to free Anwar if elected, and eventually hand over the PM job to him. Their coalition scored a historic victory in 2018, but the alliance began to unravel as the nonagenarian kept shifting the goalposts for handing over power.

In the 2022 election, Anwar’s coalition won the most seats but still fell short of the number needed to form a government.

After days of deadlock, the king appointed him PM.

Some thought his term would be short-lived. But nearly three years on, the 78-year-old has already held on to the job for longer than his three predecessors.

Anwar’s biggest achievement is perhaps the political stability he appears to have brought to a country that has cycled through three prime ministers between 2020 and 2021.

“Malaysia these days is sometimes seen as among the most stable in South East Asia… which has also made it relatively attractive for investors,” says Syaza Shukri, a political science professor at the International Islamic University Malaysia.

But cost of living is rising, as it is in so many other countries. In July, 20,000 protesters took to the streets in Kuala Lumpur demanding Anwar’s resignation, over rising costs and a lack of economic reforms.

And expensive investments in semiconductor manufacturing and data centres are yet to pay off. That’s why the tariff deal with the US was crucial for the export-driven economy.

Others accuse his administration of not doing enough to promote a more inclusive Malaysia in the face of rising Islamism. Religious outrage has sometimes spilled into violence in the Muslim-majoirty country, which also has a sizeable ethnic Chinese population.

In 2024, a convenience store chain sparked an outcry for selling socks printed with the word “Allah” – the Arabic word for God – which many Muslims saw as an insult to Islam. The store was attacked with Molotov cocktail attacks as people called for it to be boycotted and for the company’s executives to be charged.

In 2023, a Chinese Muslim restaurant had to publicly apologise after it came under fire over a staff member wearing a crucifix necklace.

“The middle ground for Malaysian politics is no longer a tolerant multiracial Malaysia, but a conservative Malaysia with an Islamic outlook… Anwar’s position on political Islam may just move the country to unchartered territory,” professor of Asian studies James Chin wrote in a commentary published by CNA.

Critics also accuse Anwar of favouritism and question his anti-corruption pledges – in a contentious move, public prosecutors dropped 47 corruption charges in 2023 against a key Anwar ally, the deputy PM.

Internationally, Anwar has been more successful.

As prime minister, he has a deft balancing act ahead to make sure the emerging, economy he is in charge of doesn’t get caught between the US and China.

He had also invited China’s leader Xi Jinping to the summit. Xi had made an official visit to Malaysia in April, after a 12-year gap, but he skipped this week’s summit.

But Trump’s presence was no small thing for South East Asian economies that rely on the US market. It meant other countries, like Thailand and Vietnam, could also discuss details and gain assurances on tariffs – which they would count as a win, for now.

Anwar has been very active on the diplomatic front. Within his first year as PM, he visited all Asean countries, apart from Myanmar, where a civil war has been raging since the army seized power in 2021.

It has been one of Asean’s most intractable challenges – while Anwar has been praised for speaking up more on the issue, little has changed on the ground, partly because China has the most influence over the military junta.

Still, Professor Chin believes Anwar has “moved the needle a little” in restoring Asean’s relevance.

His role in the Thailand-Cambodia ceasefire also boosted Anwar’s standing, but these diplomatic wins mean little to ordinary Malaysians.

What’s resonated at home is his advocacy for the Palestinian cause, which has become louder since the war in Gaza began in 2023.

“Anwar needs to fly the Palestinian flag to the hilt to satisfy public opinion and fortify himself against attacks from opponents who accuse him of not going far enough,” says Ariel Tan, coordinator of the Malaysia programme at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

But Anwar also faces a dilemma because he needs to maintain good ties with Washington, Israel’s most powerful ally, Ms Tan says.

“Since Trump’s re-election, he has reduced his criticism of the United States’ role in the conflict. Engaging the US has become more critical, particularly with the tariff threat.”

The question is, will Anwar be able to balance the demands at home with those abroad, and start to replicate his international success on a local stage?

The answer to that will be crucial to his survival in the next election, due in 2028.

Prince Andrew’s relationship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has led to mounting calls for him to be removed from his sprawling 30-room Windsor mansion.

The prince, who relinquished his titles earlier this month, has strongly denied any wrongdoing.

But the revelation that he has only ever paid a token annual rent on his home, Royal Lodge, has intensified the scrutiny over his living arrangements – even though he made large payments up front, including for renovations.

Buckingham Palace has not commented on whether Prince Andrew might move out of his home – or where he might go.

But BBC News understands that two other properties in the grounds of Windsor Castle, Adelaide Cottage and Frogmore Cottage, were options suggested to both Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson some months ago.

On Monday, the Sun newspaper reported that the prince has agreed to leave Royal Lodge, but wants Frogmore Cottage for himself, and Adelaide Cottage for Sarah Ferguson – in return.

There are also a number of other properties which could potentially be used to house the King’s brother.

Here are some of the options that could be in the mix.

If Prince Andrew is seeking a home hidden from the public gaze, then Frogmore Cottage is an ideal spot.

The Grade-II listed property, owned by the Crown Estate, is nestled in a quiet corner in the grounds of the grand Frogmore House in Windsor.

From the very beginning it was intended as a secluded refuge from the pressures of royal life, with records of its occupants scarce.

Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, had it built in 1792 as a place for her and her daughters to escape the court.

Surviving relatives of Tsar Nicholas II also lived there after fleeing to the UK, following the murder of other family members by Bolsheviks in 1918.

Since World War Two, the cottage is believed to have been used as a home for members of royal household staff, before the Duke and Duchess of Sussex moved in.

Prince Harry and Meghan quit life as working royals in 2020 and left the UK shortly afterwards. In 2023, they were asked to vacate the property.

It’s been reported that the home was offered to Prince Andrew by the King last year as well, but that he declined.

Staying in Windsor offers a number of benefits, including enabling the prince to stay close to his daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, as well as their children.

Another contender could be Adelaide Cottage, which is also in the grounds of Windsor Castle.

The Prince and Princess of Wales have been living in the property since August 2022, with their children George, Charlotte and Louis.

But after a challenging period that has seen the princess deal with a cancer diagnosis and treatment they have now decided to move to Forest Lodge, in Windsor Great Park.

That leaves it free for Prince Andrew – or indeed his ex-wife – to potentially move into.

The four-bedroom Adelaide Cottage is just a stone’s throw from Frogmore Cottage, so if a deal is struck for Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson to each occupy one of the properties, they would continue to live nearby each other.

It is a 10-minute walk from Windsor Castle, so the pair would also be close to King Charles.

By royal standards, it is a modest home – and certainly a downsizing from the mansion that Prince Andrew has been used to.

