Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a leftist politician, has taken a commanding lead in Sri Lanka’s presidential election.

The election on Saturday is the first to be held since mass protests unseated the country’s leader, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in 2022 after the country suffered its worst economic crisis.

Dissanayake promised voters tough anti-corruption measures and good governance – messages that have resonated strongly with voters who have been clamouring for systematic change since the crisis.

Early results on Sunday morning showed Dissanayake with a commanding lead, winning close to 50% of votes counted. A candidate needs 51% of the total vote to be declared the winner.

Mr Premadasa is in second place with nearly 26% of the total vote. President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is seeking a second term, has so far received 16% while Namal Rajapaksa, the nephew of the ousted president has got close to 3%.

Seventeen million Sri Lankans were eligible to vote on Saturday.

Voting proceeded peacefully, although authorities declared a curfew on Sunday morning which was extended until until noon local time (0:630 GMT).

Dissanayake has already received messages of congratulations from supporters of his two main rivals, incumbent president Ranil Wickremesinghe and opposition leader Sajith Premadasa.

Foreign Minister Ali Sabry said on X that early results clearly pointed to a victory by Dissanayake.

“Though I heavily campaigned for President Ranil Wickremesinghe, the people of Sri Lanka have made their decision, and I fully respect their mandate for Anura Kumara Dissanayake,” he said.

MP Harsha de Silva, who supported Premadasa, said he has called Dissanayake to offer his congratulations.

“We campaigned hard for @sajithpremadasa but it was not to be. It is now clear @anuradisanayake will be the new President of #SriLanka,” said de Silva, who represents Colombo in parliament.

Another Premadasa supporter, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) spokesman MA Sumanthiran, said Dissanayake delivered an “impressive win” without relying on “racial or religious chauvinism”.

Israel has launched air strikes in Lebanon and is restricting gatherings in the city of Haifa and other northern areas as it continues to attack targets linked to Hezbollah.

Dozens of fighter jets started “extensively” striking southern Lebanon “following detection of Hezbollah preparing to fire toward Israeli territory”, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Adm Daniel Hagari said.

The latest Israeli offensive comes a day after it carried out an air strike in Beirut, which the IDF said killed a dozen senior Hezbollah commanders. Lebanon said 37 people – including three children – were killed.

The US government is urging its citizens there to leave “via commercial options while still available”.

On Friday, exchanges of cross-border fire resumed between Israel and Hezbollah.

Before the evening Israeli strikes began, the IDF said earlier it had destroyed “about 180 sites and thousands of [rocket] launcher barrels” with strikes

The IDF also said more than 90 rockets were fired at Israeli territory from Lebanon. Hezbollah said it had targeted 11 Israeli military positions over the course of the day.

On Saturday night, Hezbollah said it had fired dozens of rockets towards the Ramat David Airbase in Israel’s north in retaliation for the Israeli attacks.

Earlier this week, 39 people were killed and thousands wounded after pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia and political group, exploded on two days across Lebanon.

On Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah blamed Israel for the attacks, saying it had crossed “all red lines” and vowed “just punishment”.

Israel has not claimed responsibility.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said the pager and walkie-talkie explosions violated international humanitarian law.

On Saturday, the IDF announced new restrictions on communities in northern Israel and parts of the southern Golan Heights starting at 20:30 local time (17:30 GMT).

The IDF limited gatherings to 30 participants in an open area and 300 participants in a closed space. Educational activities can continue and arrival to work is permitted as long as there are protected spaces available.

The restrictions apply to the Haifa area and northward.

As fears increase that the conflict may break out into a full-scale war, the US State Department issued new travel advice for citizens currently in Lebanon.

The US Embassy in Beirut urged people to “depart Lebanon while commercial options still remain available”, noting they were already running at “reduced capacity”.

The embassy added it “may not be able to assist US citizens who choose to remain”.

Neighbouring Jordan’s foreign ministry issued similar advice to its citizens, urging those in Lebanon to leave as soon as possible.

Cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah escalated on 8 October 2023 – the day after the attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen from Gaza – when Hezbollah fired at Israeli positions in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Israel recently added the return of people displaced from the north of the country due to the cross-border fighting to its list of war goals.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that Israel was entering a “new phase of the war” concentrating more of its efforts in the north.

“Punjabi Aa Gaye Oye (Punjab has arrived)”.

There’s only one way to start a show if you’re Diljit Dosanjh.

The trailblazing Punjabi artist has had a dizzying rise over the past few years.

He’s been heard across the world thanks to collaborations with Western acts including Sia, Ed Sheeran and rapper Saweetie.

And he cemented his megastar status by becoming the first Punjabi-language singer to perform at US music festival Coachella, following that with an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show.

But, as the traditional greeting he uses at the start of each show suggests, wherever he goes in the world, he always brings Punjab with him.

And fans, collaborators and friends say that’s part of the secret to his appeal.

“He’s shown how important it is to keep in touch with your culture,” says Khushi Kaur, a British Punjabi vocalist.

“And in an empowering way, as an artist who is growing,” Khushi, 20, tells BBC Newsbeat.

Khushi, from Nottingham, considers Diljit her main role model and feels his commitment to Punjabi culture explains some of the success.

“He has worked with Western artists, but maintained that cultural aspect,” she says.

“And that is so important because when us as the younger generation look at that, and see what he’s done… it says to us we can be a part of that.

“In our music or the way we dress, it makes us look up and say ‘we can make it’.”

• The Rise of Diljit Dosanjh: An Asian Network special on BBC Sounds

During his appearance on The Tonight Show, Diljit performed in his native language and dressed in traditional Punjabi attire, with a bhangra-filled performance.

One of the songs he performed was G.O.A.T., a track he worked on with British-Asian producer G-Funk.

He says Diljit’s appeal comes from a sense of mystery and curiosity, and doesn’t believe Western audiences would pay as much attention if he sang in English.

“People who are not Punjabi are wondering what he’s saying and what the big fuss is,” he says.

“That’s helped him.”

G-Funk says Diljit also resonates with audiences who share his Punjabi heritage by sticking to his traditions and native language.

He says he messaged the star after his Tonight Show appearance: “Thank you for putting our people on the map.”

“To be representing our people, not shying away from our culture is a big thing,” he says.

US rapper Saweetie told Podcrushed that Diljit was a “respectful and humble” collaborator, and it’s something G-Funk says he’s experienced while working with him for a number of years.

Despite being a successful musician, actor and film producer, G-Funk says the singer is a “normal and down to earth guy”, and one of their first meetings took place over dinner at Nando’s.

“He will address people as ‘Paaji’ [elder brother] even though I’m much younger than him and I haven’t done anything on his level,” says G-Funk.

He is also quick to respond to those lucky enough to have his number.

“He loves his voicenotes and there’s two emojis he likes using.

“Prayer hands and the really smiley face that goes up to your eyes.”

Up-and-coming artist Khushi says staying clear of controversty and the model of modesty Diljit portrays is an inspiration for a young artist like her.

“He has maintained his morals, his ethics and he’s remained humble which is amazing to see.

“I think that’s one thing I definitely keep that no matter how much I do,” she says.

But it’s not just in the music industry itself where Diljit’s impact has been felt.

Siblings Vaibhav and Taniya Happy, who were born in Punjab and grew up listening to Diljit’s early music, say he gives them a slice of home.

Now living in Glasgow, they tell Newsbeat they are “proud” of his journey.

“When he performed at Coachella, that was a proud moment for Punjabis,” says Vaibhav, 20.

“It feels like he’s doing it for us. He was wearing cultural clothes and enjoying himself as a Punjabi, not changing his appearance for other people.”

Taniya, 25, says Diljit has a vibe which is unmatched.

“When you grow up, you can lose a part of your culture as you start adapting to new cultures,” she says.

She feels in an English-speaking country like the UK, “it’s hard for people to speak Punjabi unless they are in their own household”.

“So it’s nice to see people out there singing Diljit, because he sings in Punjabi, and then it feels like your own place.

“It doesn’t feel like you’re in a foreign country,” she says.

Taniya and Vaibhav will be among the thousands watching Diljit perform hits like Lover, Vibe and Lak 28 Kudi Da.

For Vaibhav, it will be his first time seeing him and he says he is “gassed”.

“And I’m going with my family – sister and mum – which makes it even better.

“I grew up listening to him, with my parents and at events.

“Spending time watching him together is going to be even more beautiful,” he says.

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

A dissident freed by Russia in the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War has vowed to return to the country one day.

Vladimir Kara-Murza told the BBC he initially thought he was being “led out to be executed” when prison officers came in the night to fetch him from Siberia last month.

It was only after being moved to Moscow that the dual British-Russian citizen realised he was one of 24 prisoners to be freed in the exchange – including a Kremlin hit man.

But in his first joint interview with his wife Evgenia in Europe since they reunited, he defiantly reveals on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that he plans to return to Russia.

“When our plane was taking off from Vnukovo airport in Moscow en route to Ankara on 1 August, the FSB [Russian Federal Security Service] officer who was my personal escort sitting next to me turned to me and said, ‘Look out the window, this is the last time you’re seeing your motherland’,” he told me.

“And I just laughed in his face, and I said, ‘Look, man, I am a historian, I don’t just think, I don’t just believe, I know that I’ll be back home in Russia, and it’s going to happen much sooner than you can imagine’.”

Mr Kara-Murza, one of the Kremlin’s most vocal critics, was held in solitary confinement in a high security jail after receiving a 25-year sentence in April 2023 on charges of high treason.

Recalling the days before the huge Russia-West prisoner swap, he said: “I was asleep and suddenly the doors to my prison cell burst open and a group of prison officers barged in.

“I was woken up, I saw that it was dark, I asked what time it was, they said 3am. And they told me to get up and get ready in ten minutes.

“And at that moment, I was absolutely certain that I was being led out to be executed.

“But instead of the nearby wood, they took me to the airport, handcuffed with a prison convoy, boarded me on a plane and flew me to Moscow.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan were also released by Russia in the exchange.

In the West, Russian security service hitman Vadim Krasikov was freed by Germany along with others elsewhere accused of intelligence activities.

The US, Norway, Poland and Slovenia also participated in what was the biggest swap since the Cold War between the West and Russia ended more than 30 years ago.

On Friday, Mr Kara-Murza met prime minister Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy – and he is now urging Western governments to give stronger backing to Ukraine.

He is pushing for the release of thousands of other political prisoners who are still being held in Putin’s jails.

In their interview, to be broadcast on BBC One on Sunday at 9am, he and his wife talk about their reunion, their family and the moment they tasted freedom.

Mrs Kara Murza talks of her “immense joy” at having her husband back and seeing him with their three children.

“Having survived two assassination attempts and now this prison sentence, including eleven months in solitary confinement in horrendous conditions, he’s yet again alive and relatively healthy with us,” she said.

Watch the full interview on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC One and iPlayer at 9am.

Israeli forces have raided the offices of news broadcaster Al Jazeera in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, and ordered it to close for an initial period of 45 days.

Armed and masked Israeli soldiers entered the building early on Sunday during a live broadcast.

Viewers watched as the troops handed the closure order to the network’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari who read it out live on air.

Israel raided Al Jazeera’s offices in Nazareth and occupied East Jerusalem in May having described the Qatar-based broadcaster as a threat to national security.

“Targeting journalists this way always aims to erase the truth and prevent people from hearing the truth,” Omari said in comments reported by his employer.

The soldiers confiscated the last microphone and camera off the street outside and forced Omari out of the office, Al Jazeera journalist Mohammad Alsaafin said.

Posting about the raid on social media, Alsaafin said the troops also pulled down a poster of Shireen Abu Aqla – an Al Jazeera reporter who was killed while covering a raid by Israeli forces in the West Bank.

The network and witnesses at the time said the Palestinian-American reporter was shot by Israeli forces. Israel initially argued she had been shot by a Palestinian, however months later concluded there was a “high probability” that one of its soldiers killed her.

Relations between the Qatari-owned broadcaster and the Israeli government have long been tense but have worsened dramatically following the outbreak of war in Gaza.

With foreign journalists banned from entering the strip, Al Jazeera staff based in the area have been some of the only reporters able to cover the war on the ground.

Israel has repeatedly branded the network a terrorist mouthpiece, an accusation Al Jazeera has denied.

In April, the Israeli parliament passed a law giving the government power to temporarily close foreign broadcasters considered a threat to national security during the war.

A ban would be in place for a period of 45 days at a time, as seen in Sunday’s raid, and can be renewed.

In early May, the Al Jazeera offices in Nazareth and occupied East Jerusalem were subject to separate raids.

Israel is yet to comment on Sunday’s operation.

French President Emmanuel Macron has unveiled his new government almost three months after a snap general election delivered a hung parliament.

The long-awaited new line up, led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, marks a decisive shift to the right, even though a left-wing alliance won most parliamentary seats.

Despite the partnership between Macron’s centrist party and those on the right, parliament remains fractured and will rely on the support of other parties to pass legislation.

It comes as the European Union puts France on notice over its spiralling debt, which now far exceeds EU rules.

Among those gaining a position in the new cabinet is Bruno Retailleau, a key member of the conservative Republicans Party founded by former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

He has been appointed interior minister, a portfolio that includes immigration.

A total of 10 politicians from the Republicans have been given cabinet jobs, though Macron has kept a number of outgoing ministers in key posts.

Close Macron ally Sebastien Lecornu has been kept on as defence minister, and Jean-Noel Barrot, the outgoing Europe minister, has been promoted to foreign minister.

Just one left-wing politician was given a post in the cabinet, independent Didier Migaud, who was appointed as justice minister.

The post of finance minister went to Antoine Armand, a member of Macron’s own Renaissance party who, until now, was of little political renown.

Armand has the task of drafting the government’s budget bill before the new year to address France’s dire deficit.

Prior to the snap election, the European Union’s executive arm warned France that it would be disciplined for contravening the bloc’s financial rules.

France’s public-sector deficit is projected to reach around 5.6% of GDP this year and go over 6% in 2025. The EU has a 3% limit on deficits.

Michel Barnier, a veteran conservative, was named as Macron’s prime minister earlier this month.

Barnier had been the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, and it was he who tackled the task of forming a new government capable of surviving the fractured National Assembly.

Members of the left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP) have threatened a no-confidence motion in the new government.

In the July election, the NFP won the most parliamentary seats of any political bloc, but not enough for an overall majority.

Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon called for the new government to “be got rid of” as soon as possible.

On Saturday, before the cabinet announcement, thousands of left-wing supporters demonstrated in Paris against the incoming government, arguing that the left’s performance in the election was not taken into consideration.

The alliance between centrist and conservative parties in the cabinet is not enough to pass legislation on its own.

It will depend on others, such as Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally to stay in power and get bills into law.

Former US President Donald Trump has said he will not take part in a second TV debate ahead of November’s presidential election.

While Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s candidate, accepted an invitation to the CNN debate on 23 October, Republican nominee Trump told a rally it was “too late” as voting has already started.

