Allies including the US, UK and EU have called for a temporary ceasefire in Lebanon, following an escalation in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

The 12-strong bloc proposed an immediate 21-day pause in fighting “to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement” and a ceasefire in Gaza.

In a joint statement, they said the hostilities were “intolerable” and presented an “unacceptable risk of a broader regional escalation” that was neither in the interest of the people of Israel or Lebanon.

It comes after Israel’s military chief told troops on Wednesday that extensive air strikes in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah could pave the way for them to “enter enemy territory”.

The remarks by Lt Gen Halevi are the plainest indication yet from a senior figure that a ground invasion into Lebanon may be imminent.

The joint statement was signed by the US, Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and Qatar.

It followed a meeting of world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York.

A separate joint statement by US President Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron said it was time for a settlement “that ensures safety and security to enable civilians to return to their homes”.

The current hostilities threaten “a much broader conflict, and harm to civilians”, they said.

“We therefore have worked together in recent days on a joint call for a temporary ceasefire to give diplomacy a chance to succeed and avoid further escalations across the border.”

President Biden briefly spoke to reporters at the White House on Wednesday evening, saying there is “significant support from Europe as well as the Arab nations … it’s important the war does not widen”.

A senior administration official told the BBC neither Israel nor Lebanon has accepted the proposal – although the US is in touch with both governments. Official responses are expected within hours.

The official said a 21-day pause in fighting would be a “sustained phase” that would allow for further negotiations to take place to reach a “complicated agreement”.

They added that the US is negotiating with Lebanon’s government – rather than Hezbollah. It would then be the responsibility of the Lebanese government to engage with “non-state actors”.

Earlier in New York, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged an immediate ceasefire, and said “hell is breaking loose”.

Lebanese PM Najib Mikati said his country is “facing a blatant violation of our sovereignty and human rights through the brutal practices of the Israeli enemy”.

He added he hoped he could leave the UN session with a “serious solution” to “put pressure on Israel to achieve an immediate ceasefire on all fronts”. Asked by Reuters if a ceasefire can be reached soon, he responded: “Hopefully, yes.”

Also speaking earlier, Israel’s envoy to the UN, Danny Danon, said it was grateful for diplomatic efforts to avoid escalation but would “use all means at our disposal, in accordance with international law, to achieve our aims”.

He said Israel “does not seek a full-scale war”, and has made its desire for peace “clear”.

Mr Danon added that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu will arrive in New York on Thursday, have bilateral meetings later that day and speak at the General Assembly the following morning.

More than 600 people have been reported killed across Lebanon since Monday, when Israel began an intense air campaign to destroy what it said was infrastructure built up by Hezbollah since they last fought a war in 2006.

Another 90,000 people in Lebanon have been newly displaced, adding to the 110,000 who had fled their homes before the escalation, according to the UN. Almost 40,000 are living in shelters across the country.

Nearly a year of deadly cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza has also displaced around 70,000 people in northern Israel, whose safe return the Israeli government and military say they want to ensure.

Hezbollah says it is attacking Israel in support of its Palestinian ally, Hamas, and will not stop until there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Both groups are backed by Iran and proscribed as terrorist organisations by Israel, the UK and other countries.

Cross-border fighting continued on Wednesday, with Hezbollah saying it had targeted the headquarters of Israel’s Mossad spy agency with a missile fired towards Tel Aviv – the first time Hezbollah has targeted the heavily populated area.

It was intercepted by air defences and there were no reports of damage or casualties.

Hezbollah also fired dozens more rockets into northern Israel, injuring two.

Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad told reporters that the strikes had killed at least 51 people and injured 223, without saying how many were civilians or combatants.

It comes after an unprecedented wave of attacks on Hezbollah.

Last week, 39 people were killed and thousands were wounded when pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members to communicate exploded in two waves across Lebanon. Israel is widely believed to be responsible for the attacks.

Then, an Israeli air strike on Friday on the group’s stronghold of Dahieh, in southern Beirut, essentially wiped out the chain of command of its main fighting unit, the Radwan Force. The group confirmed that one of its top military leaders, Ibrahim Aqil, was among 55 people killed.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has approved a $7bn (£5.25bn) loan to cash-strapped Pakistan.

The country is due to receive the first $1bn of the loan immediately, with the balance to be paid out over the next three years.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif welcomed the decision and thanked the head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, and her team.

Pakistan has taken more than 20 loans from the IMF since 1958 and is currently its fifth-largest debtor.

The new programme “will require sound policies and reforms” to stabilise and help make the economy more resilient, the IMF said.

The South Asian nation has pledged that it would be the last loan from the international lender.

As part of the deal, Islamabad agreed to a number of unpopular measures, including increasing the amount of tax it collects from people and businesses.

The country has relied on IMF loans to meet its needs for decades and continued to struggle after years of financial mismanagement.

Last year, the country was on the brink of defaulting on its debts and had barely enough in foreign currencies to pay for a month of imports.

The IMF approved a $3bn bailout for Pakistan in July 2003. It also received funds from allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

At the time, Mr Sharif said the bailout was a major step forward in efforts to stabilise the economy.

“It bolsters Pakistan’s economic position to overcome immediate to medium-term economic challenges,” he said.

China says it carried out a rare test-firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into international waters, sparking protests from neighbouring countries.

The launch on Wednesday – its first in more than 40 years – was “routine” and not aimed at any country or target, according to Beijing. Chinese media reported the government also gave “relevant countries” notice.

But Japan said it had not received a warning and expressed concerns, along with Australia and New Zealand.

The launch contributes to tensions across the Indo-Pacific region, with analysts saying it highlights China’s increased long-range nuclear capabilities.

The US warned last year that China has built up its nuclear arsenal as part of a defence upgrade. An intercontinental ballistic missile can travel more 5,500km – putting China within striking range of the US mainland and Hawaii.

But Beijing’s arsenal is still estimated at less than a fifth of the size of the US’s and Russia’s, and China has long maintained that its nuclear maintainance is only about deterrence.

On Wednesday, Beijing announced that the long-range missile was fired at 08:44 local time (04:44 GMT). It carried a dummy warhead and landed in the designated area – believed to be in the South Pacific.

Beijing’s defence ministry added the test launch was “routine” and part of its “annual training”.

But analysts said China was last known to have test-fired an ICBM internationally in the 1980s. Typically, it tests internally – having previously fired ICBMs west into the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang region.

“This sort of testing is not unusual for other countries, including the United States, but is for China,” nuclear missile analyst Ankit Panda told the BBC.

China’s “ongoing nuclear modernisation” already has resulted in substantial changes, he said. This launch now appears to also show a change in its approach.

It has sparked immediate reaction from other countries. Japan said it had received “no notice” and expressed “serious concern” about Beijing’s military build-up.

Meanwhile, Australia said the action was “destabilising and raises the risk of miscalculation in the region” and that it had sought “an explanation” from Beijing. New Zealand called it “an unwelcome and concerning development”.

Mr Panda said he doesn’t believe China’s actions were primarily designed to send a political message – “but no doubt this will be a stark reminder to the region and to the US that nuclear dynamics in Asia are quickly changing”.

Other analysts went further, saying it was another wake-up call for the US and its allies in the region.

“To Washington, the message is that direct intervention in a conflict across the Taiwan Strait would involve the American homeland being vulnerable to attack,” said Leif-Eric Easley, an international relations professor at Ewha Women’s University in South Korea.

For US allies in Asia, the “provocative test… demonstrates China’s capabilities to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously,” he added.

“Timing is everything,” Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, wrote on X.

“[China’s] statement claims the launch does not target any country, but there are high-levels of tension between China and Japan, Philippines, and of course perpetual tension with Taiwan.”

While the relationship between Beijing and Washington has improved in the past year, China’s increasing assertiveness in the region remains a sticking point. Tensions have ramped up between China and the Philippines as their ships have repeatedly collided in disputed waters.

Last month, Japan scrambled fighter jets after it accused a Chinese spy plane of breaching its air space, a move that it called “utterly unacceptable”.

Beijing’s relationship with self-governed Taiwan is another source of strain.

Taiwan’s defence ministry said earlier on Wednesday that China had been carrying out “intensive” missile firing and other drills recently. The same statement noted that it detected 23 Chinese military aircraft operating around Taiwan on “long-range missions”.

Beijing routinely sends ships and aircraft into Taiwanese waters and airspace, called a “greyzone warfare” tactic meant to normalise the incursions.

In July, China suspended its nuclear arms control talks with Washington, in retaliation for the US’s continued arms sales to Taiwan.

The US last year warned of China’s nuclear modernisation although its numbers still far short of Washington’s. The Pentagon estimated that China has more than 500 operational nuclear warheads in its arsenal, of which approximately 350 are ICBMs.

The report projected that China will reach over 1,000 warheads by 2030; the US and Russia each say they possess more than 5,000 warheads.

There also have been conflicts around the Chinese military’s Rocket Force, the elite unit managing its nuclear arsenal. An aggressive anti-corruption campaign led to the firing of two of its leaders last year.

Vladimir Putin says Russia would consider an attack from a non-nuclear state that was backed by a nuclear-armed one to be a “joint attack”, in what could be construed as a threat to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine.

In key remarks on Wednesday night, the Russian president said his government was considering changing the rules and preconditions around which Russia would use its nuclear arsenal.

Ukraine is a non-nuclear state that receives military support from the US and other nuclear-armed countries.

His comments come as Kyiv seeks approval to use long-range Western missiles against military sites in Russia.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has travelled to the US this week and is due to meet US President Joe Biden in Washington on Thursday, where Kyiv’s request is expected to be top of the agenda.

Ukraine has pushed into Russian territory this year and wants to target bases inside Russia which it says are sending missiles into Ukraine.

Responding to Putin’s remarks, Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak said Russia “no longer has anything other than nuclear blackmail to intimidate the world”.

Putin has threatened the use of nuclear weapons before. Ukraine has criticised it as “nuclear sabre-rattling” to deter its allies from providing further support.

Russian ally China has also called for calm, with reports President Xi Jinping has warned Putin against using nuclear arms.

But on Wednesday, after a meeting with his Security Council, Putin announced the proposed radical expansion.

A new nuclear doctrine would “clearly set the conditions for Russia to transition to using nuclear weapons,” he warned – and said such scenarios included conventional missile strikes against Moscow.

He said that Russia would consider such a “possibility” of using nuclear weapons if it detected the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft and drones into its territory, which presented a “critical threat” to the country’s sovereignty.

He added: “It is proposed that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation.”

The country’s nuclear arms were “the most important guarantee of security of our state and its citizens”, the Kremlin leader said.

Since the end of World War Two, nuclear-armed states have engaged in a policy of deterrence, which is based on the idea that if warring states were to launch major nuclear strikes it would lead to mutually assured destruction.

But there are also tactical nuclear weapons which are smaller warheads designed to destroy targets without widespread radioactive fallout.

In June, Putin delivered a warning to European countries supporting Ukraine, saying Russia had “many more [tactical nuclear weapons] than there are on the European continent, even if the United States brings theirs over.”

“Europe does not have a developed [early warning system],” he added. “In this sense they are more or less defenceless.”

At the time he had hinted of changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine – the document which sets out the conditions under which Moscow would use nuclear weapons.

A Japanese warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland for the first time, Japanese media have reported.

The Sazanami, a Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer, passed through the strait from north to south on Wednesday while on its way to participate in multilateral drills in the South China Sea, government sources were quoted as saying.

Navy ships from Australia and New Zealand, which were part of the exercise, transited the waterway with the Japanese vessel.

This comes less than two weeks after Germany sent two warships across the narrow body of water, in what it said was a demonstration of its freedom of navigation – drawing a rebuke from China.

The defence ministries of Japan and Taiwan have not commented on the passage.

Chinese state newspaper Global Times, citing an unnamed source, said the Chinese military “conducted tracking and monitoring throughout [the vessels’] entire course and had the situation under control”.

Both the US and Taiwan say the 180km (112-mile) strait – a key shipping and trade route through which about half of the global container fleet pass – is part of international waters and is open to all naval vessels.

But China, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, claims sovereignty and jurisdiction over the strait.

Bec Strating, an international relations professor at La Trobe University in Australia, said Japan’s reported transit is “part of a broader pattern of greater naval presence by countries in and beyond Asia that are concerned about China’s maritime assertions”.

“Japan in particular has been dealing with China’s ‘grey zone’ tactics in the East China Sea,” she told AFP news agency.

Grey zone warfare tactics are aimed at weakening an adversary over a prolonged period of time, analysts say.

Washington and its allies are crossing the Taiwan Strait more frquently to reinforce its status as an international waterway.

China’s military accused Germany of increasing security risks by sailing though the strait on 13 September, but Berlin said it acted in accordance with international standards. It was the first time in 22 years for a German naval vessel to traverse the strait.

Besides Germany and Japan, Canada, Australia and the UK have also sailed warships through the strait in recent years.

Tokyo has reported an increase in Chinese military activity near Japan and around Taiwan in recent months.

Last week, Beijing sent an aircraft carrier between two Japanese islands near Taiwan for the first time. In August, a Chinese spy plane flew inside Japan’s airspace, prompting Tokyo to condemn the incursion as “utterly unacceptable” and a “serious violation of sovereignty”.

The leaders of the Quad group of nations – Japan, Australia, India and the US – said last week that they would expand cooperation on maritime security to counter China’s increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea.

As Indian-administered Kashmir prepared for assembly elections earlier this month, a local MP returned home from a Delhi prison to campaign for his candidates. Who is he and why does his return matter to the region’s politics? Auqib Javeed reports from Srinagar.

Sheikh Abdul Rashid, who had been in jail since Article 370 was abrogated in 2019, was granted interim bail earlier this month on terror funding charges he denies.

The 57-year-old, who is popularly known as Engineer Rashid, has urged people to vote for his candidates instead of regional or national parties. His Awami Ittehad Party has fielded candidates on more than three dozen seats.

The high-stakes assembly elections are the first since the region’s autonomy was revoked in 2019. With 873 candidates across 97 constituencies in the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley and Hindu-majority Jammu, the elections have been described by federal officials as a proof of normalcy in a region long plagued by insurgency. The third and last phase of the polls will be held on Tuesday and votes will be counted on 8 October.

Kashmir’s politics, dominated by mainstream parties pledging allegiance to India, has had a history of individuals and groups seeking separation from the country or enhanced autonomy for Kashmir, with some of them supporting an armed movement to achieve that.

• Article 370: What happened with Kashmir and why it matters
• Kashmir: The complicated truth behind its ‘normality’

Some separatist groups in the past have also backed Pakistan’s role in Kashmir. India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir in full, but control only parts of it.

But this assembly election has seen participation of many former separatist leaders as well.

Rashid has chosen to be part of the democratic process but has been vocal against what he calls Delhi’s “heavy-handed” rule in Kashmir.

He is known for his fiery speeches, and leading protests in unconventional ways against alleged government excesses, often irking authorities.

He made waves in June when he defeated regional political heavyweight Omar Abdullah in parliamentary elections. While he was lodged in jail, his sons led an emotionally charged and successful campaign on his behalf.

But this time he is able to speak to voters directly and he has also smartly used social media to amplify his messages.

Within hours of being released on 11 September, Rashid told the media that he was going to fight against the removal of Article 370.

The article allowed the state its own constitution, a separate flag and freedom to make laws. Foreign affairs, defence and communications remained the preserve of the federal government.

“We don’t accept Prime Minister [Narendra Modi’s] decision taken on 5 August [2019],” he said, referring to the day when the autonomy was abrogated.

He then went live on Facebook, repeating similar messages. The hour-long speech currently has more than 2.5m views, 44,000 likes and 25,000 comments – an unusually high number for a regional politician.

Rashid’s popularity worries his regional opponents, who have termed him a “proxy” of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Two former chief ministers of the state and the heirs of leading regional parties, Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah, have publicly questioned his party’s funding and alleged that he was dividing voters to favour the BJP.

He has repeatedly denied the allegations. “If I were a BJP man, I wouldn’t have spent over five years in jail,” he told the BBC. “I won [almost] 500,000 votes in the general elections, how could I be dividing votes?”.

Prof Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a political analyst, said Rashid’s release from jail just days before the elections did give his opponents a pretext to accuse him of collusion with the BJP-run federal government in Delhi.

