Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the war with Russia could end sooner than some people think.

“I think that we are closer to peace than we think. We just have to be very strong, very strong,” he said.

Speaking to US broadcaster ABC News, Zelensky also said that the victory plan he would present to US President Joe Biden this week would require Ukraine’s allies to “strengthen” the Ukrainian army.

Zelensky said the plan was not about negotiating with Russia, but rather it was “a bridge to a diplomatic way out, to stop the war”.

He added that Ukraine could only push Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the conflict if Kyiv was coming from a “strong position”.

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was being cautious about media reports of a Ukrainian plan and added that the conflict would only end when Russia’s aims were achieved.

Zelensky has long asked Western countries to allow Ukraine to ease restrictions on the use of long-range missiles which could be used to strike deep into Russia and he is expected to do so again this week as he visits the US.

On Sunday, Biden said he had not yet decided whether to give Ukraine the green light. Zelensky said the US would need to lead the decision: “Everybody’s looking up to [Biden], and we need this to defend ourselves,” he told ABC.

Zelensky will speak at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday and is also due to meet US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

The president of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, told the New York Times that Ukraine would have to be “realistic” about its prospects of recovering the areas in the east of the country which Russia has managed to gain over the last 31 months of war.

He added that the most likely outcome of the war was that a part of Ukrainian territory would remain under Russian occupation for a number of years.

A defeat of either Ukraine or Russia “will simply not happen”, Pavel told the Times, adding that the end of the conflict would be “somewhere in between”.

Zelensky’s US trip comes as Ukraine continues to come under sustained attack by Russia.

In a daytime attack on Tuesday, Russia hit a high-rise apartment block in Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv.

At least three people died and 15 were injured in the attack, which local authorities said was carried out with glide bombs.

• Three killed in Russian strike on Kharkiv apartments

On Monday night, an attack on the eastern Ukrainian town of Poltava damaged infrastructure, while in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia one person died and six others were wounded following “massive air strikes”.

Russian troops have made serious advances in the east and are closing in on Vuhledar – a city on the southern part of the Donbas front line that the Russians have been trying to seize since the beginning of their full-scale invasion.

Ukrainian military expert and retired colonel Kostyantyn Mashovets warned his fellow Ukrainians they had to be “psychologically prepared” for the loss of Selydove, Toretsk and Vuhledar in the eastern region of Donbas.

“I would love to be wrong,” he wrote on Facebook.

“But from the information I have… this is a very likely scenario of events in the near future.”

Police in Switzerland made multiple arrests after someone reportedly ended their life using a so-called suicide pod, in apparently the first case of its kind.

Police in the Schaffhausen region said they arrested “several persons” on suspicion of inciting, and aiding and abetting suicide after someone died reportedly by using a Sarco-made pod on Monday.

While assisted dying is legally protected in some circumstances in Switzerland, the Sarco pod has encountered some opposition.

Officers recovered the device and body at the scene.

The company behind the controversial pod says it can be solely operated by the person seeking to end their own life, without medical supervision.

Police said it was used Monday at a forest hut in the Merishausen area, a sparsely populated part of Switzerland on the German border.

Police said they were tipped off by a law firm about a suicide involving the device. The number of people arrested and their identities were not disclosed. The deceased also was not named.

• If you are experiencing any of the issues mentioned in this story you can visit BBC Action Line for a list of websites and helplines that can offer direct help at any time.

In July, a pro-assisted dying group, which promotes the Sarco device, said it anticipated that it would be used for the first time this year.

Advocates say it provides an option not reliant on drugs or doctors, and that it expands access to euthanasia as the portable device can be 3D-printed and assembled at home.

However, there also has been opposition in Switzerland, despite the country having some of the world’s most protective laws surrounding assisted dying.

Critics fear the device’s modern design glamorises suicide and the fact that it can be operated without medical oversight is concerning.

Assisted dying is illegal in the UK and in most other European countries, but thousands have travelled to Switzerland over the years to end their own lives.

New Zealand scientists have discovered a new species of “ghost shark” – a rare type of fish that is incredibly hard to spot because it lives at great depths in the Pacific Ocean.

Also known as a spookfish or chimera, ghost sharks are closely related to sharks and rays. They do not have scales and their skeletons are made completely of cartilage.

Dr Brit Finucci, one of the scientists who discovered the Australasian Narrow-nosed Spookfish, said the find was “exciting”.

“Their habitat makes them hard to study and monitor, meaning we don’t know a lot about their biology or threat status,” she said.

Dr Finucci and other researchers from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) found the creature in an area of ocean floor known as Chatham Rise, which lies to the east of New Zealand.

Ghost sharks typically live at depths of up to 2,600m (1.6 miles).

Dr Finucci said the species stood out for its unusually long snout, which can make up half its body length.

She has given the new fish a scientific name with a personal twist: Harriota avia.

“Avia means grandmother in Latin, I wanted to give this nod to her because she proudly supported me through my career as a scientist,” Dr Finucci explained.

“Chimaeras are also rather ancient relatives – the grandmas and grandpas – of fish and I thought the name was well suited.”

The spookfish was initially thought to be part of a species found around the world. However, research later revealed it was genetically different to its cousins and lived exclusively in Australian and New Zealand waters.

Scientists say discoveries like this are crucial, because learning more about how the species lives helps experts figure out the best ways to protect them.

Russia has struck an apartment block in the north-east Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, killing at least three people and injuring 31 more, say local officials.

The wave of strikes targeting the high-rise and other residential spots was conducted with the use of guided glide bombs on Tuesday.

“The targets for Russian bombs are a residential building, a bakery, a stadium… that is, the ordinary life of ordinary people,” said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The attack comes as fighting intensifies in the country’s east with Russian troops encircling and closing in on the largely destroyed town of Vuhledar.

Shortly after Tuesday’s blitz in Kharkiv, Zelensky issued a statement sharing pictures of the destroyed residential tower – which showed a gaping hole in the middle of the building.

He called on allies to “stop the terror”. He is in New York to address the UN General Assembly’s annual congress, having arrived on Monday reiterating Ukraine’s need for timely US military assistance.

“There is much discussion now at the UN General Assembly about collective efforts for security and the future. But we just need to stop the terror. To have security. To have a future,” Zelensky said.

• War with Russia closer to end than we think – Zelensky

Meanwhile in Kharkiv, officials said Russia had sent strikes into at least four districts in the city and the block that was hit had previously been struck at the start of the war.

“It was almost repaired, all the windows were put in, insulated, and prepared for the heating season. The enemy hit it a second time with a KAB [glide bomb],” said Kharkiv’s mayor Ihor Terekov on Telegram.

Russia has increasingly been using glide bombs in recent months – Soviet-era bombs fitted out with wings and satellite navigation aids. They are cheap, destructive, and are said to have been key to Russia’s effort to capture further ground in Ukraine.

They were used in May in attacks in Kharkiv, while military analysts also note that they appear to have been used for the first time in Zaporizhzhia city on Sunday night.

Ukrainian officials said Russia conducted seven airstrikes with KAB glide bombs, injuring at least 21 civilians in the attacks on 13 residential buildings and two educational facilities.

Zaporizhzhia officials also said Russia had conducted another strike on the south-eastern city on Monday night, which killed one person and injured at least four others including two children.

Russian forces have made serious advances in Ukraine’s east and are closing in on Vuhledar – a coal-mining town on the southern part of the Donbas front line. The Russians have been trying to seize the town since the beginning of their full-scale invasion.

On Monday, Russian military bloggers were reporting that Moscow’s troops had entered the outskirts of the town in the Donetsk region. Ukraine’s military has mentioned only a number of attempts to capture its positions in Vuhledar.

Meanwhile, Russian forces have also recently advanced near Hlyboke, Kupyansk, and Pokrovsk, according to the US-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War.

The war tracking group said Ukrainian forces had recently advanced in Kursk region.

Cats have more freedom than women in Afghanistan, Hollywood actress Meryl Streep has said in an appeal to the international community to stop the Taliban’s repression.

Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, the actress pointed out that even animals had more rights now in Afghanistan following increased restrictions on women.

In response, a Taliban spokesman said they “highly respected” women and would “never compare them to cats”.

Streep’s comments come after the Taliban government last month introduced a new set of “morality laws”.

Among other things, these rules state that women’s voices can no longer be heard in public and that they are not allowed to look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage.

The measures add to a litany of restrictions that the regime has imposed on Afghan women and girls since returning to power three years ago.

Women have to completely cover their faces and bodies when leaving their homes. Women and girls are also prevented from going to schools, parks, gyms and sport clubs. There are restrictions on the type of work that they are allowed to do.

“Today in Kabul a female cat has more freedom than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face, she may chase a squirrel in the park,” Streep said on Monday at an event to raise awareness of Afghan women’s rights at the UN headquarters in New York.

“A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban.

“A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not in public. This is extraordinary. This is a suppression of the natural law.

“The way that this culture, this society has been upended, is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world,” said Streep, who called on world leaders to “stop the slow suffocation” of Afghan women and girls.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who attended the same event, said Afghanistan “will never take its rightful place on the global stage” without educated women and women in employment.

In response to Streep’s remarks, a Taliban spokesman said that “none can deny women the rights which Islam has given them”.

“We highly respect them in their role as mother, sister, wife. They are [an] essential part of [the] family and society but we never compare them to cats,” Suhail Shaheen, the head of the Taliban’s political office, told the BBC.

He added that currently hundreds of thousands of women work in various government ministries and as entrepreneurs.

Western countries, led by the United States and the European Union, have condemned the new laws, but the Taliban has defended the edict saying it is in accordance with Islamic Sharia law.

The Taliban has also said they are trying to change the education system to more closely align with Islamic principles, and have repeatedly promised that women would be readmitted to schools once those issues are sorted. To date, however, there has not been any movement.

A former Canadian envoy whose imprisonment in China kicked off a high-profile diplomatic spat has accused Chinese authorities of inflicting “psychological torture” on him.

Michael Kovrig says he was placed in solitary confinement for months and subjected to “relentless interrogation” when he was arrested in December 2018 and held for more than 1,000 days.

The Chinese government has rejected his allegations, saying it handled his case lawfully.

Mr Kovrig and fellow Canadian Michael Spavor were detained on spying charges following the arrest of Chinese businesswoman Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, in a case that Canada called “hostage diplomacy”.

The Canadian government had at that time detained Ms Meng, the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei, on US fraud charges.

The “two Michaels” were only freed nearly three years later, after US prosecutors dropped the extradition request and agreed to release Ms Meng.

“It was the most gruelling, painful thing I’ve ever been through,” said Mr Kovrig in an interview with Canadian public broadcaster CBC that aired on Monday night.

Describing his ordeal for the first time, Mr Kovrig said that on the night he was arrested he was walking home from dinner in Beijing with his partner, who was six months pregnant at the time.

“We came up a spiral staircase right in front of the plaza in front of my apartment building, and boom,” he said.

“There’s a dozen men in black with cameras on them surrounding us, shouting in Chinese, ‘That’s him.’”

Mr Kovrig, a former diplomat who was working as a senior advisor for the International Crisis Group think tank at the time, said he was then handcuffed, blindfolded and thrown into a black SUV.

After being driven for almost an hour, he was taken into a padded cell, where he would remain for several months.

“At that point they said, ‘You are under suspicion of endangering China’s state security. You are going to be interrogated,’” Mr Kovrig said. “A chill went down my spine.”

Mr Kovrig alleged his treatment by the Chinese authorities broke international law.

“The United Nations standard is no more than 15 days in solitary confinement. More than that is considered psychological torture. I was there for nearly six months,” he said.

He added that he was kept in complete isolation under fluorescent lights for six months, while being subjected to six to nine hours of interrogation a day.

Often, he said, he was locked in a chair for hours on end and at times was forced to survive on three bowls of rice per day.

“They are trying to bully and torment and terrorise and coerce you into accepting their false version of reality,” Mr Kovrig said.

After six months Mr Kovrig and Mr Spavor, who were held separately, were formally arrested.

Mr Kovrig was moved from his windowless cell to a pre-trial detention facility, where he shared a room with a dozen inmates.

“That was kind of like moving from hell to limbo,” he said, describing how this time there was daylight coming in through Plexiglass windows and room to walk around.

Mr Kovrig stayed there for the next two years, before his release in September 2021 – the same day that the US dropped its request to extradite Meng Wanzhou.

Within two hours of Ms Meng’s extradition request being dropped, he and Mr Spavor had cleared Chinese airspace on a plane to Canada, according to CBC.

Responding to Mr Kovrig’s interview, Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that Chinese judicial authorities handled the case strictly in accordance with the law.

“Lies and smears cannot change the fact that the person you mentioned committed a crime. We advise the relevant parties to respect the facts and reflect on their mistakes,” he told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday.

Mr Kovrig’s allegations of his treatment by the Chinese authorities stands in contrast with Ms Meng’s experience in Canada.

The heiress was released on bail and placed under house arrest, but was allowed to leave her home in the daytime and roam within a large swathe of Vancouver while under supervision.

She reportedly went on private shopping sprees at high-end boutiques, and had massages and art lessons in her mansion. Ms Meng later wrote she had time to finally “read a book cover to cover” and “carefully complete an oil painting”.

Her release was covered prominently and celebrated in China where many supported her and her father, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei.

But the case severely strained China’s diplomatic ties with Canada and the US, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at one point accusing China of “using arbitrary detention as a tool to achieve political goals”.

China denied these accusations, and countered that Ms Meng’s arrest was an example of “political persecution of Chinese citizens with the aim of suppressing China’s high tech enterprises”.

China’s central bank has unveiled a major package of measures aimed at reviving the country’s flagging economy.

People’s Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Pan Gongsheng announced plans to lower borrowing costs and allow banks to increase their lending.

The move comes after a series of disappointing data has increased expectations in recent months that the world’s second largest economy will miss its own 5% growth target this year.

Stock markets in Asia jumped after Mr Pan’s announcement.

Speaking at a rare news conference alongside officials from two other financial regulators, Mr Pan said the central bank would cut the amount of cash banks have to hold in reserve – known as reserve requirement ratios (RRR).

The RRR will initially be cut by half a percentage point, in a move expected to free up about 1 trillion yuan ($142bn; £106bn).

Mr Pan added that another cut may be made later in the year.

Further measures aimed to boost China’s crisis-hit property market include cutting interest rates for existing mortgages and lowering minimum down payments on all types of homes to 15%.

The country’s real estate industry has been struggling with a sharp downturn since 2021.

Several developers have collapsed, leaving large numbers of unsold homes and unfinished building projects.

The PBOC’s new economic stimulus measures come just days after the US Federal Reserve lowered interest rates for the first time in more than four years with a bigger than usual cut.

The news pushed up share prices, with the leading stock indexes in Shanghai and Hong Kong ending the day more than 4% higher.

India has reported its first case with the new mpox strain that has triggered a public health emergency alert by the World Health Organization (WHO), Reuters reports.

Called clade 1b, the new variant is highly-transmissible and has been linked to the mpox outbreak in Africa.