Harris’s campaign team said that given the former president claimed to have won their previous debate in Philadelphia earlier this month he should accept.

Snap polls taken after that encounter suggested a majority of viewers believed the vice-president outperformed her challenger.

After the 10 September debate, Trump said there would be no further debates.

Speaking at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on Saturday, he claimed victory in that earlier head-to-head and said “it’s just too late” for another.

“Voting has already started,” he said, accusing Harris of seeking another round of sparring “because she’s losing badly.”

• Anthony Zurcher analysis: Who won the Harris-Trump debate?
• Watch key moments from Harris-Trump clash

In a statement on Saturday, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said that Americans “deserve another opportunity” to see Harris and Trump debate before the November election.

“It would be unprecedented in modern history for there to just be one general election debate,” she said. “Debates offer a unique chance for voters to see the candidates side by side and take stock of their competing visions for America.”

On X, formerly Twitter, Harris said she had “gladly” accepted the debate invitation and hoped Trump would also take part.

CNN had said the potential debate would follow the same format as the one it broadcast in June between Trump and President Joe Biden.

Biden’s faltering performance in that encounter led some Democrats to question whether he should be the party’s candidate for the election.

After weeks of uncertainty the president announced he would not seek re-election – paving the way for Harris to become the nominee.

At the Trump rally, some voters told the BBC they hoped another debate would take place.

“If you’re not afraid, why not? They both did great [at the last debate],” said Trump supporter Steve Castellano.

Adding that he thought the moderators were “a little biased” at the last debate, Mr Castellano suggested some conditions for a possible rematch.

• Republicans absorb a political shockwave in must-win North Carolina
• Ros Atkins on… Were the Trump-Harris debate moderators unfair?

“They should debate again at a network Trump chooses,” he said. “What I would really love is a good podcaster [to moderate]. I’d really love Joe Rogan to do it.”

Harris holds a slight lead over Trump in national polling averages, and North Carolina could be crucial for his hopes to return to the White House.

Since then, a majority of national polls suggest that Harris has made small gains with voters.

Trump’s campaign stop in North Carolina comes after the Republican candidate he endorsed for governor, Mark Robinson, reportedly made controversial comments on a porn website more than a decade ago.

Robinson characterised the CNN report, which alleged that he had referred to himself as a “black Nazi” on an adult forum, as “salacious tabloid lies”.

Robinson did not attend Saturday’s rally and Trump did not mention it during his 60-minute speech to supporters.

The two candidates exchanged swipes and barbs at the previous debate, with Trump calling Harris a “radical left liberal” and a Marxist who was destroying America.

Harris, for her part, goaded Trump, belittled the size of his rally crowds and quoted his Republican detractors.

CBS, the BBC’s news partner in the US, has also invited both presidential candidates to participate in an October debate in Arizona.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election
• FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger under Biden or Trump?
• POLICIES: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?
• NEWSLETTER: Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter.

Half a billion fans, a multi-million dollar personal fortune and a global business empire.

It would take a lot to dethrone YouTube’s biggest influencer Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast.

But a 54-page court document could be his toughest test yet.

Five female contestants on upcoming Prime Video show Beast Games are launching legal action against his production company MrB2024 and Amazon in Los Angeles.

Billed as the largest ever reality competition series, 1,000 contestants are set to compete for a $5m (£3.7m) prize when the show airs – or if it airs. The lawsuit has plunged the show into crisis.

Among many redacted pages, the legal document includes allegations that they “particularly and collectively suffered” in an environment that “systematically fostered a culture of misogyny and sexism”.

It cuts to the core of MrBeast’s image as one of the nicest guys on the internet.

I flicked through the document, which includes suggestions that participants were “underfed and overtired”. Meals were provided “sporadically and sparsely” which “endangered the health and welfare” of the contestants, it is claimed.

In one section where almost all of the claims are redacted from public view, it says the defendants “created, permitted to exist, and fostered a culture and pattern and practice of sexual harassment including in the form of a hostile work environment”.

Back in August, the New York Times spoke to more than a dozen of the (yet unreleased) show’s participants, and reported there were “several hospitalisations” on the set, with one person telling the paper they had gone over 20 hours without being fed.

Contestants also alleged they had not received their medication on time.

The BBC has approached MrBeast and Amazon – he has not yet publicly commented.

So will these latest allegations hurt the king of YouTube’s popularity?

MrBeast is no stranger to controversy this year – and has managed to come out unscathed each time.

In July, the 26-year-old American said he had hired investigators after his former co-host Ava Kris Tyson was accused of grooming a teenager.

Ava denied the allegations, but has apologised for “past behaviour” which was “not acceptable”.

MrBeast said he was “disgusted” by the “serious allegations”.

Later, further allegations about business practices surfaced on an anonymous YouTube channel, claiming to be a former employee. The BBC has not been able to independently verify the claims or this person’s identity.

Some of his philanthropic efforts – such as building wells in Africa, and paying for surgery for people with reduced sight and hearing – have drawn criticisms around exploitation.

“Deaf people like me deserve better than MrBeast’s latest piece of inspiration porn,” one person told the Independent last year.

But his empire continues to grow. The day before the lawsuit emerged on Wednesday, he revealed a team-up with fellow famous faces KSI and Logan Paul – a new food line designed to challenge Lunchables.

And as I wrote in an article about his meteoric rise last year, he has made his millions through hard work.

His videos are big budget experiences, with his most popular – viewed 652 million times – recreating the Netflix hit Squid Game in real life with a $456,000 (£342,000) prize.

Most of his philanthropy is less controversial – including giving away houses, cash and cars – which has worked to create an image of him being one of the internet’s good guys.

According to his website, he has delivered more than 25 million meals to the needy around the world.

People continue to flock to his social channels. In June, he gained enough subscribers to make his YouTube channel the largest in the world.

According to stats-checker Socialblade, MrBeast picked up an extra five million subscribers in the last 30 days alone.

That’s just one metric – we can’t tell how many people unsubscribed from his channel, for example.

What is certain is that the number of people who’ve actively decided to stop watching his videos has been eclipsed by those who’ve decided to subscribe.

He wouldn’t be the only YouTuber whose popularity holds through controversy – others have faced far more significant storms than MrBeast, with few facing many consequences outside of a public apology.

Logan Paul faced a massive backlash in 2018 after he uploaded a video to his 15 million subscribers which showed the body of a person who had apparently taken their own life.

After removing the original video, he shared a less than two-minute apology titled simply: “So sorry.”

Now, he has 23 million subscribers, owns an incredibly popular sports drink, and up until August was the WWE United States champion. He’s had quite a few pay-per-view boxing bouts, too.

Other high-profile YouTubers, including Pewdiepie, James Charles, and Jeffree Star have all had their own controversies, and got on with their careers after uploading apology videos.

A more modern example is Herschel “Guy” Beahm, known online as Dr Disrespect, who admitted he sent messages to “an individual minor” in 2017.

He stressed that “nothing illegal happened, no pictures were shared, no crimes were committed” and went offline for two months after posting the statement.

His comeback livestream earlier this month attracted more than three million views, despite criticism from other high-profile streamers.

Dr Disrespect remains the second-most watched streamer in the US this year, according to Streams Charts.

The point is: YouTubers tend to be forgiven quickly.

While MrBeast’s fanbase has continued growing, controversy is swirling once again – and his next move could determine his long-term success.

James Lunn, chief strategy officer at Savvy Marketing, says the star is “in an incredibly unique position” with a “multi-faceted” brand spanning many industries.

“We are indeed in uncharted waters,” he says, and “a proactive approach, addressing the issues transparently and ensuring accountability, could protect his brand”.

Brand expert Catherine Shuttleworth says the “sheer scale” of MrBeast’s fame may act as a buffer against backlash, but the latest lawsuit could be difficult.

“When it comes to his business ventures, particularly those targeting families and children – like Feastables chocolate bars or Lunchly – it’s a different story,” she says.

“Parents, who often hold the purchasing power, tend to be less tolerant of controversies involving safety, fairness, and ethics.”

Back in August 2023, when writing about MrBeast, I predicted he would soon take the YouTube crown despite him having half as many subscribers then.

He is now facing extra challenges as his fame rises, and a lot of the internet is eagerly awaiting his reply to what is, so far, one side of a complex story.

One person has died and seven others are missing, officials said, after “unprecedented” rains caused floods and landslides in the coastal quake-hit region of Ishikawa in northern Japan.

Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) on Saturday issued its highest “life-threatening” alert level for the Ishikawa region, following torrential rains which are expected to last until midday on Sunday.

More than 40,000 people across four cities have been ordered to evacuate after at least a dozen rivers in the region burst their banks.

Two of the missing were carried away by strong river currents, according to Japan’s public service broadcaster NHK.

Meanwhile, another four workers carrying out road repairs following a deadly New Year’s Day earthquake are also unaccounted for.

More than 120mm (4.7in) of rain was recorded in Wajima on Saturday morning, NHK reported, the heaviest downpour in the region since records began.

JMA forecaster Sugimoto Satoshi told reporters: “This level of downpours has never been experienced in this region before. Residents must secure their safety immediately. The risk to their lives is imminent.”

Footage aired by NHK showed an entire street in Wajima submerged under water.

Government official Koji Yamamoto told AFP that 60 people had been working to restore a road hit by the quake in the city of Wajima, but were hit by a landslide on Saturday morning.

“I asked [contractors] to check the safety of workers… but we are still unable to contact four people,” Mr Yamamoto said.

Rescue workers who had tried to gain access to the site, he said, were “blocked by landslides”.

A further two people have been seriously injured, according to government officials.

Some 6,000 households have been left without power, with an unknown number of households without running water, AFP agency reported.

The cities of Wajima and Suzu and the town of Noto have ordered some 44,000 residents to evacuate and seek shelter in Ishikawa prefecture, Honshu island.

Meanwhile, another 16,000 residents in the Niigata and Yamagata prefectures north of Ishikawa were also told to evacuate, the AFP news agency said.

Wajima and Suzu, in central Japan’s Noto peninsula, were among the areas hardest hit by a huge 7.5 magnitude earthquake on New Years Day that killed at least 236 people.

The region is still recovering from the powerful quake which had toppled buildings, ripped up roads and sparked a major fire.

Japan has seen unprecedented rainfall in parts of the country in recent years, with floods and landslides sometimes causing casualties.

A New Zealand pilot who has been freed more than 19 months after being taken hostage by separatists in Indonesia says he is “very happy” to be going home to his family.

Philip Mehrtens was kidnapped by West Papua National Liberation Army fighters in February 2023 and was released after lengthy negotiations into the care of Indonesian officials on Saturday.

He appeared before cameras looking thin and with a full beard but is said to be in good health.

The 38-year-old was kidnapped after he landed a small commercial plane in the remote, mountainous area of Nduga.

“Today I have been freed. I am very happy that shortly I will be able to go home and meet my family,” Mr Mehrtens, speaking in Indonesian, told reporters in Timika.

“Thank you for everybody who helped me today, so I can get out safely in a healthy condition.”

His release follows months of “critical” diplomatic efforts by authorities in Wellington and Jakarta.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon welcomed the release and New Zealand foreign minister Winston Peters added: “His family will be absolutely over the moon”.

Indonesian police spokesperson Bayu Suseno said Mr Mehrtens was released and then picked up in a village called Yuguru in the Maibarok district before being flown to the city of Timika.

Several days before the release, rebels told the BBC Indonesian service they would free Mr Mehrtens “safely and in accordance with international standards for the protection of human rights”.

“We the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB), remain committed to upholding the values of peace, respect and dignity in this situation,” spokesman Sebby Sambom said.

The pilot, a father-of-one, is being flown to Jakarta to be reunited with his family.

He was kidnapped after his small passenger plane – which belongs to Indonesia’s Susi Air – landed in Nduga in February last year.

He was meant to return a few hours later after dropping off five passengers but shortly after landing, rebels targeted the single-engine plane and seized him.

The five other passengers, who were indigenous Papuans, were released.

The kidnapping was part of a long-running, often brutally violent conflict between the Indonesian government and West Papua’s indigenous people.

In April, at least one Indonesian soldier was killed after being ambushed by rebels while searching for the kidnapped New Zealander in the Papua region.

Last month another New Zealand pilot, 50-year-old Glen Malcolm Conning, was shot dead by a pro-independence group known as Free Papua Organisation (OPM) after landing in the region with two Indonesian health workers and two children, all of whom survived.

Authorities said the group responsible for Mr Conning’s death is the same that was holding Mr Mehrtens.

A spokesperson from the West Papua National Liberation Army previously told the BBC Indonesian service they wanted to hold Mr Mehrtens captive until countries “like New Zealand and Australia” took responsibility for their alleged role in violence in Papua.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo said on Saturday that Jakarta had been able to secure Mr Mehrtens’ safety through ongoing negotiation, and not force.

Speaking to reporters he said: “We prioritised the safety of the pilot who was held hostage. It took a long process”.

The region is a former Dutch colony divided into two provinces, Papua and West Papua. It is separate from Papua New Guinea, which secured independence from Australia in 1975.

Papuan rebels seeking independence from Indonesia have previously issued threats and attacked aircraft they believe to be carrying personnel and supplies for Jakarta.

The resource-rich region has been caught in a battle for independence since it was brought under Indonesia’s control in a disputed UN-supervised vote in 1969.

Conflicts between indigenous Papuans and the Indonesian authorities have been common since, with pro-independence fighters mounting more frequent attacks since 2018.

They are two competing views on where desk-based employees work best.

Amazon is ordering its staff back to the office five days a week, just as the government is pushing for rights to flexible working – including working from home – to be strengthened.

The tech giant says employees will be able to better “invent, collaborate, and be connected”.

But just as the firm’s announcement became news, the UK government was linking flexibility to better performance and a more productive, loyal workforce.

Few are short of an opinion on how effective working from home is and for a government there are broader considerations such as how, for example, caring responsibilities are affected.

But more than four years since the start of the pandemic, what does the evidence tell us about how we work best and is Amazon right to believe people being in the office full time will allow them to collaborate better?

Amazon’s fellow tech giant Microsoft studied its employees during the pandemic. It looked at the emails, calendars, instant messages and calls of 61,000 of its employees in the US during the first six months of 2020. The findings were published in Nature Human Behaviour.

The study indicated that, during Covid, remote workers tended to collaborate more with networks of colleagues they already had, and that they built fewer “bridges” between different networks.

There was also a drop in communication that happened in real time – meetings that would have happened in real life weren’t necessarily happening online. Instead, more emails and instant messages were sent.

The authors suggested this may make it harder to convey and understand complex information.

Microsoft’s was a data-led study. But what about human experience?

A 2020 survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) of 1,000 senior decision-makers in organisations found about a third struggled with “reduced staff interaction and cooperation”.

However, more than 40% of the managers said there was more collaboration when people were working from home.

