Russia’s military has said it is “continuing to repel” a Ukrainian cross-border incursion into the western Kursk region – a surprise attack now in its fourth day.

The Russian defence ministry said Ukraine lost more than 280 military personnel in the past 24 hours – a claim that has not been independently verified.

Reports suggest that Ukrainian troops are operating more than 10km (six miles) inside Russia – the deepest cross-border advance by Kyiv since Moscow launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Ukraine has not openly admitted the incursion, but President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday that Moscow must “feel” the consequences for its invasion.

Meanwhile, 13 people have been killed and at least 43 injured in a Russian strike on a shopping centre in the Ukrainian town of Kostiantynivka, close to the frontline in Donetsk region, Ukrainian emergency officials say.

Residential buildings, shops and more than a dozen cars were also damaged in the attack.

News of the strike came hours after Ukraine’s military said it had hit a military airfield deep inside Russia overnight, destroying a warehouse containing hundreds of glide bombs.

The targeting of the Lipetsk air base, more than 350km (217 miles) from Ukraine’s border, is the kind of operation Kyiv has been wanting to do for some time.

These are the very tools that Russia has continually terrorised Ukrainian towns, cities and military positions with for most of its invasion.

The military’s statement also said the airfield was known for housing Russia’s Su-34, Su-35 and MiG-31 war planes.

Lipetsk’s regional authorities said a state of emergency was now in place in the area, confirming the detonations at an “energy infrastructure facility”. Residents of four nearby villages were being evacuated.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Russian defence ministry said its forces were repelling “an attempt by the Ukrainian armed forces to invade the territory of the Russian Federation”.

It said Russia was using aviation and artillery, managing to suppress “raid attempts by enemy units”.

But a video checked by BBC Verify shows a different picture, with a 15-vehicle Russian convoy damaged, burned and abandoned on a road through the town of Oktyabr’skoe, roughly 38km (24 miles) from the border on the Russian side.

The early morning footage also shows Russian soldiers, some injured, possibly dead among the vehicles.

A “federal state of emergency” has been declared in the Kursk region – a move that underlines how grave the current situation is.

Russia said that up to 1,000 Ukrainian troops, supported by tanks and armoured vehicles, entered the Kursk region on Tuesday morning.

Despite the deployment of reserve troops and orders to evacuate, Russia has been unable to slow the momentum of this Ukrainian advance.

This is more than the probing attacks we have seen in the past. Hundreds of soldiers with armoured vehicles are thought to have made it up to 10km into Russian territory.

It is a committed assault which has shocked Russia’s military and the Kremlin. For the last 18 months it has been Moscow dictating the dynamics of this war.

Now it is having to both contain this attack as well as domestic criticisms for not preventing it in the first place.

Despite long-time Western worries of an escalation, the consensus among Ukraine’s allies is that this operation falls within its right to defend itself.

While he is yet to directly reference the assault, President Zelensky said in a video address late on Thursday: “Russia has brought the war to our land and should feel what it has done.”

But with his Ukrainian forces still outnumbered by the Russians on the battlefield, the line between masterstroke and miscalculation is a fine one.

Like every morning, there was tension.

It crackled in the air like static. So much was happening lately that only a fool would walk into the hills and not be on their guard.

The sun was already high, pulsing heat across the stillness of the land. There was the sound of the animals’ bells, men and boys whistling to call in the dogs.

High on the hill opposite was the Jewish settlement of Rotem. Close by was an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) post. There to protect the settlers.

Anybody looking down would see the gathering at Ahmad Daraghme’s home: the Palestinian shepherd; the Israeli activists who support him; the foreign journalists with their camera.

Chatting to Ahmad was a 71-year-old Jewish man who regularly accompanies the shepherd into the hills, in spite of violence and harassment.

A man who, I sense, is not going to back down from any fight he believes to be righteous. “When I am convinced that my positions are true, I am ready to fight for my beliefs. Call it stubborn? All right,” says Gil Alexander.

He belongs to the Jordan Valley Activists, a group of Israelis committed to protecting Palestinians. They accompany shepherds to and from the grazing lands.

Maybe the settlers would appear around al-Farisiyah this morning, maybe not. The harassment was more frequent since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 251.

Settler violence that had been going on for years in the West Bank was escalating sharply, aimed, the Palestinians believe, at driving them off the land.

According to OCHA – the UN office for Humanitarian Affairs – there have been more than 1,000 attacks by settlers against Palestinians since October, with at least 1,390 people – including 660 children – displaced.

Lethal violence has frequently accompanied the attacks. OCHA recorded 107 that led to Palestinian fatalities and injuries, 859 causing damage to Palestinian property.

Thousands of trees and saplings belonging to Palestinians have been destroyed. Farmers like Ahmad describe how access to water for families, crops and herds is regularly blocked or limited.

International attention has been focused on Gaza, but the scale of settler violence prompted the US, the EU and Britain to impose sanctions on some settler leaders and, for the first time, against entire settler outposts.

The activists in the Jordan Valley understand that the important thing is to stay calm. No matter how much provocation there is.

Gil Alexander knows what the settlers are capable of, even when no resistance is offered. He has the scars to prove it. But this morning he is upbeat.

“A day like this,” he says, “it makes me feel good. If we can prevent attacks that gives me satisfaction.”

Gil has become a good friend of Ahmad Daraghme, who’s been harassed repeatedly. Ahmad accuses the Israeli army and police of taking the side of the settlers, a claim supported by numerous reports by Israeli and Palestinian human rights activists.

Pointing to the hills, around him, down to the main road, Ahmad says: “The problem is…all this land is forbidden for us. This hill is forbidden, all of it is forbidden. This situation is a mess: it doesn’t matter if we have permission or we don’t, they are always creating problems for us.”

We climbed up into the hills, over rocks and gullies, until a valley opened out below us. The land was auburn coloured, covered with dried stalks of recently cut corn, good fodder for hungry sheep.

Ahmad was ahead of us on his donkey, leading the flock towards the grazing land, as his forefathers had done for generations.

A mountain deer flickered through the heat haze and vanished. The picture was of a pastoral eden. In reality it is a bitter battleground.

Last December Gil Alexander and another activist were with Ahmad when settlers attacked at night. They were badly beaten and pepper sprayed.

In an incident elsewhere in the valley Gil collapsed to the ground trying to prevent a settler from scattering a Palestinian flock.

He has experienced constant threats. The fact that he is a devout religious Jew infuriates the settlers, who believe the West Bank – the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria – belong to the Jewish people.

Gil is the son of French Jews and emigrated to Israel when he was 20. His father fought in the French Resistance against the Nazis. “I feel like a representative of a humanitarian religious Judaism,” Gil says. “There are few today in Israel.”

The Palestinians like Ahmad Daraghme have lived under occupation since Israel conquered the territory in the Six Day War of 1967.

Since then over 160 settlements have been built in the Occupied Territories – including East Jerusalem – with around 700,000 Jewish residents. There are approximately three million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

For Gil Alexander, who describes himself as a Zionist, Israeli territory should end at the 1967 borders. Any settlements in the West Bank should only exist with Palestinian consent.

”We can love this land without being the owners, the sole owners of the land… In order that we are not constantly holding the local population by force, we should give away part of this land, in the hope that we will be able to get there freely later on.”

Gil says only this can avoid “the national religious conflict that has existed for 100 years, since Zionism existed, between the Palestinian population and the Jewish population”.

Although Gil believes “nothing is impossible” such an idea seems far-fetched in the bitter politics of the present.

Israel now has the most right-wing government in its history. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depends on the support of pro-settler parties for the survival of his governing coalition.

Recently Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, spoke of “mega-strategic” moves to expand settlement activity with government funding.

Three weeks ago the government declared nearly 3,000 acres in the Jordan Valley as “state land” – the largest such amount in three decades.

It comes on top of a similar declaration of nearly 2,000 acres in the area in March.

The top UN court – the International Court of Justice – has described the Israeli occupation as “de-facto annexation” and in breach of the Convention on the Eradication of Racial Discrimination which condemns “racial segregation and apartheid”.

Ahmad Daraghme knows how it works on the ground.

Speaking of his old grazing pastures, he says: “All these areas, all these places, we are not allowed to reach them. Some have been planted with olive trees. Some became reserved areas…They want us to leave this area. They want to be here. They don’t want us to be here.”

The political momentum is with the settlers.

Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, recently voted by a majority of 68 to nine to reject a Palestinian state on the West Bank on the basis that it “would pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilise the region”.

Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that Israeli security control over the West Bank is essential for the country’s safety.

To someone like Shai Rosengarten, people like the Jordanian Valley Activists are “radicals” who should stay out of the West Bank.

He says “the settlements in Israel are very important, because we think that in Israel, we have to connect to our heritage”.

Coincidentally, like Gil he is descended from Holocaust survivors.

His grandfather arrived in Israel from Poland in the years after the war.

Shai is a leading figure in the Zionist organisation Im Tirtzu which supports the settlements. Settler violence, he says, is only carried out by a minority. He claims that what he calls “radical” human rights activists are the problem.

“We see them as radical. And we see their activity as interrupting military activity. So this is very bad for the area.”

I asked Shai if what he really meant was that it was bad for the settlers?

“No, I actually mean that they are interrupting military activity. Of course, they’re trying to harass settlers, but they’re also trying to harass soldiers. And we have many examples of those kinds of activities coming in front of Israeli soldiers, and just, you know, put their camera in front of their face.

“And you know, this is very, very harming and this is very bad for the Israeli soldiers that need to concentrate on what is happening.”

Gil adamantly rejects such a characterisation and argues that he is defending true Jewish values.

He is part of an Israeli minority who have little political influence at the moment. But standing in the shade of an Acacia tree, with Ahmad rounding up the sheep and goats to corral them for the night, Gil Alexander insisted there was hope for a peaceful end to a conflict that he believed had no military solution.

“We have no choice… War, it’s obvious, will provide nothing. From war to war, we are weaker and weaker… Even our strength has limits.”

Filipino gymnast Carlos Yulo’s feud with his mother has been making headlines in his home country, threatening to eclipse the euphoria over his historic twin gold medal wins in the Paris Olympics.

At the centre of the disagreement is how Angelica Poquiz-Yulo managed her 24-year-old son’s finances and her reported disapproval of his girlfriend, a content creator on TikTok.

Intense coverage of the spat – which has played out in interviews, social media posts and even a hastily-arranged press conference – has prompted many to call on the media for restraint.

Mr Yulo is only the second Filipino to win an Olympic gold medal after weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz in the 2020 Tokyo games.

He is already a local celebrity and product endorser, with the twin medal haul only elevating his profile even higher while stirring national pride.

He will receive a 20 million-peso ($350,000; £273,000) cash bonus from the Philippine government. Corporate sponsors have pledged to give him a swanky condominium unit and a lifetime of free buffet meals and inasal, a local roasted chicken flavoured with lemongrass and ginger.

The capital city Manila has also started preparing festivities for his homecoming.

But soon after his second gold on Sunday, reports began to surface about an interview his mother had given to a local radio station that same day.

In that interview, Ms Yulo said that contrary to allegations, she did not mismanage her son’s money and had in fact deposited it at a bank in Manila. She said she received money on her son’s behalf.

Two days later, on 6 August, Mr Yulo released a video on TikTok, asking his mother where his past prize money had gone because he “never received” it.

Mr Yulo also said his Filipina girlfriend is not a “red flag” and that his mother had judged the woman because of her appearance and her liberal upbringing in Australia.

“My message to you, Ma, is I hope you heal and move on. I have forgiven you a long time ago. I pray that you are always safe and sound,” Mr Yulo said in the TikTok video.

Ms Yulo then called for a press conference on 7 August to respond to her son’s TikTok video and offered her hand in reconciliation.

She apologised for what she said in the interview, saying “rapid questions” from the media prevented her from thinking clearly.

Ms Yulo said she was issuing her “final word” on her disagreement with her son and that she was not after his money.

“This has reached an alarming level because now, the entire country is waiting for what each of us will say next, when this matter should have been kept private,” she said.

“I am not a perfect mother and God knows that you are not a perfect son. There is no perfect family,” she said.

Neither mother nor son had spoken since that press conference late on Wednesday.

On social media, fans have called for an end to speculation over Mr Yulo’s personal life, asking to shift attention back to his historic feat in Paris.

Filipino audiences have a penchant for soap operas and gossip, especially when it involves public figures – who they are dating and how they are spending their money.

There is even a local slang for the chief gossip in the neighbourhood or the chat group – Marites, a common name for a Filipina woman.

During the pandemic lockdowns, then president Rodrigo Duterte joked that too much time at home has turned the nation of 115 million people into the “Republic of Marites”.

But in the case of Mr Yulo, media attention has gone too far, said prominent journalism professor Danilo Arao.

“Let us not dilute the outstanding achievements in the 2024 Paris Olympics by reporting on trivial matters that do not carry news values and do not shape public opinion,” Prof Arao told the BBC.

Reporting on family feuds or personal problems of private individuals promotes an “unacceptable culture of voyeurism and rumour-mongering”, he said.

He said coverage of Yulo’s win should instead focus on the challenges facing Filipino athletes because of a lack of state support.

The Yulo family feud has also reignited conversations on social media on the expectations for children, under Filipino culture, to always obey their parents, even if they don’t think that it is to their best interest.

For now, social media users have resumed swapping funny memes about the country’s new sports star.

One disinfectant brand likened Yulo’s charm to its germ-killing power — 99.99% effective. Never mind the 0.01% that do not like him.

For Ms Yulo, she acknowledged that hurtful words have been said, but that they remain a family.

“Our home is open, whether or not you have money, the door is open in case you want to come back,” she said.

In the Saudi city of Jeddah on Wednesday, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of 57 countries, held an emergency meeting at Iran’s request to discuss, among other things, the assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week.

The gathering was an opportunity for Iran, whose Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has vowed “harsh punishment” for the killing, to lay out the reasons for an expected retaliation.

Both Iran and Hamas say the 31 July assassination was carried out by Israel, which has not commented but is widely believed to have been behind it.

Baqeri Ali Bagheri Kani, the acting Iranian foreign minister, said his country had “no choice” but to respond, and that this would take place “at the right time and in the appropriate shape”.

Mr Kani also described the possible Iranian reaction as “not only a defence of its own sovereignty and national security” but also a “defence of the stability and security of the entire region”.

Haniyeh was killed in a heavily protected guesthouse run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s elite military force, as he visited Tehran for the inauguration of the country’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian, a humiliating breach of Iranian security.

Since then, every sign, speech, or statement from Iran has been closely watched for an indication of how and when it might respond, amid concerns the retaliation could lead to a wider conflict with Israel.

But Mr Kani offered no clues and, with apparent limited intelligence by the West, it remains unclear what Iran could be planning to do.