“Despite these allegations, his win in the 2024 parliamentary elections from jail has given him an unprecedented credibility in the eyes of the locals,” he said.

Rashid has also worked hard to carefully craft his image.

Unlike the valley’s prominent leaders who have established political lineages, Rashid has managed to establish an image of a “common man’s politician” who doesn’t shy away from taking on authorities.

In 2012, he attempted to bring dozens of dogs into the state secretariat as a protest against the government’s inaction on the growing canine menace in his constituency, where numerous dog bite incidents had been reported.

“I hope the ministers and bureaucracy now understand the seriousness of the issue,” he said at the time.

But Rashid’s bluntness and candour have also landed him in trouble.

In 2015, he hosted a “beef party” to protest a ban on the slaughter of cows, considered sacred by many Hindus, in several states. A day later, members of the BJP, then a part of the state’s ruling coalition, assaulted him in the assembly.

A few days later, members of a Hindu group outraged by the “beef party” attacked him at Delhi’s Press Club, dousing his face with ink as he protested the lynching of a Kashmiri truck driver accused of cow smuggling in Jammu.

Rashid’s unusual protests have often addressed the alleged human rights violations in the Kashmir valley, a charge that the federal government denies.

On International Human Rights Day in 2015, his party marched through Srinagar with a cow, a mule, a goat, and a dog, holding placards saying, “Animals have more rights than people in Kashmir.” He and other leaders were detained.

His family members say they are not surprised by his politics as he had a “rebellious nature” since childhood.

“He used to protest against the human rights violations, presence of military bunkers, forced labour by the army,” said his brother Khurshid Ahmad Sheikh.

In 2008, he resigned from his government job as an engineer to contest assembly elections, winning twice in a row as an independent candidate.

Once elected to the state assembly, he gained recognition across Kashmir for protesting against what he called the government’s “anti-people” policies, analysts say.

“The element of protest makes him popular. He has been a crowd-puller since he entered politics,” said Noor Mohammad Baba, a political analyst based in Kashmir.

His jail term has intensified public interest in his rallies, he added.

At a recent rally, an enthusiastic group of men assembled to listen to him. Some of them were curious onlookers hoping to see the man in the news, and some were his fans.

Did the allegations of Rashid being a “proxy of Delhi” bother them?

“Almost all the regional parties have been in an alliance with the BJP [in the past]. They aren’t in a position to allege him of complicity with the BJP,” said Rafiq Ahmad, a businessman. “People want to give Rashid a chance and see what he does.”

Rashid spoke and demanded a resolution to the Kashmir conflict and an end to the use of anti-terror laws to put Kashmiris in jail. Young men shouted in unison in support.

Within minutes, Rashid was on his way to his next public meeting.

Often called “white gold” and the key component in rechargeable batteries, the metal lithium is so light that it floats on water, but its price has sunk like a stone over the past year.

Due to a combination of falling global sales of electric vehicles, and a world oversupply of lithium ore, the cost of the main lithium compound has fallen by more than three quarters since June 2023.

This decline has had a particularly hard impact on Australia, because it is the world’s largest producer of lithium ore, accounting for 52% of the global total last year.

Australia also has the second-largest reserves of the mineral after Chile, with the vast majority in Western Australia, and a smaller amount in the Northern Territory.

The sharp decline in lithium prices has led to mine shutdowns. Adelaide-based Core Lithium announced back in January that due to “weak market conditions” it was suspending mining at its Finniss site near Darwin, with the loss of 150 jobs.

Then in August, US firm Albemarle said it would be scaling back production at its Kemerton lithium processing plant, located some 170km (100 miles) south of Perth. This is expected to lead to more than 300 redundancies.

Arcadium Lithium followed suit this month, announcing that it would be mothballing its Mt Cattlin mine in Western Australia, blaming low prices. The firm’s shares are listed in both the US and Australia.

Yet as some producers are putting work on hold, others are expanding theirs, confident that global demand for lithium – and prices – will bounce back.

Pilbara Minerals is one such firm. The Perth-based miner aims to boost its lithium ore production by an additional 50% over the next year.

“What we’ve learned historically from lithium pricing is that it can change, and it can change rapidly,” managing director Dale Henderson recently told ABC News. “It doesn’t faze us that much because we know the long-term outlook is fantastic.”

This confidence is echoed by Kingsley Jones, founder, and chief investment officer at Canberra-based investment firm Jevons Global, which monitors the mining and metals sectors. “Lithium remains very strategic to the energy transition,” he tells the BBC.

“Storage batteries for electricity is a big growth area,” he adds, pointing to the increased need for batteries to store the power generated by solar and wind power.

But some analysts have warned that oversupply will keep the market under pressure until at least 2028.

Another company moving ahead with increased lithium ore production in Australia is Perth-based Liontown Resources. In July, it started production at its Kathleen Valley mine, located 420 miles (680km) north-east of Western Australia’s capital.

The facility gets 60% of its energy from its own solar panel farm.

Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, has praised the site’s green approach, and his government has invested $A230m ($156m; £118m) in the facility.

This move towards the use of renewables is also good news in financial terms for producers in Australia, as it reduces their dependence on buying expensive diesel, which is currently the main fuel that they use to generate electricity.

Extracting lithium ore in the country requires three times more energy than in other big producing nations such as Chile and Argentina, says Prof Rick Valenta, the director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute at the University of Queensland.

Extraction in Australia requires additional energy because the lithium ore, also known as spodumene, has to be mined and removed from solid rock. Whereas in Chile and Argentina the ore is produced by evaporating it from brine collected from under the countries’ vast salt plains.

“As Australia has hard-rock mining operations, they use more energy and produce more emissions than brine operations,” Prof Valenta adds.

The form of lithium that Australia exports – almost all of which goes to China – is partially processed ore, called spodumene concentrate.

Prices of this have mirrored the sharp fall of refined lithium. One report this month said that the price of spodumene had hit its lowest level since August 2021.

Chinese companies refine the spodumene into solid lithium, and into the two lithium compounds used in batteries – lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate.

This is where the real money is to be made, because a tonne of lithium carbonate is currently around 72,500 yuan ($10,280; £7,720) compared with just $747 (£630) for the same weight of spodumene concentrate.

Given that price differential, Australian mining firms have unsurprisingly been moving to build their own lithium refineries instead of just exporting almost all spodumene, as is the case currently. In 2022-23, 98% was exported as spodumene concentrate.

The first refined lithium to be commercially produced in Australia happened back in 2022, when Perth-based IGO announced that it was making battery-grade lithium hydroxide at its Kwinana Refinery in Western Australia. It co-owns the facility with Chinese firm Tianqi Lithium.

Meanwhile, another Australian miner, Covalent Lithium, is building its own lithium refinery, also in Western Australia. And Albemarle has its refinery, albeit one currently reducing its output.

Some commentators welcome the development of lithium refining in Australia, saying it will help to reduce China’s dominance of the global market for the metal. China currently accounts for 60% of all lithium refining.

However, Kingsley Jones says that Australia needs to be more open to embracing Chinese investment in the lithium sector. He points out that the Australian government has, in his view, “adopted a strategy, we think unwisely, to preference investment from countries other than China” in the lithium sector in recent years.

This has come as relations between the two countries have cooled since 2020. Last year, Canberra even blocked the sale of an Australian lithium miner to a Chinese firm.

The government said at the time that it was simply following the advice of the country’s Foreign Investment Review Board.

Mr Jones adds: “It’s an excellent example of how to shoot yourself in the foot as a producer. You tell the biggest buyer to go away. So, they do.”

Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources did not respond to a request for a comment.

As Australia aims to become more of a lithium refiner, government scientists are continuing to research ways to do this in a more environmentally friendly way. A code, which if cracked, could make the country one of the greenest producers of the metal. Currently the process releases a lot of poisonous chlorine gas.

“There is only one industrial method, and it has several drawbacks,” says Dongmei Liu, a research scientist at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO.

“The process is very expensive and not very efficient. Most importantly, it also produces chlorine gas. It has severe environmental issues.”

She and her team are instead working on a new process called “shock quenching”. It involves the extreme cooling of lithium vapour, and Dr Lui says it “avoids the chlorine gas emissions”.

While Australia hopes to make its mineral industries less polluting, it also wants to recycle more.

Lithium Australia is a listed company that sorts and processes batteries that have come to the end of their lives, to extract their lithium and other metals for reuse.

“Global commodities prices place economic pressure on lithium, so creating a circular battery industry will benefit Australia by ensuring we have the sovereign capability to produce and recycle our own batteries,” says Lithium Australia chief executive Simon Linge.

“If Australia is to establish a battery manufacturing industry, we must first ensure that no end-of-life lithium battery is being sent to landfill or exported to be recycled in some other country.”

A zoo in Finland will return two giant pandas to China eight years early, saying it can no longer afford to look after them.

Lumi and Pyry were brought to Finland in 2018, after the two countries signed an agreement to protect the animals.

They were meant to stay in the Nordic country for 15 years, but will be sent home in November – with Ähtäri Zoo blaming inflation and debt linked to the Covid pandemic for the pandas’ eviction.

It also said the zoo spent €1.5m (£1.2m) a year on the pandas’ upkeep, as well as more than €8m on their enclosure.

Mahrko Haekosky, curator at Ähtäri Zoo, said the €1.5m upkeep was “much more than all the other species combined”.

It included a keeper required to stay with them at all times, a preservation fee to China and imported bamboo.

“It’s a good thing for the zoo because they were so expensive,” but the pandas had been “doing really well, so it’s a pity”, said Mr Haekosky.

“They’re really nice to work with.”

Another factor in the decision to return the pandas was the Finnish government rejecting pleas for state funding last year.

“They thought the pandas would bring more visitors, and that it was a good investment – turns out it wasn’t so”, said Mr Haekosky.

The zoo revealed last year that it was discussing their return.

Lumi and Pyry will soon go into a month-long quarantine before they are shipped back to China.

A spokesperson for Finland’s foreign ministry said the pandas’ return was a business decision that did not involve the government, and that it should not impact relations between Finland and China.

Finland’s Chinese embassy, meanwhile, told the Reuters news agency that while efforts had been made to try and help the zoo, a joint decision was eventually made to send the animals back.

China sends pandas to foreign zoos to strengthen its trading ties, relationships and image abroad – termed ‘panda diplomacy’.

Hurricane Helene continues to strengthen as it barrels toward the US Gulf Coast.

The Category 1 storm is on track to quickly intensify into a dangerous Category 4 hurricane by the time it makes landfall in Florida on Thursday evening, with forecasters warning it could bring “life-threatening” storm surge, damaging winds and flooding to a large part of Florida and the south-eastern US.

The US-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said that Helene was expected to continue moving north through the Gulf of Mexico before striking Florida on Thursday evening local time.

The governors of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia have declared states of emergency ahead of the storm’s landfall.

Data from the (NHC) indicates that maximum sustained winds from the storm have increased to 85 mph (140 km/h).

By Thursday night, Helene was moving north at 12mph (19km/h) through the Gulf of Mexico, the NHC said in an update.

The NHC warned that that Helene is turning into a “major” storm that could reach Category 4 status by the time it reaches Florida.

At a news conference on Thursday, the mayor of Tallahassee, Florida, warned residents to be prepared.

“We have no more time left to wait. Today is the day. We urge you to stay weather aware as we’re on the verge of what could be … a historic event,” Mayor John Dailey said.

In Georgia, all public schools in Atlanta will close on Thursday and Friday due to the storm. It has also affected the race for the White House, with Republican candidate for vice-president JD Vance cancelling two events in Georgia that were planned for Thursday.

All across the southeastern US, the storm could trigger “catastrophic and potentially life-threatening flash and urban flooding,” the NHC said.

Before reaching the US, the storm is expected to dump 4-8 inches (10-20cm) of rain on parts of Cuba and the Cayman Islands.

In Mexico, the popular resorts of Cancún and Cozumel were lashed with heavy rainstorms and wind in the early hours of Wednesday local time.

Flooding was reported in some areas.

Red flags warning swimmers not to venture into the sea were flying on the beaches of Cancún as early as Tuesday and fishermen rushed to get their small boats out of the water.

Local businesses were boarding up their windows as torrential rain began to fall and high winds blew.

• Hurricanes: Inside the deadly storms

The NHC said that once Helene reaches the south-eastern United States, it is expected to “produce total rain accumulations of five to 10 inches” (12.7-25.4cm).

A flood watch has been issued from Florida to the southern Appalachians with the worst-affected area predicted to be the Big Bend region in Florida.

Big Bend is where Hurricane Idalia made landfall in 2023 and the area also was impacted by Hurricane Debby last month.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management has posted a list of the counties in which voluntary or mandatory evacuation orders have been issued ahead of Helene.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is facing federal criminal charges, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Adams, 64, was elected to lead the most populous US city nearly three years ago on a promise to rein in crime.

But he and a string of top officials in his orbit have faced growing scrutiny as part of multiple federal corruption probes.

The indictment remains sealed but would make Adams, 64, the first mayor in city history to be charged while in office.

“I always knew that if I stood my ground for New Yorkers that I would be a target – and a target I became,” Adams said in a statement to the BBC.

“If I am charged, I am innocent and I will fight this with every ounce of my strength and spirit.”

Federal prosecutors are expected to unseal the indictment on Thursday, when Adams will make an initial court appearance, CBS News reports.

The reported charges come less than a year after federal agents seized Adams’ electronic devices and searched the home of Brianna Suggs, his chief fundraiser.

It was later revealed that the US attorney’s office in Manhattan was looking into whether Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign team conspired with the government of Turkey to funnel illegal donations into the campaign.

The New York Times reported on Monday that prosecutors subpoenaed the campaign and the mayor’s office for information related to five other countries: Israel, China, Qatar, South Korea and Uzbekistan.

Adams has remained steadfast that he would remain in office even as a growing list of officials have called for his resignation. Earlier Wednesday, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – a popular figure in left-leaning New York – joined that list.

“I do not see how Mayor Adams can continue governing New York City,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “For the good of the city, he should resign.”

Ocasio-Cortez referenced a recent “flood of resignations and vacancies” that she said were threatening city government’s ability to function.

Adams’s reported indictment comes weeks after federal agents seized electronic devices belonging to three people closely affiliated with him – schools chancellor David Banks, his brother Deputy Mayor Phil Banks, and his fiancée Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright.

In a surprise announcement on Tuesday, David Banks announced he would be stepping down from his role at the end of the year.

The US attorney’s office in Manhattan is investigating another Banks brother, Terence, over a possible bribery scheme involving his consulting firm and city contracts.

Prosecutors in that office are also looking into bribery claims against the twin brother of former New York Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who resigned earlier this month weeks after his phone was seized by federal agents.

Acting Police Commissioner Thomas Donlon had his own homes searched last Friday.

In the past two weeks, the mayor’s chief legal counsel and the city health commissioner have also stepped down.

Adams, who is only the second black person to run New York City, is facing a growing list of Democratic challengers ahead of his re-election bid next year.

New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, a close ally who has yet to comment on the indictment, has the power to remove Adams from office.

If Adams’ tenure ends prematurely, Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, is next in line to become the city’s acting mayor.

Bridgerton fans have been left fuming after an unofficial ball in Detroit based on the Netflix show fell far below expectations.

The event on Sunday was supposed to be a glamorous affair with ballroom dancing and music, similar to that enjoyed by the members of Regency high society in the hit series.

But it has since gone viral on social media, as attendees complained it was a “scam”, with cheap decor, undercooked food and just a stripper for entertainment.

Event organisers Uncle & Me LLC have not responded to the BBC’s request for comment, but they told a local media outlet that they were working to address concerns.

The event was not endorsed by or associated with Netflix or production company Shondaland.

The advert for the event invited fans to “step into the enchanting world of the Regency era at the Detroit Bridgerton-themed ball”.

“Join us for an evening of sophistication, grace, and historical charm. Experience a night like no other filled with music, dance, and exquisite costumes,” it read.

But fans are now calling for refunds, with photos and videos circulating on social media showing women, dressed in their finest outfits, sitting on the floor scrolling on their phones.