Greater collaboration is hard to object to, but equally it is no guarantee of productivity.

In 2010, China’s biggest travel agency CTrip tried something very new among staff in its airfare and hotel booking department.

Almost 250 staff were identified as potential home workers – they needed to be established at the company and have a proper home working set-up.

Around half that group started working from home. The other group stayed office-based.

Researchers at Stanford University found the workers were 13% more productive when working from home – mainly because workers had fewer breaks and sick days, and they could take more calls because it was quieter.

There was a particularly significant drop in staff quitting for non-managers, women, and people with long commutes, the researchers said.

However, those Chinese home-workers were seeing a bit of the office: they were spending one day a week among colleagues. It could be this brought some benefit – a separate study years later from researchers at Stanford suggested fully remote work can lead to a 10% drop in productivity compared with working in the office all the time.

Barriers to communication, lack of mentoring for staff, problems building a work culture, and difficulties with self-motivation were all cited.

Amazon is not alone in telling employees to return to the office full-time.

Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon famously described working from home as an “aberration”. The US firm requires bankers to be in the office five days per week.

Rival US banks JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have also backed workers returning to the office, whereas some banks in Europe have taken a softer approach.

Elon Musk’s Tesla also requires employees to be in the office full time, leading to reports of problems finding space for them.

Another Musk company, SpaceX, brought in a policy requiring workers to return to the office full-time.

But it wasn’t without consequences: when it brought the policy in, SpaceX lost 15% of its senior-level employees, according to a study published earlier this year.

The pandemic changed work routines that were in many cases decades old.

Linda Noble, now 62, from Barnsley, was used to putting on a suit and make-up. In 2020 she was a senior officer in local government, scrutinising governance in the fire service and the police service.

Then Covid struck and she was working from home.

“I loathed it. I missed the communication – going into work, someone would make you smile,” she says.

But with time, Ms Noble adjusted. She set up her home office and she thinks that before long she was twice as productive as previously – even if that was in part because of an inability to switch off.

Many disabled people also believe working from home makes them more productive.

A 2023 study of 400 people suggested that disabled workers felt they had more autonomy and control when working from home, which led them to better manage their health and wellbeing, and 85% felt more productive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all studies come to the same conclusions. Some suggest an improvement to physical health from working at home, others disagree. The same goes for mental health.

The wellbeing of staff was a key reason one UK business decided to get them back to the office as soon as possible after lockdown restrictions ended, according to one of its directors, Francis Ashcroft.

He was chief executive of a large private UK children’s care services company. He says “some people were struggling with raised anxiety” and wanted to get back to the office “to be part of a team”.

Mr Ashcroft said there was “also a recognition that 80% of staff were at the coalface”, working in person in children’s homes and education, and so it was “right to come back” for reasons of fairness.

Although team members were collaborating online at 95% of what they had been, “coming back into the office added that 5% back”, he argues.

“It brought a realness and a sense of belonging,” Mr Ashcroft says, adding that “when it comes to delivering a service, the teamwork was much better in the office”.

Despite this experience, an umbrella review of home working that examined a range of other studies concluded that, on the whole, working from home boosts how much workers can get done.

What difference there is in approach between the government and Amazon essentially boils down to whether or not some home working should be part of the mix, with Amazon believing it shouldn’t.

Linda Noble’s time solely working from home is over. She is just about to start a hybrid job. She’s attracted by the “balance” between working from home and office work.

According to the CIPD, benefits of hybrid working include “a better work/life balance, greater ability to focus with fewer distractions, more time for family and friends and wellbeing activity, saved commuting time and costs, plus higher levels of motivation and engagement.”

And it may be that this can reduce staff churn. A study published this year found that a Chinese firm that adopted hybrid working reduced the rate at which employees quit by a third.

From an employee perspective, the optimum time for hybrid working is three days in the office – this makes employees most engaged, according to a Gallup survey of US workers, although it also says there is “no one-size-fits-all”.

In the UK, the number of people exclusively working from home is falling. But, crucially, hybrid working is continuing to rise, running at 27% of the working population.

Gallup says that despite highly publicised moves by firms to get employees back in the office, the underlying trend is that the future of office work is hybrid.

This tallies with the position of the UK government, which is clear that it believes the potential to work at home drives up productivity.

The calculation by Amazon appears to be that what evidence there is for increased productivity among employees who work in part from home fails to capture the particulars of how they operate.

“One village, two countries” used to be the tagline for Yinjing on China’s south-western edge.

An old tourist sign boasts of a border with Myanmar made of just “bamboo fences, ditches and earth ridges” – a sign of the easy economic relationship Beijing had sought to build with its neighbour.

Now the border the BBC visited is marked by a high, metal fence running through the county of Ruili in Yunnan province. Topped by barbed wire and surveillance cameras in some places, it cuts through rice fields and carves up once-adjoined streets.

China’s tough pandemic lockdowns forced the separation initially. But it has since been cemented by the intractable civil war in Myanmar, triggered by a bloody coup in 2021. The military regime is now fighting for control in large swathes of the country, including Shan State along China’s border, where it has suffered some of its biggest losses.

The crisis at its doorstep – a nearly 2,000km (1,240-mile) border – is becoming costly for China, which has invested millions of dollars in Myanmar for a critical trade corridor.

The ambitious plan aims to connect China’s landlocked south-west to the Indian Ocean via Myanmar. But the corridor has become a battleground between Myanmar rebels and the country’s army.

Beijing has sway over both sides but the ceasefire it brokered in January fell apart. It has now turned to military exercises along the border and stern words. Foreign Minister Wang Yi was the latest diplomat to visit Myanmar’s capital Nay Pyi Taw and is thought to have delivered a warning to the country’s ruler Min Aung Hlaing.

Conflict is not new to impoverished Shan State. Myanmar’s biggest state is a major source of the world’s opium and and methamphetamine, and home to ethnic armies long opposed to centralised rule.

But the vibrant economic zones created by Chinese investment managed to thrive – until the civil war.

A loudspeaker now warns people in Ruili not to get too close to the fence – but that doesn’t stop a Chinese tourist from sticking his arm between the bars of a gate to take a selfie.

Two girls in Disney T-shirts shout through the bars – “hey grandpa, hello, look over here!” – as they lick pink scoops of ice cream. The elderly man shuffling barefoot on the other side barely looks up before he turns away.

“Burmese people live like dogs,” says Li Mianzhen. Her corner stall sells food and drinks from Myanmar – like milk tea – in a small market just steps from the border checkpoint in Ruili city.

Li, who looks to be in her 60s, used to sell Chinese clothes across the border in Muse, a major source of trade with China. But she says almost no-one in her town has enough money any more.

Myanmar’s military junta still controls the town, one of its last remaining holdouts in Shan State. But rebel forces have taken other border crossings and a key trading zone on the road to Muse.

The situation has made people desperate, Li says. She knows of some who have crossed the border to earn as little as 10 yuan – about one pound and not much more than a dollar – so that they can go back to Myanmar and “feed their families”.

The war has severely restricted travel in and out of Myanmar, and most accounts now come from those who have fled or have found ways to move across the borders, such as Li.

Unable to get the work passes that would allow them into China, Li’s family is stuck in Mandalay, as rebel forces edge closer to Myanmar’s second-largest city.

“I feel like I am dying from anxiety,” Li says. “This war has brought us so much misfortune. At what point will all of this end?”

Thirty-one-year-old Zin Aung (name changed) is among those who made it out. He works in an industrial park on the outskirts of Ruili, which produces clothes, electronics and vehicle parts that are shipped across the world.

Workers like him are recruited in large numbers from Myanmar and flown here by Chinese government-backed firms eager for cheap labour. Estimates suggest they earn about 2,400 yuan ($450; £340) a month, which is less than their Chinese colleagues.

“There is nothing for us to do in Myanmar because of the war,” Zin Aung says. “Everything is expensive. Rice, cooking oil. Intensive fighting is going on everywhere. Everyone has to run.”

His parents are too old to run, so he did. He sends home money whenever he can.

The men live and work on the few square kilometres of the government-run compound in Ruili. Zin Aung says it is a sanctuary, compared with what they left behind: “The situation in Myanmar is not good, so we are taking refuge here.”

He also escaped compulsory conscription, which the Myanmar army has been enforcing to make up for defections and battlefield losses.

As the sky turned scarlet one evening, Zin Aung ran barefoot through the cloying mud onto a monsoon-soaked pitch, ready for a different kind of battle – a fiercely fought game of football.

Burmese, Chinese and the local Yunnan dialect mingled as vocal spectators reacted to every pass, kick and shot. The agony over a missed goal was unmistakable. This is a daily affair in their new, temporary home, a release after a 12-hour shift on the assembly line.

Many of the workers are from Lashio, the largest town in Shan State, and Laukkaing, home to junta-backed crime families – Laukkaing fell to rebel forces in January and Lashio was encircled, in a campaign which has changed the course of the war and China’s stake in it.

Both towns lie along China’s prized trade corridor and the Beijing-brokered ceasefire left Lashio in the hands of the junta. But in recent weeks rebel forces have pushed into the town – their biggest victory to date. The military has responded with bombing raids and drone attacks, restricting internet and mobile phone networks.

“The fall of Lashio is one of the most humiliating defeats in the military’s history,” says Richard Horsey, Myanmar adviser to the International Crisis Group.

“The only reason the rebel groups didn’t push into Muse is they likely feared it would upset China,” Mr Horsey says. “Fighting there would have impacted investments China has hoped to restart for months. The regime has lost control of almost all northern Shan state – with the exception of Muse region, which is right next to Ruili.”

Ruili and Muse, both designated as special trade zones, are crucial to the Beijing-funded 1,700km trade route, known as the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. The route also supports Chinese investments in energy, infrastructure and rare earth mining critical for manufacturing electric vehicles.

But at its heart is a railway line that will connect Kunming – the capital of Yunnan province – to Kyaukphyu, a deep sea port the Chinese are building on Myanmar’s western coast.

The port, along the Bay of Bengal, would give industries in and beyond Ruili access to the Indian Ocean and then global markets. The port is also the starting point for oil and gas pipelines that will transport energy via Myanmar to Yunnan.

But these plans are now in jeopardy.

President Xi Jinping had spent years cultivating ties with his resource-rich neighbour when the country’s elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi was forced from power.

Mr Xi refused to condemn the coup and continued to sell the army weapons. But he also did not recognise Min Aung Hlaing as head of state, nor has he invited him to China.

Three years on, the war has killed thousands and displaced millions, but no end is in sight.

Forced to fight on new fronts, the army has since lost between half and two-thirds of Myanmar to a splintered opposition.

Beijing is at an impasse. It “doesn’t like this situation” and sees Myanmar’s military ruler Min Aung Hlaing as “incompetent”, Mr Horsey says. “They are pushing for elections, not because they necessarily want a return to democratic rule, but more because they think this is a way back.”

Myanmar’s regime suspects Beijing of playing both sides – keeping up the appearance of supporting the junta while continuing to maintain a relationship with ethnic armies in Shan State.

Analysts note that many of the rebel groups are using Chinese weapons. The latest battles are also a resurgence of last year’s campaign launched by three ethnic groups which called themselves the Brotherhood Alliance. It is thought that the alliance would not have made its move without Beijing’s tacit approval.

Its gains on the battlefield spelled the end for notorious mafia families whose scam centres had trapped thousands of Chinese workers. Long frustrated over the increasing lawlessness along its border, Beijing welcomed their downfall – and the tens of thousands of suspects who were handed over by the rebel forces.

For Beijing the worst-case scenario is the civil war dragging on for years. But it would also fear a collapse of the military regime, which might herald further chaos.

How China will react to either scenario is not yet clear – what is also unclear is what more Beijing can do beyond pressuring both sides to agree to peace talks.

That predicament is evident in Ruili with its miles of shuttered shops. A city that once benefited from its location along the border is now feeling the fallout from its proximity to Myanmar.

Battered by some of China’s strictest lockdowns, businesses here took another hit when cross-border traffic and trade did not revive.

They also rely on labour from the other side, which has stopped, according to several agents who help Burmese workers find jobs. They say China has tightened its restrictions on hiring workers from across the border, and has also sent back hundreds who were said to be working illegally.

The owner of a small factory, who did not want to be identified, told the BBC that the deportations meant “his business isn’t going anywhere… and there’s nothing I can change”.

The square next to the checkpoint is full of young workers, including mothers with their babies, waiting in the shade. They lay out their paperwork to make sure they have what they need to secure a job. The successful ones are given a pass which allows them to work for up to a week, or come and go between the two countries, like Li.

“I hope some good people can tell all sides to stop fighting,” Li says. “If there is no-one in the world speaking up for us, it is really tragic.”

She says she is often assured by those around her that fighting won’t break out too close to China. But she is unconvinced: “No-one can predict the future.”

For now, Ruili is a safer option for her and Zin Aung. They understand that their future is in Chinese hands, as do the Chinese.

“Your country is at war,” a Chinese tourist tells a Myanmar jade seller he is haggling with at the market. “You just take what I give you.”

Anonymous letters have created a “village of poison” in East Yorkshire, according to residents.

Those on the receiving end of the “vulgar” mail say they have been “terrorised” through their letterboxes for the past two years.

The post sent by a mysterious writer to Shiptonthorpe, some of which has been seen by the BBC, is described as “personal, obscene and targeted”.

Humberside Police has carried out inquiries into some of the incidents.

The saga is reminiscent of scandalous letters that blighted Littlehampton, a small seaside town in Sussex, in the spring of 1920 – which sparked a House of Commons debate and period comedy drama Wicked Little Letters, starring Olivia Colman.

In Shiptonthorpe, Sophie – not her real name – said she received her first letter in December 2022 and reported it to the police.

At the time she was trying to become a ward councillor – and she was left “astonished” after opening it.

“It was vile, I ripped it up, I couldn’t believe where it had come from or why I’d received it,” she said.

Despite destroying the letter, the hurtful accusations have stuck with Sophie.

“It was accusing me of what you could call being a loose woman,” she said.

“It said the only way I would ever get anywhere within politics would be if I was to perform unspeakable things to men.”

The writer ended the letter and said Sophie should be “turned out on the Beverley Westwood pasture with the rest of the cows”.

“It was just vile,” Sophie recalled.

Humberside Police confirmed it received a report of the letter. “Inquiries were carried out at the time, including reviewing CCTV,” the force said.

“However, the content of the alleged letter was unavailable and subsequently no further investigative opportunities were able to be obtained.”

Officers said they gave Sophie safety advice. She has received three more letters since and reported them all to police.

Elsewhere in the village – home to just 500 people – Sophie’s partner Sam has opened letters claiming to be from a friend, urging him “to be honest” with himself.

One, which the BBC has seen, warned Sam about Sophie’s private life, urging him to stop Sophie from “roaming”.

The letter was signed: “From a caring dear friend.”