In April, a strike on the Iranian diplomatic compound in the Syrian capital, Damascus, killed eight IRGC officers, another attack believed to have been carried out by Israel – and another embarrassing setback for Iran.

After days of telegraphing its intentions, Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel; almost all of them were intercepted by Israel and a US-led coalition, and the retaliation had no significant impact.

Last week, American officials suggested that this time, Iran might have been preparing a bigger operation, perhaps in attempt to avoid repeating that failure.

Recent media reports, however, suggest that details of how Haniyeh’s killing was carried out – possibly from inside Iran with local assistance instead of a precise air strike from outside – combined with the fact that no Iranians were killed and diplomatic efforts from Western and Arab countries, might have forced Tehran to reconsider its plans.

The Jordanian foreign minister made a rare visit to Iran earlier this week and, on Wednesday, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, spoke to Mr Pezeshkian and, according to the French presidency, urged him to “do everything to avoid a new military escalation”.

Meanwhile, there is also the wait for another expected attack on Israel, from Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia and political movement in Lebanon.

The group has vowed to respond to the killing by Israel of senior commander Fuad Shukr, which happened just hours before Haniyeh’s assassination, in its stronghold of Dahiya, in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Concerns of a major conflict in Lebanon are at their highest since Hezbollah stepped up its strikes against Israel, a day after the Hamas attacks on 7 October.

Most of the violence has been contained to areas along the Lebanon-Israel border, with both Hezbollah and Israel still indicating they are not interested in an all-out war.

So far, the group has mainly targeted Israeli military facilities, although its attacks are increasingly more sophisticated and hitting positions deeper inside the country.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who has promised a “strong” and “effective” response, described Shukr as one of the “strategic minds of the resistance” and said they had spoken on the phone an hour before his assassination.

In the past, Hezbollah retaliated to the killings of top commanders by launching barrages of rockets at Israel. Having such a high-profile figure assassinated in their base in the Lebanese capital will likely result in a more symbolic response, although almost certain to be within what the group describes as the rules of engagement.

In Lebanon, where people still remember the devastation caused by the 2006 war between the Hezbollah and Israel, many fear they are being dragged into a conflict that is not in the nation’s interest. But a damaged Hezbollah is not in Iran’s interest either. With its precision guided missiles and attack drones, Hezbollah is a key element of Iran’s deterrence, right on Israel’s borders.

Israel sees the Iranian nuclear programme as an existential threat, and Hezbollah would probably play a vital role in Iran’s response if its facilities came under Israeli attack.

Hezbollah is the main group in the so-called Axis of Resistance, an Iranian-backed alliance across the region that includes the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq, which have also carried out attacks on Israel and Western targets since October.

It is not known whether Iran and its proxies will co-ordinate their response, although reports in US media suggest Hezbollah may act independently, and first.

This week, Gen Michael Kurilla, the head of the US Central Command, visited Israel to assess security preparations, and the US is expected to, again, lead an effort to protect Israel in the case of an Iranian attack.

And the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to “exact a heavy price for any act of aggression against us, from whatever quarter”.

As the wait continues, flights in both Israel and Lebanon are being cancelled or suspended, airlines are avoiding the countries’ airspaces and foreign governments are urging their citizens to leave. Some people are preparing for war and the region could, deliberately or by accident, slide into one.

On Thursday, Donald Trump walked into a room of journalists gathered at his Mar-a-Lago estate for a news conference. He didn’t look particularly happy.

His remarks came after a week in which Kamala Harris and her new running mate Tim Walz have dominated media attention, raked in millions of dollars and enjoyed a bump in polling. Trump’s media event seemed more an attempt to win back the spotlight than announce anything new.

Just before Trump stepped up to the podium, one of his advisors texted me the wry assessment that Donald Trump is “never boring!!” (the exclamation marks were his).

The event included a couple of news items. Trump announced that he’d agreed to join a TV debate with Vice-President Harris on 10 September. ABC News, the debate host, confirmed that Ms Harris had agreed to participate as well.

Trump also said he’d like to do two more debates. There’s no word from the Harris team yet on whether they’ve accepted those additional matchups.

Over the course of the hour-long event, Trump took dozens of questions and he chastised Ms Harris for failing to take questions from reporters since ascending to the top of the ticket.

• Debate showdown between Trump and Harris set for September
• Three ways Trump is trying to end the Harris honeymoon
• ‘Is she black or Indian?’: Trump questions Harris’ racial identity

Much of the event, though, was spent on Trump’s old favourites, as if he was reaching for his rally hits. He talked about poll numbers, the unfair media, the dire state of the country and, yes, crowd sizes (even comparing his crowds to those of the civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, Jr)

Historically, one way Trump gets attention is by saying things that are controversial. And there was some of that today, too. He suggested America was on the brink of a world war and said Jewish Americans who support Vice-President Harris need “to have your head examined”.

This attention deficit is an unusual position for Trump.

The former president is not used to having to fight for the limelight, particularly in this election cycle. The Biden campaign was happy to let Trump dominate the news, in the belief that the more the race was about the former president, the better it would be for the current one. The Biden team wanted Trump front and centre.

But the shake up on the Democratic side has been dramatic and newsworthy and has pushed Trump off the front pages. To make things harder for the Republican candidate, much of the coverage of Ms Harris’s unexpected roll out as Democratic candidate has been positive. So, the strategy by Democrats has flipped.

Right now, Democrats are enjoying the media attention. Ms Harris wants this race to be about her. And with all the Democratic political drama, the press has been happy to oblige.

Hence the Mar-a-Lago news conference that didn’t really have much news.

Trump may do better following the advice of Marc Lotter, the Republican strategist who ran communication strategy for his 2020 campaign, who texted me to say the way the former president should win back attention was to stay focused.

“Define Harris and Walz on policy,” he said. “He wins on policy and results.”

To be fair, there was some of that in this press event. Trump repeatedly described Ms Harris as “extreme” and “liberal”. He did tout his own record on the economy and the border.

But the attacks got rather lost in his grievance about crowd sizes and how they are reported, and even suggested that there may be something unconstitutional about the Harris campaign.

And, then it was over. And, as if to prove a point, within minutes of Trump walking off stage, the fickle cable news cameras had shifted their lenses from Florida to

Michigan where Ms Harris and Mr Walz were holding a meeting with union workers. It was the Democrats time for some press coverage. Once again.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Huw Edwards has been asked by the BBC to hand back more than £200,000 salary he earned after being arrested in November on child abuse image charges.

The ex-presenter “behaved in bad faith” in continuing to take his salary despite knowing what he had done, said BBC Chair Samir Shah in a letter to staff.

Edwards, formerly the BBC’s most high-profile newsreader, continued to earn his salary for five months after he was arrested on three counts of making indecent images of children.

He was suspended in July last year and arrested four months later. He did not resign from the BBC until April.

Mr Shah said Edwards had been “living a double life” as someone who on the face of it was a much-admired broadcaster but who had “betrayed the trust of staff and our audiences”.

He said the broadcaster was the “villain of the piece” and the “victims are those children for whose degradation” he provided a market for.

Edwards pleaded guilty in July to three counts of making indecent images of children.

The offences are alleged to have taken place between 2020 and 2022 and relate to 37 images that were shared on a WhatsApp chat, according to the Metropolitan Police.

The BBC has not confirmed whether legal proceedings will be undertaken if Edwards refuses to pay back his salary.

Director general Tim Davie confirmed in an interview last week that the corporation knew the presenter had been arrested over the most serious category of indecent images of children in November.

It is understood that when Edwards was arrested, the BBC sought to establish if he admitted having images of this nature. The BBC apparently did query this but was unable to establish that fact.

In a statement, the BBC Board said it “supports the decisions taken by the director general and his team during this period”.

It added that had Edwards been up front when asked by the BBC about his arrest, “we would never have continued to pay him public money”.

“He has clearly undermined the trust in the BBC and brought us into disrepute”.

The statement also said the board has “agreed to look at lessons from this period, including the BBC’s approach to the rules surrounding payments when employees are suspended”.

It noted that while the nature of the charges relate to his own personal life, “the board believes these events have also put a spotlight on the question of power imbalances in the workplace”.

Between April 2023 and April 2024, Edwards received a salary between £475,000-£479,999, an increase of £40,000 on the previous year.

The BBC’s production arm, BBC Studios, also paid Edwards for covering royal and state events. This amount of money is not revealed publicly.

Last week, the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said Edwards should return the £200,000 to the BBC.

The BBC has also announced a new independent review into workplace culture.

The review will “include work already being undertaken within the BBC, as well as working with the rest of the industry as appropriate”.

More information, including the leadership of the review will be announced in early September.

The culture secretary welcomed the review and said “public trust in the BBC is essential”.

“BBC staff must be able to feel safe in the workplace and be confident that if non-editorial complaints are raised they will be acted upon and dealt with fairly and decisively.”

Ms Nandy added that she had spoken to the BBC chair in the past week “to convey these points in the interests of the public”.

The BBC has contacted Huw Edwards’ lawyer for comment.

Rapper Travis Scott has been arrested in Paris after fighting with his bodyguard, according to French authorities.

The 33-year-old US star is alleged to have attacked a security guard who attempted to break up the two men at the five-star George V hotel on Friday morning.

French prosecutors told the Reuters and AFP news agencies they had opened a criminal investigation into “unspecified violence” against the guard.

A representative for Mr Scott told BBC Newsbeat: “We are in direct communication with the local Parisian authorities to swiftly resolve this matter and will provide updates when appropriate”.

On Thursday evening, Mr Scott, real name Jacques Bermon Webster, was photographed at Team USA’s Olympic basketball match against Serbia.

He was pictured next to American businessman Michael Rubin and fellow rapper Quavo, former frontman of hip-hop group Migos.

Earlier this year Mr Scott was arrested in Miami in relation to an argument on a private yacht.

Showbiz news site TMZ has reported that prosecutors dropped a charge of disorderly intoxication against him, but he still faces a count of trespassing.

Mr Scott is a 10-time Grammy Award nominee and one of the biggest hip-hop acts in the world.

He was previously in a relationship with Kylie Jenner and the pair have two children together.

In 2021, 10 fans died in a crowd surge at Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, Texas.

He did not face criminal charges over their deaths but remains involved in civil cases alleging that organisers were at fault.

Last year he scored his first UK number one album with Utopia, which was released a week after a planned show in front of Egypt’s pyramids was cancelled.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

Carles Puigdemont, the exiled ex-Catalan leader, has evaded a massive police manhunt and fled Spain, his party has said.

Spanish authorities launched a large manhunt for Mr Puigdemont on Thursday after he made a shock return to Spain, gave a short speech to crowds in Barcelona and then disappeared.

The 61-year-old is wanted by Spain on charges linked to a failed bid for Catalan independence in 2017.

After a tumultuous 24 hours on the run, Mr Puigdemont is now back in Belgium where he lives, his party’s secretary general Jordi Turull said on Friday.

In 2017, Catalonia’s pro-independence leaders including Mr Puigdemont organised a referendum – which was ruled illegal by Spain’s constitutional court – and later declared independence for the region.

Madrid imposed direct rule on the region soon after and Mr Puigdemont fled to Belgium.

For much of the past several years he has lived in Brussels.

On his return after seven years in exile, Mr Puigdemont briefly addressed hundreds of supporters gathered near the Catalan parliament in Barcelona.

“Long live a free Catalonia!” he told supporters and international journalists on Thursday, before saying that he had returned “to remind you that we are still here”.

“Holding a referendum is not and will never be a crime,” Mr Puigdemont added before quickly disappearing.

In an interview with RAC1 radio station on Friday, Mr Turull said he knew the ex-Catalan leader was in Brussels but could not confirm whether he had made it back to his home in the Waterloo municipality.

The chief commissioner of Catalan police Mossos d’Esquadra, Eduard Sallent, told journalists on Friday he did not have any information about Mr Puigdemont’s whereabouts and the plan had been to arrest him “in the most suitable place”.

He confirmed that two officers were detained on suspicion of helping Mr Puigdemont flee, adding that “it is possible that other Mossos helped him in his escape” and the force would follow the appropriate criminal and administrative process for each case.

One officer allegedly owns a car in which Mr Puigdemont escaped after making his address, Spanish media reported. The force denied allegations that there had been any collusion with the former leader.

Instead, it said, he “took advantage of the numbers of people around him and fled the scene in a vehicle that the Mossos tried to stop but failed”.

According to the party’s secretary general, Mr Puigdemont had been in Barcelona since Tuesday before making his surprise appearance outside Barcelona’s parliament on Thursday.

Mr Turull said the former separatist leader had dinner in Barcelona on Tuesday night and spent all of Wednesday and Thursday in the region.

His appearance coincided with the investiture of Socialist Salvador Illa as the new Catalan president.

A manhunt was launched, with roadblocks set up temporarily around Barcelona and Spanish TV showing images from La Jonquera, a municipality bordering France, where police could be seen stopping cars and checking the boots.

Catalonia’s police are facing strong scrutiny from a Spanish Supreme Court judge, who has demanded an explanation as to why Mr Puigdemont was able to get away.

Judge Pablo Llarena, who issued Mr Puigdemont’s arrest warrant, has also asked Spain’s interior ministry about its plans to arrest him at the border.

In documents made public by the Supreme Court, Mr Llarena asked the ministry to explain what orders were issued to detain him “after his escape”.

On Friday, Justice Minister Felix Bolanos said the search for Mr Puigdemont was the Mossos’ responsibility as the law enforcement authority in Catalonia.

But Mossos director general Pere Ferrer said Thursday’s events left the police “in a situation they do not deserve” and blaming officers for “unresolved political problems is bad business”.

Austrian security officials say a 19-year-old was planning to kill “a large crowd of people” in a suicide attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.

Officials say the teen – who had previously pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group (IS) – confessed that he “intended to carry out an attack using explosives and knives”.

He is one of two suspects arrested on Wednesday. A third, aged 18 and an acquaintance of the main suspect, was arrested on Thursday.

Swift’s three sold-out shows at the Ernst Happel Stadium have been cancelled. More than 195,000 people had been expected to attend.

Local media have also reported that the 19-year-old had stolen chemicals from his former workplace.

The Kurier newspaper, citing sources, reported that he used to work at a metal processing company in his home town of Ternitz, and that he had made progress in building a bomb.

The outlet also reported that he had planned to drive a car into the crowd expected to gather outside the stadium.

Security officials at a news conference on Thursday did not comment on where he got the chemicals, but public security chief Franz Ruf told reporters that chemical substances and technical devices found at the main suspect’s house showed “concrete preparatory actions”.

The head of Austria’s Directorate for Protection of the State and Intelligence (DSN) Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, said weapons were seized from the main suspect’s house, and that “his aim was to kill himself and a large crowd of people either today or tomorrow at the concert”.