• Bridgerton stars get a ‘glow up’ in season three
• How did the Willy Wonka viral sensation go so wrong?
• Police called to Willy Wonka event after refunds demanded

“This is right up there with the Fyre Festival scam,” wrote one on Facebook, referring to another infamous failed venture.

“I’ve seen kids parties that look better. It was bare and ugly,” wrote another, who said most people had left by 9pm.

Screenshots of tickets online showed prices starting at around $150, but others spent more for the “Duke and Duchess” package which included dinner.

But the meal was criticised by attendees, with one saying it was “terrible” and others saying it was still raw.

“Chicken was undercooked and pasta was cold. By the time I got a plate they were running out of food,” wrote one.

Several people also complained about the food running out.

Meanwhile, the entertainment also disappointed, with just one violinist despite guests being told there would be a full orchestra.

There was also a pole-dancing stripper, leaving some fans to question what that had to do with Bridgerton.

“They hired a stripper, we were promised an instrumental performance,” wrote a TikTok user.

She added that over 60 people were leaving just as she arrived. “People leaving told me to just go bar-hopping with with them.”

Another disappointed TikTokker posted a picture of the outfit she says she “wasted” at the event.

“I was ready to be diamond of the season. I left early,” she said.

In an interview with local news station WXYZ-TV, Detroit acrobat Tink said she had been hired as a pole-dancer just three hours before the event.

“I just feel very bad for all the patrons who showed up to the event just because my goal as a performer is to bring happiness and cheers to everyone,” she said.

“So it kind of just bummed me out knowing everyone was so unhappy with the outcome.”

People on social media have been quick to note the similarities with other viral flops, including the Fyre festival in the Bahamas and the Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow, which saw a handful of embarrassed actors trying to make the best of some sad-looking props and a bouncy castle.

In a statement to WXYZ-TV, Uncle & Me LLC said: “We understand that not everyone had the experience they hoped for at our most recent event Sunday night at The Harmonie Club, and for that, we sincerely apologise.

“Our intention was to provide a magical evening, but we recognise that organizational challenges affected the enjoyment of some guests. We take full responsibility and accountability for these shortcomings.”

The company said it was working to address all concerns raised by guests, adding: “We are reviewing resolution options, which will be communicated shortly.”

The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, has not been invited to the UK government’s International Investment Summit in response to his social media posts during last month’s riots, the BBC understands.

Violence spread across the UK after a stabbing attack in Southport, in which three children attending a dance class were killed. The tech entrepreneur posted on X, formerly Twitter, predicting civil war in the UK and repeatedly attacking the prime minister.

The summit in October is the key moment that PM Keir Starmer hopes to attract tens of billions in inward funding for business from the world’s biggest investors.

Mr Musk went to last year’s event and took a starring role in November’s AI Summit, including a fireside chat with then PM Rishi Sunak. The government and Mr Musk have been approached for comment.

During the August riots, Mr Musk shared, and later deleted, a conspiracy theory about the UK building “detainment camps” on the Falkland Islands for rioters, on X – the social media platform he owns.

At the time ministers said his comments were “totally unjustifiable” and “pretty deplorable”.

The BBC understands this is why he has not been invited to join hundreds of the world’s biggest investors at the event on 14 October.

Coming two weeks head of the Budget, the government is billing it as a huge opportunity to attract foreign investment to grow the UK economy. The Labour Party committed before the general election to hold this event within its first 100 days in office.

Under the Conservatives, Mr Musk, who owns or runs X, Tesla and SpaceX, was quietly shown around various UK sites with potential for a gigafactory for cars and batteries.

He has previously told journalists he opened a site in Germany and not the UK partly because of Brexit.

He is a regular at the equivalent French summit. In July, he attended a three-hour lunch with top executives with President Emmanuel Macron ahead of the Olympics earlier this summer.

Under his ownership of the site formerly known as Twitter, Mr Musk lifted the ban on far-right figures, including on the Britain First group.

The UK is considering a tougher Online Safety Act, after the role of misinformation in the widespread racist disorder in August.

He is the world’s richest person and has used his platform to make his views known on a vast array of topics.

Bloomberg estimates his net worth to be around $228bn.

That’s based largely on the value of his shares in Tesla, of which he owns more than 13%. The company’s stock soared in value – some say unreasonably – in 2020 as the firm’s output increased and it started to deliver regular profits.

Since bursting on to the Silicon Valley scene more than two decades ago, the 53-year-old serial entrepreneur has kept the public captivated with his business antics.

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Mr Musk showed his talents for entrepreneurship early, going door to door with his brother selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and developing his first computer game at the age of 12.

For a long time Mr Musk, who became a US citizen in 2002, resisted efforts to label his politics – calling himself “half-Democrat, half-Republican”, “politically moderate” and “independent”.

He says he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and – reluctantly – Joe Biden, all of them Democrats.

But in recent years he’s swung behind Donald Trump, who is a Republican. Mr Musk officially endorsed the former president for a second term in 2024 after his attempted assassination.

Israel’s leaders are jubilant about the progress of the offensive against Hezbollah that started with the detonation of weaponised pagers and radios and moved on to intense and deadly airstrikes.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant did not hold back his praise after Monday’s air strikes.

“Today was a masterpiece… This was the worst week Hezbollah has had since its establishment, and the results speak for themselves.”

Gallant said airstrikes destroyed thousands of rockets that could have killed Israeli citizens. In the process Lebanon says Israel killed more than 550 of its citizens, including 50 children. That is almost half Lebanon’s dead in a month of war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

Israel believes that a ferocious offensive will coerce Hezbollah into doing what it wants, inflicting so much pain that its leader Hassan Nasrallah and his allies and backers in Iran decide that the price of resistance is too high.

Israel’s politicians and generals need a victory. After almost a year of war Gaza has become a quagmire. Hamas fighters still emerge out of tunnels and ruins to kill and wound Israeli soldiers and are still holding Israeli hostages.

Hamas caught Israel by surprise last October. The Israelis did not see Hamas as a significant threat, with devastating consequences. Lebanon is different. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Mossad spy agency have been planning the next war against Hezbollah since the last war ended in a stalemate in 2006.

Israel’s leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believes the current offensive is making big progress towards his declared objective of tipping the balance of power away from Hezbollah.

He wants to stop Hezbollah firing rockets over the border into Israel. At the same time, the Israeli military says the plan is to force Hezbollah back from the border and to destroy military facilities that threaten Israel.

The last week in Lebanon brings back echoes of the last year of war in Gaza. Israel issued warnings to civilians, as it did in Gaza, to move out of areas about to be attacked. It blames Hezbollah, as it blames Hamas, for using civilians as human shields.

Some critics as well as enemies of Israel said the warnings were too vague and did not give enough time for families to evacuate. The laws of war demand that civilians be protected, and forbid indiscriminate, disproportionate use of force.

Some of Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel have hit civilian areas, breaking laws designed to protect civilians. They have also targeted the Israeli military. Israel and key Western allies, including the US and UK, classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation.

Israel insists it has a moral army that respects the rules. But much of the world has condemned its conduct in Gaza. The ignition of a wider border war will deepen the gap at the centre of a highly polarised argument.

Take the pager attack. Israel says it was aimed at Hezbollah operatives who had been issued with the pagers. But Israel could not know where they would be when the bombs inside the pagers were triggered, which was why civilians and children in homes, shops and other public places were wounded and killed. That, some leading lawyers say, proves that Israel was using deadly force without distinguishing between combatants and civilians; a violation of the rules of war.

The fight between Israel and Hezbollah started in the 1980s. But this border war began the day after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, when Hassan Nasrallah ordered his men to begin a limited, but almost daily barrage over the border to support Hamas. It tied up Israeli troops and forced around 60,000 people in border towns to leave their homes.

A few voices in the Israeli media have compared the impact of the air strikes on Hezbollah’s capacity to wage war to Operation Focus, Israel’s surprise attack on Egypt in June 1967. It was a famous raid that destroyed the Egyptian air force when its aircraft were lined up on the ground. Over the next six days Israel defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The victory created the shape of the current conflict as Israel captured the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.

It is not a good comparison. Lebanon, and war with Hezbollah, is different. Israel has inflicted heavy blows. But so far it has not stopped Hezbollah’s capacity or will to fire into Israel.

Israel’s earlier wars with Hezbollah were grinding, attritional and never produced a decisive victory for either side. This one might go the same way, however satisfying the last week of offensive action has been for Israel, its intelligence services and its military.

Israel’s offensive rests on an assumption – a gamble – that a point will come when Hezbollah will crumple, retreat from the border and stop firing into Israel. Most observers of Hezbollah believe it will not stop. Fighting Israel is the main reason why Hezbollah exists.

That means Israel, just as reluctant to admit defeat, would have to escalate the war further. If Hezbollah continued to make northern Israel too dangerous for Israeli civilians to return home, Israel would have to decide whether to launch a ground offensive, probably to capture a strip of land to act as a buffer zone.

Israel has invaded Lebanon before. In 1982 its forces swept up to Beirut to try to stop Palestinian raids into Israel. They were forced into an ignominious retreat in the face of fury at home and abroad, after Israeli troops held the perimeter as their Lebanese Christian allies massacred Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut.

By the 1990s Israel still occupied a broad band of Lebanese land along the border. Today’s Israeli generals were then young officers, who fought in endless skirmishes and firefights against Hezbollah, which was growing stronger as it fought to drive Israel out. Ehud Barak, then Israel’s prime minister and a former chief of staff of the IDF, withdrew from the so-called “security zone” in 2000. He decided that it did not make Israel any safer and was costing Israel the lives of too many soldiers.

In 2006 an ill-judged raid by Hezbollah across the tense and highly militarised border killed and captured Israeli soldiers. After the war ended Hassan Nasrallah said he would not have allowed the raid had he realised what Israel would do in return. Ehud Olmert, by then Israel’s prime minister, went to war.

At first Israel hoped air power would stop rocket attacks into Israel. When it did not, ground troops and tanks once again rolled back over the border. The war was a disaster for Lebanese civilians. But on the last day of the war, Hezbollah was still launching salvoes of rockets into Israel.

Israel’s commanders know that entering Lebanon under fire would be much more formidable military challenge than fighting Hamas in Gaza. Hezbollah has also been making plans since the end of the 2006 war, and would be fighting on home ground, in south Lebanon which has plenty of rugged, hilly terrain that suits guerrilla tactics.

Israel has not been able to destroy all the tunnels Hamas dug through sand in Gaza. In the borderlands of south Lebanon, Hezbollah has spent the last 18 years preparing tunnels and positions in solid rock. It has a formidable arsenal, supplied by Iran. Unlike Hamas in Gaza, it can be resupplied by land through Syria.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington DC, estimates that Hezbollah has around 30,000 active fighters and up to 20,000 reserves, mostly trained as mobile small units of light infantry. Many of its men have combat experience fighting in support of the Assad regime in Syria.

Most estimates say that Hezbollah has something between 120,000 and 200,000 missiles and rockets, ranging from unguided weapons to longer-range weapons that could hit Israel’s cities.

Israel may be gambling that Hezbollah will not use all of them, fearful that the Israeli air force will do to Lebanon what it did to Gaza, turning entire towns to rubble and killing thousands of civilians. Iran might not want Hezbollah to use weapons it would like to reserve as insurance against an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. That’s another gamble. Hezbollah might decide to use more of its arsenal before Israel destroys it.

With the war continuing in Gaza, and rising levels of violence on the occupied West Bank, Israel would also have to contemplate a third front if it invaded Lebanon. Its soldiers are motivated, well trained and equipped, but the reserve units that provide much of Israel’s fighting power are already feeling the strain after a year of war.

Israel’s allies, led by the United States, did not want Israel to escalate the war with Hezbollah and do not want it to invade Lebanon. They insist that only diplomacy can make the border safe enough for civilians to return to their homes on either side of it. An American envoy has worked out an agreement, partly based on UN Security resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 war.

But diplomats have their hands tied without a ceasefire in Gaza. Hasan Nasrallah has said Hezbollah will stop attacking Israel only when the Gaza war stops. At the moment neither Hamas nor the Israelis are prepared to make the necessary concessions that would produce a ceasefire agreement in Gaza and a swap of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

As Israeli air strikes continue to pound Lebanon, civilians who were already struggling to provide for their families in a broken economy face terrible pain and uncertainty. Fear crosses front lines. Israelis know that Hezbollah could do them much worse damage than they have in the last year.

Israel believes the time has come to be aggressive and audacious, to blast Hezbollah away from its borders. But it faces an obdurate, well-armed and angry enemy. This is the most dangerous crisis in the long year of war since Hamas attacked Israel and at the moment nothing is stopping it spiralling towards something much worse.

Get in touch with BBC News via this form

Britons have told the BBC they are struggling to get out of Lebanon, as Sir Keir Starmer repeats his call for UK nationals to leave.

The UK has urged British nationals to leave immediately because of the escalation in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

Speaking to BBC News, the prime minister said Britons still in the country should: “Leave now. It’s very important.”

The UK and allied nations have called for an immediate 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon “to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement”.

Speaking to the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason at the UN in New York, Sir Keir said the situation in Lebanon was escalating and he urged Britons to “leave now” without waiting for an evacuation.

The prime minister said he would not go into detail about evacuation plans, but contingency measures were in place.

The government has sent about 700 additional military personnel to Cyprus in case an emergency evacuation is required.

Britons in Lebanon have spoken of their difficulty in leaving the country.

BBC News understands there are between 4,000 and 6,000 UK nationals including dependents in Lebanon.

When the BBC visited Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport, the only civilian airport in the country, most flights were cancelled after international airlines suspended flights to and from the city.

Middle East Airlines, as well Iraqi Airways and Iran Air, are the only companies still operating at the moment.

Chloe Lewin, 24, from London, told BBC News she was due to get a flight out of Lebanon on Friday.

“Keir Starmer’s telling everyone to get out but we can’t,” the freelance journalist, who has lived in Beirut since January 2023, said.

“You can’t get out this week because they’re [flights] all full and every time you get to the last page of the booking, it just crashes and it says you can’t book a flight.

She added: “My friends were meant to leave this morning on Egyptair – that got cancelled, so they can’t get out. “

Isabella Baker said she was too scared to go to the airport in Beirut and had decided to head to Tripoli in the north of the country to stay with a friend and then continue by boat to Turkey.

The student, who had been studying for a masters degree in human rights at a French university in Beirut, described hearing drones and sonic booms over the city following the pagers attack.

Emma Bartholomew, who splits her time between London and Beirut, is booked on a flight home to London next week.

She described a gridlock on the roads from ambulances on the day of the pager explosions and Israeli jets flying low over her hotel, where hundreds of displaced people have arrived from the city’s southern suburbs.

“There’s an intense sense of anticipation and anxiety amongst Lebanese people,” she said.

A woman stuck in a town outside Beirut with a British spousal visa and Biometric Residence Permit said she hadn’t heard from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) since August to register her to leave in case of emergency.

Rita, who asked we only use her first name, told BBC Radio 4’s the World Tonight that she was booked on a commercial flight departing next week, but was eligible to leave on a British evacuation flight.

Her British husband and two sons are in London and have encouraged her to flee over land.

The FCDO said it had asked British nationals to let the UK government know they were in Lebanon through its Register Your Presence service.

Other Britons have decided to stay in Lebanon for the time being.

Anne Bouji, who has lived in the country for the last seven years, said she was going to stay with her partially paralysed Lebanese husband who does not have a British passport or visa.

She told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme “it was relatively safe” on the eastern side of Beirut where she lives, but in other parts of the city people were “very afraid and you can taste the fear in the air”.

Hayat Fakhoury, a British-Lebanese dual national, said she would leave the country only “if it becomes completely unsafe everywhere”.

Speaking to The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4, she said the possibility of an Israeli ground invasion in Lebanon was “definitely something” she feared.

Earlier, Sir Keir, addressing the UN Security Council, said the region was “on the brink” as he called for an immediate ceasefire.

The FCDO said the situation in Lebanon was deeply concerning and the risk of escalation remained high.

“That’s why we are continuing to advise people to leave now while commercial routes remain available,” a statement said.

“The government is planning for a range of scenarios and is prepared to provide additional support to British nationals if required.”

It has also said it was sending £5m to UNICEF to support humanitarian efforts.