Sam said he feared for his partner after they both received letters. “I was frightened,” he said. “I was worried that anybody would approach her because I didn’t know who else had knowledge of this letter.”

Humberside Police said it received a report from a man who felt concerned after he received an anonymous letter to his home address.

“Officers reviewed the letter, however the content was not found to contain any aggressive language and it was established that no criminal offences had been committed,” the force said.

Officers urged him to call them again if further incidents took place.

In another letter seen by the BBC, an anonymous writer told a villager: “I hope cancer finds you.”

Another resident, Jason, said although he had not received any letters, the damage stretches further throughout the village.

“A cloud of vitriol has fallen over Shiptonthorpe,” he said.

“It is a wonderful village with wonderful people, but someone has brought poison to this village.”

Jason claimed some people had left the village because of the letters.

“People come here for a quiet, tranquil, community-spirted life and that’s being damaged badly by one or two devilish people,” he said.

“In my opinion I believe this constitutes a hate crime.”

Hull and East Yorkshire on BBC Soundslatest episode of Look North here.

After thousands of pagers and radio devices exploded in two separate incidents in Lebanon – injuring thousands of people and killing at least 37 – details are still being pieced together as to how such an operation was carried out.

Lebanon and Hezbollah, whose members and communication systems were targeted, have blamed Israel – though Israel is yet to comment.

The BBC has followed a trail from Taiwan, to Japan, Hungary, Israel and back to Lebanon.

Here are the unanswered questions.

Some early speculation suggested that the pagers could have been targeted by a complex hack that caused them to explode. But that theory was quickly dismissed by experts.

To cause damage on the scale that they did, it is probable they were rigged with explosives before they entered Hezbollah’s possession, experts say.

Images of the broken remains of the pagers show the logo of a small Taiwanese electronics manufacturer: Gold Apollo.

The BBC visited the company’s offices, situated on a large business park in a nondescript suburb of Taipei.

The company’s founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, seemed shocked. He denied the business had anything to do with the operation.

“You look at the pictures from Lebanon,” he told reporters outside his firm’s offices. “They don’t have any mark saying Made in Taiwan on them, we did not make those pagers!”

Instead – he pointed to a Hungarian company: BAC Consulting.

Mr Hsu said that three years ago he had licensed Gold Apollo’s trademark to BAC, allowing them to use Gold Apollo’s name on their own pagers.

He said the money transfers from BAC had been “very strange” – and that there had been problems with the payments, which had come from the Middle East.

• Taiwan pager maker stunned by link to Lebanon attacks

The BBC went to the registered office of BAC Consulting, situated in a residential area of the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

The address appeared to be shared by 12 other companies – and no-one in the building could tell us anything about BAC Consulting at all.

Officials in Hungary say the firm, which was first incorporated in 2022, was merely a “trading intermediary with no manufacturing or operational site” in the country.

A brochure for BAC, published on LinkedIn, lists eight organisations it claims to have worked with – including the UK Department for International Development (DfID).

The UK Foreign Office – which has taken on DfID’s responsibilities – told the BBC it was in the process of investigating. But based on initial conversations, it said it did not have any involvement with BAC.

BAC’s website listed one person as its chief executive and founder – Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono.

The BBC made several attempts to contact Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono, but were unable to reach her.

However, she did reportedly speak to NBC News, saying: “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate.”

So who is really behind BAC Consulting?

The New York Times has reported that the company was in fact a front for Israeli intelligence.

The newspaper, citing three Israeli officials, said that two other shell companies were created to help hide the identities of the people who were really producing the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify these reports – but we do know that Bulgarian authorities have now begun investigating another company linked to BAC.

Bulgarian broadcaster bTV reported on Thursday that 1.6 million euros ($1.8m; £1.3m) connected to the device attacks in Lebanon passed through Bulgaria and was later sent to Hungary.

• What we know about firm linked to Lebanon pagers

The origins of the radio devices, which exploded in the second wave of attacks, are less clear.

We know that at least some of those that exploded were the IC-V82 model produced by the Japanese company, ICOM.

Those devices were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, according to a security source speaking to Reuters news agency.

Earlier, a sales executive at the US subsidiary of Icom told the Associated Press news agency that the exploded radio devices in Lebanon appeared to be knockoff products that were not made by the company – adding that it was easy to find counterfeit versions online.

It took the BBC a matter of seconds to find Icom IC-V82s listed for sale in online marketplaces.

ICOM said in a statement it had stopped manufacturing and selling the model almost a decade ago, in October 2014 – and said it had also discontinued production of the batteries needed to operate it.

The company said it does not outsource manufacturing overseas – and all its radios are produced at a factory in Western Japan.

According to Kyodo news agency, Icom director Yoshiki Enomoyo suggested that photos of the damage around the battery compartment of the exploded walkie-talkies suggest they may have been retrofitted with explosives.

• Japan firm says it stopped making walkie-talkies used in Lebanon blasts

Videos show victims reaching into their pockets in the seconds before the devices detonated, causing chaos in streets, shops and homes across the country.

Lebanese authorities have concluded that the devices were detonated by “electronic messages” sent to them, according to a letter by the Lebanese mission to the UN, seen by Reuters news agency.

Citing US officials, the New York Times said that the pagers received messages that appeared to be coming from Hezbollah’s leadership before detonating. The messages instead appeared to trigger the devices, the outlet reported.

We do not yet know what kind of message was sent to the radio devices.

This is the question many in Lebanon are now asking – paranoid that other devices, cameras, phones or laptops could have also been rigged with explosives.

The Lebanese Army has been on the streets of Beirut using a remote-controlled bomb disposal robot to carry out controlled explosions.

BBC crews in Lebanon have been stopped and told not to use their phones or cameras.

“Everyone is just panicking… We don’t know if we can stay next to our laptops, our phones. Everything seems like a danger at this point, and no-one knows what to do,” one woman, Ghida, told a BBC correspondent.

• ‘We don’t know if our phones are safe’: Lebanon on edge after exploding device attacks

There are several theories as to why the devices were triggered to explode this week.

One is that Israel chose this moment to send a devastating message to Hezbollah, following almost a year of escalating cross-border hostilities after Hezbollah fired rockets at or around northern Israel a day after the Hamas attack of 7 October.

The other is that Israel did not intend to put its plan in motion at this moment, but was forced to after fearing the plot was about to be exposed.

According to US outlet Axios, the original plan was for the pager attack to be the opening salvo of an all-out war as a way to try to cripple Hezbollah’s fighters.

But, it says, after Israel learned that Hezbollah had become suspicious, it chose to carry out the attack early.

The Nigerian National Museum in Lagos sits in the city like a respected but unloved relative – it somehow exudes importance but remains largely unvisited.

This is perhaps because the concept of a museum is based on a colonial idea – stuffing cabinets full of exoticised objects removed from the context that gave them any meaning.

Olugbile Holloway, who was appointed earlier this year to head the commission that runs the National Museum, is keen to change this – he wants to take the artefacts on the road and get them seen back where they once belonged.

“How organically African [is this concept of a museum] or has this ideology kind of been superimposed on us?” he asked me.

“Maybe the conventional model of a nice building with artefacts and lights and write-ups, maybe that isn’t what’s going to work in this part of the world?”

Established in 1957 – three years before independence – the museum houses objects from across the country, including Ife bronze and terracotta heads, Benin brass plaques and ivories, and Ibibio masks and costumes.

But there is also an irony – Mr Holloway’s job would not exist if the antiquities department, set up by the colonial government, had not got people to go around the country to collect the pieces that ended up in the museum.

Some may have otherwise been stolen by Western visitors with less scruples to be sold on the lucrative European and American artefacts market. While others could have been destroyed by zealous Nigerian Christians convinced that they were the devil’s work.

In 1967, an unlikely American duo of Charlie Cushman, a hitchhiker, and Herbert “Skip” Cole, a postgraduate student, were sent around the country by the antiquities department, to gather up some of the heritage.

“It was an incredible opportunity to spend – what was it, two weeks? – to venture into small enclaves and villages in south-eastern Nigeria,” Mr Cushman, now 90, told me.

At that time, significant cultural artefacts were kept in traditional shrines, palaces and sometimes caves. They were often central to the area’s traditional religions.

Household heads and shrine priests were responsible for maintaining and protecting these items.

“What I found particularly interesting is that many people in the villages seemed very willing to part with masks and objects that had been in their families for a long time,” 89-year-old Mr Cole told me.

“I was able to buy masks for two or three dollars. They would be worth hundreds in Europe at the time.

“Its monetary value wasn’t important in Igbo villages.

“They used the objects for ceremonies, for entertainment, for commemorating ancestors and nature spirits… which is probably why they were able to sell things inexpensively when they decided that they were no longer useful to them.”

Mr Cushman kept detailed journals of his experiences as they travelled together in a VW minibus and on foot to retrieve these artworks, including ceremonies they observed and people they met – and those handwritten notebooks have survived more than 50 years.

I was especially fascinated by their efforts to persuade Christian converts not to destroy artefacts, which they considered pagan and evil.

The diaries describe meeting a Mr Akazi, a school headmaster and “self-appointed crusader of God” who had burnt some ancestral figures.

“They are evil and remain as crutches to the people. Only with their destruction can we rid the people of these monstrous influences,” Mr Akazi is quoted as saying.

Mr Cole tried his best to explain.

“We are here to try and preserve these art objects for future generations. Rather than destroy them, could we not have them sent to the Lagos Museum where they will accomplish both of our purposes? For you, they will no longer be here to serve as obstructions to Christianity, and for us, they will be preserved.”

It seems that the headmaster was persuaded to hand them over, but did not see their cultural value.

“You see for me there are too many emotional ties connected with these hideous manifestations of Satan. Perhaps for you, these things are art, but they can never be so for me,” Mr Akazi said.

Reading those excerpts reminded me of the times I have accompanied compatriots, who were visiting me in London, to the British Museum to see some of the Nigerian artwork on display, mostly looted from our country.

Some of my guests, who were committed Christians, refused to take photographs of themselves standing with any of the objects, concerned that they might be fraternising with demonic items. We laughed about it, but they were serious.

Mr Cushman and Mr Cole’s mission originated from an assignment by Kenneth C Murray, a British colonial art teacher, who was a key figure in Nigeria’s museum history.

Murray was invited to Nigeria at the request of Aina Onabolu, a European-trained Yoruba fine artist who convinced the colonial government to bring qualified art teachers from the UK to Nigerian secondary schools and teacher training institutions.

Murray believed that contemporary art education should be grounded in traditional art, but there were no collections in Nigeria available for study.

He was also concerned about the unregulated export of Nigerian items.

To address these issues, Murray and his colleagues pressured the colonial government to legislate against the exportation of artefacts and to establish museums.

This resulted in the inauguration of the Nigerian Antiquities Service in 1943, with Murray as its first director. He established Nigeria’s first museums in Esie in 1945, Jos in 1952 and Ife in 1955.

Mr Cole was studying African art at New York’s Columbia University and conducting fieldwork in Nigeria when Murray assigned him to collect artwork from south-eastern Nigeria for the newer museum in Lagos.

Other scholars and Nigerian employees of the museums were tasked with doing this elsewhere in the country.

“I collected more than 400 artworks for the museum,” Mr Cole said. “Murray came to my flat in Enugu and carted things off both to the museum in Lagos, and also to the museum in Oron.”

Mr Cushman studied at Yale and Stanford Universities. He turned down the opportunity to work with investment company Merrill Lynch in New York, eventually deciding to travel the world. He ended up in Nigeria where he met Mr Cole, an old school friend, and was persuaded to join him on his mission.

The journals that Mr Cushman kept are all that survive from the trip.

Unfortunately, “Skip” lost all his own records when he was forced to flee south-east Nigeria during the civil war, which started in July 1967 when the region’s leaders seceded from Nigeria and formed the nation of Biafra.

He was sad to learn later that some of the artwork he had collected for the museum in the southern town of Oron had been destroyed.

“The Nigerian army took over the museum because it was the only building around with air-conditioning so they would use artefacts as firewood to cook their food,” he said.

But much of what the two men, and others, collected survived and is now the responsibility of Mr Holloway as the head of the Nigerian Commission for Museums and Monuments.

He hopes to develop a new concept of a museum that is more appealing to, and representative of, Nigerians and Africans.

“We have about 50-something museums across the country and the vast majority are not viable, because people are not interested in going into a building that has no life.

“To the white man or to the West, what they would call an artefact to us is a sacred object… I feel that the richness in those objects would be to display them as they would originally have been used.”

• Nigeria dispute jeopardises return of artefacts
• Benin Bronzes: ‘My great-grandfather sculpted the looted treasures’
• Ghana, Nigeria and the quest for UK looted treasure

As the age-old saying goes, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it – which is something author Bella Mackie has certainly stuck by.

After the success of her debut novel How To Kill Your Family, she is back with another deep dive into the lives of the super-rich.

What A Way To Go is both a dark and humorous look at wealth, class and society’s fascination with people’s deaths.

Mackie, 41, says her inspiration for the novel came from the way “British people are obsessed with class” but not really with money.

Two of the central narrators in the book – millionaire Anthony Wistern and his wife Olivia – are in constant conflict, with Anthony’s working-class upbringing often clashing with Olivia’s upper class roots.

“The British society mechanism never seems to change and it doesn’t allow people to move up or down,” Mackie tells the BBC.

“We understand it in a weirdly unspoken way that other countries don’t.”

It is easy to imagine these two characters as real-life individuals.

Anthony seems like someone who could appear as one of the millionaire investors on Dragon’s Den, whilst in the book itself, Olivia is referenced as someone who frequents the pages of glossy high society magazine Tatler.

Mackie herself has spoken about her obsession with these publications when she was growing up, and how they have shaped her interest in the lives of the upper classes – or as she calls them “ghost citizens”.

“We can never fully see them, it’s kind of a new phenomenon because there have always been super-rich people who can do whatever they want, but there is a new kind of 1%,” she says.

“They can get away with whatever they want because they’re not really conforming to the same rules or standards as everyone else”.

Mackie says “because we can’t see [them], I’ve tried to imagine it”.

Another central theme of the book is its true-crime element, as a local citizen journalist, or sleuther, investigates whether Anthony Wistern’s death should be considered murder.

Mackie, who herself is a journalist who has worked for The Guardian and Vice, says this storyline was inspired by the case of Nicola Bulley.

Bulley disappeared in a small Lancashire village in 2023, promoting social media users to show up, speculating that she had been murdered.

A coroner later ruled that her death was accidental.

The app TikTok was one of the biggest drivers of interest in the case.

“I was just aghast at what was happening, the misinformation about her was just ridiculous,” Mackie says.

“People seem to have stepped over boundaries that previously they might not have crossed.

“Contacting someone’s family or accusing a victim of being involved – maybe without the internet you wouldn’t think these were acceptable things to do,” she adds.

Mackie’s debut novel, How to Kill Your Family, is currently being adapted by Netflix into an eight-part series.