Mr Ruf added the teen had posted a video online confessing to the plot, quit his job at the end of last month and told people that he had “big plans”.

They also revealed that the main suspect – an Austrian citizen who was born there but who had North Macedonian parents – had recently changed his appearance and “adapted it to Islamic State propaganda”, and had been consuming and sharing Islamist propaganda online.

A second suspect – a 17-year-old Austrian of Turkish or Croatian heritage – was employed at a company which would have “provided services” at the stadium where Swift was to perform.

The 19- and 17-year-olds have been remanded in custody.

A 15-year-old, who was “in the area” of the stadium at the time, is being questioned.

Despite officials saying that they were not looking for any more suspects, a third – an 18-year-old Iraqi citizen – was arrested in Vienna on Thursday evening, Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said.

The man is also believed to have sworn an oath of allegiance to IS.

Speaking at the briefing on Thursday, Mr Karner said “a tragedy was averted”, and the attack was foiled with the help of international intelligence as Austrian law does not allow censorship of messenger applications.

“The terrorist threat has intensified throughout Europe and Austria was and is no exception,” he said, adding that major concerts are “often a favourite target of Islamist attackers”.

Coldplay are due to perform seven concerts in Vienna from 21 August as part of their Spheres World Tour.

Mr Haijawi-Pirchner said there was no information suggesting a specific threat to upcoming events in Austria, but security measures remain high.

Swift’s Vienna concerts were part of the European leg of her Eras Tour, which began in Paris in May.

The tour has made stops in a number of countries including Sweden, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Poland.

Swift is set to head to London to perform five shows at Wembley Stadium next week.

UK policing minister Diana Johnson said Scotland Yard would look at intelligence ahead of the Wembley Stadium dates.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has told Sky News that the city will “carry on” and that the police will work with City Hall and councils to ensure the concerts take place safely.

Nigerian police are investigating the death of a Nigerian transgender TikToker known as “Abuja Area Mama”.

The beaten and bruised body of 33-year-old transgender woman was found along a highway in the capital, Abuja, on Thursday, local media report.

Abuja Area Mama had a loyal fan base on social media, where she posted about being transgender and her life as a sex worker. She never used her full name, referring to herself sometimes as Ifeanyi.

Nigeria is a deeply conservative society and people who step outside the norms are often targeted. Last year the TikToker told of how she had been attacked and feared for her life.

Same-sex relationships are criminalised in Africa’s most-populous nation and many LGBTQ+ Nigerians live in fear.

Nigerian TikTokers who are perceived to gay have also become the target of homophobic abuse online.

In her last post on Instagram on Wednesday, Abuja Area Mama had said she was getting ready to go and see her boyfriend.

Hours later, her body was found along Katampe – Mabushi expressway in the Banex, Wuse II area of Abuja, in what is suspected to be a murder incident.

A team of detectives visited the scene on Thursday morning and “preliminary investigations revealed that the individual was a man fully dressed in female clothing with no means of identification on him”, a police statement said.

Abuja police chief Benneth Igweh has since ordered a “thorough and discreet” investigation into the death.

Last September, the TikToker said she had been stabbed by an unidentified person in what were unclear circumstances.

On her TikTok profile, she described herself as “the number one Abuja cross-dresser and queen of the street”.

She said her posts were intended to be a reflection of her life and educate her followers.

The news of her death has sparked an outpouring of grief on social media.

Even though Nigeria’s laws guarantee freedom from discrimination and the right to private and family life, mass arrests and detention of those in the LGBTQ+ community are common – especially in northern states.

“Taking laws into your hand because you don’t like another person’s sexual orientation is the worst form of inhumanity,” Martins Ifijeh, a local journalist, posted on X.

• Nigeria-EU deal sparks false claims over LGBT rights
• The Nigerian queer parties that offer liberation
• Lured into a trap and blackmailed for being gay
• The Nigerians worried about a bill to outlaw cross-dressing

Images of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting on the medal podium in Paris will go down as some of the most unforgettable of the 2024 Olympics.

A frenzied debate has raged over the International Olympic Committee clearing the duo to compete in the women’s boxing in Paris, despite them having been disqualified from last year’s Women’s World Championships for failing to meet eligibility criteria.

Amid the heat, science is shedding increasing light on our different chromosomal make-ups and what advantages they may bring to sport.

But the research is ongoing and even among the experts who spend their professional lives working on it, there are differing interpretations on what the science tells us.

We do know that the process of sex determination starts when a foetus is developing. Most females get two X chromosomes (XX), while most males get an X and a Y chromosome (XY).

Chromosomes influence a person’s sex. But hormones are important too, before birth – as well as later on during puberty. While the baby is still growing in the womb, hormones help the reproductive organs develop.

However, at some point through the pregnancy some babies’ reproductive organs don’t develop in the way most people’s do.

This can be caused by conditions called DSDs: differences in sex development.

There are a group of about 40 conditions involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs that develop in the womb. It means a person’s sex development is different from that of most other people’s.

These chromosome abnormalities are rare – but they have come into sharp focus because of the boxing row at the Olympics.

Both fighters were said to have failed International Boxing Association gender eligibility tests last year – but there has been conflicting information whether XY chromosomes or elevated testosterone were found.

While representatives of the fighters and the IOC insist the fighters were “born women, raised as women and always competed as women”, critics, including some of their opponents at Paris 2024, have speculated that perhaps the fighters have DSD.

Because these genetic variations are so many and so varied, some experts say it’s impossible to establish that everyone with a Y chromosome is a male and everyone without a Y chromosome is a female.

“Just looking at the presence of a Y chromosome on its own does not answer the question of whether someone is male or female,” says Prof Alun Williams, who researches genetic factors related to sport performance at the Manchester Metropolitan University Institute of Sport.

“It’s obviously a very good marker, as most people with a Y chromosome are male…but it’s not a perfect indicator.”

For some people with DSD, the Y chromosome is not a fully formed typical male Y chromosome. It may have some genetic material missing, damaged or swapped with the X chromosome, depending on the variation.

When it comes to being male or female, what is usually crucial is a specific gene called SRY – which stands for ‘sex-determining region of the Y chromosome’.

“This is what is called the make-male gene. It’s the master switch of sex development,” says Dr Emma Hilton, a developmental biologist who studies genetic disorders. She is also a trustee of the Sex Matters charity, which argues Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting shouldn’t be competing until further testing is done.

There are some people born with XY chromosomes who have lost what Dr Hilton calls the “make-male” gene.

“These people don’t make testosterone. They develop a very typical female anatomy,” Dr Hilton says.

So a test that identifies XY chromosomes does not offer a complete picture. And in the case of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, the IBA has not disclosed details of the way they were tested.

However, Dr Hilton also says that in most people with XY chromosomes, the SRY “make-male” gene is present.

These people usually have testicles which are often inside the body.

“When they hit puberty they start producing testosterone – which is what underpins male advantage in sports,” says Dr Hilton.

The most famous example is Caster Semenya – a double Olympic gold medallist and three-time world champion over 800m, though Prof Alun Williams says there is not direct evidence that DSD athletes have the same advantage as typical males.

The roadblock is in a gene required to generate external genitalia – which boys need in order to grow a penis. Anyone with the same condition as Caster Semenya has a mutation within that gene that stops it functioning normally.

In the womb, they will develop a male anatomy until the final stage of growing a penis – and when they are not able to, then they’ll start developing a vulva and a clitoris.

But they don’t develop female reproductive organs: they don’t have a cervix or a uterus.

These people don’t have periods and they can’t get pregnant. Having sex with males can be difficult.

Discovering you have this kind of genetic mutation can be a shock.

“The most recent woman we diagnosed with having XY chromosomes was 33,” says Claus Højbjerg Gravholt – an endocrinology professor at Aarhus University who spent the past 30 years dealing with DSD.

His patient came to see him because she had no idea why she couldn’t get pregnant.

“We discovered she didn’t have a uterus, so she would never be able to have a baby. She was absolutely devastated.”

Prof Gravholt says the implications that come with questioning one’s gender identity can be destabilising – and he often refers his patients to a psychologist.

“If I showed you her photo, you would say: that’s a woman. She has a female body, she is married to a man. She feels like a female. And that is the case for most of my patients.”

When Prof Gravholt asked her why she didn’t consult a doctor about not getting periods, she said there was another older woman in her family who never menstruated – so she thought it wasn’t abnormal.

There is another genetic mutation Prof Gravholt has come across.

He has diagnosed males who have XX chromosomes – which are normally found in females. “These men are infertile. They look like normal males, but their testes are smaller than average and don’t produce sperm. It’s always devastating when they find out. As they grow older, they stop producing testosterone in the way most men do.”

In some cultures, talking openly about periods and female anatomy is not culturally acceptable. In some parts of the world, women may lack the education to understand that there’s something atypical going on in their bodies.

And that’s why experts believe that many DSDs are never diagnosed – which means that comprehensive data is scarce.

But Prof Gravholt points to figures from Denmark as a good indicator.

“Denmark is probably the best country in the world at collecting this data – we have a national registry with everyone who has ever had a chromosome examination.”

He says that XY chromosomes in females are very rare – in Denmark it’s about one in 15,000.

But he believes that when adding these many genetic conditions together, about one in 300 people are affected.

“We are learning that these variations are more common than we thought,” Prof Gravholt says. “A lot of patients are being diagnosed later in life. The oldest person I diagnosed was a male in his 60s.”

Do people with differences of sex development have an unfair advantage in sport? The short answer is that there is not enough data to reach a definitive conclusion.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if some people with a type of DSD had some physical advantage over women,” says Prof Alun Williams. Those advantages could include larger muscle mass, as well as bigger and longer bones and larger organs such as lungs and heart.

He says they may also have higher levels of blood haemoglobin that lead to improved oxygen delivery to where it’s needed in working muscles.

“Some people with some types of DSDs might have advantages in some or all of those elements, ranging from 0-100%, depending on the type of DSD and its precise genetic cause.”

He believes his opinion is representative of the experts in his field, but that more evidence is needed.

When it comes to Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, we don’t have enough information to know if they have a DSD that would need to be regulated.

Regulating elite sports, which typically rely on male-female binary categories in competition, is complicated because the biology of sex itself is complex.

Dr Shane Heffernan has a PhD in molecular genetics in elite sports and is currently working on a paper on what athletes think about competitors with a DSD.

He says it’s all about the nuance of the individual’s genetic condition.

For example, females with a DSD known as androgen insensitivity syndrome have XY chromosomes; they produce testosterone; but their bodies aren’t equipped to process it. So they don’t get any of the benefits from that testosterone, like males do.

Dr Heffernan says that there aren’t enough known and studied athletes with a DSD to make a valid scientific conclusion as to whether they definitely have an advantage, and as to whether they should be eligible or ineligible to compete in the female category.

He believes that the International Olympic Committee is not basing its eligibility criteria on the best available science.

“This is worrying. The IOC makes an ‘assumption of no advantage’ – but there is no direct evidence for this, nor that there is a performance advantage with DSD athletes solely because of their genetic variations.

“We simply don’t have enough data. Many people hold an emotional position when it comes to inclusion in the female category, but how can the IOC justify this position – without the data to support it?”

He is one of many people who are urging the Olympics committee, international federations and funding councils to invest in research on athletes with a DSD – but he appreciates it’s difficult, because there can be a lot of stigma towards the individual athletes when it comes to these conditions.

Some are calling for mandatory sex testing at the next Olympics – including Reem Alsalem, the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls.

“Screening DNA is now a piece of cake,” Dr Emma Hilton says. “A simple cheek swab would be sufficient, and it’s minimally invasive.”

She says swabs should happen when athletes first register for their first affiliated competition – before they start winning medals and the spotlight hits them, so as to avoid what happened with Imane Khelif.

But there’s disagreement on that among scientists.

“A cheek swab wouldn’t allow you to reach a robust conclusion on someone’s sex and potential advantage in sport,” says Prof Williams.

He argues a comprehensive sex test would have to include these three categories:

1. Genetics (including looking for a Y chromosome and the SRY “make-male” gene).

2. Hormones (including, but not limited to, testosterone).

3. The body’s responsiveness to hormones like testosterone. Some people might have a Y chromosome, but be completely insensitive to testosterone.

He believes this is currently not being done because it’s expensive, it requires people with very specific expertise – and there are ethical concerns about the testing procedure.

“This assessment can be humiliating. It includes measurements of the most intimate parts of anatomy, like the size of your breast and your clitoris, the depth of your voice, the extent of your body hair.”

One thing is certain: this controversy is not going away.

For now, science is not yet able to offer a definitive view on how people with differing chromosomal make-ups should be categorised for the purposes of elite sport. For those who spend their lives trying to make sense of the science, their hope is that this latest row will propel much-needed research.

When Team GB’s Kyle Kothari reflects back on the journey to his first ever Olympic Games, he feels proud.

The 26-year-old is preparing to go for glory in the men’s 10m platform dive, the same event in which Tom Daley won bronze in Tokyo.

But, in many ways, being in Paris at all makes him feel like he’s already won.

After medals in lower-profile events, Kyle faced the possibility of career-ending operations, first in 2019 for a ruptured left achilles, and then the same injury on the other foot in 2021 – six months before the last Games in Tokyo.

“At that point, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to come back,” he tells BBC Asian Network.

Kyle says he started exploring life outside of sport, even working at JP Morgan as an analyst for seven months.

But receiving an offer to work full-time made him realise he couldn’t leave the sport just yet.

“Especially when I knew if I could stay injury-free, I knew how good I could be.

“If I didn’t give it a go, I’d be cheating myself later down the line.”

Growing up, Kyle, who is British Asian, says he was actually into gymnastics as a kid.

But he says he “loved” weekly diving sessions so much he chose the water as his future path.

According to data compiled by Sport England, about 95% of black adults and 93% of Asian adults in the UK do not swim, with South Asians among the groups least likely to be active.

“Being a British Asian in sport is already quite rare,” Kyle says.

“Especially when you get into the higher levels.”

He describes gymnastics as feeling “more diverse”, but aquatic sports like diving and swimming “were not diverse at all”.

“You sometimes need someone to do it, for you to believe that it’s possible,” he says.

That message – and sense of responsibility – hit home for him earlier this year, at the World Championships in Doha.

Speaking with the Indian diving team, he says they were surprised someone with South Asian heritage, like Kyle, was so good at diving.

“The coach told me about how some of the kids didn’t believe it was possible. Because there’s not been Indians that have been in the top six in the world before.

“It was the first time I actually thought: Hang on, it’s important to see someone that looks like you doing something.

“That makes you think that it’s possible.”

But Kyle also acknowledges his privilege in being able to follow his sporting dreams.

“Doing sport to this level requires such sacrifice. Not just financially but also from your family and support network,” he says.

Kyle points to the help from his family growing up in pushing him to achieve big things.