According to media reports, the strain has been detected in a 38-year-old man from the southern state of Kerala who returned from Dubai recently.

Mpox, previously known as monkey pox, is a contagious virus that can cause painful skin lesions.

The WHO declared mpox, which used to be called monkeypox, a public health emergency in Africa in August.

Since then, the more dangerous variant of the virus has spread to countries outside the African continent, including Sweden, Thailand and Pakistan.

On Tuesday, Health Ministry spokesperson Manisha Verma confirmed to Reuters that the mpox case reported in Kerala’s Malappuram district belonged to clade 1.

The patient is being treated in a hospital and the people he came in contact with are being traced and monitored, authorities said.

The district’s health officer said that about 29 friends and family members of the patient along with 37 passengers on board his flight were being monitored but none of them had exhibited any symptoms so far, the news agency reported.

In the last two years, India has reported more that 30 mpox cases caused by the older clade 2 strain, which is considered to be less infectious.

Earlier this month, the mpox strain was detected in a man from northern Haryana state, who was admitted in hospital for a few days.

Mpox spreads from animals to humans and between people through close contact with someone who is infected – including through sex, skin-to-skin contact and talking or breathing close to another person.

It can cause symptoms such as fever, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes and lesions across the body. If left untreated, mpox can be deadly.

The federal government has issued an advisory to all states, asking them to be vigilant for potential mpox cases.

Around 35 laboratories across the country have been designated for testing suspected mpox cases.

Some 1,685 “seriously ill” inmates have been released from one of the most notorious prisons in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the latest move to tackle overcrowding.

The release began at Makala Prison in the capital, Kinshasa, on Sunday.

It was there, at the beginning of this month, that 129 prisoners died in an attempted jailbreak. Some were shot dead by security forces while others were killed in a crush, officials said.

The government pledged to speed up its plans to decongest the prison, where conditions have been described as “true hell”.

Some of the inmates identified for release can be seen in a series of images published on the justice ministry’s Facebook page.

In one, an emaciated-looking man with dirty bandages around his right foot and below the knee is being pushed in a wheelbarrow.

In another, showing dozens of men all appearing malnourished, one of those in the foreground has an open wound.

• ‘Hell behind bars’ – life in DR Congo’s most notorious jail

In a video, a prisoner, who seems unable to stand up, is shouting that he is going to change his life and no longer cause pain to others. He also praises the official responsible, Justice Minister Constant Mutamba.

Mutamba said that those who needed medical attention would be treated while others would be sent home on buses provided by the government, the AP news agency reports.

The minister had already ordered the release of hundreds of others from Makala as he tries to get the prison population down. He has also banned the transfer of new inmates to the prison.

With a population of at least 14 million people , Kinshasa has two jails. In addition to Makala, the military prison of N’dole has an official capacity of 500.

Emmanuel Adu Cole, head of the Bill Clinton Foundation for Peace, a local NGO that focuses on prison conditions, welcomed the release, but added that more needed to be done to address the problems inside.

The jail, which was built in the 1950s, has a capacity for 1,500 inmates, but before this month’s attempted jailbreak it was holding at least 12,000 people, according to various estimates.

One former inmate told the BBC that conditions inside were “true hell”.

“Makala is not a prison, but a detention centre resembling a concentration camp, where people are sent to die,” Stanis Bujakera said.

Videos that he secretly filmed inside showed how tightly packed everyone was, as well as the inadequacy of the daily rations.

The authorities have long acknowledged the overcrowding problem.

Some officials have blamed magistrates for sending suspects to prison. In 2020, it was estimated that only 6% of the prisoners were actually serving sentences – the rest were stuck in DR Congo’s legal system where cases can drag on for years.

• PODCAST: ‘Makala is like a different country, with a new government’
• The Congolese children bearing the brunt of the mpox outbreak
• TikTokers quit vaping over Congo mining concerns

GPs couldn’t treat patients, people were stranded as planes couldn’t get off the ground, and small businesses lost much-needed sales.

Two months on from the global IT outage on 19 July, its full impact is only now becoming apparent.

A rogue software update by the US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crippled up to eight and half million computers using Microsoft systems around the world.

Adam Meyers – a senior executive at CrowdStrike – will testify at the US Congress on Tuesday.

He will speak of being “deeply sorry” about what happened, and his company’s determination to “prevent it from happening again.”

But what was it like for those on the sharp end of the crisis?

Dr David Wrigley, a GP for the past 22 years, told the BBC about cancer referrals being delayed as the online systems doctors like him rely on went dark.

“It was a very difficult period of time with very little help and support,” he said.

For many GPs, they were unable to use the EMIS system – a digital way of managing appointment bookings and patient records, as well as sending prescriptions to pharmacies.

The British Medical Association – the trade union and professional body for doctors and medical students in the UK – said the CrowdStrike outage was “one of the toughest single days in recent times for GPs across England”, with doctors forced to return to pen and paper.

At Dr Wrigley’s practice in Carnforth, Lancashire, computer problems continued between Friday and Monday.

He said this created a backlog that delayed urgent tasks such as writing referral letters for patients with suspected cancers.

In some cases, this would have been delayed by “three or four days”.

“You have to prioritise those and send them as soon as possible,” he said.

“All the referrals we do are done electronically – that couldn’t happen.”

Elsewhere, the BMA said there were also major problems in Northern Ireland.

Around 75% of GPs in Northern Ireland use the EMIS system according to Dr Frances O’Hagan, the chair of BMA’s Northern Ireland GP committee.

“We couldn’t do anything for most people,” she said.

“We just had to take it on the chin and get on with it.”

She said GPs in Northern Ireland faced similar backlogs to colleagues in England, including a delay to suspected cancer referrals.

The Department of Health told the BBC it is in discussion with “external suppliers” to strengthen “continuity arrangements” following the CrowdStrike outage.

It says GPs had access to “local copies” of patient data from EMIS during the outage, and all other systems worked.

Professor Kamila Hawthorne, Chair of the Royal College of GPs, told the BBC it was “crucial” that there should be “safeguards in place” in the future.

In Surrey, 50 patients who were due to receive radiotherapy treatment on the day of the outage were forced to reschedule.

A spokesperson from NHS Royal Surrey Trust said all urgent cases were seen within 24 hours.

NHS England did not comment.

The UK government told BBC News contingency plans were quickly enacted, and said it is working with NHS England to help prevent similar incidents.

On the west coast of the United States, meanwhile, Providence healthcare operates 53 hospitals and over 1,000 clinics.

Adam Zoller is in charge of cyber security for the company.

He describes the first few hours as “a catastrophe” for hospital IT systems, but 80% were fixed in 48 hours.

The hospitals did cancel non-emergency procedures, but Adam said “in large parts patient care was unaffected”.

“CrowdStrike could have handled this in a lot of different ways, and I think they handled it as well as they could have.”

Melanie Cree and her husband Alan, from Bangor in Northern Ireland, were due to fly home from Corfu Airport on the day of the outage.

Travel operators were forced to cancel thousands of flights across the world – and Melanie and Alan’s flight was axed.

After being taken to and from the airport several times in the next few days, they managed to fly home on Monday.

Melanie said passengers were given no food, and some ran out of medication.

“It totally ruined what should have been our dream holiday,” she said.

“We have lovely memories, but we came back absolutely shattered. It was complete chaos.”

Their provider Tui gave them a £400 voucher.

As Melanie and Alan struggled in Corfu, another UK family were caught up in the delays just over 500 miles (804km) away.

Laura and Malcolm Jones were struggling to return home to Pontypool, in south Wales, after a holiday in Rhodes with their children.

When they were on the tarmac, the flight was cancelled. Laura told the BBC there was no information, no return of bags, and no plan.

They spent 16 hours at the airport before they were taken to a conference centre, where frustrated travellers used tablecloths as blankets.

The family paid £560 out of their own pockets to fly back to the UK a few days later.

Tui has given them a £600 voucher.

“I was looking forward to travelling abroad again after Covid, but I think I might just stick going to west Wales for a few years,” Laura joked.

In a statement, Tui apologised to its customers.

But the travel company was not the only one with problems. Delta Airlines in the United States faced a huge impact.

It cancelled around 7,000 flights over five days, faces an investigation from the US authorities and is involved in several legal actions.

Back in the UK, small business owner Dawn Watts from Market Drayton, Staffordshire was caught up in the outages in a different way – her website, which provides supplies to cleaning companies and hotels, was out of action.

She estimates to have lost about £600 in sales.

“It is extremely worrying,” she said.

“I am a sole trader – I can’t have this happening again.”

Hannah Al-Khaldi, who runs a boutique fitness studio in London, faced similar issues with a non-functional website.

She estimates the outage cost her £1,000.

“It showed how many systems worldwide had put their eggs in one basket,” she said.

“When one link in the chain fails, everything else goes down.

“Is there enough choice out there for providers, or was CrowdStrike the only option?”

Across southern Lebanon, families scrambled together belongings and headed north in cars and trucks and on motorcycles as the Israeli military struck targets it said were linked to the Lebanese Shia armed group Hezbollah.

Some residents reported receiving warnings in the form of text messages and voice recordings from the Israeli military to leave areas near the Iran-backed group’s positions.

Zahra Sawli, a student in the southern town of Nabatieh told the BBC’s Newshour programme the bombardment was intense.

“I woke up at 6am to the sound of bombing. By noon it started to get really intense and I saw a lot of strikes in my area.”

“I heard a lot of glass shattering.”

Unlike many, she and those she was with did not leave the house – they didn’t dare, she said.

“Where are we supposed to go? A lot of people are still stuck on the streets. A lot of my friends are still stuck in traffic because a lot of people are trying to flee,” she said.

• Live updates: Israel strikes dozens more sites in southern Lebanon
• Bowen: Israel believes it has weakened Hezbollah but escalation still carries risks
• Cold military logic takes over in Israel-Hezbollah conflict

By the middle of the day roads north towards Beirut were clogged with traffic, with vehicles heading towards the capital on both sides of a six-lane coastal highway.

Other images showed people walking along the beach in the southern city of Tyre as smoke rose from air strikes in the countryside inland.

The BBC spoke to one family of five who had arrived in Beirut on a single motorbike.

From a village in the south, they were heading to Tripoli in the north. They were exhausted.

“What do you want us to say? We just had to flee,” the father said.

By Monday evening the Lebanese health ministry reported that 492 people had been killed and more than 1,600 injured in the bombardment. It said at least 35 children were among those killed. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had carried out 1,100 strikes over the previous 24 hours.

That included an air strike in southern Beirut that the IDF said had targeted a senior Hezbollah commander.

In Beirut too there was widespread anxiety. As people from the south arrived in the capital in cars with suitcases strapped to the top, some of the city’s residents were themselves leaving.

Israel has warned people to evacuate areas where it says Hezbollah is storing weapons – but it also sent recorded warnings to people in Beirut districts not considered Hezbollah strongholds including Hamra, an area home to government ministries, banks and universities.

Parents rushed to pick up their children from school after receiving more warnings to leave the area.

One father, Issa, took his son out of school, telling Reuters news agency: “[We’re here] because of the phone calls.

“They’re calling everyone and threatening people by phone. So we’re here to take my boy from school. The situation is not reassuring,” he said.

Mohammed, a Palestinian man on the road with his wife, spoke to the BBC on the way out of Beirut.

When asked if he would stay in the capital he said: “In Lebanon nowhere is safe, Israel is saying they are going to bombard everywhere. Now they threatened this neighbourhood, so where should we go?”

“It’s scary, I don’t know what to do – work, go home, no idea what to do.”

Meanwhile as a BBC crew set up on one side of the road, a taxi driver called out asking if they knew of a fuel crisis unfolding. “Too many people are coming to Beirut,” he said.

Schools have been hastily converted into shelters for the streams of evacuees coming from the south. On a government order, schools in Beirut and Tripoli as well as eastern Lebanon were established as shelters.

The BBC was at a classroom at a public school in Bir Hasan, west Beirut on Monday which was being prepared for people coming from the Bekaa Valley – a Hezbollah stronghold in north-eastern Lebanon which Israel said it was targeting too.

The classrooms were stacked with mattresses but would be fully occupied by the end of the day, workers said.

Meanwhile Lebanon’s hospitals were also ordered to cancel all elective surgeries on Monday as physicians braced for a wave of casualties and injuries.

Despite the tense and uncertain atmosphere in Beirut, some people were defiant.

“If a total war happens, we should stand as Lebanese people together regardless of our political affiliations because at the end of the day, our country is getting bombed,” one man told the BBC.

Others were simply resigned to the violence.

“If they want war, what can we do? It was imposed on us. We cannot do anything,” shop owner Mohammed Sibai told Reuters.

Mohammed, a 57-year-old in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahieyh – Hezbollah’s main power base in the capital – told the BBC he had “survived all the wars since 1975” so “it’s normal for me”.

“I will not leave, I will be in my house,” he said.

Monday was the bloodiest day in Lebanon since Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel.

Israel launched a massive series of air strikes this morning that have so far killed 492 people according to the Lebanese government and the Israelis are warning of more attacks to come.

The war is escalating fast, a process that is being driven by the scale of Israel’s air offensive.

They are warning civilians to leave the areas they’re targeting. The next, they’ve said, will be the Bekaa Valley in the north-east of Lebanon which is a Hezbollah stronghold.

• Live updates: Israel strikes dozens more sites in southern Lebanon
• ‘We just had to flee’: Fear and tension in Lebanon
• Cold military logic takes over in Israel-Hezbollah conflict
• Deadliest day in years for Lebanon as Israel steps up strikes on Hezbollah
• What is Hezbollah in Lebanon?

Even before the current escalation, well over 100,000 Lebanese had to leave their homes because of Israeli strikes, with no immediate expectation of being able to return.

We are seeing yet another very large escalation by the Israelis.

Perhaps their calculation is that they believe Hezbollah is in such a weakened position right now that this is their opportunity to really inflict some damage on it, and to change the strategic picture in the hills and towns on either side of the border between Israel and Lebanon.

While the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict has been going on for decades, the current war between them started the day after the Hamas attacks on 7 October last year.

Hezbollah started a limited but continuous campaign of rocket fire over the border, trying to tie down Israeli troops and damage Israeli property and people. Around 60,000 Israelis have been forced to evacuate to the centre of the country. In the last few days, returning them to their homes has been added to Israel’s list of war aims.

The US and UK, and other allies – and critics – of Israel believe that the only hope of cooling this dangerous crisis is to get a ceasefire in Gaza.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said attacks on Israel will go on until a Gaza ceasefire happens. But it seems pretty clear at this point that neither the leader of Hamas nor the leader of Israel is prepared to go for the deal the US has put on the table.

The war itself has overwhelming support from Israelis, although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains unpopular with significant parts of Israel’s electorate, despite an improvement in his poll ratings.

Many Israelis also think Netanyahu is an appalling leader who tells lies and has abandoned the hostages in Gaza. So he is a very controversial character, but bolstered in the parliament by the right wingers who support him, he is politically secure.

His decision to go on the offensive is risky.