As with Frogmore Cottage, it offers privacy and a rural setting, and is also within Windsor’s security perimeter.

Adelaide Cottage has a long history of royal usage. It was built in 1831 as a home for the wife of William IV, Queen Adelaide – hence its name.

In more recent times it was home to Group Captain Peter Townsend, the Battle of Britain pilot who became an equerry to King George VI and who became the close confidante of the King’s younger daughter, Princess Margaret.

Townsend lived at Adelaide Cottage with his first wife from 1944 to 1952.

Further afield, there’s also Wood Farm, on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, which is privately owned by the monarch.

The cottage, described as “small and intimate” by former housekeeper Teresa Thompson, has strong associations with Prince Andrew’s parents.

His father, the late Duke of Edinburgh, chose the secluded property as his permanent home when he retired from public life in 2017.

He and the late Queen already regularly stayed there in preference to opening up Sandringham House when it was just the two of them.

The wider Sandringham estate covers approximately 20,000 acres (8,100 hectares) with 600 acres (242 hectares) of gardens.

It enabled Prince Philip to indulge his passions for country pursuits, such as shooting and carriage-driving.

It was also near Sandringham where Prince Philip was involved in a car crash which left a passenger in another car with a broken wrist – an incident that prompted him to give up driving in January 2019.

The Balmoral estate is also privately owned and could present other options for Prince Andrew.

The royal portfolio also includes the Castle of Mey in the far north of Scotland, which could be a possibility.

King Charles’ grandmother, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, brought the dilapidated rural castle back to life after falling in love with the building in the early 1950s.

She had the property restored and spent her holidays there until October 2001.

The King has also been a frequent visitor to the castle over the years.

The castle, near John O’ Groats, is the most northerly inhabited castle in Scotland and the property and its gardens are run as a visitor attraction in summer months.

If none of the existing residences work, the King could simply buy a house for his brother.

It wouldn’t be the first time that has happened. In 1980, for example, the then-Prince Charles purchased Highgrove House in Gloucestershire through the Duchy of Cornwall.

It is not known under what terms Prince Andrew would move in and occupy any new home, or how any deal would be financed.

Little is also known about what other properties Prince Andrew or Sarah Ferguson might own, if indeed they own any.

Others have speculated that the pair may leave the UK altogether.

According to The Sun, they have been offered the use of a luxurious palace in Abu Dhabi – complete with six bedrooms, a gym and swimming pool – by its ruler Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The newspaper says the offer was a thank you for Prince Andrew’s “kindness” to the United Arab Emirate’s royals when he was the UK’s international business envoy.

The prince also has strong connections with the state of Bahrain, which could also present options for him, if a retreat in the Middle East is what he decides to go for.

There has been increased focus on Prince Andrew – who had already stepped back as a working royal – after he relinquished his titles following growing pressure over his links with Epstein.

Last week, more details emerged about how the prince can afford his Windsor mansion, in a lease agreement which has been revealed.

The arrangement means he has only ever paid a “peppercorn” rent on Royal Lodge, and even that might not be required under his deal with the Crown Estate, a document seen by BBC News confirms.

The deal meant that instead of paying annual rent, Prince Andrew made large lump sum payments up-front, including for renovations.

In effect, those payments – which totalled around £8m – meant he was buying himself out of future rent obligations for the duration of the 75-year lease.

The scandal over Andrew’s connections to Epstein has been reignited by new sexual abuse allegations contained in Virginia Giuffre’s posthumously-published memoir.

While Prince Andrew has always strenuously denied abusing Ms Giuffre, fresh questions have been asked in recent days about how he is able to fund his lifestyle despite not being a working royal.

The Liberal Democrats said he should be called in front of MPs to give evidence about his lease of the lodge.

But on Thursday, the government refused to give MPs time to debate the prince’s titles or his home, despite growing pressure for scrutiny.

British journalist and media commentator Sami Hamdi, an outspoken critic of Israel, has been arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

While on a speaking tour of the US over the weekend, Hamdi was detained by ICE officers and his visa was revoked, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Tricia McLaughlin, announced on X on Sunday.

Hamdi is in ICE custody pending his removal from the country, she added.

The State Department and DHS allege that Hamdi supports terrorism and poses a threat to national security, while a Muslim advocacy group argues he is being politically targeted in violation of his free speech rights.

“We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who support terrorism and actively undermine the safety of Americans,” the State Department said on X in a post about Hamdi’s detainment.

The department added that it will continue revoking the visas of people engaged in such activities.

DHS, ICE, and the State Department did not answer the BBC’s request for evidence of Hamdi’s alleged support of terrorism.

Hamdi, who frequently appears on British TV networks to comment on the Middle East, was detained at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday “apparently because of his criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza”, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation, said in a statement.

Hamdi spoke at CAIR Sacramento’s annual gala on Saturday, and was scheduled to speak at CAIR Florida’s gala on Sunday before he was detained.

“Our nation must stop abducting critics of the Israeli government at the behest of unhinged Israel First bigots. This is an Israel First policy, not an America First policy, and it must end,” CAIR wrote in its statement.

CAIR urged ICE to immediately release Hamdi, adding that its lawyers are working to address the “injustice”.

Hamdi’s arrest came after far-right political activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer wrote a series of posts on X accusing Hamdi of supporting terrorist organisations. In return, CAIR argued Loomer was promoting “anti-Muslim conspiracy theories”.

Representatives for Hamdi did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the BBC.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has revoked the visas of people who have openly criticised Israel’s war in Gaza.

In March, Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and threatened with deportation in a case that is still ongoing. His case was the most prominent in a series of arrests of student activists.

Israel has received, through the Red Cross, a coffin that Hamas says contains the body of another deceased hostage held in Gaza.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its troops had taken the coffin from Gaza back to Israel, where forensic tests would be used to identify the remains.

If they are confirmed as belonging to a hostage, Hamas will have returned 16 of the 28 dead Israelis and foreigners it was holding before the start of a ceasefire two weeks ago.

The latest handover came after the Israeli government said it had allowed a member of Hamas into territory inside Gaza controlled by the IDF to help Red Cross and Egyptian personnel search for the remaining dead hostages.

Israel accuses Hamas of violating the ceasefire agreement brokered by the US, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey because it has not returned all of the hostages’ bodies.

The Palestinian armed group says it is committed to the deal, but that it needs help to find remains buried under the rubble left by two years of war.

“The Red Cross, the Egyptian technical team, and a Hamas person have been permitted to enter beyond the IDF’s Yellow Line position in Gaza under close IDF supervision,” Israeli government spokeswoman Shosh Bedrosian told a briefing on Monday afternoon.

She also said the Egyptians would bring in more equipment, including “tractor-type vehicles”.