The book, which sold more than a million copies, sees protagonist Grace take revenge on her billionaire dad and the wealthy family members who rejected her.

After the success of the film Saltburn, which takes a playful, if slightly absurd look at the British upper classes, Mackie says she is intrigued to see how her 2021 bestseller is written for the small screen.

“The conversation [around Saltburn] was more about the class structures in the film than the plot,” she says.

“I think Americans saw that in the way they love Downton Abbey, they probably thought ‘wow that house is beautiful, what an amazing life’.

“I wonder whether they fully understood the darkness of it.”

She adds that there is definitely “a romanticisation of posh British people from Americans”.

Mackie says “it would be a shame” if the adaption of her book was tailored to an American audience as “a lot of the humour is quite British”.

The author hasn’t had any involvement in the screenwriting process, so says she will be “watching along for the first time with everyone else”.

She points to Netflix shows like Sex Education, which “felt British, but not fully – it felt like it could have been [set] anywhere”.

But despite not being involved in the screenwriting process, she says she is confident in the abilities of production company Sid Gentle Films, who were also behind the hugely successful Killing Eve.

“The writers are British and Irish so they’ll probably try and keep it as [authentic] as possible.

“And I think that works for other audiences who are looking at us and thinking what a ridiculous country we are” she adds.

It is the least populated continent on Earth, but for Scottish composer Michael Begg spending several weeks in Antarctica was anything but silent.

“Antarctica is often called the quietest continent but it is actually raging with sound,” says the Edinburgh native, now back on home soil.

“The wind never lets up and there is so much wildlife. If you’re on the ocean then you’re never far from whales, you always hear them calling and spouting around. Then when you’re on shore you have seals and penguins screaming everywhere.”

Now Michael’s trip – where he spent nearly three months aboard the Royal Navy’s ice patrol vessel, HMS Protector – has provided material for both an album and film.

While on his trip he captured everything from glaciers crumbling to a penguin colony that resembled “a holiday camp”, resulting in a continual spectacle that left the 58-year-old awestruck.

Those sounds have now been blended into Michael’s own musical ideas, resulting in Out of Whose Womb Comes The Ice – a collection of eerie, haunting music he will premiere at the end of September.

“The sense of awe became almost tiring as it never let up,” he reflects.

“There wasn’t a lot of darkness, so it was almost 24 hours straight for the most extraordinary sights and sounds and colours. Obviously, I expected the cold, I expected ice and I expected white but what I didn’t expect was the entire colour palette of the planet changes.

“You have bizarre lemon sherbet yellow sunsets and curious purple colours of water. There is so little that’s familiar to hold onto, so you just have to let go.”

Musical experiments are nothing new to Michael, and neither is utilizing nature and science in his work.

A prolific sound artist since 2000, previous experiences have included composer residencies with the Ocean ARTic Partnership and the European Marine Board.

That work saw him collaborate with scientists to create music from polar research – a style he describes as “finding music to come to us from the world”, where he uses computer programming and studio manipulation to soundtrack data.

That work led him to becoming musician in residence with the Friends of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, and when they suggested taking a trip with the Royal Navy he jumped at the chance.

While onboard the composer was “treated very well”, even his hosts may have raised eyebrows at some requests.

“I was going to a place on the planet that is very harsh and you can’t survive in for any length of time,” he says.

“So when I asked if the Marines could take me down in a small dinghy, take me across to an inhospitable island and leave me there for the day, they were like, ‘if that’s what you want we’ll need to prepare you as much as we can’.

“I was going into these extraordinary locations and left to my own devices.”

The results proved inspiring in more ways than expected. Initially taking a video camera to capture still images rather than using his phone, Michael had enough footage to create an accompany film of his experiences.

It is a body of work that he hopes will convey a changing climate, where water is increasingly warm and glacier ice was carving away.

“There is a fragility there. All I had to do was point the microphone at it, and you have this great, sorrowful expanse of ice beginning to crack and fade.

Michael admits that he has no desire “to be the sort of climate artist who is hitting people with a very hard message”, and instead hopes his work will let people “find their own way into it”.

Yet some of his experiences spokes for themselves.

“I was on Deception Island (in the South Shetland Islands, near the Antarctic Peninsula), which was actually the cauldron of a volcano.

“There had been a research station there and a whaling station there, but a succession of volcanic eruptions had driven people away. At this time of year it should be pretty solid, but there was just a sound of running water everywhere – it was like a Scottish spring after snow.

“It felt wrong, because it shouldn’t sound like that there.”

That uneasiness carries over into his work, which he will premiere at the Glad Cafe in Glasgow on 27 September as part of Sonica, the festival that combines new music and dynamic audiovisual art.

But if parts of his trip could be unsettling, then there was considerable wonder and beauty too, particularly from blending in with the natives on Bertha’s Beach in the Falkland Islands.

“I was a penguin for the afternoon,” he recalls.

“I took a long walk out there and found a colony of Gentoo penguins. It was a curious affair, because most of them barely acknowledged me.

“A few came up to me and were like ‘what ye uptae?’ It was being in a penguin holiday camp – there were lovers having an argument, kids swimming, others sunbathing and some were gathered at a wee dune, having what looked like a meeting.

“There were guidelines about not getting close, but no-one had told the penguins that…”

We asked our readers to send in their best pictures on the theme of “railways”. Here is a selection of the photographs we received from around the world.

The next theme is “arches” and the deadline for entries is 1 October 2024.

The pictures will be published later that week and you will be able to find them, along with other galleries, on the In Pictures section of the BBC News website.

You can upload your entries directly here or email them to yourpics@bbc.co.uk.

Terms and conditions apply.

Further details and themes are at: We set the theme, you take the pictures.

All photographs subject to copyright.

Travis King, the US soldier who fled from South to North Korea last year before being returned home, has been sentenced to one year of confinement and dishonourably discharged from the military.

He faced charges including desertion in July 2023 and assault of a non-commissioned officer.

But with time already served and credit for good behaviour, the 24-year-old Army private walked free, his legal team told the BBC.

At Friday’s hearing at Fort Bliss, Texas, he pleaded guilty to five of the original 14 military charges that had been filed against him. The other counts were dismissed.

King joined the army in January 2021 and was in South Korea as part of a unit rotation when he crossed into North Korea.

At the hearing, King told military judge Lt Col Rick Mathew that he had decided to flee the US Army because he was “dissatisfied” with work and had been thinking about leaving for about a year before he bolted into North Korea.

“I wanted to desert from the US Army and never come back,” King said, according to reporters inside the courtroom.

He also said he had been diagnosed with mental health conditions, though he maintained he was fit to stand trial and understood the charges.

King’s lawyer, Franklin Rosenblatt, said in a statement that his client accepts full responsibility for what happened and added that King “faced significant challenges in his life, including a difficult upbringing, exposure to criminal environments, and struggles with mental health”.

“All these factors have compounded the hardships he faced in the military,” Mr Rosenblatt said.

King illegally crossed into North Korea while on a civilian tour of the village of Panmunjom, located on the heavily guarded Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea.

He joined the civilian tour after he was released from a South Korean prison where he had served nearly two months on charges that he assaulted two people and kicked a police car.

After his release, he was taken to the airport so he could return to the Fort Bliss base to face disciplinary action. But instead of getting on the plane, King joined the civilian tour and ultimately bolted into North Korea, where he was detained by local authorities.

At the time, North Korean media reported that he had fled because of “inhuman treatment” and racism within the US military.

He became the first American to be detained in North Korea in nearly five years.

King was released two months later after “intense diplomacy”, US officials said at the time. He was taken by a state department aircraft to a US airbase in South Korea.

On 28 September 2023, he was flown back to Texas and had been in custody there since.

The following month, he was charged by the US military with desertion, kicking and punching other officers, unlawfully possessing alcohol, making a false statement and possessing a video of a child engaged in sexual activity.

King pleaded guilty to charges including desertion, three counts of disobeying an officer and assault on a non-commissioned officer.

The other charges, however, were dismissed after the government made a motion to do so, which was granted by the judge.

The Associated Press reported in July that King’s lawyers were in talks with military prosecutors to work out a plea deal. A preliminary hearing was scheduled that month, but was postponed so both sides could negotiate.

In his statement, Mr Rosenblatt said he believes that despite his client walking away free on Friday, “the negative public perception” and the time King has spent in custody “represents an ongoing punishment that he will endure for the rest of his life”.

Ukraine has banned the use of the Telegram messaging platform on official devices issued to government and military personnel, as well as defence sector and critical infrastructure employees.

The country’s powerful National Security and Defence Council (Rnbo) said this was done to “minimise” threats posed by Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Telegram is actively used by the enemy for cyber-attacks, the distribution of phishing and malicious software, user geolocation and missile strike correction,” the Rnbo said on Friday.

In a statement to the BBC, Telegram said it has “never provided any messaging data to any country, including Russia”.

Telegram is widely used by the government and the military in both Ukraine and Russia.

In a statement, the Rnbo said the ban was agreed at a meeting of Ukraine’s top information security officials, the military as well as lawmakers.

It said military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov had presented credible evidence of Russian special services’ ability to access personal correspondence of Telegram users, even their deleted messages.

“I have always supported and continue to support freedom of speech, but the issue of Telegram is not a matter of freedom of speech, it is a matter of national security,” Budanov was quoted as saying.

The Rnbo said that those officials for whom the use of Telegram was part of their work duties would be exempt from the ban.

Separately, Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Rnbo’s centre on countering disinformation, stressed the ban only applied to official devices – not personal smartphones.

He added that government officials and military personnel would be able to continue to maintain and update their official Telegram pages.

Last year, a USAID-Internews survey found that Telegram was the top social platform in Ukraine for news consumption, with 72% of Ukrainians using it.

Telegram – which offers end-to-end encryption – was co-founded by Russian-born Pavel Durov and his brother in 2013.

A year later, Durov left Russia after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on the platform.

Last month, Durov, who is also a French national, was placed under formal investigation in France as part of a probe into organised crime.

His case has fuelled a debate about freedom of speech, accountability and how platforms moderate content.

In July, Durov claimed that Telegram reached 950 million monthly active users.

Following Ukraine’s claims, a spokesperson for Telegram said the company would be “interested in reviewing any evidence that supports Mr Budanov’s claims”, adding that “to our knowledge, no such evidence exists”.

“Telegram has never provided any messaging data to any country, including Russia,” the spokesperson added.

Telegram also said “deleted messages are deleted forever and are technically impossible to recover”.

The firm added that “every instance of supposed ‘leaked messages’ Telegram has investigated has been the result of a compromised device, whether through confiscation or malware”.

South Carolina has executed its first death row inmate in 13 years, administering a lethal injection to Freddie Owens.

Owens, 46, was found guilty by a jury of killing shop worker Irene Graves during an armed robbery in Greenville in 1997.

He was executed despite his co-defendant signing a sworn statement this week claiming Owens was not present at the time of the robbery and killing.

The South Carolina Supreme Court refused to halt Owens’ execution, saying the claims were inconsistent with testimony made at his trial.

Owens was executed at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, South Carolina, on Friday evening.

He was pronounced dead at 18:55 local time (22:55 GMT) after being injected with a drug called pentobarbital. He made no final statement.

His death followed a pause in executions in the state because prison officials were unable to procure the drug required for lethal injections.

Owens was sentenced to death in 1999, two years after killing Graves, after being convicted of murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy.

The day after he was found guilty, he killed his cellmate in jail, reports CNN affiliate WHNS.

According to reporting on his trial by South Carolina newspaper The State, Owens was 19 when he and Steve Golden, then 18, held Graves at gunpoint while attempting to rob the convenience store where she worked.

Owens shot and killed Graves after she failed to open a safe below the counter, according to testimony provided by Golden at Owens’s trial.

At the time of her death, Graves was a 41-year-old single mother of three.

Lawyers for Owens tried to halt his execution a few times, including twice in September. But the court denied each request.

In the latest attempt, lawyers pointed to an affidavit signed by Golden on Wednesday, which claimed Owens was innocent.

The court denied the request to halt the execution by saying that the new affidavit was “squarely inconsistent with Golden’s testimony at Owens’s 1999 trial” and the statement he gave to police right after their arrest.

Other witnesses testified that Owens had told them he shot Graves, prosecutors said.

Advocates against the death penalty and Owens’s mother also appealed to the state for clemency, which was denied by Governor Henry McMaster.

Hours before his execution, Owens’s mother said in a statement it was a “grave injustice that has been perpetrated against my son”.

“Freddie has maintained his innocence since day one,” his mother, Dora Mason, said, according to local news outlet the Greenville News.

Inmates in South Carolina are allowed to choose whether they want to die by lethal injection, electric chair or firing squad.

Owens deferred the decision to his lawyer, who chose the lethal injection option for him, according to the Greenville News.

Journalists who witnessed the execution said members of Graves’ family were also present.

An employee of California’s state fire protection agency has been arrested on suspicion of starting five forest fires in recent weeks, local officials have said.

Robert Hernandez, a 38-year-old apparatus engineer at Cal Fire, was charged with five counts of arson, and is due to appear in court on Tuesday.

He is suspected of igniting the blazes while off duty in three areas of northern California between 15 August and 14 September.

Thanks to the quick response by firefighters and local residents less than an acre (0.4 ha) of wildland was burned, the officials said.

“I am appalled to learn one of our employees would violate the public’s trust and attempt to tarnish the tireless work of the 12,000 women and men of Cal Fire,” agency chief Joe Tyler said.

Hernandez was arrested on Friday, and booked into Sonoma County Jail on Friday.

He is suspected of starting the five fires near the towns of Geyserville, Healdsburg and Windsor, some 56-62 miles (90-100km) north of San Francisco.

Apparatus engineers at Cal Fire are responsible for operating and maintaining fire engines and water tanks during emergency responses.

California has seen a number of severe wildfires during the summer, with nearly three times as much acreage burn as during all of 2023, the AP news agency reported.

On Tuesday a 34-year-old delivery driver pleaded not guilty to 11 arson-related crimes by prosecutors in southern California.

Justin Wayne Halstenberg is alleged to have started one major wildfire – dubbed the Line Fire – which burned through 61 square miles (158 square kilometers) of the San Bernardino mountains east of Los Angeles.

An Israeli air strike on a school in Gaza City has killed at least 22 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

The school, closed during the war, was housing displaced people, the health ministry said.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it targeted a Hamas command centre which Israel said the militant group was using to “plan and carry out terrorist attacks”.

Hamas has denied using schools and other civilian sites for military purposes.

Warning: This story contains details which some people may find upsetting

The Hamas-run government media office said the people killed in Saturday’s strike in the al-Zaytoun area included several children and six women.

Gaza’s civil defence agency reported the same death toll and added that one of the women was pregnant.

Several graphic videos of the aftermath of the strike examined by BBC Verify appear to corroborate this.