Officials say the UK already has a significant diplomatic and military presence close to Lebanon, including RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and two Royal Navy ships – RFA Mounts Bay and HMS Duncan – which have been in the eastern Mediterranean over the summer.

The Royal Air Force also has planes and helicopters on standby.

Tensions have been growing across the Middle East since Hamas gunmen attacked Israel on 7 October last year, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others as hostages.

Previously sporadic fighting between Israel and armed group Hezbollah escalated on 8 October – the day after Hamas’s unprecedented attack. Hezbollah fired at Israeli positions, in solidarity with Hamas.

Hezbollah, proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK and other countries, has launched more than 8,000 rockets at northern Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. It has also fired anti-tank missiles at armoured vehicles and attacked military targets with explosive drones.

Last week Hezbollah’s communication devices started exploding across Lebanon.

Israel then launched a series of air strikes on Monday that have so far killed 569 people according to the Lebanese government.

The UN’s refugee agency says one of its staff members and one of her children were killed in an Israeli air strike in eastern Lebanon – one of well over a thousand such strikes over the past two days.

The UNHCR said Dina Darwiche’s home was hit on Monday. Her husband and her older son were rescued and are in hospital with serious injuries, the agency said.

Ms Darwiche had worked in UNHCR’s Bekaa office for 12 years.

Meanwhile Ali Basma, who had worked for UNHCR’s office in the southern city of Tyre as a cleaner, was also killed.

In a statement, the agency said it was “outraged and deeply saddened” by their killing.

“Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon are now relentlessly claiming hundreds of civilian lives,” said UNHCR’s global director Filippo Grandi on Tuesday.

“And I am very saddened to confirm that two UNHCR colleagues were also killed yesterday.”

Ms Darwiche’s friends described her as “the gentlest and kindest soul we knew.”

“She had been dedicated to her humanitarian work with UNHCR for as long as I can remember,” wrote Professor Jasmin Lilian Diab, an academic at the Lebanese American University, on X. “I am broken. I am absolutely destroyed.”

Funerals for those killed have been taking place across Lebanon.

In the southern city of Sidon, Mohammed Hilal had gathered with hundreds of other mourners to say goodbye to his daughter at a funeral also held for eight other people.

Three Hezbollah members were among those being buried, according to Reuters news agency which filmed the scene.

Mr Hilal knelt over his daughter’s body, covered in an embroidered blanket, and wept.

He told Reuters news agency that he had left his house in the town of Saksakiyeh on Monday to complete paperwork identifying his family. When he returned, he said, “I found her martyred due to the brutal aggression, the cowardly aggression that is killing children.”

Israel says it has warned Lebanese to leave their homes and put distance between themselves and sites used by Hezbollah.

But Lebanon’s health minister Firass Abiad told the BBC Israel had caused “carnage” and it was “clear” that many victims were civilians, including children and women who were in their homes doing “normal things”.

Israel says it targeted Hezbollah sites, accusing the Iranian-backed group of hiding weapons and rockets in residential homes and of using civilians as human shields.

On Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue attacking Hezbollah sites. Israel has alleged that some weapons are being stored in civilian homes.

“Anyone who has a missile in their living room and a rocket in their garage will not have a home,” he said in a video posted on social media.

Meanwhile the UN’s children’s agency told the BBC that many of the children in shelters in the capital had been “heavily traumatised”.

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese are believed to have fled their homes, the country’s foreign minister says.

“Most of them have left in a few minutes without taking anything, just getting their cars and leaving the house,” Edouard Beigbeder from Unicef said.

“Some of them have seen their house being destroyed, and some have witnessed their family members, siblings killed or injured. So those who reached Beirut are heavily traumatised.”

The tragic death of a 26-year-old Indian employee at a leading accounting firm has ignited a serious debate about workplace culture and employee welfare in corporate environments.

Anna Sebastian Perayil, a chartered accountant at Ernst & Young (EY), died in July, four months after joining the firm. Her parents have alleged that the “overwhelming work pressure” at her new job took a toll on her health and led to her death.

EY has refuted the allegation, saying that Perayil was allotted work like any other employee and that it didn’t believe that work pressure could have claimed her life.

Her death has resonated deeply, sparking a discussion on the “hustle culture” promoted by many corporates and start-ups – a work ethic that prioritises productivity, often at the expense of employee well-being.

Some argue that this culture drives innovation and growth, with many choosing extra hours out of passion or ambition. Others say that employees are often pressured by management, leading to burnout and a diminished quality of life.

Perayil’s death came under the spotlight after a letter written by her mother Anita Augustine to EY went viral on social media last week. In the letter, she detailed the alleged pressures her daughter had experienced at work, including working late into the night and on weekends, and appealed to EY to “reflect on its work culture” and take steps to prioritise its employees’ health.

“Anna’s experience sheds light on a work culture that seems to glorify overwork while neglecting the very human beings behind the roles,” she wrote. “The relentless demands and the pressure to meet unrealistic expectations are not sustainable, and they cost us the life of a young woman with so much potential.”

Many people condemned EY for its “toxic work culture”, sharing their experiences on Twitter and LinkedIn. One user alleged that he had been made to work for 20 hours a day at a top consultancy firm without being paid overtime.

“Work culture in India is horrid. Pay is dismal, exploitation is max [maximum]. There are zero repercussions and no remorse on the part of employers who routinely harass workers,” another user wrote, adding that managers are often praised for overworking and underpaying their employees.

A former EY employee criticised the work culture at the firm and alleged that employees were often “mocked” for leaving on time and “shamed” for enjoying weekends.

“Interns [are] given crazy workload, unrealistic timelines and [are] humiliated during reviews as it builds character for their future,” he wrote.

EY’s India chief, Rajiv Memani, has since said that the firm attaches the “highest importance” to the wellbeing of its employees. “I would like to affirm that the wellbeing of our people is my top-most priority and I will personally champion this objective,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

Perayil’s death isn’t the first incident that has brought India’s work culture under scrutiny. In October last year, Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy faced criticism for suggesting that young Indians should work 70-hour weeks to boost the country’s economic growth.

His views were backed by Ola’s India chief Bhavesh Aggarwal, who said that he didn’t believe in the concept of work-life balance because “if you are enjoying your work, you will find happiness in life also and work also, and both of them will be in harmony”.

In 2022, Shantanu Deshpande, founder of the Bombay Shaving Company, asked youngsters to stop “cribbing” about working hours and suggested that new recruits at any job should be prepared to work 18 hours a day for the first four to five years of their career.

But mental health experts and labour rights activists say that such demands are unfair and put employees under immense stress. In her letter, Perayil’s mother alleged that her daughter had experienced “anxiety and sleeplessness” soon after joining EY.

India is known to have one of the most overworked workforces globally. A recent report by the International Labour Organisation said half of India’s workforce worked for over 49 hours each week, making India the second country after Bhutan to have the longest working hours.

Labour economist Shyam Sunder said India’s work culture had shifted post-1990s with the rise of the service sector, leading firms to bypass labour laws to meet round-the-clock demands.

He added that the culture has now been “institutionalised” by firms but it has also been accepted by employees. “Even in business schools, students are tacitly told that working long hours to earn a high salary is normal and even desirable,” he said.

According to him, for there to be any real change in corporate culture, a “mindset shift” is necessary – one where both firms and employees approach work with a more mature outlook, viewing it as important, but not the only part and purpose of life.

“Till then, all the other steps by corporates, like offering period leave or partnering with mental health firms will remain supplementary at best and symbolic at worst,” he said.

Chandrasekhar Sripada, a professor at the Indian School of Business, agrees with this view. He said that toxic work culture was a “complex, multi-stake holder problem” and that everyone, from industry leaders to managers to employees and even society, would have to change the way they viewed productivity in order for there to be any real change.

“We’re still confusing hard work with productive work,” Mr Sripada said. “The point of technology is to reduce human work so why are working hours getting longer?”

“We need to start focussing on sustainable growth, not just from an environmental standpoint, but also from a labour rights perspective,” he added.

“Scandinavian countries have already created much gentler working environments, so there are models for India to follow. All it needs is willpower.”

Ordinarily, US District Judge Gary J Brown would have sent the man to the local federal jail to serve out his sentence for tax fraud.

But one thing stopped him: “The dangerous, barbaric conditions that have existed for some time at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.”

The notorious jail, commonly known as MDC, is in the spotlight once again due to its latest celebrity detainee. Last week, a New York judge ordered Sean “Diddy” Combs be held there after federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking, racketeering, and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has pleaded not guilty.

High-profile defendants like Mr Combs sometimes receive special protection when jailed, and the music mogul is reported to be in a section of MDC Brooklyn for detainees who require special protection.

Mr Combs is, according to local media reports, sharing a dormitory-style room there with the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who once ran a company worth billions but was convicted on mufltiple counts of fraud in March.

And because it is the only federal jail in New York City, where many high-profile cases are processed, the pair are just the latest in an extensive list of notable names to have passed through the facility’s doors. That list includes the rapper R Kelly as well as Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

But for many of MDC Brooklyn’s 1,200 current inmates, it’s a different story.

• An 11th lawsuit for Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs as he sits in jail
• Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs will stay in jail after judge refuses bail appeal
• Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs: Who is the US rapper accused of sex trafficking?

In an August sentencing decision, Judge Brown cited multiple cases of fellow jurists who had hesitated to send defendants and convicts to the jail due to the conditions.

“Allegations of inadequate supervision, unbridled assaults, and lack of sufficient medical care are supported by an increasing body of evidence, with certain instances that are irrefutable,” he said.

“Chaos reigns, along with uncontrolled violence,” Judge Brown added. His ruling included the case of a defendant who was stabbed multiple times but reported receiving no medical care, instead being locked in his cell for 25 days. The judge cited staffing shortages and worsening conditions after the Covid pandemic that forced the jail into lockdown.

If the Bureau of Prisons decided to send the defendant in the tax fraud case to MDC, the judge wrote, he would vacate the man’s sentence.

MDC Brooklyn was opened in the 1990s, and its issues stretch back years.

In 2019, an electrical fire in the dead of winter caused a blackout, plunging the facility into darkness and frigid conditions.

And in June 2020, an inmate, Jamel Floyd, died after being pepper sprayed by correctional officers. His family sued the federal government over his death. A review by the Department of Justice concluded there was “insufficient evidence” that prison authorities “engaged in administrative misconduct,” but did acknowledge that the use of pepper spray violated policy.

Judge Brown is not the only judge to harshly criticise the facility.

In January, Judge Jesse Furman of the Federal District Court in Manhattan refused to send a man who pleaded guilty in a drug case there because of its dangerous conditions.

After initially allowing the man, Gustavo Chavez, to await sentencing on supervised release, Judge Furman ultimately let him bypass MDC and report directly to the prison where he would serve out his sentence.

In July, 36-year-old Edwin Cordero died after he was injured in a fight while serving out a sentence at MDC.

• The charges against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs explained
• Diddy assault video cements fall of hip-hop icon

“The decrepit conditions are really fuelled by this sort of terrible conflation of circumstances,” Andrew Dalack, the lawyer for both Mr Cordero and Mr Chavez, told the BBC. “Overcrowding, understaffing and a lack of a political will to fix the conditions.”

As a Brooklyn-based public defender, Mr Dalack has represented numerous clients who have been sent to MDC. “It’s a really scary place to be,” he said.

After Mr Cordero’s death, US Congressman Dan Goldman, who represents the district where the Brooklyn facility is located, called for more federal oversight to address “chronic understaffing, perpetual solitary confinement and widespread violence”.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which manages the facility, said in a statement that it “takes seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintain the safety of correctional employees and the community”.

A spokesman for the bureau pointed to the creation of an urgent action team, which is seeking to address issues at MDC, and an ongoing effort to hire more staff and address a backlog of maintenance requests.

A February 2024 report compiled by the Federal Defenders office, where Mr Dalack works, attributed overcrowding issues to the closure of its troubled sister facility in Manhattan, which the government shut down in 2021 – two years after Jeffrey Epstein’s in-custody death at the facility.

• Watchdog finds serious failures at prison where Jeffrey Epstein died
• Jeffrey Epstein: Jail CCTV erased by ‘technical errors’

They also said the presence of drugs and other contraband contributes to the facility’s dangerous atmosphere.

The federal facility holds individuals who have been convicted of crimes, but a substantial portion of the population there is awaiting trial in the city’s federal courts, and have yet to be found innocent or guilty.

The conditions weighed on Mr Dalack’s clients, who were already facing the prospect of more permanent incarceration.

“It should not be the case that while your life is on the line and your liberty is on the line, that you have to be completely stripped of your humanity,” he said. “MDC Brooklyn has a way of really breaking people down, and making them feel less than human.”

The late leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, once famously called Cuba “the safest country in the world”.

In terms of the island’s low rates of violent crime and the scarcity of guns circulating among the civilian population, he may well have had a case for that title.

His critics, of course, responded that the low crime rate was achieved through intimidation, that Castro’s Cuba was – and still remains – a police state which brokered no criticism of its communist-led government, and which rode roughshod over its opponents’ human rights.

However it was done, few could deny that Cuba’s streets have traditionally been among the safest in the Americas.

Yet it doesn’t feel to Samantha González like she lives in the world’s safest nation. Her younger brother, an aspiring music producer called Jan Franco, was murdered two months ago in an apparent gang-related dispute.

From the low-income Havana neighbourhood of Cayo Hueso and just 19 years old when he was killed, Jan Franco was stabbed twice in the chest outside a recording studio, caught in the middle of an argument when someone pulled a knife.

“I still can’t understand it,” says Samantha, struggling to express her grief as she scrolls through old photos of her brother on her phone.

“He was the light of our family.”

Just 20 herself and mother of a one-year-old boy, Samantha says that Jan Franco was one of many young people to lose their lives in the streets in recent months:

“So many young people have been killed this year,” she explains.

“The violence is getting out of hand. They’re basically gangs, and they fall out with each other as gangs. That’s where it’s all coming from, these killings and deaths of young people.”

They often solve their quarrels with knives and machetes, she says.

“Almost no-one settles an argument with their fists anymore. It’s all knives, machetes, even guns. Things I just don’t understand,” her voice trails off.

The situation has been worsened by a new drug in Cuba called “quimico” – a cheap chemical high with a cannabis base. Samantha says that it’s increasingly popular among Cuban youth in the parks and on the streets.

Previously, even suggesting that Cuba had a problem with opioids and street gangs – especially to a foreign journalist – could land you in difficulties.

The Cuban authorities have always been fiercely protective of their island’s reputation as crime-free and quick to point out that the streets are demonstrably safer than those of most cities in the US. Anything that highlights Cuba’s social problems is generally painted as biased criticism of their socialist system or as anti-revolutionary fabrications originating from Miami or Washington.

However, such has been the public perception of a worsening crime rate, a perception shared by many Cubans on social media, that the authorities have openly addressed it on state television.

In August, an edition of nightly talk programme Mesa Redonda – in which Communist Party officials are invited on air to deliver the party line – was titled Cuba Against Drugs.

During the broadcast, Colonel Juan Carlos Poey Guerra, the head of the interior ministry’s anti-drug unit, acknowledged the existence, production and distribution of the new drug, químico, and its impact on Cuba’s youth. He insisted the authorities were tackling the issue.

In another edition, on crime, the government denied the situation was worsening, claiming only 9% of crimes in Cuba were violent and just 3% were murders.

However, critics question the transparency of the government’s statistics and say there’s no independent oversight of the bodies which produce them or the methodologies they use.

For its part, the government largely blames the old enemy, the United States, for both the existence of synthetic opioids in Cuba and for the decades-long US economic embargo on the island which they say is the reason some Cubans have resorted to crime.

In a rare interview, the vice-president of Cuba’s Supreme Court, Maricela Sosa Ravelo, told the BBC the problem was being blown out of proportion on social media. She refuted the suggestion that many crimes go unreported through a lack of public confidence in the police.

“In my 30 years as a judge and magistrate, I don’t think that the Cuban people lack confidence in their authorities,” she claimed, speaking inside the ornate Supreme Court building.

“In Cuba, the police have a high success rate in solving crimes. We don’t see people taking the law into their own hands – which happens in other parts of Latin America and elsewhere – which suggests the population trusts in the Cuban justice system,” she argued.

