For the past few days, there was a feeling in Lebanon that an Israeli ground invasion into the country’s south was almost inevitable as Israel indicated its campaign against Hezbollah would not stop with the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, who, for three decades, was the face of the group.

Now that this has been confirmed, with what the Israeli military describes as a “limited, localised and targeted” operation, the fear is that this could be the start of something wider.

History shows that it is easy for Israeli troops to enter Lebanon, but difficult for them to leave.

“The country is lost,” a Lebanese friend texted me. Another one wrote: “If you ask me what’s coming, my answer is it will be very long and hard days are coming”. A third said: “We just need to hope for the best.”

There is a feeling that history is repeating itself, and uncertainty about what happens next.

It remains unclear whether Hezbollah can still organise any significant and co-ordinated response. It continues to fire rockets at Israel, but not at the same intensity.

Meanwhile, this is a country under pressure, struggling with the sheer number of casualties from Israeli air strikes and one million people who have already been displaced.

Hezbollah, a Shia Muslim group armed and financed by Iran, is considered a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US and others, but is more than just a militia in Lebanon. It is also a political party with representation in parliament, and a social movement, engrained in Lebanese society, with significant support.

Powerful and influential, Hezbollah, which means Party of God, is often described as a state within a state in Lebanon. It has been weakened by two weeks of unrelenting Israeli air strikes and high-profile assassinations, but has not been defeated.

In a defiant speech on Monday, the Hezbollah number two, Naim Qassem, said its fighters were ready to resist any Israeli invasion. Before this latest escalation, Hezbollah’s armed wing, which includes a vast arsenal of weapons and thousands of battled-hardened fighters, was said to be stronger than the Lebanese army, and the country’s authorities have little say – if any – over the group’s actions.

For almost a year, as Hezbollah carried out near-daily cross-border attacks on Israel, many outside its support base in Lebanon feared that this country, already struggling to recover from years of successive crises, was being dragged into a conflict that it has not chosen to fight.

The economy has essentially collapsed, and political impasse means the country has been without a president for almost two years.

Here, there are still memories of the last war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2006, when parts of southern Lebanon and Dahieh, the group’s base in Beirut’s southern suburbs, were flattened.

Hezbollah’s rivals will not be disappointed to see a weakened group who, many say, is interested in defending its own interests – and those of its main supporter, Iran.

Hezbollah is the most powerful group in the so-called Axis of Resistance, an alliance of factions across the Middle East supported by Iran that also includes the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria.

Having a strong Hezbollah in Lebanon, right next to Israel, has always been vital for Iran, part of its deterrence against any Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities.

Yesterday, outside a building in central Beirut hit by an Israeli strike, a resident told me: “I’m against Israel, who is killing us, but I’m against Iran, who is killing us as well”.

This is, obviously, rejected by Hezbollah supporters. “We shed tears of blood over the [Israeli] strike against Nasrallah, may God grant him paradise… He’s irreplaceable,” one of them said, after being forced to flee Dahieh. “We don’t fear [Israel]. We’re still standing.”

The United States has indications that Iran is preparing to “imminently” launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel, a senior White House official said on Tuesday.

“A direct military attack from Iran against Israel will carry severe consequences for Iran,” the official told reporters, adding that the US was actively supporting defensive preparations.

The Israeli military’s spokesman said no aerial threats had been identified “at this moment”, but that its air defences were ready.

There was no immediate response from Iran, but its supreme leader vowed on Saturday that Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the allied Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, would be avenged.

The warning of an imminent Iranian attack came hours after Israeli troops began an invasion of southern Lebanon, with the military saying they were carrying out raids against “Hezbollah terror targets” in border villages that posed a threat to residents of northern Israel.

Israel has gone on the offensive after almost a year of cross-border hostilities sparked by the war in Gaza, saying it wants to ensure the safe return of residents of border areas who have been displaced by Hezbollah attacks.

However, there are widespread fears that the significant escalation of their long-running conflict risks an all-out regional war that draws in the US and Iran.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told a televised briefing on Tuesday afternoon that the US had informed Israel of Iran’s plan for an imminent missile launch.

“At this moment, we do not detect any aerial threat launched from Iran,” he said, before adding: “We have dealt with this type of threat before, and we will deal with it now as well.”

“Our aerial defence systems are fully prepared, and Israeli Air Force aircraft are currently patrolling the skies. However, the defence is not hermetic, and therefore, it is essential to continue following the Home Front Command’s instructions.”

The IDF Home Front Command earlier told the Israeli public that gatherings in an open area should be limited to up to 30 people, and up to 300 people for gatherings in a structure.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis in a video statement: “We are in the midst of a campaign against Iran’s axis of evil.

“Together, we will stand steadfast in the trying days ahead of us. Together we will stand. Together we will fight and together we will win.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We’re tracking events in the Middle East very closely. The United States is committed to Israel’s defence. We’re watching developments as I said very carefully at this moment.”

The US military’s Central Command separately announced that three additional squadrons of F-16 and F-15E fighter aircraft and A-10 attack aircraft were arriving in the Middle East, and that one squadron had already arrived.

Over the weekend, the Pentagon said it had taken steps to further enhance the defence posture of US forces throughout the Middle East to “deter aggression”, including ordering the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to remain in region.

US officials told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that any attack from Iran on Israel could be as large or larger than the attack on 13 April.

On that day, Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel in retaliation for a deadly strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria that killed several top commanders.

Almost all of them were shot down by Israel, the US and other Western allies and their Arab partners, and an air base in southern Israel sustained only minor damage when it was hit.

Israel responded by launching a missile that hit an Iranian air base.

US officials said Iran had been ready to launch an attack on short notice since early August, when it threatened to retaliate for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Israel neither confirmed nor denied that it killed Haniyeh.

On Saturday, a day after Hezbollah’s leader was killed in an Israeli air strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei promised that the death of Hassan Nasrallah “shall not go unavenged”.

He gave no details, but said: “The fate of this region will be determined by the forces of resistance, with Hezbollah at the forefront.”

Iran has built a network of allied armed groups across the Middle East, which are all opposed to the US and Israel and sometimes refer to themselves as the “Axis of Resistance”. Besides Hezbollah, they include Hamas in the Palestinian territories, the Houthis in Yemen, and a number of Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.

Israel says it has launched a ground invasion in southern Lebanon against the armed group Hezbollah, marking another significant escalation of their long-running conflict that has heightened fears of a regional war.

The Israeli military said troops were carrying out “limited” raids in villages near the border, as aircraft continued to conduct intense air strikes throughout Lebanon.

It follows weeks of heavy blows by Israel against the Iran-backed Shia Islamist military and political organisation, including the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Israel has gone on the offensive after almost a year of cross-border hostilities sparked by the war in Gaza, saying it wants to ensure the safe return of residents of border areas who have been displaced by Hezbollah attacks.

Although Hezbollah has been weakened, it remains defiant. The group is continuing to fire barrages of rockets into northern Israel and has said it is ready for the next battle.

Here’s what we know about the latest developments.

BBC Middle East correspondent Hugo Bachega in Beirut says Lebanon woke up to the news that Israel had launched a ground operation in the south – something that felt almost inevitable in the last few days.

The fear is that this could be the beginning of a wider campaign against Hezbollah, which fought a month-long war war with Israel in 2006.

In a brief statement put out early on Tuesday, the Israeli military announced that troops backed by aircraft and artillery had begun “limited, localised and targeted raids against Hezbollah terror targets” in border villages, saying they posed an “immediate threat” to northern Israeli communities.

According to BBC Middle East Correspondent Lucy Williamson in northern Israel, helicopters and jets flew low across this border overnight, to the regular crump of artillery and occasional loud explosions. And by the morning, fields a few miles from the border that had been full of dozens of tanks were emptying.

The military did not say how many troops were involved or how far it was preparing to push into Lebanese territory. However, a senior security official told the BBC that this was “not numbers of a large ground invasion” and that the troops had so far only gone as far as “very close walking distance”.

But sending ground troops even a short distance into Lebanon carries significant risks. Hezbollah, which is well armed with anti-tank missiles and mines, has been preparing to meet Israeli forces on that terrain for years.

• Live: Latest news on Israel and Hezbollah
• Analysis: What might Hezbollah, Israel and Iran do next?
• Watch: Explosions seen on Israel-Lebanon border
• Bowen: Israel claims its biggest victory yet against Hezbollah

On Tuesday, Hezbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif denied that Israel troops had crossed into southern Lebanon and stated that there had been “no direct ground clashes”.

But he added that the group was “ready for a direct confrontation with the enemy forces that dare or attempt to enter Lebanese territory and to inflict the greatest losses on them”.

Hezbollah also fired more rockets and missiles into Israel – attacks that Mr Afif said were “only the beginning” of its response to Israel’s attacks.

Sirens sounded several times in the border town of Metula, where Hezbollah said its fighters had targeted Israeli troops with artillery and rocket fire without mentioning any incursion.

The group also claimed it had fired missiles towards two Israeli intelligence bases in the central Tel Aviv area. Paramedics said two people were injured on a highway near Kafr Qasim.

Israel has inflicted huge damage on Hezbollah in recent weeks, killing more than a dozen top commanders and apparently destroying thousands of weapons in air strikes. It was also blamed for the exploding pager and walkie-talkie attacks that left thousands of Hezbollah members maimed, blinded or killed.

However, BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen says the killing of Hassan Nasrallah in an air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday is the biggest blow of all.

For more than 30 years, he was the beating heart of Hezbollah. With the help of Iranian funding, training and weapons, he turned it into a military force whose attacks led Israel to end a 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000 and which fought Israel to a standstill during a month-long war in 2006.

For Israel, Nasrallah’s killing is a huge victory. In a defiant speech at the UN on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that Israel was “winning” the war against enemies who wanted to destroy it. By then, he had authorised the strike that killed Nasrallah.

Prime Minister Najib Mikati warned on Tuesday that Lebanon was facing “one of the most dangerous phases of its history”.

He said about a million people – a fifth of the population – had fled their homes “because of the devastating war that Israel is waging on Lebanon”.

The Lebanese health ministry said more than 1,200 people had also been killed, including dozens of children and women, over the past two weeks.

Authorities are struggling to assist everyone, with shelters and hospitals under pressure.

Israel says it is hitting Hezbollah sites, including weapons stores and ammunition dumps, and accused the group of using civilians as human shields.

But BBC senior international correspondent Orla Guerin says that is disputed by residents of the central Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold that has been bombed repeatedly in the past week.

The medical director of the local Rayaq hospital also told her that all of the casualties it had treated had been civilians.

• Young Lebanese girl left fighting for life after Israeli strikes
• ‘I grabbed my grandchildren and ran’: Lebanon families flee Israeli strikes
• Who was Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah?
• What is Hezbollah and why is Israel attacking Lebanon?

US President Joe Biden welcomed Hassan Nasrallah’s killing.

And after the Israeli incursion began, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin released a statement saying he agreed with Israel on the “necessity of dismantling [Hezbollah] attack infrastructure along the border”.

However, Mr Austin also reiterated that “diplomatic resolution is required” to ensure the safety of civilians “on both sides of the border”.

BBC state department correspondent Tom Bateman says the Israeli decision to escalate sharply the conflict with Hezbollah struck a potentially fatal blow to US President Joe Biden’s entire strategy of the last 11 months – to try to stop the war in Gaza engulfing the region.

Biden has said he is boosting the US defensive posture in the Middle East, while the Pentagon has warned Iran-backed militias not to try to use this moment to attack US bases.

Despite the earlier US attempts to rein in the Israeli leader and coax Hezbollah to a truce, Netanyahu has signalled strongly that he will act as he sees fit, whatever the pressure from Washington.

• Can diplomacy bring Middle East ceasefire? Early signs don’t bode well

Hezbollah still has thousands of fighters, many of them veterans of combat in neighbouring Syria’s civil war, as well as a substantial arsenal of missiles, many of them long-range, precision-guided missiles that could reach Tel Aviv and other cities.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says there will be pressure within its ranks to use those missiles before they get destroyed, but a mass attack on Israel that kills civilians could trigger a devastating response.

The assassination of Nasrallah was also a huge blow to Iran, hitting at the heart of the regional network of allied, heavily armed militias known as the “Axis of Resistance” that is key to its deterrent strategy against Israel.

On Sunday, Israeli jets struck infrastructure in Yemen’s Red Sea port city of Hudaydah in response to recent missile and drone attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi movement.

Iran could ask the Houthis and other groups to step up their attacks on both Israel and US bases in the region. But whatever response it chooses, it will likely calibrate it to be just short of triggering a regional war that would draw in the US and which it could not win.

• Iran warns Hezbollah leader’s death ‘will not go unavenged’

Here on the Israeli side of the border, tanks and aircraft have been on the move, as the ground war that Israel and Hezbollah had avoided for almost two decades began.

Fields a few miles from the border that yesterday were full of dozens of tanks, are emptying – almost the entire fighting force there has gone, and a column of armoured vehicles were preparing to move out.

On Sunday night, helicopters and jets flew low across this border, to the regular “crump” of artillery and occasional loud explosions.

Hezbollah says it fired rockets at Israeli troops this morning along the border at Metula and Avivim, and there were also several loud interceptions directly above us, a little further south.

At an army checkpoint outside Metula, Israeli artillery was still firing this morning as a group of soldiers waited to go in.

Israel’s army says its ground forces crossed the border last night in a “limited and targeted” incursion, but it’s not immediately clear how many units have been sent in, and where.

A senior security official said today that the operations were “very limited in scope” and said there were currently “no clashes”.

When asked how far into Lebanon the Israeli forces had gone, he declined to be specific but said they were “very close, walking distance – not far in”, and that the numbers involved were not those of a large ground invasion, but something more limited.

Israel says its aim is to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure along the border that it says poses an imminent threat to Israeli communities.

But sending ground troops even a short distance into Lebanon carries significant risks to its army.

Hezbollah – well armed with anti-tank missiles and mines – has been preparing to meet Israeli forces on this terrain for years.

What’s not clear is how far Israel is preparing to push forward into Lebanese territory, whether its aim is to remove the threat of infiltration from Hezbollah fighters and tunnels, or whether it is planning to push the group further north – a much bigger and riskier undertaking for Israeli army.

The bodies of 20 children and three teachers have been recovered after a bus transporting school pupils crashed and caught fire outside Bangkok.

The bus was returning to the Thai capital after a school trip to the north of the country.

Videos from the scene showed flames engulfing the bus as it burned under an overpass, with huge clouds of dense black smoke billowing into the sky.

The driver handed himself in to police 100km (61 miles) north of Bangkok, according to local media.

Footage taken shortly after the fatal crash showed the driver attempting to extinguish the fire but he reportedly fled the scene.

Witnesses say the bus crashed into the concrete barrier dividing the highway just north of Bangkok, after a front tyre burst.

The bus was quickly consumed by an intense fire, and many on board were unable to get out. The cause of the fire is still unknown.

Nineteen children and three teachers are reported to have survived, sixteen of whom are being treated in hospital for their injuries.

Transport Minister Suriyahe Juangroongruangkit said the bus was powered by “extremely risky” compressed natural gas.

“This is a very tragic incident,” Mr Suriyahe told reporters at the scene.

“The ministry must find a measure… if possible, for passenger vehicles like this to be banned from using this type of fuel because it’s extremely risky.”

Piyalak Thinkaew, who was leading the search, said it was hard to identify the bodies because they were so badly burnt.

“Some of the bodies we found were very, very small,” he told reporters at the scene, adding that the fire started at the front of the bus.

“The kids’ instinct was to escape to the back so the bodies were there,” he said.

Forensic police said of the 23 bodies found, eleven were male, seven female and a further five were unidentifiable.

The ages of the children on board remains unclear, but the school caters for pupils between three and 15 years old.

Thailand has one of the worst road safety records in the world, with unsafe vehicles and poor driving contributing to roughly 20,000 fatalities a year.

Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, said an investigation was underway. “We have to investigate the trace of driving from the tire marks, the burning trace, and CCTV footage,” he said.

A Chinese woman has been arrested in Leipzig on suspicion of passing information about Leipzig/Halle airport, which is used as a key transport hub for the German defence industry, to Chinese intelligence.

German prosecutors said that Yaqi X, 38, had been working for a company providing logistics services at the airport.

Prosecutors said she had repeatedly sent details on flights, passengers and military cargo transport to another figure who worked for China’s secret services. The airport is considered an important centre for defence exports, particularly to Ukraine.

A second suspect, Jian G, was detained earlier this year.

He had worked as an aide for a member of the European Parliament from Germany’s far-right AfD party.

Yaqi X was remanded in custody and her home and workplace searched.

Between August 2023 and February 2024, prosecutors allege she had given Jian G information on the transport of military equipment and people linked to an unnamed German arms company.

German sources told public broadcaster ARD that the defence company involved was Rheinmetall, Germany’s biggest defence firm which has been heavily involved in supplying Ukraine with weapons, armoured vehicles and military equipment.

Yaqi X’s case appears to be linked to a spying case that unfolded last April involving parliamentary aide Jian G.

The MEP he had worked for, Maximilian Krah, dismissed Jian G as his assistant. Krah’s office in Brussels was searched by police, although there was no indication that he was involved.

Jian G was alleged to have spied on Chinese dissidents in Germany as well as passing information on the European Parliament to Chinese intelligence.

He had previously worked for dissident groups and had taken up German citizenship after coming to Germany in 2002.

On Monday, Mayor Patrick Fitzsimmons found himself at the epicentre of a disaster zone.

His town of Weaverville, North Carolina, had no electricity and no power. Only one grocery store was operational, utility poles had gone down, the town’s water plant had flooded and people had been without safe drinking water for four days, he told the BBC.

In the larger Buncombe County, where Weaverville is located, at least 35 people are dead and 600 are unaccounted for, a local CBS News affiliate reported.

Mr Fitzsimmons said the county set up a website where people can inquire about missing persons. Officials have so far received 11,000 requests.

Across the US south-east, millions of residents were thrown into chaos by storm Helene. It slammed into Florida as a category 4 hurricane on Thursday before barrelling across the states of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee, leaving flooding, power loss and death in its wake.

In the days since, the true scale of the destruction is coming into sharper relief as residents begin to return home to survey the damage.

At least 116 people have died nationwide, officials have said.

One of those people was Madison Shaw’s mother.

“Her last words to me were… ‘I love you, be safe. I’ll see you later,’” the resident of Anderson, South Carolina told CBS News. “And I said, ‘I love you. I’ll see you later as well.’”

“I can’t even describe it,” Ms Shaw told CBS News. “My mom was my best friend.”

A White House spokeswoman said on Monday that two million people are currently without power. President Joe Biden called the storm “history-making.”

Some of the most dire reports are coming from North Carolina, where the state’s governor Roy Cooper said that communities had been “wiped off the map” and that dozens of rescue teams had been deployed.

Buncombe County and the western corner of North Carolina endured some of the worst of Helene’s wrath.

The county includes Asheville, a city located in the Blue Ridge Mountains famed for its arts and music scene. Helene inundated the city with flood waters, drove people from their homes and left residents scrambling for basic resources. Trucks and trees smashed into buildings while downed power and telephone lines hung dangerously over the streets.

“Homes have been destroyed, flattened,” said 21-year-old Josh Griffith who lives just outside of Asheville in the town of Leicester.

“When it hit, we watched semi-trucks and storage crates and dumpsters and propane tanks floating down the river just rushing through parking lots, destroying everything in its path,” he told the BBC.