On Sunday, she had said they were using two to three excavators and a similar number of lorries to carry out searches.

All 20 living Israeli hostages were released soon after the ceasefire took effect on 10 October in exchange for 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,718 detainees from Gaza.

Israel had also handed over the bodies of 195 Palestinians in exchange for the bodies of the 13 Israeli hostages previously returned by Hamas, along with those of two foreign hostages – one of them Thai and the other Nepalese.

Before Monday night’s handover, 11 of the dead hostages still in Gaza were Israelis, one was Tanzanian, and one was Thai.

“Hamas knows where they are located and there is no other option but for them to be released back home,” Ms Bedrosian said.

Earlier, the group representing the Israeli hostages’ families demanded that immediate action be taken to ensure Hamas handed over all the bodies. This includes delaying the second phase of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan.

“The families urge the government of Israel, the United States administration, and the mediators not to advance to the next phase of the agreement until Hamas fulfils all of its obligations,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said.

It came after Israeli media cited an Israeli security official as saying that the Trump administration wanted to move to the second phase even if not all the hostages were found.

On Saturday, Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya said in a statement that the group was facing “challenges” because Israeli forces had “altered the terrain of Gaza”.

“Moreover, some of those who buried the bodies have been martyred or no longer remember where they buried them,” he added.

All but one of the dead hostages still in Gaza were among the 251 people abducted during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, during which about 1,200 other people were killed.

Israel responded by launching a military campaign in Gaza, during which more than 68,500 people have been killed, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Two people have been killed in an underground explosion at a mine in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), the first such incident of its kind since 2015.

Emergency services were called to the Endeavor mine at Cobar, about 700km (435 miles) northwest of Sydney, in the early hours of Tuesday after reports two people had been critically injured.

Police said a man, in his 60s, was confirmed dead at the scene and two women, both in their 20s, were brought to the surface, but one later died. The second woman was airlifted to hospital for minor injuries and shock.

Polymetals Resources, which bought the Endeavour mine in 2023, said all operations at the site had been temporarily suspended.

It did not say what caused the explosion. The company’s executive chairman Dave Sproule said it was “shocked and saddened by the tragic incident” and “our deepest thoughts and condolences go out to the employee’s families, friends and colleagues”.

Fatalities from mine explosions are rare in Australia, with the most recent death happening in 2015 at a mine in Queensland according to Safe Work Australia.

Cobar Mayor Jarrod Marsden said it was an “absolutely tragic” situation.

“The most valuable thing to come out of a mine are the miners, and two families don’t get to see their loved ones anymore,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

“Cobar is a small mining community, it’s very tight-knit, and I’m sure everyone’s going to be thinking of their families today.”

A report will be prepared for the coroner and an investigation into the incident will be carried out by the state’s workplace safety authority.

According to the Endeavour mine’s website, it had been operating continuously from 1982 to 2020 and the new owners were in the process of restarting mining activities for silver, zinc and lead metal production this year.

The mine includes a 7km (4.3 miles) decline and 300m shaft, the site said.

NSW Premier Chris Minns extended his condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of the workers who died.

“This is a heartbreaking day for the Cobar community and will be felt across the entire mining industry,” he said.

Safety protocols and procedures have “greatly improved in mining”, Minns said, but the two deaths were a “sobering reminder of why we need to always remain vigilant to protect workers”.

Amazon is planning major job cuts among its corporate workers as soon as this week, multiple media outlets have reported.

The online retail giant plans to lay off as many as 30,000 employees as part of cost-cutting measures led by chief executive Andy Jassy, according to the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Each cited sources stating the same number of layoffs.

Amazon declined to comment when contacted by the BBC.

If confirmed, the layoffs could be one of the largest seen in recent months. It would be Amazon’s biggest cuts since 2022, when the company let go of around 27,000 workers over several months.

Amazon’s layoff plans were also reported by CNBC and the New York Times, citing sources familiar with the matter. The reports did not say where in the world job cuts will be made.

The number of potential layoffs would be around 10% of the company’s corporate headcount, but still a small fraction of Amazon’s total workforce, which has more than 1.5 million employees across its warehouses and offices worldwide.

The company has around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.

Like many technology firms, Amazon hired aggressively during the Covid-19 pandemic to meet the surge in demand for online deliveries and digital services.

Amazon boss Mr Jassy has since focused on reducing spending as the company invests heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) tools to boost efficiency.

Mr Jassy said in June that the increase in AI tools will likely lead to job cuts as machines take over routine tasks.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he said then.

The father of a released Israeli hostage who was forced to dig his own grave in a Gazan tunnel by Hamas has told the BBC his son’s health is “improving every day”.

Avishai David was speaking after his 24-year-old son Evyatar David and two other freed hostages – Guy Gilboa Dalal and Eitan Mor – were discharged from hospital to a hero’s welcome at their homes on Sunday.

“I can’t explain how happy it makes me feel to see him growing back to his old self,” the father added.

In August, two months before Evyatar’s release, Hamas had posted a video showing him emaciated in a narrow concrete tunnel – a move that drew condemnation from Israel and many Western leaders.

Avishai David told the BBC he was happy to see his son’s “vitality improving every day, his colour returning [to his face], his cheeks getting fuller”.

“Thank God, he pulled through it and he’s strong.”

The father said he had suffered for months knowing that his son was only “80km away… and I can’t help him”.

“It devastated me,” he said, adding that he “couldn’t sleep, eat, drink properly.”

In August, Evyatar’s brother Ilay told the BBC the Hamas video was a “new form of cruelty”.

“He’s a human skeleton. He was being starved to the point where he can be dead at any moment, and he suffers a great deal,” Ilay said at the time.

In the footage itself, Evyatar said: “I haven’t eaten for days… I barely got drinking water.” He was seen digging what he said would be his own grave.

On Sunday, cheering crowds – including many friends and neighbours – greeted Evyatar David as he returned to his hometown of Kfar Saba in central Israel.

Dr Michal Shteinman, director at Rabin Medical Centre where the three released hostages were treated, told the BBC their bodies still bore the marks of “this horrific captivity”.

“We can see their blood tests… and we’ve also heard their stories… they are not lying. You can see the marks of this metabolic trauma. Their skin tells their story. You can see the scars and the wounds.”

But Dr Shteinman added that the hostages “came back stronger than they were”.

Evyatar was abducted from the Nova music festival during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

He and 19 other living hostages have been released by Hamas under the first phase of a US-brokered ceasefire deal earlier this month.

Hamas has also transferred 15 out of 28 deceased hostages. Thirteen were Israelis, one was Nepalese and the other Thai.

In exchange, Israel has freed 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,718 detainees from Gaza, and returned 15 bodies of Palestinians for every Israeli hostage’s remains.