While Hezbollah is wounded, it has plenty of capacity to hit back. And that is why Israel’s friends and enemies are still preparing for the worst.

It seems hard to believe that it’s less than a week since Hezbollah’s communication devices started exploding all across Lebanon.

The days since have represented a series of catastrophic setbacks for the formidable, Iranian-backed Shia militia.

With its networks disrupted, its fighting men mutilated, its leadership assassinated and its military infrastructure under constant bombardment, Hezbollah is facing its worst crisis in four decades.

Now Israel’s defence minister says the campaign is “deepening”.

But it’s a high-risk strategy, in which Hezbollah’s ability to respond cannot be ignored.

With alerts constantly sounding across northern Israel, Yoav Gallant has told Israelis to “show composure, discipline and full obedience to the directives of Home Front Command”.

We found all on display in equal measure when we visited the small community of Givat Avni, a short distance west of Tiberias.

David Yitzhak showed us where a 120mm rocket tore through the roof of his family home at lunchtime on Monday.

With sirens blaring, David bundled his wife and six-year-old daughter into the house’s safe room, seconds before the explosion.

“It’s a metre from life to death,” David said, indicating the short distance between the safe room and the hole in his daughter’s bedroom.

He said he feels no animosity towards the people of Lebanon, but says Hezbollah started the war for no reason.

“So now we are giving back. And it will be OK.”

• Live updates: Israel strikes dozens more sites in southern Lebanon
• ‘We just had to flee’: Fear and tension in Lebanon
• Bowen: Israel believes it has weakened Hezbollah but escalation risky
• Deadliest day in years for Lebanon as Israel steps up strikes on Hezbollah

But Givat Avni is 20 miles (30km) from the Lebanese border, far from the evacuation zone established by the authorities almost a year ago.

An hour later, as we arrived at nearby Kibbutz Lavi, home for the past year to families evacuated from further north, sirens sounded once more.

Rockets appeared in the sky overhead and as we were ushered into an underground shelter full of children and their artwork, we heard a series of deep resonant booms.

An hour later, more alerts, another safe room and more distant explosions.

Hezbollah had been firing rockets further into Israel, even before the latest escalation. But now an even larger swathe of northern Israel is in the firing line.

All of this is adding a sense of urgency to the government’s actions.

Speaking after a meeting with defence chiefs, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel was changing the balance of power in the north.

“We are facing complex days,” he warned.

“We do not wait for a threat,” he said. “We anticipate it. Anywhere, in any arena, at any time. We eliminate senior officials, eliminate terrorists, eliminate missiles.”

Having seized the initiative, Israel’s military seems determined to keep Hezbollah on the back foot, in the hope of realising the government’s aim of returning civilians to homes evacuated along the northern border.

On Monday morning, it stepped up another gear, telling Lebanese villagers to leave places where they believe Hezbollah is concealing its bigger weapons.

Military officials showed journalists a video of an air strike in which Israel says it destroyed a modified Russian cruise missile, hidden inside a house.

In another “illustration”, we were shown a skeletal 3D mock-up of a village in southern Lebanon, full of concealed weapons and equipment.

The mock-up, and the instructions to civilians to leave, all carried echoes of Israel’s efforts to explain its actions in Gaza.

But military officials insist that, unlike Gaza, the warnings do not mean that the army is poised to move in on the ground in southern Lebanon.

“We are currently focusing on Israel’s aerial campaign only,” a senior official said on Monday.

It seems that for now, Israel will see what it can achieve from the air. A former commander, speaking on Israel’s Channel 12, said that so far, the air force had shown only a fraction of its capabilities.

But there’s only so much Israel can achieve from the air, even if, as seems possible, jets are about to lay waste to entire villages.

At some point, a ground invasion – however limited – seems unavoidable.

But would it be wise?

“That’s exactly what Hezbollah wants,” Dr Jacques Neria, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs, told i24 News.

“The residents of southern Lebanon are Hezbollah soldiers,” he said. “And therefore we will have to fight against a mass that we do not know, under unfamiliar conditions.”

In his defiant speech last week, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah dared Israel to attempt to create a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, something the head of Israel’s Northern Command is said to be pushing for.

Such an effort, he said, would have “dire consequences” for Israel.

At the moment, there’s no sign of a diplomatic off-ramp. US-led efforts to defuse the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah have run into the sand, along with negotiations aimed at securing a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages.

Cold military logic – strike and counter-strike – appears to have taken over.

This is not a battle of equals. Israel knows it can beat Hezbollah.

There’s a complete asymmetry in the level of destruction and suffering that each side can inflict on the other.

But where the conflict is heading, and how much worse it will get before it ends, is anyone’s guess.

At first glance, Dunpo Elementary is no different from the thousands of elementary schools dotted across South Korea.

But look just beneath the surface and the differences are stark.

For one thing, most of the students in this school in Asan, an industrial city near the capital Seoul, may look ethnically Korean, but cannot speak the language.

“If I don’t translate into Russian for them, the other kids won’t understand any of the lessons,” says 11-year-old Kim Yana.

Yana speaks the best Korean in her class – but she and most of her 22 classmates are native Russian speakers.

Nearly 80% of the pupils at Dunpo are categorised as “multicultural students”, meaning they are either foreigners or have a parent who is not a Korean citizen.

And while the school says it is difficult to know exactly what these students’ nationalities are, most of them are believed to be Koryoins: ethnic Koreans typically hailing from countries in Central Asia.

Amid a plummeting birth rate and associated labour shortages, South Korea is touting the settlement of Koryoins and other ethnic Koreans as a possible solution to the nation’s population crisis. But discrimination, marginalisation, and the lack of a proper settlement programme are making it hard for many of them to integrate.

Koryoins are descendants of ethnic Koreans who migrated to the far east of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries – before many were forcibly transferred to Central Asia in the 1930s as part of Stalin’s “frontier-cleansing” policy.

They lived in former Soviet states such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and, over the generations, assimilated into those cultures and stopped speaking Korean, which was forbidden.

South Korea started granting residency to Koryoins as well as ethnic Koreans in China after a landmark ruling by the country’s constitutional court in 2001. But the number of Koryoin migrants began growing rapidly from 2014 when they were allowed to bring their families into the country as well.

Last year, about 760,000 ethnic Koreans from China and Russian-speaking countries were living in South Korea, making up about 30% of the country’s foreign population. Many have settled in cities like Asan, which have more factories and therefore greater job opportunities.

Ni Denis, who migrated to South Korea from Kazakhstan in 2018, is one of them.

“These days, I don’t see Koreans in the factory [where I work],” he says. “They think the job’s difficult, so they leave quickly. More than 80% of the people I work with are Koryoins.”

It isn’t only Koryoins, however, who are benefitting from the immigration boost. The influx of ethnic Koreans from abroad is also helping to address a severe labour shortage in a country whose population continues to shrink.

South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate, which keeps dropping year on year. In 2023, the birth rate was 0.72 – far behind the 2.1 required to maintain a stable population in the absence of immigration.

Estimates suggest that if this trend continues, South Korea’s population could halve by the year 2100.

The country will need 894,000 more workers, especially in the service industry, to “achieve long-term economic growth projections” over the next decade, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Employment and Labour.

Workers from overseas are helping to bridge the gap.

“While the overseas Korean visa is often perceived as a form of support for ethnic Koreans, it has been primarily serving to provide stable labour for manufacturing,” says Choi Seori, a researcher at the Migration Research and Training Centre.

Mr Lee, a recruiter in Asan who asked to be identified only by his surname, highlighted the workforce’s dependence on immigration another way.

“Without Koryoins,” he said. “these factories wouldn’t run.”

Yet while immigration may be one solution to the country’s workforce problem, it comes with its own set of issues in this ethnically homogenous society.

Language is one of them.

“Korean kids only play with Koreans and Russian kids only play with Russians because they can’t communicate,” says 12-year-old student Kim Bobby.

In an attempt to overcome the language barrier, Dunpo Elementary School runs a two-hour Korean class for foreign students every day. Even so, teacher Kim Eun-ju is worried that many children “hardly understand the lessons” as they move up grades.

Academic competition in South Korea is notoriously rife and the school is losing local students, as parents worry their children’s education is being affected because lessons have to be conducted at a slower pace for Koryoins.

The high school enrolment rate for multicultural students is already slightly lower than for locals, according to an official national survey conducted in 2021. Park Min-jung, a researcher at the Migration Research and Training Centre, worries that more Koryoin students will drop out of school if they don’t get the support they need.

And language is not the only point of difference.

Mr Ni says he has noticed that many of his Korean neighbours have moved out of their building.

“Koreans seem to dislike having Koryoins as neighbours,” he says with an awkward laugh. “Sometimes Koreans ask us why we don’t smile at them. It’s just the way we are; it’s not that we’re angry.”

He says there have been disputes between children in his neighbourhood, and he has heard of cases where Koryoin children have been “rough” during arguments. “After that, Korean parents tell their kids not to play with Koryoin kids. I think that’s how segregation happens.”

“I am concerned about how Korea will be able to accept other immigrants,” says Seong Dong-gi, an expert of Koryoin at Inha University, explaining that there is already “significant resistance” to the influx of ethnic Koreans who “do not look different”.

The population crisis should be a “catalyst for society to look at immigration differently”, says Ms Choi. “It’s time to think about how to integrate them”.

In 2023 there were roughly 2.5 million foreigners living in South Korea, which is also a popular destination for migrant workers from places such as Nepal, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Most of them work in manual jobs, with only 13% in professional roles.

“There is no clear plan for immigration at the national government level,” says Lee Chang-won, the director of the Migration Research and Training Centre. “Solving the country’s population problem with foreigners has been an afterthought.”

Mr Lee adds that the current immigration policy is “heavily weighted towards low-skilled workers”, leading to a “common view” that foreigners only work in South Korea for a while and then leave. As a result, he says, there has been little discussion about long-term settlement for all immigrants.

According to current laws, the government is only required to provide support with things like vocational training for foreigners who marry locals. The same rights, however, are not extended to families entirely made up of foreigners.

Analysts say a new law for these families is urgently needed.

An Asan official, who requested anonymity, says it is difficult to secure funding for more supporting facilities for Koryoin families because there is no legal requirement to do so.

But despite these challenges, Mr Ni says he has not regretted the decision to move to South Korea. He still gets a better living environment and higher wages here.

“For my children, this is home,” he says. “When we visited Kazakhstan, they asked: ‘Why are we here? We want to go back to Korea.’”

The Bird Photographer of the Year award has been announced, with Canadian photographer Patricia Homonylo scooping the top prize for her thought-provoking image titled When Worlds Collide.

The picture was taken in Toronto and beat more than 23,000 entries to claim the prize.

The photograph shows more than 4,000 birds that died colliding with windows and other reflective surfaces in the city.

“Each year more than one billion birds die in North America alone due to collisions with windows,” says Homonylo.

“I am a conservation photojournalist and have been working with the Fatal Light Awareness Program, where we save window-collision survivors in Toronto.

“Sadly, most of the birds we find are already dead.

“They are collected and at the end of the year we create this impactful display to honour the lives lost and increase public awareness.”

Homonylo’s entry was also among the winners selected for the Conservation (Single Image) category.

The Young Bird Photographer of the Year 2024 was awarded to 14-year-old Spanish photographer Andrés Luis Domínguez Blanco for his creative angle on a nuthatch scrambling down an oak tree.

Photographers competed in a eight of different categories in the adult competition, including a Conservation Award, Portfolio Award, and Video Award.

Here is a selection of the pictures that were awarded a gold, silver or bronze, with descriptions by the photographers.

“This Peregrine Falcon fledgling had been flying for over a week and his skills had improved by the day.

“While he still took food from parents, he had started to practise his hunting skills.

“He was not good enough to catch live birds in the air yet, so he took baby steps by chasing a fluttering butterfly.

“I have been photographing peregrines for years, and this was the first time I have seen fledglings play with butterflies.”

“For several weeks each year, Black Grouse gather at [the] leks on spring mornings for courtship and display.

“The males come down, each claiming their patch, and spend a couple of hours sizing each other up, charging at each other, engaging in mostly mock battles.

“Sometimes, however, the encounters escalate to real fights.

“The heated breath of a solitary fighter is steaming in the cold air, which I captured while sitting inside a small photography hide, revelling in the sounds and sights of this ancient play.”

“In the dead of winter, I marvel at the aerial ballet of the garden birds that come to visit my trees and to take advantage of the seeds that I put out for them.

“Discreetly hidden, I tried to immortalise their flight and its delicate trail using a flash and camera in ‘rear curtain’ mode.

“Hundreds of shots were required before I captured the perfect moment, which portrayed the fleeting magic of nature in winter.”

“Here we see a trio of northern gannets diving into the ocean on a sunny day in Shetland. .

“The species is Scotland’s largest seabird, and they are remarkably adept in the water, with the ability to dive to depths as far as 22 metres.

“I took this photo while scuba diving from a boat near Noss, which is home to the UK’s seventh largest colony of northern gannets.

“In the past the population has been estimated at around 25,000 birds, though their numbers were unfortunately severely reduced by the avian flu outbreak.

“It is unclear when, or if, their population will be able to recover. Dead herring from a local herring fishery were used to attract the birds to the boat.”

“This photograph shows a hoary-headed grebe as it disappears below the surface of the water to feed, pushing into the depths with its huge paddle-like feet.

“I took the image from a raised platform high above the wetland.

“With a little bit of imagination, the combination of bird and ripples look like the head of a hippo.”

“We were on a safari, and returning to camp in Sabi Sands, South Africa, on a dark March evening.

“We stopped, having picked up some unusual sounds, although unsure what they were.

“Then we heard chattering and fluttering high above us.

“When illuminated with the lamp on the vehicle, we saw these helmetshrikes huddling together against a night that was starting to turn colder.”

“Goosanders breed in the park about one kilometre from Poland’s life-giving River Vistula.

“Each mother has to move her brood to the river as quickly as possible due to lack of food and safety in the park.

“They make the journey through a series of underground passages and over a six-lane highway.

“Each year a group of volunteers help them cross this deadly road by stopping the traffic.

“This image shows a mother goosander crossing a smaller road because she decided not to use the scary and dark underground passage below it.”

“This poignant image captures the harsh reality in one of Bali’s bird markets.

“The pair of lovebirds face each other in separate cages, appearing to say their final farewells, not knowing if they will see each other again.

“Who knows what joys they would have experienced together in their lush native rainforests and whether they will ever experience that again.

“Their silent connection transcends physical barriers, emphasising the complex interaction between yearning for freedom and the urge to escape from captivity for human pleasure.”

“I took this photo on a beautiful beach on the Baltic Sea.

“There are a number of waders and other birds here, but also many visitors who enjoy the beautiful landscape.

“In this case there was also a dog who initially did not notice the grey plover. The grey plover, however, did notice the dog and flew away shortly after I took the photo.

“While I do not believe this incident greatly stressed the bird, it is crucial to acknowledge the potential impact of human activity and tourism on protected species and their habitats.”

“Lake Federsee is a famous wintering area for numerous migratory birds.