The apartment he shares with his fiancée sits high up on a hill and was safe from any serious damage. But on Saturday afternoon, by then without power or food, they decided to make their escape, taking rain-drenched roads out to north-east Georgia.

At one point, Mr Griffith and his partner were forced to drive straight through flood water, six inches deep of running water on top of six inches deep of mud. Emergency officials generally caution people against driving into flood waters of any depth during a storm.

“It was really scary,” he said. “Any time you’re driving over rushing water like that, there’s a fear your tires might slide out from underneath you.”

They made it out, stopping overnight in Georgia before driving back North Carolina, armed with food, water and supplies for their neighbours in Buncombe.

“People are just scrambling to get any resources they can,” he said.

Buncombe County officials opened four water distribution sites throughout the county on Monday.

Last week, before Helene arrived, 28-year-old Jesse Ross wondered whether the storm would be as destructive as some had forecasted.

“It turned out to be massive,” he said.

Mr Ross witnessed a “torrent of water” tear through his town of Waynesville, North Carolina, on Friday. The bridges were uncrossable. He couldn’t get in touch with anyone. His family is safe, he told the BBC, but they spent several days under a boil water advisory.

As residents begin to pick up the pieces, their futures remain uncertain.

Grayson Barnette, a lifelong resident who grew up in Lenoir, North Carolina, and now lives nearby, said a lot of the residents have spent their entire lives in these storm-ravaged communities.

“Some people are just poor and have lived in the same places for generations,” he said. “This was just unconscionable for a lot of people.”

Mr Barnette feared that residents’ deep ties to their communities may have led some to stay and weather the storm despite warnings.

“Entire communities have just been wiped off,” Mr Barnette said. “And people may or may not come back.”

Mech Dara, an award-winning Cambodian journalist who has reported extensively on human trafficking and corruption, has been arrested and charged with incitement.

Dara, who has reported for the BBC, has been charged over five social media posts which could “incite social unrest”, a court spokesperson said. He faces up to two years in jail.

Last year US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken honoured him for his work exposing online scam operations based in Cambodia.

Rights groups have spoken out over his arrest, with Human Rights Watch calling on the country’s government to “immediately release him”.

Dara was detained after being stopped at a highway toll booth on the border of Koh Kong and Sihanouk province in south-west Cambodia on Monday.

A relative in the car with Dara told the BBC that they were waiting to go through the booth when one military police car, accompanied by five other cars, pulled up alongside them.

“We got him,” one said while they were detaining Dara, his relative recounted, adding that Dara told his family not to worry as he was being taken away.

Local rights group Licadho reported that Dara messaged them, explaining that he had been arrested, before his phone was taken away.

His whereabouts were then not known for almost 24 hours, when he appeared in court in the capital Phnom Penh and was charged with incitement to commit a felony. He was sent to pre-trial detention and faces between six months and two years in jail if found guilty.

Phnom Penh Municipal Court spokesperson Y Rin told the BBC that the charges were related to five social media posts made in September, but did not elaborate.

In a statement, the court said the Facebook posts showed “edited pictures” of a “tourist attraction” which it said were “fake”.

Is said the posts were “full of ill-intention – inciting, causing anger among the public that was intended to make people think bad of the government”.

The vague charge of incitement is often used in Cambodia against government critics.

One of Dara’s relatives, who also works as a journalist but requested anonymity due to fear of reprisals, said Dara had been denied access to a lawyer and they were “so concerned” about his safety.

“The authorities didn’t show us any official arrest warrant or court papers. I’ve lost hope, I’m so concerned about practising journalism in Cambodia now,” the relative said.

One of Cambodia’s most prominent journalists, Mech Dara has been at the forefront of investigating the country’s cyberscam compounds, which are staffed mostly by trafficked workers.

Often victims are lured by adverts promising easy work and extravagant perks. Once they arrive in the country, they are held prisoner and forced to work in online scam centres. Those who do not comply face threats to their safety. Many have been subject to torture and inhuman treatment.

Last year, Mr Blinken awarded Dara the US State Department’s human trafficking Hero Award for his work.

The US State Department said it was aware of reports of his arrest and was “following developments closely with great concern”.

The US last month sanctioned powerful Cambodian tycoon and ruling party Senator Ly Yong Phat, nicknamed the “king of Koh Kong” after his influence over his home province, over alleged connections to the cyberscam industry.

The Cambodian government said the sanctions were politically motivated.

Rights groups have voiced concern over Mech Dara’s arrest.

Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said “Mech Dara is a respected journalist who has reported on important topics in the public interest such as online scam centres. Yet Cambodian authorities appear to have wrongfully arrested him yesterday.

“They should immediately release him.”

Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates (AHRLA), called Dara’s arrest “outrageous and unacceptable” and “is emblematic of the Cambodian government’s repressive, over the top reaction to any sort of criticism from the media”.

Cambodia’s independent media landscape has been hit hard in recent years, with publications including the Cambodia Daily and Voice of Democracy – both of which Dara worked for – closed down by authorities.

How would you like to spend your 80s?

Some gardening, maybe learning a language, a bit of travelling, spending time with the grandchildren.

Or perhaps entering an international beauty contest with the ultimate aim of launching your modelling career on the world stage.

For Choi Soon-hwa, it was a no-brainer.

This week, the 81-year-old took to the stage with women a quarter of her age for Miss Universe South Korea, hoping to make it to the finals in Mexico later this year.

The question, though, is why?

“After raising children and going through hardships, it’s just two people left, and that’s when you need to find what you want to do,” the former hospital worker explained to the BBC shortly after she came off stage.

“Once you find it, it becomes the energy that drives your life, leading to a positive outlook and healthier relationships with people, which in turn helps your well-being.”

For Ms Choi, the thing she wanted to do has been modelling, ever since a patient suggested she take it up at the spritely age of 72.

The comment gave her the confidence to take the leap after several years of financial hardship, which had pushed her and her family to the brink of ruin.

In the years since, she has become a familiar face in South Korea – including walking the runway at fashion week – but launching a career outside the country has proved difficult.

So when Miss Universe, the famed beauty pageant which began nine years after Ms Choi was born, decided to throw out rules banning entrants over the age of 28 earlier this year, she jumped at the chance to take part – making her the oldest ever contestant so far to take part.

“It was something I couldn’t have imagined,” she says. “For several years, I had wished to step onto the international stage as a model.

“However, there was no clear path or guidance for me, but since the Universe competition had no age restriction, I participated with the goal of reaching the global stage.”

The removal of age restrictrions come as the Miss Universe competition has moved towards becoming more diverse in recent years – allowing married women, transgender women and single mothers to take part.

But her entry still caused quite the stir – not least among her competition.

“The participants were surprised to see me, and when they learned I was 80, they expressed admiration, saying, I want to age like you,” she admits.

And it has brought her the international interest she was hoping: Ms Choi has garnered headlines around the world.

What it did not buy was a ticket to Mexico: the Miss Universe South Korea crown went instead to Han Ariel, 22.

Ms Choi didn’t walk away completely empty handed however – but with the title of “Best Dressed”.

“Just being able to participate is an amazing and honourable experience”, she says, adding that she hopes she is the first of many older women to compete for the crown and, by extension, challenge beauty norms.

“Since this is still new, there’s a lot of buzz, but as more seniors participate, perspectives on them will shift, and there will come a time when seniors can compete in world competitions,” she says. “But for now, it’s still time for the young to take the stage.”

And whatever happens next, she knows some of her biggest fans will always be at home in the form of her grandsons, aged 23 and 24.

“My grandchildren cheer me on, saying, ‘Our grandma is so cool, pretty, beautiful, and the best!'”

China’s sputtering economy has its worried leaders pulling out all the stops.

They have unveiled stimulus measures, offered rare cash handouts, held a surprise meeting to kickstart growth and tried to shake up an ailing property market with a raft of decisions – they did all of this in the last week.

On Monday, Xi himself spoke of “potential dangers” and being “well-prepared” to overcome grave challenges, which many believe was a reference to the economy.

What is less clear is how the slowdown has affected ordinary Chinese people, whose expectations and frustrations are often heavily censored.

But two new pieces of research offer some insight. The first, a survey of Chinese attitudes towards the economy, found that people were growing pessimistic and disillusioned about their prospects. The second is a record of protests, both physical and online, that noted a rise in incidents driven by economic grievances.

Although far from complete, the picture neverthless provides a rare glimpse into the current economic climate, and how Chinese people feel about their future.

Beyond the crisis in real estate, steep public debt and rising unemployment have hit savings and spending. The world’s second-largest economy may miss its own growth target – 5% – this year.

That is sobering for the Chinese Communist Party. Explosive growth turned China into a global power, and stable prosperity was the carrot offered by a repressive regime that would never loosen its grip on the stick.

The slowdown hit as the pandemic ended, partly driven by three years of sudden and complete lockdowns, which strangled economic activity.

And that contrast between the years before and after the pandemic is evident in the research by American professors Martin Whyte of Harvard University, Scott Rozelle of Stanford University’s Center on China’s Economy and Stanford masters student Michael Alisky.

They conducted their surveys in 2004 and 2009, before Xi Jinping became China’s leader, and during his rule in 2014 and 2023. The sample sizes varied, ranging between 3,000 and 7,500.

In 2004, nearly 60% of the respondents said their families’ economic situation had improved over the past five years – and just as many of them felt optimistic about the next five years.

The figures jumped in 2009 and 2014 – with 72.4% and 76.5% respectively saying things had improved, while 68.8% and 73% were hopeful about the future.

However in 2023, only 38.8% felt life had got better for their families. And less than half – about 47% – believed things would improve over the next five years.

Meanwhile, the proportion of those who felt pessimistic about the future rose, from just 2.3% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.

While the surveys were of a nationally representative sample aged 20 to 60, getting access to a broad range of opinions is a challenge in authoritarian China.

Respondents were from 29 Chinese provinces and administrative regions, but Xinjiang and parts of Tibet were excluded – Mr Whyte said it was “a combination of extra costs due to remote locations and political sensitivity”. Home to ethnic minorities, these tightly controlled areas in the north-west have long bristled under Beijing’s rule.

Those who were not willing to speak their minds did not participate in the survey, the researchers said. Those who did shared their views when they were told it was for academic purposes, and would remain confidential.

Their anxieties are reflected in the choices that are being made by many young Chinese people. With unemployment on the rise, millions of college graduates have been forced to accept low-wage jobs, while others have embraced a “lie flat” attitude, pushing back against relentless work. Still others have opted to be “full-time children”, returning home to their parents because they cannot find a job, or are burnt out.

Analysts believe China’s iron-fisted management of Covid-19 played a big role in undoing people’s optimism.

“[It] was a turning point for many… It reminded everyone of how authoritarian the state was. People felt policed like never before,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

Many people were depressed and the subsequent pay cuts “reinforced the confidence crisis,” he added.

Moxi, 38, was one of them. He left his job as a psychiatrist and moved to Dali, a lakeside city in southwestern China now popular with young people who want a break from high-pressure jobs.

“When I was still a psychiatrist, I didn’t even have the time or energy to think about where my life was heading,” he told the BBC. “There was no room for optimism or pessimism. It was just work.”

Work, however, no longer seems to signal a promising future, according to the survey.

In 2004, 2009 and 2014, more than six in 10 respondents agreed that “effort is always rewarded” in China. Those who disagreed hovered around 15%.

Come 2023, the sentiment flipped. Only 28.3% believed that their hard work would pay off, while a third of them disagreed. The disagreement was strongest among lower-income families, who earned less than 50,000 yuan ($6,989; £5,442) a year.

Chinese people are often told that the years spent studying and chasing degrees will be rewarded with financial success. Part of this expectation has been shaped by a tumultuous history, where people gritted their teeth through the pain of wars and famine, and plodded on.

Chinese leaders, too, have touted such a work ethic. Xi’s Chinese Dream, for example, echoes the American Dream, where hard work and talent pay off. He has urged young people to “eat bitterness”, a Chinese phrase for enduring hardship.

But in 2023, a majority of the respondents in the Whyte and Rozelle study believed people were rich because of the privilege afforded by their families and connections. A decade earlier, respondents had attributed wealth to ability, talent, a good education and hard work.

This is despite Xi’s signature “common prosperity” policy aimed at narrowing the wealth gap, although critics say it has only resulted in a crackdown on businesses.

There are other indicators of discontent, such as an 18% rise in protests in the second quarter of 2024, compared with the same period last year, according to the China Dissent Monitor (CDM).

The study defines protests as any instance when people voice grievances or advance their interests in ways that are in contention with authority – this could happen physically or online. Such episodes, however small, are still telling in China, where even lone protesters are swiftly tracked down and detained.

A least three in four cases are due to economic grievances, said Kevin Slaten, one of the CDM study’s four editors.

Starting in June 2022, the group has documented nearly 6,400 such events so far.

They saw a rise in protests led by rural residents and blue-collar workers over land grabs and low wages, but also noted middle-class citizens organising because of the real estate crisis. Protests by homeowners and construction workers made up 44% of the cases across more than 370 cities.

“This does not immediately mean China’s economy is imploding,” Mr Slaten was quick to stress.

Although, he added, “it is difficult to predict” how such “dissent may accelerate if the economy keeps getting worse”.

Chinese leaders are certainly concerned.

Between August 2023 and Janaury 2024, Beijing stopped releasing youth unemployment figures after they hit a record high. At one point, officials coined the term “slow employment” to describe those who were taking time to find a job – a separate category, they said, from the jobless.

Censors have been cracking down on any source of financial frustration – vocal online posts are promptly scrubbed, while influencers have been blocked on social media for flaunting luxurious tastes. State media has defended the bans as part of the effort to create a “civilised, healthy and harmonious” environment. More alarming perhaps are reports last week that a top economist, Zhu Hengpeng, has been detained for critcising Xi’s handling of the economy.

The Communist Party tries to control the narrative by “shaping what information people have access to, or what is perceived as negative”, Mr Slaten said.

CDM’s research shows that, despite the level of state control, discontent has fuelled protests – and that will worry Beijing.

In November 2022, a deadly fire – which killed at least 10 people who were not allowed to leave the building during a Covid lockdown – brought thousands onto the streets in different parts of China to protest against crushing zero-Covid policies.

Whyte, Rozelle and Alisky don’t think their findings suggest “popular anger about… inequality is likely to explode in a social volcano of protest.”

But the economic slowdown has begun to “undermine” the legitimacy the Party has built up through “decades of sustained economic growth and improved living standards”, they write.

The pandemic still haunts many Chinese people, said Yun Zhou, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan. Beijing’s “stringent yet mercurial responses” during the pandemic have heightened people’s insecurity about the future.

And this is particularly visceral among marginalised groups, she added, such as women caught in a “severely discriminatory” labour market and rural residents who have long been excluded from welfare coverage.

Under China’s contentious “hukou” system of household registration, migrant workers in cities are not allowed to use public services, such as enrolling their children in government-run schools.

But young people from cities – like Moxi – have flocked to remote towns, drawn by low rents, picturesque landscapes and greater freedom to chase their dreams.

Moxi is relieved to have found a slower pace of life in Dali. “The number of patients who came to me for depression and anxiety disorders only increased as the economy boomed,” he said, recalling his past work as a psychiatrist.

“There’s a big difference between China doing well, and Chinese people doing well.”

Whyte, Rozelle and Alisky’s research is based on four sets of academic surveys conducted between 2004 and 2023.

In-person surveys were conducted together with colleagues at Peking University’s Research Center on Contemporary China (RCCC) in 2004, 2009 and 2014. Participants ranged in age from 18-70 and came from 29 provinces. Tibet and Xingiang were excluded.

In 2023, three rounds of online surveys, at the end of the second, third and fourth quarters, were conducted by the Survey and Research Centre for China Household Finance (CHFS) at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, China. Participants ranged in age from 20-60.

The same questions were used in all surveys. To make responses comparable across all four years, the researchers excluded participants aged 18-19 and 61-70 and reweighted all answers to be nationally representative. All surveys contain a margin of error.

The study has been accepted for publication by The China Journal and is expected to be published in 2025.

Researchers for the China Dissent Monitor (CDM) have collected data on “dissent events” across China since June 2022 from a variety of non-government sources including news reports, social media platforms operating in the country and civil society organisations.

Dissent events are defined as instances where a person or persons use public and non-official means of expressing their dissatisfaction. Each event is highly visible and also subject to or at risk of government response, through physical repression or censorship.

These can include viral social media posts, demonstrations, banner drops and strikes, among others. Many events are difficult to independently verify.

Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance will meet for their one and only vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night in New York City.

While the stakes in these kind of running-mate face-offs are typically low – an undercard to the presidential main event – this one might be different.

In a tight race that could be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states, every opportunity to generate positive attention and political momentum is precious.

At the very least, the debate will be a fascinating contrast between two men with very different styles and political beliefs and two campaigns with distinct strategies for winning the White House.

Donald Trump announced his selection of Vance back in July, at the start of the Republican National Convention and just a day after his near-assassination.

The former president was riding high in the polls, and his pick of the 40-year-old Ohio senator was viewed not only as a play to the white working class in the industrial Midwest – a key demographic in a region that is a top electoral battleground – but also as a way to establish his political legacy.

Unlike Trump’s first vice-president, Mike Pence, Vance is an ideological kindred spirit, whose focus on trade and immigration match Trump’s top political priorities.

If Vance was a front-runner to be Trump’s running-mate, Walz’s path to the Democratic number-two spot was considerably more unlikely. After Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid, Vice-President Kamala Harris stepped in as the standard bearer and shortly thereafter began her ticket-mate search.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, was not a leading contender for the job, but his viral appearances on television, deriding Republicans as “weird”, and his ability to defend liberal policies in moderate-friendly language won Harris over.

On the campaign trail, both men have sought to put the political skills that earned them the running-mate jobs to work.

Vance is polished and practised – a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist with an Ivy League pedigree that belies his rural Appalachian roots. Walz is a high-school teacher turned politician with a penchant for folksy Midwestern humour.

Vance has been a frequent advocate for the Trump campaign on mainstream media news programmes. He’s also rallied potential supporters in rural areas of the Midwestern battleground states, part of the Trump campaign’s strategy of engaging sympathetic voters who may not have participated in previous elections.

Last week in Traverse City, Michigan, Vance gave his standard stump speech, which is focused on immigration, the economy and trade.

“We’re going to pursue some commonsense tax and economic policies,” he told the crowd of a few thousand cheering supporters gathered in a local fair ground. “We will do it with American workers rather than foreign slave labourers.”

While many of the rally attendees didn’t know much about Vance prior to his selection as candidate for vice-president, they said they liked what they had heard so far – even as Vance has frequently flirted with controversy. His amplification of untrue rumours that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets in Ohio is a recent example.

The Democrat has been a regular fixture in more rural areas of the battleground states – often appearing in places that are traditionally more conservative. As a former high school football coach, he’s sought to play up his background and links to America’s most popular sport. On Saturday, he was at the Michigan-Minnesota college football game which was played in front of a crowd of 110,000.

When Harris introduced Walz as her vice-presidential pick at a Philadelphia rally in early August, she repeatedly referred to him as “Coach Walz” – and highlighted his high-school teacher background.

The Democrats may be hoping his plainspoken, salt-of-the-earth appeal could cut into the Republican margins outside major metropolitan areas.