Other footage shows children among the victims. Some are seen with severe injuries, including parts of their legs missing. Others are seen lying motionless while adults try to deliver CPR.

BBC Verify confirmed the location by comparing details seen in the background to satellite and ground-level images of the targeted school.

The IDF said it took steps to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, and accused Hamas of exploiting civilian infrastructure.

Hamas “systematically violates international law by operating from inside civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and exploiting the Gazan civilian population for its terrorist activities”, the IDF said.

Also on Saturday, the health ministry said that four of its workers were killed and six injured in an Israeli “targeting” of a health ministry warehouse in the Musabah area of southern Gaza. The ministry did not specify whether the incident was an air strike.

The BBC has approached the IDF for comment on the report of health workers killed.

Other schools have been hit, some several times, by Israeli air strikes since the latest conflict with Hamas began on 7 October.

Earlier this month, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) said six of its employees were killed in an Israeli air strike on al-Jaouni school in Nuseirat refugee camp, which is being used as a shelter by thousands of displaced Palestinians.

Unrwa said it was the fifth time the school had been hit since 7 October.

Israel’s military said it carried out a “precise strike on terrorists” planning attacks from the school. The military alleged that nine of those killed were members of Hamas’s armed wing and that three of them were Unrwa staff.

Hamas gunmen attacked Israel on 7 October last year, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others as hostages.

Israel responded with a military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 41,000 people, according to the health ministry.

A US Secret Service internal review has identified poor planning and a communication breakdown among a litany of security failures on the day of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump two months ago.

Secret Service acting Director Ronald Rowe said the interim report suggested “complacency” by some of its agents.

He said the use of different radio frequencies by police and Secret Service meant Trump’s protection team were unaware a suspicious person had been identified at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally.

The report also highlighted the failure to secure the building that the shooter fired from. The attack on 13 July led to the resignation of the Secret Service’s last director.

“Secret Service did not give clear guidance or direction to local law enforcement partners,” Mr Rowe said on Friday.

A gunman fired eight shots at Trump from the roof of a building. The Republican White House candidate’s ear was grazed by a bullet, while one rally attendee was killed and two others were injured before a Secret Service sniper shot the suspect dead.

Friday’s internal findings suggest Trump’s security detail was not aware that state and local law enforcement were intensely pursuing a suspicious person, who turned out to be the gunman.

Had they been aware, agents might have moved Trump to another location during the search, according to the report.

Law enforcement also communicated vital information outside the Secret Service’s radio frequencies.

The suspect was able to get on to a nearby rooftop with a direct line of sight to where the former president was speaking.

Mr Rowe described a “lack of follow-through” on access control to the building and the rooftop.

He added that line-of-sight issues involving the building were acknowledged, but were not mitigated or escalated to supervisors.

The acting director said the Secret Service cannot “defer our responsibilities to others” as the agency moves to an accountability phase of its review.

“This was a failure on the part of the United States Secret Service,” Mr Rowe said.

“It’s important that we hold ourselves accountable for the failures of July 13, and that we use the lessons learned to make sure that we do not have another failure like this again.”

The agency says disciplinary actions will be taken for agents involved.

The acting director spoke of a heightened threat environment following the second apparent assassination attempt involving Trump on Sunday in Florida.

He said the agency needed a “paradigm shift”.

Also on Friday, the US House of Representatives voted unanimously to bolster Secret Service protection for presidential and vice- presidential candidates. The bill will need to pass the Senate.

Half a billion fans, a multi-million dollar personal fortune and a global business empire.

It would take a lot to dethrone YouTube’s biggest influencer Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast.

But a 54-page court document could be his toughest test yet.

Five female contestants on upcoming Prime Video show Beast Games are launching legal action against his production company MrB2024 and Amazon in Los Angeles.

Billed as the largest ever reality competition series, 1,000 contestants are set to compete for a $5m (£3.7m) prize when the show airs – or if it airs. The lawsuit has plunged the show into crisis.

Among many redacted pages, the legal document includes allegations that they “particularly and collectively suffered” in an environment that “systematically fostered a culture of misogyny and sexism”.

It cuts to the core of MrBeast’s image as one of the nicest guys on the internet.

I flicked through the document, which includes suggestions that participants were “underfed and overtired”. Meals were provided “sporadically and sparsely” which “endangered the health and welfare” of the contestants, it is claimed.

In one section where almost all of the claims are redacted from public view, it says the defendants “created, permitted to exist, and fostered a culture and pattern and practice of sexual harassment including in the form of a hostile work environment”.

Back in August, the New York Times spoke to more than a dozen of the (yet unreleased) show’s participants, and reported there were “several hospitalisations” on the set, with one person telling the paper they had gone over 20 hours without being fed.

Contestants also alleged they had not received their medication on time.

The BBC has approached MrBeast and Amazon – he has not yet publicly commented.

So will these latest allegations hurt the king of YouTube’s popularity?

MrBeast is no stranger to controversy this year – and has managed to come out unscathed each time.

In July, the 26-year-old American said he had hired investigators after his former co-host Ava Kris Tyson was accused of grooming a teenager.

Ava denied the allegations, but has apologised for “past behaviour” which was “not acceptable”.

MrBeast said he was “disgusted” by the “serious allegations”.

Later, further allegations about business practices surfaced on an anonymous YouTube channel, claiming to be a former employee. The BBC has not been able to independently verify the claims or this person’s identity.

Some of his philanthropic efforts – such as building wells in Africa, and paying for surgery for people with reduced sight and hearing – have drawn criticisms around exploitation.

“Deaf people like me deserve better than MrBeast’s latest piece of inspiration porn,” one person told the Independent last year.

But his empire continues to grow. The day before the lawsuit emerged on Wednesday, he revealed a team-up with fellow famous faces KSI and Logan Paul – a new food line designed to challenge Lunchables.

And as I wrote in an article about his meteoric rise last year, he has made his millions through hard work.

His videos are big budget experiences, with his most popular – viewed 652 million times – recreating the Netflix hit Squid Game in real life with a $456,000 (£342,000) prize.

Most of his philanthropy is less controversial – including giving away houses, cash and cars – which has worked to create an image of him being one of the internet’s good guys.

According to his website, he has delivered more than 25 million meals to the needy around the world.

People continue to flock to his social channels. In June, he gained enough subscribers to make his YouTube channel the largest in the world.

According to stats-checker Socialblade, MrBeast picked up an extra five million subscribers in the last 30 days alone.

That’s just one metric – we can’t tell how many people unsubscribed from his channel, for example.

What is certain is that the number of people who’ve actively decided to stop watching his videos has been eclipsed by those who’ve decided to subscribe.

He wouldn’t be the only YouTuber whose popularity holds through controversy – others have faced far more significant storms than MrBeast, with few facing many consequences outside of a public apology.

Logan Paul faced a massive backlash in 2018 after he uploaded a video to his 15 million subscribers which showed the body of a person who had apparently taken their own life.

After removing the original video, he shared a less than two-minute apology titled simply: “So sorry.”

Now, he has 23 million subscribers, owns an incredibly popular sports drink, and up until August was the WWE United States champion. He’s had quite a few pay-per-view boxing bouts, too.

Other high-profile YouTubers, including Pewdiepie, James Charles, and Jeffree Star have all had their own controversies, and got on with their careers after uploading apology videos.

A more modern example is Herschel “Guy” Beahm, known online as Dr Disrespect, who admitted he sent messages to “an individual minor” in 2017.

He stressed that “nothing illegal happened, no pictures were shared, no crimes were committed” and went offline for two months after posting the statement.

His comeback livestream earlier this month attracted more than three million views, despite criticism from other high-profile streamers.

Dr Disrespect remains the second-most watched streamer in the US this year, according to Streams Charts.

The point is: YouTubers tend to be forgiven quickly.

While MrBeast’s fanbase has continued growing, controversy is swirling once again – and his next move could determine his long-term success.

James Lunn, chief strategy officer at Savvy Marketing, says the star is “in an incredibly unique position” with a “multi-faceted” brand spanning many industries.

“We are indeed in uncharted waters,” he says, and “a proactive approach, addressing the issues transparently and ensuring accountability, could protect his brand”.

Brand expert Catherine Shuttleworth says the “sheer scale” of MrBeast’s fame may act as a buffer against backlash, but the latest lawsuit could be difficult.

“When it comes to his business ventures, particularly those targeting families and children – like Feastables chocolate bars or Lunchly – it’s a different story,” she says.

“Parents, who often hold the purchasing power, tend to be less tolerant of controversies involving safety, fairness, and ethics.”

Back in August 2023, when writing about MrBeast, I predicted he would soon take the YouTube crown despite him having half as many subscribers then.

He is now facing extra challenges as his fame rises, and a lot of the internet is eagerly awaiting his reply to what is, so far, one side of a complex story.

Israeli forces have raided the offices of news broadcaster Al Jazeera in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, and ordered it to close for an initial period of 45 days.

Armed and masked Israeli soldiers entered the building early on Sunday during a live broadcast.

Viewers watched as the troops handed the closure order to the network’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari who read it out live on air.

Israel raided Al Jazeera’s offices in Nazareth and occupied East Jerusalem in May having described the Qatar-based broadcaster as a threat to national security.

“Targeting journalists this way always aims to erase the truth and prevent people from hearing the truth,” Omari said in comments reported by his employer.

The soldiers confiscated the last microphone and camera off the street outside and forced Omari out of the office, Al Jazeera journalist Mohammad Alsaafin said.

Posting about the raid on social media, Alsaafin said the troops also pulled down a poster of Shireen Abu Aqla – an Al Jazeera reporter who was killed while covering a raid by Israeli forces in the West Bank.

The network and witnesses at the time said the Palestinian-American reporter was shot by Israeli forces. Israel initially argued she had been shot by a Palestinian, however months later concluded there was a “high probability” that one of its soldiers killed her.

Relations between the Qatari-owned broadcaster and the Israeli government have long been tense but have worsened dramatically following the outbreak of war in Gaza.

With foreign journalists banned from entering the strip, Al Jazeera staff based in the area have been some of the only reporters able to cover the war on the ground.

Israel has repeatedly branded the network a terrorist mouthpiece, an accusation Al Jazeera has denied.

In April, the Israeli parliament passed a law giving the government power to temporarily close foreign broadcasters considered a threat to national security during the war.

A ban would be in place for a period of 45 days at a time, as seen in Sunday’s raid, and can be renewed.

In early May, the Al Jazeera offices in Nazareth and occupied East Jerusalem were subject to separate raids.

Israel is yet to comment on Sunday’s operation.

Israel has launched air strikes in Lebanon and is restricting gatherings in the city of Haifa and other northern areas as it continues to attack targets linked to Hezbollah.

Dozens of fighter jets started “extensively” striking southern Lebanon “following detection of Hezbollah preparing to fire toward Israeli territory”, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Adm Daniel Hagari said.

The latest Israeli offensive comes a day after it carried out an air strike in Beirut, which the IDF said killed a dozen senior Hezbollah commanders. Lebanon said 37 people – including three children – were killed.

The US government is urging its citizens there to leave “via commercial options while still available”.

On Friday, exchanges of cross-border fire resumed between Israel and Hezbollah.

Before the evening Israeli strikes began, the IDF said earlier it had destroyed “about 180 sites and thousands of [rocket] launcher barrels” with strikes

The IDF also said more than 90 rockets were fired at Israeli territory from Lebanon. Hezbollah said it had targeted 11 Israeli military positions over the course of the day.

On Saturday night, Hezbollah said it had fired dozens of rockets towards the Ramat David Airbase in Israel’s north in retaliation for the Israeli attacks.

Earlier this week, 39 people were killed and thousands wounded after pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia and political group, exploded on two days across Lebanon.

On Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah blamed Israel for the attacks, saying it had crossed “all red lines” and vowed “just punishment”.

Israel has not claimed responsibility.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said the pager and walkie-talkie explosions violated international humanitarian law.

On Saturday, the IDF announced new restrictions on communities in northern Israel and parts of the southern Golan Heights starting at 20:30 local time (17:30 GMT).

The IDF limited gatherings to 30 participants in an open area and 300 participants in a closed space. Educational activities can continue and arrival to work is permitted as long as there are protected spaces available.

The restrictions apply to the Haifa area and northward.

As fears increase that the conflict may break out into a full-scale war, the US State Department issued new travel advice for citizens currently in Lebanon.

The US Embassy in Beirut urged people to “depart Lebanon while commercial options still remain available”, noting they were already running at “reduced capacity”.

The embassy added it “may not be able to assist US citizens who choose to remain”.

Neighbouring Jordan’s foreign ministry issued similar advice to its citizens, urging those in Lebanon to leave as soon as possible.

Cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah escalated on 8 October 2023 – the day after the attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen from Gaza – when Hezbollah fired at Israeli positions in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Israel recently added the return of people displaced from the north of the country due to the cross-border fighting to its list of war goals.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that Israel was entering a “new phase of the war” concentrating more of its efforts in the north.

Former US President Donald Trump has said he will not take part in a second TV debate ahead of November’s presidential election.

While Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s candidate, accepted an invitation to the CNN debate on 23 October, Republican nominee Trump told a rally it was “too late” as voting has already started.

Harris’s campaign team said that given the former president claimed to have won their previous debate in Philadelphia earlier this month he should accept.

Snap polls taken after that encounter suggested a majority of viewers believed the vice-president outperformed her challenger.

After the 10 September debate, Trump said there would be no further debates.

Speaking at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on Saturday, he claimed victory in that earlier head-to-head and said “it’s just too late” for another.

“Voting has already started,” he said, accusing Harris of seeking another round of sparring “because she’s losing badly.”

• Anthony Zurcher analysis: Who won the Harris-Trump debate?
• Watch key moments from Harris-Trump clash

In a statement on Saturday, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said that Americans “deserve another opportunity” to see Harris and Trump debate before the November election.

“It would be unprecedented in modern history for there to just be one general election debate,” she said. “Debates offer a unique chance for voters to see the candidates side by side and take stock of their competing visions for America.”

On X, formerly Twitter, Harris said she had “gladly” accepted the debate invitation and hoped Trump would also take part.

CNN had said the potential debate would follow the same format as the one it broadcast in June between Trump and President Joe Biden.

Biden’s faltering performance in that encounter led some Democrats to question whether he should be the party’s candidate for the election.

After weeks of uncertainty the president announced he would not seek re-election – paving the way for Harris to become the nominee.

At the Trump rally, some voters told the BBC they hoped another debate would take place.

“If you’re not afraid, why not? They both did great [at the last debate],” said Trump supporter Steve Castellano.

Adding that he thought the moderators were “a little biased” at the last debate, Mr Castellano suggested some conditions for a possible rematch.

• Republicans absorb a political shockwave in must-win North Carolina
• Ros Atkins on… Were the Trump-Harris debate moderators unfair?

“They should debate again at a network Trump chooses,” he said. “What I would really love is a good podcaster [to moderate]. I’d really love Joe Rogan to do it.”