The IDF launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 251 others hostage.

More than 68,000 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen by the UN as reliable.

Los Angeles played host to a spectacle of style and storytelling as Vogue World: Hollywood unfolded — an immersive celebration of cinema, couture and celebrity.

Blending the grandeur of classic Hollywood with the innovation of contemporary fashion, the event transformed the city into a living film set, with designers, actors and artists sharing the spotlight.

From cinematic runway moments to bold red carpet statements, the night brought together some of the world’s most recognisable names.

Here are some of the standout images capturing the energy, creativity and spectacle.

“I was in prison but you almost got there,” Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim joked to US President Donald Trump as the cameras rolled.

It was a dicey joke – one he quickly moved on from given Trump’s less-than amused demeanour – but also arguably one only a veteran politician basking in his recent wins would dare make.

He had just signed a deal with Trump to lower tariffs on Malaysian exports to the US from 24% to 19%. Although many other details remain unclear, any assurance that levies will not rise further is welcome amid all the uncertainty.

But most important of all, Anwar had secured Trump’s attendance at a regional summit whose relevance has been repeatedly questioned. The US president was at the meeting of Association of South East Asian Nations, or Asean, in Kuala Lumpur solely to preside over a highly publicised “peace deal” between Thailand and Cambodia, which Anwar orchestrated.

He also brokered the fragile ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia after deadly border clashes earlier this year – he stepped in after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on both sides if the fighting didn’t stop.

Some called it a diplomatic victory for Malaysia, while others said Anwar was simply in the right place at the right time – this year, it was the Malaysian PM’s turn to lead Asean.

But Anwar would argue he waited 25 years for his turn – a turbulent time in the wings, during which he was jailed twice.

Anwar first made his name as a charismatic firebrand student leader who founded Malaysia’s Islamic youth movement, ABIM.

In 1982, he joined the long-ruling party United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), surprising many who had expected him to steer clear of the establishment.

But it proved a canny political move – he climbed up the ladder rapidly and held multiple ministerial posts.

In 1993, he became deputy to then-prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and was widely seen as his heir-apparent. That was until they fell out over the handling of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which hit Malaysia hard.

Anwar was sacked the next year, then jailed for sodomy and corruption – charges he denies to this day, arguing they were part of a smear campaign to remove him as a political threat.

In 2004, a year after Mahathir stepped down, Malaysia’s Supreme Court overturned the sodomy conviction and freed Anwar. He emerged as the leader of an invigorated opposition, leading it to its strongest-ever performance in the 2013 elections.

Less than a year later, while preparing to fight a state election, new sodomy charges were filed against him, sending him back to jail.

Then in 2016, in a shock turn of events, Mahathir came out of retirement to run for top office, as then-leader Najib Razak faced corruption allegations.

Mahathir, then 92, struck an unlikely deal with the still-imprisoned Anwar, where he promised to free Anwar if elected, and eventually hand over the PM job to him. Their coalition scored a historic victory in 2018, but the alliance began to unravel as the nonagenarian kept shifting the goalposts for handing over power.

In the 2022 election, Anwar’s coalition won the most seats but still fell short of the number needed to form a government.

After days of deadlock, the king appointed him PM.

Some thought his term would be short-lived. But nearly three years on, the 78-year-old has already held on to the job for longer than his three predecessors.

Anwar’s biggest achievement is perhaps the political stability he appears to have brought to a country that has cycled through three prime ministers between 2020 and 2021.

“Malaysia these days is sometimes seen as among the most stable in South East Asia… which has also made it relatively attractive for investors,” says Syaza Shukri, a political science professor at the International Islamic University Malaysia.

But cost of living is rising, as it is in so many other countries. In July, 20,000 protesters took to the streets in Kuala Lumpur demanding Anwar’s resignation, over rising costs and a lack of economic reforms.

And expensive investments in semiconductor manufacturing and data centres are yet to pay off. That’s why the tariff deal with the US was crucial for the export-driven economy.

Others accuse his administration of not doing enough to promote a more inclusive Malaysia in the face of rising Islamism. Religious outrage has sometimes spilled into violence in the Muslim-majoirty country, which also has a sizeable ethnic Chinese population.

In 2024, a convenience store chain sparked an outcry for selling socks printed with the word “Allah” – the Arabic word for God – which many Muslims saw as an insult to Islam. The store was attacked with Molotov cocktail attacks as people called for it to be boycotted and for the company’s executives to be charged.

In 2023, a Chinese Muslim restaurant had to publicly apologise after it came under fire over a staff member wearing a crucifix necklace.

“The middle ground for Malaysian politics is no longer a tolerant multiracial Malaysia, but a conservative Malaysia with an Islamic outlook… Anwar’s position on political Islam may just move the country to unchartered territory,” professor of Asian studies James Chin wrote in a commentary published by CNA.

Critics also accuse Anwar of favouritism and question his anti-corruption pledges – in a contentious move, public prosecutors dropped 47 corruption charges in 2023 against a key Anwar ally, the deputy PM.

Internationally, Anwar has been more successful.

As prime minister, he has a deft balancing act ahead to make sure the emerging, economy he is in charge of doesn’t get caught between the US and China.

He had also invited China’s leader Xi Jinping to the summit. Xi had made an official visit to Malaysia in April, after a 12-year gap, but he skipped this week’s summit.

But Trump’s presence was no small thing for South East Asian economies that rely on the US market. It meant other countries, like Thailand and Vietnam, could also discuss details and gain assurances on tariffs – which they would count as a win, for now.

Anwar has been very active on the diplomatic front. Within his first year as PM, he visited all Asean countries, apart from Myanmar, where a civil war has been raging since the army seized power in 2021.

It has been one of Asean’s most intractable challenges – while Anwar has been praised for speaking up more on the issue, little has changed on the ground, partly because China has the most influence over the military junta.

Still, Professor Chin believes Anwar has “moved the needle a little” in restoring Asean’s relevance.

His role in the Thailand-Cambodia ceasefire also boosted Anwar’s standing, but these diplomatic wins mean little to ordinary Malaysians.

What’s resonated at home is his advocacy for the Palestinian cause, which has become louder since the war in Gaza began in 2023.

“Anwar needs to fly the Palestinian flag to the hilt to satisfy public opinion and fortify himself against attacks from opponents who accuse him of not going far enough,” says Ariel Tan, coordinator of the Malaysia programme at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

But Anwar also faces a dilemma because he needs to maintain good ties with Washington, Israel’s most powerful ally, Ms Tan says.

“Since Trump’s re-election, he has reduced his criticism of the United States’ role in the conflict. Engaging the US has become more critical, particularly with the tariff threat.”