“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbours and their personal choices that they make,” Walz said in Philadelphia. “Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”

During Tuesday night’s debate, Vance is likely to continue to hammer Democrats on the economy, immigration and crime – areas where polls show Trump and the Republicans are favoured.

He could accuse Walz of being slow to react to the sometimes violent demonstrations in Minnesota following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and highlight some of the more controversial liberal policies Walz enacted as governor, including around transgender rights.

He may also point to Walz’s sometimes contradictory statements about his record serving in the Minnesota National Guard.

Walz may counter by highlighting Vance’s past controversial statements – on Ohio Haitians and his derisive remarks about Democratic women who don’t have children being “childless cat ladies”.

He may also note Vance’s connections to people who oversaw Project 2025, the proposed governing agenda advanced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He is also sure to shift the focus onto the social issues where Democrats are stronger – such as healthcare, the environment and, most prominently, abortion rights.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election
• FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger under Biden or Trump?
• POLICIES: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Both men had relatively low profiles in national politics prior to their elevation to their respective presidential tickets. Vance, who has served less than two years in the US Senate, is best known for best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Walz has a longer political record, serving as governor and as a congressman from a rural area of Minnesota, but he was never in the top ranks of party leadership.

The two will have the opportunity to introduce themselves to millions of Americans for the first time on Tuesday night – and their performance could reflect on the judgement and decision-making skill of the presidential nominees who selected them.

The spotlight on Vance may be particularly sharp, given that Trump, if he wins, will be the oldest person ever elected president. Vance could also take the opportunity to provide ideological depth and detail to Trump’s conservative populism, as he did during his July Republican convention speech.

For Walz, it’s a chance not only to help Americans learn more about him as a candidate, but about a Democratic ticket that did not exist two months ago – one that, according to polls, many Americans still are uncertain of. If he can do that in a way that appeals to moderate and independent voters – his touted strength – all the better for the Harris camp.

Typically, the vice-presidential debate happens in the midst of a series of presidential debates – an interlude between the candidate showdowns that really matter.

With no further presidential debates scheduled this year, however, the running-mate face-off could be the last chance for American voters to see the two tickets represented in direct contrast before they cast their ballots.

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

Three children have been injured – one of them seriously – in a knife attack at a daycare centre in the Swiss city of Zurich.

A spokesperson for the city’s police force said a 23-year-old Chinese man attacked a group of children who were being led to the centre by a staff member.

A daycare worker and a bystander managed to overpower the attacker and restrain him until police arrived.

A five-year-old boy suffered serious injuries and was being treated in hospital. Two other five-year-old boys were treated at the scene for less severe injuries.

Officers have yet to reveal a motive for the attack, which took place shortly after 12:00 local time (11:00 BST) in the near the Bernina shopping centre in Oerlikon, an area in the north of Zurich.

Police said an investigation was continuing and local media reported heavily armed officers were guarding the scene on Tuesday afternoon, while a drone flew overhead.

NZZ, a Swiss media outlet, said police searched a residential building near the daycare. It is unclear whether the operation was connected to the attack.

Three people died and 15 others were injured after a man went on a stabbing rampage inside a Walmart supermarket in Shanghai on Monday night.

Chinese police said they arrested a 37-year-old man surnamed Lin at the scene, adding that he had come to Shanghai to “vent his anger due to a personal economic dispute”. Further investigations are continuing.

The incident took place at a shopping mall in Songjiang, a densely populated district in the city’s south-west, which is also home to several universities.

Police said the three people who died succumbed to their injuries at hospital. The others “did not sustain life-threatening wounds” and are not believed to be in danger.

“There was blood everywhere,” an eyewitnes surnamed Shi told BBC News.

Mr Shi, who runs a jewellery store at the ground floor of the Ludu International Commercial Plaza, said dozens of firefighters and special weapons and tactics (SWAT) officers entered the mall, and asked people to evacuate.

“I didn’t know what was happening, but suddenly, I saw people running in a panic,” he said.

“No one had ever experienced something like this, and we weren’t mentally prepared for it… This kind of random incident is terrifying and unsettling,” he said, adding that he had “narrowly escaped” death.

Discussions about the incident now appear to have been censored on Chinese social media.

The supermarket was open for business on Tuesday but with additional security.

Firearms are banned in China but the country has seen a spate of knife attacks in recent months.

Last month, a 10-year-old Japanese student died a day after he was stabbed near his school in southern China.

In June this year, four US college instructors were stabbed in a public park in the northeast city of Jilin. In May, a man stabbed dead two people and wounded 21 others at a hospital in the southern province of Yunnan.

Jimmy Carter celebrates his 100th birthday on Tuesday, making him the first US president to reach the milestone.

Carter, a Democrat who served in the White House from 1977 to 1981, has spent the past 19 months in hospice care in his home state of Georgia.

But the former peanut farmer, who first entered politics in the 1960s as a state senator, is “emotionally engaged and still having experiences and laughing, loving,” his grandson, Jason, said in September.

And the centenarian still has political ambitions: “I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris” in November’s election, the humanitarian and Nobel Prize recipient said, according to his grandson.

To honour the occasion, volunteers with Habitat for Humanity – the housing charity Carter has worked with for 40 years – are building 30 homes in Minnesota this week.

There will also be events in Plains, the former Georgia governor’s hometown, to celebrate the occasion on Tuesday. There will be a flyover of military jets and 100 new citizens will have naturalisation ceremonies in his honour.

It comes after a star-studded concert was held in Atlanta, Georgia, earlier this month to celebrate the 39th president’s milestone birthday and to raise funds for The Carter Center.

“It was an incredible evening, full of good music and heartfelt tributes, and it made history as the first-ever 100th birthday celebration for a living American president,” Carter said at the time.

The concert, which raised more than $1.2m (£900,000) and also featured recorded messages from other presidents, will air on Georgia Public Broadcasting on Tuesday. Dozens of musical acts performed at the event and thousands attended.

The former president will be watching the broadcast on Tuesday, his family said.

Carter, who was not able to attend the concert in person, made a rare public appearance in November 2023 when he attended a memorial service for his wife Rosalynn who died aged 96 earlier that month.

Their 77-year marriage remains the longest of any first couple.

When Carter first entered hospice care in Plains, Georgia, in February 2023, some relatives reportedly felt he only had a matter of days left to live.

“It’s a gift,” Josh Carter, another of his grandsons, said of the last few months in a recent interview with the New York Times. “It’s a gift that I didn’t know we were going to get.”

Others say Carter’s story has also raised awareness of the benefits of hospice care. “We are all rooting for Jimmy Carter,” Barbara Pearce, the CEO of Connecticut Hospice, told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

“He has done more for us than we could ever do for ourselves by pointing out that it’s a reasonable choice to make,” she said. “He’s given everybody permission to consider [hospice care] as a reasonable option that doesn’t shorten their life, but does increase their comfort and fulfilment.”

The UK government has chartered a commercial flight out of Lebanon to assist British nationals trying to flee the fighting, the foreign secretary has announced.

The situation was “volatile” and had the potential to “deteriorate quickly”, David Lammy said, just hours before Israel announced the start of a “localised and targeted” ground operation in southern Lebanon.

British nationals and their spouse or partner, and children under the age of 18 are eligible to take the flight, with vulnerable people a priority.

The plane is scheduled to leave on Wednesday from Beirut, which was hit by fresh Israeli air strikes overnight.

• Live: Latest news on Israel and Hezbollah
• Explained: What to know about the Israel-Hezbollah conflict
• Analysis: What might Hezbollah, Israel and Iran do next?
• Watch: Explosions seen on Israel-Lebanon border
• Bowen: Israel claims its biggest victory yet against Hezbollah

As of last week, there were thought to be between 4,000 and 6,000 UK nationals, including dependants in Lebanon.

The UK government will pay to charter the flight, which will depart from Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport, but British nationals will be expected to pay a fee of £350 per seat.

British nationals and dependants will be eligible to request a space on the flight. Any non-British dependants boarding the flight will require a visa, granted for at least six months, to enter the UK.

Lammy said on Tuesday that the foreign office was seeking to put on more charter flights. But he cautioned that while the UK was in “constant dialogue” with Israel, “I have been warning and cautioning that we cannot make guarantees”.

Any further flights in the coming days will depend on demand and the security situation on the ground, the Foreign Office said.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Lammy added: “I urge them to leave because the situation on the ground is fast-moving and of course whilst we will do everything we can to protect British nationals, and those plans are in place to do so, we cannot anticipate the circumstances and the speed with which we can do that if things escalate in a major way over the coming hours and days.”

A few hours later the Israeli military said a “limited, localised and targeted” ground operation was under way against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group.

Air strikes hit a southern suburb of Beirut, after the Israeli military warned residents there to evacuate.

The foreign secretary said the government had been urging British nationals to leave Lebanon “for months”.

“I have been warning since coming into office in July that British nationals should leave Lebanon,” he said. “Indeed, the previous government was saying do not travel to Lebanon.”

Victoria Lupton, 37, is planning to leave Lebanon on Wednesday with her young family – but not on the flight chartered by the UK government.

“A week ago the British government emailed us saying we should be buying our own flight, which was quite a difficult message to receive because there were no flights to be had,” she told the BBC on Tuesday.

“I eventually managed to get a flight to Athens, which is leaving tomorrow. Then last night, late at night, the British government messaged saying they had chartered one flight and would I like a place on it. But that’s leaving tomorrow so I am sticking with my existing flight.”

She spends a couple of months a year in Lebanon as the founder and chief executive of Seenaryo, a non-profit organisation which helps educate Middle Eastern women and children through theatre and play.

She told the BBC: “I’m feeling sick. All of us are feeling sick and living in a state of terror.”

“I have a three-year-old and I was moving my daughter’s cot as far away as possible from the windows to make sure she didn’t get hit. None of us are sleeping. We are only sleeping a few hours a night. It’s a very, very difficult worrying time.”

The Israeli government says the aim of its military operation is to enable 60,000 displaced Israelis to return to their homes. Hezbollah says its fighters are ready to confront an Israeli invasion.

According to officials in Lebanon, more than 1,000 people have been killed in the past two weeks, while up to a million may now be displaced.

Lammy and his US counterpart Antony Blinken spoke by phone on Monday. He said they had seen the media reports and were both urging “de-escalation”.

He added the UK would be keeping in touch with Iran, and reiterated the call for a 21-day ceasefire to enhance the prospect of a political solution.

Speaking on Tuesday, Lammy said: “The way forward is a political solution, not a military one.”

His comments come after Sir Keir Starmer last week told British nationals in Lebanon to “leave immediately” as fighting intensified between Israel and Hezbollah.

Britons had previously been advised to book flights out of the country – but there were limited options available, with most airlines except the national carrier having cancelled flights.

The Ministry of Defence has sent nearly 700 troops to nearby Cyprus to prepare for the possible evacuation of British nationals from Lebanon and the government “continues to advise against all travel to Lebanon”.

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.

The Israel military campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas attack has killed more than 41,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

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

Hezbollah 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.

Families of hostages in Gaza held a news conference in London, along with the relatives of other British-Israelis killed on 7 October, following a memorial event at Downing Street.

They said they felt let down and called on the government to do more to free their relatives. Earlier, they met Sir Keir and Lammy.

Tens of thousands of dockworkers have gone on strike indefinitely at ports across much of the US, threatening significant trade and economic disruption ahead of the presidential election and the busy holiday shopping season.

Members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) walked out on Tuesday at 14 major ports along the east and gulf coasts, halting container traffic from Maine to Texas.

The action marks the first such shutdown in almost 50 years.

President Joe Biden has the power to suspend the strike for 80 days for further negotiations, but the White House has said he is not planning to act.

Talks have been stalled for months and the current contract between parties expired on Monday.

The White House said that President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were monitoring the strike closely.

“The President has directed his team to convey his message directly to both sides that they need to be at the table and negotiating in good faith – fairly and quickly.”

The two sides are fighting over a six-year master contract that covers about 25,000 port workers employed in container and roll-on/roll-off operations, according to the US Maritime Alliance, known as USMX, which represents shipping firms, port associations and marine terminal operators.

On Monday, USMX said it had increased its offer, which would raise wages by almost 50%, triple employers’ contributions to pension plans and strengthen health care options.

Union boss Harold Daggett has called for significant pay increases for his members, while voicing concerns about threats from automation.

USMX has accused the union of refusing to bargain, filing a complaint with labour regulators that asked them to order the union back to the table.

Under the previous contract, starting wages ranged from $20 to $39 per hour, depending on a worker’s experience. Workers also receive other benefits, such as bonuses connected to container trade.

Mr Daggett has indicated the union wants to see per-hour pay increase by five dollars per year over the life of the six-year deal, which he estimated amounted to about 10% per year.

The ILA said workers are owed after shipping firm profits soared during the Covid pandemic, while inflation hit salaries. It has warned to expect a wider strike of its members, including those not directly involved in this dispute, though the exact numbers are unclear.

The union has said it represents more than 85,000 people; it claimed about 47,000 active members in its annual report to the Labor Department.

Time-sensitive imports, such as food, are likely to be among the goods first impacted.

The ports involved handle about 14% of agricultural exports shipped by sea and more than half of imports, including a significant share of trade in bananas and chocolate, according to the Farm Bureau.

Other sectors exposed to disruption include tin, tobacco and nicotine, Oxford Economics said. Clothing and footwear firms, and European carmakers, which route many of their shipments through the Port of Baltimore, will also take a hit.

Imports in the US surged over the summer, as many businesses took steps to rush shipments ahead of the strike.

“I don’t think we will see immediate, significant economic impacts…but over the course of weeks, if the strike lasts that long, we can begin to see prices rise and for there to be some shortages in goods,” said Seth Harris, a professor at Northeastern University and a former White House adviser on labour issues.

More than a third of exports and imports could be affected by the strike, hitting US economic growth to the tune of at least $4.5bn each week of the strike, according to Grace Zemmer, an associate US economist at Oxford Economics, though others have estimated the economic hit could be higher.

She said more than 100,000 people could find themselves temporarily out of work as the impact of the stoppage spreads.

“This is really a trigger event, one that will see dominoes fall over the coming months,” said Peter Sand, chief analyst at ocean freight analytics firm Xeneta, warning that the stand-off also has the potential push up wider shipping costs.

That would hit consumers and businesses which tend to rely on so-called “just-in-time” supply chains for goods, he added.

The stand-off marks the first time since 1977 that the ILA has gone on strike and injects uncertainty into the US economy at a delicate time.

The economy has been slower and the unemployment rate is ticking higher as the US election approaches in six weeks.

The strike risks putting President Biden in a tricky spot.

US presidents can intervene in labour disputes that threaten national security or safety by imposing an 80-day cooling-off period, forcing workers back on the job while negotiations continue.

In 2002, Republican President George W Bush intervened to open ports after 11 days of a strike action by dockworkers on the west coast, who are represented by a different union.

The US Chamber of Commerce business group has called on President Biden to take action.

“Americans experienced the pain of delays and shortages of goods during the pandemic-era supply chain backlogs in 2021. It would be unconscionable to allow a contract dispute to inflict such a shock to our economy,” said Suzanne P. Clark, president and chief executive of the business group.

The ILA’s Mr Daggett endorsed Democrat Biden in 2020, but has been critical of the president more recently, citing pressure on west coast dockworkers to reach a deal a year ago. He met with Donald Trump in July.

Although any strike chaos is likely to hurt Democrats, the cost of alienating allies in the labour movement just weeks before the election would be greater, said William Brucher, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University.

But public support of strikes could be tested by the dispute, which has been championed by Mr Daggett, who was acquitted of having links to organised crime in a 2004 case by federal prosecutors. A related civil suit remains unresolved.

Films such as the 1954 classic crime drama On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando, once defined the union’s image, but Prof Brucher said he thought that historical memory had largely faded and many people shared the dockworkers’ concerns about cost-of living and automation.

“As much as it could sway public opinion against the ILA, a strike by ILA members is their decision and I don’t think they will be swayed by public opinion in any meaningful way,” he said.

“What is more likely to happen is the pressure of a strike will likely force the employers back to the table with a much more substantial offer.”

On a quiet Sunday evening in November 2005, a journalist in India’s Bihar state received a panicked phone call at home.

“The Maoists have attacked the prison. People are being killed! I’m hiding in the toilet,” an inmate gasped into the mobile phone, his voice trembling. The sound of gunshots echoed in the background.

He was calling from a jail in Jehanabad, a poverty-stricken district and, at the time, a stronghold of left-wing extremism.

The crumbling, red-brick, colonial-era prison overflowed with inmates. Spread across an acre, its 13 barracks and cells were described in official reports as “dark, damp, and filthy”. Originally designed for around 230, it held up to 800 prisoners.

The Maoist insurgency, which began in Naxalbari, a hamlet in West Bengal state in the late 1960s, had spread to large parts of India, including Bihar. For nearly 60 years, the guerrillas – also called Naxalites – have fought the Indian state to establish a communist society, the movement claiming at least 40,000 lives.

The Jehanabad prison was a powder keg, housing Maoists alongside their class enemies – vigilantes from upper caste Hindu private armies. All awaited trial for mutual atrocities. Like many Indian prisons, some inmates had access to mobile phones, secured through bribing the guards.

“The place is swarming with rebels. Many are simply walking out,” the inmate – one of the 659 prisoners at the time – whispered to Mr Singh.

On the night of 13 November 2005, 389 prisoners, including many rebels, escaped from Jehanabad prison in what became India’s – and possibly Asia’s – largest jailbreak. At least two people were killed in the prison shootout, and police rifles were looted amid the chaos. The United States Department of State’s 2005 report on terrorism said the rebels had even “abducted 30 inmates” who were members of an anti-Maoist group.

In a tantalising twist, police said the “mastermind” of the jail break was Ajay Kanu, a fiery rebel leader who was among the prisoners. Security was so lax in the decrepit prison that Kanu stayed in contact with his outlawed group on the phone and through messages, helping them come in, police alleged. Kanu says this is not true.

Hundreds of rebels wearing police uniforms had crossed a drying stream behind the prison, climbed up and down the tall walls using bamboo ladders and crawled in, opening fire from their rifles.

The cells were open as food was being cooked late in the kitchen. The rebels walked to the main gates and opened them. Guards on duty looked on helplessly. Prisoners – only 30 of the escapees were convicts, while the rest were awaiting trial – escaped by simply walking out of the gates, and disappeared into the darkness. It was all over in less than an hour, eyewitnesses said.

The mass jail break exposed the crumbling law and order in Bihar and the intensifying Maoist insurgency in one of India’s most impoverished regions. The rebels had timed their plan perfectly: security was stretched thin due to the ongoing state elections.

___

Rajkumar Singh, the local journalist, remembers the night vividly.

After getting the phone call, he rode his motorbike through a deserted town, trying to reach his office. He remembers the air was thick with gunshots ringing in the distance. The invading rebels were also trying to attack a neighbouring police station.

As he turned onto the main road, dim streetlights revealed a chilling sight – dozens of armed men and women in police uniforms blocking the way, shouting through a megaphone.

“We are Maoists,” they declared. “We’re not against the people, only the government. The jailbreak is part of our protest.”

The rebels had planted bombs along the road. Some were already detonating, collapsing nearby shops and spreading fear through the town.

Mr Singh says he pressed on, reaching his fourth-floor office, where he received a second call from the same prisoner.

“Everyone’s running. What should I do?,” the inmate said.

“If everyone’s escaping, you should too,” Mr Singh said.