Again, though, that wasn’t the experience of another recent victim of opportunistic theft on Havana’s dimly lit streets.

Shyra is a transgender activist who is used to speaking out about rights in Cuba. She says that her story, of being robbed by a man brandishing a knife one evening, is common.

But it was the police response which disillusioned her the most.

“Just after I was attacked, I came across two motorcycle police in a side street,” Shyra recalls. Despite her obvious distress, the police ignored her pleas for help, she says.

“They openly told me: ‘We’re not here for stuff like that.’ It was such a shocking thing to hear because I told them where they could find the attacker, showed them which direction he was headed in, what he was wearing. But they just didn’t pay me any attention.”

In the small apartment she shares with her mother, Samantha González watches videos of her younger brother’s wake. A crowd of Jan Franco’s friends appeared outside his home and began singing the songs which he’d produced before his fledgling music career was cut short.

As his coffin was loaded onto the hearse, the mourners fell silent, except for the soft murmur of weeping and prayer.

Buried with him, and every young victim of violence on the island, is another piece of Cuba’s claim to be the world’s safest nation.

As Indian-administered Kashmir prepared for assembly elections earlier this month, a local MP returned home from a Delhi prison to campaign for his candidates. Who is he and why does his return matter to the region’s politics? Auqib Javeed reports from Srinagar.

Sheikh Abdul Rashid, who had been in jail since Article 370 was abrogated in 2019, was granted interim bail earlier this month on terror funding charges he denies.

The 57-year-old, who is popularly known as Engineer Rashid, has urged people to vote for his candidates instead of regional or national parties. His Awami Ittehad Party has fielded candidates on more than three dozen seats.

The high-stakes assembly elections are the first since the region’s autonomy was revoked in 2019. With 873 candidates across 97 constituencies in the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley and Hindu-majority Jammu, the elections have been described by federal officials as a proof of normalcy in a region long plagued by insurgency. The third and last phase of the polls will be held on Tuesday and votes will be counted on 8 October.

Kashmir’s politics, dominated by mainstream parties pledging allegiance to India, has had a history of individuals and groups seeking separation from the country or enhanced autonomy for Kashmir, with some of them supporting an armed movement to achieve that.

• Article 370: What happened with Kashmir and why it matters
• Kashmir: The complicated truth behind its ‘normality’

Some separatist groups in the past have also backed Pakistan’s role in Kashmir. India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir in full, but control only parts of it.

But this assembly election has seen participation of many former separatist leaders as well.

Rashid has chosen to be part of the democratic process but has been vocal against what he calls Delhi’s “heavy-handed” rule in Kashmir.

He is known for his fiery speeches, and leading protests in unconventional ways against alleged government excesses, often irking authorities.

He made waves in June when he defeated regional political heavyweight Omar Abdullah in parliamentary elections. While he was lodged in jail, his sons led an emotionally charged and successful campaign on his behalf.

But this time he is able to speak to voters directly and he has also smartly used social media to amplify his messages.

Within hours of being released on 11 September, Rashid told the media that he was going to fight against the removal of Article 370.

The article allowed the state its own constitution, a separate flag and freedom to make laws. Foreign affairs, defence and communications remained the preserve of the federal government.

“We don’t accept Prime Minister [Narendra Modi’s] decision taken on 5 August [2019],” he said, referring to the day when the autonomy was abrogated.

He then went live on Facebook, repeating similar messages. The hour-long speech currently has more than 2.5m views, 44,000 likes and 25,000 comments – an unusually high number for a regional politician.

Rashid’s popularity worries his regional opponents, who have termed him a “proxy” of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Two former chief ministers of the state and the heirs of leading regional parties, Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah, have publicly questioned his party’s funding and alleged that he was dividing voters to favour the BJP.

He has repeatedly denied the allegations. “If I were a BJP man, I wouldn’t have spent over five years in jail,” he told the BBC. “I won [almost] 500,000 votes in the general elections, how could I be dividing votes?”.

Prof Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a political analyst, said Rashid’s release from jail just days before the elections did give his opponents a pretext to accuse him of collusion with the BJP-run federal government in Delhi.

“Despite these allegations, his win in the 2024 parliamentary elections from jail has given him an unprecedented credibility in the eyes of the locals,” he said.

Rashid has also worked hard to carefully craft his image.

Unlike the valley’s prominent leaders who have established political lineages, Rashid has managed to establish an image of a “common man’s politician” who doesn’t shy away from taking on authorities.

In 2012, he attempted to bring dozens of dogs into the state secretariat as a protest against the government’s inaction on the growing canine menace in his constituency, where numerous dog bite incidents had been reported.

“I hope the ministers and bureaucracy now understand the seriousness of the issue,” he said at the time.

But Rashid’s bluntness and candour have also landed him in trouble.

In 2015, he hosted a “beef party” to protest a ban on the slaughter of cows, considered sacred by many Hindus, in several states. A day later, members of the BJP, then a part of the state’s ruling coalition, assaulted him in the assembly.

A few days later, members of a Hindu group outraged by the “beef party” attacked him at Delhi’s Press Club, dousing his face with ink as he protested the lynching of a Kashmiri truck driver accused of cow smuggling in Jammu.

Rashid’s unusual protests have often addressed the alleged human rights violations in the Kashmir valley, a charge that the federal government denies.

On International Human Rights Day in 2015, his party marched through Srinagar with a cow, a mule, a goat, and a dog, holding placards saying, “Animals have more rights than people in Kashmir.” He and other leaders were detained.

His family members say they are not surprised by his politics as he had a “rebellious nature” since childhood.

“He used to protest against the human rights violations, presence of military bunkers, forced labour by the army,” said his brother Khurshid Ahmad Sheikh.

In 2008, he resigned from his government job as an engineer to contest assembly elections, winning twice in a row as an independent candidate.

Once elected to the state assembly, he gained recognition across Kashmir for protesting against what he called the government’s “anti-people” policies, analysts say.

“The element of protest makes him popular. He has been a crowd-puller since he entered politics,” said Noor Mohammad Baba, a political analyst based in Kashmir.

His jail term has intensified public interest in his rallies, he added.

At a recent rally, an enthusiastic group of men assembled to listen to him. Some of them were curious onlookers hoping to see the man in the news, and some were his fans.

Did the allegations of Rashid being a “proxy of Delhi” bother them?

“Almost all the regional parties have been in an alliance with the BJP [in the past]. They aren’t in a position to allege him of complicity with the BJP,” said Rafiq Ahmad, a businessman. “People want to give Rashid a chance and see what he does.”

Rashid spoke and demanded a resolution to the Kashmir conflict and an end to the use of anti-terror laws to put Kashmiris in jail. Young men shouted in unison in support.

Within minutes, Rashid was on his way to his next public meeting.

Travelling nearly 10,000 miles by train, British photographer Katie Edwards crossed the United States capturing the landscape through a window.

The journey, from New York to San Francisco, via Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle, resulted in 20,000 photographs taken during 180 hours on the rails.

“I had assumed that the world was going to be full of exquisite moments and my job was simply to surrender to the train, its speed, direction and frame,” Edwards says.

But the reality saw dirty train windows and reflections that obscured the views.

Taking the photographs in a vestibule at the end of a carriage, Edwards taped a large bag to the opposite window to reduce the glare – though the train conductor was not so happy.

Towards the front of the train, her father, John, acted as a spotter, giving Edwards a brief warning of upcoming photo opportunities.

At one point, John shouted: “Deer,” through the phone.

“I wasn’t quick enough,” Edwards says.

“But if there was one deer, there would be more.

“Finally, my concentration paid off and I secured a shot of two little deer almost touching noses in front of a huge cliff face.

“I was very happy.”

A more unexpected message from John was simply: “Moony.”

At first, Edwards thought she had misheard but set about taking pictures anyway.

“I quickly looked back at my photos,” she says.

“There was indeed a perfect line of bottoms opposite the train.”

But while photographing the farmland of Illinois, Edwards missed a frame she wished she had shot.

“I had been standing at the window for hours, my feet were hurting and my eyes were glazing over,” she says.

“And an exquisite moment passed me by.

“A queue of army tanks were waiting at a crossing and, if that wasn’t enough, a baby deer was looking up at the first tank in fear or curiosity or both.

“Gone in a second – if I’d been concentrating, I could have caught that moment.”

Edwards describes each picture as a fragment of a larger narrative.

“The journey itself became a storyline that traversed different geographical and cultural landscapes,” she says.

An eight-hour delay meant Edwards found herself amid large open plains as the light faded towards the end of the day.

“I was able to see for hundreds of miles on either side and this created bizarre effects with the light as it hit specific strips of land in the expanse,” she says.

Returning to the UK meant long days of editing, reducing the thousands of pictures to just 20 for an exhibition at London’s Observatory Photography Gallery.

Laying all the images together created panoramic views of fields and stations, each elongated or contracted depending on the speed of the train.

“Looking at the mosaic of all the pictures, you can see strata as you move from one landscape to another,” Edwards says.

“This image was the very last one that I found in my search, discovered three months after it was taken, it almost didn’t make the exhibition.

“The rungs of the ladder make me feel as if I could climb the mountain in just a few steps.”

Portrait of America is at London’s Observatory Photography Gallery from 26 September to 25 January.

More of Edwards’s work can be seen on Instagram.

Often called “white gold” and the key component in rechargeable batteries, the metal lithium is so light that it floats on water, but its price has sunk like a stone over the past year.

Due to a combination of falling global sales of electric vehicles, and a world oversupply of lithium ore, the cost of the main lithium compound has fallen by more than three quarters since June 2023.

This decline has had a particularly hard impact on Australia, because it is the world’s largest producer of lithium ore, accounting for 52% of the global total last year.

Australia also has the second-largest reserves of the mineral after Chile, with the vast majority in Western Australia, and a smaller amount in the Northern Territory.

The sharp decline in lithium prices has led to mine shutdowns. Adelaide-based Core Lithium announced back in January that due to “weak market conditions” it was suspending mining at its Finniss site near Darwin, with the loss of 150 jobs.

Then in August, US firm Albemarle said it would be scaling back production at its Kemerton lithium processing plant, located some 170km (100 miles) south of Perth. This is expected to lead to more than 300 redundancies.

Arcadium Lithium followed suit this month, announcing that it would be mothballing its Mt Cattlin mine in Western Australia, blaming low prices. The firm’s shares are listed in both the US and Australia.

Yet as some producers are putting work on hold, others are expanding theirs, confident that global demand for lithium – and prices – will bounce back.

Pilbara Minerals is one such firm. The Perth-based miner aims to boost its lithium ore production by an additional 50% over the next year.

“What we’ve learned historically from lithium pricing is that it can change, and it can change rapidly,” managing director Dale Henderson recently told ABC News. “It doesn’t faze us that much because we know the long-term outlook is fantastic.”

This confidence is echoed by Kingsley Jones, founder, and chief investment officer at Canberra-based investment firm Jevons Global, which monitors the mining and metals sectors. “Lithium remains very strategic to the energy transition,” he tells the BBC.

“Storage batteries for electricity is a big growth area,” he adds, pointing to the increased need for batteries to store the power generated by solar and wind power.

But some analysts have warned that oversupply will keep the market under pressure until at least 2028.

Another company moving ahead with increased lithium ore production in Australia is Perth-based Liontown Resources. In July, it started production at its Kathleen Valley mine, located 420 miles (680km) north-east of Western Australia’s capital.

The facility gets 60% of its energy from its own solar panel farm.

Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, has praised the site’s green approach, and his government has invested $A230m ($156m; £118m) in the facility.

This move towards the use of renewables is also good news in financial terms for producers in Australia, as it reduces their dependence on buying expensive diesel, which is currently the main fuel that they use to generate electricity.

Extracting lithium ore in the country requires three times more energy than in other big producing nations such as Chile and Argentina, says Prof Rick Valenta, the director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute at the University of Queensland.

Extraction in Australia requires additional energy because the lithium ore, also known as spodumene, has to be mined and removed from solid rock. Whereas in Chile and Argentina the ore is produced by evaporating it from brine collected from under the countries’ vast salt plains.

“As Australia has hard-rock mining operations, they use more energy and produce more emissions than brine operations,” Prof Valenta adds.

The form of lithium that Australia exports – almost all of which goes to China – is partially processed ore, called spodumene concentrate.

Prices of this have mirrored the sharp fall of refined lithium. One report this month said that the price of spodumene had hit its lowest level since August 2021.

Chinese companies refine the spodumene into solid lithium, and into the two lithium compounds used in batteries – lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate.

This is where the real money is to be made, because a tonne of lithium carbonate is currently around 72,500 yuan ($10,280; £7,720) compared with just $747 (£630) for the same weight of spodumene concentrate.

Given that price differential, Australian mining firms have unsurprisingly been moving to build their own lithium refineries instead of just exporting almost all spodumene, as is the case currently. In 2022-23, 98% was exported as spodumene concentrate.

The first refined lithium to be commercially produced in Australia happened back in 2022, when Perth-based IGO announced that it was making battery-grade lithium hydroxide at its Kwinana Refinery in Western Australia. It co-owns the facility with Chinese firm Tianqi Lithium.

Meanwhile, another Australian miner, Covalent Lithium, is building its own lithium refinery, also in Western Australia. And Albemarle has its refinery, albeit one currently reducing its output.

Some commentators welcome the development of lithium refining in Australia, saying it will help to reduce China’s dominance of the global market for the metal. China currently accounts for 60% of all lithium refining.

However, Kingsley Jones says that Australia needs to be more open to embracing Chinese investment in the lithium sector. He points out that the Australian government has, in his view, “adopted a strategy, we think unwisely, to preference investment from countries other than China” in the lithium sector in recent years.

This has come as relations between the two countries have cooled since 2020. Last year, Canberra even blocked the sale of an Australian lithium miner to a Chinese firm.

The government said at the time that it was simply following the advice of the country’s Foreign Investment Review Board.

Mr Jones adds: “It’s an excellent example of how to shoot yourself in the foot as a producer. You tell the biggest buyer to go away. So, they do.”

Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources did not respond to a request for a comment.

As Australia aims to become more of a lithium refiner, government scientists are continuing to research ways to do this in a more environmentally friendly way. A code, which if cracked, could make the country one of the greenest producers of the metal. Currently the process releases a lot of poisonous chlorine gas.

“There is only one industrial method, and it has several drawbacks,” says Dongmei Liu, a research scientist at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO.

“The process is very expensive and not very efficient. Most importantly, it also produces chlorine gas. It has severe environmental issues.”

She and her team are instead working on a new process called “shock quenching”. It involves the extreme cooling of lithium vapour, and Dr Lui says it “avoids the chlorine gas emissions”.

While Australia hopes to make its mineral industries less polluting, it also wants to recycle more.

Lithium Australia is a listed company that sorts and processes batteries that have come to the end of their lives, to extract their lithium and other metals for reuse.

“Global commodities prices place economic pressure on lithium, so creating a circular battery industry will benefit Australia by ensuring we have the sovereign capability to produce and recycle our own batteries,” says Lithium Australia chief executive Simon Linge.

“If Australia is to establish a battery manufacturing industry, we must first ensure that no end-of-life lithium battery is being sent to landfill or exported to be recycled in some other country.”

Thailand’s king has signed a marriage equality bill into law, making the country the first in South East Asia to recognise same-sex unions.

The bill cleared the Senate in June but required royal endorsement to become law. It was published in the Royal Gazette on Tuesday and will come into effect on 22 January next year.

Activists hailed the move as historic – it marks the culmination of years of campaigning for marriage equality.

Thailand has long been seen as a relative haven for the LGBTQ+ community in a region where such attitudes are rare.

The new law uses gender-neutral terms in place of “husbands”, “wives”, “men” and “women”. And it grants same-sex couples adoption and inheritance rights.

“Today we’re not only getting to write our names in marriage certificates, but we are also writing a page in history… that tells us that love never set a condition of who we were born to be,” Ann Chumaporn, a longtime LGBTQ+ activist and co-founder of the Bangkok Pride movement, told the BBC.

“It’s a triumph of equality and human dignity.”

She said she plans to organise a mass wedding for more than 1,000 LGBTQ+ couples on 22 January.

“[The legal recognition] means we are fully accepted and can live our lives without conditions or compromises,” said advertising strategist Kwankaow Koosakulnirund.