“From November to March, Eurasian bitterns are frequent visitors to this lake.

“As soon as the lake freezes over, these rare birds retreat to trenches through the reeds.

“Surprisingly, this individual was very close to the boardwalk that leads through the nature reserve.

“From there, I could easily watch its fishing campaign and take numerous photos.”

All photographs courtesy Bird Photographer of the Year

North Korea secured a record-equalling third victory in the Fifa Under-20 Women’s World Cup on Sunday, beating Japan 1-0 in Bogota.

They became the joint most successful side in the football tournament’s history, equalling powerhouse nations Germany and the United States.

Choe Il-son’s 15th minute winner capped a superb tournament for North Korea, who won every single game in Colombia.

The 17-year-old forward finished as the competition’s overall top scorer, winning the Golden Boot with six goals.

“It’s so hard to express ourselves right now – this has been a dream of so many of us for so long,” said North Korea’s captain, Chae Un-yong.

“The final match was tough, as we expected, and we had to remain calm and play according to the coach’s tactical instructions.”

North Korea stormed their way through the tournament, despatching the likes of Argentina, the Netherlands and Brazil en route to the semis.

A 1-0 victory over the United States set up an all-Asian final against Japan – who finished as runners-up in the previous tournament in 2022.

Choe’s goal – a slightly deflected left foot strike – was enough to secure a historic win for North Korea in the El Camin Stadium

She was named player of the match and won both the Golden Boot and the Golden Ball, the latter being awarded to the World Cup’s best overall player.

North Korea’s triumph is even more notable given the country withdrew from global sporting competition for several years due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Having not played a match since 2018, the North Korean Women’s U20 returned to the international stage in March this year to compete in the Asian Cup in Uzbekistan.

Despite the six-year-break, they won that tournament, beating Japan 2-1 to secure their second title.

“To firstly win the Asian Cup and now follow that with this success means that I’m so proud of the team,” said the team coach, Ri Song-ho, following their World Cup triumph.

“We have shown that we are very dangerous in the way that we build up attacks, it’s all about the speed of how we go forward.”

Unlike their male counterparts – who are ranked 111th in the world – North Korea’s women are a genuine force in world football.

The senior side is currently ninth in the Fifa world rankings, higher than countries such as France and Australia.

To date, they have won three Asian Cups, three Asian Games and three East Asian Championships.

North Koreans rarely get to see their national sides play at home, though.

The country’s limited transport connections with the outside world – as well as its poor diplomatic relations with many governments – mean that the vast majority of North Korea’s “home” matches are played at a neutral venue, often in China or the Middle East.

From finding an alligator in a car boot to being called out to an ostrich loose on the street in the middle of the night, the Scottish SPCA’s Mike Flynn MBE has seen it all.

After 37 years with the organisation, the chief superintendent retires on Monday as he turns 65. He was a zoo elephant keeper before joining the animal charity.

“Everyone always thinks the Scottish SPCA is all puppies and kittens, but it’s far from it,” he told BBC Scotland News of his varied animal encounters over the years.

As for his proudest work-related moment, he said that was the ban on the use of snares and glue traps being introduced earlier this year.

The alligator incident happened back in 2004 in Edinburgh, after the Scottish SPCA initially spotted an advert.

A man was trying to sell the 4ft (1.2m) reptile, after buying it over the internet. He had realised he could not care for it.

Posing as potential buyers, officers and plain-clothes police met him in a car park. The boot of the Vauxhall Cavalier was opened and they were confronted by the unrestrained and unmuzzled creature.

“He was keeping it in a bath on the fifth floor of a tenement in Leith,” Mr Flynn said.

“He advertised it. We got in touch pretending to be buyers and he turned up at a car park with this alligator in the back of the car. We caught him red-handed.

“So I ended up with my colleague getting the enviable task of taking this alligator to Torremolinos in Spain.

“It was transported in a purpose-built crate, it was flown from Edinburgh to London, then London to Madrid. It was then transported in the rear of a hire car by myself and a colleague from Madrid to Torremolinos.

“And he’s still there today – Jimmy the alligator from Leith in Edinburgh.”

Mr Flynn started with the Scottish SPCA back in 1987.

“Prior to that I worked seven years at Edinburgh Zoo as an elephant keeper,” he said. “So I’ve always enjoyed the animal background.

“I joined the society with the intention of being here until I dropped. But 65 is beckoning and I think that’s a fair enough stint – 37 years is long enough for anybody.

“Working with animals has always been a passion, but to be honest being an inspector isn’t always about working with animals. That’s a tiny part of it.

“Every animal you deal with, you’ve got to deal with a person. So for every animal we help, we’re helping a member of the public or other organisations. You’ve got to have an empathy with animals, but you’ve got to have a lot of people skills too.”

Mr Flynn still “vividly” remembers his first day at the animal charity.

“The chief inspector at the time, the first thing he did was take you into this old cupboard to give you second hand uniform,” he recalled.

“So first day on the street, I think I had a jacket that fitted somebody about six sizes bigger than me.

“In my day you had to carry about a pocket full of two pences if you had to phone back to the office – you had to find a phone box – to find out if there were any other jobs coming. Back in those days, trying to find a phone box in Edinburgh that worked was a bit of a miracle anyway.”

He described another memorable incident.

“We’ve had wild boar, ostriches – I remember getting a phone call one Sunday morning from someone I actually thought was drunk,” Mr Flynn said.

“He said that he had seen an ostrich on Leith Walk in Edinburgh, but he said it was limping.

“And lo and behold, I got there and the police are pointing at this ostrich which is walking down the street.

“It was a farmed ostrich which had fallen off the back of a lorry. The guy wasn’t that drunk after all.”

He spoke out about many high-profile criminal cases over the years, including what was believed to be Scotland’s biggest puppy farm, in the north east of Scotland.

More than 100 dogs, puppies, rabbits and ferrets were seized when Scottish SPCA officers and police raided the farm, near Fyvie, in November 2017.

In 2006 he was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s 80th birthday honours list for services to animal welfare in Scotland.

“That was fantastic,” he said. “It was surreal. It was a real privilege.

“It came totally out of the blue. I got the MBE, but that was for the work of the Scottish SPCA.

“Everyone in our organisation deserves that recognition.”

“Work-wise I think the biggest achievement – and it’s taken at least 15 years to get there – is getting snaring banned.

“That was first raised way back in 2010 and we’ve constantly been at that and it’s finally been passed by the Scottish Parliament that snaring of all forms will be banned.

“That’s been a personal passion of mine because I’ve pulled too many animals out of legal and illegal snares that have just suffered immensely.”

He added: “I’ve achieved all the things I wanted to achieve over the last 20 years that I was aiming for. And with the 65th birthday coming up, I thought well let’s go out on a high and enjoy what you’ve done.

“And honestly I’ve never had a bad day with the society. And that’s all down to the goodwill of the Scottish public because it’s all donations from the public and I just hope they will continue to support us because they do make a change.”

And as for the prospect of retired life?

“It will be strange,” he admitted. “I’ll be checking the phone isn’t broken because it won’t be ringing as much.

“I’m going to take it quietly. I’ve got a couple of projects I’m going to be helping other people with. I’ll still be on the Scottish government’s animal welfare commission.

“I’m not disappearing completely off the scene and I’ll still be in contact with my old colleagues.”

The lifelong animal lover added: “It will take a while to sink in. It’s been 37 glorious years. I can’t complain. I can honestly say that I haven’t had one bad day in all that time. I’ve loved it.”

The last time Oasis played Wembley Stadium, in 2009, a standing ticket cost exactly £44.04.

For their return next summer, the same ticket was priced at £150. Vastly more than the old ticket price which, when adjusted for inflation, would cost £68.

Not only that, but some fans were charged hundreds of pounds more than the face value, after so-called “dynamic pricing” boosted the cost in response to high demand.

But Oasis aren’t alone. If you’ve logged onto Ticketmaster over the last couple of years, you’ll know the cost of live music has soared.

Ticket prices shot up by 23% last year, having already risen 19% since the pandemic. Going to a gig can cost the same amount as taking a holiday, and prices are only rising.

At the most extreme end of the scale, Madonna charged £1,306.75 for VIP passes to her Celebration tour; and Beyoncé offered fans the chance to sit on the stage of her Renaissance concerts for the bargain price of £2,400.

Overall, the average ticket price for the top 100 tours around the world was £101 last year, up from £82 in 2022, according to Pollstar, a trade publication that tracks the concert industry.

In the UK, 51% of people say high prices have stopped them going to gigs at least once in the last five years. Among 16 to 34-year-olds, two-thirds of concert-goers say they’ve reduced the number of shows they attend. But despite this, tours with high-priced tickets keep selling out – but only for the biggest-name artists.

Abbi Glover, 33, from New Holland, Lincolnshire, said the cost of tickets “creates a divide” between those who can afford them and those who are “priced out”.

“I work hard and earn a decent wage. What do I have to do to be able to just enjoy these things when I’m doing everything I possibly can?”

UK prices are still below those in the US but, as ticketing expert Reg Walker told the BBC, “what happens there happens here five to 10 years later”.

So why have costs skyrocketed?

If your first thought was “greed”, well, that’s definitely part of it.

“It’s not speculation to think that some artists want to make as much money as they can,” says Gideon Gottfried, Pollstar’s European editor.

One musician who’s been bullish about the price hikes is Bruce Springsteen.

Fans were alarmed when some seats for his 2023 US tour were priced as high as $5,000 (£3,874), thanks to Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Springsteen argued that most of the tickets were in an “affordable range”, but he was fed up with touts making money off his back, so he chose to match their prices.

“I’m going, ‘Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?’” he said.

• Listen to Mark read this article on Sounds

Kiss star Gene Simmons also defended the system.

“Whatever the pricing is, it’s all academic,” he told Forbes. “Somebody sits in a room and tries to figure out how far the rubber band can stretch. And if you’re not selling tickets, guess what happens? The price goes down. Capitalism!

“Vote with [your] money,” he concluded. “You don’t like the ticket pricing? Don’t buy a ticket.”

Springsteen and Simmons are in good company. Other artists who’ve embraced dynamic pricing include Coldplay, Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift (although she ditched it for the Eras tour after significant fan backlash).

Following the Oasis debacle, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer vowed to get a “grip” on the situation and “make sure that tickets are available at a price that people can actually afford”.

But it might not be so simple…

Aside from the lure of a big payday, there are many reasons why artists are charging more.

Some are trying to combat the impact of streaming – the majority of musicians make just 5% of their income from streaming, a sharp decline from the years when vinyl and CD were king.

Others are worried about their longevity, in an era when entire careers can be measured in the span of a TikTok trend.

“Nobody really knows what the heck is going on, and how the economy will develop and what the next crisis is going to be,” says Gottfried, “so some artists are trying to milk the cow as much as possible, while it’s still possible.”

Not everyone thinks that way. Punk-pop star Yungblud organised his own festival in Milton Keynes this August, setting prices at a market-beating £49.50.

He was compelled to take action after noticing unsold seats on his US arena tour last year.

“Five hundred seats would be completely empty because they were $200 a ticket,” he told Music Week. “I’d have 1,000 kids outside the venue who couldn’t afford to come in and I was like, ‘Something’s got to change here.’”

But the festival didn’t go completely to plan. Heightened security after a stabbing in Milton Keynes the previous weekend led to delays of up to three hours for fans waiting to get into the venue. As temperatures soared above 30 degrees Celsius, some passed out in the queue. Others gave up and went home.

Higher-priced tickets could have paid for extra security staff and eased those pressures – illustrating the delicate balance that has to be struck when setting prices.

Still, Yungblud isn’t the only one trying to get a fair deal for concert-goers.

Paul Heaton capped prices for his upcoming tour at £35. Pop star Caity Baser set her 2023 concerts at just £11 – or “two meal deals”, as she put it – to help cash-strapped fans.

But these artists don’t require big productions full of pyrotechnics and jumbotron video screens.

For acts who do, the cost of touring has spiralled since the pandemic. Here are just a few examples:

• Transport Whether you’re in a minivan or a private jet, it costs more to travel these days. Fuel prices have risen by 20% since 2019 and a shortage of drivers post-Brexit means experienced crew can charge a premium.

• Freight costs A tour isn’t just about moving bodies – for big arena and stadium shows, the stage also has to be transported. According to the pop star Lorde, the cost of shipping her stage around the world increased by up to 300% after Covid. And logistics company Freightwaves says the cost of insuring one truck can be as high as $5m (£3.8m). For context, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour requires up to 50 trucks.

• Catering We’ve all seen our food bills increase, and touring artists are no exception. When you have hundreds of mouths to feed, the costs add up.

• Stage equipment From sound systems to lighting rigs, rental costs for tour gear have risen by 15-20%. And with more tours on the road, equipment is overbooked – which can push prices even higher.

• Accommodation Hotels and accommodation are a major cost. Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, for example, had more than 300 people on the road at any one time. With hotel prices doubling in the last five years, this adds another strain on tour finances.

“We’ve seen projects where the cost of overheads have increased by up to 35 to 40%,” says Stuart Galbraith, CEO of concert promoters Kilimanjaro Live, “and the only form of income that comes in to cover all of that is ticket money”.

Even when prices go up, the profit margins are minimal, according to Stephan Thanscheidt, CEO of FKP Scorpio, which organises more than 20 European festivals, as well as tours by Ed Sheeran, the Rolling Stones and Foo Fighters.

“The costs associated with our productions have doubled or tripled [but] we cannot and will not compensate for this by tripling the ticket prices,” he told Pollstar last year.

That means the artist’s share of the box office – roughly 56% of the money you pay – increasingly goes towards production costs, not profits.

The squeeze is particularly tight on UK festival organisers, which have also been hit by a ban on “red diesel”, a fuel tinted with red dye, which they previously used to power the generators and heavy vehicles needed to construct festival sites.

The move is part of the UK’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gases, and meant some organisers suddenly had to pay a higher rate of fuel duty from April 2022 – a big increase of 46 pence per litre.

Since then, the average cost of a UK festival ticket has shot up by 22%. Combined with other rising costs, more than 50 festivals went on hiatus or closed completely this summer.

Small venues are under pressure, too. Their prices might average between £7 and £10, but they’re struggling to sell shows – partly because fans have already spent their money on stadium tickets that cost the same as a games console.

Toni Coe-Brooker from the Music Venues Trust said this is down to “a culture in which people think that grassroots gigs should be free”.

In the past, that didn’t matter because owners made plenty of money behind the bar. But Gen Z are increasingly turning their backs on alcohol. One study says 26% of 16-to-25-year-olds are teetotal, and that leaves yet another hole in venues’ finances.

Combined with other pressures including higher rent and electricity bills, 125 music venues closed or stopped hosting live music in 2023.

In those that remain, costs are so tight that “a lot of venue operators aren’t even paying themselves, which is really worrying,” says Coe-Brooker.

The Music Venue Trust wants bigger concert halls to donate £1 from each ticket sold to the grassroots scene and the next generation of artists.