“My parents really valued sport growing up, and that’s quite rare in my community. My dad would have sold the house so that I could make an Olympics.”

That support also aided his decision to leave “a financially secure job” at JP Morgan.

“How many people are able to just turn an opportunity like that down?”

Now, he says he is grateful for National Lottery funding, and hopes that sports in general can become better-paying, so it becomes a realistic career path for people from diverse backgrounds.

After making the switch from synchronised diving to individual, Kyle says he’s “excited to compete, but equally nervous”, to be at one of the world’s biggest sporting events.

The last person to win a medal for Team GB in the event was Tom Daley, someone he credits along with other members of the diving squad for their help.

“The entire team is filled with people that have multiple world medals, European medals, Commonwealth medals.

“We are just super-close mates. There’s no egos, there’s no chip on their shoulder. You can ask anyone anything about any advice.”

The aim, Kyle says, is “to try and go for a medal”, but he’s pretty chilled if it doesn’t happen.

“In a weird way, I don’t really mind.

“I don’t think I’ll be that hung up on it because my journey to get here has been so much harder,” he says.

“You can always find something to be upset about after you’ve competed.

“You can nitpick and things like that. For me, if you asked me three years ago whether I’d be on this team… it’s just a real honour.”

Listen to Ankur Desai’s show on BBC Asian Network live from 15:00-18:00 Monday to Thursday – or listen back here.

The video begins with loud bangs on a door that leads to a dimly lit stairwell.

“They are entering my home arbitrarily. They are destroying the door,” a woman can be heard crying.

It is the voice of María Oropeza, a campaign co-ordinator for opposition coalition Vente Venezuela, who is live streaming her detention on Instagram.

The bangs increase in intensity as she tells her followers that she has done nothing wrong: “I am not a criminal.”

Officials from Venezuela’s military counterintelligence agency then burst through her door and the video cuts to black.

Ms Oropeza is the latest opposition figure who has been detained following the announcement in the early hours of 29 July of Venezuela’s disputed presidential election result.

In the days since, members of the security forces have seized Freddy Superlano and Roland Carreño – both of whom worked for the opposition party Popular Will – and Ricardo Estévez, a technical adviser for the same opposition movement as Ms Oropeza.

Amnesty International told the BBC they had “well-founded reasons to believe [the detained people’s] lives and integrity are at risk”.

The pressure group says that they have been seeing a new pattern of more targeted arrests by the Venezuelan authorities since the election.

Many of those detained have reportedly not been told why they were being arrested.

In the live stream of Ms Oropeza’s detention, she can be heard asking those banging on her door if they have a search warrant. She receives no answer.

Tension has been high since Venezuela’s National Electoral Council declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner of the election – a declaration that was immediately dismissed by the opposition, which said it had proof that it, not the government had won. Mass anti-government protests quickly followed.

President Maduro accused the opposition of instigating a “coup” and announced plans to build two new maximum-security prisons to house protesters it accuses of being “criminal fascists”.

The government says more than 2,000 people have been detained, some of which it accuses of “terrorism”.

Clara del Campo, Amnesty International’s Americas senior campaigner, said the arbitrary detentions had followed a “two-pronged trend”.

“On the one hand, they have been massive and indiscriminate when it comes to protesters who took to the streets to support the opposition’s claim to election victory and, on the other, targeted and selected towards human rights defenders and opposition members,” she explained.

According to Ms del Campo, the mass detention of protesters is aimed at punishing and dissuading people from publicly expressing dissent.

It is an observation echoed by Venezuelan human rights NGO Foro Penal, which told BBC Mundo that it had witnessed an unprecedented “escalation of repression”.

Foro Penal has received reports of people who had their phones checked arbitrarily while they were walking down the street, with the security officials stopping them citing social media posts or messages as the reason for their subsequent arrest.

The NGO told the BBC that people arrested in this manner have typically been held in detention centres without access to independent lawyers.

These detentions have led to a culture of fear, with some people now worried about sharing information on social media, attending protests, or even raising the alarm about people who have been seized for fear of punishment.

President Maduro himself has spoken of a strategy he called “Operation Tun Tun” (Operation Knock Knock).

Rights groups say it consists of the authorities going door-to-door to detain those with links to the protests or the opposition.

More than 2,000 have been detained since the election, according to government figures. Amnesty International says that among them are more than 100 children aged between 13 and 17 and at least six people with disabilities.

Ms Del Campo said those detained were “largely accused of ‘terrorism’ and related crimes, denied legal defence, remain disappeared and incommunicado, and are at high risk of ill treatment”.

She also said that human rights defenders and members of the opposition had been specifically targeted so as to “curtail political participation and the protection of rights”.

One of them is Kennedy Tejeda – a young pro-bono human rights lawyer with Foro Penal – who was arrested as he was trying to assist other people detained for protesting.

As well as implementing its “Operation Knock Knock”, the authorities have also targeted activists and opposition members in other ways.

The BBC has been told about dozens of people, including journalists and activists, whose passports have been revoked.

Edni López, a university professor and humanitarian worker who assisted many NGOs in Venezuela, was detained on the morning of 4 August at the international airport in the capital, Caracas.

She was planning to board a flight to Colombia from where she was going to fly to Argentina for a holiday with friends.

She last contacted her friends and boyfriend from the airport. In Whatsapp messages seen by the BBC, she told them that the migration authorities claimed her passport was “expired”, despite it being in date. They then lost contact with Ms López.

The airport later informed them she did not board her Avianca airlines flight.

A close friend of hers told the BBC that Ms López’s case was not unique: “Many people with no ties to any political cause have stated that their passports have been cancelled as well.”

The friend, who asked to remain unnamed, said that there were apparently “no clear criteria” for deciding whose passports were void and called the detentions “unconstitutional”.

The BBC has approached the Venezuelan government and Avianca for comment. Avianca said it could not comment on specific passenger cases unless ordered to by an authority, but added the airline only allowed passengers who in addition to meeting travel requirements had been approved by the country’s authorities beforehand.

We have not yet received a reply from the government.

Talking to reporters, Edni López’s mother made a plea to the country’s authorities: “Give me back my daughter, it’s not fair that a Venezuelan mother has to go through this.”

She also said that her daughter had a health condition that required daily medication.

After two days in which they visited several detention centres, her family finally learned that she was being held at one of them and told she would be taken to court in the city of La Guaira.

They have so far received no information about the charges being brought against her.

Her friend described the situation as “overwhelming”. “We don’t know the conditions of her captivity.”

Another person close to Ms López told the BBC: “The only reason we think this measure was taken is because she works in the humanitarian sector and because she is a university professor.”

The friend added that they had heard that the charges against Ms López were of a political nature.

“I can attest and testify that Edni has not participated in any political event, much less that she has issued or made a political publication on any [social] network or platform,” the friend insisted.

Ms López is not the only person to be detained at the airport.

A day earlier, prominent LGBT activist Yendri Omar Velásquez was also seized at the same airport as he was trying to leave Venezuela to report human rights violations to the United Nations.

He was told his passport was cancelled and was held for six hours before being released.

The impact of these detentions is immense, not only on those who are seized by the authorities but also on those close to them.

Ms López’s friends and relatives asked not to be named, fearing they could face repercussions for simply highlighting her plight.

Human rights groups say that this fear is exactly what the authorities are trying to achieve.

They argue that by targeting rights activists and lawyers – the very people that those swept up in the mass arrests may turn to for help – those already in detention are further isolated, and those who may think of speaking out will be deterred.

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Six thousand riot-trained police officers were on standby to respond to potential disorder wherever it happened on Wednesday night.

But while thousands of anti-racism campaigners turned out, the far-right was largely absent.

That was a key moment when the tide turned in this wave of public disorder, says Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, one of the UK’s most senior police officers.

But he stressed there was no room for complacency, with the police now “very focused on the weekend” with “many potential events still being advertised and circulated online”.

He added: “Yes it was a turning point. Is it a decisive and definitive one?

“We will see over the coming days, but it was clearly a shift in behaviour.”

Communities had been braced for a night of unrest after it emerged a list purporting to contain the names and addresses of immigration lawyers was being spread online.

But this largely failed to materialise. Forces were aware of 160 sites of potential public disorder, but only 36 of those needed a significant policing presence.

Why? It appears the huge number of riot officers on standby, combined with the stiff sentences of up to three years in prison already handed out by the courts, had been an effective deterrent.

In practical terms, potential rioters seem to have been put off by the sheer number of police officers deployed.

Looking back to Southport nine days ago, 500 or so rioters clearly outnumbered the Merseyside officers deployed to protect the local mosque.

But it is unlikely that protesters could have got more than the 6,000 officers out on to the streets across the UK on a Wednesday night to match police numbers.

Police say some known far-right agitators appeared on the fringes of events, lurking and observing activity, but then just melted away.

What’s more, some of the large anti-racism demonstrations last night in places like Walthamstow in north-east London and Newcastle would have made it impossible for anti-immigration protesters to get anywhere near their suggested target.

In Walthamstow, riot officers began the evening trying to protect an immigration lawyer’s office, but once thousands of anti-racism campaigners had turned up, the officers withdrew, and merely threw a protective cordon around the outside of the demonstration.

Chief Constable Stephens, who is chair of the National Police Chief’s Council, said he also believed community peer pressure had become an important factor.

“Up and down the country there have been thousands of conversations going on in families and peer groups saying ‘Is it worth it?’ And of course, it isn’t worth it.

“Young people’s lives have been irrevocably changed.”

There is a sense that nobody wants to claim victory too soon on this complex and fast moving situation.

Those 6,000 specially trained officers are still available to deal with future incidents, with officers being sent to different regions around the country as needed.

When I asked Home Secretary Yvette Cooper if she believed Wednesday night marked an end to the violence she told me the government was “not going to take its foot off the pedal on this”.

“The police and the criminal justice system all have our strong support to keep going and keep making sure criminals pay the price for the kind of violent disorder, the thuggery, the extremism and the intimidation we have seen in communities. We will not stand for this violence,” she said.

“We are going to continue with this strong policing response, making sure there are additional police officers ready to respond, and also making sure we continue with prosecutions and with taking cases rapidly to court and getting sentences.”

Bringing those cases to court so quickly has taken an enormous effort by investigators.

They have pored over body-worn video and CCTV, and made use of facial recognition technology to match people in riot footage against known offenders.

Faced with overwhelming evidence, many of the rioters have pleaded guilty in order to reduce their sentences by a third.

For example, at Liverpool Crown Court, had Derek Drummond not pleaded guilty to punching a police officer, his three-year sentence is likely to have been four-and-a-half years.

And there are many others due to appear in court over the coming days in relation to this extraordinary week of violent disorder.

For many young women, there have been very few film adaptations as hotly anticipated as Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us.

The 2016 book became an internet sensation a few years ago – it took TikTok’s #booktok by storm with more than one billion tags and sold 20 million copies as the number one New York Times bestseller.

While on the surface the film appears to be a standard romantic comedy, it comes with a dark twist.

Starring Gossip Girl star Blake Lively, it tells the story of Lily Bloom, a young woman who grew up witnessing domestic abuse and winds up in the same position years later.

Lily, a florist in Boston, navigates a complicated love triangle between her charming but abusive boyfriend Ryle Kincaid – played by Jane the Virgin’s Justin Baldoni – and her compassionate first love, Atlas Corrigan, acted by Brandon Sklenar.

Speaking to the BBC at the premiere, Lively says she felt the “responsibility of servicing the people that care so much about the source material”.

“I really feel like we delivered a story that’s emotional and it’s fun, but also funny, painful, scary, tragic and it’s inspiring and that’s what life is, it’s every single colour,” says the 36-year-old actress who is married to fellow actor Ryan Reynolds.

But the film has been met with some criticism that it romanticises domestic abuse.

A two-star review from The Telegraph called it a “queasy drama” that “repackages domestic violence as slick romance”.

Tim Robey added that the film “splices abuse and glossy courtship in the big city to deeply dubious effects”.

Hoover has explained that her inspiration for the novel was the domestic abuse that her mother endured.

Rebecca Goshawk, who works for Solace, a charity that supports victims of gender-based violence, says she is worried about how the film may have covered domestic abuse.

“Film can be a really powerful way for young people to see examples of domestic abuse and educate them about healthy relationships,” she explains.

“But when it’s done poorly it’s really worrying as it could romanticise unhealthy relationships and young people don’t have the knowledge to see what is dangerous behaviour.”

Lively, who is also credited as a producer, tells the BBC that she is adamant the film has been made sensitively and “with lots of empathy”.

“Lily is a survivor and a victim and while they are huge labels, these are not her identity. She defines herself and I think it’s deeply empowering that no one else can define you.”

Fans at the premiere also say that they don’t think the book or film romanticise unhealthy relationships.

Taylor Lopez, 19, says that showing the story from the perspective of a victim who grapples with the difficult decision of loving someone but also needing to leave them is done really well.

Her friends Phoebe and Celina agree, adding that the film “perfectly comes together” and “the feelings and experiences of the characters are so relatable”.

They all also think that Lively, who rose to fame in the 2000s playing Serena van der Woodsen in Gossip Girl, is the perfect casting.

“In the book Lily is a 23-year-old and so people have complained about her casting but actually she’s the perfect choice,” Celina explains.

However, the critics have not been so favourable, awarding the film a mix of two and three stars.

The Independent said the film was “sincere but completely ludicrous” in a two-star review and added that Lively’s character “does not register as a real person, so, it’s odd, and a little uncomfortable, to see her burdened with such raw trauma”.

The Guardian acknowledged that there were “expected clichés, but there are also many that are mercifully avoided too, the story not always conforming to type”.

A four-star review from The Times was one of the most favourable and described the film as “Pretty Woman meets 50 Shades of Grey” and a “dizzy, guilty pleasure”.

“Lively is perfectly cast and has that combination of self-consciousness, determination and doubt that is wholly fitting for a character yearning to break free from the coercive clutches of those around her,” Kevin Maher wrote.

Adaptations of popular books, particularly those read by younger women such as Twilight and The Hunger Games, have become blockbuster hits.

Hoover and Lively’s loyal and impressively large fan bases may help It Ends With Us on to that list, despite the lukewarm response by the critics.

“If you remember being a kid and blowing up a balloon or into a milkshake, your cheeks got sore because there is an energy penalty associated with bubble formation.”

Paul Barrett, the Dublin-born chief executive of the Australian green energy firm Hysata, is explaining the plan to create the cheapest hydrogen in the world – by eliminating bubbles.

The company, based at Port Kembla, an industrial hub south of Sydney, is using a familiar process known as electrolysis, which involves passing electricity through water to split it into hydrogen and oxygen.

But Hysata has developed a special material which sits in the water and which it says makes its electrolyser much more efficient than competing products.