“Thailand’s LGBTQ+ community can now look toward a future beyond relationships, embracing the sense of pride that this law brings,” he said.

“We are all delighted and excited. We’ve been fighting for our rights for over 10 years, and now it’s finally happening,” another activist, Siritata Ninlapruek, told AFP news agency.

Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra posted on X: “Congratulations on everyone’s love. #LoveWins.”

Former PM Srettha Thavisin, who has been vocal in his support for the bill, also applauded the development as a “significant step” for Thailand.

“Equity and equality have become concrete in the Thai society. Gender diversity will eventually be fully accepted. Congratulations,” he wrote on X.

When the law comes into effect, Thailand will become only the third place in Asia, after Taiwan and Nepal, where same-sex couples can get married.

In 2019, Taiwan’s parliament became the first in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage. Nepal registered its first same-sex union in November last year, five months after its Supreme Court ruled in favour of it.

This was just one month after India’s top court had ruled against it, leaving the decision to the government, which said it would set up a panel to decide on more legal rights for same-sex couples.

Singapore scrapped a colonial-era law that banned gay sex in 2022, but also amended its constitution to prevent the courts from challenging the definition of marriage as one between a man and a woman.

The murder of a 19-year-old female student in an exclusive neighbourhood of Paris is fuelling new calls from the French right for tougher action on immigration.

The body of the young woman, named only as Philippine, was found on Saturday, half-buried in the Bois de Boulogne park on the western edge of the capital.

She had last been seen on Friday lunchtime a few hundred metres away, as she left the Paris-Dauphine university campus where she was studying economics.

The suspected killer was traced to Geneva, where he was arrested on Tuesday and awaits deportation to France.

He is a 22 year-old Moroccan man who was released from detention in France earlier this month after serving five years for raping a student in 2019.

Named by French media as Taha O, he was the subject of an expulsion order from France, which had not been carried out.

For France’s hardline new interior minister Bruno Retailleau, it is a first test after he took office last week promising that his top three priorities would be to “establish order, establish order and establish order.”

“It is up to us as public officials to … change our legal arsenal in order to protect the French,” he said on the X social media platform.

The far-right National Rally (RN) seized on the murder as more evidence of the laxity of the French judicial system.

“This migrant had no right to be here, but he was able to offend again in total impunity. Our justice is too lenient; our state is dysfunctional. It is time for the government to act,” said the RN’s president, Jordan Bardella.

With more than 120 members of parliament, the RN has leverage over the minority government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier because it can decide at any time to support a vote of no confidence and potentially bring it down.

Some left-wing politicians joined calls for greater effectiveness in carrying out expulsion orders.

The suspect “should have gone straight from prison to plane”, said Socialist party leader Olivier Faure.

Currently fewer than 10% of French expulsion orders are carried out, according to government figures.

Sandrine Rousseau of the Ecologists said the murder was a “femicide” which should be “punished severely”. But she warned that the far right would “exploit it to spread its racist and xenophobic hate”.

Philippine’s disappearance led to an alert on a phone app called The Sorority, whose network of members are pledged to come to the help of women in distress.

Philippine did not have the app, but The Sorority said it issued a “missing persons notice” on Saturday to encourage members to join the search.

Philippine was on her way home to her parents’ house west of Paris when she disappeared. She was described as a quiet, model student by her colleagues and was involved in the scouting movement.

Her killing has raised fears about safety in the Bois de Boulogne, which abuts the expensive areas of Paris’s 16th (district).

The park has long been a centre of prostitution but local residents say parts have become increasingly frightening in recent years, because of the presence of drug-addicts and other suspicious characters.

Eswatini’s main opposition leader has been poisoned as part of an assassination attempt and is being treated in hospital, his party says.

Mlungisi Makhanya, 46, has been living in exile in neighbouring South Africa for the last two years, saying he fears for his life at home following a violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy.

“Our president has been stabilised but he is still in a critical condition,” the People’s United Democratic Movement (Pudemo) said.

Eswatini spokesman Alpheous Nxumalo denied state involvement, saying the “government does not kill or poison suspects”.

Pudemo says the attempt on its leader’s life comes ahead of planned protests next month calling for multi-party elections.

The country, formerly known as Swaziland, allows independent candidates to stand for parliament but does not allow political parties to participate.

King Mswati III has been on the throne since 1986 and rules by decree. He has been criticised for his extravagant lifestyle and is regularly accused of not allowing any dissent, which his government denies.

Last year, Thulani Rudolf Maseko, a human rights lawyer, who was opposed to the king, was killed in his home in the capital, Mbabane, sparking widespread condemnation.

In September 2022, Makhanya’s home in Eswatini was set alight in an alleged fire bomb attack by state agents. He now lives in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, with his family.

• What does this activist’s death mean for Eswatini?
• Zuma’s daughter marrying polygamous king ‘for love’

Makhanya leads Pudemo, one of the leading pro-democracy parties which are theoretically allowed, but banned from participating in elections.

He was allegedly poisoned in the early hours of Tuesday inside his house in Pretoria by an unnamed “young boy”, who Pudemo said was used as an “agent of evil intent by Swazi government”.

Makwanya was rushed to a Pretoria hospital escorted by the South African police, the Swaziland News website reported. He was later moved to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), in a critical but stable condition, it added.

He reportedly informed police and doctors that he had been poisoned and robbed of his cell phones.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, Wandile Dludlu, the Pudemo deputy president, said an “extremely dangerous and fatal” pesticide poison was used in the incident.

“It is encouraging that the president has survived a day,” Dludlu added.

“It was an assassination attempt on the life of our leader.”

This was rejected by the Eswatini government.

“Government, through the law enforcement agencies – that adheres to a strict code of ethics and professionalism – only apprehend suspects and bring them to Justice, and they are brought to justice ‘alive’, not ‘dead’,” Nxumalo said in a statement.

The Pudemo party has appealed for international support to ensure Makhanya’s security and that of his family while in hospital.

The Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN), a group of Swazis living in South Africa, condemned what it termed a “bold attack” and a “clear assassination attempt” against Makhanya.

It called on the South African government to take action against Swazi state agents it said were targeting exiled pro-democracy activists “fighting for freedom” .

Opposition parties have accused security agents of killing dozens of protesters who have blamed the lack of development in the country on the current political system.

In 2021, student-led protests that began over alleged police brutality morphed into calls for political change. At least 46 people died in a series of clashes between the security forces and demonstrators, according to Human Rights Watch.

The government has disputed this figure and said that the police were responding to violent attacks.

“This is a political fight between the oppressed masses and the traditional autocratic monarch,” Dludlu said, vowing that Pudemo would proceed with next month’s protests as planned.

• The election in a kingdom where parties are banned
• Why people in Eswatini are protesting
• Find out more about Eswatini

The union representing thousands of striking Boeing workers says a survey of its members shows they are “not interested” in the aviation giant’s latest pay offer.

“Many comments expressed that the offer was inadequate,” the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) said in a post on X.

It comes after Boeing made a new offer earlier this week to striking workers, which proposed a 30% pay rise over four years.

BBC News has requested a statement from Boeing in response to the IAM announcement.

“The survey results from yesterday were overwhelmingly clear, almost as loud as the first offer: members are not interested in the company’s latest offer that was sent through the media,” the IAM post said.

On Monday, Boeing made what it called its “best and final” pay offer, which included the reinstatement of a performance bonus, improved retirement benefits and a one-off $6,000 (£4,470) bonus for signing a new pay deal.

The company said the offer was dependent on it being ratified by union members by midnight pacific time on Friday 27 September (7:00 GMT on Saturday 28 September).

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

It also said the company’s deadline did not give it enough time to organise a vote by its members.

Boeing denied that it had not informed IAM representatives about the offer, and said it would give the union more time, as well as logistical support, to ballot its members.

More than 30,000 Boeing workers have been on strike since 13 September after rejecting a 25% pay rise offer.

Union members – who produce planes including the 737 Max and 777 – voted overwhelmingly to reject the offer and back strike action until an agreement could be reached.

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

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

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

A zoo in Finland will return two giant pandas to China eight years early, saying it can no longer afford to look after them.

Lumi and Pyry were brought to Finland in 2018, after the two countries signed an agreement to protect the animals.

They were meant to stay in the Nordic country for 15 years, but will be sent home in November – with Ähtäri Zoo blaming inflation and debt linked to the Covid pandemic for the pandas’ eviction.

It also said the zoo spent €1.5m (£1.2m) a year on the pandas’ upkeep, as well as more than €8m on their enclosure.

Mahrko Haekosky, curator at Ähtäri Zoo, said the €1.5m upkeep was “much more than all the other species combined”.

It included a keeper required to stay with them at all times, a preservation fee to China and imported bamboo.

“It’s a good thing for the zoo because they were so expensive,” but the pandas had been “doing really well, so it’s a pity”, said Mr Haekosky.

“They’re really nice to work with.”

Another factor in the decision to return the pandas was the Finnish government rejecting pleas for state funding last year.

“They thought the pandas would bring more visitors, and that it was a good investment – turns out it wasn’t so”, said Mr Haekosky.

The zoo revealed last year that it was discussing their return.

Lumi and Pyry will soon go into a month-long quarantine before they are shipped back to China.

A spokesperson for Finland’s foreign ministry said the pandas’ return was a business decision that did not involve the government, and that it should not impact relations between Finland and China.

Finland’s Chinese embassy, meanwhile, told the Reuters news agency that while efforts had been made to try and help the zoo, a joint decision was eventually made to send the animals back.

China sends pandas to foreign zoos to strengthen its trading ties, relationships and image abroad – termed ‘panda diplomacy’.

One person has died after a gunman hijacked a Los Angeles bus on Wednesday, sparking a sprawling police chase that ended with a Swat team storming the vehicle.

The armed suspect boarded the Metro bus, which had two other passengers on board, in South Los Angeles at around 01:00 local time (08:00 GMT).

Police gave pursuit as the hijacker forced the bus driver at gunpoint to steer the vehicle through traffic for the next hour.

It is the latest violent incident on the Los Angeles transit system, which has seen a number of shootings and stabbings this year.

In Wednesday’s incident, the driver pressed a panic button, activating a “911 call police” message to flash on the light display at the front of the bus.

Police disabled the vehicle by deploying spike strips at a downtown intersection after it had travelled more than 7 miles (11km).

A Swat team deployed flash-bang grenades as they boarded the bus and arrested the suspect.

A man was found inside with multiple gunshot wounds, and he was pronounced dead in hospital. The other passenger was not injured.

Police said the suspect had boarded the bus, argued with the driver and shot a passenger.

TV news footage showed the bus driver climbing out of a window on the vehicle to escape.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority said the driver was unharmed.

It is not the first such incident on the city’s transit system this year.

In March, one person was injured when a man hijacked a bus which crashed into a hotel and several vehicles.

Mayor Karen Bass called in May for security to be beefed up on the city’s bus and train routes.

China says it carried out a rare test-firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into international waters, sparking protests from neighbouring countries.

The launch on Wednesday – its first in more than 40 years – was “routine” and not aimed at any country or target, according to Beijing. Chinese media reported the government also gave “relevant countries” notice.

But Japan said it had not received a warning and expressed concerns, along with Australia and New Zealand.

The launch contributes to tensions across the Indo-Pacific region, with analysts saying it highlights China’s increased long-range nuclear capabilities.

The US warned last year that China has built up its nuclear arsenal as part of a defence upgrade. An intercontinental ballistic missile can travel more 5,500km – putting China within striking range of the US mainland and Hawaii.

But Beijing’s arsenal is still estimated at less than a fifth of the size of the US’s and Russia’s, and China has long maintained that its nuclear maintainance is only about deterrence.

On Wednesday, Beijing announced that the long-range missile was fired at 08:44 local time (04:44 GMT). It carried a dummy warhead and landed in the designated area – believed to be in the South Pacific.

Beijing’s defence ministry added the test launch was “routine” and part of its “annual training”.

But analysts said China was last known to have test-fired an ICBM internationally in the 1980s. Typically, it tests internally – having previously fired ICBMs west into the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang region.

“This sort of testing is not unusual for other countries, including the United States, but is for China,” nuclear missile analyst Ankit Panda told the BBC.

China’s “ongoing nuclear modernisation” already has resulted in substantial changes, he said. This launch now appears to also show a change in its approach.

It has sparked immediate reaction from other countries. Japan said it had received “no notice” and expressed “serious concern” about Beijing’s military build-up.

Meanwhile, Australia said the action was “destabilising and raises the risk of miscalculation in the region” and that it had sought “an explanation” from Beijing. New Zealand called it “an unwelcome and concerning development”.

Mr Panda said he doesn’t believe China’s actions were primarily designed to send a political message – “but no doubt this will be a stark reminder to the region and to the US that nuclear dynamics in Asia are quickly changing”.

Other analysts went further, saying it was another wake-up call for the US and its allies in the region.

“To Washington, the message is that direct intervention in a conflict across the Taiwan Strait would involve the American homeland being vulnerable to attack,” said Leif-Eric Easley, an international relations professor at Ewha Women’s University in South Korea.

For US allies in Asia, the “provocative test… demonstrates China’s capabilities to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously,” he added.

“Timing is everything,” Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, wrote on X.

“[China’s] statement claims the launch does not target any country, but there are high-levels of tension between China and Japan, Philippines, and of course perpetual tension with Taiwan.”

While the relationship between Beijing and Washington has improved in the past year, China’s increasing assertiveness in the region remains a sticking point. Tensions have ramped up between China and the Philippines as their ships have repeatedly collided in disputed waters.

Last month, Japan scrambled fighter jets after it accused a Chinese spy plane of breaching its air space, a move that it called “utterly unacceptable”.

Beijing’s relationship with self-governed Taiwan is another source of strain.

Taiwan’s defence ministry said earlier on Wednesday that China had been carrying out “intensive” missile firing and other drills recently. The same statement noted that it detected 23 Chinese military aircraft operating around Taiwan on “long-range missions”.

Beijing routinely sends ships and aircraft into Taiwanese waters and airspace, called a “greyzone warfare” tactic meant to normalise the incursions.

In July, China suspended its nuclear arms control talks with Washington, in retaliation for the US’s continued arms sales to Taiwan.

The US last year warned of China’s nuclear modernisation although its numbers still far short of Washington’s. The Pentagon estimated that China has more than 500 operational nuclear warheads in its arsenal, of which approximately 350 are ICBMs.

The report projected that China will reach over 1,000 warheads by 2030; the US and Russia each say they possess more than 5,000 warheads.

There also have been conflicts around the Chinese military’s Rocket Force, the elite unit managing its nuclear arsenal. An aggressive anti-corruption campaign led to the firing of two of its leaders last year.

Allies including the US, UK and EU have called for a temporary ceasefire in Lebanon, following an escalation in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

The 12-strong bloc proposed an immediate 21-day pause in fighting “to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement” and a ceasefire in Gaza.

In a joint statement, they said the hostilities were “intolerable” and presented an “unacceptable risk of a broader regional escalation” that was neither in the interest of the people of Israel or Lebanon.

It comes after Israel’s military chief told troops on Wednesday that extensive air strikes in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah could pave the way for them to “enter enemy territory”.

The remarks by Lt Gen Halevi are the plainest indication yet from a senior figure that a ground invasion into Lebanon may be imminent.

The joint statement was signed by the US, Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and Qatar.

It followed a meeting of world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York.

A separate joint statement by US President Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron said it was time for a settlement “that ensures safety and security to enable civilians to return to their homes”.

The current hostilities threaten “a much broader conflict, and harm to civilians”, they said.

“We therefore have worked together in recent days on a joint call for a temporary ceasefire to give diplomacy a chance to succeed and avoid further escalations across the border.”

President Biden briefly spoke to reporters at the White House on Wednesday evening, saying there is “significant support from Europe as well as the Arab nations … it’s important the war does not widen”.

A senior administration official told the BBC neither Israel nor Lebanon has accepted the proposal – although the US is in touch with both governments. Official responses are expected within hours.

The official said a 21-day pause in fighting would be a “sustained phase” that would allow for further negotiations to take place to reach a “complicated agreement”.

They added that the US is negotiating with Lebanon’s government – rather than Hezbollah. It would then be the responsibility of the Lebanese government to engage with “non-state actors”.