That wouldn’t necessarily push prices up again – the trust says the £1 fee would be factored into existing costs – but here’s the fascinating thing: If the artist is the right one, fans will pay regardless.

Live Nation is the world’s biggest concert promoter and it shifted a record 118 million tickets in the first six months of 2024.

According to its latest earnings report, sales for arenas, amphitheatres, theatre and club shows are all up double digits.

“People’s enthusiasm to go out has not been as curbed as we expected in the current economy,” says Gottfried.

“VIP ticket sales have definitely picked up. Every single promoter I’ve spoken to across the individual European markets, has seen an uptake in almost every case. And £1,000 for a VIP package is not at all unheard of.”

However, the same rules don’t apply to everyone.

The biggest names might get away with charging hundreds of pounds per show, but “the weaker tours are coming under more pressure,” says Galbraith.

In other words, with an ongoing squeeze on their disposable incomes, fans are cutting back on experiences that don’t seem unique or essential.

“We’re competing in a marketplace that isn’t just gig to gig,” says Galbraith. “It’s also, are we value for money versus a restaurant? Are we value for money versus a mini break? So every tour has to be as cost effective as they possibly can.”

There are some signs that we’ve reached a peak. Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys both scrapped recent US arena tours, after fans baulked at average prices of around $150 (£116). And the most expensive tickets for Billie Eilish’s 2025 UK tour (£398, of which £151 goes to local charities) are still available, months after going on sale.

It’s hard to say whether this will change. But Leah Rafferty, 27, from Sheffield, is an example of a fan who will pay whatever is asked. She lives with her parents, which allows her to spend her disposable income on concerts – something she says she feels “extremely lucky” to do.

A devoted Swiftie, she has seen The Eras Tour six times: Once in Edinburgh, twice in Liverpool and three times in London, at a cost of £1,192.57.

“As long as it doesn’t bankrupt me, I’m happy to spend whatever it costs.”

That’s exactly what promoters are relying on, says Gottfried.

“One of the reasons you haven’t seen notable dips [in sales], despite people struggling economically, is that seeing their favourite artist means so much to them that they make irrational decisions.

“Any market will be distorted by people making irrational decisions. It might be a beautiful decision for them but it’s also an irrational one, because their emotions and their fandom will make them pay outrageous money.”

In Latino exile communities across the US, a question is being asked: is Kamala Harris really a communist?

The vice-president has been the subject of numerous misleading claims that she is a socialist or communist since becoming the Democratic candidate for president, according to the US’s largest Spanish-language fact-checker Factchequeado.

Experts say these claims capitalise on genuine fears held by some voters who fled repression in countries like Cuba and Venezuela.

In one viral video, Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz appear to pose for a selfie in front of a sign for Revolutionary Communists of America, a far-left group.

The video is fake. The background was doctored by a group of Donald Trump’s supporters known as the Dilley Meme Team.

Their original post had more than 420,000 views, but it was shared by many Spanish accounts – and repeated offline.

“It’s everywhere, this doubt: ‘Is this person a communist?’” Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a cultural context strategist from south Florida, told the BBC.

She was listening to the Spanish-language radio station La Nueva Poderosa in Miami when she heard the hosts discussing the false meme.

“Did you see them standing in front of that picture? They have no shame in who they are,” the hosts said.

She contacted the station to express concern. The hosts later said on air that they wanted to clarify the story was “not true” but that “doesn’t take away from the reality that Kamala is a Marxist”.

There are nearly 36.2 million eligible Latino voters in America, about 14.7% of the US electorate, and many live in key swing states like Nevada and Arizona, which makes them a coveted demographic for both campaigns.

They are by no means a homogeneous voting demographic, but historically, Latinos have tended to favour the Democrats. In 2020, 44% voted for Joe Biden, with only 16% voting for Trump. But polls suggest Republicans have gained ground this election cycle, with many factors cited including the economy, immigration, and abortion rights.

And for some immigrants, concerns about America today reflect their past experiences in their home countries.

Political messages warning about “socialism” or “communism” have been particularly prevalent in communities with large Cuban and Venezuelan populations, like in south Florida, experts noted.

These expats are especially vulnerable to misinformation about communism because of the trauma they experienced fleeing repression, said Samantha Barrios, a Venezuelan-American based in Miami, Florida, who votes Democrat.

She accused right-leaning Spanish media of using these terms to “scare Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans” because of “the main reason that we left our countries, trying to leave these regimes”.

For some, their criticism of the Democrats is grounded in opinions that the US government has not provided a tough enough response to political repression in Cuba or Venezuela.

But Ms Barrio is wary of the way these legitimate concerns are being weaponised through false claims that Kamala Harris herself is a communist.

Ms Pérez-Verdía agrees, but she also criticised the Democrat campaign for not doing enough to address their concerns.

“Don’t laugh off people’s fears. It’s really disrespectful. People have genuine fears, they came to the United States, they left everything behind. If they have doubts you should address their doubts.”

Not all claims exclusively target Latinos, said the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which monitors more than 1,300 WhatsApp groups and more than 200 Telegram channels in Spanish and Portuguese.

And notable right-wing and pro-Trump actors and influencers have pushed a “fear of socialism” since 2020, the organisation found.

But while Joe Biden was accused of being a communist when he ran for president, Factchequeado’s founder, Laura Zommer, said their fact checkers had “never” seen this volume of AI and doctored images before.

Some of this misinformation has been spread by Trump himself, or his high-profile supporters.

Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, posted a faked image of Kamala Harris in a red uniform emblazoned with the communist hammer and sickle, captioned “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?”

It had more than 83.9 million views. A reverse image search suggests this was the earliest posting of the image on X.

• Trump makes pitch to black and Latino voters in New York
• Major labour union declines to endorse Harris or Trump
• The political brawl brewing on Florida’s airwaves

Donald Trump shared an AI image of Harris addressing a communist crowd that had at least 81.5 million views on X, but it was not the first posting of this image.

Posts linking Harris to communism really took off online after the presidential debate, according a report by the DDIA prepared for the BBC.

During the debate, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris and her father a “Marxist” and suggested she would turn the US into “Venezuela on steroids” through her immigration policies.

After the debate, “Marxista” trended on social media and searches for “Marxist” on Google in the US jumped 1000% in 17 hours.

Factchequeado said the most searched question in Spanish after the debate was: “Who is Kamala Harris’s father?”

The DDIA said two claims especially gained traction in the week after the presidential debate. In one, a fabricated document falsely claiming Kamala Harris is a member of the Russian communist party went viral, according to Meta’s own metrics. Another claim, that Harris is “Kamarada [Comrade] Kamala”, arose from a Trump speech in which he portrays her as a “communist comrade”.

BBC Verify traced the membership card image to a website which allows people to make fake communist party documents.

The membership number, stamp and other details on the card were identical to a template on the site for making a party membership card.

Posts sharing the fake image, which was first shared in August, have been viewed more than half a million times.

The Democratic Party is not a socialist party, nor does it claim to support communist regimes. But some high-profile members like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have described their political views as “democratic socialist”.

When she was a California senator, Harris co-sponsored Sanders’ Medicare for All bill, which would have brought a single-payer health care system to the US. She has since said she no longer supports a single-payer health-care system, which would have abolished private insurers.

She has never advocated for communist policies, such as the abolition or seizure of private property.

Kamala Harris’s plan to crackdown on “price gouging” at supermarkets has been cited in Spanish social media posts as “communist”. Mr Musk claimed it would mean “empty shelves, just like in Venezuela”.

Her proposal, which would involve asking the trade commission to investigate price spikes far above the increase in the cost of production, is a far cry from the widespread price controls seen in Cuba and Venezuela that were in part blamed for severe food shortages.

But for some voters who fled those countries, their fear lies in anything they feel remotely resembles policies from the countries they came from.

Duke Machado, who runs a Latino Republican Facebook page from Texas called Latino Strikeforce, said he fears that if the Democrats win, the country would be on a slippery slope to communism.

“If we’re not careful, we’ll slide into Cuba and Venezuela. Their ultimate goal is to destroy capitalism.”

When asked if it was responsible to share fears that the Democrats could turn the US into a communist country with his followers, including Latino exiles who had fled repression, he said: “It’s not irresponsible at all. I see it as a duty.”

• 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?

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

A BBC investigation has exposed decades of serious sexual abuse allegations against Mohamed Al Fayed, the former owner of luxury department store Harrods.

The billionaire businessman, who died last year aged 94, is accused of multiple counts of rape and attempted rape by several women who worked for him – many of whom felt unable to report what had happened until recently.

At the time of many of the alleged attacks, Fayed was the owner of Harrods, the Ritz Paris hotel and football club Fulham FC.

He was a well-known public figure who had links to senior figures in Parliament and courted royalty and celebrities alike.

Here are some key dates spanning nearly 40 years where there were claims about his behaviour.

• Mohamed Al Fayed accused of multiple rapes by staff
• Timeline of sex abuse allegations
• How culture of fear at Harrods protected a predator
• Harrods investigating if current staff involved in Fayed allegations
• Watch on iPlayer: Al Fayed – Predator at Harrods

1985 – Mohamed Al Fayed buys Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, London, and becomes chairman.

1986 – “Alice”, who spoke in the 2024 BBC documentary, started working at Harrods when she was 16. She says she was sexually abused from 1987 and worked as a personal assistant to Fayed – a position she held until 1991.

1988-1991 – “He was vile,” says another one of the women, “Sophia”, who worked as his personal assistant during these years. She says he tried to rape her more than once.

1990s – “Rachel” – a woman who worked as a personal assistant for Fayed in the 90s – says in the same BBC documentary that the billionaire raped her in his luxury apartment overlooking Hyde Park in west London.

1994 – The “cash for questions” scandal erupts in Westminster. Fayed goes public and admits making payments to two Conservative MPs to ask questions in Parliament.

1994-1995 “Steve”, who worked for the billionaire during this time, tells the BBC in the 2024 documentary that security staff “did know that certain things were happening to certain female employees at Harrods and Park Lane”.

1995 – Vanity Fair publishes an article alleging racism, staff surveillance and sexual misconduct by Fayed against Harrods staff.

Fayed sues for libel, which sparks a two-year investigation from Vanity Fair editor Henry Porter. According to documents and statements compiled by Vanity Fair – that the BBC has seen – allegations of sexual harassment and assault were being made in relation to several women.

1997 – Fayed buys then third-division Fulham FC for a reported £30m.

In May, Fayed begins moves to drop his legal action against Vanity Fair, via negotiations between publisher Conde Nast UK and a Harrods executive, Michael Cole – an ex-BBC journalist.

Princess Diana and his son Dodi Al Fayed die in a car crash in Paris that August.

In a piece for the Observer on Sunday, Mr Porter says Conde Nast’s owner, Si Newhouse, agreed to close down the case “out of respect for the grieving father”.

Evidence on Fayed’s alleged activities collected by Vanity Fair is stored securely by Mr Porter, who has since allowed journalists – including the BBC documentary makers – access, he says in the Observer.

In December of that year, ITV’s The Big Story reported further serious allegations including sexual harassment and groping – which is classed as sexual assault.

Fayed issues angry statement saying claims were outrageous and untrue. He claims he did not contribute to the programme as he wasn’t able to hear allegations in advance.

1998 – Another former BBC journalist, biographer Tom Bower, publishes “Fayed: The Unauthorised Biography” with more women alleging sexual assault.

Fayed’s then official spokesperson, Michael Cole, calls it “a travesty of the truth”, saying: “We helped Tom, and then he betrayed all of that help”.

2008 – One of the women in the BBC investigation, “Ellie”, not her real name, was 15 in 2008 when she reported an assault to the police – an allegation that made headlines but did not result in any charge.

2009 – In the 2024 BBC documentary, Gemma, who worked as one of Fayed’s personal assistants between 2007-09, said his behaviour became more frightening during work trips abroad. She said that his attacks culminated in her rape at Villa Windsor in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne.

2010 – Mohamed Al Fayed sells Harrods for a reported £1.5bn to the Qatar Investment Authority. A Channel 4 Dispatches programme in which a number of women were going to make allegations was cancelled.

2013 – July: Fayed sells Fulham FC to Shahid Khan, owner of NFL side Jacksonville Jaguars in a deal said to be in the region of £150-£200m.

A woman in her twenties alleges Fayed raped her. Police investigate but no charges are brought against him.

2015 – The Mirror publishes an article about the 2013 allegations. The Met Police confirms it looked again at the case after new information came to light, but again no charges are brought.

2017 – A Channel 4 Dispatches is broadcast with three women alleging groping, assault, and sexual harassment. One woman waives her right to anonymity for the first time.

2018 – Channel 4 News follows up the Dispatches film after more women come forward, including an employee who was 15 at the time. Fayed’s lawyers dismiss the claims relating to the child as “false”, and say he was unable to comment on the other allegations.

2018-2023 – Police investigate claims by three other women during this period. The Crown Prosecution Service were called in to advise detectives but a full file of evidence was never passed on to prosecutors, as first reported by the Sunday Times in September 2024.

2023 – In July, Harrods begins settling claims with women who came forward alleging sexual assault by Fayed.

Mohamed Al Fayed dies in London aged 94 in August 2023.

2024 – The BBC Documentary “Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods” aired in September with a number of women alleging sexual abuse at the hands of Fayed.

The BBC heard testimony from more than 20 women with allegations ranging from sexual assault to rape. Five said they were raped.

Harrods has already reached financial settlements with the majority of people who have approached them since 2023, and has had new inquiries this week.

Harrods is accepting vicarious liability for the actions of Fayed, and there are no non-disclosure agreements attached to the settlements.

Harrods’ current owners said earlier this week they were “utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed Al Fayed”.

“These were the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated and we condemn them in the strongest terms,” they said in a response to the BBC investigation.

“We also acknowledge that during this time his victims were failed and for this we sincerely apologise. We are doing everything we can to fix this.”

At a press conference on 20 September, lawyer Gloria Allred said the “ugly truth” was that under Mr Al Fayed’s chairmanship, Harrods was “a toxic, unsafe and abusive environment”.

She added: “The allegations against Mohamed Al Fayed include serial rape, attempted rape, sexual battery and sexual abuse of minors.

“The allegations involve cover-ups, threats and a quarter century of sexual abuse by Mohamed Al Fayed after he purchased Harrods and became its chairman.”

Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods

A BBC investigation into allegations of rape and attempted rape by Mohamed Al Fayed, the former owner of Harrods. Did the luxury store protect a billionaire predator?

Watch Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods on BBC iPlayer now

Listen to World of Secrets, Season 4: Al Fayed, Predator at Harrods on BBC Sounds. If you’re outside the UK, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts, external.

A retired Indian high court judge will investigate allegations that a woman was physically and sexually assaulted by a group of police inside a police station in the eastern state of Odisha, the authorities say.

After the allegations, levelled last week by the 32-year-old woman and her fiancé – an army officer – led to a huge outcry, four police officials, including three women, were suspended. A fifth policeman was transferred. The action came after the state’s crime branch opened an inquiry into the case.