The question is, will Anwar be able to balance the demands at home with those abroad, and start to replicate his international success on a local stage?

The answer to that will be crucial to his survival in the next election, due in 2028.

Prince Andrew hosted Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Harvey Weinstein at Royal Lodge, the publicly-owned home where he effectively lives rent-free.

The trio visited the Windsor mansion as part of his daughter Beatrice’s masked ball 18th birthday celebrations in 2006, two months after a US arrest warrant had been issued for Epstein for the sexual assault of a minor.

It had previously been reported that Epstein, Maxwell and Weinstein visited Windsor Castle for the event, but not that they had been hosted at Andrew’s private home.

Andrew, who is facing increased scrutiny over his living arrangements in light of his relationship with Epstein, has not responded to a request for comment.

It is understood that Epstein, Maxwell and Weinstein visited Royal Lodge ahead of the main party, which took place in the state rooms of Windsor Castle and involved a champagne reception and banquet.

The BBC has matched the trees and patio wall in a previously published image of the trio to other pictures of Royal Lodge.

Epstein was arrested by police in Florida eight days after the event.

Asked by BBC Newsnight in 2019 why he invited Epstein to his daughter’s 18th birthday two months after the US arrest warrant was issued, Andrew said: “Certainly I wasn’t aware when the invitation was issued what was going on in the United States and I wasn’t aware until the media picked up on it because he never said anything about it.”

Andrew relinquished his titles earlier this month amid renewed scrutiny of his links with Epstein following the posthumous publication of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir.

In the memoir, Ms Giuffre said she was forced to have sex with the prince on three separate occasions, including once with Epstein and “eight other young girls”.

Andrew, who reached a financial settlement with Ms Giuffre in 2022, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. In 2019, he told BBC Newsnight he did not remember meeting Ms Giuffre “at all” and that they “never had any sort of sexual contact”.

Fresh questions have also been asked about how he is able to fund his lifestyle despite not being a working royal.

The revelation that he has only ever paid a token annual rent on his Windsor mansion, Royal Lodge, has intensified the questions over his living arrangements – even though he paid for renovations and rent in advance so there were no monthly payments.

Buckingham Palace has not commented on whether Prince Andrew might move out of his home – or where he might go.

But BBC News understands that two other properties in the grounds of Windsor Castle, Adelaide Cottage and Frogmore Cottage, were options suggested to both Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson some months ago.

Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell seemed to be regular guests at royal residences in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

An image of the pair at Balmoral, the royals’ private Highland estate, was released by prosecutors during Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial.

It is thought to have been taken in 1999, when Andrew reportedly invited the couple to stay at the Scottish castle

In 2000, Epstein was a guest at Windsor Castle and the prince hosted a birthday event for Maxwell at Sandringham, the monarch’s private country retreat in Norfolk.

He told BBC Newsnight the latter event was “a straightforward shooting weekend”.

Ghislaine Maxwell visited Buckingham Palace as part of a private tour in 2002.

A photo of her sitting on the monarch’s throne next to actor Kevin Spacey was obtained by the Daily Telegraph almost two decades later.

It is thought Prince Andrew organised the tour but that Jeffrey Epstein was not part of it.

Andrew has confirmed he travelled on Epstein’s private jet, stayed at his private island, stayed at his Palm Beach mansion, and visited Ghislaine Maxwell’s home at Belgravia in London.

Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

In 2008, he reached a plea deal with prosecutors after the parents of a 14-year-old girl told police in Florida that Epstein had molested their daughter at his Palm Beach home.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence in the US for recruiting and trafficking four teenage girls for sexual abuse by Epstein, her then boyfriend.

Weinstein has been convicted of sexual assault by courts in New York and Los Angeles, but has secured a retrial on some of his convictions.

A Dutch Olympic volleyball player convicted of raping a British girl a decade ago has been denied a visa to compete in Australia.

Steven van de Velde, 31, was due to play at the Beach Volleyball World Championships in Adelaide, South Australia, next month.

In 2016, the then 21-year-old pleaded guilty to three counts of raping a 12-year-old girl in Milton Keynes and was sentenced to four years in jail. He had met the girl on Facebook and travelled to England from Amsterdam before raping her in her home in 2014.

Two weeks ago, South Australia’s Attorney-General Kyam Maher wrote to the federal government, calling on authorities to reject his visa as his crimes were “utterly abhorrent”.

The letter also said “we do not believe that foreign child sex offenders should be granted entry to this country”.

Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the government will “continue to use every tool we have available to ensure that Australians can be safe and feel safe in their communities”.

After the rape in 2014, Van de Velde returned to the Netherlands but in 2016, he was extradited to the UK and arrested. Ahead of his sentencing, the court heard he was aware of the girl’s age.

He served 12 months of his four-year sentence and restarted his professional sporting career in 2018, playing for his national team in several global tournaments.

Last year, he represented the Netherlands at the Paris Olympics and was booed by some people in the crowd. Earlier, an online petition calling for him to be banned from the Olympics had attracted 90,000 signatures.

The BBC has contacted the organisers of the world championship event in South Australia and the Dutch national volleyball association for comment.

Two people have been killed in an underground explosion at a mine in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), the first such incident of its kind since 2015.

Emergency services were called to the Endeavor mine at Cobar, about 700km (435 miles) northwest of Sydney, in the early hours of Tuesday after reports two people had been critically injured.

Police said a man, in his 60s, was confirmed dead at the scene and two women, both in their 20s, were brought to the surface, but one later died. The second woman was airlifted to hospital for minor injuries and shock.

Polymetals Resources, which bought the Endeavour mine in 2023, said all operations at the site had been temporarily suspended.

It did not say what caused the explosion. The company’s executive chairman Dave Sproule said it was “shocked and saddened by the tragic incident” and “our deepest thoughts and condolences go out to the employee’s families, friends and colleagues”.

Fatalities from mine explosions are rare in Australia, with the most recent death happening in 2015 at a mine in Queensland according to Safe Work Australia.

Cobar Mayor Jarrod Marsden said it was an “absolutely tragic” situation.

“The most valuable thing to come out of a mine are the miners, and two families don’t get to see their loved ones anymore,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

“Cobar is a small mining community, it’s very tight-knit, and I’m sure everyone’s going to be thinking of their families today.”

A report will be prepared for the coroner and an investigation into the incident will be carried out by the state’s workplace safety authority.

According to the Endeavour mine’s website, it had been operating continuously from 1982 to 2020 and the new owners were in the process of restarting mining activities for silver, zinc and lead metal production this year.

The mine includes a 7km (4.3 miles) decline and 300m shaft, the site said.

NSW Premier Chris Minns extended his condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of the workers who died.

“This is a heartbreaking day for the Cobar community and will be felt across the entire mining industry,” he said.