Then he rode to the prison through the eerily empty streets. When he reached, he found the gates open. Rice pudding was strewn all over the kitchen, the cell doors were ajar. There was no jailor or policeman in sight.

In a room, two wounded policemen lay on the floor. Mr Singh says he also saw the bloodied body of Bade Sharma, the leader of the feared upper caste vigilante army of landlords called Ranvir Sena and a prisoner himself, lying on the floor. The police later said the rebels had shot him while leaving.

Lying on the floor and stuck to the walls were blood-stained handwritten pamphlets left behind by the rebels.

“Through this symbolic action, we want to warn the state and central governments that if they arrest the revolutionaries and the struggling people and keep them in jail, then we also know how to free them from jail in a Marxist revolutionary way,” one pamphlet said.

___

A few months ago, I met Kanu, the 57-year-old rebel leader the police accuse of masterminding the jailbreak, in Patna, Bihar’s chaotic capital.

At the time of the incident, media reports painted him as “Bihar’s most wanted”, a figure commanding both fear and respect from the police.

Officers recounted how the rebel “commander” instantly took control during the prison break once he was handed an AK-47 by his comrades.

In a dramatic turn, the reports said, he “expertly” handled the weapon, swiftly changing magazines before allegedly targeting and shooting Sharma. Fifteen months later, in February 2007, Kanu was arrested from a railway platform while he was travelling from Dhanbad in Bihar to the city of Kolkata.

Almost two decades later, Kanu has been acquitted in all but six of the original 45 criminal cases against him. Most of the cases stem from the jailbreak, including that of the murder of Sharma. He has served seven years in prison for one of the cases.

Despite his fearsome reputation, Kanu is unexpectedly talkative. He speaks in sharp, measured bursts, downplaying his role in the mass escape that made headlines. Now, this once-feared rebel is subtly shifting his gaze toward a different battle – a career in politics, “fighting for poor, backward castes”.

As a child, Kanu spent his days and nights listening to stories from his lower-caste farmer father about Communist uprisings in Russia, China and Indonesia. By eighth grade, his father’s comrades were urging him to embrace revolutionary politics. He says his defiance took root early – after scoring a goal against the local landlord’s son in a football match, armed upper-caste men stormed their home.

“I locked myself inside,” he recalls. “They came for me and my sister, ransacking the house, destroying everything. That’s how the upper castes kept us in check – through fear.”

In college, while studying political science, Kanu ironically led the student wing of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has waged a war against Maoism. After graduation, he co-founded a school, only to be forced out by the owner of the building. Upon returning to his village, tensions with the local landlord escalated. When a local strongman was murdered, Kanu, just 23, was named in the police complaint – and he went into hiding.

“Since then I have been on the run, most of my life. I left home early to mobilise workers and farmers, joined and went underground as a Maoist rebel,” he said. He joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), a radical communist group.

“My profession was liberation – the liberation of the poor. It was about standing up against the atrocities of the upper castes. I fought for those enduring injustice and oppression.”

___

In August 2002, with a feared reputation as a rebel leader and a 3m-rupee ($36,000; £27,000) bounty on his head – an incentive for people to report his whereabouts if they spotted him – Kanu was on his way to meet underground leaders and plan new strategies.

He was about to reach his destination in Patna when a car overtook him at a busy intersection. “Within moments, men in plainclothes jumped out, guns drawn, ordering me to surrender. I didn’t resist – I gave up,” he said.

Over the next three years, Kanu was shuffled between jails as police feared his escape. “He had a remarkable reputation, the sharpest of them all,” a senior officer told me. In each jail, Kanu says he formed prisoner unions to protest against corruption – stolen rations, poor healthcare, bribery. In one prison, he led a three-day hunger strike. “There were clashes,” he says, “but I kept demanding better conditions”.

Kanu paints a stark picture of the overcrowding in Indian prisons, describing Jehanabad, which held more than double its intended capacity.

“There was no place to sleep. In my first barrack, 180 prisoners were crammed into a space meant for just 40. We devised a system to survive. Fifty of us would sleep for four hours while the others sat, waiting and chatting in the dark. When the four hours were up, another group would take their turn. That’s how we endured life inside those walls.”

In 2005, Kanu escaped during the infamous jailbreak.

“We were waiting for dinner when gunfire erupted. Bombs, bullets – it was chaos,” he recalls. “The Maoists stormed in, yelling for us to flee. Everyone ran into the darkness. Should I have stayed behind and been killed?”

Many doubt the simplicity of Kanu’s claims.

“It wasn’t as simple as he makes it sound,” said a police officer. “Why was dinner being prepared late in the evening when it was usually cooked and served at dusk, with the cells locked up early? That alone raised suspicions of inside collusion.”

Interestingly many of the prisoners who escaped were back in jail by mid-December – some voluntarily, others not. None of the rebels returned.

When I asked Kanu whether he masterminded the escape, he smiled. “The Maoists freed us – it’s their job to liberate,” he said.

But when pressed again, Kanu fell silent.

The irony deepened as he finally shared a story from prison.

A police officer had once asked him if he was planning another escape.

“Sir, does a thief ever tell you what he’s going to steal?” Kanu replied wryly.

His words hung in the air, coming from a man who insists he had no part in planning the jailbreak.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity, which was battered after the Hamas attacks on 7 October, has been boosted by his country’s military successes against Hezbollah, a new opinion poll suggests.

A picture has been widely shared of the Israeli PM in New York giving the order for the biggest of these – the assassination of the Lebanese armed group’s long-time chief, Hassan Nasrallah.

A poll for Israel’s Channel 12, released on Sunday night, indicates the Israeli PM’s Likud party would win more seats than any other if a general election was held.

However, it did not project a win for him overall, instead suggesting the current opposition parties would have more MPs, enabling them to form a coalition.

Fortunately for Netanyahu, his former political rival, Gideon Saar, also joined his fractious coalition government on Sunday, a step that should strengthen the prime minister.

“We will work together, shoulder to shoulder, and I intend to seek his assistance in the forums that influence the conduct of the war,” Netanyahu said.

Saar will serve as a minister without portfolio with a seat in the Security Cabinet, the body overseeing the management of the war against Israel’s regional enemies.

By joining the government with his four-seat party, Netanyahu has a much more solid majority of 68 in the 120-seat parliament.

Rumours had swirled in recent weeks that the position of defence minister currently held by the popular, seasoned, former military general Yoav Gallant would go to the relatively less experienced Saar.

However, that move seemed to be abandoned as Israel began its series of major strikes against Hezbollah.

For Netanyahu, the new composition of the government weakens the power of his National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir. The far-right winger has repeatedly threatened to topple the coalition if it goes ahead with a “reckless” deal to end the war in Gaza and bring home hostages or agrees to a permanent ceasefire with Hezbollah.

The coalition could now survive without Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power party’s six seats, giving Netanyahu more room for manoeuvre.

Once seen as a rising star of Likud, Saar left the party and became one of the most vocal critics of the prime minister arguing that Netanyahu should not continue to serve while battling corruption charges. He has framed his decision to join the government as an act of patriotism, fostering unity.

However, he has been sharply criticised by some Israeli commentators who describe him as acting cynically in his own self-interest.

“Saar’s decision to join the government is certainly a painful blow to a large number of Israelis who think that Netanyahu needs to go, and not just because he is being tried on criminal charges, and not just because he is the most corrupt, hedonistic and lying prime minister Israel has ever had,” said Yedioth Ahronoth columnist, Sima Kadmon.

She sees that his action “will stabilise and boost the worst government ever to have served in Israel, so much so that the original date of the next elections, October 2026, now appears to be a realistic date”.

Certainly, the extra seats could also help solve another challenge facing Israel’s most far-right ever government.

At this sensitive time of war, when the military has a pressing need to expand its ranks, divisions have opened over the passage of a new military conscription law.

The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in June that the state must begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students into the army. They have historically been exempted, and such a move is vehemently opposed by two ultra-Orthodox parties upon which the coalition depends.

Deepening his personal rift with the prime minister, in July, Yoav Gallant approved a plan to begin sending out draft notices to 1,000 18-26-year-olds from the ultra-Orthodox community.

A slick political strategist, Netanyahu – Israel’s longest serving leader – did see a big drop in the support for his party in polls at the end of last year.

His personal image as “Mr Security” was badly damaged after the 7 October attacks – the deadliest day in Israeli history, when Hamas surprised one of the world’s best intelligence services and the best resourced military in the region took hours to respond.

However, by August, opinion polls suggested the prime minister had begun to bounce back.

That was despite the invasion of Gaza turning into Israel’s longest ever war with no sign of its objectives being met: the complete destruction of Hamas and bringing home Israel’s remaining hostages.

The latest poll gives Likud as many as 25 seats. Altogether coalition parties would be expected to take 49 seats, while opposition parties would win 66.

According to the research for Channel 12, Netanyahu also remains the favourite candidate for prime minister over the centrist opposition leader, Yair Lapid – with 38% favouring him over his rival who has 27% support.

Much in Israeli politics depends on what happens next as Israel’s multi-front war reaches a critical moment.

As Israel hints at a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, tens of thousands of Israeli citizens in the north of the country still do not know when they will return to their homes – an official goal for Israel.

If Hezbollah’s main ally Iran decides to attack, the consequences are unpredictable.

On the international stage, Israel looks increasingly isolated. International courts are considering whether to put Israel on trial for genocide and have requested an arrest warrant for the prime minister and his defence minister on allegations of crimes against humanity.

The ultimate test of Netanyahu’s resilience could be yet to come.

Nikunj Tank, a worker in the world’s diamond polishing capital Surat in western India, had been desperate since losing his job in May.

The unit he worked at for seven years was facing a financial squeeze and closed down, leaving him and over a dozen others unemployed.

Tank was the family’s sole breadwinner – he was supporting his parents, wife and daughter and had no savings.

‘‘He couldn’t find a job and unable to bear the loss, he took the extreme step,” said his retired father Jayanti Tank.

Tank died by suicide in August.

The last few years have been tough for India’s recession-hit diamond industry. Surat, in Gujarat state, processes 90% of the world’s diamonds in over 5,000 units and employs more than 800,000 polishers. The city has 15 big polishing units with an annual turnover of more than $100m (£75m).

India’s exports of cut and polished stones fell from $23bn in 2022 to $16bn in 2023 and are expected to drop further to $12bn in 2024.

• The revolution underway in India’s diamond industry
• Debt-ridden India labourer digs up diamond worth $95,000

The price of polished diamonds dipped by 5%,s to 27% in 2023, due to lower demand and oversupply, say analysts. Mahesh Virani of Star Gems explained that oversupply occurred because polishing units continued production despite limited demand to keep operations running, ultimately increasing their losses.

The state’s Diamond Workers’ Union, a group representing polishers, told BBC Gujarati that more than 30,000 have lost their jobs in the past six months alone due to the downturn.

The union says that as per their data collected from victims’ families, police records and news reports, 65 workers have died by suicide in the state over one-and-a-half years due to this slowdown. The BBC could not independently verify this figure.

Experts say the Covid-19 lockdown, the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars, and falling demand in key markets have adversely impacted India’s diamond industry.

“The business of polished diamonds has gone down by more than 25-30% due to global recession,” said Vallabh Lakhani, chairman of Kiran Gems, a leading manufacturer.

India imports 30% of its rough diamonds from Russian mines – now under Western sanctions due to the war – and cuts and polishes them, then sells them mostly in Western markets.

In March, the European Union and G7 countries imposed a fresh ban on the import of Russian unpolished diamonds, including those processed in India and sold in the West via third countries.

After the fresh ban, India publicly raised concerns, with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar stating in April that such measures hurt those lower in the supply chain more than Russia, as producers usually find alternative routes.

Traders in Surat echo that.

“India is at the low end of the value chain of the diamond industry. The country is highly dependent on the global market, both for raw materials as well as for final sales,” said exporter Kirti Shah.

• Ukraine war: Russian diamonds set for ban under new EU sanctions

Additionally, an economic downturn in G7 countries and the UAE and Belgium – India’s key export destinations – has impacted business.

The downturn is also attributed to a rise in demand for lab-grown diamonds, a cheaper alternative to natural diamonds, and to the war in Gaza, as the gems form a sizeable chunk of India’s trade with Israel.

“The diamond sector in Surat is passing through a bad phase,” said Kumar Kanani, a lawmaker from the state’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He said the police were investigating the suicide cases attributed to job losses.

“The government is ready to provide all possible help to polishers, traders and businessmen,” he said.

But the families of at least nine workers, who recently took their lives, said they had received little help from the government.

• Will a Russian diamond ban be effective?

The majority of layoffs have occurred in small and medium-sized units, which typically hire workers for quality checks of rough diamonds and for polishing and shaping them.

But bigger players are impacted too. Last month, Kiran Gems asked its 50,000 employees to go on a 10-day vacation, citing the slowdown as a reason.

In July, the Diamond Workers’ Union started a helpline which received over 1,600 distress calls from polishers seeking jobs or financial help.

But there have been others who couldn’t get help in time.

Vaishali Patel, 38, lost her husband Nitin two years back. The polishing unit he worked for had laid off a majority of its staff because of a lack of business.

Brokers and traders too are facing the brunt.

“We have been sitting idle for days. There is hardly any sale or purchase,” said Dilip Sojitra, one of the 5,000 brokers in Surat who sell diamonds to customers, traders and other brokers.

• India’s jobs crisis is more serious than it seems

Lab-grown diamonds, once in high demand, have also seen prices drop from $300 to $78 per carat due to overproduction, impacting the market. Surat Diamond Brokers Association president Nandlal Nakrani believes the situation will improve when rough diamond prices decrease and polished diamond prices rise.

Despite the slowdown, some hope the industry will recover, as it did after the 2008 Great Recession, which shut hundreds of polishing units and left thousands jobless.

Mr Sojitra says he believes the upcoming festival season, including Diwali, Christmas, and New Year, will help boost business momentum.

“This too shall pass,” he says.

The Irish economy has been increasingly attracting Chinese investment, but does it come with a reputational cost?

In 2020, 25 Chinese companies had operations in the Republic of Ireland. By this year the number had jumped to 40.

For some this new flood of yuan into the country offers Ireland an opportunity to reduce its reliance on being the European base for US tech giants such as Apple and Alphabet. And it creates additional jobs.

But for an increasing number of critics, Ireland being home to Chinese firms links the country to the human rights abuse allegations levelled against some such companies. These include Chinese clothing firm Shein, which since May 2023 has had its European headquarters in Dublin.

Shein has long been attacked for how the workers who makes its clothes are treated. And earlier this year it had to admit that it found child labour in its supply chain.

The Irish government is also in the diplomatically awkward position of luring many of the very Chinese companies that the US has sanctioned.

Two cases in point – telecoms firm Huawei and drugs company WuXi Biologics.

In May, Ireland’s Minister of State for Trade Promotion, Dara Calleary, welcomed a report celebrating how Huawei was contributing €800m ($889m; £668m) per year to the Irish economy. The firm has three research and development centres in Ireland.

This is the same Huawei whose telecoms network equipment the US has banned since 2022 due to concerns over national security. The UK has moved in the same direction, ordering phone networks to remove Huawei components. And mobile phone networks in many Western nations, including Ireland, no longer offer Huawei handsets.

Meanwhile, WuXi has, since 2018, invested more than €1bn in a facility in Dundalk, near the border with Northern Ireland.

Earlier this month the US House of Representatives passed a bill to restrict US firms’ ability to work with WuXi, again citing national security concerns. The bill now has to go to the US Senate.

Ireland’s Industrial Development Authority is the government agency whose mandate is to attract foreign investment into the country. It has three offices in China, and says it seeks “to promote Ireland as a gateway to Europe for Chinese investors”.

Another Chinese firm that has its European headquarters in Ireland is social media video app TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based parent firm ByteDance. And the parent of Chinese online retailer Temu moved its global headquarters from China to Ireland last year.

Prominent critics of Ireland rolling out a “green carpet” to Chinse firms include Barry Andrews, one of Ireland’s members of the European Parliament. “Human rights and environmental abuses should not be allowed in Irish shopping baskets,” says the Fianna Fáil MEP.

He points to a US Congress report from last year, which said there was “an extremely high risk that Temu’s supply chains are contaminated with forced labour”.

Temu had told the investigation that it had a “zero-tolerance policy” towards the practice.

“One person’s bargain is another’s back-breaking work for poverty wages,” adds Mr Andrews, whose party is part of the current Irish government coalition.

Critics also argue that there are substantial differences between US tech firms operating in Ireland and Chinese ones – for example, about openness.

For instance, Huawei and WuXi declined an opportunity to be interviewed for this article. Shein provided a spokesperson who was only prepared to speak off the record, then did not reply to follow-up questions.

Some leading economists question whether Ireland even needs the few thousand jobs that the Chinese firms provide.

“Ireland’s economy has been running at near full employment for the best part of a decade,” says Dan O’Brien, chief economist at Ireland’s Institute of International and European Affairs.

Irish unemployment was 4.3% in August 2024, only slightly above its all-time low of 3.90% in October 2020. Economists generally consider an unemployment rate of around 4 to 5% to represent full employment.

Mr O’Brien also points to the fact that a fifth of Ireland’s private-sector employment is directly, or indirectly, attributable to foreign direct investment (FDI), according to official figures. He says this is too high.

It is so elevated because Ireland has one of the lowest standard corporation tax rates in Europe, at 12.5%. This is the tax that all but the very biggest firms have to pay on their profits. By comparison, the UK rate is 25%.

Mr O’Brien says that Ireland’s level of FDI was already too high without the Chinese investment on top. “Given we are already overly dependent on FDI in a world that is at risk of deglobalisation, we don’t need another major source of FDI on top of that from the United States.”

He adds EU rules should be “actively used to discourage Chinese FDI” in Ireland.

The Irish government tells the BBC that it “supports the common EU approach to China on de-risking… [but] the government has been clear that de-risking is not decoupling”.

Irish Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Peter Burke adds: “In an era of continuous global uncertainty, Ireland offers a stable and pro-business environment. Multinational companies, including Chinese companies, recognise these opportunities.”

Given how much Ireland’s economy does depend on FDI, some economists say Chinese investment in Ireland can be seen as a welcome insurance policy in case some US firms pull out.

“There is a huge pressure on US tech companies to re-domicile and re-invest in the US,” says Constantin Gurdgiev, an economist at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Northern Colorado.

Meanwhile, other European countries, such as Poland, Estonia, Slovakia, and Malta, have made inroads in courting US investments, presenting Ireland with new competition from countries with cheaper housing and less rain.

Dr Gurdgiev also points to “the forever-looming threat of global corporate tax reforms”, further eroding Ireland’s low corporation tax. The country has already signed up to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development rules, and as a result, this year introduced a 15% corporation tax rate for firms with an annual turnover of more than €750m ($835m; £625m).

And earlier this month, the European Court of Justice ruled that Apple had to pay Ireland €13bn in unpaid taxes. It followed after the European Commission accused Ireland of giving Apple illegal tax advantages.

Dublin consistently argued against the need for the tax to be paid, but said it would respect the ruling.

Dr Gurdgiev adds that Ireland is acting “with some strategic foresight” in courting Beijing. And that even if Dublin is welcoming the likes of Huawei, he says that the strength and influence of the Irish diaspora in the US means that Washington will turn something of a blind eye.