Earlier in New York, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged an immediate ceasefire, and said “hell is breaking loose”.

Lebanese PM Najib Mikati said his country is “facing a blatant violation of our sovereignty and human rights through the brutal practices of the Israeli enemy”.

He added he hoped he could leave the UN session with a “serious solution” to “put pressure on Israel to achieve an immediate ceasefire on all fronts”. Asked by Reuters if a ceasefire can be reached soon, he responded: “Hopefully, yes.”

Also speaking earlier, Israel’s envoy to the UN, Danny Danon, said it was grateful for diplomatic efforts to avoid escalation but would “use all means at our disposal, in accordance with international law, to achieve our aims”.

He said Israel “does not seek a full-scale war”, and has made its desire for peace “clear”.

Mr Danon added that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu will arrive in New York on Thursday, have bilateral meetings later that day and speak at the General Assembly the following morning.

More than 600 people have been reported killed across Lebanon since Monday, when Israel began an intense air campaign to destroy what it said was infrastructure built up by Hezbollah since they last fought a war in 2006.

Another 90,000 people in Lebanon have been newly displaced, adding to the 110,000 who had fled their homes before the escalation, according to the UN. Almost 40,000 are living in shelters across the country.

Nearly a year of deadly cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza has also displaced around 70,000 people in northern Israel, whose safe return the Israeli government and military say they want to ensure.

Hezbollah says it is attacking Israel in support of its Palestinian ally, Hamas, and will not stop until there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Both groups are backed by Iran and proscribed as terrorist organisations by Israel, the UK and other countries.

Cross-border fighting continued on Wednesday, with Hezbollah saying it had targeted the headquarters of Israel’s Mossad spy agency with a missile fired towards Tel Aviv – the first time Hezbollah has targeted the heavily populated area.

It was intercepted by air defences and there were no reports of damage or casualties.

Hezbollah also fired dozens more rockets into northern Israel, injuring two.

Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad told reporters that the strikes had killed at least 51 people and injured 223, without saying how many were civilians or combatants.

It comes after an unprecedented wave of attacks on Hezbollah.

Last week, 39 people were killed and thousands were wounded when pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members to communicate exploded in two waves across Lebanon. Israel is widely believed to be responsible for the attacks.

Then, an Israeli air strike on Friday on the group’s stronghold of Dahieh, in southern Beirut, essentially wiped out the chain of command of its main fighting unit, the Radwan Force. The group confirmed that one of its top military leaders, Ibrahim Aqil, was among 55 people killed.

Vladimir Putin says Russia would consider an attack from a non-nuclear state that was backed by a nuclear-armed one to be a “joint attack”, in what could be construed as a threat to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine.

In key remarks on Wednesday night, the Russian president said his government was considering changing the rules and preconditions around which Russia would use its nuclear arsenal.

Ukraine is a non-nuclear state that receives military support from the US and other nuclear-armed countries.

His comments come as Kyiv seeks approval to use long-range Western missiles against military sites in Russia.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has travelled to the US this week and is due to meet US President Joe Biden in Washington on Thursday, where Kyiv’s request is expected to be top of the agenda.

Ukraine has pushed into Russian territory this year and wants to target bases inside Russia which it says are sending missiles into Ukraine.

Responding to Putin’s remarks, Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak said Russia “no longer has anything other than nuclear blackmail to intimidate the world”.

Putin has threatened the use of nuclear weapons before. Ukraine has criticised it as “nuclear sabre-rattling” to deter its allies from providing further support.

Russian ally China has also called for calm, with reports President Xi Jinping has warned Putin against using nuclear arms.

But on Wednesday, after a meeting with his Security Council, Putin announced the proposed radical expansion.

A new nuclear doctrine would “clearly set the conditions for Russia to transition to using nuclear weapons,” he warned – and said such scenarios included conventional missile strikes against Moscow.

He said that Russia would consider such a “possibility” of using nuclear weapons if it detected the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft and drones into its territory, which presented a “critical threat” to the country’s sovereignty.

He added: “It is proposed that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation.”

The country’s nuclear arms were “the most important guarantee of security of our state and its citizens”, the Kremlin leader said.

Since the end of World War Two, nuclear-armed states have engaged in a policy of deterrence, which is based on the idea that if warring states were to launch major nuclear strikes it would lead to mutually assured destruction.

But there are also tactical nuclear weapons which are smaller warheads designed to destroy targets without widespread radioactive fallout.

In June, Putin delivered a warning to European countries supporting Ukraine, saying Russia had “many more [tactical nuclear weapons] than there are on the European continent, even if the United States brings theirs over.”

“Europe does not have a developed [early warning system],” he added. “In this sense they are more or less defenceless.”

At the time he had hinted of changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine – the document which sets out the conditions under which Moscow would use nuclear weapons.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is facing federal criminal charges, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Adams, 64, was elected to lead the most populous US city nearly three years ago on a promise to rein in crime.

But he and a string of top officials in his orbit have faced growing scrutiny as part of multiple federal corruption probes.

The indictment remains sealed but would make Adams, 64, the first mayor in city history to be charged while in office.

“I always knew that if I stood my ground for New Yorkers that I would be a target – and a target I became,” Adams said in a statement to the BBC.

“If I am charged, I am innocent and I will fight this with every ounce of my strength and spirit.”

Federal prosecutors are expected to unseal the indictment on Thursday, when Adams will make an initial court appearance, CBS News reports.

The reported charges come less than a year after federal agents seized Adams’ electronic devices and searched the home of Brianna Suggs, his chief fundraiser.

It was later revealed that the US attorney’s office in Manhattan was looking into whether Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign team conspired with the government of Turkey to funnel illegal donations into the campaign.

The New York Times reported on Monday that prosecutors subpoenaed the campaign and the mayor’s office for information related to five other countries: Israel, China, Qatar, South Korea and Uzbekistan.

Adams has remained steadfast that he would remain in office even as a growing list of officials have called for his resignation. Earlier Wednesday, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – a popular figure in left-leaning New York – joined that list.

“I do not see how Mayor Adams can continue governing New York City,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “For the good of the city, he should resign.”

Ocasio-Cortez referenced a recent “flood of resignations and vacancies” that she said were threatening city government’s ability to function.

Adams’s reported indictment comes weeks after federal agents seized electronic devices belonging to three people closely affiliated with him – schools chancellor David Banks, his brother Deputy Mayor Phil Banks, and his fiancée Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright.

In a surprise announcement on Tuesday, David Banks announced he would be stepping down from his role at the end of the year.

The US attorney’s office in Manhattan is investigating another Banks brother, Terence, over a possible bribery scheme involving his consulting firm and city contracts.

Prosecutors in that office are also looking into bribery claims against the twin brother of former New York Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who resigned earlier this month weeks after his phone was seized by federal agents.

Acting Police Commissioner Thomas Donlon had his own homes searched last Friday.

In the past two weeks, the mayor’s chief legal counsel and the city health commissioner have also stepped down.

Adams, who is only the second black person to run New York City, is facing a growing list of Democratic challengers ahead of his re-election bid next year.

New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, a close ally who has yet to comment on the indictment, has the power to remove Adams from office.

If Adams’ tenure ends prematurely, Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, is next in line to become the city’s acting mayor.

Often called “white gold” and the key component in rechargeable batteries, the metal lithium is so light that it floats on water, but its price has sunk like a stone over the past year.

Due to a combination of falling global sales of electric vehicles, and a world oversupply of lithium ore, the cost of the main lithium compound has fallen by more than three quarters since June 2023.

This decline has had a particularly hard impact on Australia, because it is the world’s largest producer of lithium ore, accounting for 52% of the global total last year.

Australia also has the second-largest reserves of the mineral after Chile, with the vast majority in Western Australia, and a smaller amount in the Northern Territory.

The sharp decline in lithium prices has led to mine shutdowns. Adelaide-based Core Lithium announced back in January that due to “weak market conditions” it was suspending mining at its Finniss site near Darwin, with the loss of 150 jobs.

Then in August, US firm Albemarle said it would be scaling back production at its Kemerton lithium processing plant, located some 170km (100 miles) south of Perth. This is expected to lead to more than 300 redundancies.

Arcadium Lithium followed suit this month, announcing that it would be mothballing its Mt Cattlin mine in Western Australia, blaming low prices. The firm’s shares are listed in both the US and Australia.

Yet as some producers are putting work on hold, others are expanding theirs, confident that global demand for lithium – and prices – will bounce back.

Pilbara Minerals is one such firm. The Perth-based miner aims to boost its lithium ore production by an additional 50% over the next year.

“What we’ve learned historically from lithium pricing is that it can change, and it can change rapidly,” managing director Dale Henderson recently told ABC News. “It doesn’t faze us that much because we know the long-term outlook is fantastic.”

This confidence is echoed by Kingsley Jones, founder, and chief investment officer at Canberra-based investment firm Jevons Global, which monitors the mining and metals sectors. “Lithium remains very strategic to the energy transition,” he tells the BBC.

“Storage batteries for electricity is a big growth area,” he adds, pointing to the increased need for batteries to store the power generated by solar and wind power.

But some analysts have warned that oversupply will keep the market under pressure until at least 2028.

Another company moving ahead with increased lithium ore production in Australia is Perth-based Liontown Resources. In July, it started production at its Kathleen Valley mine, located 420 miles (680km) north-east of Western Australia’s capital.

The facility gets 60% of its energy from its own solar panel farm.

Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, has praised the site’s green approach, and his government has invested $A230m ($156m; £118m) in the facility.

This move towards the use of renewables is also good news in financial terms for producers in Australia, as it reduces their dependence on buying expensive diesel, which is currently the main fuel that they use to generate electricity.

Extracting lithium ore in the country requires three times more energy than in other big producing nations such as Chile and Argentina, says Prof Rick Valenta, the director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute at the University of Queensland.

Extraction in Australia requires additional energy because the lithium ore, also known as spodumene, has to be mined and removed from solid rock. Whereas in Chile and Argentina the ore is produced by evaporating it from brine collected from under the countries’ vast salt plains.

“As Australia has hard-rock mining operations, they use more energy and produce more emissions than brine operations,” Prof Valenta adds.

The form of lithium that Australia exports – almost all of which goes to China – is partially processed ore, called spodumene concentrate.

Prices of this have mirrored the sharp fall of refined lithium. One report this month said that the price of spodumene had hit its lowest level since August 2021.

Chinese companies refine the spodumene into solid lithium, and into the two lithium compounds used in batteries – lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate.

This is where the real money is to be made, because a tonne of lithium carbonate is currently around 72,500 yuan ($10,280; £7,720) compared with just $747 (£630) for the same weight of spodumene concentrate.

Given that price differential, Australian mining firms have unsurprisingly been moving to build their own lithium refineries instead of just exporting almost all spodumene, as is the case currently. In 2022-23, 98% was exported as spodumene concentrate.

The first refined lithium to be commercially produced in Australia happened back in 2022, when Perth-based IGO announced that it was making battery-grade lithium hydroxide at its Kwinana Refinery in Western Australia. It co-owns the facility with Chinese firm Tianqi Lithium.

Meanwhile, another Australian miner, Covalent Lithium, is building its own lithium refinery, also in Western Australia. And Albemarle has its refinery, albeit one currently reducing its output.

Some commentators welcome the development of lithium refining in Australia, saying it will help to reduce China’s dominance of the global market for the metal. China currently accounts for 60% of all lithium refining.

However, Kingsley Jones says that Australia needs to be more open to embracing Chinese investment in the lithium sector. He points out that the Australian government has, in his view, “adopted a strategy, we think unwisely, to preference investment from countries other than China” in the lithium sector in recent years.

This has come as relations between the two countries have cooled since 2020. Last year, Canberra even blocked the sale of an Australian lithium miner to a Chinese firm.

The government said at the time that it was simply following the advice of the country’s Foreign Investment Review Board.

Mr Jones adds: “It’s an excellent example of how to shoot yourself in the foot as a producer. You tell the biggest buyer to go away. So, they do.”

Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources did not respond to a request for a comment.

As Australia aims to become more of a lithium refiner, government scientists are continuing to research ways to do this in a more environmentally friendly way. A code, which if cracked, could make the country one of the greenest producers of the metal. Currently the process releases a lot of poisonous chlorine gas.

“There is only one industrial method, and it has several drawbacks,” says Dongmei Liu, a research scientist at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO.

“The process is very expensive and not very efficient. Most importantly, it also produces chlorine gas. It has severe environmental issues.”

She and her team are instead working on a new process called “shock quenching”. It involves the extreme cooling of lithium vapour, and Dr Lui says it “avoids the chlorine gas emissions”.

While Australia hopes to make its mineral industries less polluting, it also wants to recycle more.

Lithium Australia is a listed company that sorts and processes batteries that have come to the end of their lives, to extract their lithium and other metals for reuse.

“Global commodities prices place economic pressure on lithium, so creating a circular battery industry will benefit Australia by ensuring we have the sovereign capability to produce and recycle our own batteries,” says Lithium Australia chief executive Simon Linge.

“If Australia is to establish a battery manufacturing industry, we must first ensure that no end-of-life lithium battery is being sent to landfill or exported to be recycled in some other country.”

Get ready for a cosmic surprise this autumn – Earth is about to get a second moon, according to scientists.

A small asteroid is going to be captured by Earth’s gravitational pull and temporarily become a “mini-moon”.

This space visitor will be around from September 29 for a couple of months before escaping from Earth’s gravity again.

Sadly the second moon is going to be too small and dim to be seen, unless you have a professional telescope.

The asteroid was first spotted by NASA’s Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on 7 August.

Scientists worked out its trajectory in a study published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.

The asteroid, which scientists refer to as 2024 PT5, hails from the Arjuna asteroid belt, which contains rocks that follow an orbit quite similar to Earth’s.

Occasionally, some of these asteroids get relatively close, getting as near as 2.8 million miles (4.5 million km) from our planet.

According to the researchers involved in the study, if an asteroid like this is moving at a relatively slow speed of around 2,200mph (3,540km/h), Earth’s gravitational field can exert a strong influence, enough to trap it temporarily.

Which is exactly what’s about to happen – starting this weekend, this small asteroid will spend about two months orbiting Earth.

Dr Jennifer Millard, astronomer and host of the Awesome Astronomy podcast, told the BBC’s Today programme that the asteroid would enter orbit on the 29th of September and then was predicted to leave on 25 November.

“It’s not going to complete a full revolution of our planet, it’s just going to kind of have its orbit altered, just twisted slightly by our own planet and then it’ll continue on its merry way,” she said.

The asteroid is approximately 32ft (10m) long, which is tiny in comparison to Earth’s moon, which has a diameter of approximately 3,474km.

Because it is small and made of dull rock it will not be visible to people on earth even if they use binoculars or a home telescope.

“Professional telescopes, they’ll be able to pick it up. So you’ll be able to look out for lots of wonderful pictures online of this little dot kind of moving past the stars at great speed,” said Dr Millard.

Mini-moons have been spotted before, and it’s thought many more are likely to have gone unnoticed.

Some even come back for repeat visits, the 2022 NX1 asteroid became a mini-moon in 1981 and again in 2022.

So don’t worry if you miss this one – scientists predict 2024 PT5 will also return to Earth’s orbit again in 2055.

“This story highlights just how busy our solar system is and how much there is out there that we haven’t discovered, because this asteroid was only discovered this year.

“There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of objects out there that we haven’t discovered and so I think this highlights the importance of us being able to continually monitor the night sky and find all of these objects,” said Dr Millard.

The murder of a 19-year-old female student in an exclusive neighbourhood of Paris is fuelling new calls from the French right for tougher action on immigration.

The body of the young woman, named only as Philippine, was found on Saturday, half-buried in the Bois de Boulogne park on the western edge of the capital.

She had last been seen on Friday lunchtime a few hundred metres away, as she left the Paris-Dauphine university campus where she was studying economics.

The suspected killer was traced to Geneva, where he was arrested on Tuesday and awaits deportation to France.

He is a 22 year-old Moroccan man who was released from detention in France earlier this month after serving five years for raping a student in 2019.

Named by French media as Taha O, he was the subject of an expulsion order from France, which had not been carried out.