Safety protocols and procedures have “greatly improved in mining”, Minns said, but the two deaths were a “sobering reminder of why we need to always remain vigilant to protect workers”.

US President Donald Trump has not ruled out the possibility of seeking a third term for the White House, saying he would “love to do it”.

But Trump rejected the possibility of running for vice-president in 2028 – an idea floated by some supporters as a way for him to circumvent the US constitution that bars the president from running for a third term.

Speaking to reporters during his trip to Asia, Trump described the idea as “too cute” and said it “wouldn’t be right”.

It is unclear what method he would use to run again. Last week, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said that a “plan” was in place to secure the 79-year-old president another term.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to Japan from Malaysia, Trump said that while he would “be allowed” to run again as vice-president, he had no plans to do so.

“I think people wouldn’t like that,” he said. “It’s too cute. It wouldn’t be right.”

Talking about the possibility of a third term, Trump said: “I haven’t really thought about it. But I have the best poll numbers that I’ve ever had.”

Additionally, Trump also suggested vice-president JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as potential successors, calling them “unstoppable”.

“All I can tell you is that we have a great group of people, which they don’t,” he added, referring to Democrats.

• Can Trump serve a third term as US president?

The 22nd amendment of the US constitution bars presidents from seeking a third term.

Repealing the amendment would require approval from two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and then ratification by 38 of the 50 state legislatures – a process viewed as highly unlikely.

Last week, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon – who remains a vocal supporter – claimed there was a “plan” to secure a third term for Trump.

“Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that,” Bannon told The Economist. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”

In March, Trump told CNBC he would “probably not” run again, though he later said he was “not joking” about the possibility.

It is still unclear which Democrats intend to run for the White House in 2028, although several have already expressed an interest.

On Sunday, California Governor Gavin Newsom told CBS, the BBC’s US partner, that he would “be lying” if he said he was not giving serious thought to a presidential bid.

Former vice-president Kamala Harris also told the BBC she may run again and that she could “possibly” be president in the future.

Vishal Kalita’s collection of music cassettes has turned his residence in India’s Assam state into a private museum.

For more than a decade, the 30-year-old has been travelling across the country buying obsolete tapes, which he has carefully stored at his home in Guwahati city.

The collection, which was opened to the public last month, also includes hundreds of CDs and rare posters of musicians from around the world.

But it’s the discography of Zubeen Garg, a singer and composer from the state, that has been drawing the most number of visitors.

A cultural icon in Assam, Garg died in Singapore last month, leaving his millions of fans heartbroken.

Mr Kalita has some 38,000 songs of the singer in his collection, including songs that cannot be found anywhere else today, he says.

On 16 September, just days before his death, Garg had even visited Mr Kalita’s residence and said the collection reminded him of some of his “long-forgotten” creations.

Mr Kalita is now part of a larger network of Garg’s fans and friends who are trying to make his oeuvre more accessible through online streaming platforms and ensure royalties for his family.

“Some of these cassettes are too old and can get damaged. I want to bring them back to public memory,” he says.

But can he do it?

• A beloved Indian singer drowned in Singapore. Now fans want answers

Many of Garg’s songs cannot be uploaded online without risking copyright violation owing to a lack of clarity over their ownership, which is scattered among a complicated network of producers, distributors and music labels.

It’s not just him – music ownership is a long-debated subject globally.

For instance, 14-time Grammy winner Taylor Swift had to re-record her albums to own all her music, while several other musicians have started their own labels to retain full or partial control over their work. In India, too, music ownership has long been mired in tensions around contracts tilted in favour of producers and labels over creators.

Garg’s fans got a glimpse of this complicated universe soon after his death, when many of them went searching for one of his most popular songs, Mayabini Ratir Bukut, on a popular music streaming platform, but found it missing. The song was later uploaded by a user but removed within a week due to licensing issues.

“There are hundreds of his songs whose ownership is either difficult to trace or remains contested,” Manas Barua, filmmaker and Garg’s friend, told the BBC.

In India, the Copyright Act, 1957, governs music ownership, with separate copyright for lyrics, musical composition and sound recording, says Delhi-based intellectual property rights lawyer Neel Mason.

The “first owners” of the lyrics and musical composition are the “authors” – the lyricists and composers, respectively. But when it comes to the sound recordings, “the producer is deemed to be the author”, so they are the first owner, says Mr Mason.

Owners can transfer ownership or choose to grant rights to third parties, exclusively or non-exclusively, through licensing, which can lead to a complex and often untraceable network unless paperwork is meticulously maintained.

In a career spanning 33 years, 52-year-old Garg sang in more than 40 languages and dialects. Some of his songs are owned by his own label, while many from the 1990s and 2000s belong to producers and distributors that pay him royalties.

The producers transferred the copyright to distributors, says Mr Barua. “For decades, such copyright transfers were done without charging money. There was no way for producers to monetise music other than through cassettes and CDs. So, they were dependent on distributors.”

New economic prospects around music ownership opened up only after private radio stations started acquiring licences from music owners for hefty amounts, and grew manifold with online streaming.

The music licensing ecosystem in India has evolved over the years, with focus moving from royalties to ownership, says music journalist Anurag Tagat. “The online streaming revolution has highlighted the importance of ownership and the economic opportunities that can emerge in the future.”

In Garg’s case, several songs have uncertain or contested ownership, and some of them can be found online, uploaded by random users only to be repeatedly removed. Also, many of Garg’s older tracks were never digitised and risk being lost.

Shyamantak Gautam, a producer of Assamese films and an associate of Garg, has engaged a team to draft a list of songs written, sung and composed by Garg.

“At least 1,033 of his songs are registered with the [Indian Performing Right Society] IPRS so far, and we are trying to register more of them,” Gautam told the BBC.

IPRS – India’s sole government-authorised organisation that collects and distributes music royalties – says it is ensuring that creators or their families are paid when their work is used commercially.

“The rapid rise of digital platforms has made ownership tracking more complex, with diverse licensing models, multiple stakeholders and music use,” IPRS chief executive officer Rakesh Nigam told the BBC, adding that Garg’s songs registered with them will “remain protected for 60 years beyond his lifetime”.

This is a great initiative, and it should have been done years ago, popular Bollywood singer Shaan told the BBC. “Tracking distributors at a regional level to fix music ownership can be a challenging prospect. But if they can do it as a team, that’s great.”

The producers of Garg’s songs were all from Assam, so it was not difficult to identify them, says Mr Gautam, adding that the challenge begins after that.

Mr Barua says, “We are building a chain to determine how licences changed hands among distributors. In his [Garg’s] case, several distributors who last held a licence or owned his songs are either dead or have wound up their business.”