He argues that this is why the US authorities have been “largely laissez-faire in their approach to chasing tax optimization schemes that Dublin has been developing over decades”.

Plus, he says Ireland provides the US, EU and China with a useful “neutral ground” where both US and Chinese tech firms can operate.

Dr Gurdgiev adds that by putting itself in such a position, Ireland is playing a “dangerous geopolitical game” for a small economy.

However, he says its diplomatic closeness to the US should make its position “relatively safe”.

Mount Everest is 15-50m taller than it would otherwise be because a river is eroding rock and soil at its base, helping push it upwards, according to a new study.

Loss of landmass in the Arun river basin 75km (47 miles) away is causing the world’s highest peak to rise by up to 2mm a year, University College London (UCL) researchers said.

“It’s a bit like throwing a load of cargo off a ship,” study co-author Adam Smith told the BBC. “The ship becomes lighter and so floats a little higher. Similarly, when the crust becomes lighter… it can float a little higher.”

Pressure from the collision of the Indian and the Eurasian plates 40-50 million years ago formed the Himalayas and plate tectonics remains the major reason for their continued rise.

But the Arun river network is a contributing factor to the mountains’ rise, the UCL team said.

As the Arun flows through the Himalayas it carves away material – the river bed in this case – from the Earth’s crust. This reduces the force on the mantle (the next layer under the crust), causing the thinned crust to flex and float upward.

It’s an effect called the isostatic rebound. The research, published in Nature Geoscience, adds that this upward pushing force is causing Everest and other neighbouring summits, including the world’s fourth and fifth highest peaks, Lhotse and Makalu, to move upward.

“Mount Everest and its neighbouring peaks are growing because the isostatic rebound is raising them up faster than erosion is wearing them down,” fellow co-author of the study Dr Matthew Fox told the BBC.

“We can see them growing by about two millimetres a year using GPS instruments and now we have a better understanding of what’s driving it.”

Some geologists not involved in the study said the theory was plausible but there was much in the research that was still uncertain.

Everest stands on the border between China and Nepal, and its northern part is on the Chinese side. The Arun river flows down from Tibet into Nepal and then merges with two other rivers to become the Kosi which then enters northern India to meet the Ganges.

It is a very high silt-yielding river given the steepness of the mountains it flows through and the force it has, allowing it to carve off so much rock and soil on its way.

But the UCL researchers say it most likely earned its real strength when it “captured” another river or water body in Tibet 89,000 years ago, which in geological timescales is a recent event.

A Chinese academic, Dr Xu Han of China University of Geosciences, was the lead author in the study during a scholarship visit at the UCL.

“The changing height of Mount Everest really highlights the dynamic nature of the Earth’s surface,” he said.

“The interaction between the erosion of the Arun river and the upward pressure of the Earth’s mantle gives Mount Everest a boost, pushing it up higher than it would otherwise be.”

The UCL study says the Arun river most likely gained the capacity to carve off an extraordinary amount of rocks and other materials after it captured another river or water system in Tibet.

Professor Hugh Sinclair with the School of Geosciences at University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study, said the underlying process identified by the UCL team was perfectly reasonable.

But, he added, the exact amounts and timescales of river incision (or how the river cuts downward into its bed and deepens its channel) and the consequent surface uplift of surrounding peaks had large uncertainties.

“Firstly, predicting river incision of such large catchments in response to drainage capture (one river capturing another river or lake) is challenging,” he said.

This uncertainty is something the authors have acknowledged in the study.

Secondly, said Prof Sinclair, the distance over which mountains uplift from a point of intensive localised erosion is extremely hard to predict.

“However, even accounting for these reservations, the possibility that some of Everest’s exceptional elevation is linked to the river, represents an exciting insight.”

Diego Garcia, a remote island in the Indian Ocean, is a paradise of lush vegetation and white-sand beaches, surrounded by crystal blue waters.

But this is no tourist destination. It is strictly out of bounds to most civilians – the site of a highly secretive UK-US military base shrouded for decades in rumour and mystery.

The island, which is administered from London, is at the centre of a long-running territorial dispute between the UK and Mauritius, and negotiations have ramped up in recent weeks.

The BBC gained unprecedented access to the island earlier this month.

___

“It’s the enemy,” a private security officer jokes as I return to my room one night on Diego Garcia, my name highlighted in yellow on a list he is holding.

For months, the BBC had fought for access to the island – the largest of the Chagos Archipelago.

We wanted to cover a historic court case being held over the treatment of Sri Lankan Tamils, the first people ever to file asylum claims on the island, who have been stranded there for three years. Complex legal battles have been waged over their fate and a judgement will soon determine if they have been unlawfully detained.

Up until this point, we could only cover the story remotely.

Diego Garcia, which is about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from the nearest landmass, features on lists of the world’s most remote islands. There are no commercial flights and getting there by sea is no easier – permits for boats are only granted for the archipelago’s outer islands and to allow safe passage through the Indian Ocean.

To enter the island you need a permit, only granted to people with connections to the military facility or the British authority that runs the territory. Journalists have historically been barred.

UK government lawyers brought a legal challenge to try to block the BBC from attending the hearing, and even when permission was granted following a ruling by the territory’s Supreme Court, the US later objected, saying it would not provide food, transport or accommodation to all those attempting to reach the island for the case – including the judge and barristers.

Notes exchanged between the two governments this summer, seen by the BBC, suggested both were extremely concerned about admitting any media to Diego Garcia.

“As discussed previously, the United States agrees with the position of HMG [His Majesty’s Government] that it would be preferable for members of the press to observe the hearing virtually from London, to minimize risks to security of the Facility,” one note sent from the US government to British officials said.

When permission was finally granted for me to spend five days on the island, it came with stringent restrictions. These did not just cover the court reporting. They also extended to my movements on the island and even a ban on reporting what the actual restrictions were.

Requests for minor changes to the permit were denied by British and US officials.

Personnel from the security company G4S were flown to the territory to guard the BBC and lawyers who had flown out for the hearing.

But despite the constraints, I was still able to observe illuminating details, all of which helped to paint a picture of one of the most restricted locations in the world.

Approaching by plane, coconut trees and thick foliage are visible across the 44 sq km footprint-shaped atoll, the greenery punctuated by white military structures.

Diego Garcia is one of about 60 islands that make up the Chagos Archipelago or British Indian Ocean Territory (Biot) – the last colony established by the UK by separating it from Mauritius in 1965. It is located about halfway between East Africa and Indonesia.

Pulling on to the runway alongside grey military aircraft, a sign on a hangar greets you: “Diego Garcia. Footprint of Freedom,” above images of the US and British flags.

This is the first of many references to freedom on the island’s signage, a nod to the UK-US military base that has been there since the early 1970s.

Agreements signed in 1966 leased the island to the US for 50 years initially, with a possible extension for a further 20 years. The arrangement was rolled over and is set to expire in 2036.

As I make my way through airport security and beyond, US and UK influences jostle for predominance.

In the terminal, there is a door decorated with a union jack print and walls hung with photos of significant British figures, including Winston Churchill.

On the island itself, I spot British police cars and a nightclub called the Brit Club with a bulldog logo. We pass roads named Britannia Way and Churchill Road.

But cars drive on the right, as they do in the US. We are driven around in a bright yellow bus reminiscent of an American school bus.

The US dollar is the accepted currency and the electricity sockets are American. The food offered to us for the five days includes “tater tots” – a popular American fried-potato side dish – and American biscuits, similar to British scones.

While the territory is administered from London, most personnel and resources there are under the control of the US.

In the BBC’s bid to access the island, UK officials referred questions up to US staff. When the US blocked the court hearing from taking place on Diego Garcia this summer, a senior official at the Ministry of Defence said the UK “did not have the ability to grant access”.

“The US security assessment is classified… [they] have demonstrated that they have strict controls in place,” he wrote in an email to a Foreign Office colleague.

Biot’s acting commissioner has said it is not possible for him to “compel the US authorities” to grant access to any part of the military facility constructed by the US under the terms of the UK-US agreement, despite it being a British territory.

In recent years, the territory has been costing the UK tens of millions of pounds, with the bulk of this categorised under “migrant costs”. Communications obtained by the BBC between foreign office officials in July regarding the Sri Lankan Tamils warn that “the costs are increasing and the latest forecast is that these will be £50 million per annum”.

The atmosphere on the island feels relaxed. Troops and contractors ride past me on bikes, and I see people playing tennis and windsurfing in the late afternoon sun.

A cinema advertises screenings of Alien and Borderlands, and there is even a bowling alley and a museum with a gift shop attached, though I was not allowed inside.

We pass a fast-food spot called Jake’s Place, and a scenic patch of land next to the sea with a sign that reads: “Ye olde swimming hole and picnic area.” Diego Garcia-branded T-shirts and mugs are on sale on the island.

But there are also constant reminders of the sensitive base that is here. Military drills can be heard early in the morning, and near our accommodation block is a fenced-off building identified as an armoury.

All the time, US and British military officials keep a close eye on the court’s movements.

The island has startling natural beauty, from lush vegetation to pristine white beaches, and is also home to the world’s biggest terrestrial arthropod – the coconut crab. Military personnel warn of the dangers of sharks in the surrounding waters.

Biot’s website boasts that it has the “greatest marine biodiversity in the UK and its Overseas Territories, as well as some of the cleanest seas and healthiest reef systems in the world”.

But there are also clues pointing to its brutal past.

When the UK took control of the Chagos Islands – Diego Garcia is the southernmost – from former British colony Mauritius, it sought to rapidly evict its population of more than 1,000 people to make way for the military base.

Enslaved people were brought to the Chagos Islands from Madagascar and Mozambique to work on coconut plantations under French and British rule. In the following centuries, they developed their own language, music and culture.

I get to see a former plantation on the east of the island, where buildings stand in disrepair. The grand plantation manager’s house has a sign outside reading: “Danger unsafe structure. Do not enter. By order: Brit rep [representative].” A large crab crawls up the door of an abandoned guest house.

At a church on the plantation site, a sign, in French, beneath the crucifix reads: “Let us pray for our Chagossian brothers and sisters.”

Wild donkeys still roam in the area. David Vine, author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia, describes them as a “ghostly remnant of the society that had been there for almost 200 years”.

A Foreign Office memo in 1966 stated that the object of its plan “was to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls”.

A British diplomat responded that the islands were home only to “some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure and are hopefully being wished on to Mauritius”.

Another government document stated that the islands were chosen “not only for their strategic location but also because they had, for all practical purposes, no permanent population”.

“The Americans in particular attached great importance to this freedom of manoeuvre, divorced from the normal considerations applying to a populated dependent territory,” it said.

Mr Vine says the plans came at a time when the “decolonisation movement was unfolding and accelerating” and the US was concerned about losing access to military bases around the world.

Diego Garcia was one of many islands that were considered, he says, but it became the “prime candidate” because of its relatively small population and strategic location in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

For the UK, he says, it was a chance to maintain close military ties with the US, even with only a “token British presence” there – but there was also financial motivation, he adds.

The US agreed to a $14m discount on the UK’s purchase of its Polaris nuclear missiles as part of the secret deal over the islands.

In 1967, the eviction of all residents from the Chagos islands began. Dogs, including pets, were rounded up and killed. Chagossians have described being herded onto cargo ships and taken to Mauritius or the Seychelles.

The UK granted citizenship to some Chagossians in 2002, and many of them came to live in the UK.

In testimony given to the International Court of Justice years later, Chagossian Liseby Elysé said people on the archipelago had lived a “happy life” that “did not lack anything” before the expulsions.

“One day the administrator told us that we had to leave our island, leave our houses and go away. All persons were unhappy. But we had no choice. They did not give us any reason,” she said. “Nobody would like to be uprooted from the island where he was born, to be uprooted like animals.”

Chagossians have fought for years to return to the land.

Mauritius, which won independence from the UK in 1968, maintains that the islands are its own and the United Nations’ highest court has ruled, in an advisory opinion, that the UK’s administration of the territory is “unlawful” and must end.

It said the Chagos Islands should be handed over to Mauritius in order to complete the UK’s “decolonisation”.

Clive Baldwin, senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, says the “forced displacement of the Chagossians by the UK and US, their persecution on the grounds of race, and the ongoing prevention of their return to their homeland amount to crimes against humanity”.

“These are the most serious crimes a state can be responsible for. It is an ongoing, colonial crime as long as they prevent the Chagossians from returning home.”

The UK government has previously stated that it has “no doubt” as to its claim over the islands, which had been “under continuous British sovereignty since 1814”.

However, in 2022, it agreed to open negotiations with Mauritius over the future of the territory, with then-Foreign Secretary James Cleverly saying he wanted to “resolve all outstanding issues”.

Earlier this month, the government announced that former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who played a central role in negotiating the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, had been appointed to negotiate with Mauritius over the islands.

In a statement, new Foreign Secretary David Lammy – who has criticised previous governments for having for years “ignored the opinions” of various UN bodies over the islands – said the UK was endeavouring to “reach a settlement that protects UK interests and those of our partners”, as he stressed the need to protect the “long-term, secure and effective operation of the joint UK/US military base”.

Matthew Savill, military sciences director at leading UK defence think tank Rusi, says Diego Garcia is an “enormously important” base, “because of its position in the Indian Ocean and the facilities it has: port, storage and airfield”.

The nearest UK facility is some 3,400km (2,100 miles) away, and for the US, nearly 4,800km (3,000 miles), he explains, with the island also an important location for “space tracking and observation capabilities”.

Tankers operating from Diego Garcia refuelled US B-2 bombers that had flown from the US to carry out the first airstrikes on Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. And, during the subsequent “war on terror”, aircraft were also sent directly from the island itself to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The base is also one of an “extremely limited number of places worldwide available to reload submarines” with weapons like Tomahawk missiles, says Mr Savill, and the US has positioned a large amount of equipment and stores there for contingencies.

Walter Ladwig III, a senior lecturer in international relations at King’s College London, agrees the base fulfils “a lot of important roles” – but that “there is this level of secrecy that seems to go beyond what we see at other places”.

“There has been this hyper-focus on controlling access and on limiting access, which… seems to go beyond what, given what we publicly know about the assets, capabilities and units are based there.”

During my time on the island, I am required to wear a red visitor pass and am closely monitored at all times. My accommodation is guarded 24-hours-a-day and the men outside make a note of when I leave and return – always under escort.

In the mid-1980s, British journalist Simon Winchester pretended his boat had run into trouble next to the island. He remained in the bay for about two days, and managed to briefly step on shore before being escorted away and told: “Go away and don’t come back.”

He tells me he remembers British authorities there being “incredibly hostile” and the island as “extraordinarily beautiful”. More than two decades later, a Time magazine journalist spent 90 minutes or so on the island when the US presidential plane stopped there to refuel.

Rumours have long swirled about the uses of Diego Garcia, including that it has been used as a CIA black-site – a facility used to house and interrogate terror suspects.

The UK government confirmed in 2008 that rendition flights carrying terror suspects had landed on the island in 2002, following years of assurances that they had not.

“The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then,” then-Foreign Secretary David Miliband told parliament at the time.

On the same day, former CIA director Michael Hayden said that information previously “supplied in good faith” to the UK about rendition flights – stating that they had never landed there – had “turned out to be wrong”.

“Neither of those individuals was ever part of [the] CIA’s high-value terrorist interrogation programme. One was ultimately transferred to Guantanamo, and the other was returned to his home country. These were rendition operations, nothing more,” he said, while denying reports that the CIA had a holding facility on Diego Garcia.

Years later, Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to the former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Vice News that intelligence sources had told him that Diego Garcia had been used as a site “where people were temporarily housed and interrogated from time to time.”

I was not allowed near any of Diego Garcia’s sensitive military areas.

After leaving my island accommodation for the last time I received an email, thanking me for my recent stay and asking for feedback. “We want every guest to experience nothing less than a welcoming and comfortable experience,” it read.

Before flying out, my passport was stamped with the territory’s coat of arms. Its motto reads: “In tutela nostra Limuria”, meaning “Limuria is in our charge” – a reference to a mythical lost continent in the Indian Ocean.

A continent that doesn’t exist seems like a fitting symbol for an island whose legal status is in doubt and that few, since the Chagossians were expelled, have been allowed to see.

Signs that modern slavery victims were being forced to work at a McDonald’s branch and a factory supplying bread products to major supermarkets were missed for years, the BBC has found.

A gang forced 16 victims to work at either the fast-food restaurant or the factory – which supplied Asda, Co-op, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose.

Well-established signs of slavery, including paying the wages of four men into one bank account, were missed while the victims from the Czech Republic were exploited over more than four years.

McDonald’s UK said it had improved systems for spotting “potential risks”, while the British Retail Consortium said its members would learn from the case.

Six members of a family-run human trafficking network from the Czech Republic have been convicted in two criminal trials, which were delayed by the Covid pandemic.

Reporting restrictions have prevented coverage of much of the case, but BBC England can now reveal the full scale of the gang’s crimes – and the missed opportunities to stop them.

Nine victims were forced to work at the McDonald’s branch in Caxton, Cambridgeshire. Nine worked at the pitta bread company, with factories in Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire and Tottenham in north London, which made supermarket own-brand products. There were 16 victims in total across both sites, as two worked at both McDonald’s and the factory.

The victims – who were all vulnerable, most having experienced homelessness or addiction – earned at least the legal minimum wage, but nearly all of their pay was stolen by the gang.

While they lived on a few pounds a day in cramped accommodation – including a leaking shed and an unheated caravan – police discovered their work was funding luxury cars, gold jewellery and a property in the Czech Republic for the gang.

On several occasions, victims escaped and fled home only to be tracked down and trafficked back to the UK.

The exploitation ended in October 2019 after victims contacted police in the Czech Republic, who then tipped off their British counterparts.

But warning signs had been missed for at least four years, the BBC has discovered by reviewing legal documents from the gang’s trial and interviewing three victims.

The undetected red flags include:

• Victims’ wages were paid into bank accounts in other people’s names. At the McDonald’s, at least four victims’ wages – totalling £215,000 – were being paid into one account, controlled by the gang

• Victims were unable to speak English, and job applications were completed by a gang member, who was even able to sit-in on job interviews as a translator

• Victims worked extreme hours at the McDonald’s – up to 70 to 100 a week. One victim worked a 30-hour shift. The UN’s International Labour Organization says excessive overtime is an indicator of forced labour

• Multiple employees had the same registered address. Nine victims lived in the same terraced home in Enfield in north London while working at the bakery

“It really concerns me that so many red flags were missed, and that maybe the companies didn’t do enough to protect vulnerable workers,” said Dame Sara Thornton, the former independent anti-slavery commissioner, who reviewed the BBC’s findings.

Det Sgt Chris Acourt, who led the Cambridgeshire Police investigation, said there were “massive opportunities” that were missed to detect the slavery and alert authorities sooner.

“Ultimately, we could have been in a situation to end that exploitation much earlier had we been made aware,” he said.

Slavery on the High Street

For seven years, vulnerable victims of trafficking were forced to make food for major high street chains. How did their exploitation go undetected for so long?

Watch now on BBC iPlayer (UK Only)

Like many of the victims, Pavel – who has waived his legal right to anonymity – was homeless in the Czech Republic when he was approached by the gang in 2016.

He says he was lured in with the false promise of a well-paid job in the UK, where he could at the time work legally.

But the reality of what he experienced has left lasting scars, he said.

“You can’t undo the damage to my mental health, it will always live with me.”