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A video of the woman, a law graduate who runs a restaurant in the state capital Bhubaneswar, detailing her alleged abuse by police early on the morning of 15 September has been shared many times on social media.

The footage makes for a difficult watch.

In a wheelchair, with a collar around her neck and one arm in a sling, the woman repeatedly breaks down while narrating to journalists what she says happened to her.

She said she had gone to Bharatpur police station with her fiance after closing her restaurant at around 01:00 because they had been harassed by a group of men on the road.

They asked police to send a patrol car quickly to intercept the men who couldn’t have gone far, she said.

“The police refused to take down our complaint, instead they abused us. When I told them that I was a law graduate and knew my rights, they got even more angry.”

The situation escalated after the police put her fiance in the lockup, she alleged.

“When I objected, two female officials started pulling my hair and beating me. I kept pleading with them to stop. But they dragged me through the corridor and one of them tried to strangle me. When I fought back, they tied my hands and legs and locked me up in a room,” she said, sobbing.

“One male officer came in and took off my bra and started kicking me in my breasts. At around 06:00, the officer in charge of the police station came into the room. He pulled my pants down. Then he lowered his pants and threatened to rape me multiple times unless I stopped screaming for help,” she alleged.

Reports in the Indian media last week quoted police as saying the army officer and his fiancee had arrived at the station drunk and the woman had been aggressive. They alleged that she had slapped a policewoman and bitten another officer.

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She was arrested and a magistrate placed her in custody.

But three days after the alleged assault, the high court freed the woman on bail and criticised the police and the lower court that jailed her.

“On careful examination of the record, it appears that the allegations are very serious in nature… They are anathema to the very concept of a democratic and orderly society,” Justice Aditya Kumar Mohapatra said, adding that the “police had failed to follow the procedure laid down in law while arresting her”.

Justice Mohapatra said he had been informed by the government’s lawyer that “drastic action has been taken against the erring police officers… and appropriate action shall be taken against those found guilty”.

The magistrate had also “failed to apply their judicial mind” in denying the woman bail, he added.

Since then, many in India have taken to social media to express their anger at alleged police brutality. A large number of former and serving army officials have shared the viral video of the woman and pledged support to her fight since her father is a retired army brigadier.

The Indian army has also written a letter to the chief justice of the high court in Odisha saying that a “serving officer had been kept in custody for nearly 14 hours without any charge” and because of “the grave incident… his prestige was demeaned”.

“The modesty and dignity of his fiancee, who also happens to be the daughter of a retired brigadier, was grossly outraged by the police authorities,” the letter adds.

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Her father, who told the BBC that he had spent hours frantically trying to locate his daughter that night, said the police had not even informed him or his family about the allegations against his daughter.

“Some army officers informed me that my daughter had been arrested and sent to jail. I was allowed to meet her only the next afternoon,” he said. “I hope we will get justice.”

The state government said it “respects the Indian army” and is “concerned about the dignity, safety and rights of women”. It has nominated retired Justice Chitta Ranjan Dash to hold an inquiry and submit a report within 60 days.

The woman’s allegations are being investigated and her statement has been recorded, crime branch official Narendra Behera told the media. The seven men accused of harassing the couple were arrested by police and released on bail.

On social media some have commented on the woman’s clothing while others have questioned “the character of a woman who argues with men and drinks alcohol”.

Namrata Chadha, lawyer and women’s rights activist who met the woman in hospital, told the BBC that it is “heart-breaking to see this kind of victim shaming”.

“She has an injured shoulder, a cut on her face and swelling around her eye. She is very traumatised. While talking to me, her eyes welled up several times. I told her, ‘You’ll have to be courageous and face it all.’ She said she will fight to the end.”

• Hema committee report: Why are India’s biggest film stars silent?

Ms Chadha says the police have to follow a standard operating procedure when a woman lodges a complaint.

“It’s their duty to hear her patiently. They are trained to deal with a woman if she is aggressive or agitated. They have to offer her a glass of water, calm her down. But from what she has alleged, it appears that basic rules were not followed.

“Also, how come there were no CCTVs when the Indian Supreme Court mandates it for every police station?” she asks. The police station in question opened only four months ago and is supposed to be a role model for other stations in the area.

Ms Chadha says the case has received a lot of attention because the woman is from a privileged background.

“But no-one know what goes on in this – and other – police stations when ordinary women go to seek help.

“We tell our daughters that if you are in trouble, go to the nearest police station. We tell them it’s the second safest place – after their home. What do we tell them now? Where will a woman go now?”

Among the sea of glossy black and white penguins that call a popular Australian aquarium home, one baby bird stands out like a sore thumb.

Chocolatey brown, obscenely fluffy, and towering a head above his own foster parents – plus weighing more than both combined – is Pesto.

Affectionately dubbed a “fatty”, an “absolute unit”, and a “linebacker”, the chonky chick has shot to viral superstardom and attracted a legion of obsessed fans, including popstar Katy Perry.

Pesto has reached an audience of billions – dominating social media algorithms, securing wall-to-wall breakfast TV coverage in the US and UK, and drawing travellers from around the globe to Melbourne’s Sea Life Aquarium.

Born in January weighing only 200g (7oz), the nine-month-old king penguin is now more than a hundred times the size. At a whopping 22.5kg (50lb), he is the biggest chick the aquarium has ever seen.

It is normal for penguins to stack on some “healthy baby chub” after they hatch, the aquarium’s Jacinta Early tells the BBC, but keepers had no idea Pesto would become so immense.

“It’s a combination of nature [and] nurture, really,” the marine biologist explains.

Pesto’s biological father is quite tall, but he’s also been very well looked after by his foster parents Tango and Hudson: “He eclipses them now, which also makes him look comically large.”

Hand-fed several times a day, Ms Early says Pesto’s considerable heft is also partly attributable to his “very healthy appetite” – a gentle way of saying he gobbles up to 30 fish daily.

But she stresses he’s healthy – essentially half fluff – and he’ll soon begin to drop weight naturally.

“If I poked him, my entire finger would completely [disappear] deep in his feathers,” Ms Early says.

“When he does start to fledge, he’ll lose a lot of that baby fluff, and he’ll also lose much of that weight, so he’ll slim down nice and sleek.”

He’s already losing a smattering of his baby feathers, but she says there’s much more to Pesto than his cuddly appearance anyway.

She describes him as a social butterfly who chatters away in a “cute little whistle tone” and loves annoying the adult penguins “like any typical toddler would”.

“He tends to be the first one to kind of say hi [to keepers] and he also does respond to his name.”

“We definitely do have our favourites,” Ms Early says, diplomatically. “[But] Pesto seems to be a little bit in love with all the keepers as well.”

Even though staff have long been besotted with the chick, seeing the love he’s attracted from the public has been an absurd experience, they say.

It’s a generally busy period of year for the aquarium, amid school holidays, but crowds have been flocking to the penguin exhibit to catch a glimpse of the glorified pom-pom.

Millie Jacoby – a Brit who has lived in Melbourne for the past year – is one such Pesto groupie.

The 25-year-old has visited the penguin twice already and brags that she was a fan before he became an online sensation.

“We walked in and there was just this big, fluffy penguin… and we just kind of fell in love.

“He deserves to be famous.”

Olivia Wilson, who has been managing Pesto’s demanding media schedule for the aquarium, jokes that she’s not sure what’s the bigger drawcard to Melbourne this weekend: Pesto or the Australian Football League grand final – a sporting event taken so seriously that the entire state of Victoria gets a public holiday the day before to celebrate.

“You name a country, and he has had a mention in the media… there are very few places across the globe that haven’t had a bit of Pesto love.”

By her metrics, Pesto has reached an audience of about 5 billion and appears to have dethroned Thailand’s adorably erratic baby pygmy hippo as the internet’s favourite animal.

“People are trading him as Bitcoin, which has been unbelievable,” Ms Wilson says.

“Move over Moo Deng, basically.”

The Duke of Sussex’s US visa application should remain private despite him admitting taking drugs in his memoir, a judge has ruled.

Prince Harry wrote of using marijuana, cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms in his memoir Spare, which was released in January 2023.

Visa forms ask about drug use – an issue that can derail an application. A lawsuit, from the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, sought to compel the government to release the records to see if the prince disclosed his usage.

But US judge Carl Nichols ruled on Monday that “the public does not have a strong interest in disclosure of the duke’s immigration records”.

“Like any foreign national, the duke has a legitimate privacy interest in his immigration status,” he added.

Prince Harry moved to the US in January 2020 after announcing that he and his wife, Meghan Markle, would step back from royal duties.

In a lawsuit last year, the prominent Washington DC-based think tank argued that “widespread and continuous” media coverage of Prince Harry’s admitted drug use called into question whether the government properly vetted the duke and followed proper procedures when it admitted him into the country.

Application forms for US visas specifically ask about current and past drug use.

Drug use can lead to non-immigrant and immigrant visa applications being rejected, although immigration officers have discretion to make a final decision based on a number of factors.

The Heritage Foundation’s lawsuit argued that US law “generally renders such a person inadmissible for entry” to the country.

In his memoir, the duke said cocaine “didn’t do anything for me”, adding: “Marijuana is different, that actually really did help me.”

But Judge Nichols said the public’s interest in disclosure of Prince Harry’s immigration records is “outweighed by the duke’s privacy interest”.

The union representing thousands of striking Boeing workers has hit out at what the aircraft manufacturing giant called its “best and final” pay offer, which proposed a 30% rise over four years.

The new offer also included the reinstatement of a performance bonus and improved retirement benefits.

However, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) said the offer was not negotiated with the union and that “it was thrown at us without any discussion” – a claim Boeing denies.

More than 30,000 Boeing workers went on strike earlier this month after rejecting a 25% pay rise offer.

“After listening to our employees and their concerns, Boeing today presented our best and final offer,” Boeing said in a letter.

The proposal doubles the value of a one-off bonus for signing a new pay deal to $6,000 (£4,497).

The company said the offer is dependent on it being ratified by union members by midnight pacific time on Friday 27 September (7am GMT on Saturday 28 September).

But IAM said Boeing sent the new offer directly to union members and the media without telling the union’s representatives.

“This tactic is a blatant show of disrespect to you – our members – and the bargaining process,” IAM said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The union also said it would not hold a vote of its membership ahead of Boeing’s deadline.

In response, Boeing told the BBC: “We have bargained in good faith with the IAM since formal negotiations began in March.”

“We first presented the offer to the union and then transparently shared the details with our employees,” it added.

Boeing workers went on strike from 13 September after rejecting a new contract deal, which included a 25% pay rise over four years.

The union had initially aimed for a number of improvements to workers’ packages, including a 40% pay rise.

Almost 95% of the union members – who produce planes including the 737 Max and 777 – voted to reject Boeing’s initial offer.

Of those who voted, 96% backed strike action until a new agreement could be reached.

The strike threatens to cost Boeing billions of dollars, deepening the crisis at a company already facing significant challenges.

Its impacts are already being felt across the industry and wider US economy too, as Boeing has halted shipments of most parts and taken other steps to save money.

The company has already suspended the jobs of tens of thousands of staff.

It has also said that US-based executives, managers and staff would be asked to take one week of furlough every four weeks for as long as the walkout lasts.

Government officials are now helping to mediate talks between the two sides.

A man in South Korea has confessed to murdering his girlfriend and hiding her body in cement – 16 years after she was reported as missing.

The man, who is in his 50s, told local police he hit the woman with a blunt object during an argument at his apartment in the southern city of Geoje.

He then placed her dead body into a suitcase, which he buried under a layer of bricks and cement on his balcony.

It remained there unnoticed until last month, when a maintenance worker discovered it while drilling, local media reported.

The body – which had been partially preserved by the suitcase – was identified as the missing woman’s through fingerprint analysis. An autopsy revealed that she had died from blunt force trauma to the head.

The man, who police are calling Mr A, was not living in the apartment when the body was discovered but was quickly found and arrested.

He told police that he had been living with the woman for about five years in the studio apartment in Geoje, before an argument in October 2008 culminating in him hitting her with a blunt object.

He then buried the suitcase containing her body under a layer of bricks and cement on a small third-floor balcony, which could only be accessed from one of the bedrooms.

Police say he carried on living in the apartment for another eight years, before he was arrested on drugs charges in 2016.

Since then, the landlord of the apartment had left it empty, using it as storage space.

The woman – who was in her 30s at the time – was not reported missing by her family until three years after her death, the authorities said.

They had reportedly lost touch with their daughter and – when they came to look for her in Geoje – were told she had broken up with Mr A and left the city.

It was only this year when the owner of the building ordered some waterproofing work that the 16-year mystery could be solved.

Police say they are continuing with their investigations and are expected to charge the man with murder.

Sri Lanka’s new president has chosen his prime minister – selecting a woman for the third time in the country’s history.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake named former university lecturer-turned-MP Harini Amarasuriya as prime minister on Tuesday – also giving her ministerial responsibility for justice, education and labour.

Both are part of the left-leaning National People’s Power alliance, which has just three seats in Sri Lanka’s 225 seat parliament.

The remaining interim cabinet roles were shared out between the party’s two other MPs, as speculation continued to mount over a potential parliamentary election being called in the coming days.

“We will have the smallest cabinet in the history of Sri Lanka,” party member Namal Karunaratne told reporters on Tuesday, according to news agency AFP, adding that parliament could be dissolved “within the next 24 hours”.

Dissanayake had previously signalled he would dissolve parliament soon after being elected as there was “no point continuing with a parliament that is not in line with what the people want”.

Dissanayake, who has drawn increasing support in recent years for his anti-corruption and anti-poverty policies, won the country’s first election since its economy collapsed in 2022 at the weekend.

It was a remarkable turnaround for a politician who won just 3% in the 2019 presidential election.

Amarasuriya campaigned alongside him in 2019, before being elected as an MP the next year.

Her career as a public activist started in 2011, when she participated in protests demanding for free education.

The 54-year-old has since become known for her advocacy for youth development, child protection and gender inequality, among other social justice issues.

Her appointment as Sri Lanka’s 16th prime minister makes her the first academic to take office. She follows in the footsteps of just two other women – Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga – both of whom had family ties to politics. A woman has not held the role since 2000.

Singapore’s former transport minister has been convicted of receiving gifts while in office, after he pleaded guilty before a local court.

Subramaniam Iswaran, 62, was initially charged with corruption, but prosecutors amended these charges at what was supposed to be the start of his trial on Tuesday.

A corruption case involving a public official is rare in Singapore, a financial hub that prides itself with its squeaky clean image, and Iswaran’s case has gripped the nation.

Iswaran now faces a fine or up to two years in jail for each charge of receiving gifts or gratifications, compared to a corruption conviction that carries a fine of up to $100,000 or up to seven years in prison.

Iswaran is the first political office-holder in Singapore to be tried in court in the past 50 years.

He is best known for bringing the Formula 1 Grand Prix to the South East Asian island nation. The most recent edition wrapped up just days before his court appearance.

Charge sheets revealed that he was gifted more than S$403,000 ($311,882; £234,586) worth of flights, hotel stays, musicals and grand prix tickets.