Garg’s case is a window to the massive oeuvres of several Indian singers and issues of ownership right and compensation associated with them.

For instance, SP Balasubrahmanyam, who sang more than 40,000 songs, got into a legal dispute with legendary composer Ilaiyaraaja. Lata Mangeshkar, who lent her voice to more than 30,000 melodies, was a vocal advocate of artists’ royalties – an issue over which she fell out with producers and fellow artists in the industry.

Decades before Garg and several of his contemporaries in India started their music labels, legendary Indian singer KJ Yesudas did so in 1980. The central idea was the same: to have more control over their creations.

Meanwhile, in Guwahati, Mr Kalita is trying to get access to the latest Japanese technology to digitise some of Garg’s tapes that can’t be found online.

“I want these rare tapes to be digitised in the best quality. Zubeen Garg will live through his music. And, as his fan, that’s the least I can do for him,” he says.

US President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of deals on his Asia visit to secure the supply of rare earths, a critical sector that China has long dominated.

The deals with Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia differ in size and substance and it’s too early to assess their tangible impact. But they all include efforts to diversify access to the minerals that have become essential for advanced manufacturing, from electric vehicles to smartphones.

The agreements, which aim to lock partners into trading with the US, are a clear bid to reduce dependence on China, ahead of a key meeting with its leader Xi Jinping.

They could eventually challenge Beijing’s stranglehold over rare earths, but experts say it will be a costly process that will take years.

“Building new mines, refining facilities, and processing plants in regions such as Australia, the United States, and Europe comes with much higher capital costs, stricter environmental regulations, and more expensive labour and energy inputs [compared to China],” Patrick Schroder, senior research fellow at the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House wrote in an editorial this week.

It’s not clear yet if the $550bn US investment Japan had previously agreed to will be part of the rare earths deal. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is expected to flesh out those details with Japanese companies during his upcoming visit.

But it’s a turning point step in the US-China rivalry.

Beijing controls the processing of almost all the world’s rare earths, which has given Xi powerful leverage in the ongoing trade war with Washington. Chinese export controls have choked supply of rare earths recently as the two countries try to nail down a deal spanning a range of issues, from tariffs to the sale of TikTok’s US operations.

The controls have also raised familiar concerns across manufacturing hubs in the US, Europe and Asia – a reminder of how vulnerable global supply chains are to the rocky US-China relationship.

Before Trump even travelled to Asia this week, he clinched an $8.5bn deal with Australia, promising industrial co-operation and joint investment to build processing capacity for rare earths outside China.

Speaking at the time, during Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to the White House, Trump said that “in about a year from now we’ll have so much critical minerals and rare earths that you won’t know what to do with them”, adding that “they’ll be worth $2” – the suggestion being that prices would plummet as supply soared.

Both the timeline and the price are unlikely, but Australia is certainly an important partner in the US quest for critical minerals.

“The country is a periodic table that lights up like a Christmas tree boasting one of the broadest and richest concentrations of mineral resources on Earth,” Gracelin Baskaran and Kessarin Horvath of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies wrote in a recent essay.

Several companies are already building refineries, including Iluka Resources, which told the BBC earlier this year that it would be financially near impossible without government support.

The critical minerals deal with Japan involves the two sides agreeing to boost the supply and production of rare earths – and includes plans for co-ordinated investment and stockpiling of rare earths as well as a Rapid Response Group to manage supply shocks.

The deals with the smaller South East Asian economies are just as thin on details. Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia all agreed to increase US access to rare earths and export rules that would favour American buyers over Chinese companies. They also include promises that they will not block shipments to the US, and would encourage local processing and investment by non-Chinese firms.

But the deals with Malaysia and Thailand are non-binding agreements, or what we call a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU). Will they survive political shifts in these countries?

Another big question that has not been addressed is regulation – especially given potential environmental damage. With rare earths, it’s not just mining but even the processing that is a dirty business. It involves extraction, leaching, thermal cracking and refining, all of which produce radioactive components. The impact in China has been well-documented, which has meant that it’s not an industry other countries have readily embraced.

The world’s largest supplier of rare earths outside China is the Australian company Lynas Rare Earths. It relies on Malaysia for part of its refining but has faced a number of regulatory hurdles there over the years.

By binding regional heavyweights like Japan and Australia into investment deals which potentially give the US more control over rare earths supplies, Trump will enter into the high-stakes Thursday talks with Xi on firm ground.

But the fact is China still controls around 70% of rare earth processing. And catching up requires immense amounts of capital, strong environmental laws and technical expertise. Building a single processing plant can take years from design to full production. Australia has been serious about ramping up production of rare earths for a long time now, but its plants are still not up and running.

And China is hardly a silent observer in this region – trade with the world’s second-biggest economy is essential for all these countries, including Japan. So Washington cannot discount the influence Beijing wields, especially in South East Asia.

Supply chains governing rare earths need to diversify and transform. Commitments to co-operate and invest are a start, but the road ahead is long and complicated.

One longer walk a day is better for your heart than lots of short strolls, especially if you don’t exercise much, according to new research published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Walking for at least 15 minutes without stopping is ideal, it says. That’s about 1,500 steps in a row, which gives your heart a good workout.

Many people aim for 10,000 steps a day, but that number came from a Japanese pedometer advertisement – not science. Still, experts agree more steps are generally better for your health.

The study looked at 33,560 adults aged 40–79 in the UK who walked fewer than 8,000 steps a day.

They were grouped by how long their walks were (measured with a step-counter over a week):

• less than 5 minutes (43%)
• 5 to 10 minutes (33.5%)
• 10 to 15 minutes (15.5%)
• 15 minutes or more (8%)

The researchers, from the University of Sydney and the Universidad Europea in Spain, tracked their health over eight years.

People who walked in longer stretches had a lower risk of heart problems than those who walked in short bursts.

Even among the least active – those walking under 5,000 steps a day – longer walks made a big difference. Their risk of heart disease and death dropped significantly.

Whether that’s because they were fitter to begin with isn’t fully clear from the study, but the researchers did try to control for this by taking into account factors like whether the person smoked, was obese or had high cholesterol.

The researchers say how you walk matters – not just how much. Walking for longer at a time, even if you don’t walk much overall, appears to help your heart.

Simple changes, like setting aside time for a longer walk, could make a big difference, they suggest.

Co-lead researcher Prof Emmanuel Stamatakis said: “We tend to place all the emphasis on the number of steps or the total amount of walking but neglect the crucial role of patterns, for example ‘how’ walking is done.

“This study shows that even people who are very physically inactive can maximise their heart health benefit by tweaking their walking patterns to walk for longer at a time, ideally for at least 10-15 minutes, when possible.”