He was given just a few pounds a day in cash by his exploiters, despite working 70-hour weeks at the McDonald’s branch, he said.

The gang – led by brothers Ernest and Zdenek Drevenak – confiscated the passports of all their victims and controlled them through fear and violence, police found.

“We were afraid,” Pavel said. “If we were to escape and go home, [Ernest Drevenak] has a lot of friends in our town, half the town were his mates.”

The gang “treated their victims like livestock” feeding them just enough “to keep them going”, according to the Met’s Det Insp Melanie Lillywhite.

She said victims were controlled by “invisible handcuffs” – monitored by CCTV, prevented from using phones or the internet and unable to speak English.

“They really were cut off from the outside world,” she said.

While the gang has been convicted in court, Pavel believes McDonald’s also shares some responsibility.

“I do feel partially exploited by McDonald’s because they didn’t act,” he said.

“I thought if I was working for McDonalds, that they would be a little bit more cautious, that they will notice it.”

Two former colleagues told the BBC the extreme hours the men worked – and the impact it had on them – was plain to see.

Like most McDonald’s, the Caxton outlet – on the A428 – is a franchise, which means an independent business pays the fast-food giant to allow it to run the restaurant.

While victims worked there between 2015 and 2019, it was run by two different franchise-holders. We contacted both, but they did not respond.

McDonald’s UK declined our offer of an interview, but provided a statement on behalf of the corporation and its franchisees.

It said the current franchisee – Ahmet Mustafa – had only been “exposed to the full depth of these horrific, complex and sophisticated crimes” in the course of his co-operating with police and the prosecution.

The company said it cares “deeply” about all employees and promised that – working with franchisees – it would “play our part alongside government, NGOs [Non-governmental organisations] and wider society to help combat the evils of modern slavery”.

It also said it commissioned an independent review in October 2023 and had taken action to improve its ability to “detect and deter potential risks, such as: shared bank accounts, excessive working hours, and reviewing the use of interpreters in interviews”.

The bakery company – Speciality Flatbread Ltd – ceased trading and went into administration in 2022.

None of the supermarkets detected the slavery while victims worked at the factory between 2012 and 2019.

Dame Sara said she would have expected the retailers to be doing “pretty thorough due diligence”, adding that they normally “take much greater care about their own brand products because that’s their reputation that’s on the line”.

Sainsbury’s said it stopped using the company as an own-brand supplier in 2016.

The others only stopped sometime after police rescued the victims in 2019.

Asda told the BBC it was “disappointed that a historic case has been found in our supply chain”, adding that it would “review every case identified and act upon the learnings”.

It said it had made three site visits, but focused solely on food safety, and had stopped using the factory in 2020.

Tesco said inspections – supported by information from anti-slavery charity Unseen – “revealed concerning working practices” and the company “ceased all orders from the supplier” in 2020.

Waitrose said it pulled out in 2021 after its audits led to “concerns about factory standards and working conditions”.

The Co-op said it made “a number” of unannounced inspections, including worker interviews, but found no signs of modern slavery, adding that the company “actively work to tackle the shocking issue… both in the UK and abroad”.

M&S said it suspended and delisted the company in 2020 after it “became aware of potential breaches of ethical labour standards via the modern slavery helpline”.

The British Retail Consortium said workers’ welfare was “fundamental” to retailers, who it said acted quickly when concerns are raised.

“Nonetheless, it is important that the retail industry learns from cases like this to continually strengthen due diligence,” it said.

Speciality Flatbreads’ director Andrew Charalambous did not respond to written requests for comment, but in a phone call from the BBC said he had supported the police and prosecution, adding that the company had been “thoroughly audited by top law firms” and “everything we were doing was legal”.

He added: “From our perspective we didn’t break the law in any way, having said that, yes, maybe you’re right in that maybe there were certain telltale signs or things like that, but that would have been for the HR department who were dealing with it on the front line.”

The Modern Slavery Act requires larger companies – including McDonald’s and the supermarkets, but not the factory – to publish annual statements outlining what they will do to tackle the issue.

Former Prime Minister Baroness Theresa May, who introduced the act as home secretary in 2015, accepted the law failed to protect victims in this case, and believes it needs to be “beefed up”.

The former PM – who now leads the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking – said the case was “frankly shocking” and shows “large companies not properly looking into their supply chains”.

She said the global commission was reviewing what new laws are needed “to ensure action is being taken by companies”.

Responding to the case, the government said it would “set out next steps on the issue of modern slavery in due course”.

It said it was “committed to tackling all forms of modern slavery” and would “pursue gangs and employers with every lever at our disposal while ensuring that victims are provided with the support they need”.

Details of organisations offering support for victims of modern slavery are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline

Kris Kristofferson was always modest about his talent.

He disliked being called a poet and preferred it when other people performed his songs.

“I sing like a bullfrog,” he once told record producer Fred Foster.

“Yeah,” Foster replied, “but a bullfrog who communicates.”

Kristofferson’s plainspoken vocals may have lacked range but they carried something more important – conviction.

When he sang of loss and love and sorrow and drunken nights and regret-filled mornings, you believed every word.

That is partly because he never forced a song into existence – “I always had to wait until something hit me, and I could write it,” he once said – but also because he could dig into the simple truth of a sentiment.

His songwriting was not especially complex but what he could do with a few chords and a well turned phrase caused a revolution in country music.

“You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything,” Bob Dylan once said.

To mark his death, at the age of 88, here’s a guide to some of his most memorable songs.

One of Kristofferson’s most enduring songs, Me and Bobby McGee, started out as a songwriting challenge.

Monument Records founder Foster had a crush on his secretary, Barbara “Bobbie” McKee, and wanted a song that would impress her.

Kristofferson accepted the assignment – but finding inspiration took time.

“I avoided him [Foster] for three or four months because there were only thoughts running through my head,” he said in 1973.

“I was driving back to New Orleans one night, the windshield wipers were going, and it started falling together.”

He based the song on the last scene of the Fellini film La Strada (The Road), in which a broken, inebriated man stares at the sea in despair at what his life has become, and the love he has lost.

Kristofferson turned that tale into the story of two drifters, who find love on the road and are separated, eventually, by death.

It contains one of his greatest lyrics:

Originally recorded by Roger Miller, it became a number-one hit for Janis Joplin, who recorded it weeks before her death in 1970.

The desolation of Kristofferson’s downbeat delivery tells you this song is about much more than a bad hangover.

And, as it progresses, the protagonist slowly reveals more about the causes of his booze-soaked existence.

The smell of fried chicken reminds him of “something that I’d lost”.

And he stops outside a Sunday school just to hear the children singing.

The loneliness and self-loathing are expressed vividly – and Kristofferson said he had written the lyrics as a struggling musician living in a tenement after his parents had disowned him and his wife and child moved to California without him.

“Sunday was the worst day of the week if you didn’t have a family,” he said.

According to legend, Kristofferson got the song into Johnny Cash’s hands by landing a helicopter in his backyard and refusing to leave until he had listened to his demo tape.

Cash was impressed enough to play the song on his US TV programme.

And the Country Music Association named his recording song of the year 1970.

Kristofferson’s own version appeared on his debut album the same year.

Along with artists such as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, Kristofferson was part of the “outlaw country” scene that fought Nashville’s commercial and creative control.

Discussing his place in the country firmament, in 1970, he told the New York Times: “I’m nobody’s best friend.

“People kept telling me that I’d never make it in Nashville, that I ought to head for California or New York.”

He had upset the establishment, with songs such as Blame It on the Stones and The Law Is for the Protection of the People, which took a swipe at American conservatism.

His most famous song also ruffled feathers for its unadorned depiction of sexual desire, especially when recorded (and taken to number one) by female country star Sammi Smith.

Kristofferson said the lyrics had been inspired by a Frank Sinatra interview.

When asked what he believed in, Old Blue Eyes had responded: “Booze, broads, or a bible… whatever helps me make it through the night.”

Smith’s sensuous delivery was a subversive step forward for country music but Kristofferson’s own version – croaky-voiced and dripping with hunger – is just as much of a thrill.

“The first good song I wrote,” Kristofferson said of Jody and the Kid, which he composed while working as a janitor at Columbia Records in the 1960s

Like Me and Bobby McGee, it is steeped in nostalgia and loss, as the musician describes a girl who used to walk everywhere with him, “her little blue jeans rolled up to her knees”.

Over time, they fall in love, and grow old, still walking hand in hand everywhere they go.

As the song ends, the narrator traces their old paths with their daughter – but when the locals greet them, he laments his wife is no longer there to join them.

Kristofferson’s sombre, emotional vocal is both spellbinding and heartbreaking.

It is also worth out checking out his 1999 re-recording of the song (on the album The Austin Sessions), where his older, craggier voice lends it added pathos.

If the character in Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down was at a low point, this represents them at rock bottom.

““

Kristofferson was moved to write the song after attending a service at Jimmie Snow’s church in Nashville.

“Everybody was kneeling down and Jimmy said something like, ‘If anybody’s lost, raise their hand,'” he said.

“I don’t go to church a lot and the notion of raising my hand was out of the question.

“I thought, ‘I can’t imagine who’s doing this,’ when all of a sudden I felt my hand going up.”

After talking to the preacher, Kristofferson said, “I found myself weeping in public” and felt a “forgiveness that I didn’t even know I needed”.

The song works as a reaction to that moment – a slow, mournful realisation of his past behaviour, and a soul-cry for forgiveness.

Recorded with his soon-to-be wife Rita Cooolidge, the gospel-infused ballad struck a chord with audiences in 1973, giving the star his only number one on the country charts.

6) I Hate Your Ugly Face – The first song Kristofferson wrote, aged 11. A sarcastic rejection of country tropes, it reveals the early development of his storytelling talent.

7) They Killed Him – A lament for Kristofferson’s heroes – Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King – later reinterpreted by Dylan. “Having Dylan cover one of your songs is like being a playwright and having Shakespeare act in your play,” Kristofferson said.

8) Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again) – One of his most romantic songs and Kristofferson’s first chart hit, in 1971. He later re-recorded it with The Highwaymen, a supergroup of outlaw country artists that also featured Cash, Jennings and Nelson.

9) Here Comes that Rainbow Again – Inspired by a scene in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, this touching ballad is about small acts of kindness being repaid. Cash once said it “might be my favourite song by any writer”.

10) Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends – Two lovers spend one last night together, clinging on to their memories (and to one another) in the hope the inevitable break-up never comes. Written in the early 1970s, Kristofferson initially gave it to Bobby Bare but later remade it with Rita Coolidge, just as their marriage was dissolving. Their duet is devastating.

The UK is about to stop producing any electricity from burning coal – ending its 142-year reliance on the fossil fuel.

The country’s last coal power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, finishes operations on Monday after running since 1967.

This marks a major milestone in the country’s ambitions to reduce its contribution to climate change. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel producing the most greenhouse gases when burnt.

Minister for Energy Michael Shanks said: “We owe generations a debt of gratitude as a country.”

The UK was the birthplace of coal power, and from tomorrow it becomes the first major economy to give it up.

“It’s a really remarkable day, because Britain, after all, built her whole strength on coal, that is the industrial revolution,” said Lord Deben – the longest serving environment secretary.

The first coal-fired power station in the world, the Holborn Viaduct power station, was built in 1882 in London by the inventor Thomas Edison – bringing light to the streets of the capital.

From that point through the first half of the twentieth century, coal provided pretty much all of the UK’s electricity, powering homes and businesses.

In the early 1990s, coal began to be forced out of the electricity mix by gas, but coal still remained a crucial component of the UK grid for the next two decades.

In 2012, it still generated 39% of the UK’s power.

But the science around climate change was growing – it was clear that the world’s greenhouse gas emissions needed to be reduced and as the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal was a major target.

In 2008, the UK established its first legally binding climate targets and in 2015 the then-energy and climate change secretary, Amber Rudd, told the world the UK would be ending its use of coal power within the next decade.

Dave Jones, director of global insights at Ember, an independent energy think tank, said this really helped to “set in motion” the end of coal by providing a clear direction of travel for the industry.

But it also showed leadership and set a benchmark for other countries to follow, according to Lord Deben.

“I think it’s made a big difference, because you need someone to point to and say, ‘There, they’ve done it. Why can’t we do it?'”, he said.

In 2010, renewables generated just 7% of the UK’s power. By the first half of 2024, this had grown to more than 50% – a new record.

The rapid growth of green power meant that coal could even be switched off completely for short periods, with the first coal-free days in 2017.

The growth of renewables has been so successful that the target date for ending coal power was brought forward a year, and on Monday, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, was set to close.

Chris Smith has worked at the plant for 28 years in the environment and chemistry team. She said: “It is a very momentous day. The plant has always been running and we’ve always been doing our best to keep it operating….It is a very sad moment.”

Lord Deben served in former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s government when many of the UK’s coal mines were closed and thousands of workers lost their jobs. He said lessons had to be learnt from that for current workers in the fossil fuel industry.

“I’m particularly keen on the way in which this Government, and indeed the previous Government, is trying to make sure that the new jobs, of which there are very many green jobs, go to the places which are being damaged by the changes.

“So in the North Sea oil areas, that’s exactly where we should be doing carbon capture and storage, it’s where we should be putting wind and solar power,” he said.

Although coal is a very polluting source of energy, its benefit has been in being available at all times – unlike wind and solar which are limited by weather conditions.

Kayte O’Neill, the chief operating officer at the Energy System Operator – the body overseeing the UK’s electricity system – said: “There is a whole load of innovation required to help us ensure the stability of the grid. Keeping the lights on in a secure way.”

A crucial technology providing that stability Kayte O’Neill spoke of is battery technology.

Dr Sylwia Walus, research programme manager at the Faraday Institution, said that there has been significant progress in the science of batteries.

“There is always scope for a new technology, but more focus these days is really how to make it more sustainable and cheaper in production,” she said.

To achieve this the UK needs to become more independent of China in producing its own batteries and bringing in skilled workers for this purpose, she explained.

Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to get exclusive insight on the latest climate and environment news from the BBC’s Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, delivered to your inbox every week.

Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.

A judge in Georgia has struck down the state’s abortion law that has prohibited abortions after six weeks of pregnancy since it took effect in 2022.

Georgia’s Life Act was fully nullified by Judge Robert McBurney’s decision, meaning that the state must now allow abortions up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.

The judge wrote in his order that “liberty in Georgia” includes “the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices”.

Georgia passed the Life Act in 2019 but it only came into force in 2022, after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and opened the door for state bans.

SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective filed the original lawsuit with other plaintiffs in 2019, shortly after Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, signed the act into law.

When Judge McBurney reviewed the case in 2022, he struck down the law, ruling that it violated the US Constitution.

The Georgia Supreme Court later took up the case, however, and allowed the six-week limit to stand.

The case has since returned to Judge McBurney, who found this time that it violated the state constitution after a review “of our higher courts’ interpretations of ‘liberty'”.

“[D]oes a Georgian’s right to liberty of privacy encompass the right to make personal healthcare decisions? Plainly it does,” the judge wrote in his decision.

Gov Kemp’s office criticised the judge’s ruling on Monday.

“Once again, the will of Georgians and their representatives have been overruled by the personal beliefs of one judge,” Garrison Douglas, Kemp’s spokesperson, said in a statement.

“Protecting the lives of the most vulnerable among us is one of our most sacred responsibilities, and Georgia will continue to be a place where we fight for the lives of the unborn.”

This ruling could affect more than just Georgians, however.

It could open up abortion access in the US South, where several Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed laws that have severely limited access to abortion procedures.

These laws have meant people in the region sometimes travel hundreds of miles to states like North Carolina, Kansas and Illinois for legal abortions.

Judge McBurney noted the danger a six-week limit could have on women in his order, writing that “for many women, their pregnancy was unintended, unexpected, and often unknown until well after the embryonic heartbeat began”.

Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women, called the ruling “a significant step in the right direction”.

“We are encouraged that a Georgia court has ruled for bodily autonomy. At the same time, we can’t forget that every day the ban has been in place has been a day too long – and we have felt the dire consequences with the devastating and preventable deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller.”

Thurman and Miller were named in a pair of ProPublica reports that found their deaths were connected to Georgia’s abortion ban. Their cases have been highlighted by Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has made reproductive rights a centerpiece of her campaign for the White House.

Switzerland and Italy have redrawn part of their border in the Alps due to melting glaciers, caused by climate change.

Part of the area affected will be beneath the Matterhorn, one of Europe’s tallest mountains, and close to a number of popular ski resorts.

Large sections of the Swiss-Italian border are determined by glacier ridgelines or areas of perpetual snow, but melting glaciers have caused these natural boundaries to shift, leading to both countries seeking to rectify the border.

Switzerland officially approved the agreement on the change on Friday, but Italy is yet to do the same. This follows a draft agreement by a joint Swiss-Italian commission back in May 2023.

Statistics published last September showed that Switzerland’s glaciers lost 4% of their volume in 2023, the second biggest loss ever after 2022’s record melt of 6%.

An annual report is issued each year by the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network (Glamos), which attributed the record losses to consecutive very warm summers, and 2022 winter’s very low snowfall. Researchers say that if these weather patterns continue, the thaw will only accelerate.

On Friday, Switzerland said that the redefined borders had been drawn up in accordance with the economic interests of both parties.

It is thought that clarifying the borders will help both countries determine which is responsible for the upkeep of specific natural areas.

Swiss-Italian boundaries will be changed in the region of Plateau Rosa, the Carrel refuge and Gobba di Rollin – all are near the Matterhorn and popular ski resorts including Zermatt.

The exact border changes will be implemented and the agreement published once both countries have signed it.

Switzerland says that the approval process for signing the agreement is under way in Italy.

Last year, Glamos warned that some Swiss glaciers are shrinking so fast that it is unlikely they can be saved, even if global temperatures are kept within the Paris climate agreement’s 1.5C target rise.

Experts say that without a reduction in greenhouse gases linked to global warning, bigger glaciers like the Aletsch – which is not on the border – could disappear within a generation.

A number of discoveries have been made on Swiss glaciers in recent years due to their melting and rapid shrinking.

Last July, human remains found close to Matterhorn were confirmed to be those of a German climber missing since 1986.

Climbers crossing the Theodul glacier above Zermatt noticed a hiking boot and crampons emerging from the ice.

In 2022, the wreckage of a plane that crashed in 1968 emerged from the Aletsch glacier.

And the body of missing British climber Jonathan Conville was discovered in 2014 by a helicopter pilot who spotted something unusual while delivering supplies to a mountain refuge on the Matterhorn.

A Chinese woman has been arrested in Leipzig on suspicion of passing information about Leipzig/Halle airport, which is used as a key transport hub for the German defence industry, to Chinese intelligence.

German prosecutors said that Yaqi X, 38, had been working for a company providing logistics services at the airport.

Prosecutors said she had repeatedly sent details on flights, passengers and military cargo transport to another figure who worked for China’s secret services. The airport is considered an important centre for defence exports, particularly to Ukraine.

A second suspect, Jian G, was detained earlier this year.

He had worked as an aide for a member of the European Parliament from Germany’s far-right AfD party.

Yaqi X was remanded in custody and her home and workplace searched.

Between August 2023 and February 2024, prosecutors allege she had given Jian G information on the transport of military equipment and people linked to an unnamed German arms company.

German sources told public broadcaster ARD that the defence company involved was Rheinmetall, Germany’s biggest defence firm which has been heavily involved in supplying Ukraine with weapons, armoured vehicles and military equipment.