The company says it can produce a kilo of hydrogen using 20% less electricity than conventional methods.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element on the planet and, crucially, when used as a fuel or in industrial processes it does not produce carbon dioxide (CO2).

Many see hydrogen as the answer to cutting carbon dioxide emissions, particularly in heavy industry like steelmaking and chemical production.

Hydrogen production comes in four varieties – green, grey, blue and black.

The green variety is produced with renewable energy, grey comes from splitting methane into carbon dioxide and hydrogen, while blue is made in the same way, but the CO2 by-product is captured and stored.

The production of black hydrogen comes from partially burning coal.

But if there is to be a transition to green hydrogen then its supply needs to be massively increased.

“Ensuring you have the production of green hydrogen close enough to the demand point and being able to regulate the supply of that is probably the biggest challenge,” explains Dr Liam Wagner, an associate professor at Curtin University in Adelaide.

“The efficiency of production and the amount of energy required to run these processes is the biggest frontier.”

Australia is rich in natural resources and has long been the world’s quarry. It’s an export-driven nation; its coal has helped to power Japan, while its iron ore has underpinned much of China’s growth. Many hope that hydrogen could follow.

“The prospects for hydrogen are as a way of exporting energy to countries that can’t produce enough of their own either as hydrogen in a liquid form or as ammonia, which I think is the most likely,” Dr Wagner adds.

Hysata hopes to play a part in that. Its device was initially invented by researchers at the University of Wollongong in the state of New South Wales.

In a conventional electrolyser, bubbles in the water can be clingy and stick to the electrodes, clogging up the process and leading to energy loss.

By using a sponge-like material between the electrodes, Hysata eliminates those troublesome bubbles.

“It is not unlike your kitchen sponge in terms of what it does. It is just a lot thinner,” says Mr Barrett.

“It’s pretty easy to manufacture at a super low cost,” he adds.

Cost and efficiency have been major hurdles for the hydrogen sector, but Hysata has recently raised US$111m (£87m) in investment to beef up its production.

“What we are speaking about is natural hydrogen which is coming directly from the earth,” explains Dr Ema Frery, a research team leader at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.

“A lot of rocks that are in Australia can produce hydrogen. We have a lot of old granites that are now close to the subsurface and can generate hydrogen through radiogenic processes.”

So-called geogenic hydrogen is also known as white or gold hydrogen.

Dr Frery, a French-born geoscientist based in Western Australia, is investigating how it might be extracted, stored and used in an economically viable way.

“A conventional hydrogen system can consist of a rock capable of generating hydrogen at a given rate, migration pathways and a reservoir where the hydrogen can be stored.

“Surface seeps at the top of the reservoir can indicate the presence of a hydrogen system at depth,” she says. “It is happening in other countries. In Mali, people are extracting natural hydrogen from the ground for more than ten years to produce electricity for a local village.”

Despite the research work, some doubt that hydrogen will become a big export for Australia.

One of those is the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a global research organisation which advocates the use of renewable energy.

Exporting hydrogen from Australia would “make no financial sense”, according to Amandine Denis-Ryan, the chief executive of the IEEFA in Australia.

“Hydrogen shipping would be prohibitively expensive. It requires extremely low temperatures and large volumes, and involves high losses. Using hydrogen locally makes much more sense.”

She hopes that government funding will not be “wasted” on such projects.

Like bubbles on electrodes, new technologies and processes invariably hit sticky patches where progress is hindered and doubts amplified, but the architects of hydrogen’s advance are confident it has a key part to play in our energy transition.

Bahman Shabani, a professor at RMIT University’s School of Engineering in Melbourne, is working to store surplus renewable energy using an electrolyser, a storage tank and a fuel cell that together act like a battery.

“Hydrogen is gaining popularity all around the world. If you look at the investment levels in China, for example, in Japan, in Germany, in Europe in general, in the United States, they are all realising the importance of this area.”

Israel has agreed to send negotiators to a new round of talks over a ceasefire and hostage release deal, after a diplomatic push from the United States, Egypt and Qatar.

The three nations released a joint statement on Thursday pushing for the talks to take place between Israel and Hamas on 15 August in Doha or Cairo. Hamas is yet to respond.

The statement said a “framework agreement” was ready and that it had “only the details of implementation left to conclude”.

The push for new talks will be seen as an attempt by the US and its partners to stop regional tensions from spiralling out of control, after Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran last week.

Iran, blaming Israel, has vowed a response – though Israel has not commented directly on the killing.

The statement invited Israel and Hamas to restart talks “to close all remaining gaps and commence implementation of the deal without further delay”.

“As mediators, if necessary, we are prepared to present a final bridging proposal that resolves the remaining implementation issues in a manner that meets the expectations of all parties,” it said.

The statement was signed by US President Joe Biden, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

It said the “framework agreement” was based on “principles” previously outlined by President Biden on 31 May – which proposed a deal that would start with a full ceasefire and the release of a number of hostages. The UN Security Council endorsed that framework.

European Union chief Ursula Von der Leyen said she “strongly” supported the efforts to broker a ceasefire agreement.

“We need a ceasefire in Gaza now. That’s the only way to save lives, restore hope for peace, and secure the return of hostages,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the UK “fully endorses” the plan for talks, adding that it welcomed “the tireless efforts of our partners in Qatar, Egypt and the United States”.

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement on Thursday evening he had spoken with Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant to brief him on changes to US forces in the region and “reinforce my ironclad support for Israel’s defence”.

“I also stressed the importance of concluding a ceasefire deal in Gaza that releases the hostages,” he said.

Despite numerous rounds of talks, the challenge of reaching a ceasefire and hostage release agreement has so far proved elusive.

Hamas official Osama Hamdan said in June that the group was pushing for a “permanent ceasefire, a complete withdrawal [of Israeli troops] from the Gaza Strip” and a swap-deal involving Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously said the conflict can only stop once Hamas is defeated.

On Thursday, Israel continued its bombardment of the Gaza strip. Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defence force said it hit two schools, killing more than 18 people. The Israeli military said it had struck Hamas command centres.

Any proposed talks could be made even more difficult by Hamas’ decision to elect Yahya Sinwar as its new leader, replacing Haniyeh.

Sinwar, who Israel holds responsible for the planning and execution of the 7 October attacks, is seen as one of the group’s most extreme figures.

Amid fears of an attack from Iran or its allies, Israel’s security cabinet met in an underground bunker on Thursday, instead of its usual meeting place, Israel’s Channel 13 reported.

ABC News has said it will host the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on 10 September.

The network confirmed the showdown in a post on X, formerly Twitter, after Trump said on Thursday that he would be open to debating his Democratic rival multiple times before the November election.

“We think we should do three debates,” Trump said, suggesting two additional debates that he said would be hosted by Fox News and NBC, respectively.

Ms Harris confirmed that she will attend the ABC debate while at an event in Michigan on Thursday, and said later that she would be open to additional debates.

The network said the debate will be moderated by World News Tonight anchor and managing editor David Muir and ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis.

“I am looking forward to debating Donald Trump and we have a date of September 10. I hear he’s finally committed to it and I’m looking forward to it,” Ms Harris said at the event in Detroit.

Mr Trump, the Republican candidate, debated President Joe Biden once in June.

The two were slated to do so again on 10 September but Mr Biden withdrew from the presidential race after a disastrous performance against Trump in the televised matchup. That paved the way for Ms Harris to become the Democratic nominee.

The confirmation of the debate on ABC marks an end to a back-and-forth that followed Mr Biden’s decision to leave the race between the Trump and Harris campaigns over that planned showdown.

Trump had previously said that he wanted a debate hosted by the conservative network Fox News, saying it would take place in Pennsylvania, “at a site in an area to be determined”.

The Harris campaign had maintained they would still like to debate Trump on 10 September.

At a news conference on Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump also said he would like to debate Ms Harris two additional times – on 4 September on Fox News and on 25 September on NBC.

Trump said that CBS will host a debate between the two vice-presidential nominees, Republican JD Vance and Democratic Tim Walz.

NBC News is reportedly in discussions with both campaigns about a potential debate this autumn, the New York Times reported.

Fox News said it sent formal letters to both campaigns last month proposing a September debate in Pennsylvania, though the Harris campaign said on Thursday that “Trump has to show up” to the ABC debate before they confirm any further showdowns.

Trump also criticised Ms Harris for not taking reporter questions or doing an interview since she became the likely Democratic nominee just over two weeks ago.

He called her “barely competent” and criticised her intelligence.

Later on Thursday, Ms Harris told reporters that she has asked her team to “get an interview scheduled” before the end of the month.

Trump’s hour-long event was held amid reports that his campaign is feeling the pressure from Democrats, who have new enthusiasm under Ms Harris and have been dominating headlines.

National and battleground state polls suggest her campaign has gained ground in recent days, though the race for the White House remains a close contest.

The former president denied he had “recalibrated” his campaign to challenge Ms Harris instead of Mr Biden, and he appeared to prickle when asked about the audience Ms Harris draws at rallies.

“Oh, give me a break,” he said, arguing that crowds at his rallies were larger than at hers.

His Thursday news conference is the first he has held in several months, as his campaign has previously focused on holding rallies across the country.

Trump also praised his running mate Mr Vance, who was recently under fire for comments he made in 2021 when he said those without children shouldn’t be leading the country and that women who don’t have children are “miserable” and “childless cat ladies”.

“I have to tell you, JD Vance has really stepped up,” Trump said. “He’s doing a fantastic job.”

He took aim at Ms Harris’ track record on immigration and the economy.

He said that 20 million people had come over the US’s southern border with Mexico, possibly many more, during the Biden-Harris administration.

Since Mr Biden took office, the US Customs and Border Protection agency says almost 10.1 million crossings have been recorded.

While this is a significant increase on Mr Trump’s time in power and the highest figure recorded under any US administration, the 20 million figure does not seem probable.

The former president also said his tax cuts were “the biggest in history”.

But according to analysis by the independent Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, they were the eighth-largest since 1918 measured as a percentage of the size of the economy (GDP), and the fourth-largest in dollar terms since 1940 adjusted for inflation.

Although Trump didn’t introduce the largest tax cut overall, he did pass the largest corporate tax cut in US history.

He repeated his belief that US presidents should have a say over interest rates and monetary policy – a departure from the longstanding practice of having the US Federal Reserve, an independent body, oversee these matters.

He emphasised his priorities of lowering inflation, lowering crime rates and strengthening the military.

And he criticised the administration’s transport policy, saying people would be “forced” to buy electric cars.

However, the Biden administration has made it clear there are no plans for a ban on the sale of petrol vehicles.

Ms Harris on Thursday addressed United Auto Workers in Detroit, and thanked the union for endorsing her.

She said there are “89 days to get this done” ahead of the election.

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The Miss South Africa beauty contestant at the centre of a nationality row has withdrawn from the competition, saying she took the decision for her and her family’s safety and well-being.

Chidimma Adetshina’s announcement on Instagram came a day after a preliminary investigation by the home affairs department found that her mother may have committed “identity theft” to become a South African national.

Ms Adetshina – a 23-year-old law student – said she was born in Soweto, a township next to Johannesburg, and grew up in Cape Town.

In media interviews she explained her father was Nigerian and her mother was a South African of Mozambican descent.

For weeks her roots have been at the centre of a social media storm, with some South Africans questioning whether she was a South African.

As the row escalated, the organisers of the Miss South Africa pageant asked the home affairs department to conduct an investigation ahead of the event on Saturday.

In a statement on Wednesday, the department said it had so far found that the identity of an “innocent” South African mother “may have been stolen” by Ms Adetshina’s mother.

However, Ms Adetshina “could not have participated in the alleged unlawful actions of her mother as she was an infant at the time”, the department said.

It added that it was conducting further investigations with the aim of pressing criminal charges, while also obtaining legal advice “on the implications of the alleged fraudulent activity on Adetshina’s citizenship status”.

In an Instagram post, Ms Adetshina did not respond to the findings, but said she had taken the “difficult decision” to withdraw from the competition.

She said she was grateful “for all the love and support” she had received, and wished the remaining contestants the best.

“Whoever wears the crown, represents us all,” Ms Adetshina added.

• Beauty contest sparks row over who counts as South African
• Tyla’s racial identity: South African singer sparks culture war
• Nigerian anger over South African xenophobia

Katie Price has been arrested at Heathrow Airport for failing to attend court and taken into police custody.

An arrest warrant was issued for the former model on 30 July after she failed to attend a court hearing relating to her bankruptcies.

The Metropolitan Police said a 46-year-old woman had been arrested at Heathrow at 19:45 BST.

Ms Price was bailed hours after being held and will appear before a judge at the Royal Courts of Justice later on Friday.

She was detained after returning to the UK.

Photos have emerged showing her with bandages around her face, near police vans at the airport.

The PA news agency understands Ms Price, who was born in Brighton but lives in Surrey, was bailed by an out-of-hours magistrate later on Thursday evening.

She was declared bankrupt in November 2019 and again in March this year.

At a hearing in February, she was ordered to pay 40% of her monthly income from the website OnlyFans for the next three years, in relation to her first bankruptcy.

She was declared bankrupt for a second time in March because of an unpaid tax bill of more than £750,000.

Previously, Insolvency and Companies Court Judge Catherine Burton said Ms Price had received “very clear warnings” she must attend the hearing on 30 July.

She had been due to face questions about her finances in the specialist bankruptcy court in London from barristers representing the trustee of her two bankruptcies.

The judge at the previous hearing said she risked arrest if she did not attend further court dates, adding that evidence must be provided if she could not appear.

But the court heard it had been reported that Ms Price had travelled to Turkey.

Issuing the arrest warrant, Judge Burton said that Ms Price had provided no explanation for her absence from the court hearing.

Judge Burton added that an arrest warrant was not issued “lightly” but Ms Price had offered only “piecemeal co-operation” and had failed to provide the “most basic information” in relation to her bankruptcies.

Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz’s military record has been under scrutiny since he was announced as Kamala Harris’s running mate.

Historic accusations made by some veterans have been revived by his opposite number, Republican JD Vance, who himself served in the military.

Mr Vance says that Mr Walz intentionally avoided combat in Iraq by resigning shortly before his unit was deployed there, and that he has been dishonest about his role in the military.

We’ve looked into his record and the military service of Mr Vance.

Mr Vance claimed: “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the army and allowed his unit to go without him.”

Several former National Guard colleagues have previously publicly voiced frustrations at Mr Walz’s decision to leave their unit before deployment to Iraq – but others have rejected assertions that he retired to avoid combat duty.

Mr Walz served for 24 years in the Army National Guard, a military force which is usually deployed within the US to respond to events such as natural disasters, but is also part of the US Army’s reserve.

In February 2005, while he was still in the National Guard, Mr Walz filed an application to run to be elected as a member of Congress from Minnesota.