Prof Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, said while the study shows a link between walking and better heart health, it doesn’t prove that walking directly causes the improvement.

The NHS recommends 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, like brisk walking, ideally spread out evenly across the week.

Older adults over 65 should try to move every day, even if it’s just light activity around the house, the advice says.

Emily McGrath, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Exercise helps everyone live a happier and healthier life. If you have heart and circulatory disease, it can help you manage your condition and make you feel better overall.

“You may find it hard to be more active at first, but as time goes on it’ll get easier as your body gets used to the activity. You may only notice small improvements at first, but it all adds up and counts towards keeping your heart healthy.”

If you are walking or cycling at night or in low light conditions, wear reflective clothing or use a flashlight or headlamp to increase your visibility to other road users.

Stay alert and be aware of your surroundings.

Use designated lanes or paths, if available. Always cross at designated crossing points where road traffic is more likely to see and expect you to be crossing the road.

Aarish, 15, sits on a hospital bed in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. A pair of dark glasses hides a painful injury in his left eye.

His cornea was damaged a week ago when an improvised firecracker device that he bought to celebrate the Diwali festival exploded near his face, causing him to lose vision in one eye. He has undergone emergency surgery and his doctor says only time will tell how much sight he can regain.

The teenager, who doesn’t go to school, says he’s most worried about missing work – his father works as a gardener and Aarish repairs televisions to supplement the family income. Child labour is illegal in India, but millions of children work. Indian law allows children above 14 years to work in some industries which are seen as non-hazardous.

Aarish is among hundreds of children and young adults from at least five states across northern India who have suffered serious eye injuries from using the same kind of device – called “carbide guns” – during Diwali.

The “carbide gun”, a rudimentary device, using calcium carbide in a plastic pipe, gives dramatic results – a loud blast that sounds like a gunshot, accompanied by fiery sparks. But the explosion is unpredictable and often delayed – officials told the BBC that many of the injuries occurred when children peeped inside the pipe to check just as the blast happened.

The sale and purchase of calcium carbide is regulated in India, but farmers and shopkeepers often use it to artificially ripen fruit. Police officials also say the crude guns are sometimes used to scare away animals from fields.

But many in India had not heard of these guns until last week, when a spate of injuries was reported after Diwali. Officials said these devices began flooding local markets in northern India after viral social media videos showed them being used as firecrackers.

More than 100 cases of carbide gun-related eye injuries have been reported in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal district alone, with at least 15 requiring surgery. Another 100 cases have been reported from three other districts.

In Bihar state, 170 cases have been reported, with 40 requiring surgery, says Dr Bibhuti Prassan Sinha, who heads the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology in Patna city. The actual numbers are likely to be higher, he added.

Cases have also been reported from the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, as well as capital Delhi. Some states, including Madhya Pradesh, have now banned the use of carbide guns as firecrackers and several sellers have been arrested.

Kavitha Kumar, head of ophthalmology at Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal, says that patients have been coming in with mild, moderate and severe eye injuries.

“In milder cases, skin on the eye and around it has sustained chemical injuries and thermal burns. In moderate cases, chemical particulate matter has caused mild damage to the cornea and in severe cases, there’s extensive damage to the cornea, causing temporary vision loss. With surgery, the patient may be able to regain their sight over time,” she says.

Some doctors told the BBC that they were shocked by the severity of the injuries. Dr Aditi Dubey from Hamidia Hospital said that she had never seen chemical injuries caused by Diwali firecrackers and had to research what “carbide guns” were.

Many patients said that they bought the gun after seeing it on Instagram Reels and YouTube videos. An attractive aspect was the price – at 150-200 rupees ($1.70-$2; £1.28-£1.70) a piece, it was a relatively cheap firecracker that promised to make a big impact.

A search for the term “carbide gun” on Instagram and YouTube throws up dozens of videos of young people making and using these devices, often accompanied by rap music.

Some accounts have also termed these videos “science experiments” with hashtags like “useful project” and “experiment video”.

Dr Sinha told the BBC that one of his patients was an engineering student who made the gun at home after watching such videos. He’s currently being treated after losing vision in one of his eyes.

Calcium carbide is a regulated substance in India – its possession, use and manufacturing are controlled by law because of its harmful effects and potential for abuse.

When it comes in contact with water, it produces acetylene gas, which is highly flammable and has damaging properties on health.

Under the Calcium Carbide Rules, 1987, a licence is needed for its sale, purchase and storage – but only for quantities above 200kg.

A government official in Bhopal who didn’t want to be named told the BBC that calcium carbide is still widely used to artificially ripen fruit despite a federal ban as it contains traces of poisonous substances.

Harinarayanachari Mishra, Police Commissioner of Bhopal, told the BBC that carbide guns are also used in northern India during wedding festivities and by farmers to drive away monkeys.

Dr Partha Biswas, president of the All India Ophthalmological Society, says carbide guns should be banned urgently.

“It’s a national problem. And the seriousness of these incidents shouldn’t be minimised as mere “accidents” that took place during the Diwali festival,” he says.

He adds that there’s potential for these guns to be used as firecrackers during other festivals and events, like when India wins a cricket match or during New Year.

“These crude ‘carbide bombs’ or ‘carbide guns’ can cause permanent blindness, disfigurement and disability,” he says, demanding a nationwide crackdown on manufacturers and sellers of the guns as well as more control over the supply chain of calcium carbide.

Back at Hamidia Hospital, Alzain, whose left eye was operated on after he lost his vision, sits inside the tight embrace of his mother. The seven-year-old had pestered his uncle to buy the gun after watching videos on YouTube.

Alzain’s worried mother, Afreen, hasn’t left his bedside since he was admitted a week ago.

“I’m scared for his future,” she says. “I hope he’s able to see again.”

A man accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has pleaded guilty on the first day of his trial.

Tetsuya Yamagami, 45, told a court in the capital Tokyo that “everything is true”, according to local media.

Yamagami – also facing charges over arms control law violations – used a homemade gun to shoot Abe during a politcal campaign event in the western city of Nara in 2022.

Abe – who was known for his hawkish foreign policy and a signature economic strategy that popularly came to be known as “Abenomics” – was shot several times, and died in hospital later the same day.

Yamagami is reported to have previously told investigators he targeted Abe because he blamed the 67-year-old for allegedly promoting the Unification Church, which he said had bankrupted his mother.

He alleged the donations, said to total about 100 million yen ($660,000), were made as proof of her faith to the church, more popularly known as the “Moonies”.

Abe’s killing shone a spotlight on close links between the Liberal Democratic Party and the church, leading to the resignation of four ministers in the intervening years.

In March this year, a Tokyo court ordered the disbandment of the church, stripping it of its tax exempt status and requring it to liquidate its assets.