Shortly after the charges were issued in January, Iswaran pleaded not guilty to all the allegations and quit his post in government, saying he would focus on clearing his name.

Property tycoon Ong Beng Seng was named in the charges, often as the party offering the alleged bribes.

Mr Ong owns the rights to the Singapore Grand Prix, while Iswaran was advisor to the race’s steering committee.

Mr Ong’s company Hotel Properties also has 38 hotels and resorts operating under brands including Four Seasons, Hard Rock Hotels and Concorde, according to the London Stock Exchange’s Refinitiv Eikon.

Mr Ong was arrested last year along with Iswaran but has not been charged with any offence. He was initially scheduled to take the stand as a prosecution witness in Iswaran’s trial.

In March of this year, Iswaran was handed eight additional charges that allege he obtained items such as a Brompton bicycle, a set of golf clubs and whisky from another figure: construction company boss Lum Kok Seng.

Mr Lum’s company is involved with a number of government infrastructure projects around Singapore, which were awarded while Iswaran was Transport Minister. He has not been charged either.

While in government, Iswaran held multiple portfolios in the prime minister’s office: in home affairs, communications and, most recently, the transport ministry.

But it was during his long stint in the trade and industry ministry that he gained prominence, playing a role in developing Singapore’s tourism landscape in the late 2000s and 2010s.

This was a time when the government poured in vast resources and courted billions in foreign investment to build casinos, hotels, tourist attractions and events like the F1 Grand Prix.

Iswaran was a familiar face on the podium, often handing out trophies to drivers amid celebratory sprays of champagne.

The case against Iswaran is one of a series of political scandals that have rocked the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which has long touted its strong stance against corruption and amoral behaviour.

In 2023, the government was rocked by a separate corruption probe into the properties of two other ministers, which eventually cleared them of wrongdoing, as well as two lawmakers’ resignation over an extramarital affair.

Singapore’s lawmakers are among the highest-paid in the world, with some ministers earning more than S$1 million ($758,000). Leaders justify the handsome salaries by saying it combats corruption.

Prior to last year, the most recent case of a politician facing a major corruption probe was in 1986, when national development minister Teh Cheang Wan was investigated for accepting bribes. He took his own life before he was charged.

Before that, former minister of state for environment Wee Toon Boon was sentenced to 18 months jail in 1975 for a case involving more than $800,000.

Police in Switzerland made multiple arrests after someone reportedly ended their life using a so-called suicide pod, in apparently the first case of its kind.

Police in the Schaffhausen region said they arrested “several persons” on suspicion of inciting, and aiding and abetting suicide after someone died reportedly by using a Sarco-made pod on Monday.

While assisted dying is legally protected in some circumstances in Switzerland, the Sarco pod has encountered some opposition.

Officers recovered the device and body at the scene.

The company behind the controversial pod says it can be solely operated by the person seeking to end their own life, without medical supervision.

Police said it was used Monday at a forest hut in the Merishausen area, a sparsely populated part of Switzerland on the German border.

Police said they were tipped off by a law firm about a suicide involving the device. The number of people arrested and their identities were not disclosed. The deceased also was not named.

• If you are experiencing any of the issues mentioned in this story you can visit BBC Action Line for a list of websites and helplines that can offer direct help at any time.

In July, a pro-assisted dying group, which promotes the Sarco device, said it anticipated that it would be used for the first time this year.

Advocates say it provides an option not reliant on drugs or doctors, and that it expands access to euthanasia as the portable device can be 3D-printed and assembled at home.

However, there also has been opposition in Switzerland, despite the country having some of the world’s most protective laws surrounding assisted dying.

Critics fear the device’s modern design glamorises suicide and the fact that it can be operated without medical oversight is concerning.

Assisted dying is illegal in the UK and in most other European countries, but thousands have travelled to Switzerland over the years to end their own lives.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the war with Russia could end sooner than some people think.

“I think that we are closer to peace than we think. We just have to be very strong, very strong,” he said.

Speaking to US broadcaster ABC News, Zelensky also said that the victory plan he would present to US President Joe Biden this week would require Ukraine’s allies to “strengthen” the Ukrainian army.

Zelensky said the plan was not about negotiating with Russia, but rather it was “a bridge to a diplomatic way out, to stop the war”.

He added that Ukraine could only push Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the conflict if Kyiv was coming from a “strong position”.

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was being cautious about media reports of a Ukrainian plan and added that the conflict would only end when Russia’s aims were achieved.

Zelensky has long asked Western countries to allow Ukraine to ease restrictions on the use of long-range missiles which could be used to strike deep into Russia and he is expected to do so again this week as he visits the US.

On Sunday, Biden said he had not yet decided whether to give Ukraine the green light. Zelensky said the US would need to lead the decision: “Everybody’s looking up to [Biden], and we need this to defend ourselves,” he told ABC.

Zelensky will speak at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday and is also due to meet US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

The president of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, told the New York Times that Ukraine would have to be “realistic” about its prospects of recovering the areas in the east of the country which Russia has managed to gain over the last 31 months of war.

He added that the most likely outcome of the war was that a part of Ukrainian territory would remain under Russian occupation for a number of years.

A defeat of either Ukraine or Russia “will simply not happen”, Pavel told the Times, adding that the end of the conflict would be “somewhere in between”.

Zelensky’s US trip comes as Ukraine continues to come under sustained attack by Russia.

In a daytime attack on Tuesday, Russia hit a high-rise apartment block in Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv.

At least three people died and 15 were injured in the attack, which local authorities said was carried out with glide bombs.

• Three killed in Russian strike on Kharkiv apartments

On Monday night, an attack on the eastern Ukrainian town of Poltava damaged infrastructure, while in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia one person died and six others were wounded following “massive air strikes”.

Russian troops have made serious advances in the east and are closing in on Vuhledar – a city on the southern part of the Donbas front line that the Russians have been trying to seize since the beginning of their full-scale invasion.

Ukrainian military expert and retired colonel Kostyantyn Mashovets warned his fellow Ukrainians they had to be “psychologically prepared” for the loss of Selydove, Toretsk and Vuhledar in the eastern region of Donbas.

“I would love to be wrong,” he wrote on Facebook.

“But from the information I have… this is a very likely scenario of events in the near future.”

A retired Indian high court judge will investigate allegations that a woman was physically and sexually assaulted by a group of police inside a police station in the eastern state of Odisha, the authorities say.

After the allegations, levelled last week by the 32-year-old woman and her fiancé – an army officer – led to a huge outcry, four police officials, including three women, were suspended. A fifth policeman was transferred. The action came after the state’s crime branch opened an inquiry into the case.

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A video of the woman, a law graduate who runs a restaurant in the state capital Bhubaneswar, detailing her alleged abuse by police early on the morning of 15 September has been shared many times on social media.

The footage makes for a difficult watch.

In a wheelchair, with a collar around her neck and one arm in a sling, the woman repeatedly breaks down while narrating to journalists what she says happened to her.

She said she had gone to Bharatpur police station with her fiance after closing her restaurant at around 01:00 because they had been harassed by a group of men on the road.

They asked police to send a patrol car quickly to intercept the men who couldn’t have gone far, she said.

“The police refused to take down our complaint, instead they abused us. When I told them that I was a law graduate and knew my rights, they got even more angry.”

The situation escalated after the police put her fiance in the lockup, she alleged.

“When I objected, two female officials started pulling my hair and beating me. I kept pleading with them to stop. But they dragged me through the corridor and one of them tried to strangle me. When I fought back, they tied my hands and legs and locked me up in a room,” she said, sobbing.

“One male officer came in and took off my bra and started kicking me in my breasts. At around 06:00, the officer in charge of the police station came into the room. He pulled my pants down. Then he lowered his pants and threatened to rape me multiple times unless I stopped screaming for help,” she alleged.

Reports in the Indian media last week quoted police as saying the army officer and his fiancee had arrived at the station drunk and the woman had been aggressive. They alleged that she had slapped a policewoman and bitten another officer.

• On the wrong side of Indian law
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She was arrested and a magistrate placed her in custody.

But three days after the alleged assault, the high court freed the woman on bail and criticised the police and the lower court that jailed her.

“On careful examination of the record, it appears that the allegations are very serious in nature… They are anathema to the very concept of a democratic and orderly society,” Justice Aditya Kumar Mohapatra said, adding that the “police had failed to follow the procedure laid down in law while arresting her”.

Justice Mohapatra said he had been informed by the government’s lawyer that “drastic action has been taken against the erring police officers… and appropriate action shall be taken against those found guilty”.

The magistrate had also “failed to apply their judicial mind” in denying the woman bail, he added.

Since then, many in India have taken to social media to express their anger at alleged police brutality. A large number of former and serving army officials have shared the viral video of the woman and pledged support to her fight since her father is a retired army brigadier.

The Indian army has also written a letter to the chief justice of the high court in Odisha saying that a “serving officer had been kept in custody for nearly 14 hours without any charge” and because of “the grave incident… his prestige was demeaned”.

“The modesty and dignity of his fiancee, who also happens to be the daughter of a retired brigadier, was grossly outraged by the police authorities,” the letter adds.

• Jailed and ‘tortured’ for trying to report a rape
• The jailed activist Meena Harris tweeted about

Her father, who told the BBC that he had spent hours frantically trying to locate his daughter that night, said the police had not even informed him or his family about the allegations against his daughter.

“Some army officers informed me that my daughter had been arrested and sent to jail. I was allowed to meet her only the next afternoon,” he said. “I hope we will get justice.”

The state government said it “respects the Indian army” and is “concerned about the dignity, safety and rights of women”. It has nominated retired Justice Chitta Ranjan Dash to hold an inquiry and submit a report within 60 days.

The woman’s allegations are being investigated and her statement has been recorded, crime branch official Narendra Behera told the media. The seven men accused of harassing the couple were arrested by police and released on bail.

On social media some have commented on the woman’s clothing while others have questioned “the character of a woman who argues with men and drinks alcohol”.

Namrata Chadha, lawyer and women’s rights activist who met the woman in hospital, told the BBC that it is “heart-breaking to see this kind of victim shaming”.

“She has an injured shoulder, a cut on her face and swelling around her eye. She is very traumatised. While talking to me, her eyes welled up several times. I told her, ‘You’ll have to be courageous and face it all.’ She said she will fight to the end.”

• Hema committee report: Why are India’s biggest film stars silent?

Ms Chadha says the police have to follow a standard operating procedure when a woman lodges a complaint.

“It’s their duty to hear her patiently. They are trained to deal with a woman if she is aggressive or agitated. They have to offer her a glass of water, calm her down. But from what she has alleged, it appears that basic rules were not followed.

“Also, how come there were no CCTVs when the Indian Supreme Court mandates it for every police station?” she asks. The police station in question opened only four months ago and is supposed to be a role model for other stations in the area.

Ms Chadha says the case has received a lot of attention because the woman is from a privileged background.

“But no-one know what goes on in this – and other – police stations when ordinary women go to seek help.

“We tell our daughters that if you are in trouble, go to the nearest police station. We tell them it’s the second safest place – after their home. What do we tell them now? Where will a woman go now?”

New Zealand scientists have discovered a new species of “ghost shark” – a rare type of fish that is incredibly hard to spot because it lives at great depths in the Pacific Ocean.

Also known as a spookfish or chimera, ghost sharks are closely related to sharks and rays. They do not have scales and their skeletons are made completely of cartilage.

Dr Brit Finucci, one of the scientists who discovered the Australasian Narrow-nosed Spookfish, said the find was “exciting”.

“Their habitat makes them hard to study and monitor, meaning we don’t know a lot about their biology or threat status,” she said.

Dr Finucci and other researchers from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) found the creature in an area of ocean floor known as Chatham Rise, which lies to the east of New Zealand.

Ghost sharks typically live at depths of up to 2,600m (1.6 miles).

Dr Finucci said the species stood out for its unusually long snout, which can make up half its body length.

She has given the new fish a scientific name with a personal twist: Harriota avia.

“Avia means grandmother in Latin, I wanted to give this nod to her because she proudly supported me through my career as a scientist,” Dr Finucci explained.

“Chimaeras are also rather ancient relatives – the grandmas and grandpas – of fish and I thought the name was well suited.”

The spookfish was initially thought to be part of a species found around the world. However, research later revealed it was genetically different to its cousins and lived exclusively in Australian and New Zealand waters.

Scientists say discoveries like this are crucial, because learning more about how the species lives helps experts figure out the best ways to protect them.

“Vegas is where you get married, Reno is where you get divorced,” as the saying goes in the US state of Nevada.

State law allowing some legal cases to be conducted more quickly and discreetly than elsewhere in the US means this relatively small city has served as the quiet backdrop to dramatic family fallout over a global media empire.

Rupert Murdoch and his family flew in from all over the world to determine how the empire would be divided among his children when the 93-year-old patriarch dies.

For six days, the city saw a seven-car convoy of black SUVs carry the media mogul and his family to the Washoe County Courthouse.

The succession battle, which concluded on Monday, was heard in private.

The court has given no indication on when a decision will come. When this does arrive, it will be unavailable to the public.

The senior Murdoch usually left the courthouse after lunchtime, while his four children stayed inside until nightfall – all keeping their lips sealed as they exited.

Whatever the outcome of the case, it will have far-reaching consequences extending beyond the family drama, shaping the trajectory of the world’s most influential conservative media company.

News Corp owns hundreds of newspapers and media outlets around the world.

The empire includes the right-leaning Fox News in the US, which gave Donald Trump a major platform in the run-up to the 2016 election, as well as widely-read newspapers like The Sun in the UK.

• Court drama pits Murdoch against three of his children
• Listen: Rupert Murdoch: The Succession Prequel

With limited media access, much of what is known about the case has emerged from the New York Times, which obtained copies of sealed court documents.

Mr Murdoch reportedly wants to give greater control of the empire to his eldest son Lachlan, who is said to be more politically aligned with him.

What stands in the way is an irrevocable trust set up during his second divorce, which will give Mr Murdoch’s four eldest children equal shares in the company when he dies.

The trust gives the family eight votes, which it can use to have a say on the board of News Corp and Fox News.

Mr Murdoch controls four, leaving each of his eldest children with one vote. His two younger children do not have any voting rights.

Under the current trust agreement, Mr Murdoch’s votes would be shared equally among the four eldest children after his death.

He is now reportedly attempting to change the terms of this £14.9bn ($19.9bn) trust to ensure Lachlan’s control, fearing that his other elder children – James, Elisabeth, and Prudence – would steer Fox News away from its conservative slant, which could have an impact on its profitability.

Nevada may seem like an odd backdrop for the Murdoch battle, given that the family does not have any obvious ties to the Silver State.

But the state provides one of the most confidential legal settings for matters including family trust disputes, as it allows cases to unfold behind closed doors.

It has a “close on demand” statute that allows parties involved in certain sensitive cases to request that court proceedings be sealed from public access, ensuring complete privacy.

Arash Sadat, a probate lawyer with experience in family trust matters, said such cases were often deeply personal and emotional.