The following month it was announced that there would be “a possible partial mobilisation of roughly 2,000 troops from the Minnesota National Guard” to Iraq within the next two years, according to a 2005 press release from Mr Walz’s congressional campaign.

In the statement, Mr Walz said: “I do not yet know if my artillery unit will be part of this mobilisation.”

He added: “I don’t want to speculate on what shape my campaign will take if I am deployed, but I have no plans to drop out of the race.”

Mr Walz then retired from the National Guard in May 2005, which he later said was so he could focus fully on running for Congress.

It’s unclear exactly when he submitted his resignation notice. We’ve asked both the National Guard and the Harris campaign when this was.

His National Guard unit received orders to mobilise for Iraq in July 2005, and was sent there in March 2006, according to the battalion’s history page.

Mr Vance also says Mr Walz made “dishonest” claims about serving in combat in a video promoted by the Harris campaign.

During a clip in which he is talking about gun control in the US, he appears to say he carried weapons in war himself, according to the transcription from the campaign.

But what he actually meant is not entirely clear.

Mr Walz went to Italy with the National Guard in 2003 as part of support for the US war in Afghanistan – but he was never deployed to an active war zone.

Responding to this claim about Mr Walz, a Harris campaign spokesperson said: “In his 24 years of service, the Governor carried, fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times.”

The Trump campaign says Mr Walz “continues telling the lie that he retired as a Command Sergeant Major”.

His official biography on the Minnesota state website says “Command Sergeant Major Walz retired from the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion in 2005.”

He did reach the rank of command sergeant major near the end of his service, but he officially retired one rank below as a master sergeant.

A national guard spokesperson told the BBC that “his rank reverted to master sergeant on May 15th, 2005, for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the US Army Sergeants Major Academy. He retired the following day.”

Mr Vance served for four years in the US Marine Corps.

He was deployed to Iraq for about six months in 2005 as a military journalist, although he didn’t experience combat.

“I was lucky to escape any real fighting,” he said in his 2016 memoir.

He left the Marine Corps in 2007 as a corporal to attend Ohio State University.

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As Tropical Storm Debby drenches South Carolina, the region’s alligators and catfish are testing new waters – from puddles to backyard pools and the roads in between.

In a viral video, Robert Moose Rini watches from his vehicle as an alligator ambles across a rainy Hilton Head Island road before taking a quick break in a puddle. Mr Rini says he first saw the animal in the turn lane of the busy road.

“Imagine walking around the corner and seeing that sucker,” he said.

It’s a common fear, popping up in dubious social media posts every hurricane season: predators showing up where you’d least expect them.

Fake images of sharks in storm-flooded streets are so common, they have their own Wikipedia page. But alligators in backyards? Those are real for many Americans in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

Wildlife experts say that alligators don’t typically stray too far from their natural habitats. They stick to freshwater and like to burrow down when they sense a storm coming, the South Carolina newspaper The State reports.

But it’s not unusual to see alligators and other wetland creatures where human neighbourhoods and developments such as golf courses butt up against freshwater ponds, rivers and wetlands.

This summer, Hurricane Beryl and Tropical Storm Alberto were credited with pushing nearly 200 crocodiles to explore more populated areas in Tamaulipas, a Mexican state that borders Texas, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

In South Carolina, several videos show alligators popping up on roads. One woman on Hilton Head told the Island Packet newspaper that she looked out her window to find she had a pool crasher – a small gator enjoying the shallow end.

Mr Rini, a South Carolina real estate agent, tells the BBC that he has lived on the island, a popular vacation spot, since 1981. He says residents try to avoid the lagoons alligators live in, but they’re hard to spot among foliage and in murky water, especially after storms.

“They don’t bug you if don’t you bug them. But if they’re there, you know – they’re wild animals. They’re unpredictable,” he says, adding that he often has to warn out-of-town buyers with dogs and young children.

The animals inspire fear across the US coastal South, owing to their size, large mouths and prehistoric appearance. Female alligators tap out at around 10 feet, though male alligators can grow larger. And while they prefer to eat fish, amphibians and small mammals, alligators will snap their jaws at anything that comes too close.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission warns that even in neighbourhoods where residents have learned to co-exist with alligators, “the potential for conflict always exists”.

Crawl, a 2019 horror movie, depicts a Florida father and daughter fighting a pack of vicious alligators that invade their home through hurricane floodwaters.

But experts say that if treated with caution and left alone, alligators tend keep to themselves.

In fact, humans pose some threat to the species, which is protected. Drivers sometimes strike them trying to navigate roads in the rain. They can also get stuck and die in storm drains and other infrastructure.

Most are just looking for a place to ride out the storm, Matt Kraycar, owner of K&K Wildlife Services told the Island Packet. “They’re going to go back to where the food is and where they feel comfortable.”

They’re also not alone in wandering as Debby makes its way across the Southeast. Other animals are also showing up in unusual places.

Several videos after Debby’s landfall show a species known as walking catfish popping up in driveway puddles in Florida and South Carolina. The videos have drawn attention to the “slippery mucus”-covered species, which is native to southeast Asia and considered unwanted but invasive, reports CBS, the BBC’s American news partner.

Experts say the biggest animal-related risk to humans in floodwaters is snakes, which are harder to spot.

US prosecutors in Hunter Biden’s tax evasion case have accused him of accepting money from a Romanian oligarch who sought to “influence US government agencies”.

The accusation is part of a larger case against the president’s son, who is charged with evading $1.4m (£1.1m) in taxes between 2016 and 2019 while spending millions on luxury cars, drugs and escorts.

Republicans have long accused Hunter Biden, 54, of “influence peddling”, although Congressional probes have yet to uncover any wrongdoing.

The tax case is scheduled to go to trial in California in September. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

According to a court filing made on Wednesday in a Los Angeles federal court, the Romanian national hired Biden for legal work in 2015, at a time when his father was vice-president under then-President Barack Obama.

While the filing only identifies the Romanian businessman by his initials, GP, US media has identified him as Gabriel Popoviciu, who at the time was facing corruption charges in Romania.

In the filing, prosecutors said they plan to introduce evidence that Hunter Biden and an associate “received compensation from a foreign principal who was attempting to influence US policy and public opinion” and prompt the US “to investigate the Romanian investigation of GP”.

The document also says that Biden and his associate “were concerned that lobbying work might cause political ramifications for the defendant’s father” – Joe Biden – and wanted to conceal the “true nature” of the arrangement.

In total, prosecutors believe that Biden and two associates split $3m in payments from Popoviciu.

Popoviciu was sentenced to seven years in a Romanian prison on real estate fraud charges in 2017. He denied any wrongdoing.

Republicans in the House of Representatives – who last year opened an impeachment inquiry into the Biden family’s foreign business ties – had previously raised concerns about ties between Hunter Biden and Popoviciu.

“Told ya,” the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican wing wrote in a brief post on X, formerly Twitter.

James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, tweeted “bank records don’t lie”.

The latest claims against Hunter Biden come less than two months after he was found guilty on all three charges in a federal gun trial held in Delaware.

While he faces a maximum of 25 years in prison, he is a first-time, non-violent offender and experts say it is highly unlikely he will receive such a lengthy sentence.

Filipino gymnast Carlos Yulo’s feud with his mother has been making headlines in his home country, threatening to eclipse the euphoria over his historic twin gold medal wins in the Paris Olympics.

At the centre of the disagreement is how Angelica Poquiz-Yulo managed her 24-year-old son’s finances and her reported disapproval of his girlfriend, a content creator on TikTok.

Intense coverage of the spat – which has played out in interviews, social media posts and even a hastily-arranged press conference – has prompted many to call on the media for restraint.

Mr Yulo is only the second Filipino to win an Olympic gold medal after weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz in the 2020 Tokyo games.

He is already a local celebrity and product endorser, with the twin medal haul only elevating his profile even higher while stirring national pride.

He will receive a 20 million-peso ($350,000; £273,000) cash bonus from the Philippine government. Corporate sponsors have pledged to give him a swanky condominium unit and a lifetime of free buffet meals and inasal, a local roasted chicken flavoured with lemongrass and ginger.

The capital city Manila has also started preparing festivities for his homecoming.

But soon after his second gold on Sunday, reports began to surface about an interview his mother had given to a local radio station that same day.

In that interview, Ms Yulo said that contrary to allegations, she did not mismanage her son’s money and had in fact deposited it at a bank in Manila. She said she received money on her son’s behalf.

Two days later, on 6 August, Mr Yulo released a video on TikTok, asking his mother where his past prize money had gone because he “never received” it.

Mr Yulo also said his Filipina girlfriend is not a “red flag” and that his mother had judged the woman because of her appearance and her liberal upbringing in Australia.

“My message to you, Ma, is I hope you heal and move on. I have forgiven you a long time ago. I pray that you are always safe and sound,” Mr Yulo said in the TikTok video.

Ms Yulo then called for a press conference on 7 August to respond to her son’s TikTok video and offered her hand in reconciliation.

She apologised for what she said in the interview, saying “rapid questions” from the media prevented her from thinking clearly.

Ms Yulo said she was issuing her “final word” on her disagreement with her son and that she was not after his money.

“This has reached an alarming level because now, the entire country is waiting for what each of us will say next, when this matter should have been kept private,” she said.

“I am not a perfect mother and God knows that you are not a perfect son. There is no perfect family,” she said.

Neither mother nor son had spoken since that press conference late on Wednesday.

On social media, fans have called for an end to speculation over Mr Yulo’s personal life, asking to shift attention back to his historic feat in Paris.

Filipino audiences have a penchant for soap operas and gossip, especially when it involves public figures – who they are dating and how they are spending their money.

There is even a local slang for the chief gossip in the neighbourhood or the chat group – Marites, a common name for a Filipina woman.

During the pandemic lockdowns, then president Rodrigo Duterte joked that too much time at home has turned the nation of 115 million people into the “Republic of Marites”.

But in the case of Mr Yulo, media attention has gone too far, said prominent journalism professor Danilo Arao.

“Let us not dilute the outstanding achievements in the 2024 Paris Olympics by reporting on trivial matters that do not carry news values and do not shape public opinion,” Prof Arao told the BBC.

Reporting on family feuds or personal problems of private individuals promotes an “unacceptable culture of voyeurism and rumour-mongering”, he said.

He said coverage of Yulo’s win should instead focus on the challenges facing Filipino athletes because of a lack of state support.

The Yulo family feud has also reignited conversations on social media on the expectations for children, under Filipino culture, to always obey their parents, even if they don’t think that it is to their best interest.

For now, social media users have resumed swapping funny memes about the country’s new sports star.

One disinfectant brand likened Yulo’s charm to its germ-killing power — 99.99% effective. Never mind the 0.01% that do not like him.

For Ms Yulo, she acknowledged that hurtful words have been said, but that they remain a family.

“Our home is open, whether or not you have money, the door is open in case you want to come back,” she said.

In the Saudi city of Jeddah on Wednesday, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of 57 countries, held an emergency meeting at Iran’s request to discuss, among other things, the assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week.

The gathering was an opportunity for Iran, whose Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has vowed “harsh punishment” for the killing, to lay out the reasons for an expected retaliation.

Both Iran and Hamas say the 31 July assassination was carried out by Israel, which has not commented but is widely believed to have been behind it.

Baqeri Ali Bagheri Kani, the acting Iranian foreign minister, said his country had “no choice” but to respond, and that this would take place “at the right time and in the appropriate shape”.

Mr Kani also described the possible Iranian reaction as “not only a defence of its own sovereignty and national security” but also a “defence of the stability and security of the entire region”.

Haniyeh was killed in a heavily protected guesthouse run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s elite military force, as he visited Tehran for the inauguration of the country’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian, a humiliating breach of Iranian security.

Since then, every sign, speech, or statement from Iran has been closely watched for an indication of how and when it might respond, amid concerns the retaliation could lead to a wider conflict with Israel.

But Mr Kani offered no clues and, with apparent limited intelligence by the West, it remains unclear what Iran could be planning to do.

In April, a strike on the Iranian diplomatic compound in the Syrian capital, Damascus, killed eight IRGC officers, another attack believed to have been carried out by Israel – and another embarrassing setback for Iran.

After days of telegraphing its intentions, Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel; almost all of them were intercepted by Israel and a US-led coalition, and the retaliation had no significant impact.

Last week, American officials suggested that this time, Iran might have been preparing a bigger operation, perhaps in attempt to avoid repeating that failure.

Recent media reports, however, suggest that details of how Haniyeh’s killing was carried out – possibly from inside Iran with local assistance instead of a precise air strike from outside – combined with the fact that no Iranians were killed and diplomatic efforts from Western and Arab countries, might have forced Tehran to reconsider its plans.

The Jordanian foreign minister made a rare visit to Iran earlier this week and, on Wednesday, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, spoke to Mr Pezeshkian and, according to the French presidency, urged him to “do everything to avoid a new military escalation”.

Meanwhile, there is also the wait for another expected attack on Israel, from Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia and political movement in Lebanon.

The group has vowed to respond to the killing by Israel of senior commander Fuad Shukr, which happened just hours before Haniyeh’s assassination, in its stronghold of Dahiya, in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Concerns of a major conflict in Lebanon are at their highest since Hezbollah stepped up its strikes against Israel, a day after the Hamas attacks on 7 October.

Most of the violence has been contained to areas along the Lebanon-Israel border, with both Hezbollah and Israel still indicating they are not interested in an all-out war.

So far, the group has mainly targeted Israeli military facilities, although its attacks are increasingly more sophisticated and hitting positions deeper inside the country.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who has promised a “strong” and “effective” response, described Shukr as one of the “strategic minds of the resistance” and said they had spoken on the phone an hour before his assassination.

In the past, Hezbollah retaliated to the killings of top commanders by launching barrages of rockets at Israel. Having such a high-profile figure assassinated in their base in the Lebanese capital will likely result in a more symbolic response, although almost certain to be within what the group describes as the rules of engagement.

In Lebanon, where people still remember the devastation caused by the 2006 war between the Hezbollah and Israel, many fear they are being dragged into a conflict that is not in the nation’s interest. But a damaged Hezbollah is not in Iran’s interest either. With its precision guided missiles and attack drones, Hezbollah is a key element of Iran’s deterrence, right on Israel’s borders.

Israel sees the Iranian nuclear programme as an existential threat, and Hezbollah would probably play a vital role in Iran’s response if its facilities came under Israeli attack.

Hezbollah is the main group in the so-called Axis of Resistance, an Iranian-backed alliance across the region that includes the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq, which have also carried out attacks on Israel and Western targets since October.

It is not known whether Iran and its proxies will co-ordinate their response, although reports in US media suggest Hezbollah may act independently, and first.

This week, Gen Michael Kurilla, the head of the US Central Command, visited Israel to assess security preparations, and the US is expected to, again, lead an effort to protect Israel in the case of an Iranian attack.