Harris holds a slight lead over Trump in national polling averages, and North Carolina could be crucial for his hopes to return to the White House.

Since then, a majority of national polls suggest that Harris has made small gains with voters.

Trump’s campaign stop in North Carolina comes after the Republican candidate he endorsed for governor, Mark Robinson, reportedly made controversial comments on a porn website more than a decade ago.

Robinson characterised the CNN report, which alleged that he had referred to himself as a “black Nazi” on an adult forum, as “salacious tabloid lies”.

Robinson did not attend Saturday’s rally and Trump did not mention it during his 60-minute speech to supporters.

The two candidates exchanged swipes and barbs at the previous debate, with Trump calling Harris a “radical left liberal” and a Marxist who was destroying America.

Harris, for her part, goaded Trump, belittled the size of his rally crowds and quoted his Republican detractors.

CBS, the BBC’s news partner in the US, has also invited both presidential candidates to participate in an October debate in Arizona.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election
• FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger under Biden or Trump?
• POLICIES: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?
• NEWSLETTER: Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter.

French President Emmanuel Macron has unveiled his new government almost three months after a snap general election delivered a hung parliament.

The long-awaited new line up, led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, marks a decisive shift to the right, even though a left-wing alliance won most parliamentary seats.

Despite the partnership between Macron’s centrist party and those on the right, parliament remains fractured and will rely on the support of other parties to pass legislation.

It comes as the European Union puts France on notice over its spiralling debt, which now far exceeds EU rules.

Among those gaining a position in the new cabinet is Bruno Retailleau, a key member of the conservative Republicans Party founded by former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

He has been appointed interior minister, a portfolio that includes immigration.

A total of 10 politicians from the Republicans have been given cabinet jobs, though Macron has kept a number of outgoing ministers in key posts.

Close Macron ally Sebastien Lecornu has been kept on as defence minister, and Jean-Noel Barrot, the outgoing Europe minister, has been promoted to foreign minister.

Just one left-wing politician was given a post in the cabinet, independent Didier Migaud, who was appointed as justice minister.

The post of finance minister went to Antoine Armand, a member of Macron’s own Renaissance party who, until now, was of little political renown.

Armand has the task of drafting the government’s budget bill before the new year to address France’s dire deficit.

Prior to the snap election, the European Union’s executive arm warned France that it would be disciplined for contravening the bloc’s financial rules.

France’s public-sector deficit is projected to reach around 5.6% of GDP this year and go over 6% in 2025. The EU has a 3% limit on deficits.

Michel Barnier, a veteran conservative, was named as Macron’s prime minister earlier this month.

Barnier had been the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, and it was he who tackled the task of forming a new government capable of surviving the fractured National Assembly.

Members of the left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP) have threatened a no-confidence motion in the new government.

In the July election, the NFP won the most parliamentary seats of any political bloc, but not enough for an overall majority.

Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon called for the new government to “be got rid of” as soon as possible.

On Saturday, before the cabinet announcement, thousands of left-wing supporters demonstrated in Paris against the incoming government, arguing that the left’s performance in the election was not taken into consideration.

The alliance between centrist and conservative parties in the cabinet is not enough to pass legislation on its own.

It will depend on others, such as Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally to stay in power and get bills into law.

The artist George Underwood is taking part in a charity exhibition that was inspired by a lyric written by his school friend and creative collaborator David Bowie – but it is a particular episode in the late music legend’s life for which he will always be most famous.

“I know what you’re going to say. I know exactly what you’re going to say,” Underwood laughs over the phone.

The 77-year-old has enjoyed an extremely successful career, creating images that are recognised around the world, but he is still known best as the man who “changed the colour” of Bowie’s left eye.

Underwood first met David Robert Jones – who would become better known as David Bowie – not long after the future star had moved from Brixton in south London to the quiet suburb of Bromley.

“We met when we were enrolling for the Cubs. We were nine years old and started talking about music, stuff that was on the telly… everything that was sort of fashionable at that time.”

The pair were soon best pals who “were always being silly and laughing a lot”, says Underwood.

“We were always together, we were very good friends and we used to go up and down Bromley High Street all dressed to the nines, thinking we were God’s gift, trying to chat up all the girls, walking from the north Wimpy bar to the south Wimpy bar.”

They both attended Bromley Technical College, which was so new “some of the builders’ stuff was still lying around in the entrance”, where they were taught art by Owen Frampton, father of future rock star Peter Frampton.

It was at Bromley Technical – now called Ravens Wood School – that Underwood forever changed the look of David Bowie, following a row about a girl called Carol to whom they had both taken a liking.

After the pair’s attempts to woo her had failed at a chaotic 15th birthday party, where “a whole troop of blokes came in carrying bottles of gin”, Underwood agreed to meet Carol at a youth club the next evening, only for Bowie to tell him she had decided to go out with him instead.

“I decided to go down the youth club anyway a little bit later on because I’d never been there before and her mate came out shouting: ‘Where have you been? Carol’s been waiting for you for over an hour.’

“I thought: ‘Uh-oh. David’s told me a porky pie here,'” Underwood says.

Having been egged on by another friend “to stick one on him”, and hearing Bowie falsely boasting he had been out with Carol, during break time at school Underwood “went over to him and just whacked him in the eye”.

The pair made up soon afterwards even though the punch had permanently damaged the pupil in Bowie’s left eye, meaning it would no longer contract even in bright lights, giving that eye the impression of being a different colour from his right one.

“It was just horrible. I didn’t like it at the time. But of course later on, lo and behold, he says I did him a favour because it’s given him this enigmatic, otherworldly look.”

It was during this time that music began to take over the teenagers’ lives, with Underwood singing in the band The Konrads, which Bowie then joined and played his saxophone.

Later they formed the King Bees, when the future Starman would display his thirst for fame in a note to John Bloom, “who was I suppose at the time the equivalent to, say, Richard Branson”.

“I think he had his dad to help him with the letter but it was quite ballsy, you know: ‘Brian Epstein’s got The Beatles; you need us’, or something like that,” says Underwood.

The band received a telegram in reply providing the phone number for Leslie Conn, who became their manager.

“The springboard that David made, by writing that letter, into the lower ladder of rock’n’roll and music – it was amazing.”

The King Bees would soon split up but in various guises Bowie began to build up a following. Within a few years he was off on his own world tours – and was keen to have his friend along for the ride.

“In early ’72 he rang me and said: ‘Hey George, I’m doing a tour of the States for about three months. Do you wanna come with me?’ I’d only been married for about a year but he said: ‘Oh bring the wife, you know, we’ll have a great time.’

“Well you don’t turn that down, do you? Especially when he says: ‘The QE2, first class, is leaving Southampton on Saturday.’”

It was in 1972 that Bowie first adopted his most famous alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, complete with flared jumpsuits and sparkling leotards.

“Seeing the audiences looking at this creature from another planet, their mouths wide open, they couldn’t believe it,” says Underwood.

“When you think about it, how brave he was to dress up like he did, going to some of these places which were pretty rough areas. One place was actually cancelled in Texas because I think there were some threats.”

Come the end of the tour, Bowie asked his friend to join him for more shows in Japan, only for Underwood, with a heavy heart, to tell him: “David, I’ve just got married, it’s not a very good basis for a marriage going on a rock’n’roll tour.

“I’d have loved to go to Japan, but I had a life at home,” he says.

Underwood’s own forays into music ended after one solo album, when he decided “the music business wasn’t really for me” and he returned to his art studies and became a painter.

But he wouldn’t leave the music industry far behind.

“David rang me one day and said: ‘George, I’ve got this mate of mine, he’s just done a record and he’s looking for someone to do the cover and I thought you’d be good for it.'”

That mate was Marc Bolan, and Underwood soon found himself sitting in a South Kensington flat with producer Tony Visconti while the T-Rex star “was sitting cross-legged on the floor staring at his girlfriend at the time for about 10 minutes”.

With an idea in his head, Underwood returned to his parents’ house, where he was living at the time, and created what became the cover for the rather wordy debut album of Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex – My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows.

Bowie then asked his friend to create some of the artwork for his own albums, starting with the back of the star’s self-titled record. Next came the front covers of both Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars – the latter famously depicting Bowie’s alien alter ego in a rainy Heddon Street in London’s West End, leg propped up and guitar in hand.

“Who was to know how such an iconic album it was gonna be? I mean, in those days, David wasn’t very well known,” Underwood says.

He would go on to work with groups including Procol Harum and Mott the Hoople and also forged a painting career away from music, but it is art linked to Bowie that features in one of Underwood’s latest works.

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the release of Bowie’s album Diamond Dogs, charity War Child has launched Sound & Vision – a new annual exhibition and auction. This year, Underwood is among 33 artists who have created pieces inspired by the lyric from the track Rebel Rebel, “We like dancing and we look divine”, a song that featured on the Diamond Dogs album.

Underwood has created a new version of a painting called Dancing with Giants, featuring two dancers who have been dressed in very specific clothing.

“I put them in the costumes that the dancers were wearing when Ziggy arrived in 1972 at the Rainbow [Theatre],” Underwood explains.

Bowie’s show in August that year, as Ziggy Stardust, featured a dance group called The Astronettes who were led by one of Bowie’s key influences, Lindsay Kemp.

“They had these lovely full-body suits, which were like spider-webs. People who know will know about that Bowie connection.”

Underwood and Bowie remained friends throughout the decades, holidaying together and regularly exchanging “silly emails”, until the star’s death in his adopted home of New York in January 2016.

“He used to call me Michael and I would call him Robert,” says Underwood.

“I miss him deeply because he went too soon, as we know, and he was just great to be with, always fun to be with. We laughed a lot.

“I often wondered whether every time he looked in the mirror whether he thought of me,” Underwood adds.

“I’m just a bit worried that I might have it carved on my tombstone.”

The tone of the 2024 presidential race is in the spotlight after Republican nominee Donald Trump was targeted in what the FBI called another apparent assassination attempt.

He and his running mate, JD Vance, have blamed their Democratic opponents for what they characterise as their inflammatory language. The Republican candidates and their supporters have also received criticism from Democrats for their rhetoric.

The finger-pointing has led to increased scrutiny of the language and insults used by both campaigns about the other side.

Each has an active and aggressive social media presence that reaches millions of Americans, and frequently paints their opponents in derogatory terms. Trump utilises his Truth Social account to make – or promote – some of the most vitriolic attacks on Democrats.

In the end, however, the candidates are most responsible for their own spoken words. Here are nine quotes from interviews, speeches and campaign events this year that help illustrate how the political messages on both sides have – and have not – shifted over time.

Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

In what was billed as his first general election campaign address, Trump spoke to a rally crowd in Georgia for nearly two hours in March. He offered the kind of intensely personal attacks that have been a staple of his speeches since he launched his first presidential bid in 2016.

In an apocalyptic speech littered with personal insults about President Joe Biden, including mocking his stutter, he said the surge of migrants across the southern border would lead to the plunder of US cities and the violation of its people.

Biden began his presidency promising national unity, with a concerted effort not to focus on or even talk about “the former guy”, as he put it.

But as it became increasingly obvious that Trump would be the 2024 Republican nominee — with a very real chance to win back the White House — the president changed his rhetorical tune. He delivered a series of speeches warning of an existential threat to the nation if Trump returned to power.

After his disastrous debate performance three months ago – and as he battled to save his campaign – Biden told donors on a private call “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye”.

Days later, after Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally, the president called his choice of words “a mistake” but rejected Republican claims he had incited violence.

The day after Trump narrowly avoided serious injury during an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, he told the Washington Examiner that he planned to strike a new tone in his Republican National Convention speech in Wisconsin later that week.

Riding high over Biden in public opinion polls, it appeared the path to the White House was clearing for the former president. A convention speech that started with a recollection of the assassination attempt and some calls for unity, however, devolved quickly into a more typical and freewheeling Trump speech dwelling on perceived grievances.

The dynamics of the 2024 presidential campaign shifted yet again shortly after the Republican convention, when Biden abandoned his re-election bid and Vice-President Kamala Harris stepped in, promising a different, “joyful” message. Her first rally speech as a candidate was not devoid of attacks against the former president, but the dire warnings about democracy at risk were absent.

Trump’s new tone lasted all of six days after his convention speech, as he went on the attack against Harris at a rally in North Carolina. He called her “a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country” and a “danger to democracy”. Accusing the Democrats of weaponising the justice system against him, he said every criminal indictment was a badge of honour.

As the presidential contest heated up, the attacks from the Democratic ticket sharpened. In her own nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, Harris mentioned Trump 17 times, criticising his conduct during the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, his policies on abortion and tax cuts, his foreign policy stances and his criminal record. She asked America to remember the “chaos and calamity” of the Trump years.

At their first and probably only debate in Philadelphia, Harris and Trump exchanged swipes and barbs. As he often does, Trump tried to turn the “threat to democracy” line that Biden had used against him into an attack on Harris. He called her a “radical left liberal” and a Marxist who was destroying America. He said she would be remembered as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”.

Harris spent much of her time during the debate goading Trump into angry off-topic responses. She belittled the size of his rally crowds, quoted his Republican critics and mocked the size of his inheritance.

Then, as Trump fumed, she said that the American people want to move beyond “finger-pointing”. It’s the kind of strategy that fits with a voting public that says they want their candidates to take the high ground – but then responds the most to negative messages.

A second apparent assassination attempt – this time at his golf course in Florida -did not prompt Trump to return to his unity message. With polls showing the presidential race in a virtual dead heat with a little more than six weeks remaining, Trump has opted instead to attack his Democratic opponents for what he says is dangerous rhetoric – while attacking them with similar language.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election
• FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger under Biden or Trump?
• POLICIES: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?
• NEWSLETTER: Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter.

They are two competing views on where desk-based employees work best.

Amazon is ordering its staff back to the office five days a week, just as the government is pushing for rights to flexible working – including working from home – to be strengthened.

The tech giant says employees will be able to better “invent, collaborate, and be connected”.

But just as the firm’s announcement became news, the UK government was linking flexibility to better performance and a more productive, loyal workforce.

Few are short of an opinion on how effective working from home is and for a government there are broader considerations such as how, for example, caring responsibilities are affected.

But more than four years since the start of the pandemic, what does the evidence tell us about how we work best and is Amazon right to believe people being in the office full time will allow them to collaborate better?

Amazon’s fellow tech giant Microsoft studied its employees during the pandemic. It looked at the emails, calendars, instant messages and calls of 61,000 of its employees in the US during the first six months of 2020. The findings were published in Nature Human Behaviour.

The study indicated that, during Covid, remote workers tended to collaborate more with networks of colleagues they already had, and that they built fewer “bridges” between different networks.

There was also a drop in communication that happened in real time – meetings that would have happened in real life weren’t necessarily happening online. Instead, more emails and instant messages were sent.

The authors suggested this may make it harder to convey and understand complex information.