For France’s hardline new interior minister Bruno Retailleau, it is a first test after he took office last week promising that his top three priorities would be to “establish order, establish order and establish order.”

“It is up to us as public officials to … change our legal arsenal in order to protect the French,” he said on the X social media platform.

The far-right National Rally (RN) seized on the murder as more evidence of the laxity of the French judicial system.

“This migrant had no right to be here, but he was able to offend again in total impunity. Our justice is too lenient; our state is dysfunctional. It is time for the government to act,” said the RN’s president, Jordan Bardella.

With more than 120 members of parliament, the RN has leverage over the minority government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier because it can decide at any time to support a vote of no confidence and potentially bring it down.

Some left-wing politicians joined calls for greater effectiveness in carrying out expulsion orders.

The suspect “should have gone straight from prison to plane”, said Socialist party leader Olivier Faure.

Currently fewer than 10% of French expulsion orders are carried out, according to government figures.

Sandrine Rousseau of the Ecologists said the murder was a “femicide” which should be “punished severely”. But she warned that the far right would “exploit it to spread its racist and xenophobic hate”.

Philippine’s disappearance led to an alert on a phone app called The Sorority, whose network of members are pledged to come to the help of women in distress.

Philippine did not have the app, but The Sorority said it issued a “missing persons notice” on Saturday to encourage members to join the search.

Philippine was on her way home to her parents’ house west of Paris when she disappeared. She was described as a quiet, model student by her colleagues and was involved in the scouting movement.

Her killing has raised fears about safety in the Bois de Boulogne, which abuts the expensive areas of Paris’s 16th (district).

The park has long been a centre of prostitution but local residents say parts have become increasingly frightening in recent years, because of the presence of drug-addicts and other suspicious characters.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has approved a $7bn (£5.25bn) loan to cash-strapped Pakistan.

The country is due to receive the first $1bn of the loan immediately, with the balance to be paid out over the next three years.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif welcomed the decision and thanked the head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, and her team.

Pakistan has taken more than 20 loans from the IMF since 1958 and is currently its fifth-largest debtor.

The new programme “will require sound policies and reforms” to stabilise and help make the economy more resilient, the IMF said.

The South Asian nation has pledged that it would be the last loan from the international lender.

As part of the deal, Islamabad agreed to a number of unpopular measures, including increasing the amount of tax it collects from people and businesses.

The country has relied on IMF loans to meet its needs for decades and continued to struggle after years of financial mismanagement.

Last year, the country was on the brink of defaulting on its debts and had barely enough in foreign currencies to pay for a month of imports.

The IMF approved a $3bn bailout for Pakistan in July 2003. It also received funds from allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

At the time, Mr Sharif said the bailout was a major step forward in efforts to stabilise the economy.

“It bolsters Pakistan’s economic position to overcome immediate to medium-term economic challenges,” he said.

Israel’s military chief has told troops that extensive air strikes in Lebanon targeting the armed group Hezbollah could pave the way for them to “enter enemy territory”.

“You hear the jets overhead; we have been striking all day. This is both to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah,” Lt Gen Herzi Halevi said.

Lebanon’s health minister said more than 50 people were killed in strikes on Wednesday, which the Israeli military said hit Hezbollah’s intelligence directorate, as well as launchers and weapons stores.

Diplomatic efforts are gathering pace to de-escalate the hostilities, with France and the United States proposing a 21-day ceasefire.

The remarks by Lt Gen Halevi are the plainest indication yet from a senior figure that a ground invasion into Lebanon may be imminent.

“We keep striking and hitting them everywhere,” he told soldiers from the 7th Brigade taking part in an exercise on Israel’s northern border on Wednesday – in a statement quoted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

“The goal is very clear – to safely return the residents of the north. To achieve that, we are preparing the process of a manoeuvre, which means your military boots… will enter enemy territory.”

Lt Gen Halevi said troops would “destroy the enemy” and its infrastructure.

There was no immediate sign that Israel was poised to enter Lebanon and the US Pentagon said on Wednesday it did not appear “imminent”.

But the IDF chief of staff’s remarks were published shortly after the IDF called up two reserve brigades for “operational missions in the northern arena”.

When a BBC team visited an Israeli border town on Wednesday, the army said that Hezbollah fighters must move well back from the border, to positions north of the Litani River, as demanded by a UN resolution passed in 2006.

Israel’s allies, including the US, have said they are working to avoid all-out war in the region.

Several media reports on Wednesday said senior US officials were attempting to broker a short-term pause in fighting between the two sides.

French President Emmanuel Macron met with US President Joe Biden at the UN General Assembly in New York to discuss efforts to secure a ceasefire.

Shortly after the talks, France said the two countries were proposing a “temporary ceasefire” of 21 days “to allow for negotiations”.

“There cannot be a war in Lebanon. This is why we urge Israel to cease this escalation in Lebanon and to Hezbollah to cease this missile launch to Israel,” Mr Macron told the UN.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged an immediate ceasefire, and said “hell is breaking loose”.

Lebanese PM Najib Mikati said his country is “facing a blatant violation of our sovereignty and human rights through the brutal practices of the Israeli enemy”.

He added he hoped he could leave the UN session with a “serious solution” to “put pressure on Israel to achieve an immediate ceasefire on all fronts”. Asked by Reuters if a ceasefire can be reached soon, he responded: “Hopefully, yes.”

Israel’s envoy to the UN, Danny Danon, said it was grateful for diplomatic efforts to avoid escalation but would use “all use all means at our disposal, in accordance with international law, to achieve our aims”.

He said Israel “does not seek a full-scale war”, and has made its desire for peace “clear”.

Mr Danon added that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu will arrive in New York on Thursday, have bilaterial meetings later that day and speak at the General Assembly the following morning.

Cross-border fighting continued on Wednesday, with Hezbollah saying it had targeted the headquarters of Israel’s Mossad spy agency with a missile fired towards Tel Aviv – the first time Hezbollah has targeted the heavily populated area.

It was intercepted by air defences and there were no reports of damage or casualties. The launcher was subsequently destroyed in an air strike, the IDF said.

IDF spokesman Lt Col Nadav Shoshani said the missile was heading “towards civilian areas in Tel Aviv”, noting that “the Mossad headquarters is not in that area”.

Hezbollah also fired dozens more rockets into northern Israel, injuring two.

Meanwhile, the IDF said Israeli fighter jets had hit more than 280 “Hezbollah terror targets” in the latest wave of air strikes on Lebanon.

Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad told reporters that the strikes had killed at least 51 people and injured 223, without saying how many were civilians or combatants.

The health ministry reported deadly Israeli attacks in southern areas including Joun, in the Chouf mountains near the southern city of Sidon, as well as Maaysrah, in another mountainous area north of Beirut, and in the north of the Bekaa Valley.

More than 600 people have been reported killed across Lebanon since Monday, when Israel began an intense air campaign to destroy what it said was infrastructure built up by Hezbollah since they last fought a war in 2006.

Another 90,000 people in Lebanon have been newly displaced, adding to the 110,000 who had fled their homes before the escalation, according to the UN. Almost 40,000 are living in shelters across the country.

Nearly a year of deadly cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza has also displaced around 70,000 people in northern Israel, whose safe return the Israeli government and military say they want to ensure.

Hezbollah says it is attacking Israel in support of its Palestinian ally, Hamas, and will not stop until there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Both groups are backed by Iran and proscribed as terrorist organisations by Israel, the UK and other countries.

It comes after an unprecedented wave of attacks on Hezbollah.

Last week, 39 people were killed and thousands were wounded when pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members to communicate exploded in two waves across Lebanon. Israel is widely believed to be responsible for the attacks.

Then, an Israeli air strike on Friday on the group’s stronghold of Dahieh, in southern Beirut, essentially wiped out the chain of command of its main fighting unit, the Radwan Force. The group confirmed that one of its top military leaders, Ibrahim Aqil, was among 55 people killed.

Ordinarily, US District Judge Gary J Brown would have sent the man to the local federal jail to serve out his sentence for tax fraud.

But one thing stopped him: “The dangerous, barbaric conditions that have existed for some time at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.”

The notorious jail, commonly known as MDC, is in the spotlight once again due to its latest celebrity detainee. Last week, a New York judge ordered Sean “Diddy” Combs be held there after federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking, racketeering, and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has pleaded not guilty.

High-profile defendants like Mr Combs sometimes receive special protection when jailed, and the music mogul is reported to be in a section of MDC Brooklyn for detainees who require special protection.

Mr Combs is, according to local media reports, sharing a dormitory-style room there with the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who once ran a company worth billions but was convicted on mufltiple counts of fraud in March.

And because it is the only federal jail in New York City, where many high-profile cases are processed, the pair are just the latest in an extensive list of notable names to have passed through the facility’s doors. That list includes the rapper R Kelly as well as Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

But for many of MDC Brooklyn’s 1,200 current inmates, it’s a different story.

• An 11th lawsuit for Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs as he sits in jail
• Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs will stay in jail after judge refuses bail appeal
• Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs: Who is the US rapper accused of sex trafficking?

In an August sentencing decision, Judge Brown cited multiple cases of fellow jurists who had hesitated to send defendants and convicts to the jail due to the conditions.

“Allegations of inadequate supervision, unbridled assaults, and lack of sufficient medical care are supported by an increasing body of evidence, with certain instances that are irrefutable,” he said.

“Chaos reigns, along with uncontrolled violence,” Judge Brown added. His ruling included the case of a defendant who was stabbed multiple times but reported receiving no medical care, instead being locked in his cell for 25 days. The judge cited staffing shortages and worsening conditions after the Covid pandemic that forced the jail into lockdown.

If the Bureau of Prisons decided to send the defendant in the tax fraud case to MDC, the judge wrote, he would vacate the man’s sentence.

MDC Brooklyn was opened in the 1990s, and its issues stretch back years.

In 2019, an electrical fire in the dead of winter caused a blackout, plunging the facility into darkness and frigid conditions.

And in June 2020, an inmate, Jamel Floyd, died after being pepper sprayed by correctional officers. His family sued the federal government over his death. A review by the Department of Justice concluded there was “insufficient evidence” that prison authorities “engaged in administrative misconduct,” but did acknowledge that the use of pepper spray violated policy.

Judge Brown is not the only judge to harshly criticise the facility.

In January, Judge Jesse Furman of the Federal District Court in Manhattan refused to send a man who pleaded guilty in a drug case there because of its dangerous conditions.

After initially allowing the man, Gustavo Chavez, to await sentencing on supervised release, Judge Furman ultimately let him bypass MDC and report directly to the prison where he would serve out his sentence.

In July, 36-year-old Edwin Cordero died after he was injured in a fight while serving out a sentence at MDC.

• The charges against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs explained
• Diddy assault video cements fall of hip-hop icon

“The decrepit conditions are really fuelled by this sort of terrible conflation of circumstances,” Andrew Dalack, the lawyer for both Mr Cordero and Mr Chavez, told the BBC. “Overcrowding, understaffing and a lack of a political will to fix the conditions.”

As a Brooklyn-based public defender, Mr Dalack has represented numerous clients who have been sent to MDC. “It’s a really scary place to be,” he said.

After Mr Cordero’s death, US Congressman Dan Goldman, who represents the district where the Brooklyn facility is located, called for more federal oversight to address “chronic understaffing, perpetual solitary confinement and widespread violence”.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which manages the facility, said in a statement that it “takes seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintain the safety of correctional employees and the community”.

A spokesman for the bureau pointed to the creation of an urgent action team, which is seeking to address issues at MDC, and an ongoing effort to hire more staff and address a backlog of maintenance requests.

A February 2024 report compiled by the Federal Defenders office, where Mr Dalack works, attributed overcrowding issues to the closure of its troubled sister facility in Manhattan, which the government shut down in 2021 – two years after Jeffrey Epstein’s in-custody death at the facility.

• Watchdog finds serious failures at prison where Jeffrey Epstein died
• Jeffrey Epstein: Jail CCTV erased by ‘technical errors’

They also said the presence of drugs and other contraband contributes to the facility’s dangerous atmosphere.

The federal facility holds individuals who have been convicted of crimes, but a substantial portion of the population there is awaiting trial in the city’s federal courts, and have yet to be found innocent or guilty.

The conditions weighed on Mr Dalack’s clients, who were already facing the prospect of more permanent incarceration.

“It should not be the case that while your life is on the line and your liberty is on the line, that you have to be completely stripped of your humanity,” he said. “MDC Brooklyn has a way of really breaking people down, and making them feel less than human.”

China says it carried out a rare test-firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into international waters, sparking protests from neighbouring countries.

The launch on Wednesday – its first in more than 40 years – was “routine” and not aimed at any country or target, according to Beijing. Chinese media reported the government also gave “relevant countries” notice.

But Japan said it had not received a warning and expressed concerns, along with Australia and New Zealand.

The launch contributes to tensions across the Indo-Pacific region, with analysts saying it highlights China’s increased long-range nuclear capabilities.

The US warned last year that China has built up its nuclear arsenal as part of a defence upgrade. An intercontinental ballistic missile can travel more 5,500km – putting China within striking range of the US mainland and Hawaii.

But Beijing’s arsenal is still estimated at less than a fifth of the size of the US’s and Russia’s, and China has long maintained that its nuclear maintainance is only about deterrence.

On Wednesday, Beijing announced that the long-range missile was fired at 08:44 local time (04:44 GMT). It carried a dummy warhead and landed in the designated area – believed to be in the South Pacific.

Beijing’s defence ministry added the test launch was “routine” and part of its “annual training”.

But analysts said China was last known to have test-fired an ICBM internationally in the 1980s. Typically, it tests internally – having previously fired ICBMs west into the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang region.

“This sort of testing is not unusual for other countries, including the United States, but is for China,” nuclear missile analyst Ankit Panda told the BBC.

China’s “ongoing nuclear modernisation” already has resulted in substantial changes, he said. This launch now appears to also show a change in its approach.

It has sparked immediate reaction from other countries. Japan said it had received “no notice” and expressed “serious concern” about Beijing’s military build-up.

Meanwhile, Australia said the action was “destabilising and raises the risk of miscalculation in the region” and that it had sought “an explanation” from Beijing. New Zealand called it “an unwelcome and concerning development”.

Mr Panda said he doesn’t believe China’s actions were primarily designed to send a political message – “but no doubt this will be a stark reminder to the region and to the US that nuclear dynamics in Asia are quickly changing”.

Other analysts went further, saying it was another wake-up call for the US and its allies in the region.

“To Washington, the message is that direct intervention in a conflict across the Taiwan Strait would involve the American homeland being vulnerable to attack,” said Leif-Eric Easley, an international relations professor at Ewha Women’s University in South Korea.

For US allies in Asia, the “provocative test… demonstrates China’s capabilities to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously,” he added.

“Timing is everything,” Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, wrote on X.

“[China’s] statement claims the launch does not target any country, but there are high-levels of tension between China and Japan, Philippines, and of course perpetual tension with Taiwan.”

While the relationship between Beijing and Washington has improved in the past year, China’s increasing assertiveness in the region remains a sticking point. Tensions have ramped up between China and the Philippines as their ships have repeatedly collided in disputed waters.

Last month, Japan scrambled fighter jets after it accused a Chinese spy plane of breaching its air space, a move that it called “utterly unacceptable”.

Beijing’s relationship with self-governed Taiwan is another source of strain.

Taiwan’s defence ministry said earlier on Wednesday that China had been carrying out “intensive” missile firing and other drills recently. The same statement noted that it detected 23 Chinese military aircraft operating around Taiwan on “long-range missions”.

Beijing routinely sends ships and aircraft into Taiwanese waters and airspace, called a “greyzone warfare” tactic meant to normalise the incursions.

In July, China suspended its nuclear arms control talks with Washington, in retaliation for the US’s continued arms sales to Taiwan.

The US last year warned of China’s nuclear modernisation although its numbers still far short of Washington’s. The Pentagon estimated that China has more than 500 operational nuclear warheads in its arsenal, of which approximately 350 are ICBMs.

The report projected that China will reach over 1,000 warheads by 2030; the US and Russia each say they possess more than 5,000 warheads.

There also have been conflicts around the Chinese military’s Rocket Force, the elite unit managing its nuclear arsenal. An aggressive anti-corruption campaign led to the firing of two of its leaders last year.