“So it creates honestly the most contentious cases that you’ll see,” he said.

He told the BBC that estate planning is usually done in a way in which the trust could be changed by the family.

“Here what you have is an irrevocable trust that Rupert Murdoch is attempting to change… there’s a huge amount on the line,” he said.

In trying to protect their privacy, the Murdochs have had their security team scope out which entrance of the courthouse has the fewest reporters waiting outside.

The family does not want any potentially embarrassing family revelations to be made public in this small desert city. And it appears to have worked. At a tea shop around the corner from the courthouse, life continued as normal.

Lauren Whitenack and Sofia Haley, two schoolmates, were going over class notes when they overheard us ask the barista if she knew about the case.

“The Murdochs are here? Now?” they asked.

After hearing about the case, the two women said it sounded strange. “It’s such a high-stakes trial, and the fact that it’s being kept so secret is kind of shady,” Ms Whitenack said.

“It could have so much impact on our future and the future of the information that the public receives in this country.”

A few minutes later, a woman named Vikki, who asked to not be identified by her full name, walked into the shop with a few of her friends. She also couldn’t believe the future of Fox News was being argued a few minutes away.

“Secrecy. I don’t like that,” she said. “I think it’s really misleading people. And we’re just ripe with conspiracy theories [in our politics].”

The outcome of the case is also unlikely to be disclosed.

The probate commissioner overseeing the case will submit his recommendation to a local judge. The judge could take weeks or months to make a decision, which will be sealed and unavailable to the public.

The decision could not only create some awkward family dynamics – it could also shape news that is consumed by millions of people around the world.

All three women at the tea house agreed that they wouldn’t want to be at Christmas dinner with the Murdochs this year.

“It’s the classic ‘money screws up relationships’ sort of situation,” Ms Whitenack said.

Sri Lanka’s new president has chosen his prime minister – selecting a woman for the third time in the country’s history.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake named former university lecturer-turned-MP Harini Amarasuriya as prime minister on Tuesday – also giving her ministerial responsibility for justice, education and labour.

Both are part of the left-leaning National People’s Power alliance, which has just three seats in Sri Lanka’s 225 seat parliament.

The remaining interim cabinet roles were shared out between the party’s two other MPs, as speculation continued to mount over a potential parliamentary election being called in the coming days.

“We will have the smallest cabinet in the history of Sri Lanka,” party member Namal Karunaratne told reporters on Tuesday, according to news agency AFP, adding that parliament could be dissolved “within the next 24 hours”.

Dissanayake had previously signalled he would dissolve parliament soon after being elected as there was “no point continuing with a parliament that is not in line with what the people want”.

Dissanayake, who has drawn increasing support in recent years for his anti-corruption and anti-poverty policies, won the country’s first election since its economy collapsed in 2022 at the weekend.

It was a remarkable turnaround for a politician who won just 3% in the 2019 presidential election.

Amarasuriya campaigned alongside him in 2019, before being elected as an MP the next year.

Her career as a public activist started in 2011, when she participated in protests demanding for free education.

The 54-year-old has since become known for her advocacy for youth development, child protection and gender inequality, among other social justice issues.

Her appointment as Sri Lanka’s 16th prime minister makes her the first academic to take office. She follows in the footsteps of just two other women – Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga – both of whom had family ties to politics. A woman has not held the role since 2000.

Cats have more freedom than women in Afghanistan, Hollywood actress Meryl Streep has said in an appeal to the international community to stop the Taliban’s repression.

Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, the actress pointed out that even animals had more rights now in Afghanistan following increased restrictions on women.

In response, a Taliban spokesman said they “highly respected” women and would “never compare them to cats”.

Streep’s comments come after the Taliban government last month introduced a new set of “morality laws”.

Among other things, these rules state that women’s voices can no longer be heard in public and that they are not allowed to look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage.

The measures add to a litany of restrictions that the regime has imposed on Afghan women and girls since returning to power three years ago.

Women have to completely cover their faces and bodies when leaving their homes. Women and girls are also prevented from going to schools, parks, gyms and sport clubs. There are restrictions on the type of work that they are allowed to do.

“Today in Kabul a female cat has more freedom than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face, she may chase a squirrel in the park,” Streep said on Monday at an event to raise awareness of Afghan women’s rights at the UN headquarters in New York.

“A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban.

“A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not in public. This is extraordinary. This is a suppression of the natural law.

“The way that this culture, this society has been upended, is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world,” said Streep, who called on world leaders to “stop the slow suffocation” of Afghan women and girls.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who attended the same event, said Afghanistan “will never take its rightful place on the global stage” without educated women and women in employment.

In response to Streep’s remarks, a Taliban spokesman said that “none can deny women the rights which Islam has given them”.

“We highly respect them in their role as mother, sister, wife. They are [an] essential part of [the] family and society but we never compare them to cats,” Suhail Shaheen, the head of the Taliban’s political office, told the BBC.

He added that currently hundreds of thousands of women work in various government ministries and as entrepreneurs.

Western countries, led by the United States and the European Union, have condemned the new laws, but the Taliban has defended the edict saying it is in accordance with Islamic Sharia law.

The Taliban has also said they are trying to change the education system to more closely align with Islamic principles, and have repeatedly promised that women would be readmitted to schools once those issues are sorted. To date, however, there has not been any movement.

China’s central bank has unveiled a major package of measures aimed at reviving the country’s flagging economy.

People’s Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Pan Gongsheng announced plans to lower borrowing costs and allow banks to increase their lending.

The move comes after a series of disappointing data has increased expectations in recent months that the world’s second largest economy will miss its own 5% growth target this year.

Stock markets in Asia jumped after Mr Pan’s announcement.

Speaking at a rare news conference alongside officials from two other financial regulators, Mr Pan said the central bank would cut the amount of cash banks have to hold in reserve – known as reserve requirement ratios (RRR).

The RRR will initially be cut by half a percentage point, in a move expected to free up about 1 trillion yuan ($142bn; £106bn).

Mr Pan added that another cut may be made later in the year.

Further measures aimed to boost China’s crisis-hit property market include cutting interest rates for existing mortgages and lowering minimum down payments on all types of homes to 15%.

The country’s real estate industry has been struggling with a sharp downturn since 2021.

Several developers have collapsed, leaving large numbers of unsold homes and unfinished building projects.

The PBOC’s new economic stimulus measures come just days after the US Federal Reserve lowered interest rates for the first time in more than four years with a bigger than usual cut.

The news pushed up share prices, with the leading stock indexes in Shanghai and Hong Kong ending the day more than 4% higher.

India has reported its first case with the new mpox strain that has triggered a public health emergency alert by the World Health Organization (WHO), Reuters reports.

Called clade 1b, the new variant is highly-transmissible and has been linked to the mpox outbreak in Africa.

According to media reports, the strain has been detected in a 38-year-old man from the southern state of Kerala who returned from Dubai recently.

Mpox, previously known as monkey pox, is a contagious virus that can cause painful skin lesions.

The WHO declared mpox, which used to be called monkeypox, a public health emergency in Africa in August.

Since then, the more dangerous variant of the virus has spread to countries outside the African continent, including Sweden, Thailand and Pakistan.

On Tuesday, Health Ministry spokesperson Manisha Verma confirmed to Reuters that the mpox case reported in Kerala’s Malappuram district belonged to clade 1.

The patient is being treated in a hospital and the people he came in contact with are being traced and monitored, authorities said.

The district’s health officer said that about 29 friends and family members of the patient along with 37 passengers on board his flight were being monitored but none of them had exhibited any symptoms so far, the news agency reported.

In the last two years, India has reported more that 30 mpox cases caused by the older clade 2 strain, which is considered to be less infectious.

Earlier this month, the mpox strain was detected in a man from northern Haryana state, who was admitted in hospital for a few days.

Mpox spreads from animals to humans and between people through close contact with someone who is infected – including through sex, skin-to-skin contact and talking or breathing close to another person.

It can cause symptoms such as fever, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes and lesions across the body. If left untreated, mpox can be deadly.

The federal government has issued an advisory to all states, asking them to be vigilant for potential mpox cases.

Around 35 laboratories across the country have been designated for testing suspected mpox cases.

The war in Gaza always had the capacity to spread. Near-daily rocket attacks in and around northern Israel by Hezbollah, Hamas’s Lebanese allies, and air strikes by Israel have displaced tens of thousands of civilians on either side of the border.

But until recently, the smart money was on both Israel and Hezbollah avoiding full escalation. That money isn’t looking so smart today.

Last week’s extraordinary targeting of thousands of Hezbollah operatives through their pagers and walkie-talkies seems to have altered the calculus.

Israel is believed to have been behind this attack – so why might it have carried out this operation, and why last week? What does it say about how modern wars are conducted? And what can we expect to happen in the weeks to come – how likely is a ground war between Israel and Hezbollah?

First of all, it’s important to understand exactly what Hezbollah is and where it comes from.

The group came into existence in the early 1980s after Israel occupied southern Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war.

At first Hezbollah presented itself as a resistance group against Israel and the voice of Lebanon’s Shia community, says Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East Institute at SOAS University of London.

The Briefing Room: Lebanon attacks

How do the attacks alter the equation in the Middle East? David Aaronovitch and guests discuss the recent events in Lebanon.

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But when Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah kept its weapons in violation of a UN resolution requiring it to disarm. It continued to present itself as a necessary force for the defence of Lebanon and “became the country’s most powerful political actor”, says Prof Khatib.

Although it is represented in Lebanon’s government, Hezbollah’s real power lies behind the scenes, she adds – as an armed group that many analysts say is more powerful than the Lebanese army, it has the ability to intimidate its opponents.

“It is able to set the foreign policy agenda for Lebanon to a large extent, as well as declare war, basically, on behalf of Lebanon,” says Prof Khatib.

Hezbollah is also aligned with Iran – the group’s “principal armourer”, according to Shashank Joshi, The Economist’s defence editor. “There isn’t simply a sort of immediate direct command, but they are very, very closely tied in aims and in practices.”

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The rubric that we’re supposed to use when we discuss these attacks is that Israel is believed to have carried them out because Israel has not confirmed that it did so – a long-standing policy on the part of Israeli officials.

When operations take place in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, “they tend to put their hands up but they don’t when it’s Lebanon or Iran”, says Ronen Bergman, an Israeli investigative journalist with the New York Times.

However, the attacks are widely cited as having been carried out by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

Unlike other such agencies around the world, Mossad’s role is not just restricted to intelligence gathering, according to Bergman.

Mossad also sees it as its duty to “translate the intelligence it collects into what they call kinetic or aggressive or physical operations”, he says, including “explosives, sabotage, targeted killings”.

A week has now passed since the pager attacks. And the day after, the walkie-talkies were targeted too. So what do we know about these attacks?

According to Joshi, it looks to have been a supply-chain attack in which Mossad set up front companies that look to have manufactured real pagers for some time.

And when it came to this consignment bound for Hezbollah, it seems that Mossad placed explosives inside the devices that they were then subsequently able to remotely trigger.

In 2018, Bergman says, a young intelligence officer found out that Hezbollah had started using pagers and came up with the idea of Mossad infiltrating their supply chain. Some 4,500 booby-trapped devices were then supplied to Hezbollah, Bergman adds.

There are some accounts that suggest Mossad knew where these pages were and who was in possession of them before detonating them. However, Joshi is sceptical of these claims.

He says, too, that “this was not some magical cyber-attack in which the batteries spontaneously combusted by some clever bit of code as people may initially have thought or suspected”.

CCTV footage of the pagers going off were broadcast around the world.

The images were shocking – and they also tell us a great deal about Hezbollah’s organisation and structure, says Prof Khatib.

Typically, the group operates with a high degree of secrecy, she says: “Not all its members are known, sometimes even to their own families.”

What the attacks have done, then, is expose who paid members of Hezbollah actually were. That information, she says, has already proved useful to Israel.

In one case, “one of the people who ended up in hospital was later visited by someone, and that person as a visitor was later tracked by Israel, leading them to find out where the leaders of Hezbollah were meeting on the Friday that came after the attack”, Prof Khatib adds. Those commanders were later targeted by an Israeli strike, she adds.

To some the attacks will have looked like a new type of warfare. Joshi, however, is not so sure. “It’s always been possible if you wanted to put explosives inside a phone, a pager, inside a banana, if you feel like it. The point is to what end?”

He says the Americans had contemplated carrying out similar attacks in the past, but had shied away because of the potential implications.

After all, everybody now knows that Israel is capable of such an operation and can therefore take steps to prevent another one in future – taking apart devices and checking them for explosives, for instance.

As a result, he says, “my suggestion is that we’re not going to see many attacks like this”.

The implication is that this was a one-off, use-it-or-lose-it situation – once you’ve carried out an operation like this, you can’t do so again.

For this reason, Bergman says there are divisions within Israel’s hierarchy about whether this was the right time to do it.

“The timing of the attack is interesting,” says Bergman. “There are a lot of people in the defence establishment who are furious because they said this button was not supposed to be pushed here and now.”

All this raises the question of what Israel was thinking. Previously, many had thought that Israel was avoiding full-blown conflict with Hezbollah and didn’t want war on two fronts while it was fighting in Gaza. The attacks might indicate that this calculation has changed.

But Bergman says it remains the case that most of the Israel Defence Force’s generals, including its chief of staff, oppose a ground invasion of Lebanon – conscious from their experience during the occupation in the 1980s and 90s that it could be a “death trap”.

He suggests that the aim was to force Hezbollah’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah to agree to a ceasefire without Israel ending the war in Gaza.

Nasrallah has promised that he will not end his solidarity with Hamas until Israel ends its war in Gaza, says Bergman, while “Prime Minister Netanyahu, for his coalition integrity, doesn’t want to end the war with Hamas”.

The calculation, then, was that the pager and walkie-talkie attacks would shift the balance, allowing the IDF to focus on Gaza. “Of course, the risk of this is that it will lead to the other way – it will lead, instead of a ceasefire and a political solution, to an all-out war,” says Bergman.

Prof Khatib says it would be “completely foolish” of Israel to attempt a ground invasion of southern Lebanon – Hezbollah is well-prepared, with long experience of ground warfare.

But Joshi says it remains a risk. Recent air strikes against Hezbollah arms depots as well as the attacks themselves on the group’s leadership are “all the kinds of things you would need to be doing ahead of a major ground campaign inside Lebanon”.

That brings us to the question of whether Hezbollah’s capacity has been so degraded in recent weeks and its confidence so undermined that actually it isn’t in a position to fight an all-out war.

Joshi says that Hezbollah has taken a “battering”, having seen much of its leadership wiped out. “However, I think it would be a grave mistake to think it doesn’t have considerable missile power at its disposal.”

The thousands of Hezbollah rockets aimed at Tel Aviv and Haifa and other Israeli towns and cities represent a major reason why Israel might not want to engage in an all-out war, as do the thousands of residents of northern Israel who have already been evacuated from their homes because of the cross-border fighting.

“The people who have remained are the people who probably don’t have the means to flee,” says Prof Khatib. “But certainly things don’t seem to be calming down anytime soon.”