And the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to “exact a heavy price for any act of aggression against us, from whatever quarter”.

As the wait continues, flights in both Israel and Lebanon are being cancelled or suspended, airlines are avoiding the countries’ airspaces and foreign governments are urging their citizens to leave. Some people are preparing for war and the region could, deliberately or by accident, slide into one.

On Thursday, Donald Trump walked into a room of journalists gathered at his Mar-a-Lago estate for a news conference. He didn’t look particularly happy.

His remarks came after a week in which Kamala Harris and her new running mate Tim Walz have dominated media attention, raked in millions of dollars and enjoyed a bump in polling. Trump’s media event seemed more an attempt to win back the spotlight than announce anything new.

Just before Trump stepped up to the podium, one of his advisors texted me the wry assessment that Donald Trump is “never boring!!” (the exclamation marks were his).

The event included a couple of news items. Trump announced that he’d agreed to join a TV debate with Vice-President Harris on 10 September. ABC News, the debate host, confirmed that Ms Harris had agreed to participate as well.

Trump also said he’d like to do two more debates. There’s no word from the Harris team yet on whether they’ve accepted those additional matchups.

Over the course of the hour-long event, Trump took dozens of questions and he chastised Ms Harris for failing to take questions from reporters since ascending to the top of the ticket.

• Debate showdown between Trump and Harris set for September
• Three ways Trump is trying to end the Harris honeymoon
• ‘Is she black or Indian?’: Trump questions Harris’ racial identity

Much of the event, though, was spent on Trump’s old favourites, as if he was reaching for his rally hits. He talked about poll numbers, the unfair media, the dire state of the country and, yes, crowd sizes (even comparing his crowds to those of the civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, Jr)

Historically, one way Trump gets attention is by saying things that are controversial. And there was some of that today, too. He suggested America was on the brink of a world war and said Jewish Americans who support Vice-President Harris need “to have your head examined”.

This attention deficit is an unusual position for Trump.

The former president is not used to having to fight for the limelight, particularly in this election cycle. The Biden campaign was happy to let Trump dominate the news, in the belief that the more the race was about the former president, the better it would be for the current one. The Biden team wanted Trump front and centre.

But the shake up on the Democratic side has been dramatic and newsworthy and has pushed Trump off the front pages. To make things harder for the Republican candidate, much of the coverage of Ms Harris’s unexpected roll out as Democratic candidate has been positive. So, the strategy by Democrats has flipped.

Right now, Democrats are enjoying the media attention. Ms Harris wants this race to be about her. And with all the Democratic political drama, the press has been happy to oblige.

Hence the Mar-a-Lago news conference that didn’t really have much news.

Trump may do better following the advice of Marc Lotter, the Republican strategist who ran communication strategy for his 2020 campaign, who texted me to say the way the former president should win back attention was to stay focused.

“Define Harris and Walz on policy,” he said. “He wins on policy and results.”

To be fair, there was some of that in this press event. Trump repeatedly described Ms Harris as “extreme” and “liberal”. He did tout his own record on the economy and the border.

But the attacks got rather lost in his grievance about crowd sizes and how they are reported, and even suggested that there may be something unconstitutional about the Harris campaign.

And, then it was over. And, as if to prove a point, within minutes of Trump walking off stage, the fickle cable news cameras had shifted their lenses from Florida to

Michigan where Ms Harris and Mr Walz were holding a meeting with union workers. It was the Democrats time for some press coverage. Once again.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Katie Price has been arrested at Heathrow Airport for failing to attend court and taken into police custody.

An arrest warrant was issued for the former model on 30 July after she failed to attend a court hearing relating to her bankruptcies.

The Metropolitan Police said a 46-year-old woman had been arrested at Heathrow at 19:45 BST.

Ms Price was bailed hours after being held and will appear before a judge at the Royal Courts of Justice later on Friday.

She was detained after returning to the UK.

Photos have emerged showing her with bandages around her face, near police vans at the airport.

The PA news agency understands Ms Price, who was born in Brighton but lives in Surrey, was bailed by an out-of-hours magistrate later on Thursday evening.

She was declared bankrupt in November 2019 and again in March this year.

At a hearing in February, she was ordered to pay 40% of her monthly income from the website OnlyFans for the next three years, in relation to her first bankruptcy.

She was declared bankrupt for a second time in March because of an unpaid tax bill of more than £750,000.

Previously, Insolvency and Companies Court Judge Catherine Burton said Ms Price had received “very clear warnings” she must attend the hearing on 30 July.

She had been due to face questions about her finances in the specialist bankruptcy court in London from barristers representing the trustee of her two bankruptcies.

The judge at the previous hearing said she risked arrest if she did not attend further court dates, adding that evidence must be provided if she could not appear.

But the court heard it had been reported that Ms Price had travelled to Turkey.

Issuing the arrest warrant, Judge Burton said that Ms Price had provided no explanation for her absence from the court hearing.

Judge Burton added that an arrest warrant was not issued “lightly” but Ms Price had offered only “piecemeal co-operation” and had failed to provide the “most basic information” in relation to her bankruptcies.

Huw Edwards has been asked by the BBC to hand back more than £200,000 salary he earned after being arrested in November on child abuse image charges.

The ex-presenter “behaved in bad faith” in continuing to take his salary despite knowing what he had done, said BBC Chair Samir Shah in a letter to staff.

Edwards, formerly the BBC’s most high-profile newsreader, continued to earn his salary for five months after he was arrested on three counts of making indecent images of children.

He was suspended in July last year and arrested four months later. He did not resign from the BBC until April.

Mr Shah said Edwards had been “living a double life” as someone who on the face of it was a much-admired broadcaster but who had “betrayed the trust of staff and our audiences”.

He said the broadcaster was the “villain of the piece” and the “victims are those children for whose degradation” he provided a market for.

Edwards pleaded guilty in July to three counts of making indecent images of children.

The offences are alleged to have taken place between 2020 and 2022 and relate to 37 images that were shared on a WhatsApp chat, according to the Metropolitan Police.

The BBC has not confirmed whether legal proceedings will be undertaken if Edwards refuses to pay back his salary.

Director general Tim Davie confirmed in an interview last week that the corporation knew the presenter had been arrested over the most serious category of indecent images of children in November.

It is understood that when Edwards was arrested, the BBC sought to establish if he admitted having images of this nature. The BBC apparently did query this but was unable to establish that fact.

In a statement, the BBC Board said it “supports the decisions taken by the director general and his team during this period”.

It added that had Edwards been up front when asked by the BBC about his arrest, “we would never have continued to pay him public money”.

“He has clearly undermined the trust in the BBC and brought us into disrepute”.

The statement also said the board has “agreed to look at lessons from this period, including the BBC’s approach to the rules surrounding payments when employees are suspended”.

It noted that while the nature of the charges relate to his own personal life, “the board believes these events have also put a spotlight on the question of power imbalances in the workplace”.

Between April 2023 and April 2024, Edwards received a salary between £475,000-£479,999, an increase of £40,000 on the previous year.

The BBC’s production arm, BBC Studios, also paid Edwards for covering royal and state events. This amount of money is not revealed publicly.

Last week, the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said Edwards should return the £200,000 to the BBC.

The BBC has also announced a new independent review into workplace culture.

The review will “include work already being undertaken within the BBC, as well as working with the rest of the industry as appropriate”.

More information, including the leadership of the review will be announced in early September.

The culture secretary welcomed the review and said “public trust in the BBC is essential”.

“BBC staff must be able to feel safe in the workplace and be confident that if non-editorial complaints are raised they will be acted upon and dealt with fairly and decisively.”

Ms Nandy added that she had spoken to the BBC chair in the past week “to convey these points in the interests of the public”.

The BBC has contacted Huw Edwards’ lawyer for comment.

Rapper Travis Scott has been arrested in Paris after fighting with his bodyguard, according to French authorities.

The 33-year-old US star is alleged to have attacked a security guard who attempted to break up the two men at the five-star George V hotel on Friday morning.

French prosecutors told the Reuters and AFP news agencies they had opened a criminal investigation into “unspecified violence” against the guard.

A representative for Mr Scott told BBC Newsbeat: “We are in direct communication with the local Parisian authorities to swiftly resolve this matter and will provide updates when appropriate”.

On Thursday evening, Mr Scott, real name Jacques Bermon Webster, was photographed at Team USA’s Olympic basketball match against Serbia.

He was pictured next to American businessman Michael Rubin and fellow rapper Quavo, former frontman of hip-hop group Migos.

Earlier this year Mr Scott was arrested in Miami in relation to an argument on a private yacht.

Showbiz news site TMZ has reported that prosecutors dropped a charge of disorderly intoxication against him, but he still faces a count of trespassing.

Mr Scott is a 10-time Grammy Award nominee and one of the biggest hip-hop acts in the world.

He was previously in a relationship with Kylie Jenner and the pair have two children together.

In 2021, 10 fans died in a crowd surge at Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, Texas.

He did not face criminal charges over their deaths but remains involved in civil cases alleging that organisers were at fault.

Last year he scored his first UK number one album with Utopia, which was released a week after a planned show in front of Egypt’s pyramids was cancelled.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

Austrian security officials say a 19-year-old was planning to kill “a large crowd of people” in a suicide attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.

Officials say the teen – who had previously pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group (IS) – confessed that he “intended to carry out an attack using explosives and knives”.

He is one of two suspects arrested on Wednesday. A third, aged 18 and an acquaintance of the main suspect, was arrested on Thursday.

Swift’s three sold-out shows at the Ernst Happel Stadium have been cancelled. More than 195,000 people had been expected to attend.

Local media have also reported that the 19-year-old had stolen chemicals from his former workplace.

The Kurier newspaper, citing sources, reported that he used to work at a metal processing company in his home town of Ternitz, and that he had made progress in building a bomb.

The outlet also reported that he had planned to drive a car into the crowd expected to gather outside the stadium.

Security officials at a news conference on Thursday did not comment on where he got the chemicals, but public security chief Franz Ruf told reporters that chemical substances and technical devices found at the main suspect’s house showed “concrete preparatory actions”.

The head of Austria’s Directorate for Protection of the State and Intelligence (DSN) Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, said weapons were seized from the main suspect’s house, and that “his aim was to kill himself and a large crowd of people either today or tomorrow at the concert”.

Mr Ruf added the teen had posted a video online confessing to the plot, quit his job at the end of last month and told people that he had “big plans”.

They also revealed that the main suspect – an Austrian citizen who was born there but who had North Macedonian parents – had recently changed his appearance and “adapted it to Islamic State propaganda”, and had been consuming and sharing Islamist propaganda online.

A second suspect – a 17-year-old Austrian of Turkish or Croatian heritage – was employed at a company which would have “provided services” at the stadium where Swift was to perform.

The 19- and 17-year-olds have been remanded in custody.

A 15-year-old, who was “in the area” of the stadium at the time, is being questioned.

Despite officials saying that they were not looking for any more suspects, a third – an 18-year-old Iraqi citizen – was arrested in Vienna on Thursday evening, Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said.

The man is also believed to have sworn an oath of allegiance to IS.

Speaking at the briefing on Thursday, Mr Karner said “a tragedy was averted”, and the attack was foiled with the help of international intelligence as Austrian law does not allow censorship of messenger applications.

“The terrorist threat has intensified throughout Europe and Austria was and is no exception,” he said, adding that major concerts are “often a favourite target of Islamist attackers”.

Coldplay are due to perform seven concerts in Vienna from 21 August as part of their Spheres World Tour.

Mr Haijawi-Pirchner said there was no information suggesting a specific threat to upcoming events in Austria, but security measures remain high.

Swift’s Vienna concerts were part of the European leg of her Eras Tour, which began in Paris in May.

The tour has made stops in a number of countries including Sweden, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Poland.

Swift is set to head to London to perform five shows at Wembley Stadium next week.

UK policing minister Diana Johnson said Scotland Yard would look at intelligence ahead of the Wembley Stadium dates.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has told Sky News that the city will “carry on” and that the police will work with City Hall and councils to ensure the concerts take place safely.

Images of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting on the medal podium in Paris will go down as some of the most unforgettable of the 2024 Olympics.

A frenzied debate has raged over the International Olympic Committee clearing the duo to compete in the women’s boxing in Paris, despite them having been disqualified from last year’s Women’s World Championships for failing to meet eligibility criteria.

Amid the heat, science is shedding increasing light on our different chromosomal make-ups and what advantages they may bring to sport.

But the research is ongoing and even among the experts who spend their professional lives working on it, there are differing interpretations on what the science tells us.

We do know that the process of sex determination starts when a foetus is developing. Most females get two X chromosomes (XX), while most males get an X and a Y chromosome (XY).

Chromosomes influence a person’s sex. But hormones are important too, before birth – as well as later on during puberty. While the baby is still growing in the womb, hormones help the reproductive organs develop.

However, at some point through the pregnancy some babies’ reproductive organs don’t develop in the way most people’s do.

This can be caused by conditions called DSDs: differences in sex development.

There are a group of about 40 conditions involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs that develop in the womb. It means a person’s sex development is different from that of most other people’s.

These chromosome abnormalities are rare – but they have come into sharp focus because of the boxing row at the Olympics.

Both fighters were said to have failed International Boxing Association gender eligibility tests last year – but there has been conflicting information whether XY chromosomes or elevated testosterone were found.

While representatives of the fighters and the IOC insist the fighters were “born women, raised as women and always competed as women”, critics, including some of their opponents at Paris 2024, have speculated that perhaps the fighters have DSD.

Because these genetic variations are so many and so varied, some experts say it’s impossible to establish that everyone with a Y chromosome is a male and everyone without a Y chromosome is a female.

“Just looking at the presence of a Y chromosome on its own does not answer the question of whether someone is male or female,” says Prof Alun Williams, who researches genetic factors related to sport performance at the Manchester Metropolitan University Institute of Sport.

“It’s obviously a very good marker, as most people with a Y chromosome are male…but it’s not a perfect indicator.”

For some people with DSD, the Y chromosome is not a fully formed typical male Y chromosome. It may have some genetic material missing, damaged or swapped with the X chromosome, depending on the variation.

When it comes to being male or female, what is usually crucial is a specific gene called SRY – which stands for ‘sex-determining region of the Y chromosome’.

“This is what is called the make-male gene. It’s the master switch of sex development,” says Dr Emma Hilton, a developmental biologist who studies genetic disorders. She is also a trustee of the Sex Matters charity, which argues Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting shouldn’t be competing until further testing is done.

There are some people born with XY chromosomes who have lost what Dr Hilton calls the “make-male” gene.

“These people don’t make testosterone. They develop a very typical female anatomy,” Dr Hilton says.

So a test that identifies XY chromosomes does not offer a complete picture. And in the case of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, the IBA has not disclosed details of the way they were tested.