Yaqi X’s case appears to be linked to a spying case that unfolded last April involving parliamentary aide Jian G.

The MEP he had worked for, Maximilian Krah, dismissed Jian G as his assistant. Krah’s office in Brussels was searched by police, although there was no indication that he was involved.

Jian G was alleged to have spied on Chinese dissidents in Germany as well as passing information on the European Parliament to Chinese intelligence.

He had previously worked for dissident groups and had taken up German citizenship after coming to Germany in 2002.

TV and Broadway star Gavin Creel has died from a “rare and aggressive” cancer at the age of 48, his publicist Matt Polk has announced.

Creel was best known as a stage star in shows such as Hello Dolly! opposite Bette Midler, which earned him a Tony award in 2017.

He played Cornelius Hackl opposite Midler in the titular role.

Midler paid tribute on Instagram, describing Creel as a “radiant actor… he was fantastic. I can’t believe he’s gone. What a loss.”

Creel also starred in the West End, picking up a prestigious Olivier award for best actor in a musical in 2014 for his turn as Elder Price in The Book Of Mormon, a role he went on to play on Broadway.

British star Hannah Waddingham said she was “shaken to my core” following his death.

“I’ve just had to sit down. I keep re-reading his name thinking everyone’s got it wrong. Not this man, not this beautiful, smiley, talented man,” she posted on X.

“The absolute real deal, talent pouring out of every pore. I’m heartbroken you’ve gone Gavin. I hope to see you again my friend.”

Actor, producer and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda also paid tribute to Creel, who was cast as his first King George III when hit musical Hamilton was at the early workshop stage.

“Gavin Creel was our first King when all we had was 11 songs and he wrapped the audience around his finger with nothing but a Burger King crown and his mind-blowing charisma and talent,” he wrote on Instagram.

“He is so loved and it is unimaginable that he’s no longer with us.

“My heart goes out to all the friends and family and collaborators lucky enough to be in his orbit.”

Frozen star’s Idina Menzel and Josh Gad also posted tribute on social media.

Creel’s first major Broadway role was as Jimmy Smith, opposite fellow newcomer Sutton Foster, in a revival of Thoroughly Modern Millie in 2002, which landed him his first Tony nomination for best leading actor in a musical.

“My sweet friend. I will love you forever,” Foster said in a post on Instagram.

Creel also played Claude Hooper Bukowski in the 2009 revival of Hair on Broadway.

He made his West End debut in 2006 as Bert in Mary Poppins and reprised his role in the West End transfer of Hair in 2010.

Other roles included Dr Pomatter in Sara Bareilles’ musical Waitress on Broadway in 2019, a role he took to the West End a year later.

Creel’s TV career included a two-episode stint in Ryan Murphy’s miniseries American Horror Stories, opposite Matt Bomer in 2021.

He also appeared opposite Dame Julie Andrews in TV movies Eloise At The Plaza and Eloise At Christmastime in the early 2000s.

The star also co-founded Broadway Impact, a grassroots organisation aimed at mobilising the theatre community to support marriage equality.

He was born in Findlay, Ohio and was a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Music.

Creel’s publicist said there will be a small private gathering for the family and a celebration of his life will be held for the theatre community at a date yet to be announced.

Members of parliament in Kenya have started the process of removing the country’s deputy president from office.

Those who back the effort accuse Rigathi Gachagua of having a role in June’s anti-government demonstrations – which turned deadly – as well as an involvement in corruption, undermining government and promoting ethnically divisive politics.

The deputy president has dismissed the allegations.

This is the culmination of a major fallout between Gachagua and President William Ruto.

On Tuesday, the speaker of the National Assembly allowed the impeachment proceedings to begin after a motion to start things off was backed by 291 MPs, way over the threshold of the 117 MPs required.

The impeachment itself is expected to sail through both houses of parliament easily, after the main opposition joined forces with the president’s party following the recent protests. But there is no date yet for when that will actually take place.

Multiple efforts to stop the impeachment attempt through the courts failed.

The power struggle between the president and his deputy has led to concerns of instability at the heart of government, at a time when Kenya is in the throes of a deep economic and financial crisis.

Ruto chose Gachagua as his running-mate in the 2022 election, when he defeated former Prime Minister Raila Odinga in a bitterly contested election.

Gachagua comes from the vote-rich Mount Kenya region, and helped marshal support for Ruto.

But with members of Odinga’s party joining the government after the youth-led protests that forced Ruto to back down from increasing taxes, the political dynamics have changed – and the deputy president looks increasingly isolated.

Gachagua has, however, struck a defiant tone, saying he has the backing of voters in his native central Kenya region.

“Two-hundred [legislators] cannot overturn the will of the people,” he said.

For the motion to pass, it would require the support of at least two-thirds of members of the National Assembly and Senate, excluding its nominated members.

Backers of the motion are confident that it will be approved.

But Gachagua has made it clear that he will not go down without a fight.

“The president can ask MPs to stop. So, if it continues, he’s in it,” he told media outlets before Tuesday’s parliamentary session.

Ruto has in the past vowed not to subject Gachagua to “political persecution”, similar to what he says he experienced when he was deputy to his predecessor, Uhuru Kenyatta.

But the rift between Ruto and Gachagua has been apparent in recent months.

The deputy president has been conspicuously absent from seeing off his boss at the airport when he travels abroad, and receiving him when he returns.

Interior Secretary Kithure Kindiki, a law professor who is trusted by the president, appears to be taking on some of the deputy president’s responsibilities – something that also happened when Ruto and Kenyatta fell out.

Like Gachagua, Kindiki comes from Mount Kenya – the region which forms the largest voting block in Kenya.

Dozens of legislators have rallied behind Kindiki as the region’s preferred “mouthpiece”, intensifying speculation that they are pushing for him to succeed Gachagua.

That has left the deputy president largely isolated with only a handful of elected politicians backing him.

In a further sign that he is in political trouble, the police’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) recently recommended charges against two MPs, a staff member and other close allies of the deputy president, after accusing them of “planning, mobilising and financing violent protests” that occurred in June.

Gachagua defended the accused, denouncing the charges as an “act of aggression” and an “evil scheme” to “soil” his name and lay the groundwork for his impeachment.

In parliament last week, Kindiki – under whose ministry the DCI falls – pledged to remain neutral, but made it clear that “high-level individuals” will be prosecuted.

“We are dealing with the aftermath of the attempted overthrow of the constitution of Kenya by criminal and dangerous people who almost burnt the parliament of Kenya. We have a job to do,” he said.

But many of the young people who were at the forefront of the protests dismiss suggestions that Gachagua’s allies were behind it, and see the bid by lawmakers to oust him as an attempt to deflect attention from bad governance.

They say that if the deputy goes, the president must go too.

In the Senate, an opposition legislator has filed a censure motion against the president. It does not bear the same weight as impeachment and has no legal consequence.

Ruto, who is expected to host legislators from his party later this week, will be weighing the political risks of moving against Gachagua, but some lawmakers say they do not want him to wade into the debate – a tough ask.

For now, Gachagua’s fate rests with legislators, but one man might still extend him a renewed lease of political life – the president.

• Batons, tear gas, live fire – Kenyans face police brutality
• Kenyan president’s humbling shows power of African youth
• Toiling on a Kenyan flower farm to send fresh roses to Europe
• Despair as the sea slowly swallows a Kenyan beauty spot

The bodies of 20 children and three teachers have been recovered after a bus transporting school pupils crashed and caught fire outside Bangkok.

The bus was returning to the Thai capital after a school trip to the north of the country.

Videos from the scene showed flames engulfing the bus as it burned under an overpass, with huge clouds of dense black smoke billowing into the sky.

The driver handed himself in to police 100km (61 miles) north of Bangkok, according to local media.

Footage taken shortly after the fatal crash showed the driver attempting to extinguish the fire but he reportedly fled the scene.

Witnesses say the bus crashed into the concrete barrier dividing the highway just north of Bangkok, after a front tyre burst.

The bus was quickly consumed by an intense fire, and many on board were unable to get out. The cause of the fire is still unknown.

Nineteen children and three teachers are reported to have survived, sixteen of whom are being treated in hospital for their injuries.

Transport Minister Suriyahe Juangroongruangkit said the bus was powered by “extremely risky” compressed natural gas.

“This is a very tragic incident,” Mr Suriyahe told reporters at the scene.

“The ministry must find a measure… if possible, for passenger vehicles like this to be banned from using this type of fuel because it’s extremely risky.”

Piyalak Thinkaew, who was leading the search, said it was hard to identify the bodies because they were so badly burnt.

“Some of the bodies we found were very, very small,” he told reporters at the scene, adding that the fire started at the front of the bus.

“The kids’ instinct was to escape to the back so the bodies were there,” he said.

Forensic police said of the 23 bodies found, eleven were male, seven female and a further five were unidentifiable.

The ages of the children on board remains unclear, but the school caters for pupils between three and 15 years old.

Thailand has one of the worst road safety records in the world, with unsafe vehicles and poor driving contributing to roughly 20,000 fatalities a year.

Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, said an investigation was underway. “We have to investigate the trace of driving from the tire marks, the burning trace, and CCTV footage,” he said.

China’s sputtering economy has its worried leaders pulling out all the stops.

They have unveiled stimulus measures, offered rare cash handouts, held a surprise meeting to kickstart growth and tried to shake up an ailing property market with a raft of decisions – they did all of this in the last week.

On Monday, Xi himself spoke of “potential dangers” and being “well-prepared” to overcome grave challenges, which many believe was a reference to the economy.

What is less clear is how the slowdown has affected ordinary Chinese people, whose expectations and frustrations are often heavily censored.

But two new pieces of research offer some insight. The first, a survey of Chinese attitudes towards the economy, found that people were growing pessimistic and disillusioned about their prospects. The second is a record of protests, both physical and online, that noted a rise in incidents driven by economic grievances.

Although far from complete, the picture neverthless provides a rare glimpse into the current economic climate, and how Chinese people feel about their future.

Beyond the crisis in real estate, steep public debt and rising unemployment have hit savings and spending. The world’s second-largest economy may miss its own growth target – 5% – this year.

That is sobering for the Chinese Communist Party. Explosive growth turned China into a global power, and stable prosperity was the carrot offered by a repressive regime that would never loosen its grip on the stick.

The slowdown hit as the pandemic ended, partly driven by three years of sudden and complete lockdowns, which strangled economic activity.

And that contrast between the years before and after the pandemic is evident in the research by American professors Martin Whyte of Harvard University, Scott Rozelle of Stanford University’s Center on China’s Economy and Stanford masters student Michael Alisky.

They conducted their surveys in 2004 and 2009, before Xi Jinping became China’s leader, and during his rule in 2014 and 2023. The sample sizes varied, ranging between 3,000 and 7,500.

In 2004, nearly 60% of the respondents said their families’ economic situation had improved over the past five years – and just as many of them felt optimistic about the next five years.

The figures jumped in 2009 and 2014 – with 72.4% and 76.5% respectively saying things had improved, while 68.8% and 73% were hopeful about the future.

However in 2023, only 38.8% felt life had got better for their families. And less than half – about 47% – believed things would improve over the next five years.

Meanwhile, the proportion of those who felt pessimistic about the future rose, from just 2.3% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.

While the surveys were of a nationally representative sample aged 20 to 60, getting access to a broad range of opinions is a challenge in authoritarian China.

Respondents were from 29 Chinese provinces and administrative regions, but Xinjiang and parts of Tibet were excluded – Mr Whyte said it was “a combination of extra costs due to remote locations and political sensitivity”. Home to ethnic minorities, these tightly controlled areas in the north-west have long bristled under Beijing’s rule.

Those who were not willing to speak their minds did not participate in the survey, the researchers said. Those who did shared their views when they were told it was for academic purposes, and would remain confidential.

Their anxieties are reflected in the choices that are being made by many young Chinese people. With unemployment on the rise, millions of college graduates have been forced to accept low-wage jobs, while others have embraced a “lie flat” attitude, pushing back against relentless work. Still others have opted to be “full-time children”, returning home to their parents because they cannot find a job, or are burnt out.

Analysts believe China’s iron-fisted management of Covid-19 played a big role in undoing people’s optimism.

“[It] was a turning point for many… It reminded everyone of how authoritarian the state was. People felt policed like never before,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

Many people were depressed and the subsequent pay cuts “reinforced the confidence crisis,” he added.

Moxi, 38, was one of them. He left his job as a psychiatrist and moved to Dali, a lakeside city in southwestern China now popular with young people who want a break from high-pressure jobs.

“When I was still a psychiatrist, I didn’t even have the time or energy to think about where my life was heading,” he told the BBC. “There was no room for optimism or pessimism. It was just work.”

Work, however, no longer seems to signal a promising future, according to the survey.

In 2004, 2009 and 2014, more than six in 10 respondents agreed that “effort is always rewarded” in China. Those who disagreed hovered around 15%.

Come 2023, the sentiment flipped. Only 28.3% believed that their hard work would pay off, while a third of them disagreed. The disagreement was strongest among lower-income families, who earned less than 50,000 yuan ($6,989; £5,442) a year.

Chinese people are often told that the years spent studying and chasing degrees will be rewarded with financial success. Part of this expectation has been shaped by a tumultuous history, where people gritted their teeth through the pain of wars and famine, and plodded on.

Chinese leaders, too, have touted such a work ethic. Xi’s Chinese Dream, for example, echoes the American Dream, where hard work and talent pay off. He has urged young people to “eat bitterness”, a Chinese phrase for enduring hardship.

But in 2023, a majority of the respondents in the Whyte and Rozelle study believed people were rich because of the privilege afforded by their families and connections. A decade earlier, respondents had attributed wealth to ability, talent, a good education and hard work.

This is despite Xi’s signature “common prosperity” policy aimed at narrowing the wealth gap, although critics say it has only resulted in a crackdown on businesses.

There are other indicators of discontent, such as an 18% rise in protests in the second quarter of 2024, compared with the same period last year, according to the China Dissent Monitor (CDM).

The study defines protests as any instance when people voice grievances or advance their interests in ways that are in contention with authority – this could happen physically or online. Such episodes, however small, are still telling in China, where even lone protesters are swiftly tracked down and detained.

A least three in four cases are due to economic grievances, said Kevin Slaten, one of the CDM study’s four editors.

Starting in June 2022, the group has documented nearly 6,400 such events so far.

They saw a rise in protests led by rural residents and blue-collar workers over land grabs and low wages, but also noted middle-class citizens organising because of the real estate crisis. Protests by homeowners and construction workers made up 44% of the cases across more than 370 cities.

“This does not immediately mean China’s economy is imploding,” Mr Slaten was quick to stress.

Although, he added, “it is difficult to predict” how such “dissent may accelerate if the economy keeps getting worse”.

Chinese leaders are certainly concerned.

Between August 2023 and Janaury 2024, Beijing stopped releasing youth unemployment figures after they hit a record high. At one point, officials coined the term “slow employment” to describe those who were taking time to find a job – a separate category, they said, from the jobless.

Censors have been cracking down on any source of financial frustration – vocal online posts are promptly scrubbed, while influencers have been blocked on social media for flaunting luxurious tastes. State media has defended the bans as part of the effort to create a “civilised, healthy and harmonious” environment. More alarming perhaps are reports last week that a top economist, Zhu Hengpeng, has been detained for critcising Xi’s handling of the economy.

The Communist Party tries to control the narrative by “shaping what information people have access to, or what is perceived as negative”, Mr Slaten said.

CDM’s research shows that, despite the level of state control, discontent has fuelled protests – and that will worry Beijing.

In November 2022, a deadly fire – which killed at least 10 people who were not allowed to leave the building during a Covid lockdown – brought thousands onto the streets in different parts of China to protest against crushing zero-Covid policies.

Whyte, Rozelle and Alisky don’t think their findings suggest “popular anger about… inequality is likely to explode in a social volcano of protest.”

But the economic slowdown has begun to “undermine” the legitimacy the Party has built up through “decades of sustained economic growth and improved living standards”, they write.

The pandemic still haunts many Chinese people, said Yun Zhou, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan. Beijing’s “stringent yet mercurial responses” during the pandemic have heightened people’s insecurity about the future.

And this is particularly visceral among marginalised groups, she added, such as women caught in a “severely discriminatory” labour market and rural residents who have long been excluded from welfare coverage.

Under China’s contentious “hukou” system of household registration, migrant workers in cities are not allowed to use public services, such as enrolling their children in government-run schools.

But young people from cities – like Moxi – have flocked to remote towns, drawn by low rents, picturesque landscapes and greater freedom to chase their dreams.

Moxi is relieved to have found a slower pace of life in Dali. “The number of patients who came to me for depression and anxiety disorders only increased as the economy boomed,” he said, recalling his past work as a psychiatrist.

“There’s a big difference between China doing well, and Chinese people doing well.”

Whyte, Rozelle and Alisky’s research is based on four sets of academic surveys conducted between 2004 and 2023.

In-person surveys were conducted together with colleagues at Peking University’s Research Center on Contemporary China (RCCC) in 2004, 2009 and 2014. Participants ranged in age from 18-70 and came from 29 provinces. Tibet and Xingiang were excluded.

In 2023, three rounds of online surveys, at the end of the second, third and fourth quarters, were conducted by the Survey and Research Centre for China Household Finance (CHFS) at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, China. Participants ranged in age from 20-60.

The same questions were used in all surveys. To make responses comparable across all four years, the researchers excluded participants aged 18-19 and 61-70 and reweighted all answers to be nationally representative. All surveys contain a margin of error.

The study has been accepted for publication by The China Journal and is expected to be published in 2025.

Researchers for the China Dissent Monitor (CDM) have collected data on “dissent events” across China since June 2022 from a variety of non-government sources including news reports, social media platforms operating in the country and civil society organisations.

Dissent events are defined as instances where a person or persons use public and non-official means of expressing their dissatisfaction. Each event is highly visible and also subject to or at risk of government response, through physical repression or censorship.

These can include viral social media posts, demonstrations, banner drops and strikes, among others. Many events are difficult to independently verify.

For the past few days, there was a feeling in Lebanon that an Israeli ground invasion into the country’s south was almost inevitable as Israel indicated its campaign against Hezbollah would not stop with the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, who, for three decades, was the face of the group.

Now that this has been confirmed, with what the Israeli military describes as a “limited, localised and targeted” operation, the fear is that this could be the start of something wider.

History shows that it is easy for Israeli troops to enter Lebanon, but difficult for them to leave.

“The country is lost,” a Lebanese friend texted me. Another one wrote: “If you ask me what’s coming, my answer is it will be very long and hard days are coming”. A third said: “We just need to hope for the best.”

There is a feeling that history is repeating itself, and uncertainty about what happens next.

It remains unclear whether Hezbollah can still organise any significant and co-ordinated response. It continues to fire rockets at Israel, but not at the same intensity.

Meanwhile, this is a country under pressure, struggling with the sheer number of casualties from Israeli air strikes and one million people who have already been displaced.

Hezbollah, a Shia Muslim group armed and financed by Iran, is considered a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US and others, but is more than just a militia in Lebanon. It is also a political party with representation in parliament, and a social movement, engrained in Lebanese society, with significant support.

Powerful and influential, Hezbollah, which means Party of God, is often described as a state within a state in Lebanon. It has been weakened by two weeks of unrelenting Israeli air strikes and high-profile assassinations, but has not been defeated.