Microsoft’s was a data-led study. But what about human experience?

A 2020 survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) of 1,000 senior decision-makers in organisations found about a third struggled with “reduced staff interaction and cooperation”.

However, more than 40% of the managers said there was more collaboration when people were working from home.

Greater collaboration is hard to object to, but equally it is no guarantee of productivity.

In 2010, China’s biggest travel agency CTrip tried something very new among staff in its airfare and hotel booking department.

Almost 250 staff were identified as potential home workers – they needed to be established at the company and have a proper home working set-up.

Around half that group started working from home. The other group stayed office-based.

Researchers at Stanford University found the workers were 13% more productive when working from home – mainly because workers had fewer breaks and sick days, and they could take more calls because it was quieter.

There was a particularly significant drop in staff quitting for non-managers, women, and people with long commutes, the researchers said.

However, those Chinese home-workers were seeing a bit of the office: they were spending one day a week among colleagues. It could be this brought some benefit – a separate study years later from researchers at Stanford suggested fully remote work can lead to a 10% drop in productivity compared with working in the office all the time.

Barriers to communication, lack of mentoring for staff, problems building a work culture, and difficulties with self-motivation were all cited.

Amazon is not alone in telling employees to return to the office full-time.

Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon famously described working from home as an “aberration”. The US firm requires bankers to be in the office five days per week.

Rival US banks JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have also backed workers returning to the office, whereas some banks in Europe have taken a softer approach.

Elon Musk’s Tesla also requires employees to be in the office full time, leading to reports of problems finding space for them.

Another Musk company, SpaceX, brought in a policy requiring workers to return to the office full-time.

But it wasn’t without consequences: when it brought the policy in, SpaceX lost 15% of its senior-level employees, according to a study published earlier this year.

The pandemic changed work routines that were in many cases decades old.

Linda Noble, now 62, from Barnsley, was used to putting on a suit and make-up. In 2020 she was a senior officer in local government, scrutinising governance in the fire service and the police service.

Then Covid struck and she was working from home.

“I loathed it. I missed the communication – going into work, someone would make you smile,” she says.

But with time, Ms Noble adjusted. She set up her home office and she thinks that before long she was twice as productive as previously – even if that was in part because of an inability to switch off.

Many disabled people also believe working from home makes them more productive.

A 2023 study of 400 people suggested that disabled workers felt they had more autonomy and control when working from home, which led them to better manage their health and wellbeing, and 85% felt more productive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all studies come to the same conclusions. Some suggest an improvement to physical health from working at home, others disagree. The same goes for mental health.

The wellbeing of staff was a key reason one UK business decided to get them back to the office as soon as possible after lockdown restrictions ended, according to one of its directors, Francis Ashcroft.

He was chief executive of a large private UK children’s care services company. He says “some people were struggling with raised anxiety” and wanted to get back to the office “to be part of a team”.

Mr Ashcroft said there was “also a recognition that 80% of staff were at the coalface”, working in person in children’s homes and education, and so it was “right to come back” for reasons of fairness.

Although team members were collaborating online at 95% of what they had been, “coming back into the office added that 5% back”, he argues.

“It brought a realness and a sense of belonging,” Mr Ashcroft says, adding that “when it comes to delivering a service, the teamwork was much better in the office”.

Despite this experience, an umbrella review of home working that examined a range of other studies concluded that, on the whole, working from home boosts how much workers can get done.

What difference there is in approach between the government and Amazon essentially boils down to whether or not some home working should be part of the mix, with Amazon believing it shouldn’t.

Linda Noble’s time solely working from home is over. She is just about to start a hybrid job. She’s attracted by the “balance” between working from home and office work.

According to the CIPD, benefits of hybrid working include “a better work/life balance, greater ability to focus with fewer distractions, more time for family and friends and wellbeing activity, saved commuting time and costs, plus higher levels of motivation and engagement.”

And it may be that this can reduce staff churn. A study published this year found that a Chinese firm that adopted hybrid working reduced the rate at which employees quit by a third.

From an employee perspective, the optimum time for hybrid working is three days in the office – this makes employees most engaged, according to a Gallup survey of US workers, although it also says there is “no one-size-fits-all”.

In the UK, the number of people exclusively working from home is falling. But, crucially, hybrid working is continuing to rise, running at 27% of the working population.

Gallup says that despite highly publicised moves by firms to get employees back in the office, the underlying trend is that the future of office work is hybrid.

This tallies with the position of the UK government, which is clear that it believes the potential to work at home drives up productivity.

The calculation by Amazon appears to be that what evidence there is for increased productivity among employees who work in part from home fails to capture the particulars of how they operate.

After thousands of pagers and radio devices exploded in two separate incidents in Lebanon – injuring thousands of people and killing at least 37 – details are still being pieced together as to how such an operation was carried out.

Lebanon and Hezbollah, whose members and communication systems were targeted, have blamed Israel – though Israel is yet to comment.

The BBC has followed a trail from Taiwan, to Japan, Hungary, Israel and back to Lebanon.

Here are the unanswered questions.

Some early speculation suggested that the pagers could have been targeted by a complex hack that caused them to explode. But that theory was quickly dismissed by experts.

To cause damage on the scale that they did, it is probable they were rigged with explosives before they entered Hezbollah’s possession, experts say.

Images of the broken remains of the pagers show the logo of a small Taiwanese electronics manufacturer: Gold Apollo.

The BBC visited the company’s offices, situated on a large business park in a nondescript suburb of Taipei.

The company’s founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, seemed shocked. He denied the business had anything to do with the operation.

“You look at the pictures from Lebanon,” he told reporters outside his firm’s offices. “They don’t have any mark saying Made in Taiwan on them, we did not make those pagers!”

Instead – he pointed to a Hungarian company: BAC Consulting.

Mr Hsu said that three years ago he had licensed Gold Apollo’s trademark to BAC, allowing them to use Gold Apollo’s name on their own pagers.

He said the money transfers from BAC had been “very strange” – and that there had been problems with the payments, which had come from the Middle East.

• Taiwan pager maker stunned by link to Lebanon attacks

The BBC went to the registered office of BAC Consulting, situated in a residential area of the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

The address appeared to be shared by 12 other companies – and no-one in the building could tell us anything about BAC Consulting at all.

Officials in Hungary say the firm, which was first incorporated in 2022, was merely a “trading intermediary with no manufacturing or operational site” in the country.

A brochure for BAC, published on LinkedIn, lists eight organisations it claims to have worked with – including the UK Department for International Development (DfID).

The UK Foreign Office – which has taken on DfID’s responsibilities – told the BBC it was in the process of investigating. But based on initial conversations, it said it did not have any involvement with BAC.

BAC’s website listed one person as its chief executive and founder – Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono.

The BBC made several attempts to contact Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono, but were unable to reach her.

However, she did reportedly speak to NBC News, saying: “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate.”

So who is really behind BAC Consulting?

The New York Times has reported that the company was in fact a front for Israeli intelligence.

The newspaper, citing three Israeli officials, said that two other shell companies were created to help hide the identities of the people who were really producing the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify these reports – but we do know that Bulgarian authorities have now begun investigating another company linked to BAC.

Bulgarian broadcaster bTV reported on Thursday that 1.6 million euros ($1.8m; £1.3m) connected to the device attacks in Lebanon passed through Bulgaria and was later sent to Hungary.

• What we know about firm linked to Lebanon pagers

The origins of the radio devices, which exploded in the second wave of attacks, are less clear.

We know that at least some of those that exploded were the IC-V82 model produced by the Japanese company, ICOM.

Those devices were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, according to a security source speaking to Reuters news agency.

Earlier, a sales executive at the US subsidiary of Icom told the Associated Press news agency that the exploded radio devices in Lebanon appeared to be knockoff products that were not made by the company – adding that it was easy to find counterfeit versions online.

It took the BBC a matter of seconds to find Icom IC-V82s listed for sale in online marketplaces.

ICOM said in a statement it had stopped manufacturing and selling the model almost a decade ago, in October 2014 – and said it had also discontinued production of the batteries needed to operate it.

The company said it does not outsource manufacturing overseas – and all its radios are produced at a factory in Western Japan.

According to Kyodo news agency, Icom director Yoshiki Enomoyo suggested that photos of the damage around the battery compartment of the exploded walkie-talkies suggest they may have been retrofitted with explosives.

• Japan firm says it stopped making walkie-talkies used in Lebanon blasts

Videos show victims reaching into their pockets in the seconds before the devices detonated, causing chaos in streets, shops and homes across the country.

Lebanese authorities have concluded that the devices were detonated by “electronic messages” sent to them, according to a letter by the Lebanese mission to the UN, seen by Reuters news agency.

Citing US officials, the New York Times said that the pagers received messages that appeared to be coming from Hezbollah’s leadership before detonating. The messages instead appeared to trigger the devices, the outlet reported.

We do not yet know what kind of message was sent to the radio devices.

This is the question many in Lebanon are now asking – paranoid that other devices, cameras, phones or laptops could have also been rigged with explosives.

The Lebanese Army has been on the streets of Beirut using a remote-controlled bomb disposal robot to carry out controlled explosions.

BBC crews in Lebanon have been stopped and told not to use their phones or cameras.

“Everyone is just panicking… We don’t know if we can stay next to our laptops, our phones. Everything seems like a danger at this point, and no-one knows what to do,” one woman, Ghida, told a BBC correspondent.

• ‘We don’t know if our phones are safe’: Lebanon on edge after exploding device attacks

There are several theories as to why the devices were triggered to explode this week.

One is that Israel chose this moment to send a devastating message to Hezbollah, following almost a year of escalating cross-border hostilities after Hezbollah fired rockets at or around northern Israel a day after the Hamas attack of 7 October.

The other is that Israel did not intend to put its plan in motion at this moment, but was forced to after fearing the plot was about to be exposed.

According to US outlet Axios, the original plan was for the pager attack to be the opening salvo of an all-out war as a way to try to cripple Hezbollah’s fighters.

But, it says, after Israel learned that Hezbollah had become suspicious, it chose to carry out the attack early.

Polls have closed in Sri Lanka’s election, where voters are choosing a new president for the first time since mass protests unseated the country’s leader in 2022.

Saturday’s vote is widely regarded as a referendum on economic reforms meant to put the country on the road to recovery after its worst ever financial crisis.

But many people are still struggling to make ends meet because of tax hikes, and cuts to subsidies and welfare.

Multiple analysts predict that economic concerns will be front of mind for voters in what is shaping up to be a close race.

Counting began with postal votes at 17:00 local time (11:30 GMT), but results are not expected to become clear until Sunday morning.

“The country’s soaring inflation, skyrocketing cost-of-living and poverty have left the electorate desperate for solutions to stabilise prices and improve livelihoods,” Soumya Bhowmick, an associate fellow at India-based think tank the Observer Research Foundation, told the BBC.

“With the country seeking to emerge from its economic collapse, this election serves as a crucial moment for shaping Sri Lanka’s recovery trajectory and restoring both domestic and international confidence in its governance.”

President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was charged with the monumental task of leading Sri Lanka out of its economic collapse, is seeking another term.

The 75-year-old was appointed by parliament a week after former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa was chased out of power.

Shortly after taking office, Wickremesinghe crushed what was left of the protest movement. He has also been accused of shielding the Rajapaksa family from prosecution and allowing them to regroup – allegations he has denied.

Another strong contender is leftist politician Anura Kumara Dissanayake, whose anti-corruption platform has seen him draw increasing public support.

More candidates are running in Saturday’s election than any other in Sri Lanka’s history. But of more than three dozen, four are dominating the limelight.

Other than Wickremesinghe and Dissanayake, there is also the leader of the opposition, Sajith Premadasa, and the 38-year-old nephew of the ousted president, Namal Rajapaksa.

The “Aragalaya” (struggle) uprising that deposed former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa was sparked by an economic meltdown.

Years of under-taxation, weak exports and major policy errors, combined with the Covid-19 pandemic dried up the country’s foreign exchange reserves. Public debt reached more than $83 billion and inflation soared to 70%.

While the country’s social and political elite were largely insulated against the fallout, basics like food, cooking gas and medicine became scarce for ordinary people, fuelling resentment and unrest.

Then-president Rajapaksa and his government were blamed for the crisis, leading to months-long protests calling for his resignation.

On 13 July 2022, in dramatic scenes that were broadcast around the world, crowds overran the presidential palace, jumping into the swimming pool and ransacking the house.

In the wake of Rajapaksa’s flight from the country – an exile that lasted 50 days – the interim government of President Wickremesinghe imposed strict austerity measures to salvage the economy.

Although the economic reforms have successfully brought down inflation and strengthened the Sri Lankan rupee, everyday Sri Lankans continue to feel the pinch.

“Jobs are the hardest thing to find,” says 32-year-old Yeshan Jayalath. “Even with an accounting degree, I can’t find a permanent job.” Instead, he has been doing temporary or part-time jobs.

Many small businesses across the country are also still reeling from the crisis.

Norbet Fernando, who was forced to shut his roof tile factory north of Colombo in 2022, told the BBC that raw materials such as clay, wood and kerosene are three times more costly than they were two years ago. Very few people are building homes or buying roof tiles, he added.

“After 35 years, it hurts to see my factory in ruins,” Fernando told the BBC, adding that of the 800 tile factories in the area, only 42 have remained functional since 2022.

Central bank data on business sentiments shows depressed demand in 2022 and 2023 – and though the situation is improving in 2024, it’s still not back to pre-crisis levels.

“The Sri Lankan economy may for now have been put back on its feet, but many citizens still need to be convinced the price is worth paying,” Alan Keenan, the International Crisis Group’s (ICG) senior consultant on Sri Lanka, told the BBC.

Ranil Wickremesinghe: Having previously lost twice at the presidential polls, Saturday marks his third chance to be elected by the Sri Lankan people, rather than parliament

Anura Kumara Dissanayake: The candidate of the leftist National People’s Party alliance promises tough anti-corruption measures and good governance

Sajith Premadasa: The opposition leader is representing the Samagi Jana Balawegaya party – his father served as the second executive president of Sri Lanka before he was assassinated in 1993

Namal Rajapaksa: The son of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who led the country between 2005 and 2015, he hails from a powerful political lineage, but will need to win over voters who blame his family for the economic crisis

Voters in Sri Lanka elect a single winner by ranking up to three candidates in order of preference.

If a candidate receives an absolute majority, they will be declared the winner. If not, a second round of counting will commence, with second and third-choice votes then taken into account.

No election in Sri Lanka has ever progressed to the second round of counting, as single candidates have always emerged as clear winners based on first-preference votes.

This year could be different.

“Opinion polls and initial campaigning suggest the vote is likely, for the first time ever, to produce a winner who fails to gain a majority of votes,” said Mr Keenan, of ICG.

“Candidates, party leaders and election officials should be prepared to handle any possible disputes calmly and according to established procedures.”