However, Dr Hilton also says that in most people with XY chromosomes, the SRY “make-male” gene is present.

These people usually have testicles which are often inside the body.

“When they hit puberty they start producing testosterone – which is what underpins male advantage in sports,” says Dr Hilton.

The most famous example is Caster Semenya – a double Olympic gold medallist and three-time world champion over 800m, though Prof Alun Williams says there is not direct evidence that DSD athletes have the same advantage as typical males.

The roadblock is in a gene required to generate external genitalia – which boys need in order to grow a penis. Anyone with the same condition as Caster Semenya has a mutation within that gene that stops it functioning normally.

In the womb, they will develop a male anatomy until the final stage of growing a penis – and when they are not able to, then they’ll start developing a vulva and a clitoris.

But they don’t develop female reproductive organs: they don’t have a cervix or a uterus.

These people don’t have periods and they can’t get pregnant. Having sex with males can be difficult.

Discovering you have this kind of genetic mutation can be a shock.

“The most recent woman we diagnosed with having XY chromosomes was 33,” says Claus Højbjerg Gravholt – an endocrinology professor at Aarhus University who spent the past 30 years dealing with DSD.

His patient came to see him because she had no idea why she couldn’t get pregnant.

“We discovered she didn’t have a uterus, so she would never be able to have a baby. She was absolutely devastated.”

Prof Gravholt says the implications that come with questioning one’s gender identity can be destabilising – and he often refers his patients to a psychologist.

“If I showed you her photo, you would say: that’s a woman. She has a female body, she is married to a man. She feels like a female. And that is the case for most of my patients.”

When Prof Gravholt asked her why she didn’t consult a doctor about not getting periods, she said there was another older woman in her family who never menstruated – so she thought it wasn’t abnormal.

There is another genetic mutation Prof Gravholt has come across.

He has diagnosed males who have XX chromosomes – which are normally found in females. “These men are infertile. They look like normal males, but their testes are smaller than average and don’t produce sperm. It’s always devastating when they find out. As they grow older, they stop producing testosterone in the way most men do.”

In some cultures, talking openly about periods and female anatomy is not culturally acceptable. In some parts of the world, women may lack the education to understand that there’s something atypical going on in their bodies.

And that’s why experts believe that many DSDs are never diagnosed – which means that comprehensive data is scarce.

But Prof Gravholt points to figures from Denmark as a good indicator.

“Denmark is probably the best country in the world at collecting this data – we have a national registry with everyone who has ever had a chromosome examination.”

He says that XY chromosomes in females are very rare – in Denmark it’s about one in 15,000.

But he believes that when adding these many genetic conditions together, about one in 300 people are affected.

“We are learning that these variations are more common than we thought,” Prof Gravholt says. “A lot of patients are being diagnosed later in life. The oldest person I diagnosed was a male in his 60s.”

Do people with differences of sex development have an unfair advantage in sport? The short answer is that there is not enough data to reach a definitive conclusion.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if some people with a type of DSD had some physical advantage over women,” says Prof Alun Williams. Those advantages could include larger muscle mass, as well as bigger and longer bones and larger organs such as lungs and heart.

He says they may also have higher levels of blood haemoglobin that lead to improved oxygen delivery to where it’s needed in working muscles.

“Some people with some types of DSDs might have advantages in some or all of those elements, ranging from 0-100%, depending on the type of DSD and its precise genetic cause.”

He believes his opinion is representative of the experts in his field, but that more evidence is needed.

When it comes to Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, we don’t have enough information to know if they have a DSD that would need to be regulated.

Regulating elite sports, which typically rely on male-female binary categories in competition, is complicated because the biology of sex itself is complex.

Dr Shane Heffernan has a PhD in molecular genetics in elite sports and is currently working on a paper on what athletes think about competitors with a DSD.

He says it’s all about the nuance of the individual’s genetic condition.

For example, females with a DSD known as androgen insensitivity syndrome have XY chromosomes; they produce testosterone; but their bodies aren’t equipped to process it. So they don’t get any of the benefits from that testosterone, like males do.

Dr Heffernan says that there aren’t enough known and studied athletes with a DSD to make a valid scientific conclusion as to whether they definitely have an advantage, and as to whether they should be eligible or ineligible to compete in the female category.

He believes that the International Olympic Committee is not basing its eligibility criteria on the best available science.

“This is worrying. The IOC makes an ‘assumption of no advantage’ – but there is no direct evidence for this, nor that there is a performance advantage with DSD athletes solely because of their genetic variations.

“We simply don’t have enough data. Many people hold an emotional position when it comes to inclusion in the female category, but how can the IOC justify this position – without the data to support it?”

He is one of many people who are urging the Olympics committee, international federations and funding councils to invest in research on athletes with a DSD – but he appreciates it’s difficult, because there can be a lot of stigma towards the individual athletes when it comes to these conditions.

Some are calling for mandatory sex testing at the next Olympics – including Reem Alsalem, the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls.

“Screening DNA is now a piece of cake,” Dr Emma Hilton says. “A simple cheek swab would be sufficient, and it’s minimally invasive.”

She says swabs should happen when athletes first register for their first affiliated competition – before they start winning medals and the spotlight hits them, so as to avoid what happened with Imane Khelif.

But there’s disagreement on that among scientists.

“A cheek swab wouldn’t allow you to reach a robust conclusion on someone’s sex and potential advantage in sport,” says Prof Williams.

He argues a comprehensive sex test would have to include these three categories:

1. Genetics (including looking for a Y chromosome and the SRY “make-male” gene).

2. Hormones (including, but not limited to, testosterone).

3. The body’s responsiveness to hormones like testosterone. Some people might have a Y chromosome, but be completely insensitive to testosterone.

He believes this is currently not being done because it’s expensive, it requires people with very specific expertise – and there are ethical concerns about the testing procedure.

“This assessment can be humiliating. It includes measurements of the most intimate parts of anatomy, like the size of your breast and your clitoris, the depth of your voice, the extent of your body hair.”

One thing is certain: this controversy is not going away.

For now, science is not yet able to offer a definitive view on how people with differing chromosomal make-ups should be categorised for the purposes of elite sport. For those who spend their lives trying to make sense of the science, their hope is that this latest row will propel much-needed research.

The number of overseas workers, students and their families applying for visas to come to the UK has fallen by a third over the last 12 months.

The sharp decline follows rule changes, introduced by the Conservative government, which banned most international students and health and social care workers bringing family to the UK.

Provisional figures from the Home Office suggest the number of migrants and their family members applying for the visas fell from around 141,000 in July 2023 to 91,000 last month.

There was a particularly big drop in the numbers applying for health and care worker visas which dropped by 80% to 2,900.

The Home Office said it would “ensure we train up our homegrown workforce and address the shortage of skills”.

A spokesperson for the department said that immigration brought “many benefits to the UK, but it must be controlled and delivered through a fair system”.

Nadra Ahmed, executive co-chairman of the National Care Association said the sector had started to see some staff return home or move to countries with “a less hostile environment around immigration”.

Speaking to the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme, she said: “If we had a domestic workforce willing to work then we wouldn’t need these international recruits.”

She added it would “take a few years” to build up a domestic workforce and warned that vacancies in the sector could rise to unsustainable levels.

The reduction in international students applying for visas could also hurt universities already facing financial pressures.

The Migration Observatory says the decline in student visa applications could partly be down to country specific factors such as the Nigerian currency crisis.

New rules introduced by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in a bid to reduce immigration levels down from record highs also appear to have caused a decline in visa applications.

In 2022, legal net migration soared to 764,000, but fell by 10% the following year. The Office for National Statistics says it was “too early to say if this is the start of a downward trend”.

In 2021, the immigration rules for care workers had been relaxed to ease recruitment problems following Brexit.

Two years later, then-Home Secretary James Cleverly announced that the government would ban care workers from bringing family dependants to the UK, as part of efforts to reduce net migration numbers.

That came after a previously-announced ban on most overseas students bringing dependents with them. Visas issued to student dependants had risen dramatically from around 16,000 in 2019 to 135,000 in 2022.

The government also increased the minimum salary for skilled overseas workers wanting to come to the UK from £26,200 to £38,700.

To qualify as a skilled worker, applicants need to accrue 70 points under the points system introduced in 2020.

Points can be gained in different ways including by having a job offer in a sector with shortages or holding a PhD.

The Migration Observatory think tank said the Home Office’s most recent data did not demonstrate any “clear impact” from the higher salary threshold.

The previous government had also proposed raising the salary someone would need to earn to bring family members to the UK from £18,600 to £38,700.

Following a backlash it reduced the threshold to £29,000 and said further increases would be introduced at an unspecified date.

Last month, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the new Labour government would keep the threshold at £29,000 until a review by the Migration Advisory Committee was completed.

The fatal stabbing of three young girls at a dance class in the seaside town of Southport, in the north of England, has been followed by the worst unrest the UK has seen in more than a decade.

The violence, in towns and cities across England and in Northern Ireland, has been fuelled by misinformation online, the far-right and anti-immigration sentiment.

Communities have responded with a series of rallies against the riots, with thousands gathering on Wednesday 7 August.

On 29 July, Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, were killed in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga event. Eight more children and two adults were injured.

Later that day, police said they had arrested a 17-year-old from a village nearby and that they were not treating the incident as terror-related.

Almost immediately after the attack, social media posts falsely speculated that the suspect was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a boat in 2023, with an incorrect name being widely circulated. There were also unfounded rumours that he was Muslim.

In fact, as the BBC and other media outlets reported, the suspect was born in Wales to Rwandan parents.

Police urged the public not to spread “unconfirmed speculation and false information”.

The following evening, more than a thousand people attended a vigil for the victims in Southport. Later on, violence broke out near a local mosque. People threw bricks, bottles and other missiles at the mosque and police, a police van was set alight and 27 officers were taken to hospital.

The disorder was widely condemned. Local MP Patrick Hurley said “thugs” had travelled to the town to use the deaths of three children “for their own political purposes”, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer denounced the “marauding mobs on the streets of Southport”.

There had been discussion of the rally on regional anti-immigration channels on the Telegram messaging app. Police said the violence was believed to have involved supporters of the now disbanded far-right group the English Defence League (EDL).

The day after the Southport riot, violent protests in London, Hartlepool and Manchester broke out, which police linked to Southport. More took place throughout the week – with many targeting mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers.

While there was no single organising force at work, BBC analysis of activity on mainstream social media and in smaller public groups shows a clear pattern of influencers driving a message for people to gather for protests.

Multiple influencers within different circles amplified false claims about the identity of the attacker, reaching a large audience – including ordinary people without any connection to far-right individuals and groups.

On X, EDL founder, far-right activist and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, posted inflammatory messages to his nearly a million followers while on holiday in Cyprus.

An influencer on X associated with Yaxley-Lennon, who posts under “Lord Simon”, was among the first to publicly call for nationwide protests.

After the Southport attack, riots broke out across England, from Plymouth on the south coast to Sunderland in the North East. There have also been riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Crowds attacked mosques and accommodation housing asylum seekers, cars and buildings, including a library, were set on fire, and shops looted.

Violence in south Belfast, where anti-immigration and anti-racism protesters faced off in tense scenes outside the city hall, involved “racist elements”, a judge has said. Police are investigating an assault on a man whose head was reportedly stamped on as a racially motivated hate crime.

In Rotherham on Sunday, terrified staff at the Holiday Inn, which was housing asylum seekers, described how they stacked fridges and other furniture against a door to barricade themselves against a mob which had smashed its way into the building. Nearby residents described fleeing their homes as rioters entered their gardens.

As of Thursday 8 August, the chair of the Police Federation Tiffany Lynch estimated more than 100 police officers had been injured in the disorder, some receiving hospital treatment.

Merseyside Police’s chief constable said some of the officers injured “feared they would not make it home” to their families.

The spate of violence has prompted concern from outside of the UK. Malaysia, Nigeria, Australia and India have all issued travel advisories, urging people to stay vigilant and avoid protests.

It is a “nuanced picture” with a degree of local coordination, but also many instances of “locals reacting to what they’re seeing on social media, what they’re seeing outside in their streets and just joining in”, a police source told PA news agency.

BBC Home Affairs Editor Mark Easton was in Sunderland on Friday night, where he said far-right rioters attacked police, set fire to an advice centre next door to a police station, threw stones at a mosque and looted shops.

But as well as masked thugs, he also saw families cheering them on – mums and dads with pushchairs and children draped in the St George’s flag.

While some have been intent on violence, there were initially also people with concerns about immigration wanting to exert their right to peaceful protest.

One such person, who joined an anti-immigration protest in Rotherham on Sunday, told the BBC violent scenes at a hotel housing asylum seekers were “absolutely barbaric… this is not what we’re here for”.

Others may be lashing out in a general sense of frustration, according to a volunteer at Abdullah Quilliam Mosque in Liverpool.

In several cities, violent groups have clashed with counter-protesters. In Bristol, anti-racism protesters said they locked arms to stop rival demonstrators from storming a building housing asylum seekers.

There was unrest in Birmingham when a group – comprising of mainly young Asian men – gathered to oppose a rumoured far-right march that did not materialise.

About 600 arrests had been made by Friday 9 August, with more than 150 people charged. They include children as young as 11.

Sir Keir has condemned what he called “far-right thuggery”. He has promised charges and convictions, “whatever the apparent cause or motivation”, and said those participating in violence, including those “whipping up this action online”, would regret it.

The government said a “standing army” of specialist officers will tackle the disorder, and police forces would share intelligence on violent groups.

It said it was also working with social media companies to ensure misinformation and disinformation is removed.

And it has said it will make more than 500 new prison places available to ensure those taking part in the violence could be jailed.

Prosecutors are considering terrorism offences for some suspects, alongside the extradition of influencers allegedly playing a role in the disorder from abroad, the director of public prosecutions told the BBC.

Communities braced for a night of disorder on Wednesday 7 August, after it emerged a list purporting to contain the names and addresses of immigration lawyers was being spread online.

However, in most places, the planned anti-immigration protests failed to materialise.

Instead, large numbers of people took to the streets to join peaceful anti-racism protests – a response Mark Barton, the former chief constable of Durham Police, praised as “inspirational”.

Following early outbreaks of disorder, communities responded with clean-up operations and shows of solidarity with those affected in full force.

In Southport, dozens of local residents – still in shock from Monday’s killing of the girls – turned up with brushes and shovels to help after the violence.

Tradesmen also offered to rebuild walls and replace windows for free.

Fundraisers have been launched for some of those affected – one, set up to show appreciation for a mosque in Hartlepool, saw its initial target of £200 surpassed in 15 minutes.

Faith leaders in Merseyside have called for people to “remain calm and peaceful” in the wake of the Southport knife attack, and remember there is “far more that unites than divides us”.