In a defiant speech on Monday, the Hezbollah number two, Naim Qassem, said its fighters were ready to resist any Israeli invasion. Before this latest escalation, Hezbollah’s armed wing, which includes a vast arsenal of weapons and thousands of battled-hardened fighters, was said to be stronger than the Lebanese army, and the country’s authorities have little say – if any – over the group’s actions.

For almost a year, as Hezbollah carried out near-daily cross-border attacks on Israel, many outside its support base in Lebanon feared that this country, already struggling to recover from years of successive crises, was being dragged into a conflict that it has not chosen to fight.

The economy has essentially collapsed, and political impasse means the country has been without a president for almost two years.

Here, there are still memories of the last war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2006, when parts of southern Lebanon and Dahieh, the group’s base in Beirut’s southern suburbs, were flattened.

Hezbollah’s rivals will not be disappointed to see a weakened group who, many say, is interested in defending its own interests – and those of its main supporter, Iran.

Hezbollah is the most powerful group in the so-called Axis of Resistance, an alliance of factions across the Middle East supported by Iran that also includes the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria.

Having a strong Hezbollah in Lebanon, right next to Israel, has always been vital for Iran, part of its deterrence against any Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities.

Yesterday, outside a building in central Beirut hit by an Israeli strike, a resident told me: “I’m against Israel, who is killing us, but I’m against Iran, who is killing us as well”.

This is, obviously, rejected by Hezbollah supporters. “We shed tears of blood over the [Israeli] strike against Nasrallah, may God grant him paradise… He’s irreplaceable,” one of them said, after being forced to flee Dahieh. “We don’t fear [Israel]. We’re still standing.”

How would you like to spend your 80s?

Some gardening, maybe learning a language, a bit of travelling, spending time with the grandchildren.

Or perhaps entering an international beauty contest with the ultimate aim of launching your modelling career on the world stage.

For Choi Soon-hwa, it was a no-brainer.

This week, the 81-year-old took to the stage with women a quarter of her age for Miss Universe South Korea, hoping to make it to the finals in Mexico later this year.

The question, though, is why?

“After raising children and going through hardships, it’s just two people left, and that’s when you need to find what you want to do,” the former hospital worker explained to the BBC shortly after she came off stage.

“Once you find it, it becomes the energy that drives your life, leading to a positive outlook and healthier relationships with people, which in turn helps your well-being.”

For Ms Choi, the thing she wanted to do has been modelling, ever since a patient suggested she take it up at the spritely age of 72.

The comment gave her the confidence to take the leap after several years of financial hardship, which had pushed her and her family to the brink of ruin.

In the years since, she has become a familiar face in South Korea – including walking the runway at fashion week – but launching a career outside the country has proved difficult.

So when Miss Universe, the famed beauty pageant which began nine years after Ms Choi was born, decided to throw out rules banning entrants over the age of 28 earlier this year, she jumped at the chance to take part – making her the oldest ever contestant so far to take part.

“It was something I couldn’t have imagined,” she says. “For several years, I had wished to step onto the international stage as a model.

“However, there was no clear path or guidance for me, but since the Universe competition had no age restriction, I participated with the goal of reaching the global stage.”

The removal of age restrictrions come as the Miss Universe competition has moved towards becoming more diverse in recent years – allowing married women, transgender women and single mothers to take part.

But her entry still caused quite the stir – not least among her competition.

“The participants were surprised to see me, and when they learned I was 80, they expressed admiration, saying, I want to age like you,” she admits.

And it has brought her the international interest she was hoping: Ms Choi has garnered headlines around the world.

What it did not buy was a ticket to Mexico: the Miss Universe South Korea crown went instead to Han Ariel, 22.

Ms Choi didn’t walk away completely empty handed however – but with the title of “Best Dressed”.

“Just being able to participate is an amazing and honourable experience”, she says, adding that she hopes she is the first of many older women to compete for the crown and, by extension, challenge beauty norms.

“Since this is still new, there’s a lot of buzz, but as more seniors participate, perspectives on them will shift, and there will come a time when seniors can compete in world competitions,” she says. “But for now, it’s still time for the young to take the stage.”

And whatever happens next, she knows some of her biggest fans will always be at home in the form of her grandsons, aged 23 and 24.

“My grandchildren cheer me on, saying, ‘Our grandma is so cool, pretty, beautiful, and the best!'”

On a flight from Warsaw back to London on Monday I had to crawl on the floor of the plane in order to reach the toilet.

I have been paralysed ever since I was shot by al-Qaeda gunmen in Saudi Arabia 20 years ago.

My experience onboard the flight was both physically deeply uncomfortable and also, of course, quite degrading.

I know that the discomfort that I and other disabled passengers encounter is dwarfed by the horrors being experienced by people in conflict zones around the world, stories that I cover – so my own experience is minor by comparison.

In this instance it was humiliating to have to shuffle along the floor of an aircraft in front of other passengers in my suit.

Polish Airlines LOT, which flies in and out of Heathrow, said it was not its policy to have onboard aisle chairs.

This is unacceptable for disabled passengers, since these devices are smaller than a pram, and can easily fold up to fit into a cupboard or an overhead locker.

British Airways, Easyjet, and every other airline I have flown with recently all have them on board as standard.

This shouldn’t be difficult to fix in my opinion. This ‘policy’ is surely wrong – it needs to be changed without delay.

This is 2024, not 1970, and I find it extraordinary that an airline is allowed to fly in and out of British airports with a policy that effectively says ‘if you can’t walk, you can’t go to the toilet on our planes’.

In a statement to the BBC, Polish Airlines LOT said it was “deeply sorry for the distressing experience”, and that it “sincerely apologises for the inconvenience and discomfort caused by the lack of an onboard wheelchair”.

It said that due to “limited space” its short-haul flights do not have onboard wheelchairs, but that the airline understands “the importance of accessibility” and is “actively testing solutions to equip our short-haul aircraft with onboard wheelchairs in the near future”.

I’m afraid I don’t accept this as I flew with the airline in May from Tallinn to London, and the same thing happened there. In fact, its ground staff were really quite uncompromising and dismissed the idea that the plane should have this facility.

The Polish cabin staff on Monday’s flight, however, were fantastic.

They were embarrassed, apologetic and as helpful as they could be. They encouraged me to complain about this as they could see how wrong it was.

I experienced something similar 12 years ago on Kenya Airways. After raising it publicly the airline did a wonderful job of rectifying the problem, and I had some lovely letters from travel companies telling me how grateful they were that their disabled clients now felt comfortable flying with that airline.

I am surprised at having to raise this again. The UK rightly makes a big deal about disability rights. Television presenter and campaigner Sophie Morgan is doing a fantastic job of raising awareness in this area, even meeting President Biden to discuss it.

But it is shameful that disabled passengers flying out of British airports should still be so discriminated against in this way.

A Chinese woman has been arrested in Leipzig on suspicion of passing information about Leipzig/Halle airport, which is used as a key transport hub for the German defence industry, to Chinese intelligence.

German prosecutors said that Yaqi X, 38, had been working for a company providing logistics services at the airport.

Prosecutors said she had repeatedly sent details on flights, passengers and military cargo transport to another figure who worked for China’s secret services. The airport is considered an important centre for defence exports, particularly to Ukraine.

A second suspect, Jian G, was detained earlier this year.

He had worked as an aide for a member of the European Parliament from Germany’s far-right AfD party.

Yaqi X was remanded in custody and her home and workplace searched.

Between August 2023 and February 2024, prosecutors allege she had given Jian G information on the transport of military equipment and people linked to an unnamed German arms company.

German sources told public broadcaster ARD that the defence company involved was Rheinmetall, Germany’s biggest defence firm which has been heavily involved in supplying Ukraine with weapons, armoured vehicles and military equipment.

Yaqi X’s case appears to be linked to a spying case that unfolded last April involving parliamentary aide Jian G.

The MEP he had worked for, Maximilian Krah, dismissed Jian G as his assistant. Krah’s office in Brussels was searched by police, although there was no indication that he was involved.

Jian G was alleged to have spied on Chinese dissidents in Germany as well as passing information on the European Parliament to Chinese intelligence.

He had previously worked for dissident groups and had taken up German citizenship after coming to Germany in 2002.

Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance will meet for their one and only vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night in New York City.

While the stakes in these kind of running-mate face-offs are typically low – an undercard to the presidential main event – this one might be different.

In a tight race that could be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states, every opportunity to generate positive attention and political momentum is precious.

At the very least, the debate will be a fascinating contrast between two men with very different styles and political beliefs and two campaigns with distinct strategies for winning the White House.

Donald Trump announced his selection of Vance back in July, at the start of the Republican National Convention and just a day after his near-assassination.

The former president was riding high in the polls, and his pick of the 40-year-old Ohio senator was viewed not only as a play to the white working class in the industrial Midwest – a key demographic in a region that is a top electoral battleground – but also as a way to establish his political legacy.

Unlike Trump’s first vice-president, Mike Pence, Vance is an ideological kindred spirit, whose focus on trade and immigration match Trump’s top political priorities.

If Vance was a front-runner to be Trump’s running-mate, Walz’s path to the Democratic number-two spot was considerably more unlikely. After Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid, Vice-President Kamala Harris stepped in as the standard bearer and shortly thereafter began her ticket-mate search.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, was not a leading contender for the job, but his viral appearances on television, deriding Republicans as “weird”, and his ability to defend liberal policies in moderate-friendly language won Harris over.

On the campaign trail, both men have sought to put the political skills that earned them the running-mate jobs to work.

Vance is polished and practised – a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist with an Ivy League pedigree that belies his rural Appalachian roots. Walz is a high-school teacher turned politician with a penchant for folksy Midwestern humour.

Vance has been a frequent advocate for the Trump campaign on mainstream media news programmes. He’s also rallied potential supporters in rural areas of the Midwestern battleground states, part of the Trump campaign’s strategy of engaging sympathetic voters who may not have participated in previous elections.

Last week in Traverse City, Michigan, Vance gave his standard stump speech, which is focused on immigration, the economy and trade.

“We’re going to pursue some commonsense tax and economic policies,” he told the crowd of a few thousand cheering supporters gathered in a local fair ground. “We will do it with American workers rather than foreign slave labourers.”

While many of the rally attendees didn’t know much about Vance prior to his selection as candidate for vice-president, they said they liked what they had heard so far – even as Vance has frequently flirted with controversy. His amplification of untrue rumours that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets in Ohio is a recent example.

The Democrat has been a regular fixture in more rural areas of the battleground states – often appearing in places that are traditionally more conservative. As a former high school football coach, he’s sought to play up his background and links to America’s most popular sport. On Saturday, he was at the Michigan-Minnesota college football game which was played in front of a crowd of 110,000.

When Harris introduced Walz as her vice-presidential pick at a Philadelphia rally in early August, she repeatedly referred to him as “Coach Walz” – and highlighted his high-school teacher background.

The Democrats may be hoping his plainspoken, salt-of-the-earth appeal could cut into the Republican margins outside major metropolitan areas.

“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbours and their personal choices that they make,” Walz said in Philadelphia. “Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”

During Tuesday night’s debate, Vance is likely to continue to hammer Democrats on the economy, immigration and crime – areas where polls show Trump and the Republicans are favoured.

He could accuse Walz of being slow to react to the sometimes violent demonstrations in Minnesota following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and highlight some of the more controversial liberal policies Walz enacted as governor, including around transgender rights.

He may also point to Walz’s sometimes contradictory statements about his record serving in the Minnesota National Guard.

Walz may counter by highlighting Vance’s past controversial statements – on Ohio Haitians and his derisive remarks about Democratic women who don’t have children being “childless cat ladies”.

He may also note Vance’s connections to people who oversaw Project 2025, the proposed governing agenda advanced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He is also sure to shift the focus onto the social issues where Democrats are stronger – such as healthcare, the environment and, most prominently, abortion rights.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: Seven swing states that could decide election
• FACT CHECK: Was US economy stronger under Biden or Trump?
• POLICIES: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Both men had relatively low profiles in national politics prior to their elevation to their respective presidential tickets. Vance, who has served less than two years in the US Senate, is best known for best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Walz has a longer political record, serving as governor and as a congressman from a rural area of Minnesota, but he was never in the top ranks of party leadership.

The two will have the opportunity to introduce themselves to millions of Americans for the first time on Tuesday night – and their performance could reflect on the judgement and decision-making skill of the presidential nominees who selected them.

The spotlight on Vance may be particularly sharp, given that Trump, if he wins, will be the oldest person ever elected president. Vance could also take the opportunity to provide ideological depth and detail to Trump’s conservative populism, as he did during his July Republican convention speech.

For Walz, it’s a chance not only to help Americans learn more about him as a candidate, but about a Democratic ticket that did not exist two months ago – one that, according to polls, many Americans still are uncertain of. If he can do that in a way that appeals to moderate and independent voters – his touted strength – all the better for the Harris camp.

Typically, the vice-presidential debate happens in the midst of a series of presidential debates – an interlude between the candidate showdowns that really matter.

With no further presidential debates scheduled this year, however, the running-mate face-off could be the last chance for American voters to see the two tickets represented in direct contrast before they cast their ballots.

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

Jimmy Carter celebrates his 100th birthday on Tuesday, making him the first US president to reach the milestone.

Carter, a Democrat who served in the White House from 1977 to 1981, has spent the past 19 months in hospice care in his home state of Georgia.

But the former peanut farmer, who first entered politics in the 1960s as a state senator, is “emotionally engaged and still having experiences and laughing, loving,” his grandson, Jason, said in September.

And the centenarian still has political ambitions: “I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris” in November’s election, the humanitarian and Nobel Prize recipient said, according to his grandson.

To honour the occasion, volunteers with Habitat for Humanity – the housing charity Carter has worked with for 40 years – are building 30 homes in Minnesota this week.

There will also be events in Plains, the former Georgia governor’s hometown, to celebrate the occasion on Tuesday. There will be a flyover of military jets and 100 new citizens will have naturalisation ceremonies in his honour.

It comes after a star-studded concert was held in Atlanta, Georgia, earlier this month to celebrate the 39th president’s milestone birthday and to raise funds for The Carter Center.

“It was an incredible evening, full of good music and heartfelt tributes, and it made history as the first-ever 100th birthday celebration for a living American president,” Carter said at the time.

The concert, which raised more than $1.2m (£900,000) and also featured recorded messages from other presidents, will air on Georgia Public Broadcasting on Tuesday. Dozens of musical acts performed at the event and thousands attended.

The former president will be watching the broadcast on Tuesday, his family said.

Carter, who was not able to attend the concert in person, made a rare public appearance in November 2023 when he attended a memorial service for his wife Rosalynn who died aged 96 earlier that month.

Their 77-year marriage remains the longest of any first couple.

When Carter first entered hospice care in Plains, Georgia, in February 2023, some relatives reportedly felt he only had a matter of days left to live.

“It’s a gift,” Josh Carter, another of his grandsons, said of the last few months in a recent interview with the New York Times. “It’s a gift that I didn’t know we were going to get.”

Others say Carter’s story has also raised awareness of the benefits of hospice care. “We are all rooting for Jimmy Carter,” Barbara Pearce, the CEO of Connecticut Hospice, told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

“He has done more for us than we could ever do for ourselves by pointing out that it’s a reasonable choice to make,” she said. “He’s given everybody permission to consider [hospice care] as a reasonable option that doesn’t shorten their life, but does increase their comfort and fulfilment.”

Mech Dara, an award-winning Cambodian journalist who has reported extensively on human trafficking and corruption, has been arrested and charged with incitement.

Dara, who has reported for the BBC, has been charged over five social media posts which could “incite social unrest”, a court spokesperson said. He faces up to two years in jail.

Last year US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken honoured him for his work exposing online scam operations based in Cambodia.

Rights groups have spoken out over his arrest, with Human Rights Watch calling on the country’s government to “immediately release him”.

Dara was detained after being stopped at a highway toll booth on the border of Koh Kong and Sihanouk province in south-west Cambodia on Monday.

A relative in the car with Dara told the BBC that they were waiting to go through the booth when one military police car, accompanied by five other cars, pulled up alongside them.

“We got him,” one said while they were detaining Dara, his relative recounted, adding that Dara told his family not to worry as he was being taken away.

Local rights group Licadho reported that Dara messaged them, explaining that he had been arrested, before his phone was taken away.

His whereabouts were then not known for almost 24 hours, when he appeared in court in the capital Phnom Penh and was charged with incitement to commit a felony. He was sent to pre-trial detention and faces between six months and two years in jail if found guilty.

Phnom Penh Municipal Court spokesperson Y Rin told the BBC that the charges were related to five social media posts made in September, but did not elaborate.

In a statement, the court said the Facebook posts showed “edited pictures” of a “tourist attraction” which it said were “fake”.

Is said the posts were “full of ill-intention – inciting, causing anger among the public that was intended to make people think bad of the government”.

The vague charge of incitement is often used in Cambodia against government critics.

One of Dara’s relatives, who also works as a journalist but requested anonymity due to fear of reprisals, said Dara had been denied access to a lawyer and they were “so concerned” about his safety.

“The authorities didn’t show us any official arrest warrant or court papers. I’ve lost hope, I’m so concerned about practising journalism in Cambodia now,” the relative said.

One of Cambodia’s most prominent journalists, Mech Dara has been at the forefront of investigating the country’s cyberscam compounds, which are staffed mostly by trafficked workers.

Often victims are lured by adverts promising easy work and extravagant perks. Once they arrive in the country, they are held prisoner and forced to work in online scam centres. Those who do not comply face threats to their safety. Many have been subject to torture and inhuman treatment.

Last year, Mr Blinken awarded Dara the US State Department’s human trafficking Hero Award for his work.

The US State Department said it was aware of reports of his arrest and was “following developments closely with great concern”.

The US last month sanctioned powerful Cambodian tycoon and ruling party Senator Ly Yong Phat, nicknamed the “king of Koh Kong” after his influence over his home province, over alleged connections to the cyberscam industry.

The Cambodian government said the sanctions were politically motivated.

Rights groups have voiced concern over Mech Dara’s arrest.

Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said “Mech Dara is a respected journalist who has reported on important topics in the public interest such as online scam centres. Yet Cambodian authorities appear to have wrongfully arrested him yesterday.

“They should immediately release him.”

Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates (AHRLA), called Dara’s arrest “outrageous and unacceptable” and “is emblematic of the Cambodian government’s repressive, over the top reaction to any sort of criticism from the media”.

Cambodia’s independent media landscape has been hit hard in recent years, with publications including the Cambodia Daily and Voice of Democracy – both of which Dara worked for – closed down by authorities.

Three children have been injured – one of them seriously – in a knife attack at a daycare centre in the Swiss city of Zurich.

A spokesperson for the city’s police force said a 23-year-old Chinese man attacked a group of children who were being led to the centre by a staff member.

A daycare worker and a bystander managed to overpower the attacker and restrain him until police arrived.

A five-year-old boy suffered serious injuries and was being treated in hospital. Two other five-year-old boys were treated at the scene for less severe injuries.

Officers have yet to reveal a motive for the attack, which took place shortly after 12:00 local time (11:00 BST) in the near the Bernina shopping centre in Oerlikon, an area in the north of Zurich.

Police said an investigation was continuing and local media reported heavily armed officers were guarding the scene on Tuesday afternoon, while a drone flew overhead.

NZZ, a Swiss media outlet, said police searched a residential building near the daycare. It is unclear whether the operation was connected to the attack.